it is also called arbitrage

Whenever there is a mismatch between prices you'll find someone willing to step in and make money on the difference. Given normal conditions there is nearly zero financial risk in doing it. Economists will say that it helps the market be more efficient. That Microsoft's UK team can undercut the French team is one example. The pricing is not at parity across currencies (probably never is). Is it illegal to play the arbitrage game in the EU? Probably not when you're on a massive scale, but I bet the average Joes are strictly barred from it...

Think Norton is slow? Just wait

I can only imagine what checking a "5 billion-long list" of apps will do to your PC in terms of app launch latency. Or disk space.

Either that, or every time you want to launch something it has to call home to check if it is OK?

Michael Bolton too

"PC LOAD LETTER? WTF is PC LOAD LETTER????"

That movie Office Space - it should have won "best documentary" the year it was released.

No big deal

They're not going to be selling many phones, no matter if they're in the market or not. Might as well cut their costs on advertising etc.

if a tree catches fire and nobody sees it

does it make a sound? Unless I'm missing something, a brush fire in an uninhabited part of the world doesn't put any people at risk, or property. Animals are a different story... but then these fires aren't anything new to the planet.

People still buy HP printers?

I was not aware that people still buy HP printers. I thought everyone abandonded them 5+ years ago as their drivers kept getting more bloated and useless.

I agree with the PC comments. I have one for work and its even more poky than the prior Dell. Their software/driver support is almost DIY.

must-have apps - find my mum!

Hope the GPS doesn't drain the battery too quickly, a real "find my android/mum" app could be priceless.

I'm only half joking here. About a year ago a friend's father with Alzheimer's took off one afternoon, they couldn't find him. He took the truck, drove to his boyhood home/farmstead, got stuck far back on the property, and died from exposure. They located him after a couple of days.

still need to change it into something useful

Now all these people have to do is change it back into real money like dollars or pounds or euros.

Since the whole market of bitcoins has shrunk it should not be hard to find someone looking to exchange a big pile of them for real money.

Either that or they would have to dribble out their exchanges over time and dollar-cost-average their exchange rate. If they decided to dump their coins on the market would it have an impact on the price?

THANKS El Reg

I definitely owe you at The Reg a big thanks. My poky HP Laserjet 6L tore through another batch of toner, and I was just about to reorder when this article came through. Turns out that Brother is having a huge set of deals right now in February, so was able to get the HL-2270 for $USD 80. I'm excited for the ethernet and duplexing, no plans to use WiFi just yet. Too bad the intro toner cart is only rated for something like 700 sheets, but it also looks like they are very easy to refill.

or use CUPS

Looks like base AirPrint support is built into CUPS. If you're a medium to large business you probably already have a CUPS server type appliance (headless Linux box) sitting somewhere behind the scenes accepting your print jobs. Add this configuration and you've saved a small chunk of money and another box to configure.

specifics of "Femto" cells

While "femto" seems to indicate the smaller size and smaller radio coverage, to me the main difference of Femtocells is that they use a public data network as the transport back to the wireless operator. Plug them in to your ISP connection at home, and the femtocell will tunnel through the internet back to your provider.

At this point the cost of backhaul is prohibitively large for an operator to provide for femtos. At the same time it means the end user is subsidizing the transport cost (thus the rub as mentioned above.)

Picocells are physically small devices, but use the operator's private backhaul/transport network to get the voice and data packets back to the switching center. In that sense they are like the macro-network but may be physically smaller, offering lower total transmit power and capacity so as to make them mountable on a pole or side of a building, or in a mall, or subway/underground situation.

it certainly did save her life

without those monstrous funbags she'd be doomed for life to be a "nobody".

Maybe she's bipolar and/or depressed because to her the whole world looks like a bunch of drooling idiots.

rainbow tables

if you're only talking 10,000 possible combinations (of 0000 through 9999) then it is even easier to pre-compute a rainbow table once, and then simply do the matching of the captured hash to the table. The table itself would only have 10k rows and therefore has to be relatively portable.

Rainbow tables are an amazing idea. The only way around them is to have some crazy hash space where the space required to compute and store a rainbow table is prohibitive. Even then Amazon's compute cloud takes care of much of that as well.

This seems like a good thing

The regulator simply appears to be making companies come clean on their rate plans. It is either unlimited, or 2GB, but pretty hard to be both at the same time. So... which is it?

I guess an operator could claim unlimited, and then bracket it down with a bunch of restrictions, no VoIP, or no IM, or no video streaming, but then that's what the fine print is for already, no?

What a dose of sanity.

well said on the Toshiba split product lines

We bought a "cheap" Toshiba back a few years when a 37-incher cost $800 and the Samsung ones started at a minimum of $1,200. I guess it was one of their bargain-bin filler models, but I really couldn't see paying any more for TV when the content to fill it is so lame.

So the Toshiba - it sucks. Picture quality is acceptable but the black levels and/or contrast ratios are pitiful. I will never consider them for my next TV, as I don't want to chance getting one of their lower-rung models when I'm expecting to get something better.

