I love the Google phones with one exception: lack of storage. Google devices don't have microSD expansion slots, and the maximum storage sizes are small. If you're going to have small built-in flash sizes at least have an expansion slot. Or if you don't have an expansion slot, at least have versions with large storage options. HTC has a 64GB version of the One, for example. Apple has iPhone models with 64GB.
I am not a medical doctor. But my experience with Electronic Health Record (EHR) software tells me that the costs of implementing this are grossly underestimated. The reason? Training. Any time you introduce a new process into a medical environment there's an immense amount of training costs that occur. In installing EHR software (which enables electronic checklists) the cost is dominated by training expenses. I can't imagine making this kind of procedural change (even though seemingly simple) without significant education. Even if it it's only a few hours per medical professional the costs will be much higher than the estimates.
That's not to say these ideas shouldn't be implemented. They should - along with an EHR. EHR's have been shown to save lives. Checklists are easy to implement in EHRs.
But don't expect the costs to be anywhere near as low as Pronovost estimates.
This is not just an electronic problem. My brother-in-law runs two restuarants and recently devcided to accept credit cards. He's required to keep the printed credit card slips in case anyone disputes a charge. After a year as the mountains of paper are building up he's realized that this borders on the ridiculous, and creates a huge liability for him with personal credit card data. What he's doing now is keeping the paper records for 90 days and then shredding them. So he's limited the risk of losing someones card number to the last three months. Most disputed charges seem to happen within 90 days, and he's decided that he'd rather take the losses after 90 days than risk storing all that data. One thing that's important to realize here is that people dispute credit card charges all the time that they actually made. So every month he gets a handful of disputed charges that turn out to be completely legitimate. There would be a lot less need for him to keep records if credit card users didn't dispute so many legitimate charges.
Larry
I've had T-series notebooks for years, most recently a T42p. About 9 months ago I switched to a Fujitsu P7230 Lifebook and I love it. It's been rock solid. I can swap the DVD drive for a second battery and I get 7 hours of battery life with both batteries combined. It's amazing. It's a well-built solid machine and I would buy one again. The Dell and HP machines I looked at in comparison were all heavier and had worse battery life. The Sony's are nice (if you get one made by Sony), but they're expensive and they come with features I don't want (will Sony please just kill the Memory Stick). For comparison. The Fujitsu has an SD slot. I can't say enough good things about the Fujitsu.
Larry
If you hope to have publication to a digital medium count as record for prior art, you need to be able to make some assurances that the content and date are published in some archival (i.e. permanent, difficult to alter) form. Posting to a blog is not sufficient. Most blogging software/sites allow easy editing of content.
Consider this scenario. A patent is filed on something a person thought of two years ago. Said person, feeling slighted and thinking "that's obvious; I thought of it 2 years ago" decides to write up their thoughts from two years ago and publish them on a blog back dating them to when they first thought of the idea. How can any patent examiner, without doing forensic computer work, distinguish that from a valid publication of the idea?
With traditional print media, and in particular widely published journals, that kind of forgery is extremely difficult to propogate.
The problem is definitely solvable. For example, you could digitally sign each posted idea along with the date of submission, and then record that digitally signed data to a write-only medium. Even better, you could widely distribute copies of that write-only media to neutral third parties (i.e. libraries) so altering any single copy would be insufficient. It's my understanding that the paid services have worked mechanisms like this that make their records acceptable as prior-art archives.
Unfortunately, most of what I described is not easy to do on a shoestring (i.e. volunteer) budget. If you could come up with a distributed mechanism that allowed a large number of volunteers to contribute it might work.
I recently looked into this for my house. Most residential A/V and networking people have no clue. Further, they fail to consider anything but the most minimal usage. As a result you'll have to spec this out in detail yourself:
1. Plan for a wiring closet/server room.
a. Make sure you have room in the closet for a full 4-post 19" rack (not a telecom rack, which your wiring guys will probably want to do). Take into account the space you will need to insert servers on slide rails into the rack and space needed to access cabling behind the rack.
b. Run adequate cooling and power to the wiring closet. You probably want a separate zone on your air conditioning to keep the room cooler than the rest of the house. You'll probably want power for a large UPS to handle everything you mount in the rack. I put in a 30A/110V dedicated line for the UPS.
c. Your contractor will think you're nuts because no one does this kind of work in a residence. You will need to lay out the room exactly as you want it because they have no experience with this kind of equipment.
2. Run conduit from the wiring closet/server room to every TV or networking location. Expect that whatever wiring you run today will be outdated in 5 years and you will need to pull new wiring. Run the largest conduit that your contractor will put in the walls at a reasonable price. The cost is dominated by labor, not the cost of the conduit.
