...we'll need to build something to deconstruct the Commercial Space Station so that it doesn't pose a hazard to other orbiting items as space junk.
We could call it "Deconstructor of the Commercial Space Station", although I guess that's kind of a long name and would take a lot of effort to say it all the time.... hmmm... maybe we can come up with a shorter name....
Microsoft may not like GPLv2, but at least it's not GPLv3. There's only basic patent language in v2, and v3 really turbo-charges the language, providing much better protection from software patent lawsuits.
But in some ways it's a moot point, as Microsoft won't be hosting or distributing any of this software (AFAIK), they're just pointing some of their customers over there for service.
And hey, if it throws some extra money towards Automattic, then that's cool, too.
According to TFA, the (more) open system is actually relying on a number of not-so-open protocols and formats.
* Open source system. Royalties are paid by the transmitter manufactures only (and do date, most major US transmitter manufactures have already paid these). There is no royalties paid by the broadcaster to install DRM or by the consumer when purchasing a DRM capable receiver. One company does not own the rights to the modulation system for all the broadcasters in the country.
It's good that no royalties have to be paid by broadcasters or consumers, but given that I was just at the Open Hardware Summit and have a curiosity about things like GNU Radio, hopefully the amateurs won't be shaken down if they build their own receivers or transmitters.
* The CODEC is HE-AAC 4, which is widely used world wide.
The thing is, even if this isn't a completely open format, it's entirely plausible that this is the closest that anyone has gotten. While we could consider using this for now, we should always look forward and try to figure out how open we want the next set of standards to be.
I've tried to parse that sentence several ways and I'm still not getting it. Even replacing a single word in it (say, "Provided" -> "Provider(s)") doesn't seem to fix it properly.
IBM's been doing that sort of thing for years. They ship you a mainframe with more processors than you ordered or a disk array with more disk than you ordered, and you can pay them to turn it on.
Yes, but I'm pretty sure that's all predicated on IBM service contracts and/or the license on the IBM OS/application software running on the system.
If you're running a completely-FOSS debian install on top of these new Intel processors, what leverage do they have on you?
Okay, so it's entirely possible that you ran across a bug, but absent us actually looking at the particular bug and seeing how relevant it is to how many users, it's hard for us to judge how "fair" it was for the bug to have existed but not been fixed since 2005.
Or are you going to tell us that every bug found in Mail.app since 2005 has been fixed? (if Apple even has a public bug tracker and never redacts it...)
Dude, you're missing a closing ) there and it's driving me mad:(
Does your browser do something silly like convert emoticons to images?
Take a look again:
(if we...think about it...:-)
The smiley at the end is a 2-birds-1-stone type deal, emoting and serving as an end-paren.
Ordinarily, mismatched parens grate on my nerves, but a smiley can (optionally) close a parenthetical clause. If you think about it, the only logical explanation is that smileys have magical properties. Hmmmm...maybe if they use more of them over in the Middle East, we can finally have peace!
So, ladies, for the sake of world peace, sleep with an engineer.
What about the gay engineers? Make sure they get some nookie, too! (if we got all stereotypical, we'd assume they'd build a bomb and leave no fingerprint marks, and they'd clean up all of the evidence perfectly. And then they'd social-engineer that bomb anywhere they wanted to take it. Pretty scary, if you think about it...:-)
Um... dextrose *is* glucose. (Or rather, dextrose is D-glucose, but there isn't any appreciable amount of L-glucose in corn.)
It's either ignorance, or a deliberate attempt to pull in the "evils" of technology.
Hmmm, interesting.
Here's how I currently perceive the following items:
- glucose
Glucose is a particular sugar molecule (and isomers). I usually imagine it as a powder, as I think I might have only seen it in that pure form.
- dextrose
Dextrose (I believed) was a slightly different molecule, although the AC and wikipedia remind me that it's just an isomer of glucose. Reminds me of maltodextrin on labels (see Dextrose Equivalent note below).
- corn syrup
I assume this is actually a syrup, and is very sugary. Usually the stuff I see is tainted with vanilla and salt, so it probably wouldn't make that good of a wort. Sometimes it's light, sometimes it's tinted a dark color (to look like molasses, I guess?)
- high fructose corn syrup
I think I've only seen this one as a food ingredient. I assume it's...more "fructosier" than the regular corn syrup, and would expect it to be sweeter. Again, I'd expect this to be in a viscous syrup format.
- corn sugar
I've used this in small quantities for brewing (bottling, mostly). Very refined, comes in powder form.
