And you're still thinking 20th century warfare. Who said anything about guns? The grade-school bully used intimidation mostly.
Not that I'm comparing China to grade-school bullies. China is muchbetter at this all this than a grade-schooler.
I'm not saying we haven't also done so for decades. And I'm not trying to keep score of who is right or wrong, and how often. Just pointing out that the world is not all that kind to us, and hasn't been for a long time, whether we deserve it or not. If you think pursuing a policy of behaving better and being kinder to the rest of the world is in our best interest, say so and support those who agree with you. I'm saying that along with a policy of behaving better, we need to also pursue a policy of self-preservation, while trying to avoid doing so in a way that hampers our future prospects. And how to do that, in detail, is beyond me. So be thankful I'm not in power.
If you encountered bullies in school or later, you should know it is not what you think about them that counts, it's what they think about you. You do not always get to choose your enemies. Sometimes you get to choose how to respond.
Well, I objected to his paying his hands on me. And he was oblique enough about it that he never came out and said I had to leave, but that I had to 'stop doing that'. 'That' being comparing prices real-time.
A pretty lame attempt, he could have come right out and told me I could not do that and I would need to leave, and in fact I had stopped to deal with his interruption.
As far as I know, the police never came. But had they, I would have been leaving obviously. Working as a bouncer for a club in my youth, I understand the concept of serving those you want to and not serving those you don't. Tossing me for scanning barcodes? Call the cops. He don't have the right to drag me out of the store. Now, what would I tell the judge...
As if he would be happier if I never set foot in his store.
I got the same treatment last Christmas season at TWO Best Buy stores here, and both times I essentially ignored first the salesperson and then the manager-type. One tried to take my elbow and escort me out of the store. Unwise. He threatened to call the police. I offered to move somewhere in the store slightly less conspicuous and wait for them. He saud no, so I stood right where I was. Didn't take long for someone to ask me to move, and get the "I'm waiting for the police, the manager told me to saty right here" speech. The really grubby kid asked why, and next thing you know he's got HIS phone out scanning prices. Nice kid. We waited a fair amount of time and continued on with our price shopping. Manager was not seen again. Weasel.
Some of the stores around here have a nice little sign telling us they do not allow scanning barcodes, etc. If Best Buy doesn't actually want to compete on price, they should reconsider advertising that they do. And if they do, can I perhaps compare your prices right now? I should sit in the car and riffle through flyers, or call stores? Ha!
We may yet be witnessing the end of retailing for lots of stuff. Eventually we might be buying a car from the maker and having it delivered. Your next phone? Pfft, like I need a salesperson to show me the shiny bits.
I willingly pay more for goods that are not manufactured by our enemies. It makes no sense to enrich those nations that are set against us.
And yes, this means I am inconvenienced. I remember having to search for a particular Walkman player, or go to the dirty record store to find dance singles and electronica, before the Internet. It is often an effort to do what you really want.
When I started my first 'real' job in the mid-70s, I was a bench tech. Three of us in a room, all benches facing the wall, but we heckled each other constantly. Bliss for 7 years...
Then I 'hit the road' as a field tech for a total of 22 years with 4 years in between serving one or two clients and getting a desk or cubicle. On the road, your car is your cubicle.
The desk assignment actually was 9 months at a rack in the datacenter, with the keyboard about 45" off the floor. This results in impingement syndrome, and I do not recommend it. Ergonomics forced my client to provide a desk and chair. Too late, but it was in a room that was actually the passageway to the telecom tech's office. I got so I could ignore the traffic. The telecom guy never could walk by without taking a good look at my screen. Whatever. He learned IP routing and NetWare administration by eavesdropping, which is to say not very well at all. Another assignment was in a cubicle for 4 people about 12'x12'. Not bad, but I was the unwelcome NetWare guy, trying to keep the stuff alive until the NMCI could replace it. They still haven't.
Having landed a real desk job, I'm in a 2-man cubicle with an open wall, 6'x10'. I can adjust my desk surface at least. If I get a full-timer's cube here, it will be 6'x8'.
We have five different types of work spaces, not counting various meeting and conference room layouts. Some are intended to be used by groups, some are touchdown spots for people who don't work full-time at the location, and some are dedicated spaces for specific types of tasks, like clerical or management workers. Very few actual closed offices, everything is a now traditional divider system with 5' or taller dividers. It's surprisingly quiet, but not silent.
Near me there is a group that 'hot-bunks', having multiple shifts working, and they have up to 9 names on 6 seats in a row. Between you and me, they could lose the extra people and lose anything at all, but that's not my call.
