This is such an obvious troll, but it seems like the moderators are too stupid to figure this out.
The moderators live in a universe where time only moves in one direction. Hence, they think that when you write a screenshot to disk, you must have already taken the screenshot, and so the act of writing it to disk cannot affect the image in the screenshot.
Road Runner, and most other cable ISPs (and the major phone company DSL ISPs, for that matter), don't think the same thing you and I think when they say "Internet Service Provider". They think of it as "Internet (Service Provider)"...that is, a Service Provider who happens to provide the service over the internet. They basically want to be like AOL, controlling the complete internet experience, from connection to content.
What most people here want is an "(Internet Service) Provider"...someone who gives them a pipe with some IP addresses, and possibly provides DNS, SMTP, POP/IMAP, and NNTP servers, and maybe throws in some web space, and then pretty much gets out of the way.
Interesting story on CNN yesterday about this and other Marvel movies. Marvel sold the movie rights for X-Men for a fixed fee of $350,000. They got no royalties at all. X-Men was a big hit in theaters, and on DVD, and none of that went to Marvel.
The deal for Spiderman, and for Daredevil and Hulk in the next year or so, is more normal, and they will get royalties.
The problem with Sealand is the first time they piss off a country, they are gone. Suppose, say, a Chinese dissident site sets up there, and starts making trouble. All China has to do is conduct naval exercises in the region, carefully staying outside of British waters, and have a little accident with a missile.
Now before everyone jumps in and says Sealand is on a structure designed to withstand ariel bombardment, think about when it was designed. It was designed to withstand WWII arms. This means considerably weaker bombs than we have now, with considerably less accurate targetting.
Sealand is a cute gimmick, but I wouldn't put anything important there.
phpwebhosting.com [phpwebhosting.com] is easily the cheapest full service bandwidth I've found. For $12/month, they give you everything you could want - shell access, *unlimited* bandwidth
Wrong!. They offer unmetered bandwidth, not unlimited bandwidth. Their FAQ says you are limited to 5 GB/month.
They also don't allow adult sites, and they don't allow sites that are primarly for downloads (even if the material is perfectly legal).
In other words, they don't meet any of the requirements of the original poster.
The rest of the restrictions are pretty much ordinary and within the law, but the specific prohibition on a particular religion runs afoul of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution
One of the arguments for open source code is that if you participate in an open source project, you won't just be giving to the project. You'll get back code from others, so you get a fairly direct benefit. Open source coding is basically a trade.
It seems to me that this powerful incentive is missing, or at least greatly reduced, for many non-coding areas, such as interface design.
This could be one reason it is hard to get good interface designers interested in helping fix bad open source interfaces.
The usual objection to links is that they are out of context. E.g., I have some things on my web site that are out of date, but of historical interest to some people. I'm perfectly happy if people get to the old material after they go to the main page, which tells them that the old material is available, and links to it.
I would not be happy if some other site linked right to the old material, because they might not put it in context, and lead people into thinking it is current.
The only reason there hasn't been a "micropayment" system on connections has been technical, I would presume
There are ISPs in the US that do this. At my old place, my DSL was $20/month with 500 MB of xfer, plus $0.10/megabyte above that. This was what the ISP charged all DSL customers, no matter what speed connection we had. (That was the ISP charge. There was also a charge from the phone company for the line. The phone company charge depended on what speed line you had, but didn't depend on how much data you transfered).
However, most people who want to access the internet as ordinary people, not as geeks, want a fixed-price service. They don't want to have to deal with keeping track of their usage so that they don't get an unexpected large bill. That's the main reason you don't see micropayment systems.
At a level above the ISP level, micropayments could work, I think, kind of like pay-per-view. Pay-per-view only works because the things on pay-per-view are special. If all the normal channels were pay-per-view, I don't think many people would use them, even if they were very cheap.
Cable systems have limited upstream bandwidth. Bad things happen to TCP when the upstream saturates. It doesn't take many people uploading, even at only 128k, to saturate the system upstream.
As long as cable systems have these limits, P2P is not going to be a good idea on them. The only kind of large upload that doesn't cause technical problems on a cable system is email, because that is going to a server under the cable company's control, which means that they could use traffic shaping on that connection to adjust the usage as needed to keep from saturating the system-wide upstream.
great, you'll let games drive you're technical descions. I wonder if you'll ever ger any priciples. if you had an once of echnical skill, you would know how to change the look of Tk, and write a tool that lets you use it the way you want to.
whiny technical people with bo princeples, like you, are why the industries level of competence has been dropping for 10 years.