Also, the wikipedia page about Dextrose equivalents is kind of cool. It talks about how sugars are measured on a sweetness scale as compared to dextrose/glucose.
Corn sugar is a natural sweetener that is made utilizing starch that is extracted from kernels of corn. The extracted cornstarch is then refined to create a solid sugar or to make another popular sweetening agent known as corn syrup...
The process for making corn sugar begins with the removal of starchy elements from the corn. The extracted elements are actually glucose, although the refining process will transform them into another form of sugar known as dextrose. With the production of syrup, the corn sugar becomes a high fructose corn syrup...
It sounds like "corn sugar" is already used to refer to a separate product. If they don't want to continue using "HFCS," then come up with another word, the same way they did with "Tilapia."
But I think they're shooting themselves in the foot. I mean, are they trying to give ammunition to the healthier foods? First, the other projects can continue to claim that they don't contain HFCS, and they can also make fun of the other brands for trying to hide what's in their foods.
I mean, it's going to be like a fucking field day for the health foods.
Software patents such as the one for public key cryptography follow in the tradition of the engineering patents.
Do you mean that for any given software patent "S," you could write up a pure-hardware patent H that was an implementation of S?
Notice that they do not prevent a business (or foundation, hobbyist, etc) from making a competitive offering,
Hmm...not sure I agree there. Software patents prevent interoperability and close off entire field of research or implementation to new players for 2 decades.
they simply claim an avenue of implementation which,
The words may be the same, but "avenue of implementation" means different things here.
Here's a comparison I like to use. Let's say that I invent a new corn shucking device "CleanEarz". It works faster and uses less energy than other devices used to shuck corn, so I expect that I can find a market for it. The cool thing is that while I have invented a better corn-shucker, people are free to try to create new mechanical corn shuckers themselves. For most people, we'd all agree that it's pretty much a certainty that: - without infringing on my "CleanEarz" patents, - another method could be found to shuck corn (it might be worse, but there's another method out there)
Now let's take a software patent that covers a video codec like H.264. Given the patents on H.264, would it be possible for you to write an independent implementation of an H.264 encoder without infringing on those patents?
Notwithstanding various bits of legal trickery (that wouldn't work in most case), the answer is a resounding no. We're talking about an algorithm + a general-purpose computer, so there's very little one can do to avoid infringement.
assuming that the patent examiners have done a good job, may not have been hit on for many years otherwise.
That sentence makes absolutely no sense to me. The patent examiners have nothing to do with what gets submitted. Either there's a nugget of a new, interesting idea in the patent submissions somewhere, or there isn't. Maybe the patent language will be too confusing for people to understand the idea, but as long as the patent filer has actually correctly described their machine, the idea is there. Patent examiners aren't magicians.
Contrast with business methods and merchandising patents, many of which seem to be the output of a bunch of bright people sitting around a conference table jabbering excitedly while hoping that some of their ideas are at least five minutes ahead of what someone else has filed.
Like software patents, I don't really understand how business method patents were supposed to help the general economy. It seems to me that in the free market you just want everyone running their businesses as efficiently as they can, and if one company finds a good way of doing business they can either keep it private (i.e. trade secrets), they can make it public (e.g. publish a whitepaper or something), or something in the middle.
When it comes down to it, businesses don't need software/b-method patents as encouragement to innovate. They'll do just fine as-is
I'm neutral on the subject of banning software patents, but I think they should start by banning business method or merchandising patents...Those never should be patentable, whether it involves software or not. The ban should be retroactive and they should start weeding those out.
Why are you so vehemently opposed to business-method patents and not to software patents? In both cases one is patenting the concept of an abstract process, whether it's an algorithm executed on a chunk of silicon or it's a process for pushing around people and merchandise.
What, in your mind, is so much worse about the business-method patents?
I think that a lot of software patents are bogus in that they are generalized and obvious.
I agree that a lot of software patents do seem very obvious! Figuring out what should be patentable and what shouldn't be patentable can be a very difficult question for legislators (and then for the lawyers, patent office, and courts to interpret).
What kind of metric would you suggest that the patent office and courts use to separate the too-generalized and too-obvious patents from those that should be patent-eligible?
Like single-click purchasing or whatever it was called - that is just silly.
Right, that's Amazon/Bezos's "One click" patent.
But a patent on a new type of sorting algorithm or image processing algorithm could represent significant time and effort and IR&D dollars and should be protected
Do you think that software patents produce an environment of greater innovation than an environment without software patents?
