Requiring Sony to publish the source is probably not an option as there are likely many different copyright holders, each owning part of the code, and some of them may have nothing to do with the product as such: e.g. Sony bought a license to their software. Gonna be a legal mess.
And "plays for sure" can't have hurt many customers. For starters those devices never sold well, secondly there can't have been much content sold for it either, with so little uptake on the hardware side.
That was mostly MS screwing over their business partners. But then, MS business partners are probably used to that already.
It probably violates someone's copyright or patent. Or that's what they think may be the case. Better be safe than sorry, consumers be damned. They're anyway supposed to just consume the advertising with intermittant fragments of some mildly entertaining show, instead fo recording it and remove the ads.
One gotcha with VirtualBox is that the open source version (as included with Ubuntu, for example) doesn't have USB support. You have to get the closed-source version directly from Oracle for that.
That had me seriously, as the one and only reason I'm using VirtualBox is because I need Windows for my e-banking, which uses a USB encryption device which only has Windows drivers... For the rest, indeed it just works. And that's exactly what I need.
Many patents involved are valid outside of the USA. And there certainly are plenty of reasonable patents (i.e. actual inventions) in the mix. Not just software patents. And if you don't believe me, try building and selling your own smartphone. You'll soon enough find out about it.
The first 90% or so of spam is stopped by greylisting on SMTP level. Yes it delays mails from new senders a bit, but in 99.9% of those cases I'm not expecting it, and am not waiting for it, so that doesn't really matter. And by far most of the mails that I receive are from regular contacts anyway which are accepted instantly.
The last 10% that does come through amounts to some 30-40 spam per day on my account, and far less on my staff's account (which is not plastered all over the place). The number of e-mails that I get is not that great, around 50 a day maybe. So even if that's multiplied by 10, it's not much.
I used to have a 600 MHz or so PC with little RAM, that was before greylisting, and it worked just fine, I only replaced it because it simply broke down. It was handling the load easily.
I'd love to replace my server with a low-power ARM type one (Debian runs on ARM, right?). First of all, remember that there are many many more uses and installations of servers than in server farms and data centres.
My server is not doing much work, though it has many different jobs. It's running a web site that has a couple dozen hits a day maybe. It's a file server (NFS - for the home directories, and handling backups), Kerberos authenticaion, e-mail/SMTP, LDAP, etc. And it's for just two workstations, and allowing me remote access to my files and other data (ssh) and remote printing (cups). And it's doing a handful of other odd jobs, like DHCP and firewall for the local network.
And as you can imagine, most of the time it's just sitting there being mostly idle. Really I'm sure there are millions of that kind of small servers, for both small companies and private home servers. They don't do much, but what they do is important and they also do need to be on all the time. Great use case for a low-powered system, as it really doesn't need as much horsepower as it got now.
OTOH what is stopping a sex offender from going to Facebook and registering myself as, say, Samzenpus? And then registering Samzenpus as one of their current and active aliases? Now that's going to be fun. Suddenly everyone on the Internet is a registered sex offender. Though that may also be the best way to render such a law completely ineffective.
Well with the huge piles of strong and indisputable evidence they have against Dotcom he is of course obviously guilty, right? So anything he is going to do next will clearly only make him more guilty - after all it's supposed to be a successor to megaupload which everybody knows is totally guilty of breaching all kinds of laws and whatnot.
Or you really want to say that these military-style raids against Dotcom don't prove he is at least as guilty and dangerous as say Osama Bin Laden was?
That's why I said "highly" anonymous. So many things can be tracked down to an individual - but not all as easy as you linking your location to some on-line account.
A weather service would check your current location and send that to a server to request local weather information - but the server can not link requests to your phone without having access to say an IMEI number, or an IP address (which usually changes all the time - lets hope IPv6 doesn't undermine this by assigning a unique IP to each and every phone).
There are plenty of apps which track "every user's location", for example a weather application, but since that's not Google I guess tracking is OK.
That location info is highly anonymous, not linked to a Google account like Latitude. Big difference. Google can subsequently link those movements to your searches and e-mail contents and whatnot.
Needless to say, I'm not a user of Latitude and will never be.
The Singapore plan only works if there are areas you're happy to cast into shade (and block views from) with these towers. They can't be close together, or they'll be in each other's shade.
Singapore is almost right at the equator, so if you have a row (or wall) of these towers in north-south orientation then they should not cast much shadows onto one another. And besides most of the sun they catch is the first half of the morning and the second half of the afternoon, as the rest of the day the sun is so high up that you basically don't have sunlight hitting the sides of your towers.
Considering solar cell efficiency is not that great, commercial panels do around 20% only, plus the losses in converting this electricity back into light using those LEDs, not too much gain is to be made that way. And it's pretty expensive.
Well since music and movies can all be obtained through the cloud
The cloud is useless if it can't be reached because A. you have the Wi-Fi-only version and are away from home and open hotspots, B. you have no cellular data subscription, or C. you've already burned through your data plan this month.
