The big issue isn't whether it's CD vs. vinyl - it's how the sound gets mixed and warped and produced. Digital gives you more tools to adjust that, which not only means that good sound guys can do good things with it, but band sound guys can do bad things to it. These days just about the only people producing vinyl are going for the audiophile market (ahem.. snobs... ahem..:-) which wants the sound to get managed in ways that sound better than the sound that gets produced for the Britney Spears Clone market. In the early days of rock&roll, nobody had a clue how to engineer the sound - the vinyl from those days is often produced just as badly as bad CDs today, with worse equipment and badly placed mikes.
Most of the wireless plans I've seen that offer cheap "unlimited" service only allow it for the handheld device - you're not allowed to use it as a modem for your PC unless you're buying the >$80 plan. They can afford to offer $20 handheld-only unlimited, because you're only going to use so much data on a handheld.
The big problem, of course, is that cellphone companies are greedy and not visionary; they've been making scads of money selling 10-cent text messaging to teenagers and selling old-pager-priced data services to businesses, and they don't want to let go of that mindset just because the technology's changed and the users want something different. And so far it's working for them:-)
To cut them some slack, though, there are two parts to their cost - the underlying internet, for which there's really no excuse not to allow unlimited bandwidth, but also the hardware and operational cost for their radio equipment and spectrum. The per-bit cost for the radio side has come way down with the newer technologies, probably by a couple of orders of magnitude, but the capacity still has limits, and if they offered actually unlimited unlimited service at a cheap price, they'd burn through it pretty fast and their service would start to degrade.
I don't know if they know what the real capacity is, or what the real market is, but we've seen with several other technologies what happens when you offer people "unlimited" service without being prepared for customers having a different idea of what they want to do with the service than you did. I don't mind too much if they aren't willing to go there - but they shouldn't be calling their service "unlimited" when it's actually "very limited".
I'm getting tired of hearing this "You've only got two choices" whining. As the parent poster says, there may be only two providers for the physical wire into your house, but all of the major US telcos support wholesale service for DSL providers over top of that (not sure if the smaller independent telcos all do or not, but many of them are in rural areas where DSL's not practical.)
In medium-large markets, there are CLECs like Covad and New Edge that rent copper from the telco and run their own DSLAMs, and in most markets, if the telco is running a DSLAM, they'll wholesale an ATM connection to the ISP, so they're only providing Layer 2 service, though in some cases they'll only do PPPoE which is an ugly tunnelled Layer 2ish hybrid.
Either way, the DSL ISP gets complete control over the IP packets and provides the backbone connectivity to the internet. If they want to set policies against servers or kill your Port 25 packets, they can, or if they want to sell you wide open genuine Internet service with static addresses that lets you do anything you want (except for the no-spamming AUP), they can do that too. The only thing the telco affects is the base cost and the speed. If you want to whine about "I can only get 768/128 here", then yeah, that's a legitimate telco issue, but the "consumers only have two choices and they both suck" whine is bogus.
Speakeasy's probably the best-known US-wide open-policy DSL ISP, but there are a bunch of others, and a lot of regional ones.
I agree with you - from the copyright owner's perspective, this looks potentially infringing on their content, creating a derivative work. The question is whether it's done in a way that's fairly clean, like creating a frame with an ad on top and having the user's browser download the page in another frame (unlikely in this case, but some online newspapers have sued each other for that), or whether it's done by mixing content, which is clearly bad. It might also support a trademark dilution lawsuit - the box is munging the copyright owner's pages in ways that may not look good, especially if (as somebody pointed out) it's installing ads that the copyright owner wouldn't approve of.
The other question is who to sue - just the ISP, or also the box maker? If the ISP just buys the box as a product, and buys a stream of ads from an ad vendor, it may be harder to get at the box maker, but if the box is packaged as a service including the ads, then it's pretty clear that you can nail the box provider. And it's the box provider you really *want* to nail, because this is a business model that deserves to die.
It used to be pretty common for small ISPs to have HTTP proxy caching servers. It improved performance and saved them a lot of money on bandwidth, back when bandwidth was expensive. It was an especially big win for a few commonly fetched web pages, like www.netscape.com which was the default browser home page.
