Last years iPad is $730, they're about to come out with another one. Besides, people don't care about RAM or whether or not it has 2 camera's and an SD slot. From what I've heard in reviews, the Android system is sluggish compared to the iPad even though it's on better hardware and Android has already built up a bad name because of the sluggishness and the closed, "only 100 applications for $10 each" stores each provider wants to attach to it. Besides nobody wants the crap Motorola churns out and the geeks will avoid it because of it's "eFuse".
The problem with Android is it's historically beta quality software in a cutthroat market over the past few years. They should've never brought it out as a fully functional system but rather as a technology preview.
The problem with most of the phone manufacturers is that they've killed their own good names with a heap of crap phones to make a quick buck over the last 2 decades (Motorola, low-end Nokia, Samsung). Not a single phone from those manufacturers has made a device that lasted on average more than 2 years and didn't have some really bad software/UI decisions made into production. Why would anyone with a drawer full of their old phones be inclined to buy anything else when for a similar price others will give them a proven product?
People are interested in music games. The people aren't interested in getting nickeled and dimed to death to buy individual songs specifically for a game at a cost that is higher than what iTunes gives you for a song that you can transfer to any device. And then you have to pay AGAIN for the same songs for a different game from the same seller.
What killed Harmonix is the cost. $120 (game + instruments) + $2 + $2 + $2 + $2 + $5 + $2 + $7is not what people want.
You know there are specific Truck/Professional GPS units available? Off course they don't cost $50 but closer to $500 for the same 7" but the maps are specifically laid out for big rigs, hazmat and other restrictions to the roads that might come along on a cross-country drive. It seems to me that trucker probably wouldn't have been helped with a map either because he would've seen a shorter route on the map regardless.
The whole country (at least the US) is mapped and all restrictions on the roads (height, width, weight, curvature) are known by the government and private mapping companies. Those databases literally take up Terabytes and have to get condensed into usable information on a 4Gig data card, not something you can put in the simplest GPS units just yet.
You really think they're streaming over 100Mbit/s? Most likely the camera's are connected with at least a gigabit connection for the low res and FibreChannel, 10GbE or some proprietary link for the rest and there are a LOT of camera's. To stream random input like that at a 2K uncompressed already exceeds 1 Gbps per stream and then you have the database, statistics crunching, parity or mirroring overhead, disk failures and repairs etc. etc. Your 50 SATA hard drives are not going to pull that. Even if you're simply doing RAID10 you're looking at 100 drives but to get the IOPS and the throughput to pull this you're looking at 300GB 15K drives (at least 1000 of them to get to a well-maintained 100TB SAN), SSD's (not the cheap ones, think $10-100/GB), RAM-based SSD's (think $1000-5,000/GB), caches, spares.
And if he left, he could've done the equation all over again and not died and maybe gave us some more good things. Just because he was smart doesn't mean he was not an idiot. Also it doesn't mean because he was smart that he was a magician (although back in the day the difference might have been small), there is no evidence that he got really good mirrors and even if he did there is no way that a bunch of soldiers holding up mirrors would put a boat on fire. Yes it's possible to make a heat ray using the sun's energy especially with our technology but it's not possible at that distance against a moving target as it was recounted in the myth which is what the Mythbusters proved.
Why would a muslim-based one be worse than the current dictator based one or our christian-based one? The muslims in Egypt are very moderate compared to others in that region. The whole muslim world wants to be more moderate, that's one of the reason you see the young uprising in those regions that and it's unemployment and poverty rates since you could say extremism and poverty seems to be closely linked. The current favorite if Egypt will have it's government prematurely ended is a liberal muslim a lot like Ron Paul a couple of years ago (Republican yet liberal).
The Russians did a lot of space exploring. Too bad the Soviet Union was run the way it was. If it had been more democratic or a more social form of communism it would've still been kicking the US'es butt. The only extraordinary thing the US did accomplish in it's space program was put a man on the moon first but then it kinda petered off into a more corporate weapon-based space program vs. the nationalistic science-based space program of the USSR. The USSR was first in a lot of things including going bankrupt because of it's uncontrolled spending in that age.
