That wouldn't be a problem if the retailer that was shipping it to Canada would just put on a customs form that states the value of the enclosed goods. It's a little green sticker, that says what the box contains, and it's value. And even if they didn't include the proper customs forms, you CAN get the difference refunded, by providing documentation of the price you paid for the goods. It's somewhat of a pain in the ass, but if it's a $100 part being taxed at $200, then it would be well worth it. If it was a $20 part being taxed at $25, it would be mostly a waste of time.
You believe Microsoft intends to cannibalize their OS for platform independance? Would Microsoft be so stupid as to slaughter their cash cow, that brings in millions upon millions of dollars of revenue each year? Don't be ridiculous.
The one thing that Windows has repeatedly been criticized for is the fact the native APIs are archaeic and obtuse. Everytime one API call finally ended up being expanded to use all the reserved parameters, they'd be forced to introduce a new one under a different name. The entire API is riddled with DoSomething and DoSomethingEx or SomeFunction and SomeFunction2, because when things needed to change, there was no room for growth. The.NET API is MS's attempt at getting that API bloat under control, and to redesign some broken designs in the original Win32 API set.
Secondly, I find no reason to believe that Microsoft Office.NET won't use undocumented/proprietary CLR API calls like any other Microsoft product does with the native Win32 API. They have no intention of giving Linux or any other platform the elbow room to be able to squeeze themselves into a healthy chunk of the market. Microsoft would also be free to introduce API calls that are impossible to re-implement without violating Microsoft patents.
This entire.NET stuff is far more about cleaning up their own platform, rather than allowing for any other into the market.
Sure they have. The @Large folks haven't been the rubberstampers they originally expected, and they have a tendancy to speak out about issues that they don't believe are in the public interest. Karl Auerbach is a particularily vocal member. The official reasoning given by ICANN (the original appointed members) was that they were unable to get things done, that the ICANN@Large members insisted on debating all the issues.
ICANN has devolved more and more into a secret society that caters to Network Solutions/Verisign's every whim. It's not about doing what's right, correct, or even profitable for most people. It's become what's about right for Verisign.
I believe that was the goal behind at least one project. It was a combination of artificial stupidity, and artificial obnoxiousness. It was a Microsoft innovation, and graced the Microsoft Office applications, and later was partially integrated into Microsoft Windows XP. It was the Office Assistant, of course.
Excellent point. For every bad thing you might be able to do with the source code, you can do an equivelant thing by some other means only using a binary. Everything from writing a dummy replacement that works it's magic, then passes it back to the original code, to hooking and intercepting system calls, to actually modifying the files to call your own code during execution. Only one of these techniques really requires an extensive knowledge of reverse engineering and disassembling code. In some of these cases, the exploit would be far less detectable than a generic root kit installed on a UNIX style machine. System call hooking, for example, would involve a few new registry entries, and a new driver. A stub executable or library would involve only one extra file to appear on the system, and the signature of the file it was replacing to change (some viruses use this vector to replace winsock).
I think the point of all of this is, the moment an attacker gets administrative control to your machine, it's no longer your machine. The method they use to backdoor your machine, and the technique they use to break the security is not important. The other thing to remember is the attacker wants not to be detected for as long as possible, so if that attacker were to replace things like/bin/ls with modified versions from source, there's a chance that the behaviour of the program would drastically change and they would be detected. Lets take tar for instance. One version of GNU tar used 'I' for uncompressing bzip2 archives, while later versions use 'j', for example.
The other issue will be if/when D-VHS machines get cheap enough for casual home viewers to afford them, they're going to be made cheaply. As cheaply as possible, and treating the tape carefully will be the last priority. Unlike DAT/DLT tape backup drives that can still cost $1000, and are designed for data integrety, the D-VHS market will eventually be entirely about undercutting your competition, by either including more features, or cheaper price.
I seriously doubt that. When you extract the contents of a CD, each sector is 2352 bytes, 2048 of which are data. 288-bytes, of which, are used for ECC. For everything you didn't want to know about the raw format of CD-ROM data, try this page. All in all, you lose approximately 12.9% of the disc because of the format of the sectors, and the error correction/detection.
