Posts by Uncle Ron 345 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2013
Does anybody here feel as mystified as I do that Android apps regularly get permission to fully hack into my phone and tablet and slurp up any and all data--including the right to send e-mails to my contact lists without my knowledge? As the old querie goes, "Where's the outrage??
Wintel would never have become Wintel if every Windows app I installed required me to accept spoofing and data grabbing as the price to use the app. I realize many of these apps are free but why do users not push back on these practices as being too steep a price to pay. Why isn't "Do No Evil" scoffed at more than it even is? What am I missing?
I don't know which '96 Act you're reading, but you are wrong. The FCC can re-classify without any further authority and the courts would sustain the action. A corrupt US Congress is another story. Of course this is the excuse the FCC is using. It is corrupt as well.
The FCC in the US -does- have the power to reclassify. It could do this today under it's current authority. Yes it could. Of course, tomorrow, Congress could do whatever it wants, like change the authority, re-word it's authority, whatever--eliminate the FCC if it wanted to. But, Congressional approval is -not- required for the FCC to reclassify the internet as a telecommunications service. And it should.
I don't give a hoot in heck that Google algorithms are scanning my e-mails. No human is doing it, and nobody cares what's in my e-mails anyway. All it means is that the Mt. Everest of advertising that I'm going to see anyway just might bear some relevance to something I'm interested in. Especially if it means I get free e-mail, and free other-stuff.
There's privacy and there's privacy. I don't want -any- tin-pot sheriff's deputy or boon-dock country clerk to be looking, and that's fairly easy to make illegal, but if Google wants to mine my nonsense for money, I'm fine with it. Mining consumer data to get insight into market opportunities is just fine. Snooping into individuals lives isn't. That's the difference. Big Data Good, Little Data, needs a warrant.
Our country has become the Land of the Powerful, and the Home of the Corporate. I never expected the USSC would let the failed little Novel have it's day in court. They were screwed by MS and MS is the big winner. Winners and losers are defined by money, campaign contributions, politics and worse. Look for the same outcome in the Aereo deliberations and especially the Comcast merger. Too much money, too much influence. Our values are shot to he11. America is becoming a second rate country. No justice from old men. It's a joke.
If this thing is true, there is a strong stink of corruption or just plain outrageous cronyism, coming out of the FCC. I mean real, unbelievable putrid stink. Any payments of these tolls and tariffs will come right out of the pockets of consumers--and into the pockets of the monopoly cable systems and telecoms.
Even big players like Netflix, Hulu and others will not be able to compete with "ComcastFlix" and "AT&TFlix." I repeat, this really stinks. How is a democratically elected government continually able to act against the interests of it's citizens and in favor of big-shots, and get away with it?
The US is really going down the drain. Transparently, openly, outrageously, down the drain.
Huh? I don't know anything about the UK, but ALL streaming services in the US, including the live streaming services like MLB.tv, say 3-5 Mbps is enough for full HD video. I pay for 20 Mbps and I never have -any- problem with multiple HD streams in my household. I watch Vudu movies, Netflix stuff, live TV streams--all on multiple Rokus and I still have bandwidth to spare. No pixilating or any other artifact.
Only very big downloaders and businesses with dozens of on-line workers or POS terminals benefit from "Gigabit" speed.
Only if "per user" is watching multiple HD streams at once. Unlikely. In my home (I have six Rokus) there is never more than 2 simultaneous "watchers." Two people can each watch an HD video stream and others can be doing e-mail, surfing, etc. easily with 15 Mbps. That's why I say fifteen megabits is plenty. NOT "hundreds." Never "hundreds."
Only an SMB or larger, with POS terminals, dozens or hundreds of employees using cloud apps, etc. would need "Gigabit" speed. A home user gets benefit only if s/he is downloading big files and wants them in seconds. Video streaming and surfing is plenty fine with 10's of megabits per second.
Again I say, Gigabit speed means nothing if you can't afford to pay for the "Gigabytes." In the absence of real ISP competition, I see pricing (like the old days with "long distance") taking people off the web early in the month, or forced to turn to "non-metered" cable company services like "ComcastFlix" or "UverseFlix." That's what they want. And will get if the FCC doesn't step in.
AT&T has a monopolist mentality. A monopolist staff, a lobbyist staff, they won't invest a penny they don't have to. In 1972 I was paying the equivalent of $78 a month for a single line, no long-distance, and a telephone that was from around World War II.
Home users don't need "Gigabit" speed. Only businesses do. Ten to fifteen MEGABITS is plenty to deliver multiple HD video streams and surf the web with abandon. What we cannot afford is to allow them to implement metered billing. This is their absolute objective: Unbelievably profitable, and it will help them facilitate putting Netflix and every other streaming service out of business. Imagine you get meter billed for Netflix, but not for "ComcastFlix" or "UverseFlix." It will look just like cable TV does today.