Yes. I don't know if you are old enough to remember, but back then Intel-based computers were freakin' expensive. The only reason they persisted was 1) severe mismanagement within Commodore/Amiga which had some of the best selling computers with really great features (color display, 8-bit sounds) and 2) the IBM PC internals were very open (as in any company could expand on it).
The only reason Microsoft got in it's position was mismanagement within their competitors' base (especially Apple) and Microsoft already had a foot in the door selling OEM DOSes to computer manufacturers. Microsoft also sold their products much cheaper (between $15 and $30 compared to $60 for DR-DOS, $250 for CP/M and $200 for OS/2) while those other OS'es had far better system management especially once the 386 came out (Protected Mode and 32-bit being severely behind in MS-DOS until 1998).
Depends, many (commercial) firewalls (Barracuda, SonicWall, CheckPoint, low-end Cisco...) are basically Linux/BSD with IPTables/IPFW on very cheap hardware (think Celeron, Atom even ARM) in order to reduce it's heat signature in the datacenter. When you put a single one of those in front of a rack of 2.66GHz 8-core Xeon's it's not surprising that with a lot of open connections, the firewall goes out of resources first especially when you're only serving static or cached content.
So why should you put one of these things in between anyway? I don't understand it, get a hardened Linux for your web servers and set them up correctly, you won't need it. Or get something more appropriate for your workload.
You really think if they really wanted, they couldn't do this as well? Our Internet is going out to other countries only through very few (in comparison) uplinks held by a select group (roughly a dozen) of companies, some of whom already proved to be in the pocket of our DHS (AT&T, Level 3, Verizon). DNS is also in the pocket of our US Government (See the Green Paper).
There are still a bunch of yahoo's with private (and sometimes even commercial) planes that don't really follow the rules or even fly drunk. The issue is that flying vehicles are still expensive to own and operate but if any redneck could afford one I think the air traffic incidents may rise. Not having a license (because of DUI) hasn't stopped the majority of those unlicensed Americans to drive.
Even so, a lot of the airspace around metropolitan areas are already congested (multiple airports, police choppers, high rise buildings, drones,...) so I guess it would only be feasible for long distances where rail would work a lot better and be cheaper anyway.
Yes it does, RTFA. They filtered out only HD-capable devices on HD-capable networks with HD-capable movies. They can stream 4.8Mbps but on average only seem to hit 2.4Mbps. You can notice the same thing if you use eg. YouTube or another streaming service at 1080p for long periods of time. I have TWC which advertises me a 10Mbps line which I can seem to burst into for the first 5 minutes of a YouTube video (I watch a lot of e-sports and I have a 27" High-Res screen which YouTube automatically selects 1080p for, those games are typically 15-45 minutes long) however after 7 minutes (and it is timed almost to the second) all of a sudden the stream starts stuttering and needs to be buffered and I fall back to having only 2-3 Mbps throughput to the YouTube server (new streams to other servers and other services are fine). It's not my router, it's not my computer, it's TWC actively throttling my connection even though I am on an unlimited plan. The way around that (according to them) is buying TurboBoost.
The US is likewise desperate for qualified teachers. The issue is that they don't want to pay for teachers nor do they want to cross the union in order to get rid of them.
Where I live the school district can't fire their teachers. The new superintendent for the district however decided that if a teacher needs to go but can't get fired they get reassigned to a specific school. The issue is that the school is defunct, half the building is condemned and has no students so there are a bunch of teachers there that have absolutely nothing to do all day but to show up and sit around. However the unions and the city don't want to close the schools and don't want to fire any teachers. So our taxes are paying for an empty school building with a bunch of adults to wait until they either find a job elsewhere or go mad. We are currently facing 100 students per class (that is grade schools and high schools), have at least 5 empty school buildings throughout the district and an ever growing deficit. That is besides the fact that 25% of the students simply don't show up in the inner city schools.
Foundation is not for profit, company is for profit. As you may have noticed from recent history, if a company for profit makes a 'standard' it will only be possible to get implemented either by said company or with the blessings (patent licenses) of said company (DOC, ActiveX, MSOffice Open XML, Silverlight, Flash, DECNet, Skype...). When a foundation makes a standard it will be possible to get different implementations without any restrictions (OpenDocument, HTML, WebM/VP8, Ethernet,...)
