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The iPad is old news. Wired reported on the existence of the iPad way back in 1999. Why wasn't Microsoft working on their iPad-competior way back then? More importantly, why are they trying to play catch up now? Should they not be working on the next big thing?

Why is Daimler (german car company, remember?), only recently starting to develop electric vehicles?
Well, because it's economically more sensible to use existing production setups as long as possible and then (with no risk), just _buy_ some startups or license some tech when it's time.
Why did they just raise their projected revenue from 4 Billion to 6? Because they're letting others do the work und just use their enormous weight to crush or assimilate them later.
Same with M$

The iPad is old news. Wired reported on the existence of the iPad way back in 1999. Why wasn't Microsoft working on their iPad-competior way back then? More importantly, why are they trying to play catch up now? Should they not be working on the next big thing?

hey everyone -- it's my picture of "Cory's Hammock" that appeared on boingboing: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/07/27/gone-fission----see.html i release most of my pics and academic writing under CC-BY-NC-SA, which is the license that was reproduced on the post. but when i put these pics up on Flickr after Cory sent the hammock [yes, there is some irony there. it is his hammock!] i gave him permission to use them if he wished. and he has. and it's ok with me. as some of the comments in this thread note, the definition of "non-commercial" is the most problematic thing about CC licenses: see http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Defining_Noncommercial for background from the Creative Commons. however, in this case [and IP infringement decisions are based on specific circumstances] that definition is inconsequential, because my permission was granted. remember, CC licenses are non-exclusive, and the same content released under CC can also be licensed in other places in other ways. whoever started this thread didn't check with me [i'm not that hard to find] or with BoingBoing about the circumstances under which my image was used. my picture was 'Used with permission". i've suggested that the rights statement on BoingBoing be updated to make that clear. thanks for your help, everyone, but this damsel is not in distress! /jt

We've reached out to the photographer, who appears to be a friend of Cory, and mentions Cory. It appears that the Slashdot post was from an anonymous Slashdot reader who was trolling for attention, not from the photographer, as Rob stated earlier. Not from a rightsholder, but from someone trying to punk Slashdot and prank Cory while Cory was away (he says so pretty clearly in this blog post).

I think that may warrant a little clarification in the summary.

Eh, I think the image in that story was licensed under cc-by which doesn't prohibit commercial use, unlike the submitter. The family in that case is suing for a whole variety of reasons that have nothing to do with copyright. What this article reminds me of is this

If you don't want to read some guys blog, no less an authority than boing boing covered it. I wonder if they have permission to use those photos?

(This post is brought to you by the office of the commissioner of slashdot. Any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the post without the AndersOSU's express written consent is prohibited.)

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/07/27/gone-fission----see.html Update: We've removed the CC-licensed image as it appears the photographer is unhappy with our usage of it here. We support the Creative Commons and will always do our best to honor the creator's interpretation of non-commerciality. Please accept our apologies. - Rob

Going outside doesn't really help : plenty of ads there , and adblock doesn't work on them .

Not necessarily true (somewhat).

Going off-topic here, but seriously, "dealt with them"?

Yes, they did something, but they hardly solved the problem. Piracy in Somalia is still a booming business with massive return on investment, and the payments to individual pirates are ridiculously high compared to Somali average wages. This means there are a lot of interested investors, and there's a near endless supply of expendable people to send on the actual missions.

Trying to solve this situation with military presence in the area (by means of military ships) simply isn't feasible, because of the size of the area. If you secure the Gulf of Aden, which, by the way, is one of the busiest shipping routes in the world, pirates will simply travel further east into the Indian Ocean, as they have on previous occasions. For example, this story is about a ship hijacked 700 nautical miles from the Somali coast. That's a two to three days' journey for a pirate mothership traveling around 12 knots.

The only way we can solve the situation in the seas around Somalia is by solving the situation in Somalia itself. Somalia needs a stable government with an active police force and/or army to do something about the criminals that are ruling the country today.

I posted an article a while back about a DHTML engine I put on GitHub. I included an example game called Bombada that's also on GitHub. Note: the engine isn't "HTML5" per se (which is becoming more of a buzzword than makes sense) and I've moved on to a canvas engine (which will someday also be open source).

