Drm is here to stay whether we like it or not. Their whole business model is to lock up and take ownership of other people's phones so they can charge for apps and ringtones.
I'm not sure about that. Having used Verizion's standard LG software, and going to an S60 device has been night and day. I've had 0 problems setting up applications (non-signed apps just give me a warning), any song on the device can be set as a ringtone, etc. Heck, I can use the full bluetooth stack for OBEX push from my Linux laptop, and it just works.
Now, compare that to the Verizon experience: Download a ringtone? Sure, just open up "Get it Now." Install a Java app? Sure, it might be available as a BREW application, just open up "Get it Now." Download your pictures if you don't have a removable memory card? Sure, just e-mail it to yourself (at $0.25 each, re-compressed). Now, I'm comparing apples to oranges to some extent, since I'm comparing a standard phone to a smartphone, but even NOK's unlocked basic phone have a lot of possibilities available. If you want to see a locked environment, just visit your friendly Verizon store.
I did have to pay a premium for that freedom (full price for an unlocked phone), but not having to deal with some of the frustrations I used to deal with made it worth it. The phone companies are re-learning the lesson that the courts forced them to learn in the early 80s: if you let end-users use whatever they want on the network you'll get a lot more useage and more money for less effort. Right now they get a lot of incremental revenue from ring tones and other stuff. Eventually, the ring tone providers (record companies) will get stingy and want higher percentages, leading to inflation and people will just stop paying for them (and the boomer kids will get older and not bother anymore).
Specifically speaking to Nokia, I like most of what they are doing, thinking outside the box when it comes to some of their services. I doubt that the folks at AT&T would even come up with the Sports Tracker, for example. But even if they did, I'm fairly certain they would charge some crazy amount for it (I MIGHT pay an extra $0.50/month for it, but they'd want to charge $5.00 or more), make it incompatible with just about everything else on the planet, and make the UI so bad that it would be unworkable. And they aren't stopping anyone from writing their own Sports Tracker application. They just happen to have one available.
From the 10,000ft perspective, I think Nokia is not sure what to do. They have a lot of good products, want to see the world migrate to smartphones, but don't know how to do it. Their bread and butter is in cheap disposable phones that will stand up to harsh treatment. They see the iPhone and see that faster processors and better UIs are the way to go (although the basic S60 interface is just fine with me), but they are behind in this regard (not trying to sound like an Apple fanboy, just stating a fact). The N800 is a device that they had all set up to do a nice business as a webpad, but now the whole notion of a webpad is morphing into the UMPCs on the high end, and the eee-style super cheaps. I also don't think they counted on Apple doing well, and Jobs is stealing all their good ideas.
I think long term Nokia needs Linux to move ahead. S60 is nice, but isn't going anywhere. Android running on Nokia hardware would be fantastic. So would a real Debian based build (Ubuntu mobile?) with real support (Please fix the Gmail IMAP bug on my N800! It's been months). Nokia is already using it in a somewhat successful device (Internet Tablets), they've bought several open source companies, and it fits in well with their traditional model (they build hardware and license software with Symbian).
I want to know if the audio going to be historically accurate, or will they "jazz" up the sounds to make the Saturn V sound like a Die Hard movie? I have an old laserdisk of an IMAX shuttle movie, and was just blown away by the sound of the engines at launch. Nothing produced by Hollywood comes close.
the problem is that voting machines are cheap, since they are only used once every year or so. the manufacturers make 'em cheap by putting third string programmers on the project, using off the shelf operating systems, and lousy hardware.
The other big problem is that there was no complete list of requirements.
And Mr. Franklin was nearly excommunicated for messing around with the "natural order" of things. It was God's will that your house was struck by lightning. Perhaps you could have been a little more sincere in your prayers?
I think I'll let lightning do whatever God wants and keep my soul in good shape. Thanks just the same.
Dump truck/garbage truck fade. Backhoe operators tend to be much more careful around fiber optic than copper.
And why would you price out a 12 count? That wouldn't get you very far, even with creative use of DWDM. Most backbones are built with 288 count bundles minimum. A 12 count might be used as a feeder down the street to feed a few homes, but otherwise there's not much cost savings for low count fibers, except maybe if you expect to splice all of them at once.
That's assuming the entire world's population lives in a true democracy.
