Copper is only for local distribution these days. Sure, occasionally somebody will take out a bundle of 600 copper pairs and trash a neighborhood's phone lines, but typically it's not a big deal. And there's more fiber getting out into neighborhoods, so there are more fiber cuts that don't affect a lot of people.
But backbone networks are always fiber, at least since the 80s. Bubba the Backhoe Driver may actually hit neighborhood copper a lot more often, but it's more fun when he takes out the backbone route that's feeding half your bandwidth to the West Coast.
Also, L3 is a backbone company, not a local telco, so they're only doing fiber - if they've got customers on copper, like a business with a T1 or T3, they're getting the last mile from the local telco.
That's different from the problems that have affected Humboldt, which have to do with geographical isolation and low population density - it's hard to get the diversity you need up there (especially if you want very high-speed connections.)
The Silicon Valley problem involved cuts in four different places the same night.
Smartphones already deliver better graphics than any of the 1980s PCs and most from the 90s, and more CPU horsepower. The important part is creating games that have enough content depth to make them engaging, as opposed to just thumb candy (though there's also a market for selling high volumes of $1 thumb candy games.)
MYST would fit on a typical smartphone screen. Porting Nethack has probably already been done (:-), though it's probably better on a phone with a separate keypad. Some games need bigger screens to create a sense of immersion, but many don't. (Would Doom have worked on a phone?)
Facebook gaming has become really significant, not only as a gaming environment but as a way to keep Facebook users around, as opposed to burning out and moving on to the next social networking platform that comes around.
Thank you. I'd been hoping that was obvious (:-) Also, depending on your ISP, there may often be other problems with the reliability of their mail delivery, which have been discussed extensively over the years, and there's the simple problem that mail receivers may not want to accept mail from yourdomain.com if it's not the same address block as incoming mail to your domain.
If you're running the SMTP server on your machine, and set it up to accept encrypted SMTP, most SMTP MTAs systems will encrypt mail to you and your ISP won't have access to it. The real issue is getting other people to accept SMTP from you, as opposed to deciding that any home internet connection that tries to send mail is a spam botnet zombie.
And gmail may not be proactively handing the Feds everything they want on a whim, but if the Feds hand them a subpoena and a "don't tell the customer" order, they'll hand over your mail, IP records, and anything else in the subpoena, and won't tell you, because they don't have a choice.
Webmail's useful if you want to keep all your mail on somebody else's server and not need to install client software on your PC, which is to say that it's really convenient for service providers. But if you're running your own server anyway, how often are you connecting from machines you don't control? You could be using a POP/IMAP client instead, and get a better user interface.
Of course, I'm still using Eudora, because my fingers know all the shortcuts and I don't want to figure out if Thunderbird has matured enough to be as good, but at some point I'll need a client from this millennium.:-) I'm also using ssh to run mutt and Mail on some systems I use, because it's really easier for what I do there, and an Android IMAP client on my phone, and Outlook at work because I have to, but Eudora's really been the best mail client I've had for a while.
I metamoderated your article as "+", because you it's not a troll or a flame, but you're seriously wrong.
Shipping is dirt cheap - the container ship is one of the main things that revolutionized manufacturing by making globalization affordable - it's cheaper to haul stuff across the ocean by ship than across North America by train.
And "artificially low currency exchange" is also nonsense - that just means they're charging less for their labor and local raw materials than their competition are, but the materials they import cost just as much, and most of China's manufacturing isn't spending a lot on raw materials. (Compare it to the auto industry, where Japan and to some extent Korea are doing the fancy manufacturing, though they might be buying some steel from China.)
You did forget to argue about "less environmental regulation", which does apply in China, and also in places like Malaysia where a lot of the US chip companies do their manufacturing.
But you and the parent article also forgot about the systems effects, which make China work well for manufacturing, just as they used to make Detroit work well and still work in Silicon Valley. There's a huge infrastructure of companies that have skills at designing and making components and have established relationships with each other, so if you want something made they can get all the components and tools and equipment together effectively and do any additional design work.
Well of course they've made products that sucked. And there have been some years that Steve saved the company and transformed the industry by introducing computer cases that were transparent blue-green! Oh, wow! Your computer's like a Double Rainbow! It's So Cool! (ok, somehow it did the job, and let him transform the industry again a year or two later by introducing computers that were White, unless it was black that time.) And when they have products that fail, usually nobody buys them, or they buy them and grumble a bit, and maybe somewhere inside One Infinite Loop there are some new bloodstains on the shiny white floor where somebody's head rolled out the door, but that's part of what they keep a Reality Distortion Field around for, but next year there's a product that transforms the industry again.
