It's easy to find free hosting and I'm sure there are numerous wiki's or forums you could post it in... you could even just take on the/. lameness filter.
Have you considered making it into a debian package (a virtual package only containing dependencies) and maybe even hosting it on a permanent url which you could add to the sources.list to allow anyone with one of those systems get your latest suggestions?
Alternatively does anyone know of anyone already doing this or something close?
The small inexpensive item will not become more expensive then a big expensive item if more money is spent across the game on the small item, it will just become more expensive then it was so less people will be likely to buy it next week so it's price might come back down (or go up less). It'll be interesting to see if the prices stabilise or have large weekly variations, and if they stabilise just how far away they are from the original values (and what has changed price the most).
As soon as I saw the headline I thought "stupid USlAshdot again". I have to trawl down to your comment to find a mention of Branson's $3 billion pledge . So not only does the story not ascribe the cash to it's source, it doesn't even get the figure right.
If and where fair use applies (it is not a universal internaional concept) Google is taking it a lot further then you browser, they are redistributing (and also many/most legal systems explicitly allow transient copies for the purpose of display like your browser makes).
By default things are copyrighted and have a universal level of protection, the absence of a copyright disclaimer (or nocache option) does not imply that a work is in the public domain or free to redistribute.
The rules of copyright are established for a while now and the rules on redistribution are well defined. If you publish stuff on the Internet and are ignorant of those rules, that's your problem.
I'm not talking about whether what Google is doing should be wrong, but I think it is under current international (and most national) laws.
The bottom line is that any creative work is copyrighted such that only the "author" can authorise copies. Google is depending on authors not enforcing their rights against them to prevent them from making numerous copies (and from providing a service to provide those copies to anyone with Google cache). If I was to setup a site which simply allowed visitors to search (and download) all the binaries online would Linus/FSF/Microsoft not be justified in challenging me for illegally distributing their copyrighted works?
The Sexium.
How Intel's marketing ever let a Pentium II, III, IV out the door with that name in waiting I'll never know but I wonder how any people will name their four Core's Andrea, Caroline, Sharon and Jim!
If society is better served by ignoring a particular copyright, then it should be ignored.
... ignoring a particular copyright of a convicted abusive monopolist...
MS is still not complying with the previous judgement against them, I don't think it would be unrealistic to think that this could be continued to the point at which the court discards all MS EU copyrights and patents relating to the offending items.
Here is an insightful blog posting from Justin Mason about using RBL's (and bl.spamcop.net in particular which this HOW-TO mentions) for filtering spam. You could see a staggering amount of false positives unless any rbl is only one part of a scoring system which decides whether a mail should be rejected.
Palm became PalmOne (hardware) and PalmSource (software). Then PalmOne bought out the Palm name from PalmSource who were subsequently bought by Access. While most comments here are discussing the future of the Palm company, I am far more interested in seeing the future of the Access/PalmSource company and whether they can make their ambitious Linux plans pay off for them and for hardware manufacturers who might license their upcoming OS. The short story being that the next PalmSource system should allow existing Palm applications and new applications based on the Free Software layers to both operate together. In the past both IBM and Sony have licensed Palm software, perhaps the new Linux based system will have them both re-inventing portable/handheld/pda/???? with the support of a software company with no competing hardware interests.
As for BeOS, I suspect anything from it got lost in the still-born PalmOS 6. Perhaps Access/PalmSource (assuming they have it) could be convinced to release it as Free Software, they had already adopted Eclipse + prc-tools etc as a build chain and are moving to Linux as a kernel so they are familiar with the idea of using Free Software.
Without redistribution rights you may be able to fix a problem/add a feature for yourself but you could not give it to any other users, nor could you employee someone else to do it for you if you are not personally able.
Before I begin I must say that I really doubt that Apple would even consider forcing all new ipods to also be phones so you will be able to buy your plain old ipod to play music and have a seperate phone. Having said that...
Is it hard to imagine that someone could build an audio player/phone combo where the user would decide what happens to calls when audio is playing? From mixing the two to pausing/muting the audio to take the call to putting the phone on silent, preferably with tweakability based on whether a number is in your phone book, what group(s) or even just if it has a CallerId or not.
Next, if Apple made a cell phone I would imagine they are far more likely to design it for the end user then most mobile manufacturers who design them for the networks. As a result you may even be able to turn off your phone/network without powering the whole device on and off (don't waste battery on the cellular network along with not being interupted). They may even (but I doubt it) build a unit to take two sim cards and allow you to have multiple networks (preferably simultaneously) so you could turn off your business/personal line at suitable times.
