"I don't think there is anything that "REQUIRES" a phone."
Um, besides the Phone app, number three on my list, and numbers two (SMS) and four (Mobile backup uses the data channel, never tried it on wiFi), ok. Android Market wants to be able to bill you, and since it bills the phone account, the phone is necessary I think.
"Phones are now just a dedicated network device."
That would ignore the whole point of my post, that much of what runs on my phone is not dependent on the phone network, and doesn't even need a phone. Just a platform, and my phone is an ARM computer, second only to the phone stuff.
"Add speaker and a microphone and a tablet is ajust a large phone that can do more."
And a radio. A WiFi radio makes them a VOIP device also, but not a 'real phone'. Not much of a distinction, but it is.
"What the #$@%! What makes mobile phones slightly different is the priority of task (phone can interrupt anything)"
You don't use Android much, do you? Even on Donut, my phone would ignore Dialer if it was busy with something else. The dirty little secret with Android is that it really not very kind to the phone user. Multitasking has its drawbacks. Ask Apple.
"Many have a 12 keyboard (ie just a very hindered numeric keypad)."
Actually, most smartphones have either a qwerty keyboard or a virtual keyboard. BlackBerry is the exception, and look at its market share. Thye have pretty much abandoned the minimal keyboard (Pearl was the last I think).
"If all Android based tablets had a "smart phone" emulation ther is nothing a software can't do in a WiFi connected tablet that a phone can do."
Thanks for the validation. Android is a mobile OS, phone-centric it is not. Chrome seems to be not at all mobile-focused.
No, my point is they don't need a phone connection. WiFi is fine.
So are we considering if Android is a good match for tablets without any network connections? You might want to put down the pipe yourself, my friend. Tablets without network connections are placemats.
Unless your Android app is specific to some telephone thing, like SMS or a dialer, that app is going to be just fine on a tablet without phone features or even service. WiFi will do.
Really, let's go down the list of apps on my Android phone:
The Google Stuff: Calendar, Calculator, Amazon MP3, Camera, Contacts, Email, Gmail, Clock, Gallery, Google Search, Maps, Latitude, News & Weather, Navigator, Places, Talk, YouTube. None of these need phone service, they are happy with WiFi or nothing at all.
Android Market likes to have your SIM I think to validate ya. OK, ONE. Messaging, of course, likes SMS. That's TWO. Phone, obviously, THREE. Oh darn, Mobile Backup. Oh, FOUR.
None of these need phone anything. WiFi will do where needed.
Out of 44 apps on my phone (not counting some very, very obviously non-phone-dependent one I haven't listed), only 4 need or just use phone service.
Reality check. The many Android apps that want phone permissions just want them to screw with your contacts or to check the phone state. Woop.
It's not at ALL about Android needing a phone. It's about Android being more suited to small screens and small machines (minimal RAM and lesser CPUS), and Chrome pointed directly at the desktop and netbook/notebook markets. More exactly, pointed directly at Microsoft.
Fracturing a market with Android and Chrome competing for share doesn't work for Google, so they will try to avoid it. It's just that Chrome is not as ready as Android is, and Android will have to keep itself lean to be workable on smartphones.
Of course, ARM is working on giving smartphones the power that netbooks have, and Intel is growing the Atom line up and the Duo line down to crush AMD's hopes in emerging markets.
It's actually not a bad strategy to be competing with yourself. IBM gave that a go in the 80s and 90s.
Nothing like a punchdown block to impress the techs. In Arizona, we get a lot of outside wiring, and I'm thinking about that, if I bother to get a POTS line again. I'll have to get a box... VOIP is looking good compared to that.
Contamination is a big issue. In the late 80s, I had a client just starting to use the Internet thing, and modems were awful. He complained that he couldn't even get a 300 baud connection, and finally we listened into the line - it was deafening without anything connected to it. This was in coastal Maine, and among other things his service ran up the road 30 miles to get into the town where the CO was, with a local repeater station in his village. We complained to the PUC, and they made the telco (New England Telephone at the time, soon to become NYNEX) test the line. We went through the obligatory dance over whether they needed to support more then voice-grade service (they did not) and that they would not test for modem functionality. The PUC found that there were regular complaints from other subscribers, and they actually got after the telco.
Six weeks later they restrung the line. The first tech who went up to break the jacket filled his bucket with water from the cable before he could get it down to the truck and nearly went overboard. 12 miles of cable full of water. They couldn't gas it out. The rest of the trunk line was also replaced. They billed it out as an upgrade by quadrupling the capacity, and of course we paid for it. And a lot of people in that area were offered private lines where only party lines were available. Even in the 80s, party lines were common in rural Maine.
I doubt that was or is the only cabling so messed up. And we want to run VOIP over this? Nope.
Yes I can, though I cheat and use decent earphones.
128K makes cymbals sound like bacon frying. Same effect that early piezo tweeters had, plenty of energy but not much accuracy. Awful, but disco and heavy metal don't seem to require fidelity, just volume.
And 128K makes me tired. Literally. 320 or better and I can listen for extended periods.
I can actually tell the difference between 128 and 192, but it takes an effort.
Now, since I've gone over to Bluetooth headsets, this is not so much an issue, but at home playing through my moderately HiFi stereo, I detest 128K, and mostly use the library I encoded in WAV at first, then FLAC. Conversions are not always trustworthy, but I now have my collection in WAV, FLAC, WMA, and 320K. Space is cheap.
Right. Cost is the most important issue to telcos. What do they get for the expensive upgrades? My guess is nothing.
And SIP, while good technology, requires replacing every landline in every home in America, or adding a SIP router for every residential landline. So this cost is borne by who? And they get what? I bet no one cares.
I leave out commercial and business services, as they are already well on their way to these standards.
And of course virtually everyone needs to upgrade, oru all you get is the lo-fi from the Luddites who won't spend money because it still sounds awful cause no one else has upgraded...