Or how about D) your 4G network has only poor 3G coverage where you are which is not nearly fast enough for streaming movies.
Another question: why are those journalists still using obsolete and wasteful lighting technology? Modern bulbs give plenty of light on just 8-12W each.
Has there been any election in the US where it has been more than a few percentage points difference between the two main candidates? Bush even managed to get back to the White House with a minority popular vote. It didn't get the other party the vice presidency, for example - compared to the Netherlands where we just got a new governing coalition of two parties that have only a small difference in size, and the biggest supplies the premier, and the second the vice premier (we don't have a president; the premier is the closest to that function available not counting the queen).
What is far worse, is that Republicans and Democrats tend to vote against one another's plans primarily "because it's from the other side". And that's pretty paralysing, making it really hard to make necessary changes.
I've heard that sentiment before: hope he can deliver now, as he doesn't have to be re-elected.
The sad thing of this statement is that apparently if a politician fulfils his actual campaign promises, that his re-election is in jeopardy. That's a direct contradiction. A politician is elected on a certain platform, and fulfilling those promises should actually help a re-election - it means the politician is a man of his word, and that he does what he promises to do.
So that'd require those displaced people to have an absentee ballot already - how does that work? Even if they happened to have applied for it, not likely that this is with the stuff they took with them when fleeing their homes.
Also I wonder in general if there is any emergency plan thought out for just this situation. Elections happen often enough and the US is big enough to sooner or later have one seriously disturbed by some major natural disaster somewhere in the country - could be a hurricane, could also be say an earth quake or even a volcanic eruption.
Somehow it seems like a poorly thought out idea indeed. Why not just require thos ballots to be mailed in? I've heard before that in other elections it also may take days or weeks for the final result to come in due to absentee ballots mainly from overseas military personnel that are stuck in the mail.
This was an issue for some 1.5% of the devices. Hand out five, maybe ten of them for testing by third-party auditors, and good chance none of the 1.5% is included.
Smart for-profit companies will take such lessons really seriously.
Why? If they don't, one time it goes wrong and they're out of business. If they do, they get over time an excellent name, and can sell at maximum profit. Overall much more profitable than saving a bit of cost cutting corners.
And that's not even counting the potential criminal liablity by the company staff and directors, which can be quite serious in case of death through negligence.
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Requiring Sony to publish the source is probably not an option as there are likely many different copyright holders, each owning part of the code, and some of them may have nothing to do with the product as such: e.g. Sony bought a license to their software. Gonna be a legal mess.
It was meant to be Funny, not Insightful. At least the part about copyrights and patents.
And "plays for sure" can't have hurt many customers. For starters those devices never sold well, secondly there can't have been much content sold for it either, with so little uptake on the hardware side.
That was mostly MS screwing over their business partners. But then, MS business partners are probably used to that already.
It probably violates someone's copyright or patent. Or that's what they think may be the case. Better be safe than sorry, consumers be damned. They're anyway supposed to just consume the advertising with intermittant fragments of some mildly entertaining show, instead fo recording it and remove the ads.
One gotcha with VirtualBox is that the open source version (as included with Ubuntu, for example) doesn't have USB support. You have to get the closed-source version directly from Oracle for that.
That had me seriously, as the one and only reason I'm using VirtualBox is because I need Windows for my e-banking, which uses a USB encryption device which only has Windows drivers... For the rest, indeed it just works. And that's exactly what I need.
Many patents involved are valid outside of the USA. And there certainly are plenty of reasonable patents (i.e. actual inventions) in the mix. Not just software patents. And if you don't believe me, try building and selling your own smartphone. You'll soon enough find out about it.
The first 90% or so of spam is stopped by greylisting on SMTP level. Yes it delays mails from new senders a bit, but in 99.9% of those cases I'm not expecting it, and am not waiting for it, so that doesn't really matter. And by far most of the mails that I receive are from regular contacts anyway which are accepted instantly.
The last 10% that does come through amounts to some 30-40 spam per day on my account, and far less on my staff's account (which is not plastered all over the place). The number of e-mails that I get is not that great, around 50 a day maybe. So even if that's multiplied by 10, it's not much.
I used to have a 600 MHz or so PC with little RAM, that was before greylisting, and it worked just fine, I only replaced it because it simply broke down. It was handling the load easily.
And the indexing for quick searching. That's what takes quite some effort, too.
It's that they're missing ethernet ports and are low on storage, but a modern phone is more than powerful enough to serve as a simple server.
I'd love to replace my server with a low-power ARM type one (Debian runs on ARM, right?). First of all, remember that there are many many more uses and installations of servers than in server farms and data centres.
My server is not doing much work, though it has many different jobs. It's running a web site that has a couple dozen hits a day maybe. It's a file server (NFS - for the home directories, and handling backups), Kerberos authenticaion, e-mail/SMTP, LDAP, etc. And it's for just two workstations, and allowing me remote access to my files and other data (ssh) and remote printing (cups). And it's doing a handful of other odd jobs, like DHCP and firewall for the local network.