Yes, the top 100 'mature' projects on SF. In other words, the top 100 downloaded projects that the authors of said projects have decided to rank as 'mature'. The total number of projects ranked as "mature" by the project admins is only about 400 on SF. This includes some fairly well used software, such as Python, which is quite likely mature, by most people's standards. But it also includes software that reached the "mature" status while being on SF, that does exactly one or two things the author of the program wants it to do and nothing more (hence, only one developer). There is no desire by anyone to take it past that point, so it does not.
Point one, you must remember, is that all these projects are self ranked. They are not peer ranked, community ranked, or anything else. Someone could register a hello, world program, and rank it mature, and not even have the code compile right. There is no one to enforce proper ranking. For example, there is an entry for Perl on SF. It has three developers, and is ranked "planning". There's also Borland Interbase on SourceForge, a commercial product that was sold stand-alone for years prior to Borland releasing the source code, and it's only ranked "Stable/Production", not "Mature".
There's also the issue with the fact that many of these programs are very simple, that have one or maybe two functions, and nothing else. They don't aspire to be applications that people NEED on a day-to-day basis, or anything else. CDex, would be an example of this. It does two things -- rip audio tracks from CDs, and encode them to an audio file format (usually MP3) using an external DLL. An application like that doesn't need 100 different developers.
Then there's the fact that many 'mature' projects aren't even hosted on sourceforge, as was pointed out elsewhere. Apache, Samba, KDE, Linux kernel, and many other projects have their own resources, and are developed completely separately from sourceforge's infrastructure. Massive numbers of developers are part of those projects, doing various tasks.
Given how poorly the sample data was chosen, I have to wonder if this was a research paper conclusion looking for supporting data, or if the author truly believed his was choosing a valid sample (in, which case, I must question his competence).
The thing about the 5GHz range is that the signals won't travel nearly as far, either. So, while it might be clear of other devices trying to use that range, you pay for it in signal coverage. But until the price of chips that transmit on those frequencies comes down significantly, the 5GHz range will continue to be quite vacant.
You're assuming that developers will jump through hoops for the privledge of having their software work with UnitedLinux. You're probably wrong. If UL makes it too hard for develoeprs to test their programs on their platform, it won't happen. It's difficult enough to get developers to test on anything other than x86 RedHat or Mandrake, let alone any BSD or non-x86 UNIX-like OS.
The entertainment industry has been talking about "video on demand" for ages now, and the closer technology gets to supporting such a scheme, the more actively they try to push out innovators that might want to try to create this. The ReplayTV, for instance, is by far the closest that has come to a video on demand device, with it's transfer facility.
Instead of working with the manufacturers of these devices, they always work against them -- passing laws, lawsuits and various other attacks. Unfettered, the PVRs could easily turn into the "video on demand" devices the entertainment industry has been promising us, within as little as five years. But with the current rate of resistance, I wouldn't expect true video on demand for at least 20 or 30 years. Now, they want to also turn your computer into a glorified video/music player, locked down to play only RIAA/MPAA approved content (and only if you pay-per-use).
It's never been that their cards are junk, it's just that for every card, they start anew with completely untested drivers, which never quite mature before the card is discontinued, and new ones introduced. Nvidia's "unified" drivers, on the other hand, tend to be refinements from version to version and card to card, rather than completely different drivers.
If ATI could just finally fix their drivers once and for all, they'd be on even standing with Nvidia.
How about relinking the kernel (and rebooting) everytime you make a minor system configuration change. Perhaps Linux's loadable modules, and dynamic detection of devices has spoiled me
It's possible and likely he got a shock from his UPS when he disconnected the plug, particularily since disconnecting it from the outlet prevented the unit from being properly grounded, but I doubt it was 110V. If he touched the ground pin, he was grounding the entire circuit through his own body.
Then perhaps you should visit http://toolbar.google.com/. It's a toolbar for IE that lets you search direct from the tool bar, and also has other features, such has showing the rank of the page you're currently visiting (although Google warns that has privacy concerns), search (via google) the site you're currently visiting, submit your search to the image or usenet search, or highlight your search terms (this is my favorite feature, because it doesn't even rely on your current page being originated from Google). I kinda wish there was a version for Mozilla and Konqueror. A few of the features come in very handy (keyword highlighting, in particular).
Outlook and Access may be generic words, but the use of Outlook to mean a mail user agent, and Access to mean a database system is probably sufficently different from the conventioal meaning of those words to get them trademark protection. Using the name Outlook in a drawing application would probably be acceptable. Using it in a analytical prediction software package would probably be fine, too.