The first dictator, king, sultan or overlord who feels it is in the country's best interest to invade their neighbor would bring your world to an end.
It should be noted that the reason the US didn't enter WWI until 1917 and WWII until 1941 was because of very strong opposition by the population at large. It was only after we were attacked that we got involved. This, even though we were part of the Atlantic Charter, a treaty between what came to be called the "allied" powers.
"Lifestyles" sections bring in the bucks. Get your ruler out and measure how many column inches are news and how much is advertising. Now do the same thing for section A.
Up until after WWII, most American newspapers were extremely biased, much more than Fox News/CNN or whatever. As towns and cities saw fewer and fewer publishers, the news became much more "unbiased." In their zeal to become all things to all people, they end up pleasing no one.
Most local newspaper sites update once per day, or even less. There are several tv news sites that are starting to get it, although they are thin on content. Where they need to start to look is at the stories that don't make it to the print edition (or broadcast, in the case of TV news), and update when a story is completed, not at a predetermined time.
Also, I really doubt that there is a politician in the world who's able to get people to agree to spending millions on spectrum, when there are many more things that eat up budget money.
Now, since the block D spectrum didn't meet the minimum bid, why not turn it over to the schools? It is the smallest chunk, and it has the public service bands anyway. We keep hearing about how schools are underfunded and unable to move into the 21st century, but if it was easy to adapt mass marketed radios for the D block, and towers can be put on schools (since, for the most part, they are geographically centered), it just might provide a minimum level service for not much money.
Except that there is no penalty for everyone else if you don't provide tax-funded WiFi. If you don't collect the garbage, there will be a certain group of individuals who don't take their trash to the landfill, but just throw it out the window (see: 12th century Europe). So far, there doesn't seem to be a penalty to the city for not providing WiFi. That COULD change in the future, but it seems unlikely.
Most taxpayers don't want to see their money going to subsidize a few people who want to use a laptop in the park, even if that's not really the point. And using anything other than a property tax that included business property wouldn't be fair to people who don't live in the area (you mentioned a wage tax - which is almost always a death sentence for local job growth in a struggling economy).
If these municipalities were really serious, they would partner with someone who already has a wide area network in place (like Verizon or Comcast in the case of Philadelphia). For them, it would be incremental revenue, not primary. Pay them enough to get a couple of techs trained to maintain the system, give them some manner of exclusivity and limited liability, and DON'T make them provide end-user tech support. However, the muni could (and should) demand coverage minimums, QOS/uptime requirements, "openness" etc.
Of course, that would require one to admit that networking is hard, expensive, and low margin.
I've used the old SecurID system (rotating pseudorandom number on an LCD display), login/PW, and now a printed grid system. I didn't find it any more difficult to authenticate with the grid, but the SecurID device would get out of sync every few days, which led to a phone call to the IT department for a resync. This was in the mid 1990s, so hopefully the tech has progressed a bit.
Some people moan about the various authentication schemes, but I don't think they are all that big of a deal (but I understand why they are in place).
A very specific patent for adaptive equalizers. Important parts to digital receivers, but not essential. Basically, an adaptive EQ allows a transmitter or receiver to eliminate standing waves from transmission lines (like 75Ohm coax). If proper installation techniques are used, the adaptive EQ won't even be switched in. It is only if the SWR increases enough to cause problems. We're not talking about radio transmitters, so the reflections won't damage anything, but it will cause a lot of problems with distorted signals that can't be copied.
And 1% of all revenue for an obscure DSP? Good luck with that. I hope they have a few more that Google isn't finding.
Doesn't nature dynamically develop cures? Sure, we have learned to manipulate our immune system through deactivated viruses and bacteria, but our bodies produce the antibodies in most cases. As and example, many people get a minor cold via the standard flu shot. They do this because their body is developing an antibody.
For your idea to work, we would need an OS capable of detecting and eliminating the bad stuff, something that biological systems still have a hard time with. For example, a body's solution to common cold control involves physical evacuation (messy, uses lots of resources), heat generation (useless against most invaders), and finally, creation of a new T-cell(?) to fight the invader. Now, if you're willing to have greatly reduced functionality of you shiny new PC for a few months while it develops anti-bodies, and devote a large amount of storage to all the anti-bodies, it would be a great way to keep PCs safe.
