Apparently their systems are from the 1990s which was, in retrospect, the worst decade to buy any kind of IT equipment. Imagine they had some Unix system with VT100 terminals. This would have given them an easy upgrade path. They could have made simple and secure ways to remotely login, plus they could have simply replaced the system with a more modern Linux system, etc...
Paper ballots also have the great advantage that _everybody_ can check the election easily. You just make sure the ballot box is empty before they start, then you make sure everybody only throws in one ballot, and that the ballots are propperly counted. It's trivial to understand, and can be done by everybody willing to spend a day at the polling station.
Paper ballots also give you near instantaneous results. You only need to count them, which takes, depending on the size of your polling station and the complexity of the election, from a few minutes to an hour. The polling stations close at 6 and the 8 o clock news already have unofficial end results.
It could mean anything from plain circular polarization (which has been used for ages) to whatever. I'm not sure what kind of problem it should solve. After all MIMO system can separate different sources of radio just as well.
Besides there are always frauds out there, often those don't even understand what they are doing.
There were 2 classes of terminal for the German system. One for the dumb consumer, and one for the editor. The editor one was a lot more expensive. The difference was one button which had to be pressed in order to edit.
Again, if people back then would simply have offered shell accounts on Internet enabled computers, that would have taken off.
In France a simmilar system took off, because they gave out free terminals. In Germany some TV-sets could be ordered with buildt-in Bildschirmtext decoders.
The problem with all of those services was that they were walled gardens, so they only had very limited use. It was sold as a service, complete with content. It actually cost a significant amount of money to get your own page which. That, and the possibility to have people pay per page access or minute (WTF) caused the system to be used only for for 2 applications, Banking, and Pornography.
It had nothing to do with the bandwidth or the graphic capabilities. Back in the 1990s when the transition happened you were lucky to get 200 characters per second from some US site while Bildschirmtext (the German variant) already have you additional content from CD-Roms. From the users perspective the Internet was a big step down, but since it was so free and open and not just a "business model" all the good content was on it. The Internet was "free as speech" even though it was a bit more expensive and slower. Of course there were also BBSes which had a certain amount of popularity among private homes.
The technology to run telephony over fibre is extremely expensive. It's much cheaper to just run Ethernet for the Internet and leave telephony on ISDN.
Yes, one could do VoIP, but that's just *juck*. Not only will you have huge delays, modems won't work (still essentialy for many businesses), but it still requires seperate networks with complex configurations so it'll still work when you use the Internet.
(Don't get me wrong, there are situations where VoIP has its uses, but it's certainly no alternative to plain old ISDN)
Commercial licenses are typically far to complex to comprehend for the typical user. So either get a lawyer or accept to get screwed. If you don't like that, use free (as speech) software. Those typically have simpler licenses which are near impossible to break for the average user.
I mean you either packetice your voice into fairly large (i.e. 20ms) chunks of data and have horrible latency which would create problems for many applications, or you pack every single sample into a packet an waste a _lot_ of bandwidth. It only makes sense for low quality voice only telephone networks... however I don't need a phone company for that, I only need IP.
So essentially what AT&T is doing here is to throw away the only advantage they have over their competitors. If there was competiion, they probably wouldn't do that. BTW I have chosen my phone company partly because they offer real ISDN.
As you can write software once, and sell usage rights to it an unlimited number of times. So in effect an unlimited amount of money is spent on a limited amount of work. I wonder how someone can think that's sustainable.
I don't see why the US couldn't do hardware. Labor costs are near negligible on devices like computers, particularly if you optimize the design to be easy to manufacture. And Labor costs are also quite low in the US compared to other countries manufacturing hardware like Germany for example.
The problem is that local manufacturing clashes with the idea of large companies controlling the market. If everybody builds locally, it's trivial to do some last-minute changes.