Even better, there was recently a game development contest on Boing Boing which saw 9 pretty cool entires. Ours was called Onslaught! and was written in JavaScript using canvas (though it does fall back to flash for audio).

I've got some substantial experience writing games in JavaScript and HTML5. To me, the biggest hurdle right now is audio. Somebody mentioned the inability to go fullscreen, and while I've seen that handled by the video tag, to me it's not as big a problem as the audio tag being basically unusable for gaming purposes.

About eight hours ago I noticed Boing Boing has been running a gamedev contest that has attracted several Javascript/Canvas games. They seem to have sound using the "Sound" element that works in Firefox.

http://www.boingboing.net/arcade/

Boing Boing recently had a game competition, quite a few are written with JS: http://www.boingboing.net/arcade/

yesterday I stumbled on http://www.boingboing.net/arcade/ which presents a few games which are mostly html5. Since a lot of people are choosing html5 over flash I believe we'll see more and more of them coming in the future.

It's still going, and is actually available for purchase.

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/10/23/review-phantom-force.html
http://www.amazon.com/Excalibur-Phantom-Force-Chess/dp/B0018PWUJA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=toys-and-games&qid=1278785244&sr=8-1

Ah, they're still making one! Not networked, of course, and a lot more off-the-shelf.

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/10/23/review-phantom-force.html

To start with, the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty states that, yeah, there are millions of homeless people.

As about Police abuse, since your no doubt some dumb kid (you 'stoopid' comment shows your still young and dumb) would mean your too young to hear of things like Rodney King. Not to mention other incidents like what happened last year by the US border guards kinda show that it does happen.

So... I'm of course believing you have some citations for claims that these things don't happen? Or maybe you can just try going to school to begin with.

what like these ones? http://www.boingboing.net/2009/03/17/how-british-cops-are.html

Puff and strut now, big boy, but know going into this election cycle your team's major talking points are cutting off unemployment benefits and gutting social security.

Also blowjobs! At least in Texas, Republicans plan to really bring out the vote as the no-blowjob party. Democrats must be shivering in their boots over this!

The Texas Republican party has just passed it's new party platform that makes that toy a FELONY.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/26/texas-gop-comes-out.html#comment-819136

argentina ones are not Illegal as argentina has a free pass to US IP.

Yeah... that would be Antigua, not Argentina.

Mac users are very fond of pointing out this distinction, leaving out that trojans and malware, and social engineering, these days are the overwhelming majority of Windows issues as well.

Yes. Yes they are.

Now please list the count of Windows trojans vs. mac trojans. I'll get you started with the Mac count:

1 (or is this trojan actually in the wild yet?)

After all, we are talking about active trojans in the wild...

Do you not think that a system with a few orders of magnitude fewer active security threats might not, in fact, be more secure for the average user.

No I don't. I just believe that the claim that Mac has no such issues now is proven wrong. That is all. Nobody have claimed that Windows doesn't have a longer list of malware in the wild.

And questioning whether this one is in the wild is either disingenuous or you haven't RTFA or anything else on the subject. This is clearly proven to be in the wild, fx as a disguised iPhoto app for download.

Among some of the first Mac OSX trojans discovered in the wild was this one in 1996: http://www.macrumors.com/2006/02/16/the-first-mac-os-x-virus-a-new-os-x-trojan/.

And in 1997: http://boingboing.net/2007/10/31/mac-trojan-in-the-wi.html

Then you had these two: http://www.scmagazineus.com/two-in-the-wild-trojans-target-mac-os-x/article/111551/ . The ARDAgent one was drive-by stealth install (which Mac users also are fond of pointing out is a Windows only problem)

You've had a handful of others in the wild as well, like:
http://blog.trendmicro.com/mac-os-x-dns-changing-trojan-in-the-wild/ http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/30265/iservices-trojan-removal-tool

etc. There are more, but again, I'm not in any way claiming the list isn't shorter than similar Windows list, nobody is. But the claim that Mac OSX have no such malware in the wild have clearly been proven wrong (a long time ago).