I would think this technically savvy audience would understand that "Gigabit" speed means nothing to a home user. NOTHING. Gigabit speed only helps businesses. It helps businesses who need big transactions-per-second speed. Ten to fifteen MEGABIT per second speed is PLENTY to deliver multiple HD video streams.
What consumers need to guard against is METERED BILLING. A total rip-off. Multiple credible studies have shown that incremental billing for internet usage is price gouging pure and simple. It's what a monopoly does: Create artificial scarcity and invest not one penny more than necessary. Internet service is already the most profitable product the monopoly cable and telephone companies sell--by far. The only reason we get "buffering" and "freezing" is because they haven't invested. Like monopolies NEVER do.
It doesn't do you any good to have "Gigabit" speed if you have to turn off the internet on the 12th of every month because you can't afford the "Gigabits."
If (and according to CNET shills) when the Comcast merger is allowed, Netflix, Vudu, Crackle, YouTube, and all the other streaming services will go away. We'll be watching "ComcastFlix" and "AT&TFlix" and paying metered internet billing. We will be even more of a laughing stock to the rest of the world. Technology will stagnate and the internet will look like cable TV does now.
Think this is hyperbole? Look at how AT&T put the DuMont Television Network out of business in the 1950's. Artificial scarcity and price-gouging. It's what monopolists do. If we let the Comcast merger happen, we deserve to become second rate.
A huge plume of black soot, goo, or some such emerged from the flame trough at launch. The black stuff traveled half-way up the vehicle and stuck. Made the rocket look like crud. More emerged outward with the blast and was clearly more than steam. It looked like something had gone horribly wrong. Never saw that on any launch of any rocket before. Somebody said it was mud in the trough. Sounds fishy to me. Anybody know for sure? It was certainly different.
"In my opinion, this reform tends to challenge the role of ISPs at a broader scale,"
I hope so. If ISP's want to be in other businesses (other than plumbing,) those offerings should have to compete with those of non-ISP's on a level pitch. Right? Those businesses should be -totally- separated from the plumbing business. There should be NO avenue (or interest) for ISP's to favor their own offerings over others. Period.
Complete, transparent, closely regulated Net Neutrality is the only solution. The plumbing business is too important, too vital, to be allowed to be tinkered with in the name of "innovation."
ISP's wish to Cap and Meter, Throttle and Block, and erect Toll Booths for competitors. "Innovation" is totally absent from their "business model." Except in billing systems. BTW, it's exactly what I would do if I ran an ISP. It's just plain common sense--that MUST be legislated against.
Even though -nothing- can be said for sure right now about what caused this tragedy, something -can- be done -right now- to preclude it -ever- happening again: Absolute real-time GPS tracking of -every- commercial airplane everywhere on the planet. Period. Can't be turned off by the crew. Data available -immediately- to the public. No "military" secrecy, no PR spinning, no holds. Period. Worldwide, it's a relatively small data set. An iPad in each plane, connected to the existing satellite transmitter--now completely locked and secured--could do the job. Data sent in the clear for everyone to see.
Why not do this? Who is against this? The cost, even with redundancy, would be less than a single first-class seat.
This statement, "The issue is complicated by the prevalence of false alerts from security technologies," should be near the top of every story covering this security disaster. Security monitoring is not only "complicated" by false alerts, it is turned into a nearly impossible job. Automated action might well catch all malware, but will also shut down the company every day.
Yes, but at what COST? With what DATA CAPS? Right now, I have 20 Mbs from TWC and that's plenty fine for a couple of simultaneous Roku HD video streams and surfing all at the same time. TWC -currently- does not impose a data cap.
Time Warner Cable's erstwhile owner, Comcast, however, is currently already price-gouging it's monopoly customers to the tune of $10 USD per 50GB of data over a cap of 300GB. For something that multiple credible studies have shown costs nearly nothing. Last month I used 716 Gigabytes of data. Two people in my house. That would have cost me around $150 USD just for internet service. Unbelievably profitable for the ISP. In baseball season, I would use, probably, 1/3 more. Couple dollars for EACH game.
They can increase the speed to a Billion Mbs and it won't add a thing to the streaming experience. It's Capping and Metering that stinks, and amounts to monopoly price-gouging.
10Mbps or 20Mbps or so, is plenty for any home user who isn't running a server or some other "hobby" thing. That speed allows for 2 or 3 simultaneous HD video streams. Right? It's not about the speed you get, IT'S ABOUT THE DATA CAP!!. Comcast's plan/policy to cap and meter DATA use is the real price gouge that's going to happen.