Either way it's good for the customers. Google likewise decides to be notsoevil because otherwise it would cost them too much. Data retention is the wet dream of every mainstream politician these days, it allows for unlimited powers of coercion. The fact that storage is expensive and our governments are too broke to pay for it themselves is a blessing albeit a temporary one.
Yes, they have really nice sales representations when a lot of data is collected, processed and interpolated (which can be done almost on the fly these days). In the field it doesn't work that well, there are still quite some artifacts and issues where doctors will miss things because they weren't visible. It works good enough to see big things like growths or major defects but I wouldn't trust it to make a precise valve replacement.
Communications. The people that design your meds and implants are doctors and PhD's. They actually have very little understanding of solving problems in the real world. I work in the field as a support staff but actually graduated in industrial electronics. I recently had to explain 3 PhD's from the EE department how to interface a 10MHz optical signal with a coax cable - they were going to rework the whole link, I recommended they buy a media converter.
It is being driven by competition. Holland has like 20 providers to choose from for cable, DSL and there are some doing FTTH now. There are also wireless offerings which work really well.
Their neighboring country Belgium has only 2 (major) providers for Internet (cable and DSL) where cable has literally bought a monopoly status a couple of years ago in return of putting down a 200km fiber ring (they didn't even bother doing FTTH even though their offering is called FiberNet) and DSL/phone used to be a government run (and is still government owned) company. They have 10-30Mbps lines with 10-30GB monthly caps. Just recently have there been non-capped offerings because there are 1 or 2 DSL providers that have finally convinced the government that the phone line owner (the government-owned private company) can't gouge the prices for sharing lines.
And as brought out time and again, there are much less dense countries in the world that have bigger pipes and even metropolitan areas in the US don't get all that great of a broadband. Look at individual states and I would say most of the East Coast and West Coast is pretty densely populated but still many don't have broadband or very fast broadband. I don't think there are any providers in the US that provide more than 10Mbps other than those that can afford a business package.
As the Nazi leader said during the trials regarding the Nuremberg trials: It's a victor's justice. The US never tried their own (and still won't) military and political leaders for the atrocities they commit(ed) and use the same excuses.
It's talking about the iTunes Store. There is a lot of stuff on there, free stuff, paid stuff, app stuff, music stuff, video stuff, educational stuff. The average person with an iDevice has indeed downloaded 50 pieces of stuff from the app store since it opened and I think it will only go faster as more people go onto the iDevice.
A geek may not understand but the iPhone and iPod lineup is one of the most useful device lineups in the industry. I myself like my Nokia N800 but I can't give it to my wife, there's too much things you need to do to get it to work even to the point of needing to run an x-term session to fix apt-get. My wife just plugs in her iPod and knows how to get and sync music and videos even though her drawer is full of generations of MP3 players, those were 'too hard to use', you had to manually drag your music into the right folders.
My father in law has gone through Windows phones, Blackberries and just now an Android (he gets a new smartphone from work every year) and he's always had issues with it. He likes to make stuff work together - everything synced to his computer at work and home and now too with his new car but for some reason there was always something that didn't work well (the Android for example doesn't automatically recognize that his car's Bluetooth device acts as a hands-free device even though it's paired, it only works after re-pairing every time he gets in the car). Now he's actually waiting (he could've renewed already) for the iPhone from Verizon because his wife's AT&T iPhone does all the simple stuff he wants.
But how much does it really cost to make a music track or a movie and how much does it bring in. Even in the current economy, any halfway decent movie will return fully on it's investment to the studio within 2-3 weeks in the box office. The rest is just gravy. There are hardly any mainstream movies or music that actually make a loss. And that is for movies where there are usually a bunch of overpaid actors (enough money for the average schmuck to settle for life - for barely 3 months work) and a bunch of red tape (unions) to get it made.
Making a movie on a budget is not that hard and a good indie movie will get played and most likely will turn a profit. The barriers are getting lower too. I have a friend who just got in the documentary and TV advertisements business. Whereas only a few years ago a good field camera would cost 100k, these days you can pick up the same resolution cameras for 20k. Still not for everybody but it's definitely affordable. And if you're doing cheaper stuff, prosumer camcorders are only 2k and even dSLR's do well for most projects.