I mean, I assume that there's more to your argument than that. We don't just go around granting temporary monopolies to people because we feel like it. The whole idea behind patents is that society cordons-off a little space for a person or company for the purpose of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts.
Personally I'm not really in favor of software patents, and one of the primary reasons is that I'm not sufficiently convinced that the benefits that they provide for society are sufficient to justify the inconvenience of a monopoly (even a time-limited one).
Some people have suggested that software patents should have a shorter lifetime than other patents, say one of 3-4 years. Such proposals aren't perfect, but I do find them interesting as the fact that such ideas are even discussed indicates that people recognize that software patents are really different from, say, hardware patents.
What do you think about the idea of shortening the lifetime of software patents?
1) US 2) Now that I'm investigating, it appears a lot of banks offer pretty much this same service. Some, as "Late Adopter" noted above, don't charge a fee for International transfers if you hold a high enough balance or account level.
Why does electronic fund transfer have to be so complicated?
With my bank I can hop online and pay anyone in the world any amount of money. Well, they seem to limit it to how much I currently have in my account, and if the person I wish to pay does not have a real address (No "221B Baker Street + 2i" allowed), I'll have to hand deliver it instead of getting them to post it for free, but there's little limitation there.
Oh, and did I mention that the whole thing doesn't cost me a cent?
Heck, the only thing it's missing is a few features like: - The ability to transfer money anonymously (all the recipient would get would be a confirmation crypto hash or something, maybe something that I could reveal later in a court, but that they couldn't* pin on me) - The ability to make a storefront so all of the fund transfer went through "Qubit's Quantum Quickymart" - Better account management, and a way to group or tag business and bills vs. friends vs. impulse game purchases (The way GMail handles email is a good first shot at a UI)
The bank isn't making money when I transfer funds, but they don't care -- they're already making money on the stuff I have sitting in their coffers.
So why are we stuck with PayPal, which is pretty much a - Shady - Costly - Annoying - Duplicate service
??
Hopefully some bank (or series of banks) will make this happen for us. Moving money around shouldn't be anywhere near this complicated!
The key problem is firmware updates are not included in linux drivers due to legal reasons
What law? What about the ath9k stuff from Atheros. AFAIK they're funding that work and the firmware is as open as an unpatched windows machine...
it's not too difficult to reverse engineer that part from windows drivers
Sure, but it's probably much easier to just write the firmware when you have the spec in hand! Also, how legal is it to reverse-engineer the windows drivers? I know that the rules are often different across the pond...
I think it might be enough to be able to not include the firmware in the repositories, but to dynamically download the firmware from a specified FTP site and then apply it.
But what about people installing off a usb thumbdrive on a system with a wireless card but no ethernet jack (or at least no ethernet cable handy) ?
To sum up: - Kudos to Broadcom. We didn't think you'd do this in 2010! - Dear Broadcom, please consider releasing the firmware as well (and drivers/firmware for older models...we're still using them!) - Dear Users, please consider how open broadcom and atheros chipsets are when you buy stuff!
AFAIK they still haven't released the driver for interfacing with the battery to charge it... the stock reason was that they were afraid people would blow up their batteries.
Now public safety is a lofty goal, but honestly if Nokia wants more people to believe in their commitment to an open future, and wants them to jump on the MeeGo train, they're really going to have to make some big gestures, and a push to open all they can on the n900 would really be a good start.
What's the next gen of hardware? The N9 is it? Heck, better than the N9, if Nokia really wants to show off they could try to get 100% open drivers there. It'll be tough/impossible if they go with an Imagination GPU (so I think that would rule out OMAP), so maybe it'd be everything but the GPU.
Slashdot Mirror
...we'll need to build something to deconstruct the Commercial Space Station so that it doesn't pose a hazard to other orbiting items as space junk.
We could call it "Deconstructor of the Commercial Space Station", although I guess that's kind of a long name and would take a lot of effort to say it all the time.... hmmm... maybe we can come up with a shorter name....
Microsoft may not like GPLv2, but at least it's not GPLv3. There's only basic patent language in v2, and v3 really turbo-charges the language, providing much better protection from software patent lawsuits.
But in some ways it's a moot point, as Microsoft won't be hosting or distributing any of this software (AFAIK), they're just pointing some of their customers over there for service.
And hey, if it throws some extra money towards Automattic, then that's cool, too.
According to TFA, the (more) open system is actually relying on a number of not-so-open protocols and formats.