Very true. You might do a "speed test" against some third-party site and see you're getting your contracted 20Mbs or whatever, but if the streaming site itself offers a bandwidth test, you'll see something very different. Up and down even in minute by minute increments. TWC is monkeying with Netflix, I'd bet on it. And this is something only three people might know about: Some non-CEO executive, a data-center manager, and the sysadmin who wrote the script, who's now been laid off.
There just aren't any "conditions," "concessions," or "promises" that I can imagine that would make this merger acceptable. None. This collision of two garbage trucks is all about one thing: Internet service. Even -if- the "regulators" required separation of the cable TV business from the ISP business, the combine would happily ditch the TV part. It is a dead business model.
The internet service part in such a huge entity is a license to print money. For lobbying, electioneering and just plain bribing. It is already the most profitable product the monopoly cable systems in the US sell. By far. The merger should not be allowed, and tough new regulation needs to be enacted. But probably won't be. America stinks at this.
For the vast bulk of Americans, there is only one choice for high-speed broadband: The local monopoly cable company. No competition. Satellites can't do it and AT&T sucks at it and always will. Even with "net neutrality" they are already free to cap and meter internet service as Comcast already does. And without "net neutrality" they will be free to throttle and block sites they "don't like" and put up toll booths for services that compete with them. Of course they're not stupid and they won't do this overnight--although I see signs on my TWC internet that Netflix is already being tampered with.
Monopolies always exhibit near-zero innovation--even regulated monopolies. It's just a fact. No incentive to innovate. If we allow this merger to happen, and don't move as a country to more stringently regulate and monitor the existing monopoly service providers it will be completely pathetic.
This business about paying 1 cent for the cup to India and 99 cents for the logo to Switzerland is nuts--and true. I used to work for a global company and we railed about our costing models that a required a large corporate "tax" to be allotted. This caused our end prices to be less competitive. I'm sure it allowed our overall tax rate to be low, but it also caused our sales to be less robust than otherwise. Remote "shells" in tax havens that do nothing but "own" IP and perform other "services" should be outlawed everywhere.
How about "Local sales minus local costs equals taxable revenue?" "Local costs" must be "normal and reasonable." Huh?
The whole purpose, the entire purpose, the only legitimate reason for the existence of government in a democracy is to protect the powerless from the powerful. To defend against intruders, lawlessness, to educate, build and maintain safe infrastructure, and on and on.
It certainly -is- the duty of government to establish tax systems which fairly spread the cost of these programs across the population. Isn't it?
In the spirit of your final sentence do I say "Only people in favor of the poor getting poorer, would agree with a flat tax." Only people who lack any sense of historical growth, progress, development, democracy over the last hundred years would dis-agree IMO.
Windows was not a new operating system. It was simply MS-DOS with a new shell--that didn't work well at first. MS was legally obligated to give IBM the rights to successor OS's and MS waited for that agreement to expire to actually integrate (lock in) the shell with the OS. This happened in the Windows 95 timeframe. However, the underpinnings or Windows 95 was still MS-DOS, just as Windows NT is still the underpinnings of Windows 7, 8.
The "little man behind the curtain" never wrote a line of code except for a BASIC interpreter. And MS has never truly produced an operating system. Gates/Allen bought "MS-DOS" from Seattle Computer Products, which had allegedly plagiarized huge chunks of it from Gary Kildal's CP/M. Plagiarism that wouldn't have survived a modern lawsuit. IBM and Microsoft cooperated on the development of OS/2-Windows/NT, with IBM contributing the bulk of the work on both. The Object Oriented user interface and integrated Relational Database of OS/2 were too complicated and advanced for MS to swallow and so MS and IBM parted company in the NT timeframe. NT is still the foundation for "Windows" to this day.
Profits or Silicon Valley or Business Models is not the point here. If we want broadband to look like cable TV, with metered billing, "carriage fees," and all manner of "regulated" shenanigans, let's continue to bicker over whose ox is getting gored here. Our monthly bills will skyrocket, innovation will shrivel, we'll be stuck with backward technology, and zero investment... Sound familiar? It's Cable TV all over again. The rapidly dying business model of Big Cable should not be bailed out on the backs of the public.
Broadband is already the most profitable product cable systems sell. By far. The TV side profits are shrinking. Should these monopolies be allowed to impose new unwarranted billing practices simply because the world is changing? Why should the FCC or Congress bail out this industry on our backs? Broadband is a -very- -very- low tech service. These guys have a monopoly on only one thing: The right to lay the cable. Which was paid for decades ago. The rest is off-the-shelf.