Ted Turner is either laughing... or crying

CNN : "News" :: MTV : Music Videos

Used to be. A long time ago. Haven't been for quite some time.

link to Economist article

Cracking up:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/01/flat-panel-displays-0

or maybe here

http://www.economist.com/node/21543035

doesn't match the expected product lifecycle

I replace my TV's about every 10+ years. Partially because of cost, but mainly because TV's have never needed to be replaced more frequently.

But with all this IPTV and Smart stuff it could mean swapping out the "Smart" parts to keep up with where the industry is going at any point in time, possibly yearly. Of course the TV vendors would want you to toss the whole thing but that isn't going to happen, thus this article appears here. I have no plans to replace my TV every year or two just to get "Smarter than the last Smart TV (tm)" bits.

It is far better to have some general-purpose computer where the IPTV bits can be defined by software. Even the Xbox/PS3/Wii is a relatively general-purpose computer compared to the miniscule processor the TV vendors probably use. Worst case we pick up a new client device (Roku, WD TV Live) for $100 or less. I'd add that adding IPTV to the Xbox is nearly free as it is added on top of an existing machine for no new outlay. Certainly didn't cost me anything to add a Netflix channel on our Wii. A HTPC would be similar if not even more flexible.

The Economist had an article recently about LCD TV's, where every vendor loses money on the panels, and the base TV models, so they have turned to these integrated "Smart TV's" to try to gain some margin leverage. But this isn't going to work for all the obvious reasons stated by all the posts here.

release it open source for the white hats now

If the black hat / hackers have it, then you can bet they'll be working to exploit it. Why not release the code to everyone, so that the community could give Symantec a fighting chance at fixing it? I'm no fan of their software, being bloated and all, but they're going to be eaten alive by the hacker world. They'll be completely outnumbered, if not outgunned too.

One other possible outcome is Symantec releases their code, and real coders take one look at it and laugh. "You did what here????"

I bet it is "carrier aggregation"

The other big Wireless Broadband technologies (EVDO, LTE for sure) have the ability to do "carrier aggregation" which operates pretty much how you describe. Take data traffic, and split it up to carry across the multiple carriers operating in different frequency spots. I think on the wired side it is called "bonding" where you glue a few pipes together to make one virtually larger pipe.

people are lazy - make money off of them!

When you see the number of people throwing money into these app stores they're either (a) paying you to take a shortcut because they are hard-pressed for time or just plain LAZY/stupid, or they're rewarding themselves "because I'm worth it".

The trick is to keep it below their pain point. It seems that Apple has done a superb job of figuring out how much people will pay for music and apps. Any more than that and people might be motivated to find an alternative.

very simple solution - for the malls etc

The lawyers will just have the mall owners post a disclaimer in very tiny text at the entrances "tracking technology might be in use at this mall." They probably don't have to tell you if they have it deployed or activated. They might be using it, they might not be, but at least they're covered either way.

In the US this happened when the people with peanut allergies managed to get food packaging changed. I bet they really wanted to know exactly which products should be avoided which contained peanuts. But everyone realized that this opened up the liability gate, so the lawyers slapped "might contain peanuts" on nearly EVERY PRODUCT just to be safe. So... that does not appear to have worked out so well.

Siri, open the window please!

I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that.

CDMA does not use Fast Hopping

CDMA, WiFi, and other similar spread-spectrum technologies don't use frequency hopping. They employ pseudorandom direct sequence spreading to smear their bits out over a much wider band. Not sure what is left using fast frequency hopping, bluetooth, and maybe the first couple spins of early 802.11 used it but the later ones surely don't.

I suspect that frequency hopping was easier to conceptualize and came first, then followed by the mathematically challenging direct sequence methods.

For your reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-hopping_spread_spectrum

MiniDisc

I went to a "launch party" for the MiniDisc when it came out in 1992 or so. They had hired Ken Pohlmann, who is a respected audio writer, to explain the lossy compression (minidisc had 5:1 fixed compression.) The audio geeks in the room sputtered to think that bits of music would be tossed out. That all ended when they did a demo playing the CD version, the MiniDisc version, and then by subtracting the MiniDisc from the CD they were able to play only the stuff that was lost. On a challenging piece there was almost nothing there. I was amazed. Ken's message to the crowd then was that it was only the first-gen encoder and that the way that perceptual codecs worked they could improve the encoder and all of the players would be able to handle it.

One of Ken's big ideas was that if the music could be preserved in compression, then to imagine going the other direction instead of minimizing space and/or runtime, to maximizing the amount of music quality that could be packed into a standard 74-minute CD. That never really took hold, did it. I'm not sure you could get a 5x improvement over CD quality although 24/96 was one of the last attempts at it.

It is also a damn shame that Sony's content side screwed over their devices side and prevented the MiniDisc from being one of the better recordable and transportable data formats. The best at the time were Zip Discs which were completely awful. The MiniDisc might have owned the market, and the audio version may have benefitted.

boxes of wine - high class

We've been able to get boxes of wine here on the left side of the pond for some time. Although they're not the finest they are still drinkable and great for cooking where you may only need a cup of something white. I most recently scored 3 liters/litres of red Spanish wine for about $USD 15 that took up much less space than it would had it been 4 bottles, and the waste when done was almost nothing. In theory since the wine bladder collapses as you drink it there is less chance of exposure to air so it stays fresher and lets you pour a glass at a time.