3. The choice of cabling you run will be determined by how you want to do A/V distribution. You have two choices:
a. All your A/V equipment resides in the server room, and you distribute only audio/video to each TV location.
b. Or you put cable and/or satellite tuners at each TV location and distribute the raw signals.
4. If you want to use a cable and/or satellite tuner box at each TV location, I recommend at least 3 RG-6 coax to each TV location from the wiring closet. A dual tuner DirecTV Satellite HD-DVR requires 2 RG-6 coax for basic operation plus if you want to receive over the air HD channels you need a 3rd coax for that. That's 3 RG-6 for just one device. Must contractors will want to run only 1 which is totally inadequate. In addition, you will need at least 1 Ethernet and one telephone jack at each location. Most satellite, cable or TiVO boxes need at least one of those. Don't forget that not only will your TiVO, home media PC, and other set-top boxes want Ethernet, but so will your Xbox360. Consider running multiple wires verses an Ethernet hub at each location. I recommend Cat-6 since the cost is dominated by labor, not cable cost, and I prefer the peace of mind of Cat-6 in potentially long cable runs through the walls.
5. If you want to location your satellite/cable box in the server room and distribute HD video throughout the house you will need to run fiber. The only reasonable HDMI distribution system I'm aware of is by Geffen. Don't even think of doing long HDMI cable runs. The Geffen system uses 1 fiber and 1 Cat-6 line to carry HDMI. You install transceivers at either end and the Geffen HDMI switching equipment in your wiring closet.
6. If you want a mix of the above, or just want to be sure, here's what I recommend to every TV location:
+ 4 RG-6: Using 3 is easy with a dual tuner HD DVR, and if you want to carry security cameras, terrestrial TV, etc. that 4th line is useful. Cable is cheap, labor is expensive; run a bundle of 4.
+ 4 Cat-6: Make sure you punch down the Cat-6 using T568B as the wiring scheme so you can use this for GigE or phones. You can easily use 3 of these at each location if you need Ethernet, phone and centrally distributed HDMI video. Again the cable is cheap it's the labor that's expensive; run a bundle of 4. Make sure you contractor tests each line and delivers to you a test report for each line.
+ 2 fiber: Run a fiber pair as well if you want HDMI dist
I've had the same experience. I tried putting CFLs in about a year ago only to find they wouldn't fit in about half the fixtures in our house. I've also had trouble finding CFLs that produce as much light as a 100W incandescent bulb. Until CFLs actually fit legislation like this makes no sense.
Larry
Just as big a problem is the lack of video distribution systems for copy-protected HD video. Today I can have an HD player or satellite box in one room and watch the output on a TV in another room using component video distribution technology. For copy protected HD signals there's really no good video distribution system.
I can't be the only Slashdot person who's first thought was that a nuclear waste dump on the moon was beginning to go critical, and that this explosion was the precursor to a larger one that would blow the moon out of orbit? Wasn't that supposed to happen September 13, 1999?
Reliability certainly killed the Rio players with me. I owned a Carbon, which I loved while it worked. Unfortunately, it worked long enough to get out of warranty - something less than 90 days.
I learned a lesson here. After it failed, I spent more time scouring Internet review sites. The reviews were pretty binary. On a scale of 1 to 10, 9 people would give it a 10, and 1 would give it a one, for an average of 9. So a 10% failure rate turns into an average of 9...
So when using those Internet reviews, don't let the average fool you. Look at the poor reviews for a pattern, and be prepared to be one of the 10%.
I'm on the board of LMI, along with Maddog. Here's the actual text of the email Maddog sent as explanation to David Brae. I posted this as part of the previous Slashdot thread on this topic here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=159125&cid=133 34472:
From: Jon maddog Hall To: David Braue
David,
Your story is quite accurate, LAI is acting in Australia on behalf of LMI, and this is not a "scam".
Since 1995, when an unfortunate incident in the United States showed us that the world is not made of altruistic people and companies, Linux International has been defending the Linux Trademark. At that time an entity had obtained a US trademark on the word "Linux", and was trying to obtain twenty-five percent of the REVENUES of companies that had the word "Linux" in their name, or in their product names. Instead of all the member companies fighting this battle individually, Linux International fought it and won. Unfortunately it cost us a lot of money to do this, despite the pro bono efforts of Gerry Davis, of the law firm of Davis and Schroeder.