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Last years iPad is $730, they're about to come out with another one. Besides, people don't care about RAM or whether or not it has 2 camera's and an SD slot. From what I've heard in reviews, the Android system is sluggish compared to the iPad even though it's on better hardware and Android has already built up a bad name because of the sluggishness and the closed, "only 100 applications for $10 each" stores each provider wants to attach to it. Besides nobody wants the crap Motorola churns out and the geeks will avoid it because of it's "eFuse".
The problem with Android is it's historically beta quality software in a cutthroat market over the past few years. They should've never brought it out as a fully functional system but rather as a technology preview.
The problem with most of the phone manufacturers is that they've killed their own good names with a heap of crap phones to make a quick buck over the last 2 decades (Motorola, low-end Nokia, Samsung). Not a single phone from those manufacturers has made a device that lasted on average more than 2 years and didn't have some really bad software/UI decisions made into production. Why would anyone with a drawer full of their old phones be inclined to buy anything else when for a similar price others will give them a proven product?
People are interested in music games. The people aren't interested in getting nickeled and dimed to death to buy individual songs specifically for a game at a cost that is higher than what iTunes gives you for a song that you can transfer to any device. And then you have to pay AGAIN for the same songs for a different game from the same seller.
What killed Harmonix is the cost. $120 (game + instruments) + $2 + $2 + $2 + $2 + $5 + $2 + $7is not what people want.
You know there are specific Truck/Professional GPS units available? Off course they don't cost $50 but closer to $500 for the same 7" but the maps are specifically laid out for big rigs, hazmat and other restrictions to the roads that might come along on a cross-country drive. It seems to me that trucker probably wouldn't have been helped with a map either because he would've seen a shorter route on the map regardless.
The whole country (at least the US) is mapped and all restrictions on the roads (height, width, weight, curvature) are known by the government and private mapping companies. Those databases literally take up Terabytes and have to get condensed into usable information on a 4Gig data card, not something you can put in the simplest GPS units just yet.
You really think they're streaming over 100Mbit/s? Most likely the camera's are connected with at least a gigabit connection for the low res and FibreChannel, 10GbE or some proprietary link for the rest and there are a LOT of camera's. To stream random input like that at a 2K uncompressed already exceeds 1 Gbps per stream and then you have the database, statistics crunching, parity or mirroring overhead, disk failures and repairs etc. etc. Your 50 SATA hard drives are not going to pull that. Even if you're simply doing RAID10 you're looking at 100 drives but to get the IOPS and the throughput to pull this you're looking at 300GB 15K drives (at least 1000 of them to get to a well-maintained 100TB SAN), SSD's (not the cheap ones, think $10-100/GB), RAM-based SSD's (think $1000-5,000/GB), caches, spares.
And if he left, he could've done the equation all over again and not died and maybe gave us some more good things. Just because he was smart doesn't mean he was not an idiot. Also it doesn't mean because he was smart that he was a magician (although back in the day the difference might have been small), there is no evidence that he got really good mirrors and even if he did there is no way that a bunch of soldiers holding up mirrors would put a boat on fire. Yes it's possible to make a heat ray using the sun's energy especially with our technology but it's not possible at that distance against a moving target as it was recounted in the myth which is what the Mythbusters proved.
Why would a muslim-based one be worse than the current dictator based one or our christian-based one? The muslims in Egypt are very moderate compared to others in that region. The whole muslim world wants to be more moderate, that's one of the reason you see the young uprising in those regions that and it's unemployment and poverty rates since you could say extremism and poverty seems to be closely linked. The current favorite if Egypt will have it's government prematurely ended is a liberal muslim a lot like Ron Paul a couple of years ago (Republican yet liberal).
The Russians did a lot of space exploring. Too bad the Soviet Union was run the way it was. If it had been more democratic or a more social form of communism it would've still been kicking the US'es butt. The only extraordinary thing the US did accomplish in it's space program was put a man on the moon first but then it kinda petered off into a more corporate weapon-based space program vs. the nationalistic science-based space program of the USSR. The USSR was first in a lot of things including going bankrupt because of it's uncontrolled spending in that age.
Yes. I don't know if you are old enough to remember, but back then Intel-based computers were freakin' expensive. The only reason they persisted was 1) severe mismanagement within Commodore/Amiga which had some of the best selling computers with really great features (color display, 8-bit sounds) and 2) the IBM PC internals were very open (as in any company could expand on it).
