"Leaves everyone with hardware that's only supported by Android in the shit though"
I'm confused. What hardware running Android now needs any other support?
This is interesting to say the least. I get the impression that the community thinks Android should be more like Linux than Android. But it's intended to be a phone OS. If the future of Android is to include portable/mobile devices, then it is now to decide if the Android community wants to accept Google's influence and control. If not, fork and get on with it. There are several good distros (ROMs in fonspeek) that are almost independent of Google, and it must be possible. If not, well, then Google *owes* Android and all this is moot.
I'm more interested in how anyone expected to see the mainline kernel on Android phones. Kernel bloat is not what you want on a phone, and if Google is driving a leaner or better kernel for Android, I'm all for it.
Of course, Android is its own project. Perhaps there needs to be a Google-less Android? Which would require some work on several apps.
90% of PC users don't write code, compile, edit or recompress HD or any other video, render 3D anything, nor compose pages for publishing.
90% of PC users surf the Web, read and compose mail as text, watch video and tolerate sub-HD quality, and occasionally flip through their digital photographs. Rarely they use some Web service to make albums, remove red-eye, order Christmas cards and replacement checks every two years, and play Flash games. Web services rule. Banking, social interaction, news, pr0n, it's all in the Web. Microsoft has already lost this battle. Bing is their last gasp to be relevant in Webspace. Microsoft buying Yahoo! would just kill two birds with one stone.
Flash is the most demanding application most users bother to use, and many don't even realize it. Their browser is second, and they complain about how slow their machine is when their IE instance grows to >300MB and they can't get from one corner of their plot to another instantly in Farmville. They think it's their computer being slow when Facebook takes a moment to show them something cool.
Put Flash on their netbook, and any OS out there is adequate. YouTube has its own deal. If you can put Netflix on it, you're home free. Microsoft Works would be overkill. GMail is all the editor they need.
Microsoft has to fight netbooks, and especially ARM-based netbooks, since they lose any hope of selling Office 2007+ to these users. Unless they make Windows 7 Mobile on ARM a subscription model, and you need a credit card to activate. The billing starts in a year and continues until your bank fails or you upgrade, and maybe even past that.
Ubuntu or any Linux on ARM looks better and better. I suspect ASUS and others could do some nice work with Linux distros for a fraction of the cost of licensing Windows, deliver their customers some serious value, and be free of Microsoft. That last benefit may be the most powerful of all.
But the Empire will strike back. Even Adobe has a huge stake in this. If HTML5 succeeds in replacing Flash, it will be Acrobat that saves Adobe. Oh, wait...
And if they succeed, and Microsoft loses netbook share, expect Linux to suffer security exploits as never before. We haven't seen corporate espionage yet. The Microsoft v. Novell/Lotus/WordPerfect battles were nothing compared to this war. If^H^Hwhen it starts, the carnage will be worldwide, and both sides will suffer. I'm not sure any of the Chinese^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbot farmers have really exerted all their ability to own Windows. We ain't see nothing yet.
Me? I bailed on the netbokk thing and bought a 12" Thinkpad. I just needed the screen space. A Pentium M anything is fast enough for my portable machine. Those were too good.
My 7 year old Acer 1894 P4 laptop (Same as Dell Smarttep 250N) had the original battery in it for 4 years with good life. It went from 80% capacity to 3% capacity in about a month. The second battery lasted 2 years. Both were used almost exclusively plugged in, battery charged, Windows XP of some flavor.
Of course after 7 years, the DC jack has been soldered in repeatedly, smoked, and cooked well done. Replacements have to be pressed in and bumpered.
Before that, I had a Mitac 6020N, and the battery in that was typical but lived for 4 years on a desktop.
I just got a Thinkpad X41 Tablet with two batteries. The standard 4-cell battery has about 25% of capacity left, too bad. The T-cell battery has about 75% capacity, and it lasts >4 hours. I might get a new 4-cell battery, or rebuild the old one, it's a nice shape.
