Enjoy your 44.1 KHz on your CONSUMER GRADE gear you PEASANT.
So much is bandied about regarding time and frequency domains, but so little of it is valid.
An impulse is not band-limited - it contains an infinite number of frequency components.
Any digital sampling of even a simple sine wave - absolutely regardless of sampling rate - is going to present to the electronics as nothing less than a series of impulses. Regardless of the optical illusion that the sampled points look like the sine wave sampled (dots on an x-y graph) - that's not how it's going to work out.
An impulse is not band-limited; a series of them certainly won't be. The resulting frequency components in error (aliased frequencies - not solved by any amount of oversampling) can - and do - have measurable deleterious effects.
This is the basis for some people preferring higher sampled digital signals and for some people to prefer analog to digital.
It's not there are expected to be frequencies above 16 kHz - the second harmonic of a struck triangle - in most music sources. And it's not that any harmonic distortion of signals above 10 kHz even matter - because those second and higher harmonics are above 20 kHz, the accepted upper limit for the norm of hearing.
The point is therefore not frequencies at 44.1 kHz, it's to acquire the signal at 44,100 samples / second. For an 11 kHz signal - not at all unreasonable for violins, harpsichords, or synthesizers - you're getting only 4 sample points per wavelength. Chances of getting reduced sampling error - to even hit the peaks and zero crossings in time of that frequency or higher is absolutely laughable. That's 8 points at 5 to 6 kHz, and 16 sampled data points in the critical voice range.
Given the reality of the math, it's a wonder that CDs - uncompressed from their 44.1 kHz standard - manage to sound as good as they do.
(Wikipedia laughably multiplies this by 16 bits / sample in an insane misunderstanding of digital signal processing and pulse-code modulation, so I'm foregoing that as a reference.)
The tighter spaced in time the sampling, the less chance of a high delta V per sample, and therefore, the less chance for overshoot on the drive electronics being given a piecewise continuous function to deal with.
But sampling error is like the infinite energy requirement when trying to get to the speed of light - it's just a fact.
By the way - I'm one of those peasants that owns electrostatics and a class A amp. Missed the hand-made valves, though.
At what bitrate? As far as I know, a double-blind study has never shown that anyone can hear the difference between 256kbit MP3s and the uncompressed original.
Citation requested.
The only such "studies" I've read of were not in the neighborhood of rigorous, detailing neither the program content, range of listeners, nor sample sizes.
First, despite my writing skills, I expect we have more in common on this than appears - I am assuming that I'm speaking to someone who routinely adopts MS Windows revisions as rapidly as possible - I certainly do. (Although - never home editions of anything, and never CE or ME - but otherwise, I've been or have tried to have been on-board since the OS/2 and Win 1 days. I never saw the point of 95 or 98, though. NT and 2000 were pretty good. I never upgraded - most people I knew did, and less expensively. I've always paid retail for full pro releases - my data's too important to trust to anything less.)
I'm agnostic when it comes to operating systems - so, I'll slam MS, Apple and sometimes - rarely - Linux equally. (Not that I'm a Linux fanboy - I have a lot more forgiveness when is _free_ - but that's just me.)
I use all three, and I'm not gentle on criticism.
Like it or not - Vista was for quite some time a PR nightmare for MS. In my opinion, and in my experiences shared by others in getting it working - rightly so.
There is a whole lot wrong with how MS develops it products - according the rumor / blog / "news" that I see - and I feel _exactly_ the same way about Apple. - And when I'm elected King of World and take over corporate practices for s/w development everywhere, everyone will tell you just how great my utopia is. (Hope that's as self-deprecating as I'd intended.)
One of Apple's OS X releases (10.2? jeez, memory is getting old) would have been a PR nightmare if the OS had the popularity that Windows had. It was a limited PR nightmare, however, until fixes came out.
I didn't intend to knock what Vista evolved into. I didn't intend to knock Microsoft, carte blanche.
I do, however, stand by point of view that the guy I was responding to was a bit too best-of-all-possible-worlds for what I'd remembered.