I can't really work at home or telecommute, as I need to collaborate with multiple groups and people on a regular basis, and they need me as well. We have one team member that does work at home, and he's perhaps the most productive member, but that's because he's been here since the 1800s, or so it seems, and knows everything.
We were subjected to a 'restack' a while ago, getting cubes shortened by 2 ft and losing some privacy walls. This was entirely a real estate decision, to stuff more people into the space instead of continuing to lease a space elsewhere. For the cost of some space, we saw profitability when our competitors were bleeding like pigs. I kept my job. It could be worse.
But I work for an above-average corporation, and I can imagine the life in some of the cube farms I used to visit back when. Ugh.
On the other hand, we are breeding a generation of workers that might not like being tied down to a specific location. I'm getting the impression that some of them don't like being tied down to a specific task either. good luck with that.
Now, my church buddy is getting a new office. He works in a lab, and next year will get a $800 million lab built for him and his team. He does cool stuff. I should have gone into his field, man, what a life. All he has to do is explain why his employer is either making or losing billions a year. Piece o' cake.
Trying to discuss theoretical physics with a skilled theoretical physicist is like playing card with someone who plays by changing the rules when they are losing. So long as you're not betting much on it, what the heck. And when they go all in, well, we know they must not be playing with their own money.
MRTG is good enough for carrier-class deployment, and has been since 1993 or so. I relied on it to keep track of various metrics for our ISP business back then, everything from link utilization to Usenet volume to disk free space to modem utilization. (Side note, that #3 modem that had WAY more connection attempts than all the rest? That's a defective mode, boss, let's move the blade to the end of the pool until we get a replacement, ok? Just a thought...)
But damn, our first T-1 never looked like that. I would have been into the second T-1 in a day.
As a general note, if you're seeing 80% utilization on a regular basis for an Ethernet link, you're seeing true packet loss beyond what anyone should have to suffer. If comcast wants to argue this, show us your other links, and then call the gang at TATA and have them DO SOMETHING:) Riiiight.
Just a quick look at TATA, and they seem to be a services provider, not an in-the-business ISP or peering provider. Comcast chose them for cost. But I'm also thinking that TATA can't be Comcast's primary provider. We might be seeing some bad design here, and a change to some hop costs or metrics could improve this a lot. But I haven't seen their other charts, which would settle this.
It goes like: "These phones work everywhere" or "These phones work where there's no other signal"
Let that second one sink in for a moment, by itself it's almost breathtakingly salespeakish.
Then the truth:
"not only do you have to be outside, but you have to have a clear line of sight to the sky and not be near obstructions like buildings
So they DON'T work EVERYHERE. I'll not bother to ask them to work underwater. Just working where my cell phone does not would be cool, but that won't be in my living room.
What they do they do well. But they are so often oversold, and can't do what people expect them to.
Standing in the rain to make a call isn't as attractive as it sounds, if you were told you could be inside.
But this is not new or news, unless you've been surfing along in that state of bliss^H^H^H^H^Hoblivion most do.
I visit a few somewhat unsavory sites, mostly celebrity news sites (no, not the celeb pr0n sites, but my protests fall on deaf ears I know) and the occasional programming-on-the-edge blogs, and these will take ads from most anyone. For at least two years I've been sending the admins specific reports of malware-laden ad postings, and until the past 9 months or so all I got was silence or the rare "didn't happen" or "not MY Site, a-h@le" response. Yup, some of them figure I have the time to write up false URLs and make fake screenshots... Sure, and I'm poor cause I'm smart, too.
Since then, all of these sites have gone from ignoring or denying my reports to terse "thanks" or "shouldn't see that any more".
My least terse comments, from a celeb photo site, seem to show that the owner and admin has finally figured out that some of the ad networks they are doing business with are not vetting their customers. In particular, I reported a nasty piece from Doubleclick, and after a week, got confirmation that my report was accurate. Most disappointing was that one ad I reported seemed to be for a Fortune 50 company, but now we know that some of these malware-ads are totally fake, taking the ad copy and source for a legitimate ad and sprinkling it with nasty dust. Both I and the site owners are hoping that these legitimate companies will take note and go after the bad boys.
Neither the site owners nor I actually expect the ad networks to stop this. The money is too good, actually checking the ad code is too laborious, and apparently their virus checkers are worse than mine.