Youtube doesn't just censor pr0n that people complain about - they also censor copyright violation. It's possible that Pirate Bay is doing this as a pr0n site, but my guess given their history is that their intention is more about giving people a place to post movie clips and other material that violates various locations' copyright rules. (Of course, some of that's pirated pr0n movies as well...)
They're currently Slashdotted, so I can't see their site's comments about itself.
H.264 is a really interesting codec for video conferencing - compared to the fairly universal H.263, it gives you equivalent video quality with about half the bandwidth, somewhat like using AAC instead of MP3, and it's designed to be fairly loss-tolerant. For business conferencing, that typically means using 192kbps instead of 384, but if you're doing personal talking-heads conferencing that can also mean much better video at 128kbps. Just because they've got the codec player doesn't mean they've got the encoder, but it would surprise me if they're not working on it; phone-to-phone video conferencing is an obvious cool feature to implement.
Obviously you can use it for streaming as well, though I don't know if you get the same bandwidth comparisons vs. the most popular streaming-video codecs, since there are so many of those out there. According to one of the Wikipedia pages, newer iPods support H.264 video formats, so they're capitalizing on those sales. And they're probably cutting down on the bandwidth required for YouTube, which is really important in a mobile data environment.
There's still lots of business for small ISPs using DSL. There are several different ways that they can provide service, which have different amounts of dependency on the telco, so different sets of profit margins, but I've seen people in all of them. Think about the IP protocol stack and work your way up:
Dig up the street yourself (yeah, yeah, too hard) or run wireless (ok, that's a different technology niche that you weren't talking about, but I know several ISPs in that business as well as community wireless efforts.)
Rent dry copper from the telco, and cage space in the telco offices, and run your own DSLAMs. Covad does this, as do a few other players. Then either build your own upstream network or rent your DSLAM capacity wholesale to other ISPs that do that.
Rent copper and DSLAM service from the telco, Covad, etc. - they'll deliver you an ATM pipe (DSL is really ATM underneath), so this is Layer 2 of the protocol stack. Provide routers, any services like email, and upstream internet bandwidth, and set any policies you like, such as static IP addresses, running servers, whether there's a monthly cap, sharing wireless with your neighbors, whatever. Lots of small to fairly large ISPs do this - Speakeasy's one of the best known; I use sonic.net who have a similar service and do some cool wireless things.
Same thing with PPPoE instead of ATM, so it's a Layer 2 over Layer 3 service. It's much more annoying and occasionally causes MTU size problems, and the main real benefit is that it's slightly easier to cut off customers that don't pay their bills, but it does also mean that the ISP can use a single routed pipe for their feed instead of needing to manage lots of ATM PVCs on an ATM-friendly router like Redback. It's also a good excuse to tell customers that you don't support Mac and Linux users, if you like telling customers that sort of thing.
Wholesale reseller for the connectivity, so the customer gets a bill with your logo on it, calls your help desk, and you're probably providing value-added services like mailboxes and web page storage space. It's not as useful to the consumer market, but it's actually quite convenient for some businesses where the customer wants to deal with one provider to get nationwide service. By the way, the Cable Openness Debate from a decade ago was really about this - the problem with cable modem service was not that it interfered with small ISPs by being too closed, but by being too open - it was routed IP from the head end on up, so unlike dial service or DSL, the customer didn't need the local ISP to provide them with upstream internet connectivity and mailboxes weren't perceived as providing enough profit margin for the ISP. If the cable modem people hadn't been boneheads, they'd have offered wholesale billing so the little ISPs could at least have their logo on the bill and made 10% on the transport, and they'd have avoided lots of political hassles and gotten more Americans on faster cable modem service because DSL wasn't very fast back then.
Somebody's already invented Feature Y, and let the world know about it by filing a patent that discloses it, claiming that it's new, useful, and not obvious. If Feature Y really was Not Obvious, then you either learned about it by seeing a product that had it, or by reading other disclosure material by the inventor, and if you want to implement it, then you must have decided that it was useful. If you want to use it, you can do so by licensing it from the inventor. Under some conditions in US law, licensing is mandatory, but in general it apparently isn't (IANAL).
One fairly common event is that companies want standards committees to write "standards" that include their patented invention. Sometimes that's done blindly, but many standards committees have policies that say they'll only adopt a standard if the patent-holder will license the technology free, or under "reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms, i.e. cheap and available to everybody.
