The big problem is communications. If the company building your product is far away, they are unlikely to contact you when they have problems. Likewise it's impossible for you to find out if something goes wrong. For example we once outsourced a certain RF-cable to china. The result was that they didn't connect the shield at all. Apple must have simmilar problems, though on a different scale. Since they outsourced their manufacturing the quality went down considerably.
Outsourcing can be made to work for low complexity products like cars. For example BMW, a german car manufacturer outsourced part of it's production to a low-wage north american country just north of mexico. It seems to work.
However countries like china will be able to improve their quality by getting more and more engineers. This however will also mean that they will be less dependent on foreign intellectual property. And chineese manufacturers seem to get a lot more right. Just look at DVD-Players. You used to be happy when you could play VCDs on them. Since the Chineese took over every cheap player can play just anything the hardware can decode. The Chineese just don't build as many stupid limits into their systems.
Well first of all PCM, the base of most "lossless" codecs is lossy by itself. It only approximates the original waveform. (just like tracking a mechanically recorded one with a stylus does)
However the bigger loss is before it even becomes a waveform. You have an instument which radiates different sounds into different directions, yet you can only record it with a limited number of microphones. That signal from the microphones is then mixed down to a small number of channels. Those channels are reproduced by loudspeakers in a random enviroment before reaching your ears.
Then some reproduction equipment plays the sound at the wrong volume. Just increasing or decreasing the amplitude of a signal can greatly change it's sound. So it's vital that you use the same volume as it was originally. Unfortunately records don't have callibrated tones on them to tell you how loud they should be played.
MP3 and OGG are economical Alternatives to PCM for when the bitrate is limited. Just compare any of those PCM-based "lossless" systems to MP3 at a bitrate of 64 kbit. If you have the bandwidth, just use PCM with the maximum parameters your hardware can do. (Or parameters you can easily convert to the ones for your final product)
I guess the best combination would be internet and terrestrial televison, as satellite television, the most economical way to distribute it, is scrambled in the US. Here in Europe I have a system set up which gets about 1000 free to air channels, including all the relevant german and brittish channels. It works via VDR and uses the streamdev plugin to stream video to the internet.
In the US many people could provide such streaming services for their local programmes. Kinda like peer to peer streaming. Unfortunately I haven't seen any software for that yet.
You don't build munchipal networks in a centraliced fashion, you make meshed networks which are in the hands of their users. That way there is no way anybody could turn them off. Maybe someone would decide to not offer Internet anymore, but turning of the network as a whole is impossible.
You can get cheap routers, install the Freifunk firmware and off you go.
Well, but you also have that weired in-band signalling for your numbers so it takes you _ages_ to dial a number.
I guess part of the quality advantage is that ISDN-phones use piecoelectric or dynamic microphones which sound _far_ better than the carbon mikes used in analog phones.
Well I guess in the US the problem is also that phone connections were horribly bad. When I listen to call-in radio shows from the US I'm often shocked to hear how bad phone calls sound.
The rest of the world is used to bit-transparent PCM connections with a delay of just a few samples even on the cheapest providers. That's _way_ better than VoIP or cellular networks. And ISDN also typically is far more reliable than even DSL. Under bad conditions DSL usually breaks far quicker than ISDN.
Well there's the Fritz!Box series of DSL routers with telephony functions. Towards the landline they support ISDN and that old quasi analog system used in some developing countries. It runs Linux and is fairly hackable. It also supports preety much all DECT GAP handsets even with a sampling rate of 16 kHz.
It completely misses the point. The point is not that a system is "impossible" to manipulate. The point is that _every_ voter has the ability to check the vote.
Just compare it with the pen and paper based system. Everybody can understand it. You have a box which must be empty when they start voting. And people come in, get a piece of paper each, fill it out in private fold it and throw it into the box. At the same time his name gets crossed out on a list. Now everybody can check this fairly easily.
Now let's look at whatever machine-based system you've got. You've got this machine, either mechanical or electronical. You usually cannot look inside of it. You cannot tell if the levers are labelled correctly or if the firmware is really what it's supposed to be. Even if you have sourcecode that's completely unusable for the 90% of people who cannot read code. Relying on others is not an option as the others could be against you. Just imagine a party forming beeing against computers, which programmer would help them?
I don't think the problem is actual network bandwidth after the first mile. After all, it's hard to get any serious equipment with a bandwidth of less than a Gigabit per second and it makes virtually no sense to run less than that over a fibre.
For cable operators the problem simply is the last mile. Shared media like CATV cables aren't suitable for such purposes.
The point is simply, I'm paying my ISP to provide me bandwidth. I'm paying them to buy whatever is needed to get most of my packets through.If there is any kind of congestion over longer periods of time it's their fault.
