Maybe they'll even go ruggedized and have that niche to themselves.
Have you even looked for ruggerdised laptops recently?
I did some research for a couple of field engineers (Geo's) and they are all 12-14" tablet PC's with touchscreens. Also they are all around $5K so if Cisco entered this market with a ~1K device they'd clean up. Even the semi-ruggerdised ones are $1K more expensive then their non-ruggerdised counterparts but the Australian outback would kill a semi-ruggaerised device in a matter of days.
Actually, my company has been demo'ing the IPad for about a month now, and we can not find anything useful for businesses to justify the expenditure.
Has you been able to make a business case to buy Ipod Touches? If not then why did you think there would be a business case for something larger and more expensive?
What if I change phones? My old phone breaks and I buy the $40 special from JB HiFi.
I have to call the phone companies customer disservice line and get my new IMEI assigned to my voicemail account and hope they dont screw it up in the six to eight weeks it takes them to do anything.
A better solution is to enforce voicemail passwords. They already make you set a message before activating it, adding a requirement for a 4 digit min numerical password should be trivial.
It's simple common-sense. In Australia, if I leave my car unlocked in a car-park, and then come back to find my stuff inside gone, if I go to the police and report it, I doubt they'll have a lot of sympathy for me. They'll probably write me off as an idiot - and rightly so. Everybody makes mistakes, but sometimes *touch wood* you have to take responsibiltiy for them.
The Police dont have to care but they still have to act on any information (I.E. they find your stuff or the car park had CCTV security installed). Now your insurance company, that's a whole different story. If you left your car unlocked you are "negligent" and they really don't have to care. I generally go by "would this be covered by my Insurance" when thinking about how well to secure something.
My wife forgot to lock our house door one night and we were burglarized. By your logic, we deserved that. Good to know; I appreciate the heads up, and I'll be sure to let her know.
If your wife regally forgets to lock your house door then yes, yes you did deserve to get robbed.
By the same token if you don't put a password on important information stores then it's your own fault when someone just walks in a takes/modifies/deletes your info.
Of course, now Google has to play whack-a-mole locking out these apps for much the same reason Apple locks their handhelds: No matter who's really at fault, they get the bad press.
I dont see why Google should do anything about the applications. Nothing has violated Google's TOS here. They are violating AT&T's TOS so let AT&T be the bad guys and ban the violators from their networks.
I fail to see how Android is at fault here. That is basically how voicemail is intended to work, and if you don't put a password on it, you're just as much to blame - same as with any computerised system. The fact that you're spoofing it using an Android app is irrelevant.
You see this is how AT&T is trying to discredit android. Locking down the handsets is bad enough but now they're trying to say "OMG, they're out of the walled garden, it's terrible and look at all the damage they are doing !!110NE11!Ponies. Teh Android must be stopped."
The fact you could do this on WinMo, Symbian, Maemo or even a jailbroken Iphone is irrelevant to this aim. Under no circumstances must this be made to look like an AT&T insecurity issue. However there is a prize for the first person to spoof the number of the AT&T CEO and replace the voicemail message with "Hello, you've reached the number of Butthole Felcher esq. Can you hear me now". Also spoofing the number of Steve Job's Iphone and replacing his voicemail message with one expressing his deep and undying love for Google Android will earn significant street cred, I am content to leave the exact wording of this to the users imagination.
Anyone else wonder how long these companies can go before they ruin the 'wrong' life.
No, because it will be a very long time.
This isn't backwards republic, where a business man who pisses off the local police chief winds up floating in the canal having apparently died from a heart attack (three times to the back of the head). Our corrupt officials are in cahoots with our corrupt businesses.
As an example:
Spy - "I heard that the Air Force's new radios can't even do X" counter spy - "What!? of course it can do X, we can even do X with Y and Z!"
Next week in [_]MOSCOW/[_]WASHINGTON.
Spy - "The [_]AMERICANS/[_]RUSSIANS can do Z with their radios"
Taskmaster - "What, that is impossible"/picks up phone.
Taskmaster - "[_]COMRADE/[_]SENATOR we have a serious issue, the [_]AMERICANS/[_]RUSSIANS can do Z"
Politician - "We cant allow a Z gap."