The only reason Microsoft got in it's position was mismanagement within their competitors' base (especially Apple) and Microsoft already had a foot in the door selling OEM DOSes to computer manufacturers. Microsoft also sold their products much cheaper (between $15 and $30 compared to $60 for DR-DOS, $250 for CP/M and $200 for OS/2) while those other OS'es had far better system management especially once the 386 came out (Protected Mode and 32-bit being severely behind in MS-DOS until 1998).
Depends, many (commercial) firewalls (Barracuda, SonicWall, CheckPoint, low-end Cisco...) are basically Linux/BSD with IPTables/IPFW on very cheap hardware (think Celeron, Atom even ARM) in order to reduce it's heat signature in the datacenter. When you put a single one of those in front of a rack of 2.66GHz 8-core Xeon's it's not surprising that with a lot of open connections, the firewall goes out of resources first especially when you're only serving static or cached content.
So why should you put one of these things in between anyway? I don't understand it, get a hardened Linux for your web servers and set them up correctly, you won't need it. Or get something more appropriate for your workload.
You really think if they really wanted, they couldn't do this as well? Our Internet is going out to other countries only through very few (in comparison) uplinks held by a select group (roughly a dozen) of companies, some of whom already proved to be in the pocket of our DHS (AT&T, Level 3, Verizon). DNS is also in the pocket of our US Government (See the Green Paper).
There are still a bunch of yahoo's with private (and sometimes even commercial) planes that don't really follow the rules or even fly drunk. The issue is that flying vehicles are still expensive to own and operate but if any redneck could afford one I think the air traffic incidents may rise. Not having a license (because of DUI) hasn't stopped the majority of those unlicensed Americans to drive.
Even so, a lot of the airspace around metropolitan areas are already congested (multiple airports, police choppers, high rise buildings, drones, ...) so I guess it would only be feasible for long distances where rail would work a lot better and be cheaper anyway.
Yes it does, RTFA. They filtered out only HD-capable devices on HD-capable networks with HD-capable movies. They can stream 4.8Mbps but on average only seem to hit 2.4Mbps. You can notice the same thing if you use eg. YouTube or another streaming service at 1080p for long periods of time. I have TWC which advertises me a 10Mbps line which I can seem to burst into for the first 5 minutes of a YouTube video (I watch a lot of e-sports and I have a 27" High-Res screen which YouTube automatically selects 1080p for, those games are typically 15-45 minutes long) however after 7 minutes (and it is timed almost to the second) all of a sudden the stream starts stuttering and needs to be buffered and I fall back to having only 2-3 Mbps throughput to the YouTube server (new streams to other servers and other services are fine). It's not my router, it's not my computer, it's TWC actively throttling my connection even though I am on an unlimited plan. The way around that (according to them) is buying TurboBoost.
The US is likewise desperate for qualified teachers. The issue is that they don't want to pay for teachers nor do they want to cross the union in order to get rid of them.
Where I live the school district can't fire their teachers. The new superintendent for the district however decided that if a teacher needs to go but can't get fired they get reassigned to a specific school. The issue is that the school is defunct, half the building is condemned and has no students so there are a bunch of teachers there that have absolutely nothing to do all day but to show up and sit around. However the unions and the city don't want to close the schools and don't want to fire any teachers. So our taxes are paying for an empty school building with a bunch of adults to wait until they either find a job elsewhere or go mad. We are currently facing 100 students per class (that is grade schools and high schools), have at least 5 empty school buildings throughout the district and an ever growing deficit. That is besides the fact that 25% of the students simply don't show up in the inner city schools.
Foundation is not for profit, company is for profit. As you may have noticed from recent history, if a company for profit makes a 'standard' it will only be possible to get implemented either by said company or with the blessings (patent licenses) of said company (DOC, ActiveX, MSOffice Open XML, Silverlight, Flash, DECNet, Skype...). When a foundation makes a standard it will be possible to get different implementations without any restrictions (OpenDocument, HTML, WebM/VP8, Ethernet, ...)
Either way it's good for the customers. Google likewise decides to be notsoevil because otherwise it would cost them too much. Data retention is the wet dream of every mainstream politician these days, it allows for unlimited powers of coercion. The fact that storage is expensive and our governments are too broke to pay for it themselves is a blessing albeit a temporary one.
