He doesn't make that clear at all. He claims that it is contrary to the license, but he fails to explain which license term it actually is supposed to violate.
If she doesn't want her "sofa on Google", she should perhaps get some curtains. Given that her address is public, I expect photographers will now try to see how much they can actually capture from public property. And given that she is now a public figure, there is even less she can do about it.
If she had been in a compromising position, I'd at least understand why she might be unhappy, but a blurry picture of her cat seems hardly reason to complain.
So, Ms. Kalin-Casey, either embrace your latent exhibitionist tendencies, or just get some curtains, like civilized people do.
Well, chairs were invented thousands of years ago, and there is a huge market in them.
Multi-touch and camera-based interaction was invented a couple of decades ago. They have been made commercially for a while, but the market seems tiny. And what difference does it make that Microsoft has built one too?
Well, if you want to find the actual papers, you'll have to do your literature searches yourself; 1980's publications are largely not on-line. This kind of thing was used for "natural painting tools" (relying on internal reflection, camera captures image of brushes as they interact with the acrylic surface), and for mixed reality desktop interactions (down-projection, but otherwise same idea).
Microsoft used to be an evil, monopolistic company that has won big by taking advantage of their users instead of delivering value. After starting self-serving "community projects", publishing source code that only works on Windows, obtaining patent-encumbered standards, and attempting to wage a patent war on FOSS, they still are.
They like each other because their business models are so similar: big, expensive boxes requiring expensive, packaged software and frequent updates. In a world rapidly moving to web-based services and applications, they see their software and hardware profit margins evaporate.
Companies look out for themselves. Once people realize that, it really helps. They aren't good. They aren't evil. They exist to serve the shareholders (or owners, if not public)...
Yes, but some companies manage to align their interests and those of their customers, while others make money by screwing their customers. You can figure out which is which.
What you call a "pseudo standard" is how good standards are created: first you use and document a technology, then, after several years of practical use, you go to a standards body.
Unfortunately, these days, a "standard" seems to mean to many people a rubber stamping of some idea that some committee or engineers cooked up, with little or no practical usage. W3C is guilty of that, and ECMA even more so.
Why not just create a desktop app that talks to the webapp through web services when you get back the connection?
Because the common case is that people are online, and it makes sense to build the best app for that, and that's often a web app these days. Even if you wanted to spend the money to develop two apps, that still would be a bad solution for users because they'd now have to learn two user interfaces.
Also, web apps address mobile, multi-machine, and collaborative uses very naturally; doing the same with a desktop app is a lot more work.
The basic idea is a good one: mostly, what people do with a laptop is write, present, email, and browse the web. A device like this can solve that better than a laptop. It's the same idea as the Nokia 800 and Pepperpad, just with a keyboard.
However, people like to be able to install some stuff even on mobile devices: little games, VPN clients, ssh, etc. If they kept the Foleo open and compatible enough, it may work.
But a bigger issue is: if the PC is supposed to be your smartphone and this is just a keyboard/screen for that, then we need better smartphones. The Palm, PocketPC, and Symbian platforms are awful platforms: slow, limited, hard to program, and they can't figure out how to do a scalable GUI.
I frankly would rather have an OLPC with a decent keyboard, and that would cost half as much and run standard Linux apps. Let's hope Quanta will make those.
Nobody who knows what they're talking about would claim that non-ionizing radiation can't affect cells. If nothing else it can heat them
It's (obviously) the "something else" that we're talking about here.
Heating up a cell will cause it to die, but it does not cause it to become cancerous. Cooling down a cell will cause it to die but not to become cancerous. Slapping a cell around will cause it to die but not to become cancerous.
You have a simplistic and incorrect understanding of processes that can cause cancer. Mutagens cause cancer, but so do mechanisms that interfere with DNA repair, DNA replication or cell membrane permeability, cause inflammation, cause cell proliferation, or interfere with immune system function. A mechanism that causes selective cell death may be responsible for any one of those.
If you're worried you can stop using yours though.
Concerns about something "causing cancer" are public health concerns, not individual concerns. A 20% increased risk of brain cancer would not be something to worry about for you or me, but it is something to worry about for society as a whole.
You can put a few TB of storage into a single box with ZFS, but then you have a single box with a few TB of drives in them. ZFS replaces RAID.
SAN and NAS is about using networks for interconnecting storage and CPUs. I don't see what ZFS has to do with that at all, and ZFS probably can't even be used at all over some network-attached drives.
