"Q: I want to copy the MP3s from my PJB-100 back to my PC. How do I do that?
A: You cannot. To ensure that the PJB-100 complies with the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA), It is not possible to retrieve the MP3 files from the PJB-100. You should physically posess each CD that you transfer to the PJB-100, or have rights to the material you download from the Internet"
"Q: I want to write a Linux driver for the PJB. Can I get specifications for the programming interfaces for the PJB or the USB protocol?
A: Not at this time. We do recognize that Linux and Macintosh users would like support for the PJB, but our initial product launch has focused on the Windows implementation. "
Frankly, if they are going to treat their customers like children, they can take someone else's money. There is no way I am going to pay any amount of money for an audio device that is incapable of giving back the data that I put into it. This is the same despotic mentality that gave Intel the idea for encrypting the signal from your video card to your monitor. If I wanted that, I would pay for it. But I don't and no one else does either.
There is just no reason for it other than removing the right to use something you own. Actually, that you license because of course, you can't really own anything anymore.
I forgot to add, and I'm sure someone will argue this, that yes, they were also charged with crimes where they used those tools.
But this is insane. It is legal to own a fork. If I use the fork to stab someone to death, what possible logic is there for charging me with both 'murder' and 'posession of a deadly weapon?" The only purpose is to make ALL people criminals just for living their lives. Once just living is a crime that they 'forgive you until you do something wrong,' then we have tyranny.
Many previous comments have railed against/. for suggesting that they were charged just with posession. But the fact is that they were charged with posession of something that is legal.
And this happens all the time.
The fact that the police can arrest you for walking down the street (legal) while in posession of a screwdriver (legal) is a clear sign of tyranny: when the law is applied with an intentional vagueness that basically makes everyone criminals.
I think we need to seriously discuss the need for political action to end the vague powers that the law provides to the police.
(Inflammatory) case in point: Amadou Diallo (sp?) was shot to death by police officers who were not wearing uniforms. His crime? Startling them. Punishment: Death. Theirs: none.
If a police officer can shoot anyone even when he is not in uniform and get off scot free, that puts us right back in feudalism. The real citizens could kill anyone who was not a citizen (Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate is a perfect example). Are we just going to sit around and wait as our meager freedoms disappear?
You of all people are aware that computer displays, in their current low-dpi, high-glare state, require different style for optimal readability. To this end, you have suggested that sites bow to the user's own font size settings and respect the rule that blue is for links and purple is for visited links.
But why is there this inherent assumption that the user will be reading with a white background and black text? Staring at even the most wonderful CRT is straining in this format, and black backgrounds with white text are much easier on the eyes.
Yet setting your preferences in any modern browser or graphical OS to black background, white text will leave you looking at many sites or applications that are illegible due to their myopic dependency on specific colored backgrounds. Is this ever going to change?
You have suggested a number of times that the Internet needs a centralized user identification system that would allow you to login once and dispense with annoying site-specific accounts.
Yet the meager privacy guarantees we have now are already insufficient. Our own government is untrustworthy as an identity-registrar given their history of ignoring the law, and I doubt that Microsoft or almost any other company would be acceptable, given the lack of respect for privacy that the corporate world has shown us.
In short, how do you envision such a system working when the current privacy situation is already horribly broken? Doubleclick already has access to your browsing habits and a database to match that to your address and credit-report, and that's without any 'global login.'
If you doubt the veracity of any of this, I suggest sending the original story, in french to babelfish. Notice that France's Minister of Defense is quoted saying they had outside experts investigate the whole report.
Some of you may be happy to sit back and make inane jokes about France's backwardness, but they have: * nuclear missiles. * their own version of the CIA. * the Eurofighter (equivalent performance to the next-generation fighter jets the US Congress is still arguing over whether to put into mass production). --------------- Not to mention a certain popular distribution: * Mandrake.
And if you'll recall, they pulled out of Vietnam just in time for us to jump in.
I'm running RH 6.1 on an i386. I installed the jdk that inprise linked to from their website, and I added it to my path, and the installer sees it. The installer happily prompts me to choose the virtual machine that it found (at/usr/local/bin/jdk/bin/java) and then pauses for a moment and exits. No error message, no x activity.
I have no nfs mounts, and I'm running as root. No matter how many times windows crashes on me, programs install themselves so easily...
I would take this comment further. The comparison between Linux and Windows that is relevent to everyday users is the comparison between X and Windows.
Windows offers a unified interface, something X may never have because X is an open platform.