Then that's a particularily commercial free program. Many programs have a 2:1 ratio of shows to commericals. Most 30 minute programs are 20 or 22 minutes long, most 1 hour programs are 40 to 45 minutes long. Some televised movies can be even worse. A 90 minute movie will be stretched to 120 minutes, but so will an 80 minute movie, or even a 70 minute movie. Advertisers in North America have discovered that it's very difficult to make a quality commerical to bring in people, so they've decided to make up for it in quantity, playing the same commericals over and over again, knowing eventually they'll stick in your head.
Actually, you're wrong. The copyright for those long since expired, and the stories fell into the public domain. What's paradoxial is the fact that Disney, who profited so richly from the public domain, seems to be actively trying to prevent it from growing. If you ask me, they're shooting themselves in the foot
I'm not confused, I'm merely implying that the printers are indeed sold at or near a loss. I've seen HP Apollo printers sold for $20CDN. Assuming the retailer has a 30% markup, do you believe a printer can be made for $15CDN (about $10USD)? I suspect they don't even break even on that deal.
Then consider for a moment that they often sell printers at a cost lower than the combined cost of all the ink cartridges to go with it. My current printer cost me $50CDN ($100 - $50 MIR), while the cartridges alone for the printer would've cost me >$80CDN. Unless bundling the printer somehow lets them save $30, I'd say they're selling something at a loss there.
This is the same Vint Cerf that believes that ICANN is effective. Believes that there's no place for democracy on the board of ICANN, and believes that dissenting opinions within ICANN must be removed.
As for the "protection of intellectual property", there have been laws on the books for ages that concern protecting copyrights and patents for ages. However, none of this is about protecting copyright, but rather controlling its creation, controlling it's distribution, and controlling its use. For that reason alone, most of these protections do not deserve our support.
I don't know. I think Fritz Hollings should be linked to his true dark master, rather than a merely obscene site. Perhaps we could even link Disney to Fritz Hollings to complete the loop. Why not truly make him the senator from Disney?
It's funny how that's the excuse used for passing all these new laws, and customers never see any real benefit to them. The prices neither go down, nor stay the same. The RIAA, and MPAA both charge what they percieve the market will bear, and if the market starts refusing to bear it, they start crying, "Piracy! Piracy!" For the longest time, consumers were told that CD prices would drop as the popularity grows -- didn't happen, and the prices have actually risen. So the recording industry does something like a $35 CD, and when it inevitably fails to sell well, they get to blame their customers for the failure.
The recording industry execs are caught in some kind of dream world, where they believe they can do no wrong, and everything that doesn't go as expected for them, can be blamed on their piracy. Look at the failure of things like musicnet, and such, which are incredibly restricted services, that are bound to fail. However, they use the failure as ammunition to get harsher and harsher laws passed. It seems absolutely inconceivable to them that customers would like to have a service where they keep the music they've downloaded after cancelling the service, or that customers might want to transfer their downloaded music into a variety of portable players, and because of these factors choose to pirate the music because it doesn't impose artificial limitations on them.
Except for one thing -- the record companies make the bands they've signed pay for all the parts of making an album out of any royalties they might collect. There's a decent breakdown of the math used, here, but getting signed to a recording contract has all the disadvantages of owning your own business, with all the disadvantages of being an employee. Unless you sell many million copies of an album, you'll never be profitable, and would probably have an easier time making ends meet working in a grocery store.
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That wouldn't be a problem if the retailer that was shipping it to Canada would just put on a customs form that states the value of the enclosed goods. It's a little green sticker, that says what the box contains, and it's value. And even if they didn't include the proper customs forms, you CAN get the difference refunded, by providing documentation of the price you paid for the goods. It's somewhat of a pain in the ass, but if it's a $100 part being taxed at $200, then it would be well worth it. If it was a $20 part being taxed at $25, it would be mostly a waste of time.
The one thing that Windows has repeatedly been criticized for is the fact the native APIs are archaeic and obtuse. Everytime one API call finally ended up being expanded to use all the reserved parameters, they'd be forced to introduce a new one under a different name. The entire API is riddled with DoSomething and DoSomethingEx or SomeFunction and SomeFunction2, because when things needed to change, there was no room for growth. The .NET API is MS's attempt at getting that API bloat under control, and to redesign some broken designs in the original Win32 API set.