I'm sorry these behemoths find themselves in a dull utility business, but that doesn't mean they get to screw us through lobbying, campaign contributions and bribery. It's not right.
I too comment on the "Google's Borg system is rumored to have been so good at this task juggling act that it saved the ad-slinger from building an entire data center" statement. Even if the implication is true, that Google saved a data center, I say, So What? A data center is only 10's of millions of dollars and a few handfuls of employees. A literal drop in the Google bucket. The power and cooling for all those coders probably exceeds that of a data center...
I still feel that throwing hardware at a problem, when today's hardware is -very- cheap, makes more sense than developing more and more complex software that always leads to lots of unintended consequences. As a matter of fact, if 90% of my jobs (which is probably true) require an ARM processor with 4GB of memory, why not have a million ARMs with channel access to lots of segmented memory?
As Albert Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
Yes, I noticed the same thing. I've been watching rockets lift off for 50 years and never saw one shift over like this one did right at liftoff. In the video, it alarmingly crabbed over to the left right after it left the base. Like something was holding it back, or it was somehow unbalanced. I also thought it was quickly going to start going sideways, or hit the tower equipment and begin the end of a very bad day. What happened?
Why is this too simple: 1) If you are not asserting the patent yourself, i.e., using it in a product, within, say, 1.5 years after being granted the patent, you can't enforce it, or 2) If you or your heirs/assignees didn't actually invent the thing, you can't enforce it--unless it's in a product you or your heirs/assignees actually sell and people actually buy.
In other words, you can't patent something and then bury it for your own benefit and you can't sell the patent for the sole purpose of screwing other people. You can patent something to make money off it yourself or sell it to someone who will. Regardless, the 1.5 year drop-dead date applies.
IBM and other tech titans have tens of thousands of patents that will never appear in products, but sit there lurking over the shoulders of anyone who actually wants to DO something in this business. How is that helpful? How does that foster innovation? The patent system should foster innovation, that's all.
This is AT&T nonsense!! US consumers should press hard to remove all data caps and to be charged what data actually costs, which is NEARLY NOTHING. The incremental cost of delivering a Gigabyte of data over cable is less than a penny. Mobile is more, but not much. VERY PROFITABLE. Carriers in the USA want nothing more than to get consumers used to paying by the bit.
Carriers want us to get used to $100, $200, $300 a month bills. For something that costs them $1 or $2 or $3. But they know that consumers will balk at also actually paying for advertising. Only a corrupt regulatory, legislative, and MEDIA environment would allow this. It's why the USA is behind even South Korea (!) in the performance and cost of broadband.
BTW, this is why Google is pushing so hard to implement cheap, Gigabit fiber broadband. They need cheap, very fast broadband to push fast, rich advertising everywhere that users won't push back on...
I agree with all your points. The big enterprise vendors started taking Linux seriously in the mid-90's. Linux is now firmly entrenched in many big enterprises. Not to the exclusion, of course, of Windows, AIX, etc., but definitely there. Twelve months from now (as you say, faster than Linux) OpenStack will be on that same trajectory. Enterprises will demand portability from one XaaS vendor to another, and from private to public and back, and proprietary stacks will be semi-obsolete. IMHO, Ceilometer, Heat, etc., will get better, quicker.
BR,
Edgar
I'd like a high quality, 4G, microSD, WiFi, Bluetooth, HDMI out, Jelly Bean or higher, Sprint smart phone and I want it to be THE SAME SIZE AS AN iPHONE. Is that too much to ask? Almost all smartphones are JUST TOO BIG. If I wanted a 5" tablet, I'd buy a 5" tablet. I want first and foremost a PHONE.
I bought a first day Nexus 7 "2012." Terrific tablet. I'm very pleased with it. But, this new one still has no HDMI, no SD card slot, and maxes out at 32GB. What the hey? I can't believe it.
The original Nexus 7 had the best ppi or resolution or whatever the kids are calling it these days--better than any Apple tab. Really noticeably better than any other in any size. Love it. Performance is really snappy. The only gripe I have had is limited storage on board, no HDMI and TERRIBLE speakers. Almost useless at full volume. With more on-board storage and better sound, I may still fork over the dough...
The real caveat here is "Tough regulation should ensure customers can switch easily." Tough regulation of ANY industry hasn't happened in the US during the entire Internet age. The FCC in the US, and many other "regulators" and even Congress itself are in the back pockets of Big Cable and Big Telco and there isn't much hope for innovation, competition or any other consumer benefit.
Congress and the "regulators" are more interested in keeping the flow of campaign cash and in issuing a license to print money for the chosen few.
Not much hope here.
Uncle Ron
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