Meanwhile Z does not actually exist but it is sometimes important to make the enemy think you are more advanced then you really are. But this does not apply to the situation at hand, which is just bog standard sabre rattling.
We have enough disks to lose one or two a month in our systems, and I'd have to say that a dual-disk failure in the same system is pretty uncommon.
The biggest risk with RAID is the controller, lose that and you're screwed. After that you have the fact that you are using identical disks in most arrays. Same batch number in many cases and I think this is what the GP was referring to in the case of a bad batch of drives. But still your point stands, a simultaneous failure is extremely unlikely but this is what disaster recovery is for. If you absolutely need five nines of uptime then you not only have redundant controllers, you have redundant arrays on separate bits of HW. RAID is, as you said a reliability solution, not a backup solutions and personally I prefer RAID 6 just in case of a multiple disk failure.
But five nines is way beyond the requirements of a home user, I'd get a 2 TB external drive/NAS and RSync it. No one wants to lose their pr0n collection.
Does the Dell aversion extend to laptops? If so, which manufacturers to/.ers recommend?
Dell's business lines are OK, just avoid the XPS's as they are overpowered and under-cooled (and designed for people with insecurity issues). Vostro and Latitude lines are OK.
Lenovo are also good, Once again go with the business lines (Thinkpad) but a bit more expensive then Dell.
Toshiba and Asus are also highly recommended but they don't allow for easy customisation like Dell and Lenovo (most laptop purchasers don't understand the performance benefit of using a 7.2K RPM disk and almost all disks in SKU's are 5.4K RPM).
I build my own gaming boxes but doing that with laptops quickly becomes prohibitivly expensive. The Lenovo R400 I bought last year is rock solid and thus far, the new Vostro 3300 I bought for my boss has generated no complaints. The story in the Article is from 2005 and model specific.
The BP that sells petrol is a different entity to the BP that pulls oil out of the ground which is a different entity to the BP that turns oil into Petrol.
The BP that pulls oil out of the ground sells that oil on the open market, it doesn't expressly go to BP refineries to be sold in BP petrol stations. The oil that goes to BP refineries comes from BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Saudi Aramco, Chevron Texaco and anyone else in the oil extraction game. This petroleum is also sold on the open market so a Esso petrol station will be selling BP as well as Shell and Chevron petrol.
Besides, if you want to know who is really to blame for the gulf disaster you need only look for the nearest mirror. Unquenchable thirst for oil combined with unreasonable demand for low prices caused this. If you want to help, suspend the Jones act as there are companies in Europe and the Middle East who are experts at dealing with these kinds of problems who at the moment cannot do a damn thing because of politics.
If you are wondering why nVidia said 100C was okay it is because manufacturers like HP wanted to make quieter and thinner laptops, which means lower speed fans a smaller heatsinks/vents.
This is why I love my Lenovo R400. It's not the prettiest, lightest or thinnest of laptops but it's cool, quiet and near indestructible. Sitting through a 30C night in Australia and you hardly know its on by how little sound it makes. I took it to the Philippines recently, Sitting at a bar in Subic bay, this Americans Macbook kept crashing because of the heat and humidity whilst the Lenovo kept powering on. The fans and ventilation were cooling the internals enough to keep the CPU and GPU from overheating and shutting down.
Call up Dell tech support, tell them what's going on, and bam! Motherboard either overnighted, or a tech sent out within two days to replace the board at no cost.
This I think is the real test of a tech supplier.
How quickly can I get a fix when things do break and yes it is a when, something will be broken or DOA if you have enough of them. Dell's business support are quite good in this regard, so is their consumer support but getting to this point's a pain in the arse (script monkeys that aren't permitted to transfer you until they finish their script). I always tell people to buy from the small business lines (Vostro or Latitude) for this very reason.
I suppose I am an Apple "fanboy" and I like hearing interesting Apple news as much as the next guy, but there is no news here.
Not only that, this isn't even new.
Every year (now every few months) you get the same "OMG Iphone N+1 will be on $TELCO". I had an American friend who is switching to Verizon (because he was moving out of another telco's service area, how quaint) and was looking at my Milestone (GSM variant of the Droid) in comparison to the Iphone yet all the Itards kept saying "there are strong rumours that Iphone4 will be on Verizon". Well we all saw how that one ended didn't we, Apple rumours are less trustworthy then normal rumours and people tend to forget that Apple likes excursive contracts and AT&T have one for 5 years.
