...which was exactly the sort of point that I tried to make when I filled in the "consultation" form (see links above) earlier today. For example. just about any shop in the UK that sells things with plugs on (which seems to be anything bigger than a corner shop) is selling some sort of PVR, none of which have any artificial 30-day limit. It's this world (and the world of sites Youtube/torrents/whatever happens next year) that the BBC are now living in, and bits of the BBC don't seem to have grasped it yet.
Or you could move to the UK. "Scenes from a Marriage" is on free broadcast TV right now. The digital film channels here probably run one every couple of month sor so.
If you need to watch them more often than that, you'll probably need therapy yourself.
Is that the US has a great wire based communication system whereas often nations with great cellular service don't. Where are you thinking of? When I think "nation with great cellular service" I tend to think of European countries like Finland and Sweden, and the wired service there is fine (at least in the populous bits that I'm likely to visit).
Interesting that two Canadian cities made the cut, while every other nation only had one. Maybe I missed it, but did the Scots declare UDI from Britain overnight? Maybe the next list should include a numeracy check on the population... (only kidding!).
It's still an odd list though. Sunderland's local economy has succeeded on the basis of wages that are low relative to the rest of the UK, and the presence of the Nissan car plant and associated supply chain. I don't think that they've got much more of a prevalance of call centres than, for example, South Wales or the Dearne valley.
Even based on the woolly criteria in the article, I can think of several places that would be more obvious candidates (parts of the Netherlands, districts around Coperhagan and Helsinki spring immediately to mind).
> integration with things like Google Maps is not something that other phones have
Not sure if this is sarcasm or not(!). You can certainly dial a number from the Google Maps application on a Blackberry, and I'd have expected the same functionality on the other supported platforms - it's not exactly rocket science.
I think that you're partially right about the target market (Treo + iPod), but I'd add "... and don't get one issued by their place of work, and are willing to spend more money on a phone than most people when it comes to contract renewal".
... because it hasn't been released - it's only been announced. What we do know is that Apple are a thousand and one times better at managing their prospective user base than anyone else out there.
I can think of lots of reasons why it may not be very good as a phone, or as a media player, and I'm sure plenty of other people can, but not too many people seem to be doing other than raving about it. One exception was the Register, with a couple of recent "emperor has no clothes" articles (which drove lots of traffic to their letters pages).
So it's going to be released some time in June (or not if it's late), and it'll completely dominate it's market, (or perhaps it won't). We just don't know yet. The thing that we can reasonably assume is that lots of people will buy it whenever it comes out, because Apple's marketing has been so good so far. So we'll find out whether it's any good real soon after it's been released.
Isn't the "dominant home server" right now some sort of generic video hard disk recorder or PVR? Or if not that, maybe Tivo (in the US) or Sky+ (in the UK)? Not many of them are networked (unless you count sneakernet of DVDs), but they tend to be what has replaced the VHS.
I don't know that there are that many people using Windows "Media Center Edition" actually as a media center.
Sort of - unless you pick a lossless codec, you aren't going to end up with what you started with. Personally, I still buy those round silver things - you can always rip them again when necessary.
I've seen it, but it's hardly a piece of balanced journalism. That's not to say that comments from GM's press office are to be taken at face value either, but fighting half-truths with more half-truths doesn't make things any better.
If you want to buy an electric car or a hybrid, buy one. Tell people about how wonderful it is - maybe they'll buy one too. If enough people do that, car companies such as GM are more likely to keep making them. GM's business is to make money, not cars - if the EV1 was profitable for the company* it would have continued making them.
* That's to ignore the political (Zero-emission mandate / CARB) side to the story of course - if you want things to happen there you need to vote at the ballot box rather than with your $$$ at a car dealership.
I think someone's misusing the word "clone" here. For that I'd expect to get a genuine-looking passport, with my picture on it (not yours) and with an RFID chip containing relevant data. A copy of the data off your passport is only useful (for creating a passport for me) if I look similar enough to you for your picture to pass as me. I guess that that's not impossible - UK passports are valid for 10 years, so the person in the picture doesn't always look exactly like the person holding the passport.
This isn't to say that passports readable at a distance are a good idea, or that "securing" the biometric data with information available from other sources is, but "someone can read data on an RFID chip with an RFID reader" isn't really a news story. By extension, the photcopy of the back page of my passport that I keep in case the real one gets nicked is as much of a "clone" as this is.