If they have to pay to much to their upstream provider: Well why didn't they peer with their competitors?
Most of the problems in the debate stem from ISPs beeing run as a business, however it's a public service.
Well it's already done in some parts of Germany under a project named Freifunk. I participate in one of those projects and have 2 routers running, connected via TINC with the other routers on the network.
Absolutely, the problem with software or complex hardware of any sort is that the average person cannot verify it working. The simple "paper and pencil" approach can be understood and verified by everybody, even people who cannot programm or cannot reverse-engineer complex microelectronics with their bare eyes.
Well when corporations and governments are corrupt, the best way to go is obviously to install (wireless) mesh networking equipment. Essentially you need a few people who can install the alternative firmware onto cheap wireless routers and set an IP-Address. The rest of the people now just need to put those routers in convenient places. As a bonus feature, you could add simple single chip serial terminals into the case and make cheap and tiny internet terminals.
Well it's the same as with "security" software. Most people don't care. The large majority don't know what it is and does. A minority cares and knows that it's a bad idea. However there's a small, but powerful minority able to convince large parts of the society about something. He only needs to convince them to reach the big market.
Applied to the AV industry it looks like that. Most people don't know that that kind of software is doing. The ones that do understand what it's doing and are slightly into security know that it's mostly snake-oil. However there are a few powerfull people like authors who can be convinced that AV software does anything useful. And those people will act as multipliers for your idea.
On the Internet this looks a bit differently. Here we have ISPs which can simply force any kind of policy onto their users. And those are easily convinced that anonymity is a bad thing. Especially when you tell them that your system also allows billing for content. So he'd only have to convince them to get his system through. As in many places there is no competition on Internet access, the ISPs have little reason to not do that.
If you are talking about actually doing development ON an iPhone instead of FOR an iPhone, I can't for a second fathom why you would want to subject yourself to that much pain...
Because I have a problem an I need to use a computer. Therefore I need to programm it and cannot wait until someone on another computer has developed a program for me.
The iPhone is nothing more than an appliance, a device made for people who cannot program.
The problem why most computing devices suck today is that are to restricted and often to cumbersome to use. The iPhone was only successfull, because it is easy to use. It's still heavily restricted, for example you cannot do application development on it. Windows Mobile devices are not much less restricted than the iPhone, but are harder to use.
At least for geeks this might change with newer Linux-based devices running on distributions like Maemo. For example my N810 can do nearly everything your unixoid workstation can do. Sure it's limited in display and keyboard, but seriously, you cannot fit a 30" display into a portable device, can you? I can simply ssh to other computers, or even ssh from them to my portable device. I can simply use apt-get to install packages, and if it shouldn't be availiable, it should be possible to compile it on the device.
He obviously ran out of arguments for his software so he has to claim that all existing software (and most DNS-Server right now are open source) is bad and _therefore_ his software must be great. It's a train of arguments used by many people in the past: "Witches are bad, therefore we are good when we burn them." "The terrorists are evil, therefore we are good whatever we do." Now this is paired with an idiot who doesn't even know the difference between free software and freeware.
True, the way to go is simply to store every change and usually display the newest version of a record. This also allows you to make an "undo" function which your users will appreciate very much.
Well actually moving now makes a lot of sense as you will be one of the first to be on IPv6. Nobody cares what you do on IPv6 so you can easily just run FTP-Servers and be sure that nobody except the people you tell that will ever find you. You can do Bittorrent without any problems, in fact Sixxs.net is having it's own IPv6-only tracker. IPv6 still is free.
And not many people are as lucky as you actually having an ISP giving you 16 IPs. In Germany for example you'll have to get a commercial account and those are many times as expensive as domestic ones. In Africa and Asia you are lucky if you get a single public IP-address at all. There you often are behind several layers of NAT.
Well if you are with a cable or mobile ISP it might even be easier to get propper IPv6 than IPv4. Just set up a tunnel to a tunnel broker like Sixxs for example. It will even work through NAT and you'll get 2^80 IPv6 adresses.
I mean even today there are ISPs which only give you NAT. ISPs which filter your IPv4 traffic or inject additional packets to keep you from using IPv4. Many ISPs also only give you one dynamic IP-address and charge more if you want more of them.
I mean IPv4 is so hard to use by now that people actually prefer Google reading through their mail instead of setting up their own mailserver! With IPv6 that's trivial to do. You can also easily log into your computer at home without having to go through hoops like dynamic DNS.
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The big problem is communications. If the company building your product is far away, they are unlikely to contact you when they have problems. Likewise it's impossible for you to find out if something goes wrong. For example we once outsourced a certain RF-cable to china. The result was that they didn't connect the shield at all.
Apple must have simmilar problems, though on a different scale. Since they outsourced their manufacturing the quality went down considerably.