I was actually quite surprised. I started playing with Arduinos a year or so ago, and found that all of my local Radio Shacks have a section about 6 feet wide, 10 drawers high, with actual electronic components in them, as well as soldering stuff and a variable amount of other electronics on the wall (typically a couple of PIC or Basic Stamp sets.) Half of them are various audio connectors, and half of what's left are collections (Bag O' Resistors, Bag O' LEDs, etc.), but it's still been really useful. They don't have AVR microcontrollers, but they've got 555 timers and a couple kinds of op-amps, and they've got lots of different LEDs. And yeah, you'll pay a lot more than if you ordered them online, but there's no shipping cost and they're right there on your way home from work. (On the other hand, if you want a USB cable, they've only got $25 ones, not $2 ones.)
Obviously it's not an English name (:-) And there are other Etzioni's out there, such as Amitai Etzioni, but I suppose his name doesn't help refute your theory very well...
Yahoo may have been in more things, but Altavista was really the search engine to beat, and Google beat them. And of course there were other search/portal companies (like Excite, which @Home unfortunately decided to buy/merge for $Nbillion.)
First of all, there's an opportunity for other search systems even within Google - as TFA says, Classic Google Search isn't really designed for the constraints of a cellphone screen (much less for voice-based searches, where the keyword model might not even be the right engine to put underneath the user interface, unlike mobile-phone search where it probably is.) A good mobile-phone search UI would be a real improvement, whether or not you end up selling your startup to Google, or marketing your search tool as an Android App..
Second, any time you're talking about Design as a strategic business tool in an even vaguely computer-related area, you've got to think about Apple. They may not want to eat your lunch today, but if they ever do, they'll come out with a product that's insanely great, paradigm-shifting, and shiny, and you'll have to deal with them. Maybe it'll look a better product in your current space, like iPods taking over the MP3 market, but then you find out that iTunes is at least as important as the hardware itself, or maybe it'll be something even more subversive, like an App Store.
And then there are companies like Tellme or Genesys, which have been in the IVR / dumb-phone voice search space for decades, and probably have cool things to do in the smartphone space as well, or Nuance (who own Dragon Dictate and a few other technologies.) (And Tellme got bought by Microsoft a few years back, so there are some hooks into other large product sets.)
So there's essentially no technical difference between the RC planes/copters you're allowed to fly for fun and the ones you're not allowed to fly for money (except that businesses are more likely to pay for bigger drones than hobbyists.)
But what if you're having fun playing with model airplanes at work? Sure, most people don't get paid to play with toys, but they also say that about jobs in the computer game industry....
And what if your job is developing RC drone aircraft? Do you have to get them certified before you can fly them, and can you get them certified without flying them first?
Somebody else's post suggests that the difference between hobbyist and commercial use is that there are presumably very few hobbyists and lots of commercial users, so the commercial ones need licensing. I'd suggest that that's backwards - there are lots of hobbyists using RC planes they bought at the toy store, and fewer businesses using them commercially (though the businesses may put in more flight hours.)
And if the FAA is saying that News Corp can't use drone aircraft to perv on vacationing celebrities at the beach, but everybody else can, that seems to have serious First Amendment issues.
Seeed Studios makes Grove System, a connectorized bunch of input and output parts that plug in to an Arduino shield, and also sells Arduinos, Netduinos, Zigbee things, and *duino clones. Grove is $39 for the basic set of ~10 things (and has various extra frobs available.) (And realistically, you'll still want to get a breadboard and bag of assorted LEDs and some resistors.) They previously made a similar system called Electronic Brick, which is a 3-wire interface; Grove is 4-wire so it can support either I2C or analog.
If there isn't a cool parts store near you, then you order from Digikey or Mouser if you want industrial-style supply catalogs, or Sparkfun or Adafruit if you want friendly hobbyist stuff. Or you can go to a less cool Radio Shack, who don't carry most of the fancy stuff (though they're about to start carrying Arduino) but are good for basic ICs, LEDs, resistors, capacitors, breadboards, and soldering irons.