Secondly, I find no reason to believe that Microsoft Office.NET won't use undocumented/proprietary CLR API calls like any other Microsoft product does with the native Win32 API. They have no intention of giving Linux or any other platform the elbow room to be able to squeeze themselves into a healthy chunk of the market. Microsoft would also be free to introduce API calls that are impossible to re-implement without violating Microsoft patents.
This entire .NET stuff is far more about cleaning up their own platform, rather than allowing for any other into the market.
Lucky you don't live in the Canadian maritimes... (10% provincial tax + 7% federal tax) X 2 = one big ass tip.
ICANN has devolved more and more into a secret society that caters to Network Solutions/Verisign's every whim. It's not about doing what's right, correct, or even profitable for most people. It's become what's about right for Verisign.
I believe that was the goal behind at least one project. It was a combination of artificial stupidity, and artificial obnoxiousness. It was a Microsoft innovation, and graced the Microsoft Office applications, and later was partially integrated into Microsoft Windows XP. It was the Office Assistant, of course.
I think the point of all of this is, the moment an attacker gets administrative control to your machine, it's no longer your machine. The method they use to backdoor your machine, and the technique they use to break the security is not important. The other thing to remember is the attacker wants not to be detected for as long as possible, so if that attacker were to replace things like /bin/ls with modified versions from source, there's a chance that the behaviour of the program would drastically change and they would be detected. Lets take tar for instance. One version of GNU tar used 'I' for uncompressing bzip2 archives, while later versions use 'j', for example.
The other issue will be if/when D-VHS machines get cheap enough for casual home viewers to afford them, they're going to be made cheaply. As cheaply as possible, and treating the tape carefully will be the last priority. Unlike DAT/DLT tape backup drives that can still cost $1000, and are designed for data integrety, the D-VHS market will eventually be entirely about undercutting your competition, by either including more features, or cheaper price.
I seriously doubt that. When you extract the contents of a CD, each sector is 2352 bytes, 2048 of which are data. 288-bytes, of which, are used for ECC. For everything you didn't want to know about the raw format of CD-ROM data, try this page. All in all, you lose approximately 12.9% of the disc because of the format of the sectors, and the error correction/detection.
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Point one, you must remember, is that all these projects are self ranked. They are not peer ranked, community ranked, or anything else. Someone could register a hello, world program, and rank it mature, and not even have the code compile right. There is no one to enforce proper ranking. For example, there is an entry for Perl on SF. It has three developers, and is ranked "planning". There's also Borland Interbase on SourceForge, a commercial product that was sold stand-alone for years prior to Borland releasing the source code, and it's only ranked "Stable/Production", not "Mature".
- There's also the issue with the fact that many of these programs are very simple, that have one or maybe two functions, and nothing else. They don't aspire to be applications that people NEED on a day-to-day basis, or anything else. CDex, would be an example of this. It does two things -- rip audio tracks from CDs, and encode them to an audio file format (usually MP3) using an external DLL. An application like that doesn't need 100 different developers.
- Then there's the fact that many 'mature' projects aren't even hosted on sourceforge, as was pointed out elsewhere. Apache, Samba, KDE, Linux kernel, and many other projects have their own resources, and are developed completely separately from sourceforge's infrastructure. Massive numbers of developers are part of those projects, doing various tasks.
Given how poorly the sample data was chosen, I have to wonder if this was a research paper conclusion looking for supporting data, or if the author truly believed his was choosing a valid sample (in, which case, I must question his competence).The thing about the 5GHz range is that the signals won't travel nearly as far, either. So, while it might be clear of other devices trying to use that range, you pay for it in signal coverage. But until the price of chips that transmit on those frequencies comes down significantly, the 5GHz range will continue to be quite vacant.
You're assuming that developers will jump through hoops for the privledge of having their software work with UnitedLinux. You're probably wrong. If UL makes it too hard for develoeprs to test their programs on their platform, it won't happen. It's difficult enough to get developers to test on anything other than x86 RedHat or Mandrake, let alone any BSD or non-x86 UNIX-like OS.