Windows has a single place (the Start Menu) that every installed application is visible the moment you install it. I cannot stand how many times I have completely forgotten where a program's data files were because it could be in any of a huge number of directories that all store "end user" applications.
EVERY application in Windows has a graphical configuration tool that has defaults that work the moment you install. In contrast, Fvwm2 (the only window manager that does not crash daily for me, and I've tried the latest E, Gnome, and KDE versions) comes with horrible defaults and requires hours to shape the way you want it.
Linus was right when he said that Linux is not ready for the desktop space. And there needs to be an acceptance of this and a concerted effort on the part of Open Source developers to spend some time making linux usable without a systems administrator involved. Yes it will involve less power, but the point is you should have the option between leaving defaults or opening up a root shell and doing everything yourself.
Um can you say "impossible"? The Palm is limited in hardware to just 1 serial activity at a time. This is a hardware limitation that just can't be fixed. Beaming, typing, modem: all use the serial interface, all cannot be done at once. I suppose you could MAYBE create a program to switch back and forth, but you couldn't type and communicate at once!
Frankly, I don't know what the law says on ISPs shutting down sites at anonymous requests, but I think he should sue his ISP for censoring him with no legal justification and no legal right even if they had justification because as an ISP they are not liable for content posted by their subscribers; this is part of the CDA and is current law.
Having personally used the stowaway keyboard for over 2 months solid every single day for 8 to 10 hours a day, I think I can pretty authoritatively say it has wonderful key travel, nice solid clicking that you would find on the best laptops, and it is about exactly as heavy as my palm IIIe.
Someone commented that you could not type on your lap because the keyboard would just "fold up." This is not the case because when you open the keyboard, you slide the sections of the keys together so that they are locked. Sure the board can bend some if its on your lap, but it is still useable. My unit is pre-production, so it could get stiffer still, but I can't say.
I don't quite see how people can complain about the uselessness of typing on a palm. Both the keyboard and a palmIIIe fit in my pockets nicely and I can be anywhere and pull it out to write.
DISCLAIMER: I used and continue using the keyboard so extensively because I was a consultant for Think Outside this summer (paying for college) and worked on bug testing the unit. So of course I love it.
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From their FAQ,
"Q: I want to copy the MP3s from my PJB-100 back to my PC. How do I do that?
A: You cannot. To ensure that the PJB-100 complies with the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA), It is not possible to retrieve the MP3 files from the PJB-100. You should physically posess each CD that you transfer to the PJB-100, or have rights to the material you download from the Internet"
"Q: I want to write a Linux driver for the PJB. Can I get specifications for the programming interfaces for the PJB or the USB protocol?
A: Not at this time. We do recognize that Linux and Macintosh users would like support for the PJB, but our initial product launch has focused on the Windows implementation. "
Frankly, if they are going to treat their customers like children, they can take someone else's money. There is no way I am going to pay any amount of money for an audio device that is incapable of giving back the data that I put into it. This is the same despotic mentality that gave Intel the idea for encrypting the signal from your video card to your monitor. If I wanted that, I would pay for it. But I don't and no one else does either.
There is just no reason for it other than removing the right to use something you own. Actually, that you license because of course, you can't really own anything anymore.
I forgot to add, and I'm sure someone will argue this, that yes, they were also charged with crimes where they used those tools.
But this is insane. It is legal to own a fork. If I use the fork to stab someone to death, what possible logic is there for charging me with both 'murder' and 'posession of a deadly weapon?" The only purpose is to make ALL people criminals just for living their lives. Once just living is a crime that they 'forgive you until you do something wrong,' then we have tyranny.
Many previous comments have railed against /. for suggesting that they were charged just with posession. But the fact is that they were charged with posession of something that is legal.
And this happens all the time.
The fact that the police can arrest you for walking down the street (legal) while in posession of a screwdriver (legal) is a clear sign of tyranny: when the law is applied with an intentional vagueness that basically makes everyone criminals.
I think we need to seriously discuss the need for political action to end the vague powers that the law provides to the police.
(Inflammatory) case in point: Amadou Diallo (sp?) was shot to death by police officers who were not wearing uniforms. His crime? Startling them. Punishment: Death. Theirs: none.
If a police officer can shoot anyone even when he is not in uniform and get off scot free, that puts us right back in feudalism. The real citizens could kill anyone who was not a citizen (Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate is a perfect example). Are we just going to sit around and wait as our meager freedoms disappear?
You of all people are aware that computer displays, in their current low-dpi, high-glare state, require different style for optimal readability. To this end, you have suggested that sites bow to the user's own font size settings and respect the rule that blue is for links and purple is for visited links.