This is very interesting - I've been experiencing extreme wifi interference issues since I moved to my new place (about a year ago) in Brooklyn. My neighborhood is not known as one of the more crime free boroughs in the city, and presumably as a result of that reputation, the neighboring building's backyard has an always-on sodium light at the ground floor (of the brightness and sickening color of your typical street-side sodium lamp). My bedroom (also on the ground floor, facing the backyard) experiences the worst effects of a very obvious latent interference in the area, that is lesser (but not gone) in the 5GHz range, but renders wifi nearly unusable in the 2.4GHz band (with the added interference of several other networks in that frequencey range close by - though there is 3 channel free band). I wonder if the sodium lamp is the issue...
Staying in Phuket recently, I noticed the wifi at my hotel would drop out around 6:30 at night. The first thing I noticed is that everyone in that street turned on their lights and neon signs around the same time. Given how shoddily wiring is done in Thailand this may have been the cause.
No, and it never will. Apple's support for "open standards" is limited to only support for such standards when they depend on proprietary formats like AAC, mp3, h.264, etc.
Not just open standards, Apple hates industry standards as well. What does the MicroSIM bring to the party. Nothing really, it's just a normal SIM with bits hacked off to ensure that the device cant fit in a normal SIM (completing the vendor lock in). Not that the SIM form factor was ever an issue, much smaller devices have no problems fitting in a full sized SIM card. The MicroSIM adds no new functionality and fixes an issue that does not exist whilst attempting to eliminate compatibility.
How does an app maintain a network connection? or listen of incoming messages? Or is this not possible?
Difference between an application and a service.
Much like the Iphone, when an application is removed from the foreground it is suspended (effectively terminated and removed from memory). If an application wants to do anything in the background the application needs to start a service, the service can run in the background and can maintain a network connection, process data or perform a variety of other tasks. Third party services cannot be started on the Iphone, even version 4.
The current Aussie Govt. is still waiting for plans from the Menzies era to come to fruition.
Politics is not fast at the best of times. My point was that the current pollies get credit/blame for plans when they come to fruition, regardless of who made them.
The process was started a good ten years ago, and signed into law in prior administrations, (yet in this all things to Chairman Mao world, Obama gets credit).
To be fair, all the bad policies started in the Bush era, Obama now gets the blame for. Render unto Caesar what is Caesars.
How much are YOU getting charged to auction the spectrum off to the carriers? I don't get it.
Where do you think the carriers get the money to participate in these auctions?
Personally I think the US couldn't be going faster in the wrong direction. Rather then allowing another spectrum to be bough up the US Govt should be selecting a single 4G spectrum and forcing all Telco's to use that one spectrum. Now before the Randroids come in with their "OMG Socialism" rants let me explain. This will create more competition in the market and make things easier for you, the consumer. Right now if you buy a Verizon phone, you are stuck on the Verizon network no, even if you pay the ETF you still cant use that phone anywhere else. If you want to switch to AT&T's 3G services you need a phone that works on the AT&T freq. Picking one freq allows you to buy a handset from any carrier or even a retail store and use it with any carrier. This will also allow for the creation of better MVNO's and smaller local carriers.
This isn't the "gubbermit" controlling 4G, this is the government saying that 4G == x MHz and everyone can license this freq. This is pretty much what the use govt. does now except it says AT&T == x MHz and T-Mobile == y MHz. Carriers still set up their towers, create the plans, same level of customer disservice, the only change will be the fact that you wont be beholden to a single carrier unless you buy a new phone because they all operate a common freq.
In Australia, if I buy a handset from Optus or a retail store, that handset will work on the 3G networks of Telstra, Vodafone and Three as all four networks support a 2100 MHz 3G network. Not to mention I can take that same handset to Europe and Asia and have my choice of carriers in most nations.
...is this ever going to get past the antitrust hounds.
Actually it will
And it is high time MS did something like this. The regulators, even in the EU wont have a problem with this as MS aren't completely retarded and will still permit installations from other sources (such as the Internet, DVD, USB drives) as almost all of their customers will want to do this and will kill MS if they made this the only way to get applications.