There are records where gender directly makes a difference - most children, for instance.
And there are records where gender influences body shape, size, strength, and therefore separate records might make sense - running fast or far, lifting weights, etc.
But then there are records like this where gender mainly influences the social environment - of those women who wanted to be astronauts when they were kids, or who kind of fell into it later after being doctors or test pilots, the percentage who could get through the prejudice of the military (who are the main source for astronauts) or the other civilian organizations that NASA deals with is going to be lower than the number of men who have that.
So it's kind of like "Record for being in space longest with one hand tied behind your back". You can either give extra karma points to the person who sets the record, or deduct them from the people who discourage women from being astronauts.
Charlie talks about a variety of options - the generation ship approach is just one of them, and he was talking about its requirements and limitations. He also talked about the issues with getting a single canned monkey somewhere useful in its lifetime (as an alternative to robot mothers), and expressed some skepticism about the intelligence levels possible for robots, and what that would cost in terms of energy.
The point is, "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." It's going to take some really radical technology shifts just to make it economical to get to nearby parts of the solar system, and we're not going to be able to develop any interstellar travel before we've done significant solar system colonization, unless a few magic wands get waved.
We're not going to get humans usefully to Mars in George Bush's lifetime - getting to the moon just took ego and the Cold War Space Race to get it funded, but getting to Mars for an ego trip is a lot harder, and any significant level of orbital colonization is going to require self-sustaining economics with incremental value added from most of the steps. It's definitely going to require cheap transport up to orbit, probably space elevators. And it's going to require serious study on closed ecosystems, because you're not going to sustain a beyond-Earth-orbit space economy with one-way consumption and Earth-based resupply - we're not close to having serious research happening on that, leave aside the problems that'll show up once we start doing the research out in space, e.g. Russian Creeping Mold. (Politically, I don't think the Republicans are up for ecosystem research - that'll need to wait until hippies get elected. But I don't see the Republicans talking about serious elevator research either, and I think that'll take a long time to get the materials right.)
For Text, you're absolutely correct - text message pricing is left over from when it was new and cool and the signalling network didn't have much extra capacity, and with 3G around, charging pager-network prices doesn't make sense for a consumer. (For the carrier, it makes lots of sense, just as charging people $2/month to rent the black wireline phone they've had since the 1970s makes sense for wireline carriers:-) Unfortunately, here in the US most of the cellular companies want to charge that kind of per-KB pricing for 2.5G and 3G data services as well.
VOIP technology isn't that good a match for 3G - the latency is fairly high and jittery, due to the way cellular data is handled, so the Push-To-Talk stuff works fine but live VOIP has some quality issues. On the other hand, the phone has voice compression/decompression hardware built in, and plenty of bandwidth, so if it'll let the user's programs get to it, it's a natural thing to implement, and it's possible to use decent encryption instead of the joke encryption that GSM comes with. (Except for key exchange, crypto doesn't take much CPU resource at compressed-voice speeds, so it's not an extra performance hit.)
That's a cool phone - if it came in a flip-phone shape I'd be tempted to buy it.
We bought my mom a Jitterbug phone, which is similarly simple and designed for old people, with very big easy-to-read print, backlighting (looks like the Motofone F3 skips that), fat well-separated buttons, and a simple menu interface - most of the time you're just typing a name or number and hitting Yes, but you can also voice-dial or call the operator to connect you. It's not that old people are dumb, but if they've got vision problems then all the gadgety cutesy icons and menus with 400 different options in 4-point font just don't cut it. We cheated and entered Mom's phone list for her, but she could have done it herself or had the operator do it. She still needs a magnifying glass to read it, but couldn't do that reliably with her previous phone.
In spite of being dumbed-down, it's really slick. It's not trying to do a lot of fancy stuff, just let you tell it who to call and get on with it.
The US has more households with broadband this year than last year, so our percentages have gone up. Other countries may have gone up faster, and if so then good for them. The fact that there are more countries higher on the list than the US *doesn't* *matter*.
What really matters is what cool stuff we or they can do with them. If it lets people have more fun compared to broadcast TV, cool. If it lets workers be more productive, cool. If it lets people develop new applications to take advantage of the network connectivity, way cool, but I've seen surprisingly little of that, except for a few things the Koreans seem to be doing with online grocery shopping.