Newer batteries, to me, seem to tolerate constant charging. My work machine is an X61S, and after a year of 8-hour use and rare discharges it still has all the life I expect out of the 8-cell battery.
I suspect one difference between premium notebooks and low-end might be the power management and charging. A sub-$400 notebook might not do as well, and the cells might not be so excellent either. You sometimes do get what you pay for.
And I suspect leaving your notebook on 24x7 isn't good for it either. The Acer is a hot beast with a P4 2.8 in it. the Thinkpad at home rarely spins the fan so you can hear it. When the Acer dies, my wife gets a used Thinkpad. She can try and burn that up playing Bejewelled.
I've been playingAvatar since 1985. I had over 400 hours on two characters in the 85 version, another 100 or so on a character in the 95 version, and now probably 60 hours on three characters in the cyber1 game.
I would give it a try on an Android phone, if I can get a port of the terminal. But it would take some keymapping, and the screen is tough. And Avatar never struck me as a display-intensive game, just that it likes its screen space.
I get RPG games as serious. I may have been doing that since before you were born, but maybe not. Your UID probably means you're not 19.
I now have more time in FPS games than I do in RPGs, but it's close to 50-50, and I could go on another tear and crank my chars in Avatar to pretend I can reach Guildmaster. Which is really pointless, the cyber1 game is pretty much top-heavy I think. I will need at least 2 years to do it. And doing it on a phone makes me think of eating glass.
Now, on a netbook, easy. Tablets lack the interface. A better UI and tablets work. I have an X41T I'm messing with.
I'm a FPS player. Playing what FPS on a phone would be satisfying? Battlefieldwhatever? COD4?
Pus.
I also play an old DnD game, Avatar. This would work if a PLATO terminal for, say, Android, existed, but actually even that screen would be marginal.
So the games I play on my G1 are Bonzai Blast, Jewels, Solitair games, and 'Mahjongg' which isn't mahjongg, but don't get me started.
If a 4" screen is suitable for 'real gaming', then we oughta be able to get a decent port of Halo running right?
Sorry. Pus. Phones as gaming platforms suck. They just suck. Bedazzled, Tetris, the usual time-wasters work fine, but anything 'serious' needs screen. We can work around the controls, but shooting the little dots is truly pointless.
Oh, in case you were wondering how I felt; this is a stupid question with a self-evident answer. Give it up, ok? Games on phones will be either simple, a terrible compromise, or something revolutionary. You were asking where the revolutionary games are? In someone's head still. We'll see them. Maybe. But I bet they suck.
I don't need mhy surgeon strassing over breakfast. She can BUY breakfast.
And these hotshot spacefarers can BUY a functional website.
If you're serious, you'll do things right. My surgeon will have proper equipment, competent staff, and access to adequate facilities. These hotshots either take their website seriously, or they don't, or this is what a serious spacefarer thinks is a serious website.
Judge them by their appearances? I choose my surgeon on both recommendation, reputation, and presentation. Not many private space ventures have recommendations, and reputation is similarly somewhat fragile.
"and Flash support in Android should be a given by launch time (though that isn't certain)."
Some day we will discover that Adobe hired away the best of the Duke Nukem Forever team.
And the best wasn't good enough.
Please stop with the rumors that Adobe will bring Flash to Android everywhere. They might for the MSI pad, and some of the more endowed devices, but for most android devices Flash is a a cruel promise. They can't make it work. If they could, they would have already. It's been long enough.
1. Load-balancing doesn't belong in the DNS spec, and neither does location awareness. If you want to handle me differently based on my location, do it after I've found you. Tacking this onto DNS risks unexpected consequences beyond the political.
2. From the article:
"providing enough information to the authoritative nameserver to determine your network location, without affecting your privacy."
Um, maybe I consider my location private. Would you mind asking me if I do first, ok? Thanks. And I do, so don't add this to DNS.
