Beyond the $100 difference in initial price, what advantages does this thing have over the netbook?
I have no interest in using a netbook most of the time. I can grab my wife's if I need it, but would usually rather use a beefier machine. And of course, MUCH better battery life running this little WiFi bubble for those other devices, since we're not running a whole computer, with display and storage, just to bridge 3G to WiFi.
Yeah, with averaging only 160MB a day, seven days a week, there's just no way you could run some RDP sessions, check your mail, do some business, upload some JPGs to Grandma, read the news, and call it an hour's work until you get back to a WiFi hotspot of your home/office broadband. Yes, just plain useless. None of that is "using the internet," huh.
It does exactly what it's supposed to, it's tiny, fast, and very simple to administer. It's a shame that 5GB/month costs what it costs, but if you can put out one serious server fire or interact with a customer in a way that saves a deal, it's worth every bit of what it costs.
I bought one on a Friday night, and it paid for itself and earned its monthly keep before lunchtime on Saturday.
Interestingly, it seems to be far more sensitive to Verizon's local RF signals than my phone is. Which is nice.
... if people want their government representatives and judges to understand their reservations about RIAA's way of doing business...
This is exactly what's wrong, here. Appelate judges (which include the associates of the Supreme Court) do not represent the people. They represent the Constitution. They look at existing laws and make sure that, when a case is brought before them, those laws are being applied in keeping with the Constitution. The judges should be completely blind to the aspirations, desires, or preferences of "the people," other than as it has been expressed through the laws that the people's representatives have legislated into place. And those representatives and the laws they've produced have a long history of supporting copyrights.
That's why Sotomayor's comments about her expectations that a wise Latina would make
"better" decisions than a white male says a lot about how wrong headed she is about her prospective new job and the role of a justice. Likewise when she yuks it up, nudge-nudge-wink-wink, about how she shouldn't say out loud how the appelate courts are where "policy is made." Completely, absolutely backwards, constitutionally. Just like the guy who's appointed her, of course, so that's not really all that surprising, I suppose.
You're missing the real point, which is that the GP is deliberately tap-dancing around the real point. He doesn't want to acknowledge the reality that major, wide-spread use of F/OSS stuff is never going to happen unless it find painless deployment in large business settings. And there's no way that a company will bother with that if it comes with some sort of baggage attached - like having to commit (to who?) to a certain amount of software development or other support for ever copy of slax or webmin that's running around on a thumbdrive within their workforce.
You can't have it both ways, and he's stamping his feet because he wants to.
If corporate IT types are going to have to sign up for some sort of commitment for using F/OSS goodies, they're going to just make life easier and sign up for an invoice from Microsoft or SAP or somebody else, and avoid weeks of meetings explaining why F/OSS is good, even if most of it is written by people that aren't accountable for anything, can't be reached on the phone, only correspond in Romanian, etc.
If the F/OSS folks want a greater cultural embrace of what they do, they should be praising the big companies that give them exposure, rather than bitching about them. Otherwise, they'll just have to admit that the model isn't sustainable when it has to support enterprise end users. TCO and perceived risks are real concepts, and the F/OSS religious types never seem to get that.
Social Security in the U.S. is one example among many
Exactly! Thank you. That system isn't exactly a monument to liberty, is it? It's confiscatory, non-voluntary, and bankrupt (both morally and fiscally). A socialist program that makes one person a slave to another, and which has been embedded into the psyche of enough voters as a magic entitlement that it now defies most any legislative cure by the people sent to congress to democratically represent the people footing the bill.
I've never really understood the mentality that seems to equate "socialism" with "dictatorship"
"Dictatorship" isn't really the right word. "Totalitarianism" would be a better fit. Though the "benign" dictatorship of western European countries, which provide dubious cradle-to-grave "care" for their hugely taxed citizens is paternalistic and unavoidable if you're born there.
a testament to our free media and our democracy; it has nothing to do with our economic system
You cannot separate the two. Take away the opportunities to take risk and thrive (by forming a Nanny State, instead), and you also chip away at democracy and freedom.
Compared to what and when? The middle class of forty years ago would never have considered themselves to middle class if they had two cars, four televisions, mobile phones, fresh produce from Chile flown into their local grocery store every day, etc. If people today deliberately stuck to similarly scaled expectations and monthly overhead, they'd live far, far better than the middle class to which you seem to be comparing them. They're not vanishing - you're just changing the definition.
unemployment is high
This week. Of course this country has had it far, far worse, and for years on end. We are now - at the depths of a cyclical recsession - experience unemployment rates that are about what many countries live with permanently, and a fraction of what's found in many other places. With the typical upswing that (despite the current congress's and administration's seeming attempts to prevent it) inevitably comes, we'll be back to unemployment rates that are the envy of most industrialized countries.