Yes - Longhorn failed. I was excited at first at what it promised, then as we both recall, strange crufty things seemed to have worked their way into the product development. What it seemed to have been becoming failed, and in my opinion, rightly so. By that, I only mean that what I was hearing was certainly reminding me of Operating System/360 (lurkers, read Mythical Man-Month if the reference is lost - http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Mythical-Man-Month/Frederick-P-Brooks/e/9780201835953 ).
Is Snow Leopard losing data? I hadn't been following that, I've been work-busy since it came out (and paying more attention to Windows 7, frankly). If so, then you are far more generous than I - I'd call that a failure.
I came up with punchcards. I'm not pulling color of my gray-beard or anything, you come across as very experienced yourself. And one thing that I was mentored to - and now mentor to others - never lose data, it's the whole reason that the computer is being used in the first place.
When I was a VMS freak, I loved that, hated unix. Unix improved, loved that - and have used a lot of its incarnations for decades. If I'm a fan of Apple's OS X, it's primarily because of of its BSD underpinnings. (I thank you for the Copland reference, I did not know about it - but enjoyed reading a bit on it. I started on Apple with a ][+, had slight and occasional contacts with Macs, then got on board during the end of OS X Beta.) I liked that in 10.0, some of us had gotten together, shared info, and had the Gnome desktop running on it - and Fink just made things easier. By the time Parallels came out, I had one platform would _reliably_ run my favorite apps from Apple, Linux, and Windows - slowly back then - but effectively.
And FWIW, if anything, it was my Apple hardware that I first got Vista running properly on, not my PC stuff (had to upgrade a year-old machine for that, as I recall.)
In my opinion, we've been through enough technological hacks that by now we should have operating systems that should be performing a lot b
Actually, the common story I'm aware of is that the children used a combination of Hindi words and others from their local dialects to describe things like the cursor, as they'd had no English instruction on computer terms.
Given that English is one of India's official languages - I find the opposite claim that you can take children with no English, some of whom would be used to a non-Roman alphabet, give them a computer, and collectively, they've spontaneously learned English - incredible, to say the least.
Well, they could ship thumb drives - I hope they do, then. Otherwise, this is of limited value.
The OLPC discussions that were rife in/. in days past - before its falling out of favor - had LOTS of comments from people wanting to use these in remote areas.
For those cases, the internet just doesn't sound like the option that everyone is making it out to be.
I don't mind VOD / pay for new movies. I can see people paying for latest-run TV shows, I guess.
And there's a lot of BBC stuff I'd like to be able to stream, legally - with some sort of reasonable model.
I'd like to see Doctor Who and whatever that series was that had the British flying around trying to sell franchises, as well as many others - any of the early BlackAdders come to mind as well.
But these are OLD tv shows. You can make a few bucks selling ads and selling ads for DVD / Blu-ray discs. Consider the following VOD:
Note to BBC - I hear your iplayer is working now. Great. We don't need the DRM or the extra charges for shows that will come around in rerun on the same non-tiered channels we saw them on outside of your country in the first place - cheers, thanks a lot.
Maybe - the use case also expected is that the teacher creates a subnet and the kids net together using non-traditional agent / peer contacts, independent of the internet as well.
Fortunately however for Microsoft and Apple, the previous versions of Vista and OSX have now been out for long enough that a good number (20% according to Vista stats) of people have been exposed to it, this can only help ease that learning curve.
OS X was released worldwide in March of 2001. The OS X Beta was available before that - the server version was out in 1999.
Its interface is largely unchanged for over 8 years. It has fundamentally just worked since day one.
Vista was released worldwide in January of 2007. Betas were available in 2006.
It is now replaced by an incremental upgrade where everything is supposed to just work.
So one could argue that on that point alone Windows7 will have a better time that Vista ever could have!
Yes, one could argue that. For the 20% of Vista users exposed case, or for the percentage of Vista users vs. XP users case?