The applications companies might even remotely want protection against Microsoft lawsuits for are OpenOffice, Samba, Evolution, OpenXchange, and Mono. Yet, it looks like the Novell/Microsoft deal fails to provide protection for specifically those packages. Seems to me that that makes Novell's deal largely worthless for licensees, since they receive no more protection by buying from Novell than they do by buying from RedHat.
(And while there's nothing legally wrong with their definition, it's absolutely ridiculous for Microsoft to go around and talk about "clone products", given that almost their entire product line consists of "clone products".)
There's a difference between convincing a cell it doesn't want to divide and screwing up it's DNA enough to cause it to become cancerous. A big difference.
The argument for the safety of cell phones has been that non-ionizing radiation can't affect cell growth at all. The fact that this does is a bad sign. And interfering with specific subpopulations of cells can be very bad. By analogy, imagine you had a big beam that can be tuned to stop selected groups of people; if you tune it to stop criminals, you reduce crime; if you tune it to stop police, you increase crime. Carefully tuned, this effect might well stop not cancer cells, but immune system cells responsible for fighting cancer.
The physics geniuses on Slashdot, not to mention the cell phone industry, keep saying that electromagnetic radiation is non-ionizing, so it can't affect the brain!
There you have it... free trade UK style: reduce trade barriers for big businesses, but don't reduce barriers in a way that might actually lower prices for the general public.
The "transition plan" is: you can switch to NeoOffice or buy your own. Sounds like a good plan to me. They should, however, instituted the same plan for Windows users: use OpenOffice.
The "expect problems" statement on the NeoOffice site is open source conservatism. In reality, NeoOffice works fine and is as good and stable as for-pay software, if not more so.
Why are you addressing me? I'm not doing this project.
Mac users don't want to user open source package managers and neither to windows users.
I think they actually do: both Mac and Windows users like automatic updates. Furthermore, there's a strong argument to be made that a good way to get Mac and Windows users to switch to open source operating systems is to get them interested in open source desktop applications first. And a simple delivery mechanism for those desktop applications greatly helps with that.
The problem with Fink and MacPorts is that it's too Linux-like and is built around Linux packaging technologies. A good Mac/Windows package manager probably needs to be built from the ground up for those platforms, even if it is for open source software.
I like the goal, but I'm not sure it's going to work. People have tried hard to make this work on the Mac, where you can get MacPorts and Fink. Neither of them has caught on at all among general Mac users. Even as someone who loves the Linux package managers on Linux, I don't use either MacPorts or Fink on the Mac because I find them to be more hassle than they are worth.
At the very least, have a look at MacPorts and Fink and try to understand who uses them and how they are being used.
I've read several comments like yours in this thread. I just picked a random one to comment on. It's important to realize that the majority of professional developers are paid to produce a product, that works, in the shortest amount of time possible, with the mindset that things will need to change quickly to accommodate clients needs.
Yes, and my point is that tools like Eclipse, Visual Studio, XML libraries, GUI designers, etc. probably hurt programmer productivity. Their real benefit is to reduce the amount of training people need initially, but whether that is a good tradeoff overall is unclear; one highly skilled programmer may well be more productive and cost-effective overall than ten average programmers.
Not to be misunderstood: I do think there is a place for good tools to support working programmers, it's just that the tools that are widespread are mainly aimed at getting people "hooked" on them, not at supporting experienced professional programmers optimally.
I would venture to guess, that the majority of professional (not at an academic, student or research level) would hardly ever have the need for parallel systems.
This is not an academic or research issue. For example,every modern web application is a parallel, distributed system, and modern CPUs implicitly attempt to treat sequential code as parallel. The fact that many programmers don't know the right abstractions for dealing with parallelism causes both serious inefficiencies and outright bugs.
The point I am trying to make, is; the benefits of a multicore machine, go FAR beyond individual applications in the real world.
Yes, and I'm saying that inability to deal with parallel programming is only a symptom of a far deeper deficiency.
(I also don't think that multicore parallelism is going to be very important in the long run, compared to other forms of parallelism.)
Slashdot Mirror
He makes it clear: It is contrary to the license,
He doesn't make that clear at all. He claims that it is contrary to the license, but he fails to explain which license term it actually is supposed to violate.
If she doesn't want her "sofa on Google", she should perhaps get some curtains. Given that her address is public, I expect photographers will now try to see how much they can actually capture from public property. And given that she is now a public figure, there is even less she can do about it.
If she had been in a compromising position, I'd at least understand why she might be unhappy, but a blurry picture of her cat seems hardly reason to complain.