Linux International has been defending the Linux Trademark for the world, which due to the costs of registering and obtaining International Trade Marks is VERY expensive. Linux International has spent over 300,000 USD to do this over the years. LI is a non-profit and does not have very much revenue, so some of this money has come from my own personal checkbook. While I can not say how much money I have spent on defending the mark per se, I can tell you that I have spent about 250,000 USD of my own money in keeping LI alive. I am not looking for medals or a chest to pin them on. I am only stating this to show people that this is not a "scam", nor is anyone making any money off this other than the international legal and trademark community, and I am sure that they are necessary and justifiable fees. Certainly Jeremy Malcolm has seemed to be above board and conscientious in all of our dealings with him, as has Jonathan Oxer and the rest of the fine people at LAI.
After a while the board of Linux International recognized the advantage of forming a separate non-profit, the Linux Mark Institute (LMI). We need LMI to be self-funding, and following trademark laws in the 200 countries of the world is very expensive. In addition to the normal issues of a company obtaining a trademark of their own product, using their own name, we have issues such as:
o "Who owns the right to use 'Linux'" o "Who (therefore) has the right to the broad name 'Linux University'?" o "Can there be more than one "Linux University? If so, what should its name
be?" o "If I call my company 'Linux Experts', does this mean that I am the only
group of 'Linux Experts' worldwide?....shouldn't everyone come to me
because I called myself 'Linux Experts'?"
as well as the issues of people who wish to use the name in bad ways (as a pornography attractor or on items confusing to the Linux market).
We have tried to make the licensing as unobtrusive as possible, tailored to the amounts of money that people might be making off the use of the mark, and with an eye to keeping the cost to non-profits and user groups as low as possible. We also have to re-license the name periodically so we can protect against "name squatting" (ala URLs) and defunct entities who no longer need the name they registered.
The trademark laws of the world were not created in the days of the World Wide Web, or even the Internet, where unscrupulous people can take advantage of a good name for a good idea and create havoc for people who want to start legitimate industry in their territory under a mark that is registered in some other country. By protecting the mark of "Linux" in as many countries as possible, LMI
I'm on the board of LMI, along with Maddog. Maddog sent the following email as explanation to David Brae. Hopefully this clears up a lot of the confusion:
From: Jon maddog Hall To: David Braue
David,
Your story is quite accurate, LAI is acting in Australia on behalf of LMI, and this is not a "scam".
Since 1995, when an unfortunate incident in the United States showed us that the world is not made of altruistic people and companies, Linux International has been defending the Linux Trademark. At that time an entity had obtained a US trademark on the word "Linux", and was trying to obtain twenty-five percent of the REVENUES of companies that had the word "Linux" in their name, or in their product names. Instead of all the member companies fighting this battle individually, Linux International fought it and won. Unfortunately it cost us a lot of money to do this, despite the pro bono efforts of Gerry Davis, of the law firm of Davis and Schroeder.
Linux International has been defending the Linux Trademark for the world, which due to the costs of registering and obtaining International Trade Marks is VERY expensive. Linux International has spent over 300,000 USD to do this over the years. LI is a non-profit and does not have very much revenue, so some of this money has come from my own personal checkbook. While I can not say how much money I have spent on defending the mark per se, I can tell you that I have spent about 250,000 USD of my own money in keeping LI alive. I am not looking for medals or a chest to pin them on. I am only stating this to show people that this is not a "scam", nor is anyone making any money off this other than the international legal and trademark community, and I am sure that they are necessary and justifiable fees. Certainly Jeremy Malcolm has seemed to be above board and conscientious in all of our dealings with him, as has Jonathan Oxer and the rest of the fine people at LAI.
After a while the board of Linux International recognized the advantage of forming a separate non-profit, the Linux Mark Institute (LMI). We need LMI to be self-funding, and following trademark laws in the 200 countries of the world is very expensive. In addition to the normal issues of a company obtaining a trademark of their own product, using their own name, we have issues such as:
o "Who owns the right to use 'Linux'" o "Who (therefore) has the right to the broad name 'Linux University'?" o "Can there be more than one "Linux University? If so, what should its name
be?" o "If I call my company 'Linux Experts', does this mean that I am the only
group of 'Linux Experts' worldwide?....shouldn't everyone come to me
because I called myself 'Linux Experts'?"
as well as the issues of people who wish to use the name in bad ways (as a pornography attractor or on items confusing to the Linux market).
We have tried to make the licensing as unobtrusive as possible, tailored to the amounts of money that people might be making off the use of the mark, and with an eye to keeping the cost to non-profits and user groups as low as possible. We also have to re-license the name periodically so we can protect against "name squatting" (ala URLs) and defunct entities who no longer need the name they registered.