You have stated very well the real and often unstated issue that Vista faced, nobody understood it!
And I also stated that the real reason that Vista is replaced by Windows 7 is that people DID understand it.
I've had it working for a year and half on one machine. Compare and contrast to two other machines that are still running XP - and are going to run XP until Windows 7 proves itself.
Kahle says the Internet Archive books will be available through the reading "activity" on the XO Laptop. (Software on the laptop is organized into groups called activities pertaining to different types of creative and educational projects.) In an upcoming version of the XO's basic software, the reading activity will also allow students to browse books from a variety of providers, Kahle says, including libraries and commercial publishers.
He drew an explicit contrast between these approach and the more closed and controlled e-book sales models being forwarded by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other distributors. But getting new, copyrighted books onto platforms that don't provide strict digital rights management protections is still a tricky business proposition--so for now, the book sharing arrangement between the Archive and OLPC is restricted to free, public-domain books.
While I'm all for this project - tell me again HOW those books are going to get to an OLPC-using kid's hands?
As other posters have pointed out - there's the issue of indexing this stuff properly.
Longhorn was the code name for Longhorn. When they couldn't deliver on their promises, they throttled back and delivered a subset that you know as Vista.
Removing significant features != Eventually becomes.
From that page: 'WinFS was billed as one of the pillars of the "Longhorn" wave of technologies, and would ship as part of the next version of Windows.'
Kinda matches my memory - and I do believe that there were other promised techs as well with Longhorn, also not delivered.
Longhorn didn't disappear, it was the code name for what eventually became Vista.
Wouldn't a much simpler - and more honest - solution to the piracy you're advocating be to simply get people to switch to Opera or Firefox?
And let's be clear - you claim to be a web developer. So the pages you develop have nothing to do with anyone's products or ideas? You couldn't simply sense IE 6, state that it's not fully supported on your pages, and put in friendly links to Opera, Firefox, Safari, Chrome or the Microsoft Win7 homepages?
No - you come here and advocate piracy.
How about we track down every page you've developed, copy the source for public consumption, and tell the people that you work for that you don't believe that people who work for a living putting out software products should get paid for their efforts if it makes your life harder.
Vista was more like a transition, while actually still being a good OS.
That is revisionist history in the extreme.
Despite all who liked Vista - and there were many - no, it was not a good operating system if you use simple consumer metrics: a) it frustrated people, b) it caused many working Windows systems to no longer work, c) it created confusion without end.
You can even use this simple product metric - it was so bad that the company that made it decided to call the fixed version by a completely different name.
At the risk of being modded down as a basher - and I'm not - I say this because it's REALITY.
You might want to disagree with me as a happy Vista user - but that makes my point. You might WANT for reality to have been that Vista was great and poor, poor Microsoft was unfairly slagged and misunderstood - but that is not Vista's history.
Do you even remember Longhorn? How that failed to materialize? How Vista was supposed to be all of the Longhorn goodness that was supposed to be ready for prime-time release? You do know that Vista wasn't just some follow-on to XP that didn't get a fair shake, yes? And if it was supposed to be the transition to anything, it would have been to the lauded claims of Longhorn?
Vista failed. Microsoft fixed it (we hope) - but it was such a failure, they had to rename it.
That was not the fault of Consumer Misunderstanding or poor Microsoft being bashed by the Spiteful Media or People Like Me.
It failed because too us could get it to work - and fewer still were those that got it working that didn't still prefer XP.
Yeah - you may be right, you may not - German law and customs are outside what I know. TFA did say that prosecutors routinely rejected such criminal complaints and urged civil action instead.
The article(s) did make German law and culture sound very different on this point. For all I know, public take-down notices would have fueled anger for YouTube there, rather than the other way around.
Admittedly - that article's for translation software. It may not directly answer your question about military / restricted apps for the iPhone - but it seems to lay the foundation in that the DoD is already pretty okey-dokey with the use of these devices by the troops.