It's the money that has to be spent to overcome the lo-fi, low-bandwidth hardware. Analog POTS still rules in the U.S., despite virtually all the telcos using SLICs to A/D it and throw it at the CO.
Even in the dawn of telephony, frequency response was a significant issue. Besides the poor quality of transducers, the lines themselves weren't very good. Twisted pairs would have been nice, but early telephone wasn't twisted to improve common-mode rejection, it was twisted to keep the pairs together. Common residential service used something approaching zip cord from about 1960 on, maybe earlier. This isn't even twisted. You wonder why your DSL service is so crappy? I wonder how it even works at all. 10Base-T would barf on 30 feet of straight-line zip cord, and there is a good chance your house has 60-80 feet of it from the pole to the NT1. My first ISDN service at home was a fiasco, with load coils and conditioners being ripped out and new cable strung from the street to the complex demarc.
Frequency response is not the same thing as bandwidth (though they are directly related), but for telephone a 300-3300Hz response is intelligible and manageable. Doubling it to 6500Hz doesn't do a whole lot except consume bandwidth and marginally improve intelligibility. If you want fidelity, well, 12,500Hz is a good start. A loty of people never heard the flyback transformer on their old TVs vibrate, but I can hear them loud and clear. That's 15,750Hz.
And AM radio can sound very, very good. AM in America has a theoretical response of 16KHz, but currently is restricted in the U.S. to 10.2KHz (since 1989) to accomodate more stations and reduced interference from distant stations. The BBC at one time sent good audio, and a few shortwave stations did, and old AM radios had great speakers because they sent pretty good audio back then. Reducing response is also a way to extend range, along with compression, limiting, and a few other tricks that degrade ausio quality greatly. But AM is now the province of talk and news, so it doesn't seem to matter. FM, of course, also uses those tricks, and the result is nasty sound quality. To a generation broguth up on 128kbps MP3s, this is not a great loss. I code my music for my players at 320K or any of the lossless formats. 128k sizzle drive me crazy. And most FM music stations use MP3s anyways, they are largely programmed nationally and delivered over a satellite link. Tragedy.
To ask for improved sound quality in telephone is to ask for some compromises - fewer conversations over a given link, fewer conversations per cell tower, more Internet bandwidth. I'm pretty sure none of the incumbents will bother, as this ultimately results in increased direct costs, and probably zero increased revenue. Skype, etc., play with the codec and give apparently better results, the emphasis on 'apparently'. There are some clever audio tricks that will give a more pleasing experience with very little increase in bandwidth. Maybe Android can play with the audio, but I bet Apple could care less. The ILECS, bah!
So, the legacy of telephony is an old one, and has left us with something that works, but not as well as it could. Just a few more dollars, and you could have better!
I have visions of either having your key out there somewhere, and some way to securely access it, or having your key on something like a token.
If the key is out there, do I access it by providing a passcode to authenticate myself? Sounds like a password to me.
If it's on a token, well, where do I insert that, or do I use the token to get a passcode. Again, a password, though we use tokens here so it is at least something 'I HAVE', one of the three factors we like.
In the end, remember, I need a solution that works on multiple computers, does not leave behind any of itself, and can be remembered or discovered by ME easier than a password.
BTW, for my token-based access, we use both a fixed password and the token variable. Still a password. Something I have, the token as a variable password. Something I know, user name and fixed password. Something I am we do not yet support, but I'm willing. I use fingerprints on my little notebook at home. I don't at work or on any other machine.
These new 'money-laundering' rules are going to impact merchants and processors significantly. Visa is probably happy to be rid of a business with massive fraud, payment issues, and scams on every corner.
Next up will be gambling sites, mostly the poker sites which in general should be burnt off the Web for the faurds they commit, not to mention the money-laundering potential. Imagine watching user A play like a fool and lose $100k to user B, knowing all along this is the equivalent of wiring the money to user B and suffering the house's rake as cost of shuffling the funds. This is an international problem, and the only thing that stops this from happening more is that 'legitimate' poker sites do everything to keep you from actually receiving your winnings. A poker site built to facilitate laundering wouldn't bother with that nonsense, but it would discourage players other than the intended 'clientele' from playing big-stakes games (probably by using a buy-in or premium membership to keep the riffraff out) and thereby preventing unexpected players from receiving funds expected to just be 'won' by the laundering destination.
Amazingly creative these people are. The 'legitimate' poker sites rake enough, and of course are mostly pure scams, with bots hammering on live players and some people making money a few bucks at a time. The fraud and disputes are rampant, and most processors want nothing to do with this business, so they have holdbacks and huge discount rates and fees if they bother at all. Being offshore makes matters worse, and users in the U.S. for instance will have no help from anybody collecting their winnings, so they often dispute their membership fees and such, with the predictable result that the site essentially survives by scamming its users while the users are scamming each other. There is no good in online poker. None.
This is one of the darker corners of the Web. These 'money-laundering' rules will impact these businesses a lot.
And, of course, these rules will also aid in collecting taxes. The IRS is in the midst of implementing rules to use credit card processors to provide payment data which is matched to the merchants' tax reporting. If something is wrong, the IRS has the power to garnish the intended credit card payments and deliver them to the business only if they agree that the taxes were collected and all is well. And if there is a problem with the merchant's records, and the processor has some typo or error in the merchant's files, they have to send the money to the IRS and the merchant may^H^H^Hwill wait for an entire quarter to get their money back, less anything the IRS decides to withold. I say 'money-laundering' because a lot of the motivation here by the government is to get more data and get into the payment streams.
Well, for starters, while some of the Bible might predate the Bronze Age, even peer reviewed research that is later found to be flawed is defended vigorously until it is exposed. The New Testament, in particular, was written by men who mostly went to their deaths defending their faith and their writings. They were convinced. I'm not ready to discard that, but it doesn't meet any scientific critera, I know.