* Open source system. Royalties are paid by the transmitter manufactures only (and do date, most major US transmitter manufactures have already paid these). There is no royalties paid by the broadcaster to install DRM or by the consumer when purchasing a DRM capable receiver. One company does not own the rights to the modulation system for all the broadcasters in the country.
It's good that no royalties have to be paid by broadcasters or consumers, but given that I was just at the Open Hardware Summit and have a curiosity about things like GNU Radio, hopefully the amateurs won't be shaken down if they build their own receivers or transmitters.
* The CODEC is HE-AAC 4, which is widely used world wide.
AAC is patented, and they make you pay money.
In addition to that, DRM30 station have the ability to transmit low frame rate H. 264 video.
H.264 is patented, and they make you pay money.
The thing is, even if this isn't a completely open format, it's entirely plausible that this is the closest that anyone has gotten. While we could consider using this for now, we should always look forward and try to figure out how open we want the next set of standards to be.
Dude, I had the only comment on this article for like 2 minutes and I'm the one who gets modded redundant.
WTF, mods...
What the heck is up with that title?
'Throttling' Broadband Provided Sued In Australia
I've tried to parse that sentence several ways and I'm still not getting it. Even replacing a single word in it (say, "Provided" -> "Provider(s)") doesn't seem to fix it properly.
WTF, editors?
IBM's been doing that sort of thing for years. They ship you a mainframe with more processors than you ordered or a disk array with more disk than you ordered, and you can pay them to turn it on.
Yes, but I'm pretty sure that's all predicated on IBM service contracts and/or the license on the IBM OS/application software running on the system.
If you're running a completely-FOSS debian install on top of these new Intel processors, what leverage do they have on you?
submitted it to Bugzilla
Test case + bug #, or it didn't happen.
Okay, so it's entirely possible that you ran across a bug, but absent us actually looking at the particular bug and seeing how relevant it is to how many users, it's hard for us to judge how "fair" it was for the bug to have existed but not been fixed since 2005.
Or are you going to tell us that every bug found in Mail.app since 2005 has been fixed? (if Apple even has a public bug tracker and never redacts it...)
Dude, you're missing a closing ) there and it's driving me mad :(
Does your browser do something silly like convert emoticons to images?
Take a look again:
(if we ...think about it... :-)
The smiley at the end is a 2-birds-1-stone type deal, emoting and serving as an end-paren.
Ordinarily, mismatched parens grate on my nerves, but a smiley can (optionally) close a parenthetical clause. If you think about it, the only logical explanation is that smileys have magical properties. Hmmmm...maybe if they use more of them over in the Middle East, we can finally have peace!
So, ladies, for the sake of world peace, sleep with an engineer.
What about the gay engineers? Make sure they get some nookie, too! (if we got all stereotypical, we'd assume they'd build a bomb and leave no fingerprint marks, and they'd clean up all of the evidence perfectly. And then they'd social-engineer that bomb anywhere they wanted to take it. Pretty scary, if you think about it... :-)
Um... dextrose *is* glucose. (Or rather, dextrose is D-glucose, but there isn't any appreciable amount of L-glucose in corn.)
It's either ignorance, or a deliberate attempt to pull in the "evils" of technology.
Hmmm, interesting.
Here's how I currently perceive the following items:
- glucose Glucose is a particular sugar molecule (and isomers). I usually imagine it as a powder, as I think I might have only seen it in that pure form. - dextrose Dextrose (I believed) was a slightly different molecule, although the AC and wikipedia remind me that it's just an isomer of glucose. Reminds me of maltodextrin on labels (see Dextrose Equivalent note below). - corn syrup I assume this is actually a syrup, and is very sugary. Usually the stuff I see is tainted with vanilla and salt, so it probably wouldn't make that good of a wort. Sometimes it's light, sometimes it's tinted a dark color (to look like molasses, I guess?) - high fructose corn syrup I think I've only seen this one as a food ingredient. I assume it's...more "fructosier" than the regular corn syrup, and would expect it to be sweeter. Again, I'd expect this to be in a viscous syrup format. - corn sugar I've used this in small quantities for brewing (bottling, mostly). Very refined, comes in powder form.Also, the wikipedia page about Dextrose equivalents is kind of cool. It talks about how sugars are measured on a sweetness scale as compared to dextrose/glucose.
