Seriously, this is just the marketroids doing their thing. When the accountants start warning about threats from Linux, we know there's a real threat. Linux is getting mention in the latest annual filing, too.
Most people already carry multiple forms of ID anyway. A standard would make it easier.
With a single form of ID, there is a single point of failure. When the One True Database has bad data about you, you will be screwed. If the One True Database says that you are a sex offender, then you are.
Furthermore, since the One True Database is always right, by definition, you will find it harder than ever to fix those mistakes.
Government inefficiency is the most immediate bulwark of our freedoms in the U.S. We don't want to risk eliminating it.
Here's a useful litmus test: if something would make life harder for would-be terrorists, it's going to take away freedoms we can't afford to loose, and the government wins. That's worse than letting the terrorists win, since the government has the ability and moral authority to kill far more of us than the terrorists could ever dream of hurting.
... it would take to long for the government to catch up to the BBC.
Hate to pop your bubble, but the BBC is the British government. Well, it's an arm or subsidiary of the government, at least. So, for the Americans in the audience, it's like saying: ``The government caught up with the Post Office.'' Technically, they aren't the same, but practically, there isn't enough difference.
I know that the answer to ``why?'' is ``why not?''. but I'm trying to think of some practical use for this.
Maybe you could use some Knoppix-style hardware detection to probe the hardware at boot-time, then custom-compile a kernel to match? I just can't really see that that would be an improvement over just compiling in everything and the kitchen sink as a module.
... does this mean the edge of the fabric is really sharp?
Can you keep it stiff? Paper will cut you if you can keep it stiff enough to slide your finger along the edge with a little pressure, but silk cloth of the same thickness won't because it isn't stiff.
If you can figure out a way to make it rigid, you'll have a nifty new razor blade.
I only use Linux, so I only buy hardware that works with Linux. If it doesn't work with Linux, it's just a paperweight.
I don't do games, and I have no use for 3D. A nice 2D card that was endorsed by the kernel and X gurus (something like ``this company is doing everything we ask to make sure we can use their hardware'') would be an easy sale to me, as long as it didn't cost much more than the low-end NVidia.
If it would do dual-head, and drive a couple of 21 inch monitors at 1600 x 1200 with 32bit color, it could cost way more than the low-end Nvidia and be a great deal.
I'll be in the market for some new hardware about the time they could get this out, too. I'll be keeping my eyes open.
Does he think that cheaper hardware will make copying software harder to do?
Yes, it will, because the down-market, sub-$100 PC will be a cardboard box whose guts are a picture of a motherboard and a mental image of a CD writer.
The part he hasn't thought through is that folks will only need a mental image of a blue screen to make it work up to MS's usual high standards.
This just goes to show that most of us aren't successful because we aren't stupid enough to say something like that with a straight face.
Anyway, why exactly do you need a PowerPC 603e and two USB ports for..uh..diagnosing cars?
The car has a computer onboard. It takes one to know one, so to speak. You have to interface with the onboard diagnostic system to read the trouble codes it has stored. You can read the codes with a simple tool. According to the article, this has nothing to do with diagnostics, though; that was about the only thing the article didn't mention. Way to many buzzwords.
The article did mention:
Call center services such as GM OnStar
In-car navigation and guidance systems
Car/cellphone integration (for example, for hands-free operation through the radio and a dash-mounted microphone)
XM radio and Becker Online Pro
Fleet management systems such as Qualcomm Omnitracs
... an embedded direct solution might function a little better by avoiding the overhead of simply running Linux.
If you're going to have a network interface and drive a terminal or a gui, you can either reinvent Linux, poorly, or you can use whatever portions of Linux help. Since you can fit the entire OS on a single
floppy, I don't think it has to be any heavier than is really necessary.
A friend of mine had a Kaypro Four which he overclocked. It had originally had (if I'm remembering correctly) a 4MHz 8085, which he replaced with an 8MHz Z80 (and a new crystal). He had to replace a few of the other big chips on the board, as I recall. When he was done, he had a machine that was way faster then the IBM PC with its measly 4.77MHZ 8088.
This was in about 1981. He was doing freelance programming, using SBasic, and claimed speeding up the compiles was worth the few bucks to took to do the work.
The license terms look reasonable: Don't sue us over our patent, don't say we (Yahoo!) endorse you (the licensee), you can distribute and sublicense on the same terms. I just gave it a quick read, but if I didn't miss anything, this is OK.
I've quoted some of the interesting looking parts below.