I've run into very few applications where I need more bandwidth (other than filesharing, of course.) I used to telecommute at 9600 baud, which was a bit limiting, but email was almost all ASCII in those days so it was ok. Given the current bloatware that we use today, I'd be grumpy with less than 384kbps, though just about everything I do works fine at 128kbps. Obviously watching videos works much better with faster connections, but surprisingly I'd rather have Tivo watch my television for me (which it does on cable) instead of having my computer do that.
You're not the average computer user. And as a friend of mine once said "You live in Silicon Valley - nobody you even *know* is an average computer user."
Yes, there are things wrong with each of Microsoft's products individually, but together they've very *very* successful at selling the things to businesses, and the sales of each one boosts the sales of the others by forcing them or the people they do business with into buying them. Individually the products wouldn't be as successful, but the level of integration between them keeps them selling.
Exchange/Outlook is a special case. There are other ways that calendaring could be implemented that would IMHO be easier to use and work better - but it's a good enough calendar tool for most business applications, and the critical thing about a calendar tool is that if it's even something close to adequate, and most of your coworkers use it, then it's the right tool for you to use too, because that's how meetings get set up. I'd prefer a calendar system I could use without having to fire up Outlook, that kept calendar entries in a simple open format that was easy to parse with multiple tools, and that was accessible with a web browser as opposed to email (which would work fine, since Outlook-style email systems can call browsers to open html or xml attachments), but hey, it's close enough for government work.
So we've got more broadband users than anybody else in the world, and more this year than last year, and they're calling that "falling"?
And that's only counting households - that's not counting the number of people there, or the number of zombies using our machines when we're not busy with them...:-)
Yes, the rest of the world is catching up, and they're ahead in terms of connectivity per capita, and some of them have pulled ahead of us this year. Good for them!
IMHO, the people pushing the "oh, no, we're falling behind" FUD are mainly trying to sell television over broadband (or consulting/pundit services.)
Microsoft's got a tight-knit set of products out there - businesses want to run Office because everybody else does, so they buy Windows to run it on, and buy upgrades to Office when it comes out, and buy upgrades to Windows when Office needs them. And they run Exchange for somewhat dodgier reasons, but again they buy Windows to go with it, and if they've got Windows they can run Office. And they developed IE and IE-dependent web site products mainly to make sure that people didn't replace their operating environments with Mozilla and Java, which would have made it easier to junk Windows.
Just about anything else could be released as Open Source, or given away free, and they'd do ok. They've done some things like that - Netmeeting was the first widespread H.323 voice/video/data/conferencing product, and while they didn't give out the source, the product was free beer (on Windows, of course), and was a reasonably standards-based reference implementation that everybody else in the industry could use. But messing with Office is messing with the crown jewels.
They said they'd found a million of the things - they weren't claiming to have caught all the zombies in the country or world. It's a good start, especially if they can get them cleaned up and watch for attempts at re-infecting them. It may be the low-hanging fruit, and they busted a couple of the zombie operators, which is good.
Of course, busting the operators also means there'll be some thousands of zombies out there who are waiting for Master to tell them what to do next, and some of them may get exploited by other people. But it's still a good start.
Usually it's pretending to be from Microsoft or AOL or your ISP or McAfee (though some of the mail I get claiming to be from McAfee is because I'm using a different anti-virus product at home this year:-) So the FBI is another authority that scammers can tell the gullible that they're working for.
If enough different authorities get forged, maybe the gullible will believe them less often...
While this is the first time I've heard of a fine for using biodiesel, there are a lot of states that will fine businesses and sometimes individuals for using home heating oil instead of regular diesel. It's the same reason - highway taxes - and they don't whine about "level playing fields", they just say they want the money. There isn't much difference between some grades of diesel and heating oil - diesel may or may not have some additives in it, and some states will put colored dye in them so you can tell them apart and bust gas stations that sell heating oil as diesel.
Back when I lived in New Jersey, I had oil heat, and if I'd forgotten to check the oiltank dipstick in a while and ran out of oil at night, I could get a can of diesel at the gas station to restart my furnace until the oil people could get there. It was really convenient.