Per Amazon:
Corn Sugar is the common name for dextrose.
and per Wise Geek
Corn sugar is a natural sweetener that is made utilizing starch that is extracted from kernels of corn. The extracted cornstarch is then refined to create a solid sugar or to make another popular sweetening agent known as corn syrup...
The process for making corn sugar begins with the removal of starchy elements from the corn. The extracted elements are actually glucose, although the refining process will transform them into another form of sugar known as dextrose. With the production of syrup, the corn sugar becomes a high fructose corn syrup...
It sounds like "corn sugar" is already used to refer to a separate product. If they don't want to continue using "HFCS," then come up with another word, the same way they did with "Tilapia."
But I think they're shooting themselves in the foot. I mean, are they trying to give ammunition to the healthier foods? First, the other projects can continue to claim that they don't contain HFCS, and they can also make fun of the other brands for trying to hide what's in their foods.
I mean, it's going to be like a fucking field day for the health foods.
In that post he also expresses dislike for the American style of politics in which he will now be able to participate directly."
...but just don't email the POTUS and call him a p***k!
is here
that site is taking one heck of a beating...
Software patents such as the one for public key cryptography follow in the tradition of the engineering patents.
Do you mean that for any given software patent "S," you could write up a pure-hardware patent H that was an implementation of S?
Notice that they do not prevent a business (or foundation, hobbyist, etc) from making a competitive offering,
Hmm...not sure I agree there. Software patents prevent interoperability and close off entire field of research or implementation to new players for 2 decades.
they simply claim an avenue of implementation which,
The words may be the same, but "avenue of implementation" means different things here.
Here's a comparison I like to use. Let's say that I invent a new corn shucking device "CleanEarz". It works faster and uses less energy than other devices used to shuck corn, so I expect that I can find a market for it. The cool thing is that while I have invented a better corn-shucker, people are free to try to create new mechanical corn shuckers themselves. For most people, we'd all agree that it's pretty much a certainty that:
- without infringing on my "CleanEarz" patents,
- another method could be found to shuck corn (it might be worse, but there's another method out there)
Now let's take a software patent that covers a video codec like H.264. Given the patents on H.264, would it be possible for you to write an independent implementation of an H.264 encoder without infringing on those patents?
Notwithstanding various bits of legal trickery (that wouldn't work in most case), the answer is a resounding no. We're talking about an algorithm + a general-purpose computer, so there's very little one can do to avoid infringement.
assuming that the patent examiners have done a good job, may not have been hit on for many years otherwise.
That sentence makes absolutely no sense to me. The patent examiners have nothing to do with what gets submitted. Either there's a nugget of a new, interesting idea in the patent submissions somewhere, or there isn't. Maybe the patent language will be too confusing for people to understand the idea, but as long as the patent filer has actually correctly described their machine, the idea is there. Patent examiners aren't magicians.
Contrast with business methods and merchandising patents, many of which seem to be the output of a bunch of bright people sitting around a conference table jabbering excitedly while hoping that some of their ideas are at least five minutes ahead of what someone else has filed.
Like software patents, I don't really understand how business method patents were supposed to help the general economy. It seems to me that in the free market you just want everyone running their businesses as efficiently as they can, and if one company finds a good way of doing business they can either keep it private (i.e. trade secrets), they can make it public (e.g. publish a whitepaper or something), or something in the middle.
When it comes down to it, businesses don't need software/b-method patents as encouragement to innovate. They'll do just fine as-is
-A handshake machine, its just a mannequin arm that moves up and down on a small motor (the drawings made it look REALLY like a handjob machine)
Did they happen to include a working prototype?
I'm neutral on the subject of banning software patents, but I think they should start by banning business method or merchandising patents...Those never should be patentable, whether it involves software or not. The ban should be retroactive and they should start weeding those out.
Why are you so vehemently opposed to business-method patents and not to software patents? In both cases one is patenting the concept of an abstract process, whether it's an algorithm executed on a chunk of silicon or it's a process for pushing around people and merchandise.
What, in your mind, is so much worse about the business-method patents?
I think that a lot of software patents are bogus in that they are generalized and obvious.
I agree that a lot of software patents do seem very obvious! Figuring out what should be patentable and what shouldn't be patentable can be a very difficult question for legislators (and then for the lawyers, patent office, and courts to interpret).
What kind of metric would you suggest that the patent office and courts use to separate the too-generalized and too-obvious patents from those that should be patent-eligible?
Like single-click purchasing or whatever it was called - that is just silly.
Right, that's Amazon/Bezos's "One click" patent.