I hope to God that someday I'll get a chance to ger some priciples.
know they are available. That's why I kept saying "out of the box".:-)
The reason "out of the box" is important, is that is the configuration that is easiest to maintain.
Yes, I can add bash and vim and a better terminal to OS X, but then, if a security update is needed to, say, bash, I have to track it down and apply it. It won't be found by Apple's software update.
With my Linux system, any necessary bash update will be found and applied automatically, because I use Red Hat Network.
I know they are available. That's why I kept saying "out of the box".:-)
Given some searching and downloading, all current operating systems (Windows XP, Linux, OS X) can be made into quite acceptable environments.
The nice thing about most Linux distributions is that you don't need to do that searching and downloading. That's especially nice for those that don't have broadband.
That's why I say that for the pure Unix user, Linux wins. It's got all that good stuff out of the box.
OS X reminds me a lot of a commercial Unix in the '80s and 90's. A good base that you can tweek with free software to get something great. And, unlike those other commerical Unixes, it also runs end-user consumer applications.
Let me put it another way. Take away the GUI from OS X and you are left with Darwin. Darwin is available for x86. How many people do you see choosing Darwin/x86 over Linux? Not many...because as a Unix, it just isn't as good a Unix as Linux is.
Now that I've had a chance to use OS X for a while, I'd have to say that if what you are looking for is Unix...that is, if you are the kind of person who thinks that the purpose of a GUI is to conveniently manage a bunch of terminal windows and run a web browser, then Linux is better out of the box.
OS X can certainly be fixed up to be as good, mostly, but out of the box, most Linux distributions win:
No bash on OS X
No Vim
Terminal program is nowhere near as good as the KDE terminal program
That's not a complete list, of course. Basically, what I've found is that if I sit down and try to use OS X to develop Unix programs, I run into lots of little things where it is just not as good as Linux.
If I had to have exactly one computer, and if Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot did not exist (their existence makes this no contest...I'd pick Windows), it would be a Mac with OS X, because the combination of an acceptable Unix plus mainstream commercial apps, and a very nice administrative interface for those things I'm not expert enough in to configure by hand, makes it a great system.
Oh, and the development tools and environment are certainly a big plus for OS X.
With Interface Builder and Project Builder, using Carbon or Cocoa, it is easy to whip out an application that consists of a nice GUI front end and a traditional command-line stdin/stdout Unix program on the backend.
Yes, you can do this on Linux, using something like Perl/Tk, but when you do it on OS X, you get a great looking interface.
Perl/Tk is one of those things we like in spite of its looks.
The difference is that when they take your picture for a human to recognize, that's just a picture. When they use a machine, it is no longer a picture...it is now biometric information. It sounds so much more frightening that way.
Like you, the only problem I can see is that the state might be too trusting of the technology. However, I see nothing inherently big-brotherish about the technology. It neither increases nor decreases the privacy issues associated with drivers licenses.
People who go ballistic over this, but don't see a problem with the old system, are just Luddites at heart.
I misunderstood. I tought it meant he took a picture of the speedometer every mile. For some reason, I was strangely disappointed to find that this was not the case.
Palms and even WinCE PDAs are fairly mature at this point in time. To compare them with a newly-released, first-generation Linux-based PDA isn't completely fair
There's are some very good points made in the front of the O'Reilly book on Palm programming. They explain why the Palm did so well, right from the start. The fundamental reason was that Palm understood the role of the PDA. The PDA is not meant to be a complete stand-along computing environment. It's role is to be an extension of your desktop...a way to take a little bit of your computer with you.
When you realize that, it is clear what is important for a PDA. First, it needs to sync easily with the computer. Second, it needs to be small and light, so people will actually lug the thing around. Third, it needs to be fast...if you want to look up a phone number, you don't want to wait 30 seconds while the PDA boots or does internal stuff. Fourth, it needs an interface designed for the small screen and for the environment in which you use PDAs (e.g., it needs to be simple...you usually use a PDA to support other things you are doing, and don't want to have to devote a lot of attention to dealing with the interface).
Palm got these things correct right from the start.
From what I've read so far, it looks like Sharp got most of them wrong, indicating they fundamentally misunderstood the role of the PDA.
Comparing Sharp's implementation to Palm's now is a bit unfair, as you say, because Palm's is more mature. However, comparing their understanding of the design principles of good PDAs is not unfair...companies can and must get that correct right from the start.
But for a techie that wants to hack a little, they are awesome
Perhaps if you have uncontrollable urges to hack while riding the bus...but for most of us techies, we can hack on our desktop computers. I don't see the point of getting a poor PDA just to hack.