My thoughts as well. However, judging by the opinions of the archivists at the Library of Congress, photographic media are a terrifically better long-term preservation strategy than magnetic tape or magnetic media of any variety: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/09/gallery-digitizing-t.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+boingboing/iBag+(Boing+Boing)

It seems to me that you could get incredible fidelity and preservation characteristics for audio recordings by using photographic media, which could then be played back either with a machine or as you suggest, by scanning. I'm sure it would be possible to construct a continuous feed scanner that could output either to an image file or process directly to an audio stream.

Either way, it seems like these guys took the long way through the problem, essentially trying to re-create an original machine rather than using modern technology to read what was on the tape. I'm guessing a continuous-feed scanner with reels attached could be hacked relatively quickly from mostly commodity parts, and the doing the rest in software would be far more interesting and hold far more long-term usefulness. I'm betting you could get it to produce an image plus simultaneous analog and digital data-streams from one sensor.

Hey to break the news to you, but Nobama? Is nothing but Bush dipped in Chocolate. Hell even Jon Stewart thinks he's full of shit. As for the "red state/blue state" bullshit? Why shouldn't we enjoy bleeding liberals dry? It's fun! Hell my state is in the black, how's yours? But the simple fact is you should look at your history. Ever hear of "he who doesn't learn from history" yada yada? Guess what happens in places where there is NO LAW? It is called vigilantism, and we are seeing it more and more down here as cops look the other way.

Of course you don't give a shit about the Mexicans getting treated like slaves, sexually abused, etc, as long as Paco picks your fruit...right? Hey come on down to TX, we'll score you a 14 year old! Do whatever you want with her, nobody gives a fuck around there, just Mexicans...right? With NO law you will ALWAYS get the scum of the earth, period. Rapists, dope dealers, car jackers (ever see what the insurance is like down south? Hell even the Mexican Feds are driving hot car!) so you can get off your "poor Paco fruit picker" bullshit, because for every Paco you got a half a dozen drug mules and assorted scum of the fucking earth.

Of course, who cares...right? It is just capitalism...right? It doesn't matter that deaths from illegals will be beating Iraq in about a yrear, or that AZ is becoming Bogota with all the kidnappings, they are just being good little capitalists! And if the states get blocked by the feds, watch the violence shoot through the roof. Like it or not blue boy, people in the south are sick of the fucking bullshit and having to have wetback crossing signs like fucking deer signs. Funny how a liberal supports abuse and slavery, but then again we always knew liberals were full of shit.

Silly mods. Haven't they heard about this: http://boingboing.net/2010/04/23/microsoft-wins-its-1.html

For those who don't know, Cory Doctorow also co-edits BoingBoing, a popular tech/culture group blog that's worth checking out.

Thanks,

Cory Doctorow

I'm sorry my opinion on what qualifies as interesting is different from yours. I thought these flying robot drones posted today, were pretty neat. Of course not all of it suits my tastes, but then, neither do all slashdot articles. And while I disagree with Xeni's review of the iPad, it doesn't mean that the whole blog is garbage by association.

For those who don't know, Cory Doctorow also co-edits BoingBoing, a popular tech/culture group blog that's worth checking out.

I already steer clear of the "1 click" option on Amazon. Not only is it something that never should have been patentable, but it's not even a "service" i want to use. If i don't want something enough to go through the usual purchasing process it's really not worth it. I don't need Amazon encouraging me to spend on a whim.

"1-nod" is an even worse idea. People might end up buying something just because of a "smile or even a raise of the eyebrow"? If Amazon actually managed to convince a lot of people to sign up for that service than purchases of items like this would skyrocket.

It's Funny!
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/04/bpgoatse.jpg

Laugh!

Most blogs I know just grab the work of others and pretend that they did some real work. Look at this brilliant blog post:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/03/commercially-availab.html

The blogger wrote one sentence. Wow. I can't wait for bloggers to continue when they finally overthrow the evil mainstream media.

What if they had a closed-source proprietary product of comparatively inferior quality fiercely guarded by the capricious and draconian rules of a corporation which transparently wants to conquer and control the I.T. media world, and nobody could be arsed to develop anything for it?