But is the Bible the 'right one'? You do know that the Q'uran references many Old Testament characters and events, don't you? The vedas seem to have been written starting around 1500 B.C., nearly contemporary to Moses. An interesting time. Must have been the development of useful written language and implements that makes this a coincidence. I do not know if the vedas were similarly defended by martyrs, but belivers in the Q'uran have a way of killing their detractors. Christians seem to have largely given that up after an unfortunate series of episodes. Nowadays, Chrtistians are once again the martyrs, all over the world. It comes with the territory. They are not alone, I know.
I was taught in high school that 'Homer' wrote at least two good books. Well, that didn't hold up. But we don't have any record that those books were intended to be read as 'divinely inspired'. Actually, the Hebrew god and Christ I think are singular individuals in literature as in life. Comparing them to others is not useful.
But the issue of 'modern miracles' is a difficult one. After you go through the fakes and mistakes, there are few documented miracles. And within Christianity, there is considerable debate over whether they are even necessary. I believe I've witnessed one, but I haven't gone back to ask her how she is doing now, 5 years later. Until then, I'm not willing to recite it as 'provbable', but merely what I saw. The kids that went to Brazil 4 years ago, though, they saw much more, and I need to ask them if they have been back and what has endured. Nothing without proof.
One question I do have. Was Greek mythology intended as testimonials, or was it pure fiction even then? While many claim the Bible is a collection of myths and legends, the Torah is held to be a literal history. Since Greek gods were regularly depicted in architecture and elsewhere, I suspect they were considered to be real. If so, where are they now?
Gravity attests to its existence by evidence of its effect, and we aren't quibbling about whether or not gravity is. But while it is well-known, do you have a good working definition of the force of gravity? Or are you merely restating its effects?
Nothing wrong with that, but do we have any scientific methods to actually 'see' the forces we are aware of? we can measure them, but to 'see' them? The four natural forces I am aware of, strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational, are actually only three apparently - the electroweak, electromagnetic, and gravitational. My knowledge of physics is constantly being revised as we identify and speculate on new, previously unknown things.
Sadly, God, the God of the Bible, already states that He cannot be seen by humans, His close presence is too much for us. So we won't be getting any physical evidence for you by His presence, though if He is in fact omnipotent, He could make Himself known to us directly. He doesn't seem to want to, and hasn't since Moses' time, and He hasn't given physical evidence of His existence since, well, now that you ask, since the last time someone was healed on Earth by miraculous means, and upon request. Which was probably a few minutes ago, most likely somewhere in Africa or South America, though that happens elsewhere.
Just a bit of research myself into 'proofs' of miraculous healings left me with the problem that even very credible reporters (Dr. Alexis Carrel, for instance) are most always ostracized and denigrated, and their previous accomplishments and reputation discarded. It's a neat trick, discredit the evidence by repudiating the reporter in spite of their previous reliability. Of course Carrel had other issues, but he did win a Nobel Prize. While you would think, as I did and still do, that miraculous healings would be big news, in fact they are universally challenged (as they should be) and dismissed without hesitation. Sadly, too many charlatans are out there faking healings. Since this is a matter of faith, it will be a point of contention between you and I. And this problem afflicts Science also.
But the Bible is not as old as the Bronze Age, as it is first based on the Torah, much of which is held to be written in Moses' time. The first five books refer to Creation, the first covenants, and establishment of Israel. Of old literature, early Greek or Mycenaean works are more or less contemporary to Moses.
I was taught that the Iliad and the Oddessy were both written by Homer. This has been in dispute for some time now. The dispute over authorship of the Bible is not even so simple, as it is also a dispute over authorship of the Torah. You'll have to argue with my Jewish friends over that one. They believe they have a history of their people in the Torah, and that's the end of it.
But this is all now faith. I'm stuck with no hard proofs to show you, I know. When we better understand gravity, we will have more to discuss.
Here we go, redefining the Universe to meet our expectations. And of course, redefining the forces that we don't understand to match our puny abilities to do make sense of it all.
I assume, of course, that the peer review process that most scientific papers undergo nowadays is also withoutflaws?
Actually, the book I refer to is an old one, and predates cryptography, digital data, and even the human manipulation of electricty. It's an old book that has been handed down for thousands of years, accepted as true by an entire race of people, and has not only been challenged, but defended to the death by many.
Not much of a test, but how many scientists have defended their research to their deaths? I know the answer to this is greater than one, and he was insipired, in part, by the book I refer to.
I know, you refuse the writings of long-lost authors, and the veracity of their words based on just the one book. Compare the sources of Biblical manuscripts with those of Homer or even Gallileo. But I'm wasting my time to go further. We want modern proofs. Happenings that we don't understand we either subscribe to miracles or we dismiss as untrue.
Ditto for HTC. The MT3G waited for a while for updates, G1 of course is EOL and won't get anything official past 1.6 due to memory constraints, and any number of HTC boxen are just waiting for promised updates.
Expecting a lot of work on phones that are either no longer sold or are well past their most popular moment is pretty useless. Buying an Android phone with the expectation that it will be upgraded promptly is also unwise - if you think buying a Ford on the premise that it will get some massive 'magic' upgrades without cost makes sens, then you're not in my reality.
ps- The Exchange on non-standard ports problem plagues many platforms and clients. If you know this, you can't buy a phone to access your corporate mail without checking this FIRST. Do I need to repeat this louder and slower?
The scientific community is willing to accept a preexisting condition of gravity, but not a preexisting condition of God.
So here's the offer; If you can explain how gravity preexisted everything, I'm in. If, however, you want an explanation of a preexisting God, well, I have this book, written by him.
So we choose between the papers on something that can't be very well explained, or the autobiography of the One who made that something.