As for whats with the eggs in one basket... simple, why carry multiple devices? Why not carry a swiss army knife instead of a dedicated blade, screwdrivers, pliers, corkscrew etc (if it is suitable for your needs)? Why have to backup multiple devices when you can backup one (and why don't mobile phones have a standard irda/bluetooth/card/cable dump and restore function, to a common open format).
Bottom line is the mobile industry is screwy, and will remain so until the end users take the purchasing power (curiously I've heard reports that bundling/subsidising phones with network contracts is illegal in Norway, the home of Nokia). Until then the phones you can buy will only be the phones the networks want you to be able to buy.
If Access/PalmSource get people to build devices based on their upcoming Linux based OS you may have your next best thing. A Linux based device, with gstreamer and a palmos api to build applications against. A full suite of Palm apps on launch and most likely a rapid development of ports of Free apps after release. But then again it might be rubbish/locked down or unused by any manufacturers.
I'm sure the idea goes back even further in time but I still find it interesting to see that the technique taken by knoppix, embraced by Kanotix and finally mimiced by Ubuntu is now being used by MS. The question is will you be able to carry around these vista images as a live system taking advantage of it's hardware detection to run your own copy of windows on any machine (real or virtual)? If not officially, will someone be able to produce a neat hack to do it? I would have thought everyone would like to have their own liveDVD of their system, featuring all the stuff they wanted installed and all their settings.
You should probably be sharing the blame out betwen OpenSUSE and ATI. I spent many long hours trying to coax an ATI driver into working on various distros a few years ago (just to compare it's performance to the Free driver as I have r2*0 chips), then I discovered Kanotix where you can simply issue one Kanotix command and have it install the non-free driver perfectly for you (or upgrade it to the latest). No more worrying about the interactions of ATI's blob with your system as the distro team have taken care of it for you. Of course I only ever used it on throwaway test systems as I preferred to stick with the free drivers (and it's why I bought those machines/cards).
Of course it would be nicer if people didn't feel the need to contaminate their systems with binary drivers but there do not seem to be an alternative if you want current card to give you anything like it's potential 3d performance. Time to start lobbying AMD to provide documentation for their next video chip (and even for past and current ones) and maybe even to try and organise an interested group to pay them to provide the documentation and support to create a good open driver (there must be more companies like the weather channel out there who will pay some cash to have good 3d support for a chip on linux).
Rather then fund a rival manufacturer, raise bounties for deals like the Weather Channel deal which brought us the free r200 drivers. Allow people to put up money for a specific card/manufacturer, range of cards, feature set (play doom3@res*fps) or FSFs pick and have a very public page where shareholders can come and get an idea of how much money is there for the taking. I suspect most people could be convinced to pledge their cash for the FSF selection (which means the FSF has a budget to negotiate with any manufacturer over any chipsets) so it would be a giant slush-fund to bring cash from people who want free drivers to manufacturers who co-operate and to pay for the work.
If one manufacturer takes a punt and claims the bounty to pay some developers to write drivers for their next chipset, with documents in advance, how many extra cards with that device will be sold based on it? How would the product sales life-cycle look (I can picture a stronger then normal purchase of the initial expensive cards and longer then normal sales unless other chipsets have the same treatment)?
You could use this to boot from an ntfs partition if you wanted, just use a kernel based read-only driver to get to an initial ramdisk which includes enough support to remount the partition with this. Even without this you should be able to use a loopback filesystem on ntfs even with the older ntfs drivers as their write support is at least meant to be solid if you are not creating or changing the size of files.
If the Corel/Borland merger had gone through things could have been very different as one company would then have had a Linux OS (Corel Linux), Office Suite (Corel's WP Office Suite), Graphics Suite (Corel Draw and Photopaint were both "ported") and Development Suite (Borland's Kylix). It didn't happen though as between the time Corel/Borland announced the intention and the time when it would hae come to fruition the realtive values of the companies by the market had changed too much to let the deal go through.
As to your second point, Corel put work and money into Debian, KDE and Wine. Quantifying the benefits any of these really got from Corel's actions is a tough question.