If the vendor built a killer product, you wouldn't be talking about "Killer App" as "A product that runs on the vendor's platform" - you'd be talking about "Cool stuff you can do with the product". So the killer app for a mobile phone isn't usually "That cool game written in Java" - it's "Making phone calls from anywhere" or more recently "Text messaging your friends". And those things have been done - Apple might be able to make them 10% friendlier, and 40% prettier, and easy for older people to read, but it's still basically a phone with a shiny built-in Reality Distortion Effect.
Sometimes vendors can write killer apps for their own platforms, but that's not usually how it works. The vendor has the vendor's vision about what the product does and about what the user wants to do with it; killer apps happen when somebody has a *better* vision about what the user wants to do. If you've got a good development platform, lots of people can write apps for it, and if one of them's good enough to be a killer, it can make sales of the platform take off. The vendor has the platform expertise and may have better funding and a head start on time.
With the original IBM PC, the real killer app was "it's a cheap enough development platform that thousands of people can buy them and develop applications for themselves and potentially millions of end-users", which allowed development of the perceived killer apps like spreadsheets and word processors. It wasn't the best possible hardware or software, but it was sort of good enough and the price was right for businesses and some hobbyists.
Yes, I know you were making a Beatles joke, which was highly appropriate for Apple.....
But as long as they're supporting some common public standards, and (TBD?...) providing documentation, isn't that *better* than having Yet Another Proprietary SDK? I don't particularly like Ajax, and I'd rather see Java supported, but it's a reasonable platform to work with. Certainly enough for somebody to write the Next Cool App.
Yeah, it's nice and stable unless you happen to browse a web page like this one or this one in which case you're toast.
Too bad - I'd really like to try Safari, and I'll put up with an occasional browser-crash exploit, but not a remote-execution exploit. After all, IE and even Mozilla have their own ways to crash, not even requiring malice on the part of the web page authors...
Slashdot Mirror
The big issue isn't whether it's CD vs. vinyl - it's how the sound gets mixed and warped and produced. Digital gives you more tools to adjust that, which not only means that good sound guys can do good things with it, but band sound guys can do bad things to it. These days just about the only people producing vinyl are going for the audiophile market (ahem.. snobs... ahem.. :-) which wants the sound to get managed in ways that sound better than the sound that gets produced for the Britney Spears Clone market. In the early days of rock&roll, nobody had a clue how to engineer the sound - the vinyl from those days is often produced just as badly as bad CDs today, with worse equipment and badly placed mikes.
The big problem, of course, is that cellphone companies are greedy and not visionary; they've been making scads of money selling 10-cent text messaging to teenagers and selling old-pager-priced data services to businesses, and they don't want to let go of that mindset just because the technology's changed and the users want something different. And so far it's working for them:-)
To cut them some slack, though, there are two parts to their cost - the underlying internet, for which there's really no excuse not to allow unlimited bandwidth, but also the hardware and operational cost for their radio equipment and spectrum. The per-bit cost for the radio side has come way down with the newer technologies, probably by a couple of orders of magnitude, but the capacity still has limits, and if they offered actually unlimited unlimited service at a cheap price, they'd burn through it pretty fast and their service would start to degrade.
I don't know if they know what the real capacity is, or what the real market is, but we've seen with several other technologies what happens when you offer people "unlimited" service without being prepared for customers having a different idea of what they want to do with the service than you did. I don't mind too much if they aren't willing to go there - but they shouldn't be calling their service "unlimited" when it's actually "very limited".
In medium-large markets, there are CLECs like Covad and New Edge that rent copper from the telco and run their own DSLAMs, and in most markets, if the telco is running a DSLAM, they'll wholesale an ATM connection to the ISP, so they're only providing Layer 2 service, though in some cases they'll only do PPPoE which is an ugly tunnelled Layer 2ish hybrid.
Either way, the DSL ISP gets complete control over the IP packets and provides the backbone connectivity to the internet. If they want to set policies against servers or kill your Port 25 packets, they can, or if they want to sell you wide open genuine Internet service with static addresses that lets you do anything you want (except for the no-spamming AUP), they can do that too. The only thing the telco affects is the base cost and the speed. If you want to whine about "I can only get 768/128 here", then yeah, that's a legitimate telco issue, but the "consumers only have two choices and they both suck" whine is bogus.