1.1 Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, DomainKeys Developer hereby grants You, a royalty-free, worldwide, sub-licensable, non-exclusive license under its rights to the Yahoo! Patent Claims to make, use, sell, offer for sale, and/or import Implementations.
3. TERMS.
3.1. You agree not to assert against Yahoo!, or any other DomainKeys Developer, a patent infringement claim against any Implementation ("Implementation IP Claim").
3.2. To indicate your assent to the terms and conditions of this Agreement and in order to obtain a license to make, use, sell, offer for sale, and/or import Implementations, You must include or preserve the following prominently displayed statement in the source code and object code of any such Implementations : "This code incorporates intellectual property owned by Yahoo! and licensed pursuant to the Yahoo! DomainKeys Patent License Agreement.".
3.3. You will not use the name of Yahoo! to endorse or promote any products or Implementations without specific prior written permission of Yahoo!. "DomainKeys" is a trademark of Yahoo!. However, You may state Your Implementation is "DomainKeys compliant", "supports DomainKeys", or is "DomainKeys-enabled", without citation to Yahoo!, but You should create Your own product names or trademarks for Your specific Implementations and the term "DomainKeys" shall not be used by You in or as part of a name for Your specific Implementations.
3.4. You may choose to distribute Implementations under this Agreement or a separate agreement, including without limitation a sublicense agreement, provided that:
(a) such agreement complies with the terms and conditions of this Agreement;
(b) a copy of this Agreement or the separate agreement is included with each copy of the Implementations along with the following prominently displayed statement: "By making, using, selling, offering for sale, and/or importing this product, you agree to the terms and conditions of the Yahoo! DomainKeys Patent License Agreement or other separate agreement contained herein."; and
(c) if distributed under a separate agreement, such separate agreement must contain terms no less protective of DomainKeys Developers than the terms and conditions of this Agreement, including, without limitation, Sections 3.1, 3.4, 3.7, 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3.
and if any of the novels turn out well ...
on
Kamikaze Novel Writing
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
If any of the novels turn out to be good, we'll have found another Asimov (he wrote hundreds of books, so must have been able to write this fast).
The two other posts I see are complaining about no wireless, but I'm thinking this is a computer in the palm of my hand. The only lack that I see is no docking station.
Seriously, add an inexpensive docking station, and this would be the ultimate ultracompact laptop. You could use it as a normal PDA where ever you are, and at home or work you could plug it into the docking station and be on the network, use it for email and typing, and so on. For most people, this would make a practical second computer.
Lets just hope the price (including that cheap docking station) matches the size!
The article got it wrong: they compared the tit-for-tat strategy for the iterated prisoner's dilemma to mutual assured destruction. That's wrong, since nuclear war is usually considered to be a one-time game: once you've blown each other up, there is no next round. Tit-for-tat requires that there always be a following round.
Repeated games have radically different outcomes than one-time games. It's long been known that where cooperation is possible, cooperation can beat solitary strategies in repeated games. I really don't think there's anything surprising here.
It's not ``monopoly meet monopoly'', it's ``monopolymonopsony''.
Yes, I think the difference does matter.
Since Walmart is so big, they have some monopsony power: they (the buyer) can set the prices at which they buy. Since RIAA is an oligopoly, they set the prices at which they sell. ``Monopoly v. monopoly'' just doesn't make sense.
Really, it should be ``oligopsonist meet oligopolist'' since the RIAA is a cartel of producers.
What I've heard is that it is called an ``amorphous solid''. It has no crystalline structure, as do most other solids, but it is solid.
... if you let it sit for 100 years it would droop...
I've heard various stories on this one. I don't think that I believe them. Consider antique bottles. Even the ones which have been buried under many feet of soil don't seem to have ``drooped'' out of shape, even after several hundred years. I think that at human-survivable temperatures (say, 0-100C, to be generous), glass isn't going to sag, period.
I had no idea what a ceramic lens is, so I googled and found: this press release and this on Gizmodo.
In a nutshell, the transparent ceramic lens can be thinner and lighter than a glass lens because it has a higher refractice index (bends light more). It's also stronger, they say. Nifty, just what you need to make a smaller camera. Of course, if you put that tiny lens in front of lousy electronics, you get a lousy camera. As another post mentioned, the review said there was a lot of noise, which sounds like a lousy camera to me.
Sounds like a lot of money for a little computer
on
OQO For Sale
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
``Under $2000'' for something which is too small and wimpy to use as a desktop replacement or for gaming (from the article: ``... the OQO isn't designed to be a desktop replacement, nor intended to be a portable video game machine...), and too big to put in your pocket?