The point is to be able to write short little commands for everyday use. Commands you might only use once, and even when used once already save hours. People must understand how computers work in order to use them. Since the state of the art in GUIs is still horrible, this means they need to be able to program at least in whatever shell skripting language they have.
This is something that needs to be taught like maths or history. It's something which everybody should have heard of. Then you will find people who are good at it around you. Those people will be able to actually use computers to gain productivity, and help others improve their productivity.
I take some offence on the word "software developer". It indicates that there is a special class of people who are allowed to program, while the rest only uses it without being allowed to write a loop. This is a false idea. The task of the software developer is to make little pieces of "Lego" the users can incorporate into their own programs. Those programs might also be single line shell commands.
TV does have a couple of technical advantages. First of all it's completely DRM free. You can simply have your DVB-S card and record whatever you like, you have access to the EPG so you can use it like a "torrent". Then it doesn't have as many boundaries as "legal" Internet distribution. I can easily watch the BBC over satellite, but I cannot access their iPlayer.
There's also one big difference in financing. TV is financed like a public good, like roads. That's why piracy doesn't matter as we all payed for it anyhow.
The point is that if I buy a computer, I should do exactly what I want it to do. Installing any sort of software which I don't want for any reason is a step in the wrong direction.
Seriously, we need to get the operators and the hardware companies out of the software loop. I get my software from one place, the hardware from another and the wireless service comes from a third.
Who controls the BES? If it was based on an open protocol, everybody could just run their own server. Since its not, you have to either use the BES of your network operator, or buy a product you cannot look into.
Of course the network operators see this as a feature. They want control, and they want to do more than just shuffling around bits. That's why they heavily subsidize everything giving them control over the device. For a long time this meant that devices supporting OpenVPN or VoIP wouldn't be subsidized. Since the majority of phones are bought by operators, the devices are built according to the wishes of the operators.
...to get back the resources needed to produce it in energy? Electronics is horribly expensive to make, resource-wise. And this particular piece seems like it wasn't made to last.
Well actually this is not a fault of smartphones as such. For example the maemo line of smartphones actually had a normal bash shell so you could program it on the phone itself. It is, in a nutshell, just a matter of software.
Besides even before the smartphone craze, there were lots of little programmable portable computers which would now be considered smartphones (without the radio).
In a nutshell there are 3 different ways to handle software distribution. (with some overlap)
1. Anarchy: This way is typically done on Windows. You either use a search engine to type in "$program free download" and follow the first link, or you download the source-code and compile it yourself. This requires the user to be able to evaluate the software themselves. There is no guide. This works perfectly well with competent users, but can lead to large problems with the masses.
2. Dictatorship: You have a pre-made "app-store" which only lists programmes which went through some sort of censorship process. There is typically only one to choose from and typically you have no way to influence the rules or decisions. This is the way it's now typically done on newer smartphones, for example on iOS/Blackberry/WP7/Android. Since you cannot control what code you have running on your system, you have very little control about what your system is doing.
3. Communism: (in the sense of community) You have list of recommended programs which can be easily installed. That list is compiled by a community which you can join if you have proven to be competent or at least ask why they have done a decision in a certain way. If you don't like that decision, you can always go to another community and often even mix 2 for the greatest benefit. Installing software yourself is discouraged but not forbidden. You can always just do that.
The big point why this is so important is that computers are now extensions of your brain. This means the software running on your computer influences how you think.
Most companies are paper based. So you have sheets of paper containing information and status. With E-Mail you would need to type in the information or print it out. There is no visible media transition on Fax, you put in a piece of paper and you get out a piece of paper.
In a business E-Mail is no advantage, as, in order to integrate it into your processes, the employees would need to be able to program so their computers can process them automatically. Those would be very primitive programs, but on a GUI-based computing environment, it's very hard to automatize processes.
So unless you teach people how to program, the fax will be dominant.