It's a matter of faith. If you believe Science has the answer, you apply the method and make the best of it. Ditto God.
I'm not finding fault with Science having faith in itself, but I do find fault with them declaring all other faiths not merely invalid or wrong, but beyond that harmful or specious. Contrary to popular opinion, the God of the Bible does not invalidate Science.
Still, it is worthwhile to contemplate Creation. I'm encouraged that Hawking presses the issue. Asking is important.
My Thinkpad X41 tablet hibernates just fine under XP. Even if my wife signs on to her account and then closes the lid, while I'm hibernated.
Your complaints are not uncommon, but they are also not the typical experience. I trust you know how to set Power Controls to Hibernate on lid close, not just Suspend.
ps- I've diagnosed many hibernation/shutdown problems in one of three categories:
1. Malware. 2. Crapware. 3. Old machine with new OS, bad drivers or ACPI.
Rarely, the maker does a bad job with ACPI or drivers, and it never hibernates out of the box.
"I can remember reading Dune for the first time, and I started by reading the glossary," Stephenson say. "Any book that had that kind of extra stuff in it was always hugely fascinating to me."
I remember reading The Hobbit, then the Ring trilogy, and then the Silmarillion. With the History of Middle-Earth, Tolkien pretty much succeeded in writing more about the books than the books themselves, his son's contributions included.
The Dune series is deserving of being made into movies too, but it's not necessary to remake the original again. Just move on to Dune Messiah. The SciFi flop can be ignored. Maybe Brian's works too, though we would never get that far.
"there are also social features that allow readers to create their own profiles, earn badges for activity on the site or in the application, and interact with other readers"
It's a game platform. Ok, how much is the subscription?
As India extends its reach into all communications, they will create an undesireable environment for foreign corporations to do any confidential work. This will make those corporations think twice about offshoring work to India that includes trade secrets, confidential or personal data, or even just really interesting stuff.'
As an American, I look forward to the return of jobs sent there in the past.
AT&T seems to be saying they use Diffserv to provide many of their subscribers with prioritized services, specifically, the article points out they offer that to commercial/business customers, and an example is tagging VOIP for better service.
This, by itself, doesn't bother me at all. In fact, if I'm running VOIP at my business, I want it prioritized to ensure good performance. If I have problems with other important traffic failing, I probably have too little bandwidth and need to make some choices, but this is network management at its best.
The community (/.'rs especially) seem to equate this with some horrid scheme to not just allow end users to prioritize important traffic, but as a way to restrict other traffic, either to penalize unpopular (to the ISPs and others) services, or to make them uncompetitive. This fear is mostly quoted as seeing cable cos. de-prioritize video streaming, so as to enhance their own streaming offerings, and usually to gain more paid subscribers for those 'new' services. For instance, Cox (my carrier) would, in this scenario, deprioritize Hulu packets, for instance, while leaving their own video streaming alone. This would be evil in these instances:
- If Cox did this deprioritization of Hulu traffic at their gateways, I think that's evil. It indicates this is a corporate decision, if it is explained as a network utilization response I feel as if I've bought Internet access that can't deliver a desired service to me ( I want my money back if they can't fix the network), and it is clearly not a choice BY their end-users.
- If Cox begins offering a free video streaming service and does this, it smells like they are trying to kill Hulu just to keep me on Cox services, evil.
- If Cox begins offering a paid video streaming service, and coincidentally starts harming Hulu (and/or other) competing (for free) services, this smells really evil.
So, if Cox decides to de-prioritize traffic at their gateways, they are shouldering the burden of either proving this is necessary, or exposing themselves to the charge that they are evil.
Now, there are other problems that AT&T and others using Diffserv might cause, and more evil to be had.
If peers start deprioritizing traffic at their NAPs, how long before a carrier that services Google, for instance, has a claim against one that is predominately serving residential customers if they see Google traffic being slowed? Why does Google get caught in the position of having to pay extra to provide good service to their end-users? Excellent question, and the crux of the overall Net Neutrality question for me.
If ISPs are going to charge sites or services that provide value to their customers, we have what is beginning to look like the 'Cableization' of the Internet. Let me explain.
Cable systems, as they grew out of the MATV era, started providing video from largely free (to them) sources, primarily local stations. As satellite services grew, cable systems rarely had to pay for access, ESPN being an example. HBO, of course, was the exception, and proves the rule. Pr0n was always paid content, because it is considered valuable by the customer.
Telephone companies used to charge usurous rates for long distance because there was no other alternative. As CLECS and third-party LD providers get into the game, that changed. Cell phones have destroyed the LD market, so telcos were stuck with a lot of copper and not many ways to sell it profitably.
This is not so today.
Cable systems have to pay for many of the programming sources they offer, as the content providers realized that the cable systems needed them more than they needed cable. Actually, not so true any more, and cable TV has matured into the dominant and preferred delivery network and the content providers that can charge for their content do so.
The Internet was, for a long time, in the MATV mode - every one wanted to get stuff from the Internet, and most providers off
Last time I read an article on this, 60% of IT projects were considered failures. That's not counting the ones that didn't quite meet goals, but were good enough to go into production and be replaced as soon as possible by something that 'would work'. What the heck, do it over...
And the common management strategy in the U.S. military had just a little bit in common with U.S. business strategy; Oursourcing functions was pretyt popular for the military, until we realised that they are actually more expensive and don't really work as well as the incumbents.
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"I don't think there is anything that "REQUIRES" a phone."
Um, besides the Phone app, number three on my list, and numbers two (SMS) and four (Mobile backup uses the data channel, never tried it on wiFi), ok. Android Market wants to be able to bill you, and since it bills the phone account, the phone is necessary I think.
"Phones are now just a dedicated network device."
That would ignore the whole point of my post, that much of what runs on my phone is not dependent on the phone network, and doesn't even need a phone. Just a platform, and my phone is an ARM computer, second only to the phone stuff.