And if this isn't reason enough, refer to problem #1 above.
I get it. An idea to let DNS help you do something UNRELATED to DNS. Don't
Where oh where is John Postel when you need him? May his spirit move us away from this...
Sometimes it's called risk avoidance, sometimes risk sharing, sometimes risk transfer.
It isn't sharing believe me. Wherever possible, processors and issuers will try to palm the risk off on the merchant, or the customer.
While fraud prevention is a massive issue, there is no sure method to detect it. And online merchants suffer both more fraud and more penalties. They often pay higher fees to cover the inevitable fraud expenses.
Even address verification is not enough. I'm not signing up for this, it means nothing yet.
Well, actually, since I am a customer, he thought I had one of their routers. I corrected him. And I think I probably referred to his supervisor as 'someone who can get in touch with someone who actually understands this stuff'. Cause the Cable Guy is mostly good at accidentally disconnecting my service when he completes a service audit across the street, and cutting my cable because it looks just like the old cable from the 'other company' they bought out in 2006.
He means well. He's just too busy to learn his job. His supervisor, on the other hand, is too busy doing nothing to be bothered with customers.
I'm not nearly so polite to the poor blighters calling me to market their additional services. They get all uppity when I tell them I am not interested before they finish - like I haven't heard the pitch a half-dozen times already, ok? OK?
BTW, where I live I get new neighbors every few months, and some of them get new WiFi routers and set them up on my channel. I changed my channel a few times before I gave up, the local ISPs took to choosing 1, 6, or 11 randomly. Most of the time I can log into their router and change the channel:) Sometimes I just hammer it until their ISP comes and 'fixes' it. One tech came over on a Saturday morning, banged on my door as I wasleaving for the gym, and announced to me that I was interfering with his customer's service and had to change some settings, which he was happy to do for me, how nice Cable Guy. I explained how I lived there for 3 years already, his customer had moved in a week ago, and it was 'his problem to work out' as my service was working fine. Oh, he HAD to change my router, cause changing channels made his customer's router nonstandard and would cause trouble for other techs. I asked him to have his supervisor tell me this, hopefully with a straight face. Never heard another word, but the tech comes back pretty regular to undo people's tragic attempts to steal cable, and he won't look me in the eye. If he does, I will bite him.
Besides the FCC specs that WiFi devices meet (which are really a fairly bare minimum to avoid really crappy interference), manufacturers take some time to make sure their devices behave. You can be certain Cisco pays attention, and other well-regarded makers, because they intend for their enterprise clients to deploy these in a mesh and will definitely suffer if they are out of spec.
Now, there are plenty of shady outfits, but since everyone pretty much uses the same few radio chipsets, the makers of those chips do their work and produce decent product. No one wants to take back a few thousand routers because they suck so bad they can't live with anything. Besides, does anyone buy D-Link routers any more after their NNTP fiasco? Well, actually, we have short memories, and there is fresh meat being minted every day.
Claiming this is a technical failure by the manufacturers is bogus. More likely, the WiFi spec doesn't really accomodate an infestation of routers. There just aren't enough channel spacing options to solve this in WiFi, and I doubt there is a fix beyond a new spec.
Hey, that's it, call IEEE! We need a new 5GHz or higher spec, dudes. We can wait 4 or 5 years. get on it, ok?
Not that going to higher bandwidth will solve range problems. It's a morass of options and expectations.
One way to not get work; fail to develop good relationships with your clients. Another way to not get work; Fail to do the work.
One way to get more work; keep your client happy. Another way to get more work; do very good work.
You sound like you want to get paid. Those who have every excuse may not.
I was lucky to work for a small company, so the boss was always available to me. In a setting like EDS, I would not be interested. Too big, too impossible to steer anything. Scope creep is both sides fault.