Android's been getting a lot of tech press lately. I'm not sure who that press impacts - and while we're smarmy about the new Droid ad, I'm not sure who that's impacting either - the existing Android faithful or a new market.
Now Forbes - the darling of investors and managers - is telling that audience that a major defense contractor with an iconic American name in electronics has selected Android.
To top it off, the follow-on links given to Forbes readers are:
I think that this one story just did a lot to validate Android as mainstream-ready to corporate America - and that it's good for personal use, too (second tagged story alone).
Anyway - those are just my ideas. I don't really know what the inflection points for new tech-product demand are - I'm one of those clowns that tends to adopt any new tech as soon as reasonably practical - if not before.
Maybe I'm romanticizing - but I seem to recall a lot of stories about soldiers getting GPS units from home back in Desert Storm, sent by parents buying them from Radio Shack. I think that that really raised awareness and GPS units proliferated and prices dropped.
Slashdot Mirror
Enjoy your 44.1 KHz on your CONSUMER GRADE gear you PEASANT.
So much is bandied about regarding time and frequency domains, but so little of it is valid.
An impulse is not band-limited - it contains an infinite number of frequency components.
Any digital sampling of even a simple sine wave - absolutely regardless of sampling rate - is going to present to the electronics as nothing less than a series of impulses. Regardless of the optical illusion that the sampled points look like the sine wave sampled (dots on an x-y graph) - that's not how it's going to work out.
An impulse is not band-limited; a series of them certainly won't be. The resulting frequency components in error (aliased frequencies - not solved by any amount of oversampling) can - and do - have measurable deleterious effects.
This is the basis for some people preferring higher sampled digital signals and for some people to prefer analog to digital.
It's not there are expected to be frequencies above 16 kHz - the second harmonic of a struck triangle - in most music sources. And it's not that any harmonic distortion of signals above 10 kHz even matter - because those second and higher harmonics are above 20 kHz, the accepted upper limit for the norm of hearing.
The point is therefore not frequencies at 44.1 kHz, it's to acquire the signal at 44,100 samples / second. For an 11 kHz signal - not at all unreasonable for violins, harpsichords, or synthesizers - you're getting only 4 sample points per wavelength. Chances of getting reduced sampling error - to even hit the peaks and zero crossings in time of that frequency or higher is absolutely laughable. That's 8 points at 5 to 6 kHz, and 16 sampled data points in the critical voice range.
Given the reality of the math, it's a wonder that CDs - uncompressed from their 44.1 kHz standard - manage to sound as good as they do.
(Wikipedia laughably multiplies this by 16 bits / sample in an insane misunderstanding of digital signal processing and pulse-code modulation, so I'm foregoing that as a reference.)
The tighter spaced in time the sampling, the less chance of a high delta V per sample, and therefore, the less chance for overshoot on the drive electronics being given a piecewise continuous function to deal with.
But sampling error is like the infinite energy requirement when trying to get to the speed of light - it's just a fact.
By the way - I'm one of those peasants that owns electrostatics and a class A amp. Missed the hand-made valves, though.
Hope this helps.
At what bitrate? As far as I know, a double-blind study has never shown that anyone can hear the difference between 256kbit MP3s and the uncompressed original.
Citation requested.
The only such "studies" I've read of were not in the neighborhood of rigorous, detailing neither the program content, range of listeners, nor sample sizes.
First, despite my writing skills, I expect we have more in common on this than appears - I am assuming that I'm speaking to someone who routinely adopts MS Windows revisions as rapidly as possible - I certainly do. (Although - never home editions of anything, and never CE or ME - but otherwise, I've been or have tried to have been on-board since the OS/2 and Win 1 days. I never saw the point of 95 or 98, though. NT and 2000 were pretty good. I never upgraded - most people I knew did, and less expensively. I've always paid retail for full pro releases - my data's too important to trust to anything less.)
I'm agnostic when it comes to operating systems - so, I'll slam MS, Apple and sometimes - rarely - Linux equally. (Not that I'm a Linux fanboy - I have a lot more forgiveness when is _free_ - but that's just me.)