So, Ms. Kalin-Casey, either embrace your latent exhibitionist tendencies, or just get some curtains, like civilized people do.
Well, chairs were invented thousands of years ago, and there is a huge market in them.
Multi-touch and camera-based interaction was invented a couple of decades ago. They have been made commercially for a while, but the market seems tiny. And what difference does it make that Microsoft has built one too?
Well, if you want to find the actual papers, you'll have to do your literature searches yourself; 1980's publications are largely not on-line. This kind of thing was used for "natural painting tools" (relying on internal reflection, camera captures image of brushes as they interact with the acrylic surface), and for mixed reality desktop interactions (down-projection, but otherwise same idea).
Microsoft used to be an evil, monopolistic company that has won big by taking advantage of their users instead of delivering value. After starting self-serving "community projects", publishing source code that only works on Windows, obtaining patent-encumbered standards, and attempting to wage a patent war on FOSS, they still are.
They like each other because their business models are so similar: big, expensive boxes requiring expensive, packaged software and frequent updates. In a world rapidly moving to web-based services and applications, they see their software and hardware profit margins evaporate.
Camera-based multitouch surfaces were first built about 20 years ago. They're nice but not all that useful.
It will be interesting to see whether you can use Google Docs offline with the Palm Foleo. The Foleo seems ideal for these kinds of apps.
Companies look out for themselves. Once people realize that, it really helps. They aren't good. They aren't evil. They exist to serve the shareholders (or owners, if not public)...
Yes, but some companies manage to align their interests and those of their customers, while others make money by screwing their customers. You can figure out which is which.
Though still only a psuedo-standard. (Boo!) :-)
What you call a "pseudo standard" is how good standards are created: first you use and document a technology, then, after several years of practical use, you go to a standards body.
Unfortunately, these days, a "standard" seems to mean to many people a rubber stamping of some idea that some committee or engineers cooked up, with little or no practical usage. W3C is guilty of that, and ECMA even more so.
Why not just create a desktop app that talks to the webapp through web services when you get back the connection?
Because the common case is that people are online, and it makes sense to build the best app for that, and that's often a web app these days. Even if you wanted to spend the money to develop two apps, that still would be a bad solution for users because they'd now have to learn two user interfaces.
Also, web apps address mobile, multi-machine, and collaborative uses very naturally; doing the same with a desktop app is a lot more work.
How does this compare to Dojo Offline?
http://dojotoolkit.org/offline
This is also much more like what an OLPC should be. ARM == low power & cost relative to an x86.
That's funny, given that the OLPC costs half as much and its battery lasts more than twice as long.
And I have some Linux ARM devices--believe me, an x86 compatible chip is a blessing.
The basic idea is a good one: mostly, what people do with a laptop is write, present, email, and browse the web. A device like this can solve that better than a laptop. It's the same idea as the Nokia 800 and Pepperpad, just with a keyboard.
However, people like to be able to install some stuff even on mobile devices: little games, VPN clients, ssh, etc. If they kept the Foleo open and compatible enough, it may work.
But a bigger issue is: if the PC is supposed to be your smartphone and this is just a keyboard/screen for that, then we need better smartphones. The Palm, PocketPC, and Symbian platforms are awful platforms: slow, limited, hard to program, and they can't figure out how to do a scalable GUI.
I frankly would rather have an OLPC with a decent keyboard, and that would cost half as much and run standard Linux apps. Let's hope Quanta will make those.
Nobody who knows what they're talking about would claim that non-ionizing radiation can't affect cells. If nothing else it can heat them
It's (obviously) the "something else" that we're talking about here.
Heating up a cell will cause it to die, but it does not cause it to become cancerous. Cooling down a cell will cause it to die but not to become cancerous. Slapping a cell around will cause it to die but not to become cancerous.
You have a simplistic and incorrect understanding of processes that can cause cancer. Mutagens cause cancer, but so do mechanisms that interfere with DNA repair, DNA replication or cell membrane permeability, cause inflammation, cause cell proliferation, or interfere with immune system function. A mechanism that causes selective cell death may be responsible for any one of those.
If you're worried you can stop using yours though.
Concerns about something "causing cancer" are public health concerns, not individual concerns. A 20% increased risk of brain cancer would not be something to worry about for you or me, but it is something to worry about for society as a whole.
You can put a few TB of storage into a single box with ZFS, but then you have a single box with a few TB of drives in them. ZFS replaces RAID.