The trademark laws of the world were not created in the days of the World Wide Web, or even the Internet, where unscrupulous people can take advantage of a good name for a good idea and create havoc for people who want to start legitimate industry in their territory under a mark that is registered in some other country. By protecting the mark of "Linux" in as many countries as possible, LMI makes this type of deliberate extortion MUCH more difficult and MUCH more expensive.
Believe me, I have LOTs of other, more pleasant, more lucrative things that I can do with my life than have to deal with this, but this is the albatross that has been hung about my neck, and which I resignedly bear because others do not want it and are off making lots more money than I make.
I think that Perens' specific point about the patents currently in the pool is likely correct; certainly it deserves to be discussed on its own merits.
Yes, although I believe that the intent is to encourage the contribution of original unencumbered patents, and that this is just a starting point.
If Perens is also making a broader claim that the patent pool effort is useless, and that only political action matters, then I think he's clearly wrong in that. The current state of the patent pool doesn't justify a dismissive "it'll never work" attitude, but it does justify a skeptical "show me the money" attitude.
My major concern was smaking sure that people understood that the effort is not useless. It is important. Political action is also important. Both are worth pursuing. The patent pool should not be dismissed on day one because it's not yet effective. It will take a long time to make it effective. We must be willing to persist at it for the duration.
Case 1 is always a problem, and no one expects a patent pool to solve it. The argument here reads a bit like this to me: "Your solution to problem A doesn't solve problem B, therefore your solution is bad." Huh?
Case 2 is solvable by a patent pool. The argument made here that a patent pool is ineffective depends on the fallacy that patents in that pool have already been licensed to a potential aggressor through some other means. Again, I think that everyone recognizes that to be effective, the pool must contain original IP not already licesned to a potential aggressor. The discussion we should have is how to encourage and enable the growth of that part of the pool.
Using human skin as the medium to conduct signals for communications is a concept that has been around for years. See for example this computer.org article (PDF).
The biggest issue with kids is that you need to keep to a fixed schedule. You can't go on 24 hour coding marathons and get home whenever. You need to be home for important family time. The only way to make that happen is to schedule it. You have to live by your calendar. If that means 4pm to 8pm is dinner, playtime, storytime, and then bedtime, you must keep to that schedule.
You'll need to adjust your hours to that schedule. For a lot of people that means shifting from being a nightowl to working early morning hours. Late afternoon/early evening seems to be prime coding hours for single people. Usually it doesn't work that way if you're married with kids. Everything is driven off the kids bedtime. That sets your family dinner and bedtime story times.
OSDL has put in place a legal defense fund whose purpose is to reimburse legal expenses of companies in this position so that their cost to defend a lawsuit is zero.
Paying SCO before the legal issues have been resolved is a waste of money since companies can turn to OSDL to reimburse their legal costs. This was a bad business decision.
Charles Booher is a smart developer and Linux user. He was one of the first people I know to use Linux on an embedded appliance - a network monitoring sensor he built when he was at NAT. From what I understand he also did some pretty impressive crypto work with his SecureOffice product. I suspect he could program circles around many Slashdot readers.
Good points, but I don't entirely agree. Mom wants to be able to seemlessly exchange files with her friends, and do the same things that her friends do.
One of my concerns is that I don't think many Open source developers udnerstand the capabilities that MS has in Office 10 (Office XP), and the new capabilities that are being built into Office 11. I think Open Source developers tend to underestimate Office because it's not a core application they use heavily. They think that Excel is a spreadsheet and that Word is a text editor. They don't realize that Office is becoming an entire appliation development platform where spreadsheet, database, word processing, XML, and graphics tools are embedded in the platform.
i.e. don't think of Excel as the thing you want to build, but rather as a set of library functions available for you to build on.
Your comment:
Slap together the features contained in OpenOffice, Abiword, Gnumeric, Evolution, and other stuff I never use and, feature-wise, and you've got more than enough features to do the stuff you need to do -- it's just a question of the user being able to figure out how to do it easily, and that goes back to the UI again.
is an example of this. Slap together the features contained in OpenOffice, Abiword, Gnumeric, Evolution, and other stuff you never use and you get the basic functionailty that most Open Source people think is what Office does. If you enver use this stuff, how do you know what it really does? You know it on the surface, but you don't know the real functionality underneath. You're playing right into Microsoft's hands.
Regardless, I think Mom will be extremely disappointed if she's used to Office and tries to use OpenOffice instead. One of my points was that the decision for Mom will not be at the OS level (Linux vs. Windows), but at the application level (OpenOffice vs. MS Office). Those of us in the Open Source world need to realize that's where the decision is made.
This review was very telling. What did Mom look for first? Microsoft Office.