What if media developers weren't so damn greedy and shortsighted and none of them rushed to stake a claim in Apple's walled garden?

There're plenty of reasons (for example: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either.html/) why noone should be bothered with Apple but in all the whining and sounds of dismay everytime Apple does something anti-consumer and anti-developer, I don't hear a lot of people saying they're going to give away their iPhone or go to Android or whatever.

It's just a gadget, people. Your life was fine before you got it and it'll be a lot finer after you've forgotten about it. Assuming Jobs doesn't rule the world by then....

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/22/table-saw-that-stops.html search "capacitance" in the following page: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7290474.html It's not a library checkout system but it does address your opening question. Of course in this system, a hot-dog would work, so probably so would it in a live-ness detector based on capacitance.

Because Africa isn't the cliche poverty you're thinking of, small children with big bellies etc. Here's a nice example how useful information can be in the third world: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/05/22/infoladies-of-bangla.html.

Id rather be hit with a tazer then a 40cal any day. Nothing is 100% safe

That is a false dilemma. You have a right not to be assaulted in the first place.

and besides 99.999% of the time you did something to warrant getting hit, so its your own damned fault if you die.

You're right. You must have viewed the video I pasted. It was indeed that teenage boy's fault for being tasered. It was his fault that his back and leg were broken and he was in confused daze when officers tased 19 times for not complying. It was his fault he was charged with resisting arrest.

Sarcasm aside, I suppose you believe police are infallible and there is nothing wrong with an unusually high number of otherwise peaceful people being arrested for minor infractions with charges of resisting arrest and assault on a police officer thrown in for good measure.

Wake up. You are losing your civil rights. You probably don't realize it because it hasn't yet happened to you. Don't worry; at will at some point.

Id rather be hit with a tazer then a 40cal any day. Nothing is 100% safe

That is a false dilemma. You have a right not to be assaulted in the first place.

and besides 99.999% of the time you did something to warrant getting hit, so its your own damned fault if you die.

You're right. You must have viewed the video I pasted. It was indeed that teenage boy's fault for being tasered. It was his fault that his back and leg were broken and he was in confused daze when officers tased 19 times for not complying. It was his fault he was charged with resisting arrest.

Sarcasm aside, I suppose you believe police are infallible and there is nothing wrong with an unusually high number of otherwise peaceful people being arrested for minor infractions with charges of resisting arrest and assault on a police officer thrown in for good measure.

Wake up. You are losing your civil rights. You probably don't realize it because it hasn't yet happened to you. Don't worry; at will at some point.

At least with our capitalist systems, we have Constitutions to chain our governments from being abusive, elections to remove dickheds from said government, and Courts to protect the citizens from abuse by one another or the corporations.

Of course thats what those laws are for, to prevent people from being abused by things like fake DMCA notices, , litigation that is more or less 'legal blackmail', and no president would invade another country for no reason and highly support crimes like torture for fear of impeachment. Isn't it great?

At least with our capitalist systems, we have Constitutions to chain our governments from being abusive, elections to remove dickheds from said government, and Courts to protect the citizens from abuse by one another or the corporations.

Of course thats what those laws are for, to prevent people from being abused by things like fake DMCA notices, , litigation that is more or less 'legal blackmail', and no president would invade another country for no reason and highly support crimes like torture for fear of impeachment. Isn't it great?

That's "wide" about the 2012 Olympics...
http://boingboing.net/2007/06/04/london-2012-olympic-.html

Well, these aren't the only things being used to fight the whole concept of body scanners. Its just the another piece against their usage. In fact there are other, more better arguments against these scanners. Arguments like the images being used in 'less then professional' ways. Another problem being is they just don't work well enough.

The goal of book bans is to prevent you ever learning the toughts of others on a subject and as such to try to prevent you from ever sharing those thoughts so book bans and such restrictions on the transmission of ideas is inherently related to thoughtcrime.

But of course the UK could never be going down that road.

http://www.boingboing.net/200701091052.jpg

Or is it NULL? Either way he should stay away from the Sacramento Credit Union's online banking service.