"Add speaker and a microphone and a tablet is ajust a large phone that can do more."
And a radio. A WiFi radio makes them a VOIP device also, but not a 'real phone'. Not much of a distinction, but it is.
"What the #$@%! What makes mobile phones slightly different is the priority of task (phone can interrupt anything)"
You don't use Android much, do you? Even on Donut, my phone would ignore Dialer if it was busy with something else. The dirty little secret with Android is that it really not very kind to the phone user. Multitasking has its drawbacks. Ask Apple.
"Many have a 12 keyboard (ie just a very hindered numeric keypad)."
Actually, most smartphones have either a qwerty keyboard or a virtual keyboard. BlackBerry is the exception, and look at its market share. Thye have pretty much abandoned the minimal keyboard (Pearl was the last I think).
"If all Android based tablets had a "smart phone" emulation ther is nothing a software can't do in a WiFi connected tablet that a phone can do."
Thanks for the validation. Android is a mobile OS, phone-centric it is not. Chrome seems to be not at all mobile-focused.
No, my point is they don't need a phone connection. WiFi is fine.
So are we considering if Android is a good match for tablets without any network connections? You might want to put down the pipe yourself, my friend. Tablets without network connections are placemats.
Unless your Android app is specific to some telephone thing, like SMS or a dialer, that app is going to be just fine on a tablet without phone features or even service. WiFi will do.
Really, let's go down the list of apps on my Android phone:
The Google Stuff: Calendar, Calculator, Amazon MP3, Camera, Contacts, Email, Gmail, Clock, Gallery, Google Search, Maps, Latitude, News & Weather, Navigator, Places, Talk, YouTube. None of these need phone service, they are happy with WiFi or nothing at all.
Android Market likes to have your SIM I think to validate ya. OK, ONE.
Messaging, of course, likes SMS. That's TWO.
Phone, obviously, THREE.
Oh darn, Mobile Backup. Oh, FOUR.
Other Apps: AppMonster, Terminal, World, AK Notepad, Astro Player, Barcode Scanner, AndroZip, Barcode Scanner, Bonsai Blast, Browser, Classic Tetris, Craigslist, CraigsNotifier, eBay, Facebook, GPS Status, Music, Pandora, SetCPU, Superuser, Twitter, WiFi Analyzer, World.
None of these need phone anything. WiFi will do where needed.
Out of 44 apps on my phone (not counting some very, very obviously non-phone-dependent one I haven't listed), only 4 need or just use phone service.
Reality check. The many Android apps that want phone permissions just want them to screw with your contacts or to check the phone state. Woop.
It's not at ALL about Android needing a phone. It's about Android being more suited to small screens and small machines (minimal RAM and lesser CPUS), and Chrome pointed directly at the desktop and netbook/notebook markets. More exactly, pointed directly at Microsoft.
Fracturing a market with Android and Chrome competing for share doesn't work for Google, so they will try to avoid it. It's just that Chrome is not as ready as Android is, and Android will have to keep itself lean to be workable on smartphones.
Of course, ARM is working on giving smartphones the power that netbooks have, and Intel is growing the Atom line up and the Duo line down to crush AMD's hopes in emerging markets.
It's actually not a bad strategy to be competing with yourself. IBM gave that a go in the 80s and 90s.
Usually only part of a worm.
For a whole worm, use Windows.... Mostly.
I've been punching 66 and/or 110 since 1990. Bridge clips for 66 are not a waste of money.
Nothing like a punchdown block to impress the techs. In Arizona, we get a lot of outside wiring, and I'm thinking about that, if I bother to get a POTS line again. I'll have to get a box... VOIP is looking good compared to that.
Contamination is a big issue. In the late 80s, I had a client just starting to use the Internet thing, and modems were awful. He complained that he couldn't even get a 300 baud connection, and finally we listened into the line - it was deafening without anything connected to it. This was in coastal Maine, and among other things his service ran up the road 30 miles to get into the town where the CO was, with a local repeater station in his village. We complained to the PUC, and they made the telco (New England Telephone at the time, soon to become NYNEX) test the line. We went through the obligatory dance over whether they needed to support more then voice-grade service (they did not) and that they would not test for modem functionality. The PUC found that there were regular complaints from other subscribers, and they actually got after the telco.
Six weeks later they restrung the line. The first tech who went up to break the jacket filled his bucket with water from the cable before he could get it down to the truck and nearly went overboard. 12 miles of cable full of water. They couldn't gas it out. The rest of the trunk line was also replaced. They billed it out as an upgrade by quadrupling the capacity, and of course we paid for it. And a lot of people in that area were offered private lines where only party lines were available. Even in the 80s, party lines were common in rural Maine.
I doubt that was or is the only cabling so messed up. And we want to run VOIP over this? Nope.
Yes I can, though I cheat and use decent earphones.
128K makes cymbals sound like bacon frying. Same effect that early piezo tweeters had, plenty of energy but not much accuracy. Awful, but disco and heavy metal don't seem to require fidelity, just volume.
And 128K makes me tired. Literally. 320 or better and I can listen for extended periods.
I can actually tell the difference between 128 and 192, but it takes an effort.
Now, since I've gone over to Bluetooth headsets, this is not so much an issue, but at home playing through my moderately HiFi stereo, I detest 128K, and mostly use the library I encoded in WAV at first, then FLAC. Conversions are not always trustworthy, but I now have my collection in WAV, FLAC, WMA, and 320K. Space is cheap.
Right. Cost is the most important issue to telcos. What do they get for the expensive upgrades? My guess is nothing.
And SIP, while good technology, requires replacing every landline in every home in America, or adding a SIP router for every residential landline. So this cost is borne by who? And they get what? I bet no one cares.
I leave out commercial and business services, as they are already well on their way to these standards.