The free batch-job handler that most student projects used gave you 1 second of CPU time and 6-10 pages of output (depending on the year.) But if things were busy, it might take an hour between the time you queue up to put your cards into the reader and the time your printout arrives. A few years later, I was taking a compiler course at night, and could either do my work on a VAX shared with about 30-40 other people, or on a mainframe running a somewhat odd version of Unix, which usually only had a couple of interactive users on it - it was really amazing to be able to type "cc myproject.c", hit carriage return, and get a $ prompt back immediately.
If you live in a real community, especially a small one, you're going to know teachers socially, not just professionally. My high school music teacher was also my church choir director. At least one teacher's kid was my age. My history teacher was in the community theater group that I was in, and yes, community theater groups have parties with alcohol (don't remember if any were at his house.) One teacher hired a couple of students to do some logging work for a couple of days (so yes, I'm a lumberjack, and I'm still alive - today's paranoids would probably be more worried about that than about the occasional glass of wine.) It wasn't a problem.
There was one 25-year-old English teacher who could have passed for a student if she'd wanted to, so she probably worked harder at looking professional than the older teachers.
The standard teaching language at Cornell in the mid-70s was PL/C, Cornell's version of the IBM PL/I Checkout Compiler. It didn't "fix" infinite loops, but if "fixed" a lot of simple syntax errors and some runtime errors like "divide by zero" or out-of-bounds array indexes.
Sure, it wasn't always reliable, and could even cause infinite loops rather than preventing them, but it still let you speed up the code-keypunch-wait-run-debug cycle a lot. Fixing the syntax errors meant that you could usually identify all your syntax errors in one run (especially simple ones like forgetting a statement-delimiting semicolon or using the wrong number of closing parentheses), and could often find where you had logic errors even though it didn't always do the right thing (e.g. replacing an out-of-bounds array index with "1" was seldom correct, but it told you you'd done something wrong.) Since the development cycle typically included "wait for a keypunch", "wait to put your cards in the reader" and "wait for your batch job to come out of the printer", and the computer labs got overcrowded when CS100 projects were due, this was a big win.
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Copper is only for local distribution these days. Sure, occasionally somebody will take out a bundle of 600 copper pairs and trash a neighborhood's phone lines, but typically it's not a big deal. And there's more fiber getting out into neighborhoods, so there are more fiber cuts that don't affect a lot of people.
But backbone networks are always fiber, at least since the 80s. Bubba the Backhoe Driver may actually hit neighborhood copper a lot more often, but it's more fun when he takes out the backbone route that's feeding half your bandwidth to the West Coast.
Also, L3 is a backbone company, not a local telco, so they're only doing fiber - if they've got customers on copper, like a business with a T1 or T3, they're getting the last mile from the local telco.
That's different from the problems that have affected Humboldt, which have to do with geographical isolation and low population density - it's hard to get the diversity you need up there (especially if you want very high-speed connections.)
The Silicon Valley problem involved cuts in four different places the same night.
That goes along with the recent /. story about how Mozilla's Nightingale is why Firefox Still Matters.
Smartphones already deliver better graphics than any of the 1980s PCs and most from the 90s, and more CPU horsepower. The important part is creating games that have enough content depth to make them engaging, as opposed to just thumb candy (though there's also a market for selling high volumes of $1 thumb candy games.)
MYST would fit on a typical smartphone screen. Porting Nethack has probably already been done (:-), though it's probably better on a phone with a separate keypad. Some games need bigger screens to create a sense of immersion, but many don't. (Would Doom have worked on a phone?)
Facebook gaming has become really significant, not only as a gaming environment but as a way to keep Facebook users around, as opposed to burning out and moving on to the next social networking platform that comes around.
Thank you. I'd been hoping that was obvious (:-) Also, depending on your ISP, there may often be other problems with the reliability of their mail delivery, which have been discussed extensively over the years, and there's the simple problem that mail receivers may not want to accept mail from yourdomain.com if it's not the same address block as incoming mail to your domain.
If you're running the SMTP server on your machine, and set it up to accept encrypted SMTP, most SMTP MTAs systems will encrypt mail to you and your ISP won't have access to it. The real issue is getting other people to accept SMTP from you, as opposed to deciding that any home internet connection that tries to send mail is a spam botnet zombie.
And gmail may not be proactively handing the Feds everything they want on a whim, but if the Feds hand them a subpoena and a "don't tell the customer" order, they'll hand over your mail, IP records, and anything else in the subpoena, and won't tell you, because they don't have a choice.