Vintners sometimes try to stretch the comfort zone of the public, so we'll see some of these advances with juice boxes of good wine, etc. They'll get there eventually.

There are ways to fix this, if they want to fix it.

Cisco could kill the counterfeit market for their hardware if they dropped the prices of the boards. They'd then need to move toward a software business and/or use licensing to enable the hardware. Imagine if they were to get most of their revenue from "software licenses", they wouldn't even care if you bought your cards from somewhere else - counterfeit or second-hand, as you'd have to pay them to get them unlocked in the cage.

tools

One more shiny shiny new thing that makes it easier to separate a fool from his money. Micropayments are awesome too - they're only a quid or so... but after a few hundred of those it adds up to real money.

The media companies are catching on... slowly

I don't waste much money on Disney stuff, in fact we try to waste as little as possible. But do love Netflix streaming-only. If Disney stuff gets loaded onto Netflix then we'll probably be watching a lot of it at my house, and I would assume that Disney would get a few coins from it. That is an increment to Disney's revenue, although not nearly as much as they want (but aren't getting.)

I remember when RIM came out and everyone carried two phones

When the first blackberries first came out everyone carried their blackberry for work, but then also carried around another phone for voice as the performance of the blackberries were completely terrible. That seemed to fade after a while, but now I'm noticing that people are carrying a Blackberry as well as an iPhone or Android phone. This time for access to the data and apps I bet.

I'll bet that all it would take is some enterprise-grade iPhone controls and people would drop their Blackberry in a second. These guys have nowhere to go but farther down.

other technologies build this in from the start

Digital cellular technologies like GSM and CDMA all knew about this user device battery drain problem when they were designing the network standards. In CDMA it is called "slotted mode", where the network and handset agree how often to send out notifications. By doing that at prearranged times it allows the handset/chipset to drop into deep sleep for a second or so, and only wake up for milliseconds at a time to listen for its name to be called. Tremendous savings in battery power.

It seems that Wi-Fi didn't built it in, so these guys had to find a way to duct-tape one into it?

This place reminds me of Priceline.com

Priceline.com was the darling of one of the previous web hysteria/bubbles. Now they're not much more than an average travel website. Expect the same for Groupon. I don't think the savings work out very well for the consumers either, what with most of our friends having not used a deal before it expired. Won't have to get burned too many times for people to shy away from the DEALZ OMG.

(Remember when you could bargain for gas on Priceline?)

Sure, people want iPads

but they'll also show you there is a market for $99 versions from HP.

I think the iPad is too expensive, so an (and)Roid version at the same price is still too much.

Probably going to get flamed for this, but Androids will have to take a discount to sell. An Android version would have to be at least $100 less, if not closer to half the price of an iPad in order to get people to switch their buying decision. That cheaper slab might also find a few of us cheapskates. Selling all of the products at the same price just helps to steer everyone to Apple.

Not the "engine room"

More like the "boiler room", the sweatshop type places where they stuff the pump-and-dump type of financial salesmen.

spectrum scarcity = solve one problem, create a bigger one

This idea of spectrum scarcity is really a load of crap in the US. There are other ways to get around a capacity problem, shrinking the size of the cells being the best way to do it, not the first choice though from the business/cost perspective. You did do a good job of highlighting that there are loads of spectrum already assigned that are not built upon.

The other problem with the current batch of existing spectrum, is that the spectrum is so fragmented that not much of that "real estate" is very appealing to the operators or the vendors. Sure, it is technically possible to build a network in some of these bands, but it will be a one-off semi-custom thing and the cost to develop/deploy will be much higher. Adding more spectrum to the mix will only make it more fragmented. When you are talking device/mobile market the "efficiencies of scale" really require that you work in tens of millions of handsets, if not hundreds of millions. Completely the opposite of a fragmented marketplace.

I've seen so many of these network schemes that are stuck at the starting phase. The spectrum exists, but not the equipment, NOR the handsets, and the price that would need to be paid in order to get the vendors off the fence wrecks the operator's business model. Guaranteed non-starter.

redux of the first wireless network

I was at a european business school, and their wireless network was an infrared version of this. And that was 10 years ago. I don't think they got anything close to 800 Mbps though. Maybe closer to 800 kbps. Needed special cards for the clients... and line of sight.

maybe not

With all of the rain we've been getting in the Chicago US area, some people have gotten FEET of water in their basements. I'd take a rack or two but it better be waterproof!

isn't this how those experiment kit radios worked?

If I'm not mistaken, the "cats whisker" type radios that we built as kids from the box of electronic experiment kits did not use batteries, which means that they harvested AM radio signals to drive a speaker.

And many of today's passive RFID tags are powered by the reading signal.

The fact that the GT team captures spurious signals appears to be the only part of this that hasn't been already done before.