Most Linux zealots are happily toiling away making a Linux desktop that's friendly to a generation of users trained on Microsoft Windows. Meanwhile, Microsoft is creating an entirely new operating environment and training the next generation of users to live in that environment: Microsoft Office.
Office is the franchise, not Windows. Microsoft Windows maintains its dominance on the desktop primarily because it runs Microsoft Office. The underlying OS doesn't matter. Mom doesn't care what the OS is. She cares that it runs Microsoft Office.
MS is slowly replacing Windows as the dominant platform with Office as the dominant platform. When the next generation of Office comes out, you'll see more and more applications written to run within Office. More and more applications will be Office plugins that run using Office APIs. Microsoft is changing the rules of the game. Go ahead, build a better OS. It won't matter because the world will have moved one step up to Microsoft Office.
In order to compete on the desktop, the Open Source world needs to devote the kind of energy to competing at the Office level as it does to competing at the OS level. Then maybe Linux will truely have a chance on the desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
I would buy a Lenovo Yoga 2 running Android. Great form factor, but crippled by Windows 8.
I love the Google phones with one exception: lack of storage. Google devices don't have microSD expansion slots, and the maximum storage sizes are small. If you're going to have small built-in flash sizes at least have an expansion slot. Or if you don't have an expansion slot, at least have versions with large storage options. HTC has a 64GB version of the One, for example. Apple has iPhone models with 64GB.
That's because if they were writing in C++ they would still be writing the application and wouldn't have any users yet. Larry
I am not a medical doctor. But my experience with Electronic Health Record (EHR) software tells me that the costs of implementing this are grossly underestimated. The reason? Training. Any time you introduce a new process into a medical environment there's an immense amount of training costs that occur. In installing EHR software (which enables electronic checklists) the cost is dominated by training expenses. I can't imagine making this kind of procedural change (even though seemingly simple) without significant education. Even if it it's only a few hours per medical professional the costs will be much higher than the estimates.
That's not to say these ideas shouldn't be implemented. They should - along with an EHR. EHR's have been shown to save lives. Checklists are easy to implement in EHRs.
But don't expect the costs to be anywhere near as low as Pronovost estimates.
Larry
This is not just an electronic problem. My brother-in-law runs two restuarants and recently devcided to accept credit cards. He's required to keep the printed credit card slips in case anyone disputes a charge. After a year as the mountains of paper are building up he's realized that this borders on the ridiculous, and creates a huge liability for him with personal credit card data. What he's doing now is keeping the paper records for 90 days and then shredding them. So he's limited the risk of losing someones card number to the last three months. Most disputed charges seem to happen within 90 days, and he's decided that he'd rather take the losses after 90 days than risk storing all that data. One thing that's important to realize here is that people dispute credit card charges all the time that they actually made. So every month he gets a handful of disputed charges that turn out to be completely legitimate. There would be a lot less need for him to keep records if credit card users didn't dispute so many legitimate charges. Larry
I've had T-series notebooks for years, most recently a T42p. About 9 months ago I switched to a Fujitsu P7230 Lifebook and I love it. It's been rock solid. I can swap the DVD drive for a second battery and I get 7 hours of battery life with both batteries combined. It's amazing. It's a well-built solid machine and I would buy one again. The Dell and HP machines I looked at in comparison were all heavier and had worse battery life. The Sony's are nice (if you get one made by Sony), but they're expensive and they come with features I don't want (will Sony please just kill the Memory Stick). For comparison. The Fujitsu has an SD slot. I can't say enough good things about the Fujitsu. Larry
If you hope to have publication to a digital medium count as record for prior art, you need to be able to make some assurances that the content and date are published in some archival (i.e. permanent, difficult to alter) form. Posting to a blog is not sufficient. Most blogging software/sites allow easy editing of content.
Consider this scenario. A patent is filed on something a person thought of two years ago. Said person, feeling slighted and thinking "that's obvious; I thought of it 2 years ago" decides to write up their thoughts from two years ago and publish them on a blog back dating them to when they first thought of the idea. How can any patent examiner, without doing forensic computer work, distinguish that from a valid publication of the idea?
With traditional print media, and in particular widely published journals, that kind of forgery is extremely difficult to propogate.
The problem is definitely solvable. For example, you could digitally sign each posted idea along with the date of submission, and then record that digitally signed data to a write-only medium. Even better, you could widely distribute copies of that write-only media to neutral third parties (i.e. libraries) so altering any single copy would be insufficient. It's my understanding that the paid services have worked mechanisms like this that make their records acceptable as prior-art archives.
Unfortunately, most of what I described is not easy to do on a shoestring (i.e. volunteer) budget. If you could come up with a distributed mechanism that allowed a large number of volunteers to contribute it might work.