At home, I'm still running all my anti-stuff on all my machines. My wife sometimes asks me what an alarm means, and I point out the warning message. She usually responds "but honey, it's Facebook..." and I assure her the warning is real. Somtimes she says 'But I got this from blablabla site, they aren't dangerous", and I get to tell her it was probably an ad, not the actual site. She gets a little miffed, but hey, it's cute and now it's entertaining for me. Until they get through, then it's re-imaging time.
I'm looking forward to fully virtualized systems and near-instant recovery. Until then, it' an arms race.
But I'm still innocently believing that the major ad networks are unwitting victims here, and that they don't have a few sales types taking money to turn a blind eye and knowingly sell to miscreants. And yes, there is little difference between selling ads for 'V1@5^' and selling ads for botware, but there is a difference. Can we puth them both out of business? Doubt it.
I grew up (so I say anyways) in Maine, and for one summer worked for Oakhurst Dairy. Many of my uncles and my father worked for them as well.
The single most important thing to come out of that suit: Mainers now know that when you say your milk is from farmers that don't use hormones, you are getting milk without hormones. Some Mainers prefer that. All they wanna know is what's in their milk. Is that too much?
According to the food libel laws, actually it IS. A pox on all of them.
ps- Oakhurst is a fairly ethical company. Nobody's perfect, but they were trying last I knew. Their competition is largely out of state.
1) Wheels on stuff is cool. Make sure at least 2 of 4 wheels lock, and get the biggest diameter wheels you can stand. Rolling a workbench with 600+lbs on it will shred those plastic casters.
2) If you're going vertical, get a Little Giant-like ladder that splits into two a-frames, other brands work very well. Handy to be able to a-frame it, stretch it out and store vertically in a corner, use with planks as a third workbench, and of course lend out under constant supervision when someone else needs one.
There is little else as much fun as establishing a new shopspace. I've done three big ones, and it's a riot. Just be glad you're not working on portable tape recorders, and have to explain the $400 P.O. for screws. Having a 1x1.2mm screw when you need one; priceless. Sony made great stuff back then, man.
My favorite is to start researching a product and get into the reviews.
I often find the same review is cross-posted, copied, plagiarized, and just plain rewritten over and over. Sometimes I search on a distinctive phrase and marvel at how many different sites carry this crap. It both dilutes the trustworthiness (IMHO these review whores are just untrustworthy) and potential accuracy of reviews.
I read through reviews pretty carefully anyways, as I have read glowing reviews of products that I've purchased, and the stuff was just plain junk. And we've all read scathing reviews from someone (or apparently 'many') and in the end realized they had a bad experience, but their expectations were simply outlandish, and their resolution skills are totally lacking.
Actually, Android is built upon a virtual machine tech that is pretty close to what you just described.
Well, close as in free beer. But VMWare is almost layering on VMs to a VM (Dalvik). Interesting. Dual phone numbers are already possible, either with dual SIMS or some CDMA witchery in silicon, and split personalities are something RIM has dabbled in. Android makes this much easier, since it is so close to Linux that work on one can be brought to the other without building from scratch.
We'll see, but I, for one, welcome our virtual Android overlords. Gotta be a way to assimilate this technology to my personal benefit.
"They want access to the personnal and credit card data? If I buy a magazine at a kiosk, the guy takes my money, period. Apple is just a digital kiosk."
First, most magazines don't care much about newsstand sales. They care about subscribers, with some exceptions. Mostly because they know where subscribers live, etc., and so they can tell advertisers somethign about their audience. Otherwise, why would anyone bother to advertise in, say, GQ?
Second, Apple thinks they own the magazines, and the publishers are merely content providers to Apple and hence to THEIR subscribers, who they DO know a lot about.
I'm heartened by this. Apple will be killing their revenue potential for iPad sales and then sales through the App Store and iTunes. Levels the playing field just a little bit.
Jobs does get it, this is just a fight for the customer. Should Apple start publishing its own e-magazines? will anyone care? Will Apple figure out who their customer REALLY is in iPad publication? Hint, it's NOT the iPad user.
Slashdot Mirror
And you're still thinking 20th century warfare. Who said anything about guns? The grade-school bully used intimidation mostly.
Not that I'm comparing China to grade-school bullies. China is much better at this all this than a grade-schooler.
I'm not saying we haven't also done so for decades. And I'm not trying to keep score of who is right or wrong, and how often. Just pointing out that the world is not all that kind to us, and hasn't been for a long time, whether we deserve it or not. If you think pursuing a policy of behaving better and being kinder to the rest of the world is in our best interest, say so and support those who agree with you. I'm saying that along with a policy of behaving better, we need to also pursue a policy of self-preservation, while trying to avoid doing so in a way that hampers our future prospects. And how to do that, in detail, is beyond me. So be thankful I'm not in power.