Systems that were not open enough, so they failed. All major "online services" had their own formats, incompatible with each other. For example German company T-Online had 2 system. One was based on Prestel, a character based protocol allowing for user definable characters and 32 out of 4096 colours as well as 3 phase blinking. The other one was called "KITT" which allowed for GIF images and CD-Rom integration.
I guess if it hadn't been for http and html, we'd probably be using public logins with telnet or something similar. Or perhaps someone would have made the same system with FTP and some other document format. Perhaps plain text.
Or in a nutshell, the Web didn't win because it was better, the web won because everybody could easily participate.
It would have been more urgent to find out where an allocated part of RAM ends.
Or just like Integers and floats, strings could have been their very own basic type. Essentially leave the implementation of it to the compiler, so it can do range checks. Most C-programmers seem to believe that this is done already.
BTW range check on integers don't cost anything anymore. I've benchmarked some real-life code using large arrays (doing statistics on it) and range checks didn't cause any slow down. Essentially the compare operation can be done in parallel with the memory read operation.... that is when your language supports that at all.
Essentially you'd need a little plug-in server which gets an IPv6 address and displays an URL/QR-code on the display. This little server should then do your part of the social network for you by staying in contact with your friends servers and only handing out data to them.
That way no social network operator can just get _all_ the data to datamine it. They have to go through the slow process of tricking you into befriending them.
Maybe end your encounter with the BSA (doing whatever your lawyer recommends) by announcing to them, that you are going to help the BSA by working on reducing the amount of software you use old by their members.
Since your company is using commercial software, it probably has a software legal department for such cases anyhow. If not you'll now have to pay the price of not having one. Buying commercial software is not like buying a house, it's a complicated legal procedure.
Yes, but unlike cable, ADSL was actually meant for broadband communications. For cable you'd have to do huge investments, essentially fibre to the home. Once you do that, it doesn't matter if the rest of the line is coaxial or twisted pair.
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Apparently their systems are from the 1990s which was, in retrospect, the worst decade to buy any kind of IT equipment. Imagine they had some Unix system with VT100 terminals. This would have given them an easy upgrade path. They could have made simple and secure ways to remotely login, plus they could have simply replaced the system with a more modern Linux system, etc...
Well such behaviour would be highly undemocratic.
Paper ballots also have the great advantage that _everybody_ can check the election easily. You just make sure the ballot box is empty before they start, then you make sure everybody only throws in one ballot, and that the ballots are propperly counted. It's trivial to understand, and can be done by everybody willing to spend a day at the polling station.
Paper ballots also give you near instantaneous results. You only need to count them, which takes, depending on the size of your polling station and the complexity of the election, from a few minutes to an hour. The polling stations close at 6 and the 8 o clock news already have unofficial end results.
It could mean anything from plain circular polarization (which has been used for ages) to whatever.
I'm not sure what kind of problem it should solve. After all MIMO system can separate different sources of radio just as well.
Besides there are always frauds out there, often those don't even understand what they are doing.
There were 2 classes of terminal for the German system. One for the dumb consumer, and one for the editor. The editor one was a lot more expensive. The difference was one button which had to be pressed in order to edit.
Again, if people back then would simply have offered shell accounts on Internet enabled computers, that would have taken off.
In France a simmilar system took off, because they gave out free terminals. In Germany some TV-sets could be ordered with buildt-in Bildschirmtext decoders.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBfvIh2K4G0
The problem with all of those services was that they were walled gardens, so they only had very limited use. It was sold as a service, complete with content. It actually cost a significant amount of money to get your own page which. That, and the possibility to have people pay per page access or minute (WTF) caused the system to be used only for for 2 applications, Banking, and Pornography.
It had nothing to do with the bandwidth or the graphic capabilities. Back in the 1990s when the transition happened you were lucky to get 200 characters per second from some US site while Bildschirmtext (the German variant) already have you additional content from CD-Roms. From the users perspective the Internet was a big step down, but since it was so free and open and not just a "business model" all the good content was on it. The Internet was "free as speech" even though it was a bit more expensive and slower. Of course there were also BBSes which had a certain amount of popularity among private homes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBfvIh2K4G0
The technology to run telephony over fibre is extremely expensive. It's much cheaper to just run Ethernet for the Internet and leave telephony on ISDN.