It's not clear that it's sustainable
As opposed to what... Marxism? Yeah, that sure worked out.
Take a look at the biosphere
Indeed. The environment is at its most trashed in places where socialist governments run the show. See the train wreck that happened in eastern Europe under the helpful central control of the Soviets, or the rapidly worsening disaster that is China.
For the most part it is being used to make rich people richer.
Exactly! Compared to 100 years ago, most people living in western nations are richer than their grand/parents. Standards of living have improved hugely. See issues like antibiotics, refridgeration, ubiquitous electricty, satellite television, long distance phone calls for pennies (or less), instant access to enourmous troves of information, lives that are decades longer, births that are far less fatal to mother and baby...
"Rich" is and always has been relative. Even lower-middle-class folks today enjoy personal amenities and creature comforts that some proverbial, rich, artistocratic Duke of Earl would have considered god-like magic only a few generations ago. The child of a wealthy industry magnate, only some years back, couldn't - for any ammount of money - have had a cochlear implant as now seen in plenty of average (but hearing impaired) kids today. It's absurd to compare one person's cash on hand with someone else's (as a measure of wealth) and to ignore comparisons to the vast reach of human history... compared to which billions of people live like kings.
Indie Newspaper Publisher / Writer / Janitor to himself: Man, I'm so hungry. I wonder if I could eat just a little of my belt or my shoes if I got them wet enough?
The time to take control away from someone is -before- they abuse the power, not after
And giving it to the UN, which regularly demonstrates its embrace of corruption at every level of its bureaucracy and finances, is better because... at least you know that domain name control will be immediately perverted by special interests and tyrants, instead of wondering if it might be, by a country with better free speech standards than pretty much anywhere else on the planet?
Hope they are not expecting to make any money by selling out their Customers at the drop of a hat.
How are people who show up to use a free service "customers?" Google's customers, for example, are their advertisers, not the people who use the free stuff.
I was in a kick-off meeting for a small web project for my firm's new client (a non-profit advocacy type organization). We were going to build a little CMS for part of their relocated web presence, and this was back before you could just-add-water to Drupal or Joomla, etc., and when which browser you used actually mattered when it came to admin tasks.
So, I asked the group around the conference table, "Just so we know how to approach some of this, which web browser do you folks use here in the office?" The public relations director raised her hand and said, "Oh, that's me!"
She was the Official Web Browser in the office, and was the one to talk to about all such matters. What do you say at that point? So I said, "Excellent... it's helpful to have a designated contact point on the... uh... highly technical stuff."
war, intrigue, politics, a giant wall of ice hundreds of metres high, torture, incest, dire wolves, eunuchs, castles, tournaments, rape, duels, slavery, dragons, fratricide, patricide... all the good stuff
I don't understand what last year's Democratic National Convention has to do with it. Please keep politics out of these discussions, OK? Thanks.
Really? All the time? And they never have any dealings with beligerant idiots, scam artists, thieves, rapists, drunk drivers, or anyone else who might sometimes be lying about things for any number of reasons? And you reflexively presume that the police are, always, lying about that stuff? Why?
So, is there a way to detect GPS antennas (maybe with some kind of frequency resonator ?)
You just reverse the polarity of the emitters, and use a tachion pulse. You might need to modulate some things, too, and release some plasma and stuff. Just don't ignite the Red Matter.
Says the group that anthropomorphizes a fictional being who's sole purpose is to prevent us from seeing his works while seeing his works.
What the hell are you talking about? Crazy superstitious people are crazy superstitious people, whether they worship Allah, the Tooth Fairy, The One Big Bad God, Thor, or any other fictional character... or whether they think trees have personalities, that the ice ages don't matter, that Gaia is their personal best friend, that even though most of the species that have ever existed are now extinct we're now at the Perfect State and nothing should ever change. Tree huggers afflicted with magical thinking aren't any better than traditionally religious people afflicted with magical thinking. The difference is that the Mother Nature Anthropomorphizers are fashionably reinforced by everyone from Disney/Pixar to PBS.
Except it's usually the loopy lefty crunchy hippy types that actually most often anthropomorophize nature, assign it a personality, presume they know what it wants and how it should be, etc. You know it's true.
Yes, that means watching the slaughter occur in various places in Africa
Should we also stop being the single largest source of humanitarian aid to Africa? Should we stop shipping goods back and forth to and and from areas that come under attack from crazy neighhoring states? Should we retreat from global commerce whenever the neighborhood is taken over by what amount to totalitarian drug dealers, international counterfeiters, and long range missile builders? Should we wait until a militant organization that has attacked us previously in the past does so again, and bigger, before dealing with the far-away government that is harboring and financially supporting them?