I did see some of EDS' work on the NMCI. Started out good, then they realized the true scope. Didn't take long to see the scope shrink, because as a DOD job there were no good overruns for this project. Not like a weapons job where you just hide it off-book. The NMCI was in plain view. EDS underbid expecting to be able to make it up in overruns and scope creep (actually underestimating the scope and then point to the obvious, making the case they were blindsided - ha...) and addons. It took them 4 years to crank in another 30% or so, which is in fact a pretty big failure for EDS. They should have been able to jack it up 50% at least. Some they made up in skrimping on delivery. I never did hear how the Submarine Service actually did with the NMCI, but there were complaints about shoddy equipment and poor support from Naval offices. I can imagine how that would go over on board a sub.
Now, I'm watching a software outfit play my senior VPs like violins. Kinda sad, they make promises, deliver inferior product, and come out with a new contract to deliver the original product for more money, later than before. But they have a relationship with the VP. So they will be fine. Me? I'll help our users muddle through. We'll make it work. The original product still looks better than the second try in 4 years by these guys. But they have a relationship.
I've done a lot of contract work, but nothing on the scale of a CRM install. Despite that, there are somem things that are the same, no matter the size of the job;
- The relationship is key. If you don't forge a good relationship with your client, you will always suffer. Always.
- If the relationship is good you can overcome any obstacle. Even total failure. Yes, even if your solution turns out to not work at all, you can work out the relationship.
- Relationships are give-and-take. If you succeed wildly, you will get more and better. If you do fairly well, you get what is due. If you mostly fail, you work it out. Sometimes it doesn't work out, true. If you fail totally, well, you get what you deserve.
- Importantly, don't get into a relationship you don't intend to actually work on, and don't have any real expectation of success. Someone on the engineering side of HP-EDS needed to tell the sales side 'we can't do all this'.
- Most important, don't go into a relationship with a crazy partner. Sky may have violated this one. Money makes contractors crazy. Trust me on this. The more money, the crazier. Those of you who have real-life relationships with real-life people will find corollaries to this, and they are indeed true. You do not need to waste your 401K to learn this, ok? The tabloids will offer proof enough. Same thing in business. Almost the same process.
And like most arms races, the opposition will swarm over your latest creation to reverse-engineer it, redesign it, build countermeasures, and neutralize it.
And count on the spammers being subscribged to your service. They'll get your filters as soon as their victims do. The iteration delay will be infinitesmal.
Refer to the previous posts as to why it still won't work.
Yeah, I bought one of those a few years ago. Came in a nice box, with instructions and everything.
Actually, about 8 years before I could buy an Arduino. They still sell them, like the Viper thing.
Mine worked over a 1/4 mile or a little more, almost line-of-sight from a second story office. Most of the cost was for installation. At the time, I didn't have decent schematics for my car.
Only a temporary solution. After a few generations, we would be back to burning coal in stoves. From there, making engines for the raising of water by fire, and in no timne we're tooling around in internal combustion engine-driven vehicles again. At best, maybe a 200 year respite, and we are right back to exaggerating the claims of global warming.
There is only one solution to the global warming problem. Critical analysis of valid data, and making correct decisions based on the best available information. We are getting closer to that. Thermonuclear war is not the best solution. Impoverishing the developed world probably isn't either, but it is not yet so obvious that it is a well-understood joke.
I just snarfed a used X41 Tablet, and if I could tesch it Graffiti, it would be perfect.
But pen tablets have some advantages over touch screens. You can rest your hand on the screen and not type garbage or ruin a drawing. The pen is natural - writing with your finger less so, but learnable. The haptics are much better than touch screen keyboards.
Of course, the pen gets chewed up by your dog, or yourself...
Slashdot Mirror
"Leaves everyone with hardware that's only supported by Android in the shit though"
I'm confused. What hardware running Android now needs any other support?
This is interesting to say the least. I get the impression that the community thinks Android should be more like Linux than Android. But it's intended to be a phone OS. If the future of Android is to include portable/mobile devices, then it is now to decide if the Android community wants to accept Google's influence and control. If not, fork and get on with it. There are several good distros (ROMs in fonspeek) that are almost independent of Google, and it must be possible. If not, well, then Google *owes* Android and all this is moot.