This will be just like Synaptic on Ubuntu. You can use Synaptic or you can use Apt-get, a deb package or compile from the source if you so desire. Where I see it going wrong is with MS and MS's corporate policies. They will make it compatible with IE9/10 only, it will not work on Windows 7, it will be tied into the new Xii (Xbox Wii) and they will make it hard for any publisher to do anything meaningful with it due to bureaucracy (the GFW program is a complete disaster because of stupid rules like "you may not put letters into version numbers"). It really is a shame as this kind of thing should make managing my system easier by keeping things updated on my system. No more looking for the correct version of.Net or Windows Installer when re-installing a game, urgent patches to protect against 0day exploits easier to find and install and perhaps even keeping something like Java up to date.
If that wasn't a death kiss, nothing is. As i predicted, in 2 years flash will be a distant ( bad ) memory
In two years Flash will still be the only consistent, multi-platform framework for video and interactive applications (Java as it is, is good for applications but is just not totally consistent and different Java versions cause trouble). HTML5 will be fragmented and useless because Apple and MS are intent on forcing the use of proprietary codecs and removing features that do not meet with iApproval. HTML 5 will get nowhere until companies like Apple and Microsoft are removed from it's development as they will simply fail to create a usable standard equivalent to Flash because of their need for control.
I dont like flash that much but seriously, if you're placing your hopes into an Apple bastardised version of HTML to compete with it you are extremely naive. If the IEEE or another group with diverse interests were able to make the standard then you might have a chance of toppling flash in maybe 5 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you even looked for ruggerdised laptops recently?
I did some research for a couple of field engineers (Geo's) and they are all 12-14" tablet PC's with touchscreens. Also they are all around $5K so if Cisco entered this market with a ~1K device they'd clean up. Even the semi-ruggerdised ones are $1K more expensive then their non-ruggerdised counterparts but the Australian outback would kill a semi-ruggaerised device in a matter of days.
Has you been able to make a business case to buy Ipod Touches? If not then why did you think there would be a business case for something larger and more expensive?
What if I change phones? My old phone breaks and I buy the $40 special from JB HiFi.
I have to call the phone companies customer disservice line and get my new IMEI assigned to my voicemail account and hope they dont screw it up in the six to eight weeks it takes them to do anything.
A better solution is to enforce voicemail passwords. They already make you set a message before activating it, adding a requirement for a 4 digit min numerical password should be trivial.
The Police dont have to care but they still have to act on any information (I.E. they find your stuff or the car park had CCTV security installed). Now your insurance company, that's a whole different story. If you left your car unlocked you are "negligent" and they really don't have to care. I generally go by "would this be covered by my Insurance" when thinking about how well to secure something.
If your wife regally forgets to lock your house door then yes, yes you did deserve to get robbed.
By the same token if you don't put a password on important information stores then it's your own fault when someone just walks in a takes/modifies/deletes your info.
I dont see why Google should do anything about the applications. Nothing has violated Google's TOS here. They are violating AT&T's TOS so let AT&T be the bad guys and ban the violators from their networks.
You see this is how AT&T is trying to discredit android. Locking down the handsets is bad enough but now they're trying to say "OMG, they're out of the walled garden, it's terrible and look at all the damage they are doing !!110NE11!Ponies. Teh Android must be stopped."
The fact you could do this on WinMo, Symbian, Maemo or even a jailbroken Iphone is irrelevant to this aim. Under no circumstances must this be made to look like an AT&T insecurity issue. However there is a prize for the first person to spoof the number of the AT&T CEO and replace the voicemail message with "Hello, you've reached the number of Butthole Felcher esq. Can you hear me now". Also spoofing the number of Steve Job's Iphone and replacing his voicemail message with one expressing his deep and undying love for Google Android will earn significant street cred, I am content to leave the exact wording of this to the users imagination.
No, because it will be a very long time.
This isn't backwards republic, where a business man who pisses off the local police chief winds up floating in the canal having apparently died from a heart attack (three times to the back of the head). Our corrupt officials are in cahoots with our corrupt businesses.
Next week in [_]MOSCOW/[_]WASHINGTON. /picks up phone.
Spy - "The [_]AMERICANS/[_]RUSSIANS can do Z with their radios"
Taskmaster - "What, that is impossible"
Taskmaster - "[_]COMRADE/[_]SENATOR we have a serious issue, the [_]AMERICANS/[_]RUSSIANS can do Z"
Politician - "We cant allow a Z gap."