Instead of working with the manufacturers of these devices, they always work against them -- passing laws, lawsuits and various other attacks. Unfettered, the PVRs could easily turn into the "video on demand" devices the entertainment industry has been promising us, within as little as five years. But with the current rate of resistance, I wouldn't expect true video on demand for at least 20 or 30 years. Now, they want to also turn your computer into a glorified video/music player, locked down to play only RIAA/MPAA approved content (and only if you pay-per-use).
If ATI could just finally fix their drivers once and for all, they'd be on even standing with Nvidia.
How about relinking the kernel (and rebooting) everytime you make a minor system configuration change. Perhaps Linux's loadable modules, and dynamic detection of devices has spoiled me
It's possible and likely he got a shock from his UPS when he disconnected the plug, particularily since disconnecting it from the outlet prevented the unit from being properly grounded, but I doubt it was 110V. If he touched the ground pin, he was grounding the entire circuit through his own body.
Then perhaps you should visit http://toolbar.google.com/. It's a toolbar for IE that lets you search direct from the tool bar, and also has other features, such has showing the rank of the page you're currently visiting (although Google warns that has privacy concerns), search (via google) the site you're currently visiting, submit your search to the image or usenet search, or highlight your search terms (this is my favorite feature, because it doesn't even rely on your current page being originated from Google). I kinda wish there was a version for Mozilla and Konqueror. A few of the features come in very handy (keyword highlighting, in particular).
Outlook and Access may be generic words, but the use of Outlook to mean a mail user agent, and Access to mean a database system is probably sufficently different from the conventioal meaning of those words to get them trademark protection. Using the name Outlook in a drawing application would probably be acceptable. Using it in a analytical prediction software package would probably be fine, too.
Then that's a particularily commercial free program. Many programs have a 2:1 ratio of shows to commericals. Most 30 minute programs are 20 or 22 minutes long, most 1 hour programs are 40 to 45 minutes long. Some televised movies can be even worse. A 90 minute movie will be stretched to 120 minutes, but so will an 80 minute movie, or even a 70 minute movie. Advertisers in North America have discovered that it's very difficult to make a quality commerical to bring in people, so they've decided to make up for it in quantity, playing the same commericals over and over again, knowing eventually they'll stick in your head.
Actually, you're wrong. The copyright for those long since expired, and the stories fell into the public domain. What's paradoxial is the fact that Disney, who profited so richly from the public domain, seems to be actively trying to prevent it from growing. If you ask me, they're shooting themselves in the foot
I'm not confused, I'm merely implying that the printers are indeed sold at or near a loss. I've seen HP Apollo printers sold for $20CDN. Assuming the retailer has a 30% markup, do you believe a printer can be made for $15CDN (about $10USD)? I suspect they don't even break even on that deal.
Then consider for a moment that they often sell printers at a cost lower than the combined cost of all the ink cartridges to go with it. My current printer cost me $50CDN ($100 - $50 MIR), while the cartridges alone for the printer would've cost me >$80CDN. Unless bundling the printer somehow lets them save $30, I'd say they're selling something at a loss there.
As for the "protection of intellectual property", there have been laws on the books for ages that concern protecting copyrights and patents for ages. However, none of this is about protecting copyright, but rather controlling its creation, controlling it's distribution, and controlling its use. For that reason alone, most of these protections do not deserve our support.
I don't know. I think Fritz Hollings should be linked to his true dark master, rather than a merely obscene site. Perhaps we could even link Disney to Fritz Hollings to complete the loop. Why not truly make him the senator from Disney?
The recording industry execs are caught in some kind of dream world, where they believe they can do no wrong, and everything that doesn't go as expected for them, can be blamed on their piracy. Look at the failure of things like musicnet, and such, which are incredibly restricted services, that are bound to fail. However, they use the failure as ammunition to get harsher and harsher laws passed. It seems absolutely inconceivable to them that customers would like to have a service where they keep the music they've downloaded after cancelling the service, or that customers might want to transfer their downloaded music into a variety of portable players, and because of these factors choose to pirate the music because it doesn't impose artificial limitations on them.
Except for one thing -- the record companies make the bands they've signed pay for all the parts of making an album out of any royalties they might collect. There's a decent breakdown of the math used, here, but getting signed to a recording contract has all the disadvantages of owning your own business, with all the disadvantages of being an employee. Unless you sell many million copies of an album, you'll never be profitable, and would probably have an easier time making ends meet working in a grocery store.