I have more to do than compile my phone kernel. I'll get a ROM.
There is more to life than compiling your rig.
No, the black hole will only be half as big :)
I'm more interested in how anyone expected to see the mainline kernel on Android phones. Kernel bloat is not what you want on a phone, and if Google is driving a leaner or better kernel for Android, I'm all for it.
Of course, Android is its own project. Perhaps there needs to be a Google-less Android? Which would require some work on several apps.
Google has silently forked the kernel. There is an 'Android' kernel, and the mainline kernel
Is this the first time this has happened?
Will it matter?
Apparently, this is reasonably well understood.
I, for one, welcome our Android kernel overlords. My phone doesn't need server optimizations.
90% of PC users don't write code, compile, edit or recompress HD or any other video, render 3D anything, nor compose pages for publishing.
90% of PC users surf the Web, read and compose mail as text, watch video and tolerate sub-HD quality, and occasionally flip through their digital photographs. Rarely they use some Web service to make albums, remove red-eye, order Christmas cards and replacement checks every two years, and play Flash games. Web services rule. Banking, social interaction, news, pr0n, it's all in the Web. Microsoft has already lost this battle. Bing is their last gasp to be relevant in Webspace. Microsoft buying Yahoo! would just kill two birds with one stone.
Flash is the most demanding application most users bother to use, and many don't even realize it. Their browser is second, and they complain about how slow their machine is when their IE instance grows to >300MB and they can't get from one corner of their plot to another instantly in Farmville. They think it's their computer being slow when Facebook takes a moment to show them something cool.
Put Flash on their netbook, and any OS out there is adequate. YouTube has its own deal. If you can put Netflix on it, you're home free. Microsoft Works would be overkill. GMail is all the editor they need.
Microsoft has to fight netbooks, and especially ARM-based netbooks, since they lose any hope of selling Office 2007+ to these users. Unless they make Windows 7 Mobile on ARM a subscription model, and you need a credit card to activate. The billing starts in a year and continues until your bank fails or you upgrade, and maybe even past that.
Ubuntu or any Linux on ARM looks better and better. I suspect ASUS and others could do some nice work with Linux distros for a fraction of the cost of licensing Windows, deliver their customers some serious value, and be free of Microsoft. That last benefit may be the most powerful of all.
But the Empire will strike back. Even Adobe has a huge stake in this. If HTML5 succeeds in replacing Flash, it will be Acrobat that saves Adobe. Oh, wait...
And if they succeed, and Microsoft loses netbook share, expect Linux to suffer security exploits as never before. We haven't seen corporate espionage yet. The Microsoft v. Novell/Lotus/WordPerfect battles were nothing compared to this war. If^H^Hwhen it starts, the carnage will be worldwide, and both sides will suffer. I'm not sure any of the Chinese^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbot farmers have really exerted all their ability to own Windows. We ain't see nothing yet.
Me? I bailed on the netbokk thing and bought a 12" Thinkpad. I just needed the screen space. A Pentium M anything is fast enough for my portable machine. Those were too good.
My 7 year old Acer 1894 P4 laptop (Same as Dell Smarttep 250N) had the original battery in it for 4 years with good life. It went from 80% capacity to 3% capacity in about a month. The second battery lasted 2 years. Both were used almost exclusively plugged in, battery charged, Windows XP of some flavor.
Of course after 7 years, the DC jack has been soldered in repeatedly, smoked, and cooked well done. Replacements have to be pressed in and bumpered.
Before that, I had a Mitac 6020N, and the battery in that was typical but lived for 4 years on a desktop.
I just got a Thinkpad X41 Tablet with two batteries. The standard 4-cell battery has about 25% of capacity left, too bad. The T-cell battery has about 75% capacity, and it lasts >4 hours. I might get a new 4-cell battery, or rebuild the old one, it's a nice shape.