Meanwhile Z does not actually exist but it is sometimes important to make the enemy think you are more advanced then you really are. But this does not apply to the situation at hand, which is just bog standard sabre rattling.
The biggest risk with RAID is the controller, lose that and you're screwed. After that you have the fact that you are using identical disks in most arrays. Same batch number in many cases and I think this is what the GP was referring to in the case of a bad batch of drives. But still your point stands, a simultaneous failure is extremely unlikely but this is what disaster recovery is for. If you absolutely need five nines of uptime then you not only have redundant controllers, you have redundant arrays on separate bits of HW. RAID is, as you said a reliability solution, not a backup solutions and personally I prefer RAID 6 just in case of a multiple disk failure.
But five nines is way beyond the requirements of a home user, I'd get a 2 TB external drive/NAS and RSync it. No one wants to lose their pr0n collection.
I'm guessing this was created by a middle manager, only someone with no brains, guts, spine or heart could call 50 Degrees C "quite comfortable".
Dell's business lines are OK, just avoid the XPS's as they are overpowered and under-cooled (and designed for people with insecurity issues). Vostro and Latitude lines are OK.
Lenovo are also good, Once again go with the business lines (Thinkpad) but a bit more expensive then Dell.
Toshiba and Asus are also highly recommended but they don't allow for easy customisation like Dell and Lenovo (most laptop purchasers don't understand the performance benefit of using a 7.2K RPM disk and almost all disks in SKU's are 5.4K RPM).
I build my own gaming boxes but doing that with laptops quickly becomes prohibitivly expensive. The Lenovo R400 I bought last year is rock solid and thus far, the new Vostro 3300 I bought for my boss has generated no complaints. The story in the Article is from 2005 and model specific.
I can answer this one.
Jack Shit.
The BP that sells petrol is a different entity to the BP that pulls oil out of the ground which is a different entity to the BP that turns oil into Petrol.
The BP that pulls oil out of the ground sells that oil on the open market, it doesn't expressly go to BP refineries to be sold in BP petrol stations. The oil that goes to BP refineries comes from BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Saudi Aramco, Chevron Texaco and anyone else in the oil extraction game. This petroleum is also sold on the open market so a Esso petrol station will be selling BP as well as Shell and Chevron petrol.
Besides, if you want to know who is really to blame for the gulf disaster you need only look for the nearest mirror. Unquenchable thirst for oil combined with unreasonable demand for low prices caused this. If you want to help, suspend the Jones act as there are companies in Europe and the Middle East who are experts at dealing with these kinds of problems who at the moment cannot do a damn thing because of politics.
This is why I love my Lenovo R400. It's not the prettiest, lightest or thinnest of laptops but it's cool, quiet and near indestructible. Sitting through a 30C night in Australia and you hardly know its on by how little sound it makes. I took it to the Philippines recently, Sitting at a bar in Subic bay, this Americans Macbook kept crashing because of the heat and humidity whilst the Lenovo kept powering on. The fans and ventilation were cooling the internals enough to keep the CPU and GPU from overheating and shutting down.
This I think is the real test of a tech supplier.
How quickly can I get a fix when things do break and yes it is a when, something will be broken or DOA if you have enough of them. Dell's business support are quite good in this regard, so is their consumer support but getting to this point's a pain in the arse (script monkeys that aren't permitted to transfer you until they finish their script). I always tell people to buy from the small business lines (Vostro or Latitude) for this very reason.
Not only that, this isn't even new.
Every year (now every few months) you get the same "OMG Iphone N+1 will be on $TELCO". I had an American friend who is switching to Verizon (because he was moving out of another telco's service area, how quaint) and was looking at my Milestone (GSM variant of the Droid) in comparison to the Iphone yet all the Itards kept saying "there are strong rumours that Iphone4 will be on Verizon". Well we all saw how that one ended didn't we, Apple rumours are less trustworthy then normal rumours and people tend to forget that Apple likes excursive contracts and AT&T have one for 5 years.
2 minutes later:
ME: "Well, I'm off to Pattaya. Have fun".
Sex tourism, the nuclear weapons of bad breakups.