I use all three, and I'm not gentle on criticism.
Like it or not - Vista was for quite some time a PR nightmare for MS. In my opinion, and in my experiences shared by others in getting it working - rightly so.
There is a whole lot wrong with how MS develops it products - according the rumor / blog / "news" that I see - and I feel _exactly_ the same way about Apple. - And when I'm elected King of World and take over corporate practices for s/w development everywhere, everyone will tell you just how great my utopia is. (Hope that's as self-deprecating as I'd intended.)
One of Apple's OS X releases (10.2? jeez, memory is getting old) would have been a PR nightmare if the OS had the popularity that Windows had. It was a limited PR nightmare, however, until fixes came out.
I didn't intend to knock what Vista evolved into. I didn't intend to knock Microsoft, carte blanche.
I do, however, stand by point of view that the guy I was responding to was a bit too best-of-all-possible-worlds for what I'd remembered.
Yes - Longhorn failed. I was excited at first at what it promised, then as we both recall, strange crufty things seemed to have worked their way into the product development. What it seemed to have been becoming failed, and in my opinion, rightly so. By that, I only mean that what I was hearing was certainly reminding me of Operating System/360 (lurkers, read Mythical Man-Month if the reference is lost - http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Mythical-Man-Month/Frederick-P-Brooks/e/9780201835953 ).
Is Snow Leopard losing data? I hadn't been following that, I've been work-busy since it came out (and paying more attention to Windows 7, frankly). If so, then you are far more generous than I - I'd call that a failure.
I came up with punchcards. I'm not pulling color of my gray-beard or anything, you come across as very experienced yourself. And one thing that I was mentored to - and now mentor to others - never lose data, it's the whole reason that the computer is being used in the first place.
When I was a VMS freak, I loved that, hated unix. Unix improved, loved that - and have used a lot of its incarnations for decades. If I'm a fan of Apple's OS X, it's primarily because of of its BSD underpinnings. (I thank you for the Copland reference, I did not know about it - but enjoyed reading a bit on it. I started on Apple with a ][+, had slight and occasional contacts with Macs, then got on board during the end of OS X Beta.) I liked that in 10.0, some of us had gotten together, shared info, and had the Gnome desktop running on it - and Fink just made things easier. By the time Parallels came out, I had one platform would _reliably_ run my favorite apps from Apple, Linux, and Windows - slowly back then - but effectively.
And FWIW, if anything, it was my Apple hardware that I first got Vista running properly on, not my PC stuff (had to upgrade a year-old machine for that, as I recall.)
In my opinion, we've been through enough technological hacks that by now we should have operating systems that should be performing a lot b
Microsoft is very effective at marketing in a fashion that gets many people interested in their products.
Windows 7 Party
Bill and Jerry in the shoe store
Now, you'll excuse me while I brush the floor off of my shoulder - evidently stuck there from the fact that I'm ROTFLMAO.
But then again, I wonder - how has Microsoft's most successful marketing worked? Ah - here it is:
Microsoft forces DELL to deliver Windows
Actually, the common story I'm aware of is that the children used a combination of Hindi words and others from their local dialects to describe things like the cursor, as they'd had no English instruction on computer terms.
Given that English is one of India's official languages - I find the opposite claim that you can take children with no English, some of whom would be used to a non-Roman alphabet, give them a computer, and collectively, they've spontaneously learned English - incredible, to say the least.
Well, they could ship thumb drives - I hope they do, then. Otherwise, this is of limited value.
The OLPC discussions that were rife in /. in days past - before its falling out of favor - had LOTS of comments from people wanting to use these in remote areas.
For those cases, the internet just doesn't sound like the option that everyone is making it out to be.
I don't mind VOD / pay for new movies. I can see people paying for latest-run TV shows, I guess.
And there's a lot of BBC stuff I'd like to be able to stream, legally - with some sort of reasonable model.
I'd like to see Doctor Who and whatever that series was that had the British flying around trying to sell franchises, as well as many others - any of the early BlackAdders come to mind as well.