Newer batteries, to me, seem to tolerate constant charging. My work machine is an X61S, and after a year of 8-hour use and rare discharges it still has all the life I expect out of the 8-cell battery.
I suspect one difference between premium notebooks and low-end might be the power management and charging. A sub-$400 notebook might not do as well, and the cells might not be so excellent either. You sometimes do get what you pay for.
And I suspect leaving your notebook on 24x7 isn't good for it either. The Acer is a hot beast with a P4 2.8 in it. the Thinkpad at home rarely spins the fan so you can hear it. When the Acer dies, my wife gets a used Thinkpad. She can try and burn that up playing Bejewelled.
I'm getting a little uneasy with SSL. Nothing is safe.
I've been playing Avatar since 1985. I had over 400 hours on two characters in the 85 version, another 100 or so on a character in the 95 version, and now probably 60 hours on three characters in the cyber1 game.
I would give it a try on an Android phone, if I can get a port of the terminal. But it would take some keymapping, and the screen is tough. And Avatar never struck me as a display-intensive game, just that it likes its screen space.
I get RPG games as serious. I may have been doing that since before you were born, but maybe not. Your UID probably means you're not 19.
I now have more time in FPS games than I do in RPGs, but it's close to 50-50, and I could go on another tear and crank my chars in Avatar to pretend I can reach Guildmaster. Which is really pointless, the cyber1 game is pretty much top-heavy I think. I will need at least 2 years to do it. And doing it on a phone makes me think of eating glass.
Now, on a netbook, easy. Tablets lack the interface. A better UI and tablets work. I have an X41T I'm messing with.
They can bite my shiny metal ass.
I'm a FPS player. Playing what FPS on a phone would be satisfying? Battlefieldwhatever? COD4?
Pus.
I also play an old DnD game, Avatar. This would work if a PLATO terminal for, say, Android, existed, but actually even that screen would be marginal.
So the games I play on my G1 are Bonzai Blast, Jewels, Solitair games, and 'Mahjongg' which isn't mahjongg, but don't get me started.
If a 4" screen is suitable for 'real gaming', then we oughta be able to get a decent port of Halo running right?
Sorry. Pus. Phones as gaming platforms suck. They just suck. Bedazzled, Tetris, the usual time-wasters work fine, but anything 'serious' needs screen. We can work around the controls, but shooting the little dots is truly pointless.
Oh, in case you were wondering how I felt; this is a stupid question with a self-evident answer. Give it up, ok? Games on phones will be either simple, a terrible compromise, or something revolutionary. You were asking where the revolutionary games are? In someone's head still. We'll see them. Maybe. But I bet they suck.
I don't need mhy surgeon strassing over breakfast. She can BUY breakfast.
And these hotshot spacefarers can BUY a functional website.
If you're serious, you'll do things right. My surgeon will have proper equipment, competent staff, and access to adequate facilities. These hotshots either take their website seriously, or they don't, or this is what a serious spacefarer thinks is a serious website.
Judge them by their appearances? I choose my surgeon on both recommendation, reputation, and presentation. Not many private space ventures have recommendations, and reputation is similarly somewhat fragile.
"and Flash support in Android should be a given by launch time (though that isn't certain)."
Some day we will discover that Adobe hired away the best of the Duke Nukem Forever team.
And the best wasn't good enough.
Please stop with the rumors that Adobe will bring Flash to Android everywhere. They might for the MSI pad, and some of the more endowed devices, but for most android devices Flash is a a cruel promise. They can't make it work. If they could, they would have already. It's been long enough.
1. Load-balancing doesn't belong in the DNS spec, and neither does location awareness. If you want to handle me differently based on my location, do it after I've found you. Tacking this onto DNS risks unexpected consequences beyond the political.
2. From the article:
"providing enough information to the authoritative nameserver to determine your network location, without affecting your privacy."