But why is there this inherent assumption that the user will be reading with a white background and black text? Staring at even the most wonderful CRT is straining in this format, and black backgrounds with white text are much easier on the eyes.
Yet setting your preferences in any modern browser or graphical OS to black background, white text will leave you looking at many sites or applications that are illegible due to their myopic dependency on specific colored backgrounds. Is this ever going to change?
You have suggested a number of times that the Internet needs a centralized user identification system that would allow you to login once and dispense with annoying site-specific accounts.
Yet the meager privacy guarantees we have now are already insufficient. Our own government is untrustworthy as an identity-registrar given their history of ignoring the law, and I doubt that Microsoft or almost any other company would be acceptable, given the lack of respect for privacy that the corporate world has shown us.
In short, how do you envision such a system working when the current privacy situation is already horribly broken? Doubleclick already has access to your browsing habits and a database to match that to your address and credit-report, and that's without any 'global login.'
Why bother buying a laptop now if you can wait for Crusoe-powered machines?
You can run whatever OS you want, whenever you want, at near native speed.
With huge batterylife.
So why bother with the old stuff?
If you doubt the veracity of any of this, I suggest sending the original story, in french to babelfish.
Notice that France's Minister of Defense is quoted saying they had outside experts investigate the whole report.
Some of you may be happy to sit back and make inane jokes about France's backwardness, but they have:
* nuclear missiles.
* their own version of the CIA.
* the Eurofighter (equivalent performance to the next-generation fighter jets the US Congress is still arguing over whether to put into mass production).
---------------
Not to mention a certain popular distribution:
* Mandrake.
And if you'll recall, they pulled out of Vietnam just in time for us to jump in.
I'm running RH 6.1 on an i386. I installed the jdk that inprise linked to from their website, and I added it to my path, and the installer sees it. The installer happily prompts me to choose the virtual machine that it found (at /usr/local/bin/jdk/bin/java) and then pauses for a moment and exits. No error message, no x activity.
I have no nfs mounts, and I'm running as root. No matter how many times windows crashes on me, programs install themselves so easily...
I would take this comment further. The comparison between Linux and Windows that is relevent to everyday users is the comparison between X and Windows.
Windows offers a unified interface, something X may never have because X is an open platform.
Windows has a single place (the Start Menu) that every installed application is visible the moment you install it. I cannot stand how many times I have completely forgotten where a program's data files were because it could be in any of a huge number of directories that all store "end user" applications.
EVERY application in Windows has a graphical configuration tool that has defaults that work the moment you install. In contrast, Fvwm2 (the only window manager that does not crash daily for me, and I've tried the latest E, Gnome, and KDE versions) comes with horrible defaults and requires hours to shape the way you want it.
Linus was right when he said that Linux is not ready for the desktop space. And there needs to be an acceptance of this and a concerted effort on the part of Open Source developers to spend some time making linux usable without a systems administrator involved. Yes it will involve less power, but the point is you should have the option between leaving defaults or opening up a root shell and doing everything yourself.
Um can you say "impossible"? The Palm is limited in hardware to just 1 serial activity at a time. This is a hardware limitation that just can't be fixed. Beaming, typing, modem: all use the serial interface, all cannot be done at once. I suppose you could MAYBE create a program to switch back and forth, but you couldn't type and communicate at once!
Frankly, I don't know what the law says on ISPs shutting down sites at anonymous requests, but I think he should sue his ISP for censoring him with no legal justification and no legal right even if they had justification because as an ISP they are not liable for content posted by their subscribers; this is part of the CDA and is current law.
Having personally used the stowaway keyboard for over 2 months solid every single day for 8 to 10 hours a day, I think I can pretty authoritatively say it has wonderful key travel, nice solid clicking that you would find on the best laptops, and it is about exactly as heavy as my palm IIIe.
Someone commented that you could not type on your lap because the keyboard would just "fold up." This is not the case because when you open the keyboard, you slide the sections of the keys together so that they are locked. Sure the board can bend some if its on your lap, but it is still useable. My unit is pre-production, so it could get stiffer still, but I can't say.
I don't quite see how people can complain about the uselessness of typing on a palm. Both the keyboard and a palmIIIe fit in my pockets nicely and I can be anywhere and pull it out to write.
DISCLAIMER: I used and continue using the keyboard so extensively because I was a consultant for Think Outside this summer (paying for college) and worked on bug testing the unit. So of course I love it.