Well actually

The Austrian power grid nearly collapsed recently because of a misguided broadcast packet instructing all sensors to dump their values onto the network causing a huge overload on the data network.

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Chaos-im-Stromnetz-durch-verirrte-Zaehlerabfrage-1865269.html

He claimed a lot of things

Like breaking into the GSM-network in the 1990s. Do yourself a favour, look at his "German years" before he mercifully left out country and was still called "Kim Schmitz". That guy was just one of the most annoying people out there.

Wait! They are selling it?

That's a revolutionary new idea for novel mobile phones. For example Nokia successfully tries a "no sale" strategy on their N950 and N9 phones, which much success, the N9 probably still sells more often than all their Windows phones combined.

So trying to sell it, that could be the new idea for successful mobile phones everyone's been waiting for.

Again let's compare the user experience

Pirate: Got DRM-free file immediately without paying. It plays on any device without any problems. And it will play essentially till infinity.

Customer: Had to install special software which may or may have malevolent components, and may or may not work on some devices. Lost all his content now.

Again, DRM only affects the paying customer. And it always affects them negatively.

Well I recently had an interview at an appliance vendor

They seem to believe that networks can somehow be secure, their TCP/IP stack is a custom one running on a microcontroller to small to run Linux.

The big problem is that we are used to having our systems designed by people who know about networking since they are experienced with some form of unixoid system. However there is currently a wave of new devices comming from people to whom the idea of a port-scanner is novel and undocumented protocols are secure... since nobody could exploit a protocol they don't know about.

The problem is, as long as there is nobody who does it right, we will never see any decent solutions.

I don't get the reasoning of the headline

I mean sure, microwave links become a niche, though I'm surprised they actually removed all those dishes, just giving those spaces to radio hams and Freifunk enthusiasts would put it into good use.

However it's current use to the BT is completely independent of its shape. It's a building, it got sensible amounts of fibre to it, it has a generator so they use it for backend broadcast systems. Of course it's a serious decision, but would it have been an office building with the same infrastructure, they would have taken that one.

So yes it's a relic even though they still get some use out of it.

Where's the advantage over free space optics?

I mean 240 GHz probably doesn't go well through walls... or dirt on the antenna.

It might be interrested once the main processor is usable

Currently you can only use that tiny little ARM core on the Raspberry Pi, while the main processor, a large DSP used for it's video outputs, is largely unusable running some closed realtime OS.

Opening up that DSP would enable a whole new set of applications. For example you could do fast data processing, for example to do sonar or even radar on that little board.

Missing the long term problem

Sure, they are now near copying ARMs approach and try to appeal to handset makers in that way, but that's not the long term problem. We are now in the "home computer" age of mobile computers. Every manufacturer has a totally different platform. If you are lucky you get some dedicated port of some operating system (i.e. Android) which won't be supported and which you will be stuck with.

In the home computing age the IBM-compatible PC arrived, sweeping away its competitors. Suddenly you had a machine that could run different operating systems, where you could upgrade the operating system just by booting from a different diskette.

If Intel wants to succeed in the long run, they must bring real advantages over ARM. For example they could create a SoC with a little boot ROM which allows booting from an SD-card. That ROM could also have routines to access the hardware, kinda like a BIOS. (But please not as complex as UEFI)

One of Intel's strengths in the 1970s and early 1980s was that they provided full developer support. For example you could buy their development system and it would include a full Pascal compiler, while the other vendors still required you to hand-assemble your code. Intel should try to do the equivalent of that today. Make it easy to build a mobile device and slap your software onto it, just like it's easy to slap a new operating system onto a PC.

They wouldn't be successful with it at first, but once all those tiny Chinese manufacturers get a hold of this they will have conquered the mobile devices market.

When in doubt, stick with your CEO

That seems to be the prevailing idea of investors these days, continuity of management, even if the current management consists of total idiots. I mean just look at HP, as far as I know they had a CEO who made stage publicity photographs of using a competitors product, and announced the discontinuation of the PC branch only to not actually do it afterwards.

As a CEO you have no actual accountability. You are paid to make decisions, you might have some bonus coupled to the stock price, but today it's near impossible to get sacked, no matter what you do.

I don't quite understand the reason for this

I mean just having short codes robs you of the fun of exploring the IVR. (If you are into it) Obscure options might be more interresting. If you want something from a company calling them usually is the worst option, sending a letter to the CEO personally will give you a better and quicker response. (letter not e-mail!)

Well for my IVR I'm thinking of adding an "I just want to talk to someone" option. It then randomly picks a country and city, and dials a random number in it.

Where's the advantage?

I still don't see where the advantage is. JS-interpreters are so amazingly fast these days, you will have problems getting any advantage from having some byte code.

However the disadvantages are obvious. Byte code is much harder to check for malware, and it's much harder to edit it when you have found some.

That's why you want free software

The Android universe is not really free. It requires device specific changes, making it nearly impossible to have sustainable free Android distributions. Just look at Cyanogenmod. It's a great effort, but they cannot support more than a few models at a time.

What we would need is a common scalable hardware platform. Essential things like unaccelerated frame buffer access (and setup) should work the same on all devices, as well as hardware discovery. Just like on the PC. Every PC boots your operating system the same way, it'll have certain standard hardware, it'll have BIOS routines to access other hardware. It has ways to enumerate devices on the PCI bus.