Outsourcing can be made to work for low complexity products like cars. For example BMW, a german car manufacturer outsourced part of it's production to a low-wage north american country just north of mexico. It seems to work.
However countries like china will be able to improve their quality by getting more and more engineers. This however will also mean that they will be less dependent on foreign intellectual property. And chineese manufacturers seem to get a lot more right. Just look at DVD-Players. You used to be happy when you could play VCDs on them. Since the Chineese took over every cheap player can play just anything the hardware can decode. The Chineese just don't build as many stupid limits into their systems.
Well first of all PCM, the base of most "lossless" codecs is lossy by itself. It only approximates the original waveform. (just like tracking a mechanically recorded one with a stylus does)
However the bigger loss is before it even becomes a waveform. You have an instument which radiates different sounds into different directions, yet you can only record it with a limited number of microphones. That signal from the microphones is then mixed down to a small number of channels. Those channels are reproduced by loudspeakers in a random enviroment before reaching your ears.
Then some reproduction equipment plays the sound at the wrong volume. Just increasing or decreasing the amplitude of a signal can greatly change it's sound. So it's vital that you use the same volume as it was originally. Unfortunately records don't have callibrated tones on them to tell you how loud they should be played.
MP3 and OGG are economical Alternatives to PCM for when the bitrate is limited. Just compare any of those PCM-based "lossless" systems to MP3 at a bitrate of 64 kbit. If you have the bandwidth, just use PCM with the maximum parameters your hardware can do. (Or parameters you can easily convert to the ones for your final product)
Well it would transform the iPhone from a Gadget to a computer, by adding the final step, rapid application development on the device itself.
I guess the best combination would be internet and terrestrial televison, as satellite television, the most economical way to distribute it, is scrambled in the US. Here in Europe I have a system set up which gets about 1000 free to air channels, including all the relevant german and brittish channels. It works via VDR and uses the streamdev plugin to stream video to the internet.
In the US many people could provide such streaming services for their local programmes. Kinda like peer to peer streaming. Unfortunately I haven't seen any software for that yet.
You don't build munchipal networks in a centraliced fashion, you make meshed networks which are in the hands of their users. That way there is no way anybody could turn them off. Maybe someone would decide to not offer Internet anymore, but turning of the network as a whole is impossible.
You can get cheap routers, install the Freifunk firmware and off you go.
Absolutely the 304 response won't work anymore under that new proposal. And 304 already saves a lot as most external references are static.
There is only one exception, advertisements. One can only asume that Google wants this to effectively push advertisements on the user.
Well, but you also have that weired in-band signalling for your numbers so it takes you _ages_ to dial a number.
I guess part of the quality advantage is that ISDN-phones use piecoelectric or dynamic microphones which sound _far_ better than the carbon mikes used in analog phones.
Well I guess in the US the problem is also that phone connections were horribly bad. When I listen to call-in radio shows from the US I'm often shocked to hear how bad phone calls sound.
The rest of the world is used to bit-transparent PCM connections with a delay of just a few samples even on the cheapest providers. That's _way_ better than VoIP or cellular networks.
And ISDN also typically is far more reliable than even DSL. Under bad conditions DSL usually breaks far quicker than ISDN.
Well there's the Fritz!Box series of DSL routers with telephony functions. Towards the landline they support ISDN and that old quasi analog system used in some developing countries. It runs Linux and is fairly hackable. It also supports preety much all DECT GAP handsets even with a sampling rate of 16 kHz.
It completely misses the point. The point is not that a system is "impossible" to manipulate. The point is that _every_ voter has the ability to check the vote.
Just compare it with the pen and paper based system. Everybody can understand it. You have a box which must be empty when they start voting. And people come in, get a piece of paper each, fill it out in private fold it and throw it into the box. At the same time his name gets crossed out on a list. Now everybody can check this fairly easily.
Now let's look at whatever machine-based system you've got. You've got this machine, either mechanical or electronical. You usually cannot look inside of it. You cannot tell if the levers are labelled correctly or if the firmware is really what it's supposed to be. Even if you have sourcecode that's completely unusable for the 90% of people who cannot read code. Relying on others is not an option as the others could be against you. Just imagine a party forming beeing against computers, which programmer would help them?
I don't think the problem is actual network bandwidth after the first mile. After all, it's hard to get any serious equipment with a bandwidth of less than a Gigabit per second and it makes virtually no sense to run less than that over a fibre.
For cable operators the problem simply is the last mile. Shared media like CATV cables aren't suitable for such purposes.
The point is simply, I'm paying my ISP to provide me bandwidth. I'm paying them to buy whatever is needed to get most of my packets through.If there is any kind of congestion over longer periods of time it's their fault.
If they have to pay to much to their upstream provider: Well why didn't they peer with their competitors?