Larry
I recently looked into this for my house. Most residential A/V and networking people have no clue. Further, they fail to consider anything but the most minimal usage. As a result you'll have to spec this out in detail yourself:
1. Plan for a wiring closet/server room.
a. Make sure you have room in the closet for a full 4-post 19" rack (not a telecom rack, which your wiring guys will probably want to do). Take into account the space you will need to insert servers on slide rails into the rack and space needed to access cabling behind the rack.
b. Run adequate cooling and power to the wiring closet. You probably want a separate zone on your air conditioning to keep the room cooler than the rest of the house. You'll probably want power for a large UPS to handle everything you mount in the rack. I put in a 30A/110V dedicated line for the UPS.
c. Your contractor will think you're nuts because no one does this kind of work in a residence. You will need to lay out the room exactly as you want it because they have no experience with this kind of equipment.
2. Run conduit from the wiring closet/server room to every TV or networking location. Expect that whatever wiring you run today will be outdated in 5 years and you will need to pull new wiring. Run the largest conduit that your contractor will put in the walls at a reasonable price. The cost is dominated by labor, not the cost of the conduit.
3. The choice of cabling you run will be determined by how you want to do A/V distribution. You have two choices:
a. All your A/V equipment resides in the server room, and you distribute only audio/video to each TV location.
b. Or you put cable and/or satellite tuners at each TV location and distribute the raw signals.
4. If you want to use a cable and/or satellite tuner box at each TV location, I recommend at least 3 RG-6 coax to each TV location from the wiring closet. A dual tuner DirecTV Satellite HD-DVR requires 2 RG-6 coax for basic operation plus if you want to receive over the air HD channels you need a 3rd coax for that. That's 3 RG-6 for just one device. Must contractors will want to run only 1 which is totally inadequate. In addition, you will need at least 1 Ethernet and one telephone jack at each location. Most satellite, cable or TiVO boxes need at least one of those. Don't forget that not only will your TiVO, home media PC, and other set-top boxes want Ethernet, but so will your Xbox360. Consider running multiple wires verses an Ethernet hub at each location. I recommend Cat-6 since the cost is dominated by labor, not cable cost, and I prefer the peace of mind of Cat-6 in potentially long cable runs through the walls.
5. If you want to location your satellite/cable box in the server room and distribute HD video throughout the house you will need to run fiber. The only reasonable HDMI distribution system I'm aware of is by Geffen. Don't even think of doing long HDMI cable runs. The Geffen system uses 1 fiber and 1 Cat-6 line to carry HDMI. You install transceivers at either end and the Geffen HDMI switching equipment in your wiring closet.
6. If you want a mix of the above, or just want to be sure, here's what I recommend to every TV location:
+ 4 RG-6: Using 3 is easy with a dual tuner HD DVR, and if you want to carry security cameras, terrestrial TV, etc. that 4th line is useful. Cable is cheap, labor is expensive; run a bundle of 4.
+ 4 Cat-6: Make sure you punch down the Cat-6 using T568B as the wiring scheme so you can use this for GigE or phones. You can easily use 3 of these at each location if you need Ethernet, phone and centrally distributed HDMI video. Again the cable is cheap it's the labor that's expensive; run a bundle of 4. Make sure you contractor tests each line and delivers to you a test report for each line.
+ 2 fiber: Run a fiber pair as well if you want HDMI dist
I've had the same experience. I tried putting CFLs in about a year ago only to find they wouldn't fit in about half the fixtures in our house. I've also had trouble finding CFLs that produce as much light as a 100W incandescent bulb. Until CFLs actually fit legislation like this makes no sense. Larry
Yeah, but what does it do? Larry
Just as big a problem is the lack of video distribution systems for copy-protected HD video. Today I can have an HD player or satellite box in one room and watch the output on a TV in another room using component video distribution technology. For copy protected HD signals there's really no good video distribution system.
Larry
Reliability certainly killed the Rio players with me. I owned a Carbon, which I loved while it worked. Unfortunately, it worked long enough to get out of warranty - something less than 90 days.
I learned a lesson here. After it failed, I spent more time scouring Internet review sites. The reviews were pretty binary. On a scale of 1 to 10, 9 people would give it a 10, and 1 would give it a one, for an average of 9. So a 10% failure rate turns into an average of 9...
So when using those Internet reviews, don't let the average fool you. Look at the poor reviews for a pattern, and be prepared to be one of the 10%.