Taiwan is not our enemy. Neither is India.
China, on the other hand, seems to want to succeed us as the dominant economic power. Their words, not mine.
If you encountered bullies in school or later, you should know it is not what you think about them that counts, it's what they think about you. You do not always get to choose your enemies. Sometimes you get to choose how to respond.
How we respond is critical.
Al Aqueida doesn't use the same tactics as some of our other enemies. No more or less dangerous, perhaps.
Well, I objected to his paying his hands on me. And he was oblique enough about it that he never came out and said I had to leave, but that I had to 'stop doing that'. 'That' being comparing prices real-time.
A pretty lame attempt, he could have come right out and told me I could not do that and I would need to leave, and in fact I had stopped to deal with his interruption.
As far as I know, the police never came. But had they, I would have been leaving obviously. Working as a bouncer for a club in my youth, I understand the concept of serving those you want to and not serving those you don't. Tossing me for scanning barcodes? Call the cops. He don't have the right to drag me out of the store. Now, what would I tell the judge...
Bear in mind that sometimes your enemy chooses you. Maybe for good reasons, at least to them, but it happens.
Yes, we've managed to export much of our manufacturing base. This is costing us.
As if he would be happier if I never set foot in his store.
I got the same treatment last Christmas season at TWO Best Buy stores here, and both times I essentially ignored first the salesperson and then the manager-type. One tried to take my elbow and escort me out of the store. Unwise. He threatened to call the police. I offered to move somewhere in the store slightly less conspicuous and wait for them. He saud no, so I stood right where I was. Didn't take long for someone to ask me to move, and get the "I'm waiting for the police, the manager told me to saty right here" speech. The really grubby kid asked why, and next thing you know he's got HIS phone out scanning prices. Nice kid. We waited a fair amount of time and continued on with our price shopping. Manager was not seen again. Weasel.
Some of the stores around here have a nice little sign telling us they do not allow scanning barcodes, etc. If Best Buy doesn't actually want to compete on price, they should reconsider advertising that they do. And if they do, can I perhaps compare your prices right now? I should sit in the car and riffle through flyers, or call stores? Ha!
We may yet be witnessing the end of retailing for lots of stuff. Eventually we might be buying a car from the maker and having it delivered. Your next phone? Pfft, like I need a salesperson to show me the shiny bits.
I willingly pay more for goods that are not manufactured by our enemies. It makes no sense to enrich those nations that are set against us.
And yes, this means I am inconvenienced. I remember having to search for a particular Walkman player, or go to the dirty record store to find dance singles and electronica, before the Internet. It is often an effort to do what you really want.
Be intentional.
"I really miss having other options when I shop"
How about going to other stores? Just a thought...
"so you never^H^H^H^H^H have to worry about the cloud backing up your data."
There, fixed that up for ya.
When I started my first 'real' job in the mid-70s, I was a bench tech. Three of us in a room, all benches facing the wall, but we heckled each other constantly. Bliss for 7 years...
Then I 'hit the road' as a field tech for a total of 22 years with 4 years in between serving one or two clients and getting a desk or cubicle. On the road, your car is your cubicle.
The desk assignment actually was 9 months at a rack in the datacenter, with the keyboard about 45" off the floor. This results in impingement syndrome, and I do not recommend it. Ergonomics forced my client to provide a desk and chair. Too late, but it was in a room that was actually the passageway to the telecom tech's office. I got so I could ignore the traffic. The telecom guy never could walk by without taking a good look at my screen. Whatever. He learned IP routing and NetWare administration by eavesdropping, which is to say not very well at all. Another assignment was in a cubicle for 4 people about 12'x12'. Not bad, but I was the unwelcome NetWare guy, trying to keep the stuff alive until the NMCI could replace it. They still haven't.
Having landed a real desk job, I'm in a 2-man cubicle with an open wall, 6'x10'. I can adjust my desk surface at least. If I get a full-timer's cube here, it will be 6'x8'.
We have five different types of work spaces, not counting various meeting and conference room layouts. Some are intended to be used by groups, some are touchdown spots for people who don't work full-time at the location, and some are dedicated spaces for specific types of tasks, like clerical or management workers. Very few actual closed offices, everything is a now traditional divider system with 5' or taller dividers. It's surprisingly quiet, but not silent.