SAN and NAS is about using networks for interconnecting storage and CPUs. I don't see what ZFS has to do with that at all, and ZFS probably can't even be used at all over some network-attached drives.
The applications companies might even remotely want protection against Microsoft lawsuits for are OpenOffice, Samba, Evolution, OpenXchange, and Mono. Yet, it looks like the Novell/Microsoft deal fails to provide protection for specifically those packages. Seems to me that that makes Novell's deal largely worthless for licensees, since they receive no more protection by buying from Novell than they do by buying from RedHat.
(And while there's nothing legally wrong with their definition, it's absolutely ridiculous for Microsoft to go around and talk about "clone products", given that almost their entire product line consists of "clone products".)
Cell phone radiation is non ionizing.
Yes, you're stating the obvious.
There's a difference between convincing a cell it doesn't want to divide and screwing up it's DNA enough to cause it to become cancerous. A big difference.
The argument for the safety of cell phones has been that non-ionizing radiation can't affect cell growth at all. The fact that this does is a bad sign. And interfering with specific subpopulations of cells can be very bad. By analogy, imagine you had a big beam that can be tuned to stop selected groups of people; if you tune it to stop criminals, you reduce crime; if you tune it to stop police, you increase crime. Carefully tuned, this effect might well stop not cancer cells, but immune system cells responsible for fighting cancer.
Woosh--that just went completely over your head, didn't it?
Of course, cell phones don't emit ionizing radiation. The silliness is that some people believe that non-ionizing radiation is automatically safe.
The physics geniuses on Slashdot, not to mention the cell phone industry, keep saying that electromagnetic radiation is non-ionizing, so it can't affect the brain!
There you have it... free trade UK style: reduce trade barriers for big businesses, but don't reduce barriers in a way that might actually lower prices for the general public.
The "transition plan" is: you can switch to NeoOffice or buy your own. Sounds like a good plan to me. They should, however, instituted the same plan for Windows users: use OpenOffice.
The "expect problems" statement on the NeoOffice site is open source conservatism. In reality, NeoOffice works fine and is as good and stable as for-pay software, if not more so.
Your efforts
Why are you addressing me? I'm not doing this project.
Mac users don't want to user open source package managers and neither to windows users.
I think they actually do: both Mac and Windows users like automatic updates. Furthermore, there's a strong argument to be made that a good way to get Mac and Windows users to switch to open source operating systems is to get them interested in open source desktop applications first. And a simple delivery mechanism for those desktop applications greatly helps with that.
The problem with Fink and MacPorts is that it's too Linux-like and is built around Linux packaging technologies. A good Mac/Windows package manager probably needs to be built from the ground up for those platforms, even if it is for open source software.
I like the goal, but I'm not sure it's going to work. People have tried hard to make this work on the Mac, where you can get MacPorts and Fink. Neither of them has caught on at all among general Mac users. Even as someone who loves the Linux package managers on Linux, I don't use either MacPorts or Fink on the Mac because I find them to be more hassle than they are worth.
At the very least, have a look at MacPorts and Fink and try to understand who uses them and how they are being used.
I've read several comments like yours in this thread. I just picked a random one to comment on. It's important to realize that the majority of professional developers are paid to produce a product, that works, in the shortest amount of time possible, with the mindset that things will need to change quickly to accommodate clients needs.
Yes, and my point is that tools like Eclipse, Visual Studio, XML libraries, GUI designers, etc. probably hurt programmer productivity. Their real benefit is to reduce the amount of training people need initially, but whether that is a good tradeoff overall is unclear; one highly skilled programmer may well be more productive and cost-effective overall than ten average programmers.
Not to be misunderstood: I do think there is a place for good tools to support working programmers, it's just that the tools that are widespread are mainly aimed at getting people "hooked" on them, not at supporting experienced professional programmers optimally.
I would venture to guess, that the majority of professional (not at an academic, student or research level) would hardly ever have the need for parallel systems.
This is not an academic or research issue. For example,every modern web application is a parallel, distributed system, and modern CPUs implicitly attempt to treat sequential code as parallel. The fact that many programmers don't know the right abstractions for dealing with parallelism causes both serious inefficiencies and outright bugs.
The point I am trying to make, is; the benefits of a multicore machine, go FAR beyond individual applications in the real world.
Yes, and I'm saying that inability to deal with parallel programming is only a symptom of a far deeper deficiency.
(I also don't think that multicore parallelism is going to be very important in the long run, compared to other forms of parallelism.)