If two criminal gangs are frequently shooting it out on the streets you use going to and from work, are you really better off just permanently staying home? Or do you have an active interest in dealing with them, even if they don't actually live in the house physically next door to you?
The problem is that the GP thinks that democratic governments shouldn't have police or militaries. Which means that he doesn't think that India should have the capacity to protect itself from the Taliban either.
And, really, you don't see how it's in every free country's interests to prevent medieval-minded thugs like the Taliban from having nukes or ruling large parts of the world? Really?
if the government can afford to pay soldiers and cops to do their bidding, taxes are still too high
Yes! There should be no police! Now you're talking. And once you've gotten rid of them, there will be no more people to ever rob you of your possessions, or rape your daughter, since the lack of any consequences for such things always makes them go away.
Well we could start by not constantly being at war.
Excellent idea. I propose that we have the Taliban run the entire Middle East, and use the nukes they'll seize to destroy Israel, parts of India, and perhaps some friendly democracies in eastern Europe. We should also remove any prospect of a military deterrent so that friendly guys like Hugo Chavez can expand their totalitarian military rule throughout South America. Also, it would be awesome of Taiwan could be subjugated by force into communist China, and the North Koreans could set up more of their slave camps in place of the Kia and Hyundai factories in the south.
Obviously, if you have a 1% tax rate, no realistic amount of economic growth is going to provide as much tax revenue as a 30% tax rate.
Sure it will, if the 30% rate shuts down the businesses that grow the economy, or run them out of the country. People and companies that can barely pay their taxes spend less on the very movement of goods and services that does grow the economy. A small percentage of a lot of money moving around produces a lot more revenue than a large percentage of a receeding economy that you're busy trying to inefficiently nationalize into oblivion. See Venezuela for an example.
Lower tax rates can spur economic growth, but so can government spending (funded by higher tax rates)
Except that you're laundering all of that money through a notoriously inefficient, pork-laden, sinkhole that kills its efficient allocation.
Slashdot Mirror
Beyond the $100 difference in initial price, what advantages does this thing have over the netbook?
I have no interest in using a netbook most of the time. I can grab my wife's if I need it, but would usually rather use a beefier machine. And of course, MUCH better battery life running this little WiFi bubble for those other devices, since we're not running a whole computer, with display and storage, just to bridge 3G to WiFi.
Yeah, with averaging only 160MB a day, seven days a week, there's just no way you could run some RDP sessions, check your mail, do some business, upload some JPGs to Grandma, read the news, and call it an hour's work until you get back to a WiFi hotspot of your home/office broadband. Yes, just plain useless. None of that is "using the internet," huh.
It does exactly what it's supposed to, it's tiny, fast, and very simple to administer. It's a shame that 5GB/month costs what it costs, but if you can put out one serious server fire or interact with a customer in a way that saves a deal, it's worth every bit of what it costs.
I bought one on a Friday night, and it paid for itself and earned its monthly keep before lunchtime on Saturday.
Interestingly, it seems to be far more sensitive to Verizon's local RF signals than my phone is. Which is nice.
... if people want their government representatives and judges to understand their reservations about RIAA's way of doing business ...
This is exactly what's wrong, here. Appelate judges (which include the associates of the Supreme Court) do not represent the people. They represent the Constitution. They look at existing laws and make sure that, when a case is brought before them, those laws are being applied in keeping with the Constitution. The judges should be completely blind to the aspirations, desires, or preferences of "the people," other than as it has been expressed through the laws that the people's representatives have legislated into place. And those representatives and the laws they've produced have a long history of supporting copyrights.
That's why Sotomayor's comments about her expectations that a wise Latina would make "better" decisions than a white male says a lot about how wrong headed she is about her prospective new job and the role of a justice. Likewise when she yuks it up, nudge-nudge-wink-wink, about how she shouldn't say out loud how the appelate courts are where "policy is made." Completely, absolutely backwards, constitutionally. Just like the guy who's appointed her, of course, so that's not really all that surprising, I suppose.
You're missing the real point, which is that the GP is deliberately tap-dancing around the real point. He doesn't want to acknowledge the reality that major, wide-spread use of F/OSS stuff is never going to happen unless it find painless deployment in large business settings. And there's no way that a company will bother with that if it comes with some sort of baggage attached - like having to commit (to who?) to a certain amount of software development or other support for ever copy of slax or webmin that's running around on a thumbdrive within their workforce.