Near me there is a group that 'hot-bunks', having multiple shifts working, and they have up to 9 names on 6 seats in a row. Between you and me, they could lose the extra people and lose anything at all, but that's not my call.
I can't really work at home or telecommute, as I need to collaborate with multiple groups and people on a regular basis, and they need me as well. We have one team member that does work at home, and he's perhaps the most productive member, but that's because he's been here since the 1800s, or so it seems, and knows everything.
We were subjected to a 'restack' a while ago, getting cubes shortened by 2 ft and losing some privacy walls. This was entirely a real estate decision, to stuff more people into the space instead of continuing to lease a space elsewhere. For the cost of some space, we saw profitability when our competitors were bleeding like pigs. I kept my job. It could be worse.
But I work for an above-average corporation, and I can imagine the life in some of the cube farms I used to visit back when. Ugh.
On the other hand, we are breeding a generation of workers that might not like being tied down to a specific location. I'm getting the impression that some of them don't like being tied down to a specific task either. good luck with that.
Now, my church buddy is getting a new office. He works in a lab, and next year will get a $800 million lab built for him and his team. He does cool stuff. I should have gone into his field, man, what a life. All he has to do is explain why his employer is either making or losing billions a year. Piece o' cake.
Trying to discuss theoretical physics with a skilled theoretical physicist is like playing card with someone who plays by changing the rules when they are losing. So long as you're not betting much on it, what the heck. And when they go all in, well, we know they must not be playing with their own money.
MRTG is good enough for carrier-class deployment, and has been since 1993 or so. I relied on it to keep track of various metrics for our ISP business back then, everything from link utilization to Usenet volume to disk free space to modem utilization. (Side note, that #3 modem that had WAY more connection attempts than all the rest? That's a defective mode, boss, let's move the blade to the end of the pool until we get a replacement, ok? Just a thought...)
But damn, our first T-1 never looked like that. I would have been into the second T-1 in a day.
As a general note, if you're seeing 80% utilization on a regular basis for an Ethernet link, you're seeing true packet loss beyond what anyone should have to suffer. If comcast wants to argue this, show us your other links, and then call the gang at TATA and have them DO SOMETHING :) Riiiight.
Just a quick look at TATA, and they seem to be a services provider, not an in-the-business ISP or peering provider. Comcast chose them for cost. But I'm also thinking that TATA can't be Comcast's primary provider. We might be seeing some bad design here, and a change to some hop costs or metrics could improve this a lot. But I haven't seen their other charts, which would settle this.
That was the real question of course.
Since we can't know which ad to trust, we might as well block them all.
Or pretend that shooting trespassers after they've shot us is a solution.
It goes like: "These phones work everywhere" or "These phones work where there's no other signal"
Let that second one sink in for a moment, by itself it's almost breathtakingly salespeakish.
Then the truth:
"not only do you have to be outside, but you have to have a clear line of sight to the sky and not be near obstructions like buildings
So they DON'T work EVERYHERE. I'll not bother to ask them to work underwater. Just working where my cell phone does not would be cool, but that won't be in my living room.
What they do they do well. But they are so often oversold, and can't do what people expect them to.
Standing in the rain to make a call isn't as attractive as it sounds, if you were told you could be inside.
Then there's the rates.
How do you configure Adblock to give you the option to click on ads you want to?
But this is not new or news, unless you've been surfing along in that state of bliss^H^H^H^H^Hoblivion most do.
I visit a few somewhat unsavory sites, mostly celebrity news sites (no, not the celeb pr0n sites, but my protests fall on deaf ears I know) and the occasional programming-on-the-edge blogs, and these will take ads from most anyone. For at least two years I've been sending the admins specific reports of malware-laden ad postings, and until the past 9 months or so all I got was silence or the rare "didn't happen" or "not MY Site, a-h@le" response. Yup, some of them figure I have the time to write up false URLs and make fake screenshots... Sure, and I'm poor cause I'm smart, too.
Since then, all of these sites have gone from ignoring or denying my reports to terse "thanks" or "shouldn't see that any more".
My least terse comments, from a celeb photo site, seem to show that the owner and admin has finally figured out that some of the ad networks they are doing business with are not vetting their customers. In particular, I reported a nasty piece from Doubleclick, and after a week, got confirmation that my report was accurate. Most disappointing was that one ad I reported seemed to be for a Fortune 50 company, but now we know that some of these malware-ads are totally fake, taking the ad copy and source for a legitimate ad and sprinkling it with nasty dust. Both I and the site owners are hoping that these legitimate companies will take note and go after the bad boys.