It's like quoting the cost of a car over 5 years as "list price + 20k miles / year fuel + servicing etc. etc.".
However, most of the cost over 5 years is "Internet" which is based on "the global average of 20 hours/month of connectivity" (however you have to get it). I can't see that 1 satellite connection per school (once you've got the kit in place and have been using it for a year for $1) is going to cost USD$36.91 or up to USD$56.31 per child.
Forced integration with iTunes is exactly why I don't own an iPod. Forced integration with Windows is why I don't own a Windows Smartphone. Something tells me that I won't own an "iPhone" either.
I guess this is as good a place as any to ask - how did RIM ever sell the idea of having all corporate email and web traffic for Blackberries routed through their servers? The alternative would be to work the way that MS Mobile 5 does and have the device in the field connect directly into the Exchange Server (or whatever) via an access mechanism that you maintain. That means that you have to do the work to "keep the bad guys out" rather than RIM. Which one is "better" will depend on your point of view, and what you want to use mobile devices for. Personally, the RIM model makes a lot of sense to me, as you're already trusting your data to "someone else's network" (the wireless carrier). It's a lot easier to implement a connection (always initiated outbound) from your company to RIM than it is to support 1000s of remote devices in the field connecting in to you. Also, as has already been said above, the "rogue employee at RIM" would have to crack the AES / 3DES encryption on the traffic as it went through their servers.
Even better, what I think is referred to as "baloney" (the food product) in the US is "polony" in the UK (at least the bit I grew up in): http://www.thefreedictionary.com/polony
I'm not so sure that that would be a good idea - the fact that both "notsomething" and "something" are both listed means that it's easy to see that there's a hot debate about a topic. Imagine that there were 1000 X tags, 999 !X tags and 100 Z - tagging it as "Z, X" wouldn't accurately describe what people felt. I know that the "original idea" was to have "!X" used instead of "notX" to show which way the balance of opinion sits, but sometimes useful results appear in unintended ways.
So effectively the UK (including me) have spent money on snake oil because it was mandated by the US?
What seems crazy is not that all of the data used for the key is present in plain text on the passport, but that it is also often used elsewhere (hotels demand passport numbers, etc.) - only the check digits aren't quoted externally. The even crazier thing is that there DOES appear to be room on the second line of machine readable data on UK passports for an extra field (I'm guessing that other countries may store issuing office or something similar here?). Maybe the ICAO specifically exclude other data items?
Having all of the the data in plain text still means that data can be read remotely if you've got access to all the data on the passport, but not using data that is already public and easily obtainable. It's eqivalent to the three digits on the back of a credit card - once you've given information to someone, you haven't any real control over what they do with it, but it's more secure than just trusting the credit card number (mine will be in landfills on five continents, I'm sure).
The interesting question is "in the longer term then what?". Chip and Pin passports, anyone(!)
Hate it say it, but that was actually the almost the first thing that I thought of too - right after "Christopher Monckton - wasn't he that loony from the Thatcher years?" (a quick google suggested that yes he was, and also that he held some, er, "unusual" views that I wasn't aware of).
The fact that idiot A and idiot B disagree about a major issue of the day isn't surprising. The problem is that they're both arguing in religious rather than scientific terms (neither the Guardian nor the Telegraph are peer-reviewed scientific journals, and both have opposing, decidedly non-neutral points of view on many issues).
The future climate of this planet is too important to be left to people selling newspapers or massaging their own egos, and I'm not convinced that politicians (of whatever colour) are helping much at the moment either - The Stern Review (an economist throwing some numbers together based on existing scientific data) won't help "convert" people who don't "believe" the scientific data in the first place. More actual science would help - maybe some of the cash that went into the Stern Review should have gone there instead?
Slashdot Mirror
... the logical conclusion is to knock down all buildings, and bulldoze the entire cityhttp://www.masspike.com/bigdig/updates/timeline.h
...which was exactly the sort of point that I tried to make when I filled in the "consultation" form (see links above) earlier today. For example. just about any shop in the UK that sells things with plugs on (which seems to be anything bigger than a corner shop) is selling some sort of PVR, none of which have any artificial 30-day limit. It's this world (and the world of sites Youtube/torrents/whatever happens next year) that the BBC are now living in, and bits of the BBC don't seem to have grasped it yet.
v iew-report-research/pvt_iplayer/iplayer_pvt_provis ional_conclusions.pdf
If you want a laugh, have a read of the PDF of their conclusions:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/re
Or you could move to the UK. "Scenes from a Marriage" is on free broadcast TV right now. The digital film channels here probably run one every couple of month sor so.