And of course virtually everyone needs to upgrade, oru all you get is the lo-fi from the Luddites who won't spend money because it still sounds awful cause no one else has upgraded...
It's the money that has to be spent to overcome the lo-fi, low-bandwidth hardware. Analog POTS still rules in the U.S., despite virtually all the telcos using SLICs to A/D it and throw it at the CO.
Ok:
Web service or whatever runs on my computer (I know it's out there ).
USB/memory/cert are something have.
User ID I know.
And I was explaining how I use a token at work. I get it.
But a cert on a stick isnt enough.
Even in the dawn of telephony, frequency response was a significant issue. Besides the poor quality of transducers, the lines themselves weren't very good. Twisted pairs would have been nice, but early telephone wasn't twisted to improve common-mode rejection, it was twisted to keep the pairs together. Common residential service used something approaching zip cord from about 1960 on, maybe earlier. This isn't even twisted. You wonder why your DSL service is so crappy? I wonder how it even works at all. 10Base-T would barf on 30 feet of straight-line zip cord, and there is a good chance your house has 60-80 feet of it from the pole to the NT1. My first ISDN service at home was a fiasco, with load coils and conditioners being ripped out and new cable strung from the street to the complex demarc.
Frequency response is not the same thing as bandwidth (though they are directly related), but for telephone a 300-3300Hz response is intelligible and manageable. Doubling it to 6500Hz doesn't do a whole lot except consume bandwidth and marginally improve intelligibility. If you want fidelity, well, 12,500Hz is a good start. A loty of people never heard the flyback transformer on their old TVs vibrate, but I can hear them loud and clear. That's 15,750Hz.
And AM radio can sound very, very good. AM in America has a theoretical response of 16KHz, but currently is restricted in the U.S. to 10.2KHz (since 1989) to accomodate more stations and reduced interference from distant stations. The BBC at one time sent good audio, and a few shortwave stations did, and old AM radios had great speakers because they sent pretty good audio back then. Reducing response is also a way to extend range, along with compression, limiting, and a few other tricks that degrade ausio quality greatly. But AM is now the province of talk and news, so it doesn't seem to matter. FM, of course, also uses those tricks, and the result is nasty sound quality. To a generation broguth up on 128kbps MP3s, this is not a great loss. I code my music for my players at 320K or any of the lossless formats. 128k sizzle drive me crazy. And most FM music stations use MP3s anyways, they are largely programmed nationally and delivered over a satellite link. Tragedy.
To ask for improved sound quality in telephone is to ask for some compromises - fewer conversations over a given link, fewer conversations per cell tower, more Internet bandwidth. I'm pretty sure none of the incumbents will bother, as this ultimately results in increased direct costs, and probably zero increased revenue. Skype, etc., play with the codec and give apparently better results, the emphasis on 'apparently'. There are some clever audio tricks that will give a more pleasing experience with very little increase in bandwidth. Maybe Android can play with the audio, but I bet Apple could care less. The ILECS, bah!
So, the legacy of telephony is an old one, and has left us with something that works, but not as well as it could. Just a few more dollars, and you could have better!
Oh, and you losers in Gurgaon...
Thanks! Good job! We love ya!
Ok, so explain how an PKI key system would work.
I have visions of either having your key out there somewhere, and some way to securely access it, or having your key on something like a token.
If the key is out there, do I access it by providing a passcode to authenticate myself? Sounds like a password to me.
If it's on a token, well, where do I insert that, or do I use the token to get a passcode. Again, a password, though we use tokens here so it is at least something 'I HAVE', one of the three factors we like.
In the end, remember, I need a solution that works on multiple computers, does not leave behind any of itself, and can be remembered or discovered by ME easier than a password.
BTW, for my token-based access, we use both a fixed password and the token variable. Still a password. Something I have, the token as a variable password. Something I know, user name and fixed password. Something I am we do not yet support, but I'm willing. I use fingerprints on my little notebook at home. I don't at work or on any other machine.
These new 'money-laundering' rules are going to impact merchants and processors significantly. Visa is probably happy to be rid of a business with massive fraud, payment issues, and scams on every corner.
Next up will be gambling sites, mostly the poker sites which in general should be burnt off the Web for the faurds they commit, not to mention the money-laundering potential. Imagine watching user A play like a fool and lose $100k to user B, knowing all along this is the equivalent of wiring the money to user B and suffering the house's rake as cost of shuffling the funds. This is an international problem, and the only thing that stops this from happening more is that 'legitimate' poker sites do everything to keep you from actually receiving your winnings. A poker site built to facilitate laundering wouldn't bother with that nonsense, but it would discourage players other than the intended 'clientele' from playing big-stakes games (probably by using a buy-in or premium membership to keep the riffraff out) and thereby preventing unexpected players from receiving funds expected to just be 'won' by the laundering destination.
Amazingly creative these people are. The 'legitimate' poker sites rake enough, and of course are mostly pure scams, with bots hammering on live players and some people making money a few bucks at a time. The fraud and disputes are rampant, and most processors want nothing to do with this business, so they have holdbacks and huge discount rates and fees if they bother at all. Being offshore makes matters worse, and users in the U.S. for instance will have no help from anybody collecting their winnings, so they often dispute their membership fees and such, with the predictable result that the site essentially survives by scamming its users while the users are scamming each other. There is no good in online poker. None.
This is one of the darker corners of the Web. These 'money-laundering' rules will impact these businesses a lot.
And, of course, these rules will also aid in collecting taxes. The IRS is in the midst of implementing rules to use credit card processors to provide payment data which is matched to the merchants' tax reporting. If something is wrong, the IRS has the power to garnish the intended credit card payments and deliver them to the business only if they agree that the taxes were collected and all is well. And if there is a problem with the merchant's records, and the processor has some typo or error in the merchant's files, they have to send the money to the IRS and the merchant may^H^H^Hwill wait for an entire quarter to get their money back, less anything the IRS decides to withold. I say 'money-laundering' because a lot of the motivation here by the government is to get more data and get into the payment streams.