Larry
I'm on the board of LMI, along with Maddog. Here's the actual text of the email Maddog sent as explanation to David Brae. I posted this as part of the previous Slashdot thread on this topic here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=159125&cid=133 34472:
From: Jon maddog Hall
To: David Braue
David,
Your story is quite accurate, LAI is acting in Australia on behalf of LMI, and this is not a "scam".
Since 1995, when an unfortunate incident in the United States showed us that the world is not made of altruistic people and companies, Linux International has been defending the Linux Trademark. At that time an entity had obtained a US trademark on the word "Linux", and was trying to obtain twenty-five percent of the REVENUES of companies that had the word "Linux" in their name, or in their product names. Instead of all the member companies fighting this battle individually, Linux International fought it and won. Unfortunately it cost us a lot of money to do this, despite the pro bono efforts of Gerry Davis, of the law firm of Davis and Schroeder.
Linux International has been defending the Linux Trademark for the world, which due to the costs of registering and obtaining International Trade Marks is VERY expensive. Linux International has spent over 300,000 USD to do this over the years. LI is a non-profit and does not have very much revenue, so some of this money has come from my own personal checkbook. While I can not say how much money I have spent on defending the mark per se, I can tell you that I have spent about 250,000 USD of my own money in keeping LI alive. I am not looking for medals or a chest to pin them on. I am only stating this to show people that this is not a "scam", nor is anyone making any money off this other than the international legal and trademark community, and I am sure that they are necessary and justifiable fees. Certainly Jeremy Malcolm has seemed to be above board and conscientious in all of our dealings with him, as has Jonathan Oxer and the rest of the fine people at LAI.
After a while the board of Linux International recognized the advantage of forming a separate non-profit, the Linux Mark Institute (LMI). We need LMI to be self-funding, and following trademark laws in the 200 countries of the world is very expensive. In addition to the normal issues of a company obtaining a trademark of their own product, using their own name, we have issues such as:
o "Who owns the right to use 'Linux'"
o "Who (therefore) has the right to the broad name 'Linux University'?"
o "Can there be more than one "Linux University? If so, what should its name
be?"
o "If I call my company 'Linux Experts', does this mean that I am the only
group of 'Linux Experts' worldwide?....shouldn't everyone come to me
because I called myself 'Linux Experts'?"
as well as the issues of people who wish to use the name in bad ways (as a pornography attractor or on items confusing to the Linux market).
We have tried to make the licensing as unobtrusive as possible, tailored to the amounts of money that people might be making off the use of the mark, and with an eye to keeping the cost to non-profits and user groups as low as possible. We also have to re-license the name periodically so we can protect against "name squatting" (ala URLs) and defunct entities who no longer need the name they registered.
The trademark laws of the world were not created in the days of the World Wide Web, or even the Internet, where unscrupulous people can take advantage of a good name for a good idea and create havoc for people who want to start legitimate industry in their territory under a mark that is registered in some other country. By protecting the mark of "Linux" in as many countries as possible, LMI
I'm on the board of LMI, along with Maddog. Maddog sent the following email as explanation to David Brae. Hopefully this clears up a lot of the confusion:
From: Jon maddog Hall
To: David Braue
David,
Your story is quite accurate, LAI is acting in Australia on behalf of LMI, and this is not a "scam".
Since 1995, when an unfortunate incident in the United States showed us that the world is not made of altruistic people and companies, Linux International has been defending the Linux Trademark. At that time an entity had obtained a US trademark on the word "Linux", and was trying to obtain twenty-five percent of the REVENUES of companies that had the word "Linux" in their name, or in their product names. Instead of all the member companies fighting this battle individually, Linux International fought it and won. Unfortunately it cost us a lot of money to do this, despite the pro bono efforts of Gerry Davis, of the law firm of Davis and Schroeder.
Linux International has been defending the Linux Trademark for the world, which due to the costs of registering and obtaining International Trade Marks is VERY expensive. Linux International has spent over 300,000 USD to do this over the years. LI is a non-profit and does not have very much revenue, so some of this money has come from my own personal checkbook. While I can not say how much money I have spent on defending the mark per se, I can tell you that I have spent about 250,000 USD of my own money in keeping LI alive. I am not looking for medals or a chest to pin them on. I am only stating this to show people that this is not a "scam", nor is anyone making any money off this other than the international legal and trademark community, and I am sure that they are necessary and justifiable fees. Certainly Jeremy Malcolm has seemed to be above board and conscientious in all of our dealings with him, as has Jonathan Oxer and the rest of the fine people at LAI.