Yes, they have really nice sales representations when a lot of data is collected, processed and interpolated (which can be done almost on the fly these days). In the field it doesn't work that well, there are still quite some artifacts and issues where doctors will miss things because they weren't visible. It works good enough to see big things like growths or major defects but I wouldn't trust it to make a precise valve replacement.
Communications. The people that design your meds and implants are doctors and PhD's. They actually have very little understanding of solving problems in the real world. I work in the field as a support staff but actually graduated in industrial electronics. I recently had to explain 3 PhD's from the EE department how to interface a 10MHz optical signal with a coax cable - they were going to rework the whole link, I recommended they buy a media converter.
You could just send them different ways much like the Pioneers and Voyagers.
It is being driven by competition. Holland has like 20 providers to choose from for cable, DSL and there are some doing FTTH now. There are also wireless offerings which work really well.
Their neighboring country Belgium has only 2 (major) providers for Internet (cable and DSL) where cable has literally bought a monopoly status a couple of years ago in return of putting down a 200km fiber ring (they didn't even bother doing FTTH even though their offering is called FiberNet) and DSL/phone used to be a government run (and is still government owned) company. They have 10-30Mbps lines with 10-30GB monthly caps. Just recently have there been non-capped offerings because there are 1 or 2 DSL providers that have finally convinced the government that the phone line owner (the government-owned private company) can't gouge the prices for sharing lines.
And as brought out time and again, there are much less dense countries in the world that have bigger pipes and even metropolitan areas in the US don't get all that great of a broadband. Look at individual states and I would say most of the East Coast and West Coast is pretty densely populated but still many don't have broadband or very fast broadband. I don't think there are any providers in the US that provide more than 10Mbps other than those that can afford a business package.
As the Nazi leader said during the trials regarding the Nuremberg trials: It's a victor's justice. The US never tried their own (and still won't) military and political leaders for the atrocities they commit(ed) and use the same excuses.
He actually didn't until they came up with some false charges in order to take the attention off of what is really going on in the world government.
It's talking about the iTunes Store. There is a lot of stuff on there, free stuff, paid stuff, app stuff, music stuff, video stuff, educational stuff. The average person with an iDevice has indeed downloaded 50 pieces of stuff from the app store since it opened and I think it will only go faster as more people go onto the iDevice.
A geek may not understand but the iPhone and iPod lineup is one of the most useful device lineups in the industry. I myself like my Nokia N800 but I can't give it to my wife, there's too much things you need to do to get it to work even to the point of needing to run an x-term session to fix apt-get. My wife just plugs in her iPod and knows how to get and sync music and videos even though her drawer is full of generations of MP3 players, those were 'too hard to use', you had to manually drag your music into the right folders.
My father in law has gone through Windows phones, Blackberries and just now an Android (he gets a new smartphone from work every year) and he's always had issues with it. He likes to make stuff work together - everything synced to his computer at work and home and now too with his new car but for some reason there was always something that didn't work well (the Android for example doesn't automatically recognize that his car's Bluetooth device acts as a hands-free device even though it's paired, it only works after re-pairing every time he gets in the car). Now he's actually waiting (he could've renewed already) for the iPhone from Verizon because his wife's AT&T iPhone does all the simple stuff he wants.
But how much does it really cost to make a music track or a movie and how much does it bring in. Even in the current economy, any halfway decent movie will return fully on it's investment to the studio within 2-3 weeks in the box office. The rest is just gravy. There are hardly any mainstream movies or music that actually make a loss. And that is for movies where there are usually a bunch of overpaid actors (enough money for the average schmuck to settle for life - for barely 3 months work) and a bunch of red tape (unions) to get it made.
Making a movie on a budget is not that hard and a good indie movie will get played and most likely will turn a profit. The barriers are getting lower too. I have a friend who just got in the documentary and TV advertisements business. Whereas only a few years ago a good field camera would cost 100k, these days you can pick up the same resolution cameras for 20k. Still not for everybody but it's definitely affordable. And if you're doing cheaper stuff, prosumer camcorders are only 2k and even dSLR's do well for most projects.
I wish a judge would rule that I don't make enough commensurate with the market. Maybe this tax season the IRS will see that I don't make enough.