Webmail's useful if you want to keep all your mail on somebody else's server and not need to install client software on your PC, which is to say that it's really convenient for service providers. But if you're running your own server anyway, how often are you connecting from machines you don't control? You could be using a POP/IMAP client instead, and get a better user interface.
Of course, I'm still using Eudora, because my fingers know all the shortcuts and I don't want to figure out if Thunderbird has matured enough to be as good, but at some point I'll need a client from this millennium. :-) I'm also using ssh to run mutt and Mail on some systems I use, because it's really easier for what I do there, and an Android IMAP client on my phone, and Outlook at work because I have to, but Eudora's really been the best mail client I've had for a while.
Mod parent off-topic, please!
I metamoderated your article as "+", because you it's not a troll or a flame, but you're seriously wrong.
Shipping is dirt cheap - the container ship is one of the main things that revolutionized manufacturing by making globalization affordable - it's cheaper to haul stuff across the ocean by ship than across North America by train.
And "artificially low currency exchange" is also nonsense - that just means they're charging less for their labor and local raw materials than their competition are, but the materials they import cost just as much, and most of China's manufacturing isn't spending a lot on raw materials. (Compare it to the auto industry, where Japan and to some extent Korea are doing the fancy manufacturing, though they might be buying some steel from China.)
You did forget to argue about "less environmental regulation", which does apply in China, and also in places like Malaysia where a lot of the US chip companies do their manufacturing.
But you and the parent article also forgot about the systems effects, which make China work well for manufacturing, just as they used to make Detroit work well and still work in Silicon Valley. There's a huge infrastructure of companies that have skills at designing and making components and have established relationships with each other, so if you want something made they can get all the components and tools and equipment together effectively and do any additional design work.
The other Prius's driver looked like Sarah Connor.
Well of course they've made products that sucked. And there have been some years that Steve saved the company and transformed the industry by introducing computer cases that were transparent blue-green! Oh, wow! Your computer's like a Double Rainbow! It's So Cool! (ok, somehow it did the job, and let him transform the industry again a year or two later by introducing computers that were White, unless it was black that time.) And when they have products that fail, usually nobody buys them, or they buy them and grumble a bit, and maybe somewhere inside One Infinite Loop there are some new bloodstains on the shiny white floor where somebody's head rolled out the door, but that's part of what they keep a Reality Distortion Field around for, but next year there's a product that transforms the industry again.
I was actually quite surprised. I started playing with Arduinos a year or so ago, and found that all of my local Radio Shacks have a section about 6 feet wide, 10 drawers high, with actual electronic components in them, as well as soldering stuff and a variable amount of other electronics on the wall (typically a couple of PIC or Basic Stamp sets.) Half of them are various audio connectors, and half of what's left are collections (Bag O' Resistors, Bag O' LEDs, etc.), but it's still been really useful. They don't have AVR microcontrollers, but they've got 555 timers and a couple kinds of op-amps, and they've got lots of different LEDs. And yeah, you'll pay a lot more than if you ordered them online, but there's no shipping cost and they're right there on your way home from work. (On the other hand, if you want a USB cable, they've only got $25 ones, not $2 ones.)
Obviously it's not an English name (:-) And there are other Etzioni's out there, such as Amitai Etzioni, but I suppose his name doesn't help refute your theory very well...
Yahoo may have been in more things, but Altavista was really the search engine to beat, and Google beat them. And of course there were other search/portal companies (like Excite, which @Home unfortunately decided to buy/merge for $Nbillion.)
First of all, there's an opportunity for other search systems even within Google - as TFA says, Classic Google Search isn't really designed for the constraints of a cellphone screen (much less for voice-based searches, where the keyword model might not even be the right engine to put underneath the user interface, unlike mobile-phone search where it probably is.) A good mobile-phone search UI would be a real improvement, whether or not you end up selling your startup to Google, or marketing your search tool as an Android App..
Second, any time you're talking about Design as a strategic business tool in an even vaguely computer-related area, you've got to think about Apple. They may not want to eat your lunch today, but if they ever do, they'll come out with a product that's insanely great, paradigm-shifting, and shiny, and you'll have to deal with them. Maybe it'll look a better product in your current space, like iPods taking over the MP3 market, but then you find out that iTunes is at least as important as the hardware itself, or maybe it'll be something even more subversive, like an App Store.