After a while the board of Linux International recognized the advantage of forming a separate non-profit, the Linux Mark Institute (LMI). We need LMI to be self-funding, and following trademark laws in the 200 countries of the world is very expensive. In addition to the normal issues of a company obtaining a trademark of their own product, using their own name, we have issues such as:
o "Who owns the right to use 'Linux'"
o "Who (therefore) has the right to the broad name 'Linux University'?"
o "Can there be more than one "Linux University? If so, what should its name
be?"
o "If I call my company 'Linux Experts', does this mean that I am the only
group of 'Linux Experts' worldwide?....shouldn't everyone come to me
because I called myself 'Linux Experts'?"
as well as the issues of people who wish to use the name in bad ways (as a pornography attractor or on items confusing to the Linux market).
We have tried to make the licensing as unobtrusive as possible, tailored to the amounts of money that people might be making off the use of the mark, and with an eye to keeping the cost to non-profits and user groups as low as possible. We also have to re-license the name periodically so we can protect against "name squatting" (ala URLs) and defunct entities who no longer need the name they registered.
The trademark laws of the world were not created in the days of the World Wide Web, or even the Internet, where unscrupulous people can take advantage of a good name for a good idea and create havoc for people who want to start legitimate industry in their territory under a mark that is registered in some other country. By protecting the mark of "Linux" in as many countries as possible, LMI makes this type of deliberate extortion MUCH more difficult and MUCH more expensive.
Believe me, I have LOTs of other, more pleasant, more lucrative things that I can do with my life than have to deal with this, but this is the albatross that has been hung about my neck, and which I resignedly bear because others do not want it and are off making lots more money than I make.
Warmest regards,
maddog
Larry
Case 2 is solvable by a patent pool. The argument made here that a patent pool is ineffective depends on the fallacy that patents in that pool have already been licensed to a potential aggressor through some other means. Again, I think that everyone recognizes that to be effective, the pool must contain original IP not already licesned to a potential aggressor. The discussion we should have is how to encourage and enable the growth of that part of the pool.
Larry
Someone else mentioned the Microsoft patent.
The interesting thing about Microsft's patent is that it includes power, not just data.
Larry
You'll need to adjust your hours to that schedule. For a lot of people that means shifting from being a nightowl to working early morning hours. Late afternoon/early evening seems to be prime coding hours for single people. Usually it doesn't work that way if you're married with kids. Everything is driven off the kids bedtime. That sets your family dinner and bedtime story times.
Larry
Paying SCO before the legal issues have been resolved is a waste of money since companies can turn to OSDL to reimburse their legal costs. This was a bad business decision.
Larry
In fact, I bet if someone had thought of it at the time, it would have been proposed as an alternative to imposing air bags on everyone.
Larry
Larry
Larry
One of my concerns is that I don't think many Open source developers udnerstand the capabilities that MS has in Office 10 (Office XP), and the new capabilities that are being built into Office 11. I think Open Source developers tend to underestimate Office because it's not a core application they use heavily. They think that Excel is a spreadsheet and that Word is a text editor. They don't realize that Office is becoming an entire appliation development platform where spreadsheet, database, word processing, XML, and graphics tools are embedded in the platform.
i.e. don't think of Excel as the thing you want to build, but rather as a set of library functions available for you to build on.
Your comment:
is an example of this. Slap together the features contained in OpenOffice, Abiword, Gnumeric, Evolution, and other stuff you never use and you get the basic functionailty that most Open Source people think is what Office does. If you enver use this stuff, how do you know what it really does? You know it on the surface, but you don't know the real functionality underneath. You're playing right into Microsoft's hands.Regardless, I think Mom will be extremely disappointed if she's used to Office and tries to use OpenOffice instead. One of my points was that the decision for Mom will not be at the OS level (Linux vs. Windows), but at the application level (OpenOffice vs. MS Office). Those of us in the Open Source world need to realize that's where the decision is made.
Most Linux zealots are happily toiling away making a Linux desktop that's friendly to a generation of users trained on Microsoft Windows. Meanwhile, Microsoft is creating an entirely new operating environment and training the next generation of users to live in that environment: Microsoft Office.
Office is the franchise, not Windows. Microsoft Windows maintains its dominance on the desktop primarily because it runs Microsoft Office. The underlying OS doesn't matter. Mom doesn't care what the OS is. She cares that it runs Microsoft Office.
MS is slowly replacing Windows as the dominant platform with Office as the dominant platform. When the next generation of Office comes out, you'll see more and more applications written to run within Office. More and more applications will be Office plugins that run using Office APIs. Microsoft is changing the rules of the game. Go ahead, build a better OS. It won't matter because the world will have moved one step up to Microsoft Office.
In order to compete on the desktop, the Open Source world needs to devote the kind of energy to competing at the Office level as it does to competing at the OS level. Then maybe Linux will truely have a chance on the desktop.