I think this fills a need that too many folks don't have.
Also, the article says that many of the specs are out of date, but they're going to launch anyway. That tells me that the second generation OQO is going to have more guts, and be out as soon as enough suckers have bought enough of the wimpy ones to finance further development. I'll wait.
The patent office used to do something like this: they once required that every patent be accompanied by a working model. They spent a lot of money over the years storing those models. Today, they only require models of eternal motion machines. There is little downside to Bray's proposal, since the storage space for the software models would be negligable.
Bray says that software patents do a lousy job of disclosing inventions: they are (sez he) ``notoriously inaccurate, incomplete, and unreadable.'' He assumes that the patent office, which can't even seem to read the patent applications, would be able to test the software and determine whether it was indeed a functional and useful implementaion. That sounds optimistic.
Furthermore, any patented methods and the code which embodied them would be of no value to Libre software until the patent had run out. After all, public domain implementation or not, you still have the problem of a license for the method!
You must make the source code available under the GPL, not so with this one.
Excellent point. It's early yet, here, I missed that.
You have the freedom to do anything, but without the source code, you might have a hard time using that freedom. I guess that's why the GPL goes that one step farther.
You must enable others to use their freedom
I guess I should have said ``most of the GPL in a nutshell''.
You can't stop others from doing anything they like.
Looks more like the BSD license to me.
Well, the BSD license would say:
You can do anything you want.
You can stop others from doing anything they want.
That's the essential difference between the GPL and the BSD licenses: you can fork BSD and take it proprietary (the proprietary part is the part where you stop others from doing whatever they want, like distributing your fork.).
The BSD license gives you the freedom to restrict the freedoms of others. The GPL does not. It's sort of like the difference between the Union and the Confederacy (U.S., circa 1860-1864): the Union restricted the freedom of slave owners, the Confederacy didn't. Did that mean that the Confederacy was a free-er place than the Union?
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, this is just the marketroids doing their thing. When the accountants start warning about threats from Linux, we know there's a real threat. Linux is getting mention in the latest annual filing, too.
I wonder what sort of music the sharks prefer with dinner? Maybe the theme from a lawyer show like LA Law?
With a single form of ID, there is a single point of failure. When the One True Database has bad data about you, you will be screwed. If the One True Database says that you are a sex offender, then you are.
Furthermore, since the One True Database is always right, by definition, you will find it harder than ever to fix those mistakes.
Government inefficiency is the most immediate bulwark of our freedoms in the U.S. We don't want to risk eliminating it.
Here's a useful litmus test: if something would make life harder for would-be terrorists, it's going to take away freedoms we can't afford to loose, and the government wins. That's worse than letting the terrorists win, since the government has the ability and moral authority to kill far more of us than the terrorists could ever dream of hurting.
Hate to pop your bubble, but the BBC is the British government. Well, it's an arm or subsidiary of the government, at least. So, for the Americans in the audience, it's like saying: ``The government caught up with the Post Office.'' Technically, they aren't the same, but practically, there isn't enough difference.
Maybe you could use some Knoppix-style hardware detection to probe the hardware at boot-time, then custom-compile a kernel to match? I just can't really see that that would be an improvement over just compiling in everything and the kitchen sink as a module.
Oh, well, even if it's useless, it's neat.
It's not surprising that it's crap: we've known for decades that RCA stood for Remarkably Crappy Apparatus.
That's right, blame it all on the Irish. After all, it's not like anyone else ever screwed up...
Can you keep it stiff? Paper will cut you if you can keep it stiff enough to slide your finger along the edge with a little pressure, but silk cloth of the same thickness won't because it isn't stiff.
If you can figure out a way to make it rigid, you'll have a nifty new razor blade.
I don't do games, and I have no use for 3D. A nice 2D card that was endorsed by the kernel and X gurus (something like ``this company is doing everything we ask to make sure we can use their hardware'') would be an easy sale to me, as long as it didn't cost much more than the low-end NVidia.
If it would do dual-head, and drive a couple of 21 inch monitors at 1600 x 1200 with 32bit color, it could cost way more than the low-end Nvidia and be a great deal.
I'll be in the market for some new hardware about the time they could get this out, too. I'll be keeping my eyes open.
Yes, it will, because the down-market, sub-$100 PC will be a cardboard box whose guts are a picture of a motherboard and a mental image of a CD writer.
The part he hasn't thought through is that folks will only need a mental image of a blue screen to make it work up to MS's usual high standards.
This just goes to show that most of us aren't successful because we aren't stupid enough to say something like that with a straight face.