I live in a city of 50,000. It would not cost billions of dollars to enter this market

As long as you only want an "internet" of 50,000 people, sure. Eventually, some of your customers are going to want to watch youtube, and when you go to hook up your little network to a competitor's network to get their packets there, what are you going to do if the other company says "NO"?

Don't worry though, your work won't be in vain. I'm sure the national ISP will buy your carefully laid network at pennies on the dollar at your bankruptcy auction.

Ah. A source perhaps? http://www.boingboing.net/2010/05/06/bp-oil-spill-conspir.html

The quality argument is weak. What do political cartoons have to do with "quality?" What do sex themed apps have to do with "quality?" What about banning an app that fetches books from Project Gutenberg http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/22/apple-says-no-projec.html ? Quality control in all these cases? What about this one: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/apple-scratch-app/ ? Was this about quality too: http://www.newser.com/off-the-grid/post/451/creepy-steve-jobs-may-not-want-you-to-read-this-or-will-break-down-your-door.html ?

Apple is not interested in quality, and the argument that they are is nothing more than an excuse from apologists.

For downloading I have no idea where I can download and install Office, Quicken, or TurboTax legally.

Office, Quicken, TurboTax. HTH!

And sleep is not instant on.

"Yeah, I asked for a shaggy dog, but I didn't mean that shaggy."

Come on. What do you think the iPad does when you "turn it off"? It goes to sleep, just like the iPhone and iPod (and Android devices, and most smartphones and PDAs). When it has to do a full reboot, it takes around 15 seconds, which is nothing special.

I have had countless times I've gone to boot a Netbook or Laptop that I left in sleep for a week only to find the battery had completely drained.

Heh, my Mac laptop did that even if I shut it down completely. I think that's a "feature" of the battery.

I have yet to find a Netbook with a 10 hour battery life

Try this one, this one, or this one.

Hell, even my full-sized laptop will run for 6 hours on a charge.

If you live in Canada and this didn't piss you off enough then there's always this you can use to fuel your rage.

not done with drones - but how much easier it would be if you're even
one more level detached from the reality?? when killing is like a videogame.. :-P

wiki-leaks video of airstrikes on reporters
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/05/wikileaks-video-of-u.html#more

There's always fair use.

And that would be relevant if they had equivalent sales. As things stand, it actually argues against your point: ebook sales in the US last year come to about $13 million dollars out of a (roughly) $23 billion dollar a year industry, according to the AAP. If the quality of the product and the price of the alternatives are the only driving factors, then I conclude that people are unwilling to pay equal amounts for a product that has no associated baseline costs and a product whose cost is dominated by those factors.

The low numbers are partially because the baseline cost is free - go to the library (or Project Gutenberg for pre-1923 works, the last year to probably ever be public domain). The truth is, the product you buy is not a product, it's a one-platform non-transferable DRM encrusted unresaleable bunch of words that will be disabled when the dot.com at the other end of the wire decides it's profitable to abandon or goes out of business, sold for the same price as a tangible product. Ebooks are massively crippled so they are worth even less than a sherlockholmes.txt ASCII file, and yet have still been priced uncompetitively, almost so they won't make a dent in the centuries-old paper codex business.

The only sheeple customers who can't say no to DRM seem to be those who respond to marketing that tells them they need to buy the latest gadgets to be cool and fashionable. Why do you think iPhone buyers were so upset when the price of the phone dropped from $600 to $400? Because more people could afford to join the fashionista club.

It's expensive, although much better than last time I looked at a similar ISP.

I pay £18/month, including the phone line rental -- I get 40GB/month although I'm not aware of ever hitting that limit. There's also unlimited UK landline calls. (It's with TalkTalk, who recently spoke out against the proposed pro-big-media copyright laws, which was a nice surprise. I only picked them because they were cheap.)

Yesterday I noticed an advert for broadband for £6.95/month (not including phone line), with Plus.net. That's only 10GB/month.

Whatever happened to just wearing a ski mask when committing a "crime"? I'm not sure I'd feel less silly painting my face than simply putting on a mask.

Not just any mask...