But a patent on a new type of sorting algorithm or image processing algorithm could represent significant time and effort and IR&D dollars and should be protected
Do you think that software patents produce an environment of greater innovation than an environment without software patents?
I mean, I assume that there's more to your argument than that. We don't just go around granting temporary monopolies to people because we feel like it. The whole idea behind patents is that society cordons-off a little space for a person or company for the purpose of promoting the progress of science and the useful arts.
Personally I'm not really in favor of software patents, and one of the primary reasons is that I'm not sufficiently convinced that the benefits that they provide for society are sufficient to justify the inconvenience of a monopoly (even a time-limited one).
Some people have suggested that software patents should have a shorter lifetime than other patents, say one of 3-4 years. Such proposals aren't perfect, but I do find them interesting as the fact that such ideas are even discussed indicates that people recognize that software patents are really different from, say, hardware patents.
What do you think about the idea of shortening the lifetime of software patents?
I have 3 fairly recent patents (one hardware and two software)
Do you have a reasonable expectation that the software patents will only be used for defensive purposes?
(If not, do you believe that software patents are a good idea?)
What country, and what bank?
1) US
2) Now that I'm investigating, it appears a lot of banks offer pretty much this same service. Some, as "Late Adopter" noted above, don't charge a fee for International transfers if you hold a high enough balance or account level.
Why does electronic fund transfer have to be so complicated?
With my bank I can hop online and pay anyone in the world any amount of money. Well, they seem to limit it to how much I currently have in my account, and if the person I wish to pay does not have a real address (No "221B Baker Street + 2i" allowed), I'll have to hand deliver it instead of getting them to post it for free, but there's little limitation there.
Oh, and did I mention that the whole thing doesn't cost me a cent?
Heck, the only thing it's missing is a few features like:
- The ability to transfer money anonymously (all the recipient would get would be a confirmation crypto hash or something, maybe something that I could reveal later in a court, but that they couldn't* pin on me)
- The ability to make a storefront so all of the fund transfer went through "Qubit's Quantum Quickymart"
- Better account management, and a way to group or tag business and bills vs. friends vs. impulse game purchases (The way GMail handles email is a good first shot at a UI)
The bank isn't making money when I transfer funds, but they don't care -- they're already making money on the stuff I have sitting in their coffers.
So why are we stuck with PayPal, which is pretty much a
- Shady
- Costly
- Annoying
- Duplicate service
??
Hopefully some bank (or series of banks) will make this happen for us. Moving money around shouldn't be anywhere near this complicated!
* Says the power of NP.
The key problem is firmware updates are not included in linux drivers due to legal reasons
What law? What about the ath9k stuff from Atheros. AFAIK they're funding that work and the firmware is as open as an unpatched windows machine...
it's not too difficult to reverse engineer that part from windows drivers
Sure, but it's probably much easier to just write the firmware when you have the spec in hand! Also, how legal is it to reverse-engineer the windows drivers? I know that the rules are often different across the pond...
I think it might be enough to be able to not include the firmware in the repositories, but to dynamically download the firmware from a specified FTP site and then apply it.
But what about people installing off a usb thumbdrive on a system with a wireless card but no ethernet jack (or at least no ethernet cable handy) ?
The real solution here is to open the firmware. I'm no expert here, but I believe that the current atheros chips have both open drivers and open firmware. So you don't have any distribution, linking, derivative work, etc... issues.
To sum up:
- Kudos to Broadcom. We didn't think you'd do this in 2010!
- Dear Broadcom, please consider releasing the firmware as well (and drivers/firmware for older models...we're still using them!)
- Dear Users, please consider how open broadcom and atheros chipsets are when you buy stuff!
4 laws good, 2 laws better!
Erm...wait... how did that go again?
(And don't forget the zeroth law, "The freedom to run a robot, for any purpose, as long as it doesn't hurt humanity")
AFAIK they still haven't released the driver for interfacing with the battery to charge it... the stock reason was that they were afraid people would blow up their batteries.
Now public safety is a lofty goal, but honestly if Nokia wants more people to believe in their commitment to an open future, and wants them to jump on the MeeGo train, they're really going to have to make some big gestures, and a push to open all they can on the n900 would really be a good start.
What's the next gen of hardware? The N9 is it? Heck, better than the N9, if Nokia really wants to show off they could try to get 100% open drivers there. It'll be tough/impossible if they go with an Imagination GPU (so I think that would rule out OMAP), so maybe it'd be everything but the GPU.
Just click here and avoid the Slashdotting...