It may be because most of the company was hired right out of college and has never worked for anyone else.
There isn't any incentive to work crazy hours, or to do anything cutting edge, since there's no stock options that will go through the roof anymore.
As I understand it, MS managers are promoted from within (a good thing IF they get a lot of manager training), and this means they are managing people who's job they used to do, only "much better." If they didn't get good management training, and never worked anywhere else, they do everything "The Microsoft Way (TM)" and just bitch about the screwed up things that happen instead of trying to change things.
Bureaucracies work great if there's a strong leader pushing things along. I would think that if I worked for MS, I would be a fan of Bill. Now that he's gone, I don't think I would feel the same way about Ballmer.
No tinfoil needed. Just experience working for a large company with little competition.
Why do desktops in a work environment need local hard drives anyway? My Windows folder (created Sunday Nov 10, 2002) is about 4GB. A 4GB SD card is about $30, and a lot of RAM would eliminate the need for a swap file. Basically the only thing that is a bottleneck is the \temp folder and there may be a way to do that with a ramdrive as well. My company requires all user storage to be on a network server, although not really enforced.
The answer, of course, is that there are a lot of business applications that only install themselves on the C: drive and don't play nice without a \temp folder. The standard model PC is a motherboard, RAM, hard disk drive, graphics card and KB/mouse. Add to that Microsoft licensing agreements that discourage virtual machines and other lightweight desktops, remote offices with less than ideal network connections, and "power users" who have real/perceived needs for local storage, laptops, etc. and we can't seem to shake the hard disk.
From your earlier post: I believe the first undersea cable was New York to London.
The first Transatlantic cable was not NYC to London. Of course, rereading your post, I now see that you meant the London to Paris cable. The North American and European telegraph network were well along before someone came up with the funding for a Transatlantic cable.
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I'm not sure about that. Having used Verizion's standard LG software, and going to an S60 device has been night and day. I've had 0 problems setting up applications (non-signed apps just give me a warning), any song on the device can be set as a ringtone, etc. Heck, I can use the full bluetooth stack for OBEX push from my Linux laptop, and it just works.
Now, compare that to the Verizon experience: Download a ringtone? Sure, just open up "Get it Now." Install a Java app? Sure, it might be available as a BREW application, just open up "Get it Now." Download your pictures if you don't have a removable memory card? Sure, just e-mail it to yourself (at $0.25 each, re-compressed). Now, I'm comparing apples to oranges to some extent, since I'm comparing a standard phone to a smartphone, but even NOK's unlocked basic phone have a lot of possibilities available. If you want to see a locked environment, just visit your friendly Verizon store.
I did have to pay a premium for that freedom (full price for an unlocked phone), but not having to deal with some of the frustrations I used to deal with made it worth it. The phone companies are re-learning the lesson that the courts forced them to learn in the early 80s: if you let end-users use whatever they want on the network you'll get a lot more useage and more money for less effort. Right now they get a lot of incremental revenue from ring tones and other stuff. Eventually, the ring tone providers (record companies) will get stingy and want higher percentages, leading to inflation and people will just stop paying for them (and the boomer kids will get older and not bother anymore).
Specifically speaking to Nokia, I like most of what they are doing, thinking outside the box when it comes to some of their services. I doubt that the folks at AT&T would even come up with the Sports Tracker, for example. But even if they did, I'm fairly certain they would charge some crazy amount for it (I MIGHT pay an extra $0.50/month for it, but they'd want to charge $5.00 or more), make it incompatible with just about everything else on the planet, and make the UI so bad that it would be unworkable. And they aren't stopping anyone from writing their own Sports Tracker application. They just happen to have one available.
From the 10,000ft perspective, I think Nokia is not sure what to do. They have a lot of good products, want to see the world migrate to smartphones, but don't know how to do it. Their bread and butter is in cheap disposable phones that will stand up to harsh treatment. They see the iPhone and see that faster processors and better UIs are the way to go (although the basic S60 interface is just fine with me), but they are behind in this regard (not trying to sound like an Apple fanboy, just stating a fact). The N800 is a device that they had all set up to do a nice business as a webpad, but now the whole notion of a webpad is morphing into the UMPCs on the high end, and the eee-style super cheaps. I also don't think they counted on Apple doing well, and Jobs is stealing all their good ideas.