And then there are companies like Tellme or Genesys, which have been in the IVR / dumb-phone voice search space for decades, and probably have cool things to do in the smartphone space as well, or Nuance (who own Dragon Dictate and a few other technologies.) (And Tellme got bought by Microsoft a few years back, so there are some hooks into other large product sets.)
So there's essentially no technical difference between the RC planes/copters you're allowed to fly for fun and the ones you're not allowed to fly for money (except that businesses are more likely to pay for bigger drones than hobbyists.)
But what if you're having fun playing with model airplanes at work? Sure, most people don't get paid to play with toys, but they also say that about jobs in the computer game industry....
And what if your job is developing RC drone aircraft? Do you have to get them certified before you can fly them, and can you get them certified without flying them first?
Somebody else's post suggests that the difference between hobbyist and commercial use is that there are presumably very few hobbyists and lots of commercial users, so the commercial ones need licensing. I'd suggest that that's backwards - there are lots of hobbyists using RC planes they bought at the toy store, and fewer businesses using them commercially (though the businesses may put in more flight hours.)
And if the FAA is saying that News Corp can't use drone aircraft to perv on vacationing celebrities at the beach, but everybody else can, that seems to have serious First Amendment issues.
Yes, you got the author right. The trick is that in the 1920 edition, he's taking the other road...
Seeed Studios makes Grove System, a connectorized bunch of input and output parts that plug in to an Arduino shield, and also sells Arduinos, Netduinos, Zigbee things, and *duino clones. Grove is $39 for the basic set of ~10 things (and has various extra frobs available.) (And realistically, you'll still want to get a breadboard and bag of assorted LEDs and some resistors.) They previously made a similar system called Electronic Brick, which is a 3-wire interface; Grove is 4-wire so it can support either I2C or analog.
If there isn't a cool parts store near you, then you order from Digikey or Mouser if you want industrial-style supply catalogs, or Sparkfun or Adafruit if you want friendly hobbyist stuff. Or you can go to a less cool Radio Shack, who don't carry most of the fancy stuff (though they're about to start carrying Arduino) but are good for basic ICs, LEDs, resistors, capacitors, breadboards, and soldering irons.
The free batch-job handler that most student projects used gave you 1 second of CPU time and 6-10 pages of output (depending on the year.) But if things were busy, it might take an hour between the time you queue up to put your cards into the reader and the time your printout arrives. A few years later, I was taking a compiler course at night, and could either do my work on a VAX shared with about 30-40 other people, or on a mainframe running a somewhat odd version of Unix, which usually only had a couple of interactive users on it - it was really amazing to be able to type "cc myproject.c", hit carriage return, and get a $ prompt back immediately.
You cannot escape the gazebo.
If you live in a real community, especially a small one, you're going to know teachers socially, not just professionally. My high school music teacher was also my church choir director. At least one teacher's kid was my age. My history teacher was in the community theater group that I was in, and yes, community theater groups have parties with alcohol (don't remember if any were at his house.) One teacher hired a couple of students to do some logging work for a couple of days (so yes, I'm a lumberjack, and I'm still alive - today's paranoids would probably be more worried about that than about the occasional glass of wine.) It wasn't a problem.
There was one 25-year-old English teacher who could have passed for a student if she'd wanted to, so she probably worked harder at looking professional than the older teachers.
The standard teaching language at Cornell in the mid-70s was PL/C, Cornell's version of the IBM PL/I Checkout Compiler. It didn't "fix" infinite loops, but if "fixed" a lot of simple syntax errors and some runtime errors like "divide by zero" or out-of-bounds array indexes.
Sure, it wasn't always reliable, and could even cause infinite loops rather than preventing them, but it still let you speed up the code-keypunch-wait-run-debug cycle a lot. Fixing the syntax errors meant that you could usually identify all your syntax errors in one run (especially simple ones like forgetting a statement-delimiting semicolon or using the wrong number of closing parentheses), and could often find where you had logic errors even though it didn't always do the right thing (e.g. replacing an out-of-bounds array index with "1" was seldom correct, but it told you you'd done something wrong.) Since the development cycle typically included "wait for a keypunch", "wait to put your cards in the reader" and "wait for your batch job to come out of the printer", and the computer labs got overcrowded when CS100 projects were due, this was a big win.