Most of the problems in the debate stem from ISPs beeing run as a business, however it's a public service.
Absolutely. Resolution _always_ is one dimension. So at most it's a bit more than twice the resolution. It's about 4 times the number of pixels.
Well it's already done in some parts of Germany under a project named Freifunk. I participate in one of those projects and have 2 routers running, connected via TINC with the other routers on the network.
They would probably switch to meshed wireless networking.
Culturally it would be more like in the BBS days with good local connectivity, but very little remote one.
Those networks are of course much harder to controll so piracy will still be there.
Absolutely, the problem with software or complex hardware of any sort is that the average person cannot verify it working. The simple "paper and pencil" approach can be understood and verified by everybody, even people who cannot programm or cannot reverse-engineer complex microelectronics with their bare eyes.
Well when corporations and governments are corrupt, the best way to go is obviously to install (wireless) mesh networking equipment. Essentially you need a few people who can install the alternative firmware onto cheap wireless routers and set an IP-Address. The rest of the people now just need to put those routers in convenient places. As a bonus feature, you could add simple single chip serial terminals into the case and make cheap and tiny internet terminals.
Well it's the same as with "security" software. Most people don't care. The large majority don't know what it is and does. A minority cares and knows that it's a bad idea.
However there's a small, but powerful minority able to convince large parts of the society about something. He only needs to convince them to reach the big market.
Applied to the AV industry it looks like that. Most people don't know that that kind of software is doing. The ones that do understand what it's doing and are slightly into security know that it's mostly snake-oil. However there are a few powerfull people like authors who can be convinced that AV software does anything useful. And those people will act as multipliers for your idea.
On the Internet this looks a bit differently. Here we have ISPs which can simply force any kind of policy onto their users. And those are easily convinced that anonymity is a bad thing. Especially when you tell them that your system also allows billing for content. So he'd only have to convince them to get his system through. As in many places there is no competition on Internet access, the ISPs have little reason to not do that.
If you are talking about actually doing development ON an iPhone instead of FOR an iPhone, I can't for a second fathom why you would want to subject yourself to that much pain...
Because I have a problem an I need to use a computer. Therefore I need to programm it and cannot wait until someone on another computer has developed a program for me.
The iPhone is nothing more than an appliance, a device made for people who cannot program.
The problem why most computing devices suck today is that are to restricted and often to cumbersome to use.
The iPhone was only successfull, because it is easy to use. It's still heavily restricted, for example you cannot do application development on it.
Windows Mobile devices are not much less restricted than the iPhone, but are harder to use.
At least for geeks this might change with newer Linux-based devices running on distributions like Maemo. For example my N810 can do nearly everything your unixoid workstation can do. Sure it's limited in display and keyboard, but seriously, you cannot fit a 30" display into a portable device, can you? I can simply ssh to other computers, or even ssh from them to my portable device. I can simply use apt-get to install packages, and if it shouldn't be availiable, it should be possible to compile it on the device.
He obviously ran out of arguments for his software so he has to claim that all existing software (and most DNS-Server right now are open source) is bad and _therefore_ his software must be great.
It's a train of arguments used by many people in the past: "Witches are bad, therefore we are good when we burn them." "The terrorists are evil, therefore we are good whatever we do."
Now this is paired with an idiot who doesn't even know the difference between free software and freeware.
True, the way to go is simply to store every change and usually display the newest version of a record. This also allows you to make an "undo" function which your users will appreciate very much.
Wow, that's insane. I have a Casio TV-770 which only needs 3.5 watts.
Well actually moving now makes a lot of sense as you will be one of the first to be on IPv6. Nobody cares what you do on IPv6 so you can easily just run FTP-Servers and be sure that nobody except the people you tell that will ever find you. You can do Bittorrent without any problems, in fact Sixxs.net is having it's own IPv6-only tracker. IPv6 still is free.
And not many people are as lucky as you actually having an ISP giving you 16 IPs. In Germany for example you'll have to get a commercial account and those are many times as expensive as domestic ones. In Africa and Asia you are lucky if you get a single public IP-address at all. There you often are behind several layers of NAT.
Well if you are with a cable or mobile ISP it might even be easier to get propper IPv6 than IPv4. Just set up a tunnel to a tunnel broker like Sixxs for example. It will even work through NAT and you'll get 2^80 IPv6 adresses.
I mean even today there are ISPs which only give you NAT. ISPs which filter your IPv4 traffic or inject additional packets to keep you from using IPv4. Many ISPs also only give you one dynamic IP-address and charge more if you want more of them.
I mean IPv4 is so hard to use by now that people actually prefer Google reading through their mail instead of setting up their own mailserver! With IPv6 that's trivial to do. You can also easily log into your computer at home without having to go through hoops like dynamic DNS.