But these are OLD tv shows. You can make a few bucks selling ads and selling ads for DVD / Blu-ray discs. Consider the following VOD:
http://www.slashcontrol.com/free-tv-shows/babylon-5 (yes - all five seasons)
Next ones go without saying:
http://www.hulu.com/
http://www.crackle.com/
And here's the best content manager I know:
http://getmiro.com/
Note to BBC - I hear your iplayer is working now. Great. We don't need the DRM or the extra charges for shows that will come around in rerun on the same non-tiered channels we saw them on outside of your country in the first place - cheers, thanks a lot.
Sorry. Having a very bad day.
Maybe - the use case also expected is that the teacher creates a subnet and the kids net together using non-traditional agent / peer contacts, independent of the internet as well.
You're exactly right. That's exactly how Linux was when I started using it - about 13 years ago.
Of course, back then, I was all too happy to have a free unix system, and was willing to put up with quite a bit to get it.
Oh wait ... you're implying that difficult configuration is an acceptable attribute for a popular operating system.
Ah. I see. You're an elitist.
Fortunately however for Microsoft and Apple, the previous versions of Vista and OSX have now been out for long enough that a good number (20% according to Vista stats) of people have been exposed to it, this can only help ease that learning curve.
OS X was released worldwide in March of 2001. The OS X Beta was available before that - the server version was out in 1999.
Its interface is largely unchanged for over 8 years. It has fundamentally just worked since day one.
Vista was released worldwide in January of 2007. Betas were available in 2006.
It is now replaced by an incremental upgrade where everything is supposed to just work.
So one could argue that on that point alone Windows7 will have a better time that Vista ever could have!
Yes, one could argue that. For the 20% of Vista users exposed case, or for the percentage of Vista users vs. XP users case?
You have stated very well the real and often unstated issue that Vista faced, nobody understood it!
And I also stated that the real reason that Vista is replaced by Windows 7 is that people DID understand it.
I've had it working for a year and half on one machine. Compare and contrast to two other machines that are still running XP - and are going to run XP until Windows 7 proves itself.
From TFA:
Kahle says the Internet Archive books will be available through the reading "activity" on the XO Laptop. (Software on the laptop is organized into groups called activities pertaining to different types of creative and educational projects.) In an upcoming version of the XO's basic software, the reading activity will also allow students to browse books from a variety of providers, Kahle says, including libraries and commercial publishers.
He drew an explicit contrast between these approach and the more closed and controlled e-book sales models being forwarded by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other distributors. But getting new, copyrighted books onto platforms that don't provide strict digital rights management protections is still a tricky business proposition--so for now, the book sharing arrangement between the Archive and OLPC is restricted to free, public-domain books.
While I'm all for this project - tell me again HOW those books are going to get to an OLPC-using kid's hands?
As other posters have pointed out - there's the issue of indexing this stuff properly.
And there's still distribution to think about.
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/09/09/10/0318203/Pigeon-Turns-Out-To-Be-Faster-Than-S-African-Net
Longhorn was the code name for Longhorn. When they couldn't deliver on their promises, they throttled back and delivered a subset that you know as Vista.
Removing significant features != Eventually becomes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS
From that page: 'WinFS was billed as one of the pillars of the "Longhorn" wave of technologies, and would ship as part of the next version of Windows.'
Kinda matches my memory - and I do believe that there were other promised techs as well with Longhorn, also not delivered.
Longhorn didn't disappear, it was the code name for what eventually became Vista.
Wanting a thing to be true does not make it true.
You're spouting more revisionist history as well.
Well - if you really have a lot of IE6 users to support - I suppose....
Can't you simply design out such totally brower-specific things in the first place?
That's probably a stupid question to pro web developer, I guess - but honestly, as a lowly web user - I don't know why.
Wouldn't a much simpler - and more honest - solution to the piracy you're advocating be to simply get people to switch to Opera or Firefox?