The car has a computer onboard. It takes one to know one, so to speak. You have to interface with the onboard diagnostic system to read the trouble codes it has stored. You can read the codes with a simple tool. According to the article, this has nothing to do with diagnostics, though; that was about the only thing the article didn't mention. Way to many buzzwords. The article did mention:
If you're going to have a network interface and drive a terminal or a gui, you can either reinvent Linux, poorly, or you can use whatever portions of Linux help. Since you can fit the entire OS on a single floppy, I don't think it has to be any heavier than is really necessary.
A friend of mine had a Kaypro Four which he overclocked. It had originally had (if I'm remembering correctly) a 4MHz 8085, which he replaced with an 8MHz Z80 (and a new crystal). He had to replace a few of the other big chips on the board, as I recall. When he was done, he had a machine that was way faster then the IBM PC with its measly 4.77MHZ 8088.
This was in about 1981. He was doing freelance programming, using SBasic, and claimed speeding up the compiles was worth the few bucks to took to do the work.
Them was the good old days.
I've quoted some of the interesting looking parts below.
If any of the novels turn out to be good, we'll have found another Asimov (he wrote hundreds of books, so must have been able to write this fast).
Seriously, add an inexpensive docking station, and this would be the ultimate ultracompact laptop. You could use it as a normal PDA where ever you are, and at home or work you could plug it into the docking station and be on the network, use it for email and typing, and so on. For most people, this would make a practical second computer.
Lets just hope the price (including that cheap docking station) matches the size!
Repeated games have radically different outcomes than one-time games. It's long been known that where cooperation is possible, cooperation can beat solitary strategies in repeated games. I really don't think there's anything surprising here.
Since Walmart is so big, they have some monopsony power: they (the buyer) can set the prices at which they buy. Since RIAA is an oligopoly, they set the prices at which they sell. ``Monopoly v. monopoly'' just doesn't make sense.
Really, it should be ``oligopsonist meet oligopolist'' since the RIAA is a cartel of producers.
This really isn't the same as what Dr. Josef Mengele did: he waited until after the children were born before he tortured them.
What I've heard is that it is called an ``amorphous solid''. It has no crystalline structure, as do most other solids, but it is solid.
I've heard various stories on this one. I don't think that I believe them. Consider antique bottles. Even the ones which have been buried under many feet of soil don't seem to have ``drooped'' out of shape, even after several hundred years. I think that at human-survivable temperatures (say, 0-100C, to be generous), glass isn't going to sag, period.
In a nutshell, the transparent ceramic lens can be thinner and lighter than a glass lens because it has a higher refractice index (bends light more). It's also stronger, they say. Nifty, just what you need to make a smaller camera. Of course, if you put that tiny lens in front of lousy electronics, you get a lousy camera. As another post mentioned, the review said there was a lot of noise, which sounds like a lousy camera to me.
I think this fills a need that too many folks don't have.
Also, the article says that many of the specs are out of date, but they're going to launch anyway. That tells me that the second generation OQO is going to have more guts, and be out as soon as enough suckers have bought enough of the wimpy ones to finance further development. I'll wait.
Bray says that software patents do a lousy job of disclosing inventions: they are (sez he) ``notoriously inaccurate, incomplete, and unreadable.'' He assumes that the patent office, which can't even seem to read the patent applications, would be able to test the software and determine whether it was indeed a functional and useful implementaion. That sounds optimistic.
Furthermore, any patented methods and the code which embodied them would be of no value to Libre software until the patent had run out. After all, public domain implementation or not, you still have the problem of a license for the method!
Excellent point. It's early yet, here, I missed that.
You have the freedom to do anything, but without the source code, you might have a hard time using that freedom. I guess that's why the GPL goes that one step farther.
You must enable others to use their freedom
I guess I should have said ``most of the GPL in a nutshell''.
You can do anything you like.
You can't stop others from doing anything they like.
Looks more like the BSD license to me.
Well, the BSD license would say:
You can do anything you want.
You can stop others from doing anything they want.
That's the essential difference between the GPL and the BSD licenses: you can fork BSD and take it proprietary (the proprietary part is the part where you stop others from doing whatever they want, like distributing your fork.).
The BSD license gives you the freedom to restrict the freedoms of others. The GPL does not. It's sort of like the difference between the Union and the Confederacy (U.S., circa 1860-1864): the Union restricted the freedom of slave owners, the Confederacy didn't. Did that mean that the Confederacy was a free-er place than the Union?
You can do anything you like.
You can't stop others from doing anything they like.
That's the GPL in a nutshell. I like it.