... then you haven't ridden on the Paris metro - you have signal many meters below ground level. The US is falling behind in infrastucture in all sorts of ways.
I was going to make my perennial plug for American jobs jobs jobs, in this case, a mondo rewiring project (to go with the mondo highway upgrade project, etc. People really seem to underestimate how much literal spadework needs to be done for a lot of projects.) But then this came up @223:
Simple answer: I'm not American, and neither is Apple. It may be headquartered in Cupertino, but it's a global corporation, and it's not catering exclusively to the needs of rural-Americans. In fact, it doesn't need to cater to them. The urban market is more than large enough to provide a decent level of profit.
So I'll veer into the another Closing of the American Frontier post. It seems that a common thread for a lot of these discussions is the poor shape of rural regions in the U.S. - not just in terms of the condition of the fiber or concrete roads, but in terms of employment opportunities, education levels in the general populace, age, etc. The urban corridors and the more densely populated suburban regions are just fine, thank you very much.
Given the state of American finances and American can-do attitude, maybe instead of having hundred-gigabyte feeds reconnecting Rural America to the rest of us, just the opposite will be true: those regions incapable or unwilling to rewire their infrastructures to bring them up to 21st century standards will just lag farther and farther behind instead of having anyone else picking up the slack at the federal level. The King Log Way to going Galt if you will. Connecting the dots, I'd guess that things like broadband/cloud computing will cause the Square States to empty even faster than they are now and the mid-21 will see a net population flow to the urban centers and costal regions where amenities like good public transportation (perhaps nuclear powered) is the norm. So instead of saying things like "Why don't we try to colonize the sea floor or Antartica before trying to colonize space?", the new meme might be "Why don't we try to colonize North Dakota before trying to colonize space? The Dakotan regolith is rich in aluminum and other metals which could be processed . . ." :-)
]]>An idea with perhaps limited appeal: I thought at one time automobiles might be equipped with some sort of computing resources[1]. Noting fancy, but you could have a rig in the trunk (or some sort of secure space) with maybe a terabyte of memory and some modest chipware which could then connect with your tablet or phone or whatever via a secure broadband connection. Shoot, put the heavy machinery on your bike which is parked outside the coffee shop.
A silly alternative future perhaps, but one I find appealing because it's silly :-)
[1]This was more of a story idea, Americans being wedded to the automobiles the way they are. You might as well put in the metaphorical kitchen sink as well as the hobby room in the back of your mechanical mover.
]]>Is the iPad really that tethered? One of the more eye opening things to me with an iPhone was installing an app on the fly. Anecdote: my partner had to get a plane flight at very short notice on weekend. So we manicly booked a Qantas flight on the web and dashed out of the house to for the airport. And realised we didn't know the departure gate and time might be tight. So while I was driving along an express way and through a tunnel, she downloaded Qantas' app directly to her phone and then checked out her flight booking.
Of course that needed 3G and I gather lots of iPads won't have that, but surely they have the same app store functionality?
However, in general (backups, syncing a lot of other stuff) your tethering comment is on the nail. - Cameron
]]>Microsoft does not sell operating systems to the general public. (Have you ever tried installing Windows from scratch? Painful, just painful.)
Microsoft managed in the late 80s to secure a cosy bundling deal with the hardware vendors, none of whom felt like devoting the software resources to writing their own competing OS from scratch. Once established, they structured their wholesale pricing to lock out competitors -- big discounts off a spuriously high list price, which would go away if the vendors didn't ship an MS OS on every box sold. At the same time, network externalities kick in; if all PCs come with Windows, then there's no point writing software for any other platform because everybody's got windows.
The consumer, of course, had zero say in this. The effect of the Windows monopoly has been to keep them unaware that things could be different in any way. Don't get me started on "19xx is going to be the year of UNIX on the desktop" (followed by 20xx and Linux). The Mac environment between 1990 and 2000 was succumbing to the same bloat and obscurantism as Windows, and was (sensibly) taken out back and shot, to be replaced by a descendant of NeXTStep with a MacOS compatability bag on the side; a decent workstation OS, but most of its complexity is deliberately hidden from the user (who'd flee screaming if they had to grapple daily with the tools hidden in /Applications/Utilities, rather than going through a patchwork of Assistants).