And as you can imagine, most of the time it's just sitting there being mostly idle. Really I'm sure there are millions of that kind of small servers, for both small companies and private home servers. They don't do much, but what they do is important and they also do need to be on all the time. Great use case for a low-powered system, as it really doesn't need as much horsepower as it got now.
That's one issue that can't be enforced.
OTOH what is stopping a sex offender from going to Facebook and registering myself as, say, Samzenpus? And then registering Samzenpus as one of their current and active aliases? Now that's going to be fun. Suddenly everyone on the Internet is a registered sex offender. Though that may also be the best way to render such a law completely ineffective.
Like many other African countries the government is corrupt like hell so I think that part is the least of the worries of the average people.
Well with the huge piles of strong and indisputable evidence they have against Dotcom he is of course obviously guilty, right? So anything he is going to do next will clearly only make him more guilty - after all it's supposed to be a successor to megaupload which everybody knows is totally guilty of breaching all kinds of laws and whatnot.
Or you really want to say that these military-style raids against Dotcom don't prove he is at least as guilty and dangerous as say Osama Bin Laden was?
Who cares if it is 24 times more or less bigger than mega! It's at least 1000 times bigger. Another 24 times bigger doesn't matter much does it?
That's why I said "highly" anonymous. So many things can be tracked down to an individual - but not all as easy as you linking your location to some on-line account.
A weather service would check your current location and send that to a server to request local weather information - but the server can not link requests to your phone without having access to say an IMEI number, or an IP address (which usually changes all the time - lets hope IPv6 doesn't undermine this by assigning a unique IP to each and every phone).
There are plenty of apps which track "every user's location", for example a weather application, but since that's not Google I guess tracking is OK.
That location info is highly anonymous, not linked to a Google account like Latitude. Big difference. Google can subsequently link those movements to your searches and e-mail contents and whatnot.
Needless to say, I'm not a user of Latitude and will never be.
The Singapore plan only works if there are areas you're happy to cast into shade (and block views from) with these towers. They can't be close together, or they'll be in each other's shade.
Singapore is almost right at the equator, so if you have a row (or wall) of these towers in north-south orientation then they should not cast much shadows onto one another. And besides most of the sun they catch is the first half of the morning and the second half of the afternoon, as the rest of the day the sun is so high up that you basically don't have sunlight hitting the sides of your towers.
Considering solar cell efficiency is not that great, commercial panels do around 20% only, plus the losses in converting this electricity back into light using those LEDs, not too much gain is to be made that way. And it's pretty expensive.
Well since music and movies can all be obtained through the cloud
The cloud is useless if it can't be reached because A. you have the Wi-Fi-only version and are away from home and open hotspots, B. you have no cellular data subscription, or C. you've already burned through your data plan this month.
Or how about D) your 4G network has only poor 3G coverage where you are which is not nearly fast enough for streaming movies.
Another question: why are those journalists still using obsolete and wasteful lighting technology? Modern bulbs give plenty of light on just 8-12W each.
Has there been any election in the US where it has been more than a few percentage points difference between the two main candidates? Bush even managed to get back to the White House with a minority popular vote. It didn't get the other party the vice presidency, for example - compared to the Netherlands where we just got a new governing coalition of two parties that have only a small difference in size, and the biggest supplies the premier, and the second the vice premier (we don't have a president; the premier is the closest to that function available not counting the queen).
What is far worse, is that Republicans and Democrats tend to vote against one another's plans primarily "because it's from the other side". And that's pretty paralysing, making it really hard to make necessary changes.
I've heard that sentiment before: hope he can deliver now, as he doesn't have to be re-elected.
The sad thing of this statement is that apparently if a politician fulfils his actual campaign promises, that his re-election is in jeopardy. That's a direct contradiction. A politician is elected on a certain platform, and fulfilling those promises should actually help a re-election - it means the politician is a man of his word, and that he does what he promises to do.
So that'd require those displaced people to have an absentee ballot already - how does that work? Even if they happened to have applied for it, not likely that this is with the stuff they took with them when fleeing their homes.
Also I wonder in general if there is any emergency plan thought out for just this situation. Elections happen often enough and the US is big enough to sooner or later have one seriously disturbed by some major natural disaster somewhere in the country - could be a hurricane, could also be say an earth quake or even a volcanic eruption.
Somehow it seems like a poorly thought out idea indeed. Why not just require thos ballots to be mailed in? I've heard before that in other elections it also may take days or weeks for the final result to come in due to absentee ballots mainly from overseas military personnel that are stuck in the mail.
This was an issue for some 1.5% of the devices. Hand out five, maybe ten of them for testing by third-party auditors, and good chance none of the 1.5% is included.
Smart for-profit companies will take such lessons really seriously.
Why? If they don't, one time it goes wrong and they're out of business. If they do, they get over time an excellent name, and can sell at maximum profit. Overall much more profitable than saving a bit of cost cutting corners.
And that's not even counting the potential criminal liablity by the company staff and directors, which can be quite serious in case of death through negligence.