If you need to watch them more often than that, you'll probably need therapy yourself.
(only kidding!).
It's still an odd list though. Sunderland's local economy has succeeded on the basis of wages that are low relative to the rest of the UK, and the presence of the Nissan car plant and associated supply chain. I don't think that they've got much more of a prevalance of call centres than, for example, South Wales or the Dearne valley.
Dundee I've never visited, but the web site says "Major employers include NCR...", but...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/tayside_and_c
(oops)
Even based on the woolly criteria in the article, I can think of several places that would be more obvious candidates (parts of the Netherlands, districts around Coperhagan and Helsinki spring immediately to mind).
When I had a need for Powerpoint-esque slides on Linux, Impress didn't.
I ended up using S5:
http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/
It isn't Powerpoint, but it worked for me.
By the time they need replacing, technology will have moved on, and the answer may be "something else". But this answer seems OK to me for now.
> integration with things like Google Maps is not something that other phones have
Not sure if this is sarcasm or not(!). You can certainly dial a number from the Google Maps application on a Blackberry, and I'd have expected the same functionality on the other supported platforms - it's not exactly rocket science.
I think that you're partially right about the target market (Treo + iPod), but I'd add "... and don't get one issued by their place of work, and are willing to spend more money on a phone than most people when it comes to contract renewal".
... because it hasn't been released - it's only been announced. What we do know is that Apple are a thousand and one times better at managing their prospective user base than anyone else out there.
I can think of lots of reasons why it may not be very good as a phone, or as a media player, and I'm sure plenty of other people can, but not too many people seem to be doing other than raving about it. One exception was the Register, with a couple of recent "emperor has no clothes" articles (which drove lots of traffic to their letters pages).
So it's going to be released some time in June (or not if it's late), and it'll completely dominate it's market, (or perhaps it won't). We just don't know yet. The thing that we can reasonably assume is that lots of people will buy it whenever it comes out, because Apple's marketing has been so good so far. So we'll find out whether it's any good real soon after it's been released.
Isn't the "dominant home server" right now some sort of generic video hard disk recorder or PVR? Or if not that, maybe Tivo (in the US) or Sky+ (in the UK)? Not many of them are networked (unless you count sneakernet of DVDs), but they tend to be what has replaced the VHS.
I don't know that there are that many people using Windows "Media Center Edition" actually as a media center.
Sort of - unless you pick a lossless codec, you aren't going to end up with what you started with. Personally, I still buy those round silver things - you can always rip them again when necessary.
A. Luddite.
I've seen it, but it's hardly a piece of balanced journalism. That's not to say that comments from GM's press office are to be taken at face value either, but fighting half-truths with more half-truths doesn't make things any better.
If you want to buy an electric car or a hybrid, buy one. Tell people about how wonderful it is - maybe they'll buy one too. If enough people do that, car companies such as GM are more likely to keep making them. GM's business is to make money, not cars - if the EV1 was profitable for the company* it would have continued making them.
* That's to ignore the political (Zero-emission mandate / CARB) side to the story of course - if you want things to happen there you need to vote at the ballot box rather than with your $$$ at a car dealership.
...celebrities not to comment on any issue without a brain being engaged first (theirs, or someone else's if they're lacking in that department)?
Surely a reference to Brass Eye is relevant here, as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_Eye
I think someone's misusing the word "clone" here. For that I'd expect to get a genuine-looking passport, with my picture on it (not yours) and with an RFID chip containing relevant data. A copy of the data off your passport is only useful (for creating a passport for me) if I look similar enough to you for your picture to pass as me. I guess that that's not impossible - UK passports are valid for 10 years, so the person in the picture doesn't always look exactly like the person holding the passport.
This isn't to say that passports readable at a distance are a good idea, or that "securing" the biometric data with information available from other sources is, but "someone can read data on an RFID chip with an RFID reader" isn't really a news story. By extension, the photcopy of the back page of my passport that I keep in case the real one gets nicked is as much of a "clone" as this is.