I think long term Nokia needs Linux to move ahead. S60 is nice, but isn't going anywhere. Android running on Nokia hardware would be fantastic. So would a real Debian based build (Ubuntu mobile?) with real support (Please fix the Gmail IMAP bug on my N800! It's been months). Nokia is already using it in a somewhat successful device (Internet Tablets), they've bought several open source companies, and it fits in well with their traditional model (they build hardware and license software with Symbian).
you have to give back the phone, in new condition.
You just described the innovator's dilemma.
I want to know if the audio going to be historically accurate, or will they "jazz" up the sounds to make the Saturn V sound like a Die Hard movie? I have an old laserdisk of an IMAX shuttle movie, and was just blown away by the sound of the engines at launch. Nothing produced by Hollywood comes close.
And will they change the M16s to walkie talkies?
Because the radios they were using were single sideband.
the problem is that voting machines are cheap, since they are only used once every year or so. the manufacturers make 'em cheap by putting third string programmers on the project, using off the shelf operating systems, and lousy hardware.
The other big problem is that there was no complete list of requirements.
Finally... Gary Kildall's strategy is starting to pay off.
And Mr. Franklin was nearly excommunicated for messing around with the "natural order" of things. It was God's will that your house was struck by lightning. Perhaps you could have been a little more sincere in your prayers?
I think I'll let lightning do whatever God wants and keep my soul in good shape. Thanks just the same.
See also: Apollo 12.
Dump truck/garbage truck fade. Backhoe operators tend to be much more careful around fiber optic than copper.
And why would you price out a 12 count? That wouldn't get you very far, even with creative use of DWDM. Most backbones are built with 288 count bundles minimum. A 12 count might be used as a feeder down the street to feed a few homes, but otherwise there's not much cost savings for low count fibers, except maybe if you expect to splice all of them at once.
That's assuming the entire world's population lives in a true democracy.
The first dictator, king, sultan or overlord who feels it is in the country's best interest to invade their neighbor would bring your world to an end.
It should be noted that the reason the US didn't enter WWI until 1917 and WWII until 1941 was because of very strong opposition by the population at large. It was only after we were attacked that we got involved. This, even though we were part of the Atlantic Charter, a treaty between what came to be called the "allied" powers.
"Lifestyles" sections bring in the bucks. Get your ruler out and measure how many column inches are news and how much is advertising. Now do the same thing for section A.
Up until after WWII, most American newspapers were extremely biased, much more than Fox News/CNN or whatever. As towns and cities saw fewer and fewer publishers, the news became much more "unbiased." In their zeal to become all things to all people, they end up pleasing no one.
Most local newspaper sites update once per day, or even less. There are several tv news sites that are starting to get it, although they are thin on content. Where they need to start to look is at the stories that don't make it to the print edition (or broadcast, in the case of TV news), and update when a story is completed, not at a predetermined time.
Most of the regional coverage is much larger than one municipality, and doesn't necessarily stay on boundries. http://wireless.fcc.gov/auctions/data/maps/CMA.pdf
Ever try to herd cats?
Also, I really doubt that there is a politician in the world who's able to get people to agree to spending millions on spectrum, when there are many more things that eat up budget money.
Now, since the block D spectrum didn't meet the minimum bid, why not turn it over to the schools? It is the smallest chunk, and it has the public service bands anyway. We keep hearing about how schools are underfunded and unable to move into the 21st century, but if it was easy to adapt mass marketed radios for the D block, and towers can be put on schools (since, for the most part, they are geographically centered), it just might provide a minimum level service for not much money.
Except that there is no penalty for everyone else if you don't provide tax-funded WiFi. If you don't collect the garbage, there will be a certain group of individuals who don't take their trash to the landfill, but just throw it out the window (see: 12th century Europe). So far, there doesn't seem to be a penalty to the city for not providing WiFi. That COULD change in the future, but it seems unlikely.
Most taxpayers don't want to see their money going to subsidize a few people who want to use a laptop in the park, even if that's not really the point. And using anything other than a property tax that included business property wouldn't be fair to people who don't live in the area (you mentioned a wage tax - which is almost always a death sentence for local job growth in a struggling economy).