Neither the site owners nor I actually expect the ad networks to stop this. The money is too good, actually checking the ad code is too laborious, and apparently their virus checkers are worse than mine.
At home, I'm still running all my anti-stuff on all my machines. My wife sometimes asks me what an alarm means, and I point out the warning message. She usually responds "but honey, it's Facebook..." and I assure her the warning is real. Somtimes she says 'But I got this from blablabla site, they aren't dangerous", and I get to tell her it was probably an ad, not the actual site. She gets a little miffed, but hey, it's cute and now it's entertaining for me. Until they get through, then it's re-imaging time.
I'm looking forward to fully virtualized systems and near-instant recovery. Until then, it' an arms race.
But I'm still innocently believing that the major ad networks are unwitting victims here, and that they don't have a few sales types taking money to turn a blind eye and knowingly sell to miscreants. And yes, there is little difference between selling ads for 'V1@5^' and selling ads for botware, but there is a difference. Can we puth them both out of business? Doubt it.
Not as much fun as it could be. But hey, they would have gotten a sample back for testing. Nice.
Tellin ya, he's in everything man... He's not letting up just because he's out of office.
I grew up (so I say anyways) in Maine, and for one summer worked for Oakhurst Dairy. Many of my uncles and my father worked for them as well.
The single most important thing to come out of that suit: Mainers now know that when you say your milk is from farmers that don't use hormones, you are getting milk without hormones. Some Mainers prefer that. All they wanna know is what's in their milk. Is that too much?
According to the food libel laws, actually it IS. A pox on all of them.
ps- Oakhurst is a fairly ethical company. Nobody's perfect, but they were trying last I knew. Their competition is largely out of state.
1) Wheels on stuff is cool. Make sure at least 2 of 4 wheels lock, and get the biggest diameter wheels you can stand. Rolling a workbench with 600+lbs on it will shred those plastic casters.
2) If you're going vertical, get a Little Giant-like ladder that splits into two a-frames, other brands work very well. Handy to be able to a-frame it, stretch it out and store vertically in a corner, use with planks as a third workbench, and of course lend out under constant supervision when someone else needs one.
There is little else as much fun as establishing a new shopspace. I've done three big ones, and it's a riot. Just be glad you're not working on portable tape recorders, and have to explain the $400 P.O. for screws. Having a 1x1.2mm screw when you need one; priceless. Sony made great stuff back then, man.
My favorite is to start researching a product and get into the reviews.
I often find the same review is cross-posted, copied, plagiarized, and just plain rewritten over and over. Sometimes I search on a distinctive phrase and marvel at how many different sites carry this crap. It both dilutes the trustworthiness (IMHO these review whores are just untrustworthy) and potential accuracy of reviews.
I read through reviews pretty carefully anyways, as I have read glowing reviews of products that I've purchased, and the stuff was just plain junk. And we've all read scathing reviews from someone (or apparently 'many') and in the end realized they had a bad experience, but their expectations were simply outlandish, and their resolution skills are totally lacking.
But that's just me.
Actually, Android is built upon a virtual machine tech that is pretty close to what you just described.
Well, close as in free beer. But VMWare is almost layering on VMs to a VM (Dalvik). Interesting. Dual phone numbers are already possible, either with dual SIMS or some CDMA witchery in silicon, and split personalities are something RIM has dabbled in. Android makes this much easier, since it is so close to Linux that work on one can be brought to the other without building from scratch.
We'll see, but I, for one, welcome our virtual Android overlords. Gotta be a way to assimilate this technology to my personal benefit.
"They want access to the personnal and credit card data? If I buy a magazine at a kiosk, the guy takes my money, period. Apple is just a digital kiosk."
First, most magazines don't care much about newsstand sales. They care about subscribers, with some exceptions. Mostly because they know where subscribers live, etc., and so they can tell advertisers somethign about their audience. Otherwise, why would anyone bother to advertise in, say, GQ?
Second, Apple thinks they own the magazines, and the publishers are merely content providers to Apple and hence to THEIR subscribers, who they DO know a lot about.
I'm heartened by this. Apple will be killing their revenue potential for iPad sales and then sales through the App Store and iTunes. Levels the playing field just a little bit.
Jobs does get it, this is just a fight for the customer. Should Apple start publishing its own e-magazines? will anyone care? Will Apple figure out who their customer REALLY is in iPad publication? Hint, it's NOT the iPad user.
Oh, and I'm cool with URLs that look like:
'https://www.example.com/page?sessid=37a1-fb6c-9372-11de'
Works for me.