It's like quoting the cost of a car over 5 years as "list price + 20k miles / year fuel + servicing etc. etc.".
However, most of the cost over 5 years is "Internet" which is based on "the global average of 20 hours/month of connectivity" (however you have to get it). I can't see that 1 satellite connection per school (once you've got the kit in place and have been using it for a year for $1) is going to cost USD$36.91 or up to USD$56.31 per child.
4. Big corporations know how to get press releases into the IHT by referring to another "cool" project.
It doesn't matter that they're not competitive on price, or even whether the device will ever actually appear.
Forced integration with iTunes is exactly why I don't own an iPod. Forced integration with Windows is why I don't own a Windows Smartphone. Something tells me that I won't own an "iPhone" either.
I guess this is as good a place as any to ask - how did RIM ever sell the idea of having all corporate email and web traffic for Blackberries routed through their servers? The alternative would be to work the way that MS Mobile 5 does and have the device in the field connect directly into the Exchange Server (or whatever) via an access mechanism that you maintain. That means that you have to do the work to "keep the bad guys out" rather than RIM. Which one is "better" will depend on your point of view, and what you want to use mobile devices for. Personally, the RIM model makes a lot of sense to me, as you're already trusting your data to "someone else's network" (the wireless carrier). It's a lot easier to implement a connection (always initiated outbound) from your company to RIM than it is to support 1000s of remote devices in the field connecting in to you. Also, as has already been said above, the "rogue employee at RIM" would have to crack the AES / 3DES encryption on the traffic as it went through their servers.
Even better, what I think is referred to as "baloney" (the food product) in the US is "polony" in the UK (at least the bit I grew up in):
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/polony
What GEC did in the late '90s puts many other company cockups very much into perspective.
Google for "gec disaster marconi weinstock" and you'll get a selection of articles, including the Telegraph's obituary of Lord Weinstock.
I'm not so sure that that would be a good idea - the fact that both "notsomething" and "something" are both listed means that it's easy to see that there's a hot debate about a topic. Imagine that there were 1000 X tags, 999 !X tags and 100 Z - tagging it as "Z, X" wouldn't accurately describe what people felt. I know that the "original idea" was to have "!X" used instead of "notX" to show which way the balance of opinion sits, but sometimes useful results appear in unintended ways.
So effectively the UK (including me) have spent money on snake oil because it was mandated by the US?
What seems crazy is not that all of the data used for the key is present in plain text on the passport, but that it is also often used elsewhere (hotels demand passport numbers, etc.) - only the check digits aren't quoted externally. The even crazier thing is that there DOES appear to be room on the second line of machine readable data on UK passports for an extra field (I'm guessing that other countries may store issuing office or something similar here?). Maybe the ICAO specifically exclude other data items?
Having all of the the data in plain text still means that data can be read remotely if you've got access to all the data on the passport, but not using data that is already public and easily obtainable. It's eqivalent to the three digits on the back of a credit card - once you've given information to someone, you haven't any real control over what they do with it, but it's more secure than just trusting the credit card number (mine will be in landfills on five continents, I'm sure).
The interesting question is "in the longer term then what?". Chip and Pin passports, anyone(!)
Never mind South Island NZ - they already live in Africa!
http://www.sanccob.co.za/african_penguin.htm
Hate it say it, but that was actually the almost the first thing that I thought of too - right after "Christopher Monckton - wasn't he that loony from the Thatcher years?" (a quick google suggested that yes he was, and also that he held some, er, "unusual" views that I wasn't aware of).
The fact that idiot A and idiot B disagree about a major issue of the day isn't surprising. The problem is that they're both arguing in religious rather than scientific terms (neither the Guardian nor the Telegraph are peer-reviewed scientific journals, and both have opposing, decidedly non-neutral points of view on many issues).
The future climate of this planet is too important to be left to people selling newspapers or massaging their own egos, and I'm not convinced that politicians (of whatever colour) are helping much at the moment either - The Stern Review (an economist throwing some numbers together based on existing scientific data) won't help "convert" people who don't "believe" the scientific data in the first place. More actual science would help - maybe some of the cash that went into the Stern Review should have gone there instead?