If these municipalities were really serious, they would partner with someone who already has a wide area network in place (like Verizon or Comcast in the case of Philadelphia). For them, it would be incremental revenue, not primary. Pay them enough to get a couple of techs trained to maintain the system, give them some manner of exclusivity and limited liability, and DON'T make them provide end-user tech support. However, the muni could (and should) demand coverage minimums, QOS/uptime requirements, "openness" etc.
Of course, that would require one to admit that networking is hard, expensive, and low margin.
I've used the old SecurID system (rotating pseudorandom number on an LCD display), login/PW, and now a printed grid system. I didn't find it any more difficult to authenticate with the grid, but the SecurID device would get out of sync every few days, which led to a phone call to the IT department for a resync. This was in the mid 1990s, so hopefully the tech has progressed a bit.
Some people moan about the various authentication schemes, but I don't think they are all that big of a deal (but I understand why they are in place).
It would help if the Patent office was properly funded and maintained the spirit of the law (innovation should be rewarded), instead of what we have.
Google Patent search:
http://www.google.com/patents?id=YI2ZAAAAEBAJ&dq=Rembrandt+IP+Management
A very specific patent for adaptive equalizers. Important parts to digital receivers, but not essential. Basically, an adaptive EQ allows a transmitter or receiver to eliminate standing waves from transmission lines (like 75Ohm coax). If proper installation techniques are used, the adaptive EQ won't even be switched in. It is only if the SWR increases enough to cause problems. We're not talking about radio transmitters, so the reflections won't damage anything, but it will cause a lot of problems with distorted signals that can't be copied.
And 1% of all revenue for an obscure DSP? Good luck with that. I hope they have a few more that Google isn't finding.
Luckily, most aluminium is recycled (along with steel), which uses about 5% of the energy of smelting.
But you are correct. Al is very expensive to produce from bauxite. It was one of the first industrial uses of electricity.
Doesn't nature dynamically develop cures? Sure, we have learned to manipulate our immune system through deactivated viruses and bacteria, but our bodies produce the antibodies in most cases. As and example, many people get a minor cold via the standard flu shot. They do this because their body is developing an antibody.
For your idea to work, we would need an OS capable of detecting and eliminating the bad stuff, something that biological systems still have a hard time with. For example, a body's solution to common cold control involves physical evacuation (messy, uses lots of resources), heat generation (useless against most invaders), and finally, creation of a new T-cell(?) to fight the invader. Now, if you're willing to have greatly reduced functionality of you shiny new PC for a few months while it develops anti-bodies, and devote a large amount of storage to all the anti-bodies, it would be a great way to keep PCs safe.
It may be because most of the company was hired right out of college and has never worked for anyone else.
There isn't any incentive to work crazy hours, or to do anything cutting edge, since there's no stock options that will go through the roof anymore.
As I understand it, MS managers are promoted from within (a good thing IF they get a lot of manager training), and this means they are managing people who's job they used to do, only "much better." If they didn't get good management training, and never worked anywhere else, they do everything "The Microsoft Way (TM)" and just bitch about the screwed up things that happen instead of trying to change things.
Bureaucracies work great if there's a strong leader pushing things along. I would think that if I worked for MS, I would be a fan of Bill. Now that he's gone, I don't think I would feel the same way about Ballmer.
No tinfoil needed. Just experience working for a large company with little competition.
No. Global Thermonuclear War.
Why do desktops in a work environment need local hard drives anyway? My Windows folder (created Sunday Nov 10, 2002) is about 4GB. A 4GB SD card is about $30, and a lot of RAM would eliminate the need for a swap file. Basically the only thing that is a bottleneck is the \temp folder and there may be a way to do that with a ramdrive as well. My company requires all user storage to be on a network server, although not really enforced.
The answer, of course, is that there are a lot of business applications that only install themselves on the C: drive and don't play nice without a \temp folder. The standard model PC is a motherboard, RAM, hard disk drive, graphics card and KB/mouse. Add to that Microsoft licensing agreements that discourage virtual machines and other lightweight desktops, remote offices with less than ideal network connections, and "power users" who have real/perceived needs for local storage, laptops, etc. and we can't seem to shake the hard disk.
From your earlier post:
I believe the first undersea cable was New York to London.
The first Transatlantic cable was not NYC to London. Of course, rereading your post, I now see that you meant the London to Paris cable. The North American and European telegraph network were well along before someone came up with the funding for a Transatlantic cable.