Right now every ARM device boots differently. And when you are booted you have no idea of finding out what kind of SoC you are on. You cannot access your framebuffer, you cannot access your external Flash. Often you cannot even access a serial debug interface for help.

We'd need better education first

In order to make sufficient progress in computing, we'd need to have actual computer literacy in our society. That doesn't mean that everybody needs to be able to program large software packages, but that people can understand what a computer actually is. People know what a book is, and they could write a little text if they had to, still few write whole books. However this knowledge is essential for widespread computer use. People need to know which limitations lie inherent within the technology and which ones are arbitrary, chosen by the designer of the system. Only then they can really choose which systems they want, or what changes they want to existing systems. Some of them may even be able to make those changes themselves.

The next point is that now that we have lots of data, we can make more interesting interfaces. Completely native interfaces are next to impossible, however you can meet somewhere in the middle between natural language and computing language. You end up with something like SQL, which, once you put a bit of effort into learning it, allows you to efficiently state complex questions to a computer which it will answer.

Whenever you read an economy study...

... keep in mind that economists are not scientists. They like calling themselves that way and they like to use metaphors of science, but they aren't. They don't conduct experiments to disprove their theories, they don't adapt/abolish their theories when they collide with observations, they do nothing real scientists would do.

EuroPCs are still made?

http://www.classiccomputer.de/ams/scheuropc.htm

Of course you shouldn't be surprised that a PC with an 8088 CPU doesn't sell to well.

5G may not be about speed

There's plenty of problems with current systems aside from speed. Speed is already something LTE Advanced tackles.

Maybe 5G will be about avoiding patents, or about cutting down the required infrastructure and making the network mesh like. There are a lot of things that could go into 5G.

Of course the importance of handwriting is shifting

In 2003 or so I worked in the archive of an old hospital. There I've seen their old books from the 1920s wher they carefully noted down everyone who came to them in beautiful handwriting. It had to be well written as many people had to be able to read it quickly. We usually don't need that kind of handwriting any more. We communicate less and less often via handwriting.

Today handwriting is mostly an extension to your brain. The best examples for this can be found in maths and engineering. You write down intermediate results which otherwise wouldn't fit into your consciousness. You only have something like 150 Shannons of capacity there. Handwriting is not limited to text, but can also other kinds of data, like relations or geometrical forms. That's the beauty of it. And that's a tool that's still useful... for people who deal with more than 150 Shannons of information.

Well back when GSM came out...

...it was the early 1990s. And since nanocells do have all the data processing inside, all you need to do is to care about signaling. And that's not a lot of work since it had to be done by 1990 general purpose computers.

Once we get full access to the main CPU of the Pi, there will be a whole array of uses for that little board.

Well, you need to be consistent.

You can either spend money on education and first educate your users then give them cheaper and more productive systems to use, or you can keep your users ignorant and solve problems by buying newer and more expensive systems.

Those people could probably work way more efficiently on an old early 1990s UNIX box with a bunch of terminals, but uneducated users don't accept that any more. I mean I learned word processing on a Microsoft Xenix system. It even had Microsoft Works for Xenix installed. It worked, and it wasn't harder to use than modern versions of Offices. The main difference was that menus were accessed by hitting Esc twice, then you could scroll through them. However to be fair, that 386/50 we had was quite slow for 20 users.

I never quite understood why such a market even exists

I mean you don't just install SAP R3 into a server and you are done with, those systems require a huge development effort to adapt them to the company. Wouldn't it be much simpler and more cost effective to develop your management software internally? I mean how much of SAP R3 do you actually need? Do you need new features of it? Wouldn't it be better to instead have something you made yourself (or contracted someone to make it for you, giving you the source code) so you could change it depending on what you actually want?

Computing is now such a vital part of many businesses, why hand it over to another company?

So... you give a list of all the people who visited you to a cloud service?

...just so they can ring a bell?

Apart from the obvious question why you even wanted to ring with your smartphone, wouldn't it be much more simpler to just have a QR-code with a picture... so you can direct the ringer to an URL which will make it ring?

Something like:

scanning QR-code on door => starting CGI-script on your webserver => sending off IM messages and playing "ding dong" on your server

This seems much simpler than trying to get it to work with people who visit you. It doesn't need apps, and you can even buy hardware buttons which make an HTTP request if you still fancy a normal doorbell.

Makes sense, they are cheaper for small capacities in the long run

I mean if you just have a simple desktop PC you don't need hundreds of Gigabyte of storage, an SSD will just be cheaper in the long run.

So to recap the difference between the old and the new universe

In the new universe anti-reflection coatings were never invented causing lots of lens flare and reflections ultimately leading to the destruction of the Vulcan empire and Nokia somehow surviving this decade.

Hmm....

Terminal?

Dedicated box for InfoBeamer?

There would be uses, but Android and touch seem more like obstacles.

So is this per wavelength?

Because 10 Gig is already standard per wavelength, and you can run about 100 wavelengths over a pair of fibres totalling around 10 Terabits per second.

I should open a cloud service....

for Chip8 software.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip8

Or maybe even Basicode

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basicode

Seriously .net always was a "me too" from Microsoft to copy Java. And Java tried to solve a problem which doesn't exist anymore. You don't need "platform independent bytecode" any more since now virtually all platforms are POSIX. Not even Microsoft uses .net for their important stuff (like Office).