Staying in Phuket recently, I noticed the wifi at my hotel would drop out around 6:30 at night. The first thing I noticed is that everyone in that street turned on their lights and neon signs around the same time. Given how shoddily wiring is done in Thailand this may have been the cause.
Not just open standards, Apple hates industry standards as well. What does the MicroSIM bring to the party. Nothing really, it's just a normal SIM with bits hacked off to ensure that the device cant fit in a normal SIM (completing the vendor lock in). Not that the SIM form factor was ever an issue, much smaller devices have no problems fitting in a full sized SIM card. The MicroSIM adds no new functionality and fixes an issue that does not exist whilst attempting to eliminate compatibility.
Difference between an application and a service.
Much like the Iphone, when an application is removed from the foreground it is suspended (effectively terminated and removed from memory). If an application wants to do anything in the background the application needs to start a service, the service can run in the background and can maintain a network connection, process data or perform a variety of other tasks. Third party services cannot be started on the Iphone, even version 4.
The current Aussie Govt. is still waiting for plans from the Menzies era to come to fruition.
Politics is not fast at the best of times. My point was that the current pollies get credit/blame for plans when they come to fruition, regardless of who made them.
To be fair, all the bad policies started in the Bush era, Obama now gets the blame for. Render unto Caesar what is Caesars.
Where do you think the carriers get the money to participate in these auctions?
Personally I think the US couldn't be going faster in the wrong direction. Rather then allowing another spectrum to be bough up the US Govt should be selecting a single 4G spectrum and forcing all Telco's to use that one spectrum. Now before the Randroids come in with their "OMG Socialism" rants let me explain. This will create more competition in the market and make things easier for you, the consumer. Right now if you buy a Verizon phone, you are stuck on the Verizon network no, even if you pay the ETF you still cant use that phone anywhere else. If you want to switch to AT&T's 3G services you need a phone that works on the AT&T freq. Picking one freq allows you to buy a handset from any carrier or even a retail store and use it with any carrier. This will also allow for the creation of better MVNO's and smaller local carriers.
This isn't the "gubbermit" controlling 4G, this is the government saying that 4G == x MHz and everyone can license this freq. This is pretty much what the use govt. does now except it says AT&T == x MHz and T-Mobile == y MHz. Carriers still set up their towers, create the plans, same level of customer disservice, the only change will be the fact that you wont be beholden to a single carrier unless you buy a new phone because they all operate a common freq.
In Australia, if I buy a handset from Optus or a retail store, that handset will work on the 3G networks of Telstra, Vodafone and Three as all four networks support a 2100 MHz 3G network. Not to mention I can take that same handset to Europe and Asia and have my choice of carriers in most nations.
Actually it will
.Net or Windows Installer when re-installing a game, urgent patches to protect against 0day exploits easier to find and install and perhaps even keeping something like Java up to date.
And it is high time MS did something like this. The regulators, even in the EU wont have a problem with this as MS aren't completely retarded and will still permit installations from other sources (such as the Internet, DVD, USB drives) as almost all of their customers will want to do this and will kill MS if they made this the only way to get applications.
This will be just like Synaptic on Ubuntu. You can use Synaptic or you can use Apt-get, a deb package or compile from the source if you so desire. Where I see it going wrong is with MS and MS's corporate policies. They will make it compatible with IE9/10 only, it will not work on Windows 7, it will be tied into the new Xii (Xbox Wii) and they will make it hard for any publisher to do anything meaningful with it due to bureaucracy (the GFW program is a complete disaster because of stupid rules like "you may not put letters into version numbers"). It really is a shame as this kind of thing should make managing my system easier by keeping things updated on my system. No more looking for the correct version of
In two years Flash will still be the only consistent, multi-platform framework for video and interactive applications (Java as it is, is good for applications but is just not totally consistent and different Java versions cause trouble). HTML5 will be fragmented and useless because Apple and MS are intent on forcing the use of proprietary codecs and removing features that do not meet with iApproval. HTML 5 will get nowhere until companies like Apple and Microsoft are removed from it's development as they will simply fail to create a usable standard equivalent to Flash because of their need for control.
I dont like flash that much but seriously, if you're placing your hopes into an Apple bastardised version of HTML to compete with it you are extremely naive. If the IEEE or another group with diverse interests were able to make the standard then you might have a chance of toppling flash in maybe 5 years.