Um, maybe I consider my location private. Would you mind asking me if I do first, ok? Thanks. And I do, so don't add this to DNS.
And if this isn't reason enough, refer to problem #1 above.
I get it. An idea to let DNS help you do something UNRELATED to DNS. Don't
Where oh where is John Postel when you need him? May his spirit move us away from this...
Sometimes it's called risk avoidance, sometimes risk sharing, sometimes risk transfer.
It isn't sharing believe me. Wherever possible, processors and issuers will try to palm the risk off on the merchant, or the customer.
While fraud prevention is a massive issue, there is no sure method to detect it. And online merchants suffer both more fraud and more penalties. They often pay higher fees to cover the inevitable fraud expenses.
Even address verification is not enough. I'm not signing up for this, it means nothing yet.
Well, actually, since I am a customer, he thought I had one of their routers. I corrected him. And I think I probably referred to his supervisor as 'someone who can get in touch with someone who actually understands this stuff'. Cause the Cable Guy is mostly good at accidentally disconnecting my service when he completes a service audit across the street, and cutting my cable because it looks just like the old cable from the 'other company' they bought out in 2006.
He means well. He's just too busy to learn his job. His supervisor, on the other hand, is too busy doing nothing to be bothered with customers.
I'm not nearly so polite to the poor blighters calling me to market their additional services. They get all uppity when I tell them I am not interested before they finish - like I haven't heard the pitch a half-dozen times already, ok? OK?
BTW, where I live I get new neighbors every few months, and some of them get new WiFi routers and set them up on my channel. I changed my channel a few times before I gave up, the local ISPs took to choosing 1, 6, or 11 randomly. Most of the time I can log into their router and change the channel :) Sometimes I just hammer it until their ISP comes and 'fixes' it. One tech came over on a Saturday morning, banged on my door as I wasleaving for the gym, and announced to me that I was interfering with his customer's service and had to change some settings, which he was happy to do for me, how nice Cable Guy. I explained how I lived there for 3 years already, his customer had moved in a week ago, and it was 'his problem to work out' as my service was working fine. Oh, he HAD to change my router, cause changing channels made his customer's router nonstandard and would cause trouble for other techs. I asked him to have his supervisor tell me this, hopefully with a straight face. Never heard another word, but the tech comes back pretty regular to undo people's tragic attempts to steal cable, and he won't look me in the eye. If he does, I will bite him.
Besides the FCC specs that WiFi devices meet (which are really a fairly bare minimum to avoid really crappy interference), manufacturers take some time to make sure their devices behave. You can be certain Cisco pays attention, and other well-regarded makers, because they intend for their enterprise clients to deploy these in a mesh and will definitely suffer if they are out of spec.
Now, there are plenty of shady outfits, but since everyone pretty much uses the same few radio chipsets, the makers of those chips do their work and produce decent product. No one wants to take back a few thousand routers because they suck so bad they can't live with anything. Besides, does anyone buy D-Link routers any more after their NNTP fiasco? Well, actually, we have short memories, and there is fresh meat being minted every day.
Claiming this is a technical failure by the manufacturers is bogus. More likely, the WiFi spec doesn't really accomodate an infestation of routers. There just aren't enough channel spacing options to solve this in WiFi, and I doubt there is a fix beyond a new spec.
Hey, that's it, call IEEE! We need a new 5GHz or higher spec, dudes. We can wait 4 or 5 years. get on it, ok?
Not that going to higher bandwidth will solve range problems. It's a morass of options and expectations.
There are two types of contractors:
1. Those who get work.
2. Those who don't.
One way to not get work; fail to develop good relationships with your clients.
Another way to not get work; Fail to do the work.
One way to get more work; keep your client happy.
Another way to get more work; do very good work.
You sound like you want to get paid. Those who have every excuse may not.