Well, for starters, while some of the Bible might predate the Bronze Age, even peer reviewed research that is later found to be flawed is defended vigorously until it is exposed. The New Testament, in particular, was written by men who mostly went to their deaths defending their faith and their writings. They were convinced. I'm not ready to discard that, but it doesn't meet any scientific critera, I know.
But is the Bible the 'right one'? You do know that the Q'uran references many Old Testament characters and events, don't you? The vedas seem to have been written starting around 1500 B.C., nearly contemporary to Moses. An interesting time. Must have been the development of useful written language and implements that makes this a coincidence. I do not know if the vedas were similarly defended by martyrs, but belivers in the Q'uran have a way of killing their detractors. Christians seem to have largely given that up after an unfortunate series of episodes. Nowadays, Chrtistians are once again the martyrs, all over the world. It comes with the territory. They are not alone, I know.
I was taught in high school that 'Homer' wrote at least two good books. Well, that didn't hold up. But we don't have any record that those books were intended to be read as 'divinely inspired'. Actually, the Hebrew god and Christ I think are singular individuals in literature as in life. Comparing them to others is not useful.
But the issue of 'modern miracles' is a difficult one. After you go through the fakes and mistakes, there are few documented miracles. And within Christianity, there is considerable debate over whether they are even necessary. I believe I've witnessed one, but I haven't gone back to ask her how she is doing now, 5 years later. Until then, I'm not willing to recite it as 'provbable', but merely what I saw. The kids that went to Brazil 4 years ago, though, they saw much more, and I need to ask them if they have been back and what has endured. Nothing without proof.
One question I do have. Was Greek mythology intended as testimonials, or was it pure fiction even then? While many claim the Bible is a collection of myths and legends, the Torah is held to be a literal history. Since Greek gods were regularly depicted in architecture and elsewhere, I suspect they were considered to be real. If so, where are they now?
Gravity attests to its existence by evidence of its effect, and we aren't quibbling about whether or not gravity is. But while it is well-known, do you have a good working definition of the force of gravity? Or are you merely restating its effects?
Nothing wrong with that, but do we have any scientific methods to actually 'see' the forces we are aware of? we can measure them, but to 'see' them? The four natural forces I am aware of, strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational, are actually only three apparently - the electroweak, electromagnetic, and gravitational. My knowledge of physics is constantly being revised as we identify and speculate on new, previously unknown things.
Sadly, God, the God of the Bible, already states that He cannot be seen by humans, His close presence is too much for us. So we won't be getting any physical evidence for you by His presence, though if He is in fact omnipotent, He could make Himself known to us directly. He doesn't seem to want to, and hasn't since Moses' time, and He hasn't given physical evidence of His existence since, well, now that you ask, since the last time someone was healed on Earth by miraculous means, and upon request. Which was probably a few minutes ago, most likely somewhere in Africa or South America, though that happens elsewhere.
Just a bit of research myself into 'proofs' of miraculous healings left me with the problem that even very credible reporters (Dr. Alexis Carrel, for instance) are most always ostracized and denigrated, and their previous accomplishments and reputation discarded. It's a neat trick, discredit the evidence by repudiating the reporter in spite of their previous reliability. Of course Carrel had other issues, but he did win a Nobel Prize. While you would think, as I did and still do, that miraculous healings would be big news, in fact they are universally challenged (as they should be) and dismissed without hesitation. Sadly, too many charlatans are out there faking healings. Since this is a matter of faith, it will be a point of contention between you and I. And this problem afflicts Science also.
But the Bible is not as old as the Bronze Age, as it is first based on the Torah, much of which is held to be written in Moses' time. The first five books refer to Creation, the first covenants, and establishment of Israel. Of old literature, early Greek or Mycenaean works are more or less contemporary to Moses.
I was taught that the Iliad and the Oddessy were both written by Homer. This has been in dispute for some time now. The dispute over authorship of the Bible is not even so simple, as it is also a dispute over authorship of the Torah. You'll have to argue with my Jewish friends over that one. They believe they have a history of their people in the Torah, and that's the end of it.
But this is all now faith. I'm stuck with no hard proofs to show you, I know. When we better understand gravity, we will have more to discuss.
quickly.
Define quickly. A few billion years? Trillions?
Here we go, redefining the Universe to meet our expectations. And of course, redefining the forces that we don't understand to match our puny abilities to do make sense of it all.
I assume, of course, that the peer review process that most scientific papers undergo nowadays is also without flaws?
Actually, the book I refer to is an old one, and predates cryptography, digital data, and even the human manipulation of electricty. It's an old book that has been handed down for thousands of years, accepted as true by an entire race of people, and has not only been challenged, but defended to the death by many.
Not much of a test, but how many scientists have defended their research to their deaths? I know the answer to this is greater than one, and he was insipired, in part, by the book I refer to.
I know, you refuse the writings of long-lost authors, and the veracity of their words based on just the one book. Compare the sources of Biblical manuscripts with those of Homer or even Gallileo. But I'm wasting my time to go further. We want modern proofs. Happenings that we don't understand we either subscribe to miracles or we dismiss as untrue.
Ditto for HTC. The MT3G waited for a while for updates, G1 of course is EOL and won't get anything official past 1.6 due to memory constraints, and any number of HTC boxen are just waiting for promised updates.
Expecting a lot of work on phones that are either no longer sold or are well past their most popular moment is pretty useless. Buying an Android phone with the expectation that it will be upgraded promptly is also unwise - if you think buying a Ford on the premise that it will get some massive 'magic' upgrades without cost makes sens, then you're not in my reality.
ps- The Exchange on non-standard ports problem plagues many platforms and clients. If you know this, you can't buy a phone to access your corporate mail without checking this FIRST. Do I need to repeat this louder and slower?