Speakeasy's probably the best-known US-wide open-policy DSL ISP, but there are a bunch of others, and a lot of regional ones.
The other question is who to sue - just the ISP, or also the box maker? If the ISP just buys the box as a product, and buys a stream of ads from an ad vendor, it may be harder to get at the box maker, but if the box is packaged as a service including the ads, then it's pretty clear that you can nail the box provider. And it's the box provider you really *want* to nail, because this is a business model that deserves to die.
It used to be pretty common for small ISPs to have HTTP proxy caching servers. It improved performance and saved them a lot of money on bandwidth, back when bandwidth was expensive. It was an especially big win for a few commonly fetched web pages, like www.netscape.com which was the default browser home page.
They're currently Slashdotted, so I can't see their site's comments about itself.
Obviously you can use it for streaming as well, though I don't know if you get the same bandwidth comparisons vs. the most popular streaming-video codecs, since there are so many of those out there. According to one of the Wikipedia pages, newer iPods support H.264 video formats, so they're capitalizing on those sales. And they're probably cutting down on the bandwidth required for YouTube, which is really important in a mobile data environment.
Maybe they haven't translated it yet, but it's there.
One fairly common event is that companies want standards committees to write "standards" that include their patented invention. Sometimes that's done blindly, but many standards committees have policies that say they'll only adopt a standard if the patent-holder will license the technology free, or under "reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms, i.e. cheap and available to everybody.
And there are records where gender influences body shape, size, strength, and therefore separate records might make sense - running fast or far, lifting weights, etc.
But then there are records like this where gender mainly influences the social environment - of those women who wanted to be astronauts when they were kids, or who kind of fell into it later after being doctors or test pilots, the percentage who could get through the prejudice of the military (who are the main source for astronauts) or the other civilian organizations that NASA deals with is going to be lower than the number of men who have that.
So it's kind of like "Record for being in space longest with one hand tied behind your back". You can either give extra karma points to the person who sets the record, or deduct them from the people who discourage women from being astronauts.
The point is, "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." It's going to take some really radical technology shifts just to make it economical to get to nearby parts of the solar system, and we're not going to be able to develop any interstellar travel before we've done significant solar system colonization, unless a few magic wands get waved.
We're not going to get humans usefully to Mars in George Bush's lifetime - getting to the moon just took ego and the Cold War Space Race to get it funded, but getting to Mars for an ego trip is a lot harder, and any significant level of orbital colonization is going to require self-sustaining economics with incremental value added from most of the steps. It's definitely going to require cheap transport up to orbit, probably space elevators. And it's going to require serious study on closed ecosystems, because you're not going to sustain a beyond-Earth-orbit space economy with one-way consumption and Earth-based resupply - we're not close to having serious research happening on that, leave aside the problems that'll show up once we start doing the research out in space, e.g. Russian Creeping Mold. (Politically, I don't think the Republicans are up for ecosystem research - that'll need to wait until hippies get elected. But I don't see the Republicans talking about serious elevator research either, and I think that'll take a long time to get the materials right.)
VOIP technology isn't that good a match for 3G - the latency is fairly high and jittery, due to the way cellular data is handled, so the Push-To-Talk stuff works fine but live VOIP has some quality issues. On the other hand, the phone has voice compression/decompression hardware built in, and plenty of bandwidth, so if it'll let the user's programs get to it, it's a natural thing to implement, and it's possible to use decent encryption instead of the joke encryption that GSM comes with. (Except for key exchange, crypto doesn't take much CPU resource at compressed-voice speeds, so it's not an extra performance hit.)
We bought my mom a Jitterbug phone, which is similarly simple and designed for old people,
with very big easy-to-read print, backlighting (looks like the Motofone F3 skips that), fat well-separated buttons, and a simple menu interface - most of the time you're just typing a name or number and hitting Yes, but you can also voice-dial or call the operator to connect you. It's not that old people are dumb, but if they've got vision problems then all the gadgety cutesy icons and menus with 400 different options in 4-point font just don't cut it. We cheated and entered Mom's phone list for her, but she could have done it herself or had the operator do it. She still needs a magnifying glass to read it, but couldn't do that reliably with her previous phone.