I was lucky to work for a small company, so the boss was always available to me. In a setting like EDS, I would not be interested. Too big, too impossible to steer anything. Scope creep
is both sides fault.
I did see some of EDS' work on the NMCI. Started out good, then they realized the true scope. Didn't take long to see the scope shrink, because as a DOD job there were no good overruns for this project. Not like a weapons job where you just hide it off-book. The NMCI was in plain view. EDS underbid expecting to be able to make it up in overruns and scope creep (actually underestimating the scope and then point to the obvious, making the case they were blindsided - ha...) and addons. It took them 4 years to crank in another 30% or so, which is in fact a pretty big failure for EDS. They should have been able to jack it up 50% at least. Some they made up in skrimping on delivery. I never did hear how the Submarine Service actually did with the NMCI, but there were complaints about shoddy equipment and poor support from Naval offices. I can imagine how that would go over on board a sub.
Now, I'm watching a software outfit play my senior VPs like violins. Kinda sad, they make promises, deliver inferior product, and come out with a new contract to deliver the original product for more money, later than before. But they have a relationship with the VP. So they will be fine. Me? I'll help our users muddle through. We'll make it work. The original product still looks better than the second try in 4 years by these guys. But they have a relationship.
I've done a lot of contract work, but nothing on the scale of a CRM install. Despite that, there are somem things that are the same, no matter the size of the job;
- The relationship is key. If you don't forge a good relationship with your client, you will always suffer. Always.
- If the relationship is good you can overcome any obstacle. Even total failure. Yes, even if your solution turns out to not work at all, you can work out the relationship.
- Relationships are give-and-take. If you succeed wildly, you will get more and better. If you do fairly well, you get what is due. If you mostly fail, you work it out. Sometimes it doesn't work out, true. If you fail totally, well, you get what you deserve.
- Importantly, don't get into a relationship you don't intend to actually work on, and don't have any real expectation of success. Someone on the engineering side of HP-EDS needed to tell the sales side 'we can't do all this'.
- Most important, don't go into a relationship with a crazy partner. Sky may have violated this one. Money makes contractors crazy. Trust me on this. The more money, the crazier. Those of you who have real-life relationships with real-life people will find corollaries to this, and they are indeed true. You do not need to waste your 401K to learn this, ok? The tabloids will offer proof enough. Same thing in business. Almost the same process.
And like most arms races, the opposition will swarm over your latest creation to reverse-engineer it, redesign it, build countermeasures, and neutralize it.
And count on the spammers being subscribged to your service. They'll get your filters as soon as their victims do. The iteration delay will be infinitesmal.
Refer to the previous posts as to why it still won't work.
Yeah, I bought one of those a few years ago. Came in a nice box, with instructions and everything.
Actually, about 8 years before I could buy an Arduino. They still sell them, like the Viper thing.
Mine worked over a 1/4 mile or a little more, almost line-of-sight from a second story office. Most of the cost was for installation. At the time, I didn't have decent schematics for my car.
Only a temporary solution. After a few generations, we would be back to burning coal in stoves. From there, making engines for the raising of water by fire, and in no timne we're tooling around in internal combustion engine-driven vehicles again. At best, maybe a 200 year respite, and we are right back to exaggerating the claims of global warming.
There is only one solution to the global warming problem. Critical analysis of valid data, and making correct decisions based on the best available information. We are getting closer to that. Thermonuclear war is not the best solution. Impoverishing the developed world probably isn't either, but it is not yet so obvious that it is a well-understood joke.
Sounds like a great idea, but impractical. Judges need to hear everything in their courtroom, even from the gallery.
Nice try, though.
I just snarfed a used X41 Tablet, and if I could tesch it Graffiti, it would be perfect.
But pen tablets have some advantages over touch screens. You can rest your hand on the screen and not type garbage or ruin a drawing. The pen is natural - writing with your finger less so, but learnable. The haptics are much better than touch screen keyboards.
Of course, the pen gets chewed up by your dog, or yourself...