Yes, one could do VoIP, but that's just *juck*. Not only will you have huge delays, modems won't work (still essentialy for many businesses), but it still requires seperate networks with complex configurations so it'll still work when you use the Internet.
(Don't get me wrong, there are situations where VoIP has its uses, but it's certainly no alternative to plain old ISDN)
Commercial licenses are typically far to complex to comprehend for the typical user. So either get a lawyer or accept to get screwed. If you don't like that, use free (as speech) software. Those typically have simpler licenses which are near impossible to break for the average user.
I mean you either packetice your voice into fairly large (i.e. 20ms) chunks of data and have horrible latency which would create problems for many applications, or you pack every single sample into a packet an waste a _lot_ of bandwidth.
It only makes sense for low quality voice only telephone networks... however I don't need a phone company for that, I only need IP.
So essentially what AT&T is doing here is to throw away the only advantage they have over their competitors. If there was competiion, they probably wouldn't do that. BTW I have chosen my phone company partly because they offer real ISDN.
As you can write software once, and sell usage rights to it an unlimited number of times. So in effect an unlimited amount of money is spent on a limited amount of work. I wonder how someone can think that's sustainable.
I don't see why the US couldn't do hardware. Labor costs are near negligible on devices like computers, particularly if you optimize the design to be easy to manufacture. And Labor costs are also quite low in the US compared to other countries manufacturing hardware like Germany for example.
The problem is that local manufacturing clashes with the idea of large companies controlling the market. If everybody builds locally, it's trivial to do some last-minute changes.
The point is to be able to write short little commands for everyday use. Commands you might only use once, and even when used once already save hours.
People must understand how computers work in order to use them. Since the state of the art in GUIs is still horrible, this means they need to be able to program at least in whatever shell skripting language they have.
This is something that needs to be taught like maths or history. It's something which everybody should have heard of. Then you will find people who are good at it around you. Those people will be able to actually use computers to gain productivity, and help others improve their productivity.
I take some offence on the word "software developer". It indicates that there is a special class of people who are allowed to program, while the rest only uses it without being allowed to write a loop. This is a false idea. The task of the software developer is to make little pieces of "Lego" the users can incorporate into their own programs. Those programs might also be single line shell commands.
TV does have a couple of technical advantages. First of all it's completely DRM free. You can simply have your DVB-S card and record whatever you like, you have access to the EPG so you can use it like a "torrent". Then it doesn't have as many boundaries as "legal" Internet distribution. I can easily watch the BBC over satellite, but I cannot access their iPlayer.
There's also one big difference in financing. TV is financed like a public good, like roads. That's why piracy doesn't matter as we all payed for it anyhow.
The point is that if I buy a computer, I should do exactly what I want it to do. Installing any sort of software which I don't want for any reason is a step in the wrong direction.
Seriously, we need to get the operators and the hardware companies out of the software loop. I get my software from one place, the hardware from another and the wireless service comes from a third.
Who controls the BES? If it was based on an open protocol, everybody could just run their own server. Since its not, you have to either use the BES of your network operator, or buy a product you cannot look into.
Of course the network operators see this as a feature. They want control, and they want to do more than just shuffling around bits. That's why they heavily subsidize everything giving them control over the device. For a long time this meant that devices supporting OpenVPN or VoIP wouldn't be subsidized. Since the majority of phones are bought by operators, the devices are built according to the wishes of the operators.
...to get back the resources needed to produce it in energy? Electronics is horribly expensive to make, resource-wise. And this particular piece seems like it wasn't made to last.
Exactly. Why does a modern smartphone have be be less powerfull than a programmable calculator?