And let's be clear - you claim to be a web developer. So the pages you develop have nothing to do with anyone's products or ideas? You couldn't simply sense IE 6, state that it's not fully supported on your pages, and put in friendly links to Opera, Firefox, Safari, Chrome or the Microsoft Win7 homepages?
No - you come here and advocate piracy.
How about we track down every page you've developed, copy the source for public consumption, and tell the people that you work for that you don't believe that people who work for a living putting out software products should get paid for their efforts if it makes your life harder.
Sheesh!
Thanks - thought it was covered, but evidently didn't search right.
Final sentence - ...too few of us....
Yeah - I know - preview.
Vista was more like a transition, while actually still being a good OS.
That is revisionist history in the extreme.
Despite all who liked Vista - and there were many - no, it was not a good operating system if you use simple consumer metrics: a) it frustrated people, b) it caused many working Windows systems to no longer work, c) it created confusion without end.
You can even use this simple product metric - it was so bad that the company that made it decided to call the fixed version by a completely different name.
At the risk of being modded down as a basher - and I'm not - I say this because it's REALITY.
You might want to disagree with me as a happy Vista user - but that makes my point. You might WANT for reality to have been that Vista was great and poor, poor Microsoft was unfairly slagged and misunderstood - but that is not Vista's history.
Do you even remember Longhorn? How that failed to materialize? How Vista was supposed to be all of the Longhorn goodness that was supposed to be ready for prime-time release? You do know that Vista wasn't just some follow-on to XP that didn't get a fair shake, yes? And if it was supposed to be the transition to anything, it would have been to the lauded claims of Longhorn?
Vista failed. Microsoft fixed it (we hope) - but it was such a failure, they had to rename it.
That was not the fault of Consumer Misunderstanding or poor Microsoft being bashed by the Spiteful Media or People Like Me.
It failed because too us could get it to work - and fewer still were those that got it working that didn't still prefer XP.
Did Raytheon miss the announcement that linux is open source too?
You know, it's entirely possible that they did. You should email them this link right away!
http://developer.android.com/guide/basics/what-is-android.html
What is a US provider of "defense" doing abroad, instead of defending the US?
I think that this all has something to do with the name change from the War Department to the Department of Defense.
Is there any way for contributors to the free software movement to block use of their software by military contractors?
OK - so you want to restrict military contractors from using Linux, anything GNU and any other F/OSS?
Did you just wake up?
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1417047&cid=29857831
We'll see.
Yeah - you may be right, you may not - German law and customs are outside what I know. TFA did say that prosecutors routinely rejected such criminal complaints and urged civil action instead.
The article(s) did make German law and culture sound very different on this point. For all I know, public take-down notices would have fueled anger for YouTube there, rather than the other way around.
Is there any way to do something like that on iPhones?
Evidently, the iPod touch is already providing popular service to US troops in Iraq.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/194623
Admittedly - that article's for translation software. It may not directly answer your question about military / restricted apps for the iPhone - but it seems to lay the foundation in that the DoD is already pretty okey-dokey with the use of these devices by the troops.
Android's been getting a lot of tech press lately. I'm not sure who that press impacts - and while we're smarmy about the new Droid ad, I'm not sure who that's impacting either - the existing Android faithful or a new market.
Now Forbes - the darling of investors and managers - is telling that audience that a major defense contractor with an iconic American name in electronics has selected Android.
To top it off, the follow-on links given to Forbes readers are:
Motorola CEO Talks Android
Google's Android To Invade Homes
I think that this one story just did a lot to validate Android as mainstream-ready to corporate America - and that it's good for personal use, too (second tagged story alone).
Anyway - those are just my ideas. I don't really know what the inflection points for new tech-product demand are - I'm one of those clowns that tends to adopt any new tech as soon as reasonably practical - if not before.
Maybe I'm romanticizing - but I seem to recall a lot of stories about soldiers getting GPS units from home back in Desert Storm, sent by parents buying them from Radio Shack. I think that that really raised awareness and GPS units proliferated and prices dropped.