You can't have it both ways, and he's stamping his feet because he wants to.
If corporate IT types are going to have to sign up for some sort of commitment for using F/OSS goodies, they're going to just make life easier and sign up for an invoice from Microsoft or SAP or somebody else, and avoid weeks of meetings explaining why F/OSS is good, even if most of it is written by people that aren't accountable for anything, can't be reached on the phone, only correspond in Romanian, etc.
If the F/OSS folks want a greater cultural embrace of what they do, they should be praising the big companies that give them exposure, rather than bitching about them. Otherwise, they'll just have to admit that the model isn't sustainable when it has to support enterprise end users. TCO and perceived risks are real concepts, and the F/OSS religious types never seem to get that.
Social Security in the U.S. is one example among many
Exactly! Thank you. That system isn't exactly a monument to liberty, is it? It's confiscatory, non-voluntary, and bankrupt (both morally and fiscally). A socialist program that makes one person a slave to another, and which has been embedded into the psyche of enough voters as a magic entitlement that it now defies most any legislative cure by the people sent to congress to democratically represent the people footing the bill.
I've never really understood the mentality that seems to equate "socialism" with "dictatorship"
"Dictatorship" isn't really the right word. "Totalitarianism" would be a better fit. Though the "benign" dictatorship of western European countries, which provide dubious cradle-to-grave "care" for their hugely taxed citizens is paternalistic and unavoidable if you're born there.
a testament to our free media and our democracy; it has nothing to do with our economic system
You cannot separate the two. Take away the opportunities to take risk and thrive (by forming a Nanny State, instead), and you also chip away at democracy and freedom.
the middle class is vanishing in America
Compared to what and when? The middle class of forty years ago would never have considered themselves to middle class if they had two cars, four televisions, mobile phones, fresh produce from Chile flown into their local grocery store every day, etc. If people today deliberately stuck to similarly scaled expectations and monthly overhead, they'd live far, far better than the middle class to which you seem to be comparing them. They're not vanishing - you're just changing the definition.
unemployment is high
This week. Of course this country has had it far, far worse, and for years on end. We are now - at the depths of a cyclical recsession - experience unemployment rates that are about what many countries live with permanently, and a fraction of what's found in many other places. With the typical upswing that (despite the current congress's and administration's seeming attempts to prevent it) inevitably comes, we'll be back to unemployment rates that are the envy of most industrialized countries.
It's not clear that it's sustainable
As opposed to what... Marxism? Yeah, that sure worked out.
Take a look at the biosphere
Indeed. The environment is at its most trashed in places where socialist governments run the show. See the train wreck that happened in eastern Europe under the helpful central control of the Soviets, or the rapidly worsening disaster that is China.
For the most part it is being used to make rich people richer.
Exactly! Compared to 100 years ago, most people living in western nations are richer than their grand/parents. Standards of living have improved hugely. See issues like antibiotics, refridgeration, ubiquitous electricty, satellite television, long distance phone calls for pennies (or less), instant access to enourmous troves of information, lives that are decades longer, births that are far less fatal to mother and baby...
"Rich" is and always has been relative. Even lower-middle-class folks today enjoy personal amenities and creature comforts that some proverbial, rich, artistocratic Duke of Earl would have considered god-like magic only a few generations ago. The child of a wealthy industry magnate, only some years back, couldn't - for any ammount of money - have had a cochlear implant as now seen in plenty of average (but hearing impaired) kids today. It's absurd to compare one person's cash on hand with someone else's (as a measure of wealth) and to ignore comparisons to the vast reach of human history... compared to which billions of people live like kings.
Indie Newspaper Publisher / Writer / Janitor to himself: Man, I'm so hungry. I wonder if I could eat just a little of my belt or my shoes if I got them wet enough?
The time to take control away from someone is -before- they abuse the power, not after
... at least you know that domain name control will be immediately perverted by special interests and tyrants, instead of wondering if it might be, by a country with better free speech standards than pretty much anywhere else on the planet?
And giving it to the UN, which regularly demonstrates its embrace of corruption at every level of its bureaucracy and finances, is better because
Wow, a Godwin-First-Post hybrid. The force is strong in this one.
Hope they are not expecting to make any money by selling out their Customers at the drop of a hat.
How are people who show up to use a free service "customers?" Google's customers, for example, are their advertisers, not the people who use the free stuff.
Bindens apperent inablity to lie is interesting
You mean, when he's not completely making stuff up, of course, or plagarizing somebody. He's got a long track record on both accounts.
I was in a kick-off meeting for a small web project for my firm's new client (a non-profit advocacy type organization). We were going to build a little CMS for part of their relocated web presence, and this was back before you could just-add-water to Drupal or Joomla, etc., and when which browser you used actually mattered when it came to admin tasks.