Also, consider this quote from the article... "Even Congressional members are today prevented by this antiquated law from monitoring TV news coverage from their home states while working in their offices in Washington, D.C". This seems to be unreasonable.
Changing the law would not change that, except for Congress members from NY and LA. DirectTV uses spot beams for locals, and Dish will be using spot beams soon. Spot beams aim the signal at a relatively small area. So, instead of sending the Seattle locals to the whole country, for example, they just send them to the Seattle area on a spot beam. That lets them use the same frequencies on another spot beam for the Memphis locals.
Only the LA and NY locals are on wide beams, so that they can provide those to people who are in markets whose locals are not available.
There isn't enough capacity on Dish or DirectTV to send everyone's locals everywhere.
Since she had access to the details of Clipper and you didn't, and she knows way more about cryptography than you do...on what basis do you claim that her conclusions about Clipper are "stupid"?
FreeBSD is rock solid. I have absolutely no need to plan for a kernel panic
That's the downside of extreme stability...stupid people can get admin jobs, and since the OS doesn't crash, there's no chance for the admin to demonstrate their idiocy and get fired.
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The moderators live in a universe where time only moves in one direction.
Hence, they think that when you write a screenshot to disk, you must have already taken the screenshot, and so the act of writing it to disk cannot affect the image in the screenshot.
How does it work in your universe?
What most people here want is an "(Internet Service) Provider"...someone who gives them a pipe with some IP addresses, and possibly provides DNS, SMTP, POP/IMAP, and NNTP servers, and maybe throws in some web space, and then pretty much gets out of the way.
The deal for Spiderman, and for Daredevil and Hulk in the next year or so, is more normal, and they will get royalties.
Suppose, say, a Chinese dissident site sets up there, and starts making trouble.
All China has to do is conduct naval exercises in the region, carefully staying outside of British waters, and have a little accident with a missile.
Now before everyone jumps in and says Sealand is on a structure designed to withstand ariel bombardment, think about when it was designed. It was designed to withstand WWII arms. This means considerably weaker bombs than we have now, with considerably less accurate targetting.
Sealand is a cute gimmick, but I wouldn't put anything important there.
Wrong!. They offer unmetered bandwidth, not unlimited bandwidth. Their FAQ says you are limited to 5 GB/month.
They also don't allow adult sites, and they don't allow sites that are primarly for downloads (even if the material is perfectly legal).
In other words, they don't meet any of the requirements of the original poster.
No it doesn't.
Then it fails to meet his requirements.
It seems to me that this powerful incentive is missing, or at least greatly reduced, for many non-coding areas, such as interface design.
This could be one reason it is hard to get good interface designers interested in helping fix bad open source interfaces.
Considering that most new OS X-only development is done in Carbon, not Cocoa, I doubt they will ever discard Carbon.
I would not be happy if some other site linked right to the old material, because they might not put it in context, and lead people into thinking it is current.
There are ISPs in the US that do this. At my old place, my DSL was $20/month with 500 MB of xfer, plus $0.10/megabyte above that. This was what the ISP charged all DSL customers, no matter what speed connection we had. (That was the ISP charge. There was also a charge from the phone company for the line. The phone company charge depended on what speed line you had, but didn't depend on how much data you transfered).
However, most people who want to access the internet as ordinary people, not as geeks, want a fixed-price service. They don't want to have to deal with keeping track of their usage so that they don't get an unexpected large bill. That's the main reason you don't see micropayment systems.
At a level above the ISP level, micropayments could work, I think, kind of like pay-per-view. Pay-per-view only works because the things on pay-per-view are special. If all the normal channels were pay-per-view, I don't think many people would use them, even if they were very cheap.
As long as cable systems have these limits, P2P is not going to be a good idea on them. The only kind of large upload that doesn't cause technical problems on a cable system is email, because that is going to a server under the cable company's control, which means that they could use traffic shaping on that connection to adjust the usage as needed to keep from saturating the system-wide upstream.
I wonder if you'll ever ger any priciples.
if you had an once of echnical skill, you would know how to change the look of Tk, and write a tool that lets you use it the way you want to.
whiny technical people with bo princeples, like you, are why the industries level of competence has been dropping for 10 years.
I hope to God that someday I'll get a chance to ger some priciples.
OK, who is the idiot who moderated this as a "troll"?
The reason "out of the box" is important, is that is the configuration that is easiest to maintain.