In spite of being dumbed-down, it's really slick. It's not trying to do a lot of fancy stuff, just let you tell it who to call and get on with it.
What really matters is what cool stuff we or they can do with them. If it lets people have more fun compared to broadcast TV, cool. If it lets workers be more productive, cool. If it lets people develop new applications to take advantage of the network connectivity, way cool, but I've seen surprisingly little of that, except for a few things the Koreans seem to be doing with online grocery shopping.
I've run into very few applications where I need more bandwidth (other than filesharing, of course.) I used to telecommute at 9600 baud, which was a bit limiting, but email was almost all ASCII in those days so it was ok. Given the current bloatware that we use today, I'd be grumpy with less than 384kbps, though just about everything I do works fine at 128kbps. Obviously watching videos works much better with faster connections, but surprisingly I'd rather have Tivo watch my television for me (which it does on cable) instead of having my computer do that.
Yes, there are things wrong with each of Microsoft's products individually, but together they've very *very* successful at selling the things to businesses, and the sales of each one boosts the sales of the others by forcing them or the people they do business with into buying them. Individually the products wouldn't be as successful, but the level of integration between them keeps them selling.
Exchange/Outlook is a special case. There are other ways that calendaring could be implemented that would IMHO be easier to use and work better - but it's a good enough calendar tool for most business applications, and the critical thing about a calendar tool is that if it's even something close to adequate, and most of your coworkers use it, then it's the right tool for you to use too, because that's how meetings get set up. I'd prefer a calendar system I could use without having to fire up Outlook, that kept calendar entries in a simple open format that was easy to parse with multiple tools, and that was accessible with a web browser as opposed to email (which would work fine, since Outlook-style email systems can call browsers to open html or xml attachments), but hey, it's close enough for government work.
And that's only counting households - that's not counting the number of people there, or the number of zombies using our machines when we're not busy with them...
Yes, the rest of the world is catching up, and they're ahead in terms of connectivity per capita, and some of them have pulled ahead of us this year. Good for them!
IMHO, the people pushing the "oh, no, we're falling behind" FUD are mainly trying to sell television over broadband (or consulting/pundit services.)
Just about anything else could be released as Open Source, or given away free, and they'd do ok. They've done some things like that - Netmeeting was the first widespread H.323 voice/video/data/conferencing product, and while they didn't give out the source, the product was free beer (on Windows, of course), and was a reasonably standards-based reference implementation that everybody else in the industry could use. But messing with Office is messing with the crown jewels.
Of course, busting the operators also means there'll be some thousands of zombies out there who are waiting for Master to tell them what to do next, and some of them may get exploited by other people. But it's still a good start.
If enough different authorities get forged, maybe the gullible will believe them less often...
This peyote cactus, man, it's talkin' to me.
Back when I lived in New Jersey, I had oil heat, and if I'd forgotten to check the oiltank dipstick in a while and ran out of oil at night, I could get a can of diesel at the gas station to restart my furnace until the oil people could get there. It was really convenient.
Sometimes vendors can write killer apps for their own platforms, but that's not usually how it works. The vendor has the vendor's vision about what the product does and about what the user wants to do with it; killer apps happen when somebody has a *better* vision about what the user wants to do. If you've got a good development platform, lots of people can write apps for it, and if one of them's good enough to be a killer, it can make sales of the platform take off. The vendor has the platform expertise and may have better funding and a head start on time.
With the original IBM PC, the real killer app was "it's a cheap enough development platform that thousands of people can buy them and develop applications for themselves and potentially millions of end-users", which allowed development of the perceived killer apps like spreadsheets and word processors. It wasn't the best possible hardware or software, but it was sort of good enough and the price was right for businesses and some hobbyists.
But as long as they're supporting some common public standards, and (TBD?...) providing documentation, isn't that *better* than having Yet Another Proprietary SDK? I don't particularly like Ajax, and I'd rather see Java supported, but it's a reasonable platform to work with. Certainly enough for somebody to write the Next Cool App.
Too bad - I'd really like to try Safari, and I'll put up with an occasional browser-crash exploit, but not a remote-execution exploit. After all, IE and even Mozilla have their own ways to crash, not even requiring malice on the part of the web page authors...