... uh ... highly technical stuff."
So, I asked the group around the conference table, "Just so we know how to approach some of this, which web browser do you folks use here in the office?" The public relations director raised her hand and said, "Oh, that's me!"
She was the Official Web Browser in the office, and was the one to talk to about all such matters. What do you say at that point? So I said, "Excellent... it's helpful to have a designated contact point on the
war, intrigue, politics, a giant wall of ice hundreds of metres high, torture, incest, dire wolves, eunuchs, castles, tournaments, rape, duels, slavery, dragons, fratricide, patricide... all the good stuff
I don't understand what last year's Democratic National Convention has to do with it. Please keep politics out of these discussions, OK? Thanks.
cops lie all the time
Really? All the time? And they never have any dealings with beligerant idiots, scam artists, thieves, rapists, drunk drivers, or anyone else who might sometimes be lying about things for any number of reasons? And you reflexively presume that the police are, always, lying about that stuff? Why?
So, is there a way to detect GPS antennas (maybe with some kind of frequency resonator ?)
You just reverse the polarity of the emitters, and use a tachion pulse. You might need to modulate some things, too, and release some plasma and stuff. Just don't ignite the Red Matter.
Says the group that anthropomorphizes a fictional being who's sole purpose is to prevent us from seeing his works while seeing his works.
What the hell are you talking about? Crazy superstitious people are crazy superstitious people, whether they worship Allah, the Tooth Fairy, The One Big Bad God, Thor, or any other fictional character... or whether they think trees have personalities, that the ice ages don't matter, that Gaia is their personal best friend, that even though most of the species that have ever existed are now extinct we're now at the Perfect State and nothing should ever change. Tree huggers afflicted with magical thinking aren't any better than traditionally religious people afflicted with magical thinking. The difference is that the Mother Nature Anthropomorphizers are fashionably reinforced by everyone from Disney/Pixar to PBS.
There is no reason to argue with conservatives
Except it's usually the loopy lefty crunchy hippy types that actually most often anthropomorophize nature, assign it a personality, presume they know what it wants and how it should be, etc. You know it's true.
Yes, that means watching the slaughter occur in various places in Africa
Should we also stop being the single largest source of humanitarian aid to Africa? Should we stop shipping goods back and forth to and and from areas that come under attack from crazy neighhoring states? Should we retreat from global commerce whenever the neighborhood is taken over by what amount to totalitarian drug dealers, international counterfeiters, and long range missile builders? Should we wait until a militant organization that has attacked us previously in the past does so again, and bigger, before dealing with the far-away government that is harboring and financially supporting them?
If two criminal gangs are frequently shooting it out on the streets you use going to and from work, are you really better off just permanently staying home? Or do you have an active interest in dealing with them, even if they don't actually live in the house physically next door to you?
The problem is that the GP thinks that democratic governments shouldn't have police or militaries. Which means that he doesn't think that India should have the capacity to protect itself from the Taliban either. And, really, you don't see how it's in every free country's interests to prevent medieval-minded thugs like the Taliban from having nukes or ruling large parts of the world? Really?
if the government can afford to pay soldiers and cops to do their bidding, taxes are still too high
Yes! There should be no police! Now you're talking. And once you've gotten rid of them, there will be no more people to ever rob you of your possessions, or rape your daughter, since the lack of any consequences for such things always makes them go away.
Well we could start by not constantly being at war.
Excellent idea. I propose that we have the Taliban run the entire Middle East, and use the nukes they'll seize to destroy Israel, parts of India, and perhaps some friendly democracies in eastern Europe. We should also remove any prospect of a military deterrent so that friendly guys like Hugo Chavez can expand their totalitarian military rule throughout South America. Also, it would be awesome of Taiwan could be subjugated by force into communist China, and the North Koreans could set up more of their slave camps in place of the Kia and Hyundai factories in the south.
Obviously, if you have a 1% tax rate, no realistic amount of economic growth is going to provide as much tax revenue as a 30% tax rate.
Sure it will, if the 30% rate shuts down the businesses that grow the economy, or run them out of the country. People and companies that can barely pay their taxes spend less on the very movement of goods and services that does grow the economy. A small percentage of a lot of money moving around produces a lot more revenue than a large percentage of a receeding economy that you're busy trying to inefficiently nationalize into oblivion. See Venezuela for an example.
Lower tax rates can spur economic growth, but so can government spending (funded by higher tax rates)
Except that you're laundering all of that money through a notoriously inefficient, pork-laden, sinkhole that kills its efficient allocation.