Yes, I can add bash and vim and a better terminal to OS X, but then, if a security update is needed to, say, bash, I have to track it down and apply it. It won't be found by Apple's software update.
With my Linux system, any necessary bash update will be found and applied automatically, because I use Red Hat Network.
Given some searching and downloading, all current operating systems (Windows XP, Linux, OS X) can be made into quite acceptable environments.
The nice thing about most Linux distributions is that you don't need to do that searching and downloading. That's especially nice for those that don't have broadband.
That's why I say that for the pure Unix user, Linux wins. It's got all that good stuff out of the box.
OS X reminds me a lot of a commercial Unix in the '80s and 90's. A good base that you can tweek with free software to get something great. And, unlike those other commerical Unixes, it also runs end-user consumer applications.
Let me put it another way. Take away the GUI from OS X and you are left with Darwin. Darwin is available for x86. How many people do you see choosing Darwin/x86 over Linux? Not many...because as a Unix, it just isn't as good a Unix as Linux is.
OS X can certainly be fixed up to be as good, mostly, but out of the box, most Linux distributions win:
No bash on OS X
No Vim
Terminal program is nowhere near as good as the KDE terminal program
That's not a complete list, of course. Basically, what I've found is that if I sit down and try to use OS X to develop Unix programs, I run into lots of little things where it is just not as good as Linux.
If I had to have exactly one computer, and if Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot did not exist (their existence makes this no contest...I'd pick Windows), it would be a Mac with OS X, because the combination of an acceptable Unix plus mainstream commercial apps, and a very nice administrative interface for those things I'm not expert enough in to configure by hand, makes it a great system.
Oh, and the development tools and environment are certainly a big plus for OS X. With Interface Builder and Project Builder, using Carbon or Cocoa, it is easy to whip out an application that consists of a nice GUI front end and a traditional command-line stdin/stdout Unix program on the backend.
Yes, you can do this on Linux, using something like Perl/Tk, but when you do it on OS X, you get a great looking interface. Perl/Tk is one of those things we like in spite of its looks.
Like you, the only problem I can see is that the state might be too trusting of the technology. However, I see nothing inherently big-brotherish about the technology. It neither increases nor decreases the privacy issues associated with drivers licenses.
People who go ballistic over this, but don't see a problem with the old system, are just Luddites at heart.
I misunderstood. I tought it meant he took a picture of the speedometer every mile. For some reason, I was strangely disappointed to find that this was not the case.
There's are some very good points made in the front of the O'Reilly book on Palm programming. They explain why the Palm did so well, right from the start. The fundamental reason was that Palm understood the role of the PDA. The PDA is not meant to be a complete stand-along computing environment. It's role is to be an extension of your desktop...a way to take a little bit of your computer with you.
When you realize that, it is clear what is important for a PDA. First, it needs to sync easily with the computer. Second, it needs to be small and light, so people will actually lug the thing around. Third, it needs to be fast...if you want to look up a phone number, you don't want to wait 30 seconds while the PDA boots or does internal stuff. Fourth, it needs an interface designed for the small screen and for the environment in which you use PDAs (e.g., it needs to be simple...you usually use a PDA to support other things you are doing, and don't want to have to devote a lot of attention to dealing with the interface).
Palm got these things correct right from the start.
From what I've read so far, it looks like Sharp got most of them wrong, indicating they fundamentally misunderstood the role of the PDA.
Comparing Sharp's implementation to Palm's now is a bit unfair, as you say, because Palm's is more mature. However, comparing their understanding of the design principles of good PDAs is not unfair...companies can and must get that correct right from the start.
Perhaps if you have uncontrollable urges to hack while riding the bus...but for most of us techies, we can hack on our desktop computers. I don't see the point of getting a poor PDA just to hack.
Changing the law would not change that, except for Congress members from NY and LA. DirectTV uses spot beams for locals, and Dish will be using spot beams soon. Spot beams aim the signal at a relatively small area. So, instead of sending the Seattle locals to the whole country, for example, they just send them to the Seattle area on a spot beam. That lets them use the same frequencies on another spot beam for the Memphis locals.
Only the LA and NY locals are on wide beams, so that they can provide those to people who are in markets whose locals are not available.
There isn't enough capacity on Dish or DirectTV to send everyone's locals everywhere.
I've seen this exact message before.
Since she had access to the details of Clipper and you didn't, and she knows way more about cryptography than you do...on what basis do you claim that her conclusions about Clipper are "stupid"?
That's the downside of extreme stability...stupid people can get admin jobs, and since the OS doesn't crash, there's no chance for the admin to demonstrate their idiocy and get fired.