Speaking as a sometime IT professional I agree with you about the undesirability of data lock-in in the cloud. On the other hand, so do a lot of other people (what is Open Cloud?). And despite my contrarian position, I don't think Apple will succeed in locking their customers in, and I believe that like the Mac before it, the iPad will become a more open platform over the next few years ... but they'll provide a valuable service for those who are too clueless to secure their assets for themselves.
]]>Actually, I have a theory about where we went wrong. First, in 1949 we ended up with the Von Neumann architecture rather than the Harvard Architecture in (almost) all of our computers. Using common addressable storage for code and data was the first big mistake. Next, around 1970-72, Ken Thompson decided to save bytes when designing the C programming language by using null-terminated strings, rather than a type-safe data structure storing length metainformation (as in, say, Modula-2). Thus permitting all sorts of stack-smashing and buffer-overrun attacks.
Alas, we're locked in these horribly insecure design decisions at such a fundamental, deep level in our computing architectures that we can't back out again without reinventing everything, from microprocessor instruction sets to low-level programming languages and even software engineering techniques.
But we know how to fix our security headaches. We just lack the will to ditch everything and start again.
Computer problems can only come from one thing, and thats user error. The computer only does what you tell or click it to do, and some of those clicks can be harmful.
Written by a true non-programmer. (Anyone else remember Intel's F00F bug?)
]]>Would you care to justify your assertions?
(Bear in mind that someone has to make the hardware. Hardware vendors are usually in it for a profit. If free software stacks are available, some will seek to pare their margins to the bone and sell on low price to the consumer; others will look for ways to differentiate themselves, add value, and thus gain the ability to charge more. What makes you think that one side of this see-saw will automatically win?)
]]>Is that MB or Mb per sec?
If the latter, we've had it around here for years.
If it's the former, well, it suggests SF is finally playing catch-up with the state of the art.
Last month, visiting friends in Tokyo, they noted that in their (new) apartment block, the choice is between 100BaseT and Gigabit Ethernet to the fat pipe in the basement ...
The success or failure of new technologies depends on the ability of existing infrastructure to support them. I've seen a lot of drive-bys in the comments posted here by people who were clearly mistaking the conditions in their own parochial back yard for the Natural Order if the Universe. In contrast, Apple appear to be cosmopolitan enough to realize that the USA's antiquated utilities aren't the be-all and end-all of the game if you're playing on a global scale, and to be designing a product line for the next decade rather than the next earnings quarter.
]]>But it's not a landmass of 3.719 million square miles in population terms -- more than 50% of the population lives in large cities/metropolitan districts. You only have to hook up the population, not the uncharted wildernesses of North Dakota and Nebraska; the wilderness you can leave to satellite phones.
]]>You're American.
Standard English usage is to refer to corporations -- collective groups of people -- as plurals.
Consider your deviant colonial usage sneered at ;-)
]]>No it's not: you're American, I'm British, and you're in the wrong (British usage wins, on this blog).
]]>Nope, I drive on the CORRECT side of the road.
Here's a hint: this is MY blog. I set the grammar rules, in accordance with English usage. You are a guest here. Read the moderation policy before posting again, lest I consider you to be a troll and ban your sorry ass.
]]>Tell that to Steve Jobs -- specifically, explain why the Macintosh was a complete failure (zero backward compatability, remember).
Does he really think he has the power to ignore millions of creative Flash developers and millions of their customers in communication departments who do work using his Apple products?
Yep, apparently he does. And yep, YouTube have recoded all their videos to H.264; according to a recent study, 60% of videos on the web are already iPad compatible, and the proportion is rising fast.
]]>That is a topic for an entirely different discussion.
(And as we're dropping back to one legit comment a day -- and a dozen spams -- I'm closing the comment thread herewith.)
]]>