Well actually this is not a fault of smartphones as such. For example the maemo line of smartphones actually had a normal bash shell so you could program it on the phone itself. It is, in a nutshell, just a matter of software.
Besides even before the smartphone craze, there were lots of little programmable portable computers which would now be considered smartphones (without the radio).
In a nutshell there are 3 different ways to handle software distribution. (with some overlap)
1. Anarchy: This way is typically done on Windows. You either use a search engine to type in "$program free download" and follow the first link, or you download the source-code and compile it yourself. This requires the user to be able to evaluate the software themselves. There is no guide. This works perfectly well with competent users, but can lead to large problems with the masses.
2. Dictatorship: You have a pre-made "app-store" which only lists programmes which went through some sort of censorship process. There is typically only one to choose from and typically you have no way to influence the rules or decisions. This is the way it's now typically done on newer smartphones, for example on iOS/Blackberry/WP7/Android. Since you cannot control what code you have running on your system, you have very little control about what your system is doing.
3. Communism: (in the sense of community) You have list of recommended programs which can be easily installed. That list is compiled by a community which you can join if you have proven to be competent or at least ask why they have done a decision in a certain way. If you don't like that decision, you can always go to another community and often even mix 2 for the greatest benefit. Installing software yourself is discouraged but not forbidden. You can always just do that.
The big point why this is so important is that computers are now extensions of your brain. This means the software running on your computer influences how you think.
Most companies are paper based. So you have sheets of paper containing information and status. With E-Mail you would need to type in the information or print it out. There is no visible media transition on Fax, you put in a piece of paper and you get out a piece of paper.
In a business E-Mail is no advantage, as, in order to integrate it into your processes, the employees would need to be able to program so their computers can process them automatically. Those would be very primitive programs, but on a GUI-based computing environment, it's very hard to automatize processes.
So unless you teach people how to program, the fax will be dominant.
Systems that were not open enough, so they failed. All major "online services" had their own formats, incompatible with each other. For example German company T-Online had 2 system. One was based on Prestel, a character based protocol allowing for user definable characters and 32 out of 4096 colours as well as 3 phase blinking. The other one was called "KITT" which allowed for GIF images and CD-Rom integration.
I guess if it hadn't been for http and html, we'd probably be using public logins with telnet or something similar. Or perhaps someone would have made the same system with FTP and some other document format. Perhaps plain text.
Or in a nutshell, the Web didn't win because it was better, the web won because everybody could easily participate.
It would have been more urgent to find out where an allocated part of RAM ends.
Or just like Integers and floats, strings could have been their very own basic type. Essentially leave the implementation of it to the compiler, so it can do range checks. Most C-programmers seem to believe that this is done already.
BTW range check on integers don't cost anything anymore. I've benchmarked some real-life code using large arrays (doing statistics on it) and range checks didn't cause any slow down. Essentially the compare operation can be done in parallel with the memory read operation.... that is when your language supports that at all.
Essentially you'd need a little plug-in server which gets an IPv6 address and displays an URL/QR-code on the display. This little server should then do your part of the social network for you by staying in contact with your friends servers and only handing out data to them.
That way no social network operator can just get _all_ the data to datamine it. They have to go through the slow process of tricking you into befriending them.
Well it's not. That's just my outgoing mail server for my own e-mail address.
Maybe end your encounter with the BSA (doing whatever your lawyer recommends) by announcing to them, that you are going to help the BSA by working on reducing the amount of software you use old by their members.
Since your company is using commercial software, it probably has a software legal department for such cases anyhow. If not you'll now have to pay the price of not having one. Buying commercial software is not like buying a house, it's a complicated legal procedure.
Yes, but unlike cable, ADSL was actually meant for broadband communications. For cable you'd have to do huge investments, essentially fibre to the home. Once you do that, it doesn't matter if the rest of the line is coaxial or twisted pair.