The scientific community is willing to accept a preexisting condition of gravity, but not a preexisting condition of God.
So here's the offer; If you can explain how gravity preexisted everything, I'm in. If, however, you want an explanation of a preexisting God, well, I have this book, written by him.
So we choose between the papers on something that can't be very well explained, or the autobiography of the One who made that something.
It's a matter of faith. If you believe Science has the answer, you apply the method and make the best of it. Ditto God.
I'm not finding fault with Science having faith in itself, but I do find fault with them declaring all other faiths not merely invalid or wrong, but beyond that harmful or specious. Contrary to popular opinion, the God of the Bible does not invalidate Science.
Still, it is worthwhile to contemplate Creation. I'm encouraged that Hawking presses the issue. Asking is important.
My Thinkpad X41 tablet hibernates just fine under XP. Even if my wife signs on to her account and then closes the lid, while I'm hibernated.
Your complaints are not uncommon, but they are also not the typical experience. I trust you know how to set Power Controls to Hibernate on lid close, not just Suspend.
ps- I've diagnosed many hibernation/shutdown problems in one of three categories:
1. Malware.
2. Crapware.
3. Old machine with new OS, bad drivers or ACPI.
Rarely, the maker does a bad job with ACPI or drivers, and it never hibernates out of the box.
"I can remember reading Dune for the first time, and I started by reading the glossary," Stephenson say. "Any book that had that kind of extra stuff in it was always hugely fascinating to me."
I remember reading The Hobbit, then the Ring trilogy, and then the Silmarillion. With the History of Middle-Earth, Tolkien pretty much succeeded in writing more about the books than the books themselves, his son's contributions included.
The Dune series is deserving of being made into movies too, but it's not necessary to remake the original again. Just move on to Dune Messiah. The SciFi flop can be ignored. Maybe Brian's works too, though we would never get that far.
"there are also social features that allow readers to create their own profiles, earn badges for activity on the site or in the application, and interact with other readers"
It's a game platform. Ok, how much is the subscription?
As India extends its reach into all communications, they will create an undesireable environment for foreign corporations to do any confidential work. This will make those corporations think twice about offshoring work to India that includes trade secrets, confidential or personal data, or even just really interesting stuff.'
As an American, I look forward to the return of jobs sent there in the past.
Bring it on!
....along with the facts.
AT&T seems to be saying they use Diffserv to provide many of their subscribers with prioritized services, specifically, the article points out they offer that to commercial/business customers, and an example is tagging VOIP for better service.
This, by itself, doesn't bother me at all. In fact, if I'm running VOIP at my business, I want it prioritized to ensure good performance. If I have problems with other important traffic failing, I probably have too little bandwidth and need to make some choices, but this is network management at its best.
The community (/.'rs especially) seem to equate this with some horrid scheme to not just allow end users to prioritize important traffic, but as a way to restrict other traffic, either to penalize unpopular (to the ISPs and others) services, or to make them uncompetitive. This fear is mostly quoted as seeing cable cos. de-prioritize video streaming, so as to enhance their own streaming offerings, and usually to gain more paid subscribers for those 'new' services. For instance, Cox (my carrier) would, in this scenario, deprioritize Hulu packets, for instance, while leaving their own video streaming alone. This would be evil in these instances:
- If Cox did this deprioritization of Hulu traffic at their gateways, I think that's evil. It indicates this is a corporate decision, if it is explained as a network utilization response I feel as if I've bought Internet access that can't deliver a desired service to me ( I want my money back if they can't fix the network), and it is clearly not a choice BY their end-users.
- If Cox begins offering a free video streaming service and does this, it smells like they are trying to kill Hulu just to keep me on Cox services, evil.
- If Cox begins offering a paid video streaming service, and coincidentally starts harming Hulu (and/or other) competing (for free) services, this smells really evil.
So, if Cox decides to de-prioritize traffic at their gateways, they are shouldering the burden of either proving this is necessary, or exposing themselves to the charge that they are evil.
Now, there are other problems that AT&T and others using Diffserv might cause, and more evil to be had.
If peers start deprioritizing traffic at their NAPs, how long before a carrier that services Google, for instance, has a claim against one that is predominately serving residential customers if they see Google traffic being slowed? Why does Google get caught in the position of having to pay extra to provide good service to their end-users? Excellent question, and the crux of the overall Net Neutrality question for me.
If ISPs are going to charge sites or services that provide value to their customers, we have what is beginning to look like the 'Cableization' of the Internet. Let me explain.
Cable systems, as they grew out of the MATV era, started providing video from largely free (to them) sources, primarily local stations. As satellite services grew, cable systems rarely had to pay for access, ESPN being an example. HBO, of course, was the exception, and proves the rule. Pr0n was always paid content, because it is considered valuable by the customer.
Telephone companies used to charge usurous rates for long distance because there was no other alternative. As CLECS and third-party LD providers get into the game, that changed. Cell phones have destroyed the LD market, so telcos were stuck with a lot of copper and not many ways to sell it profitably.
This is not so today.
Cable systems have to pay for many of the programming sources they offer, as the content providers realized that the cable systems needed them more than they needed cable. Actually, not so true any more, and cable TV has matured into the dominant and preferred delivery network and the content providers that can charge for their content do so.
The Internet was, for a long time, in the MATV mode - every one wanted to get stuff from the Internet, and most providers off
Last time I read an article on this, 60% of IT projects were considered failures. That's not counting the ones that didn't quite meet goals, but were good enough to go into production and be replaced as soon as possible by something that 'would work'. What the heck, do it over...
And the common management strategy in the U.S. military had just a little bit in common with U.S. business strategy; Oursourcing functions was pretyt popular for the military, until we realised that they are actually more expensive and don't really work as well as the incumbents.