Welcome to the PalmSource/Access vision. Here you will have a choice of writing programs with GTK, Java or Palm 68k interfaces. The result should be to allow their devices access the full Palm and Java range of programs out there as well as leaving a new open route with GTK (and GStreamer) which should be fairly source compatible with other GTK based systems (e.g. Maemo from the N770). Of course nothing has been released yet so it remains to see how this will pan out in practice.
If you have a startup sound then you are far less likely to suddenly be blasted out of it by some random noises your computer is inspired to make. That startup sound both tells you that your soundcard and speakers are working as well as reminding you what volume you have left them at.
As for a shutdown noise, as long as it is fed out to play away without interupting the speedy shutdown of your machine what does it matter? You could argue that here it also serves to remind you what volume you are leaving the speakers at for the next person to boot it up.
Then of course there are the implications for people with sight problems to whom these noises are probably far more useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Debian is Trademarked
It's easy to find free hosting and I'm sure there are numerous wiki's or forums you could post it in ... you could even just take on the /. lameness filter.
Care to post it?
Have you considered making it into a debian package (a virtual package only containing dependencies) and maybe even hosting it on a permanent url which you could add to the sources.list to allow anyone with one of those systems get your latest suggestions?
Alternatively does anyone know of anyone already doing this or something close?
The small inexpensive item will not become more expensive then a big expensive item if more money is spent across the game on the small item, it will just become more expensive then it was so less people will be likely to buy it next week so it's price might come back down (or go up less). It'll be interesting to see if the prices stabilise or have large weekly variations, and if they stabilise just how far away they are from the original values (and what has changed price the most).
As soon as I saw the headline I thought "stupid USlAshdot again". I have to trawl down to your comment to find a mention of Branson's $3 billion pledge . So not only does the story not ascribe the cash to it's source, it doesn't even get the figure right.
If and where fair use applies (it is not a universal internaional concept) Google is taking it a lot further then you browser, they are redistributing (and also many/most legal systems explicitly allow transient copies for the purpose of display like your browser makes).
By default things are copyrighted and have a universal level of protection, the absence of a copyright disclaimer (or nocache option) does not imply that a work is in the public domain or free to redistribute.
The rules of copyright are established for a while now and the rules on redistribution are well defined. If you publish stuff on the Internet and are ignorant of those rules, that's your problem.
I'm not talking about whether what Google is doing should be wrong, but I think it is under current international (and most national) laws.
The bottom line is that any creative work is copyrighted such that only the "author" can authorise copies. Google is depending on authors not enforcing their rights against them to prevent them from making numerous copies (and from providing a service to provide those copies to anyone with Google cache). If I was to setup a site which simply allowed visitors to search (and download) all the binaries online would Linus/FSF/Microsoft not be justified in challenging me for illegally distributing their copyrighted works?
The Sexium.
How Intel's marketing ever let a Pentium II, III, IV out the door with that name in waiting I'll never know but I wonder how any people will name their four Core's Andrea, Caroline, Sharon and Jim!
MS is still not complying with the previous judgement against them, I don't think it would be unrealistic to think that this could be continued to the point at which the court discards all MS EU copyrights and patents relating to the offending items.
Here is an insightful blog posting from Justin Mason about using RBL's (and bl.spamcop.net in particular which this HOW-TO mentions) for filtering spam. You could see a staggering amount of false positives unless any rbl is only one part of a scoring system which decides whether a mail should be rejected.
Apple Boot Camp Because we have nothing to fear
Palm became PalmOne (hardware) and PalmSource (software). Then PalmOne bought out the Palm name from PalmSource who were subsequently bought by Access. While most comments here are discussing the future of the Palm company, I am far more interested in seeing the future of the Access/PalmSource company and whether they can make their ambitious Linux plans pay off for them and for hardware manufacturers who might license their upcoming OS. The short story being that the next PalmSource system should allow existing Palm applications and new applications based on the Free Software layers to both operate together. In the past both IBM and Sony have licensed Palm software, perhaps the new Linux based system will have them both re-inventing portable/handheld/pda/???? with the support of a software company with no competing hardware interests.
As for BeOS, I suspect anything from it got lost in the still-born PalmOS 6. Perhaps Access/PalmSource (assuming they have it) could be convinced to release it as Free Software, they had already adopted Eclipse + prc-tools etc as a build chain and are moving to Linux as a kernel so they are familiar with the idea of using Free Software.
Without redistribution rights you may be able to fix a problem/add a feature for yourself but you could not give it to any other users, nor could you employee someone else to do it for you if you are not personally able.
Before I begin I must say that I really doubt that Apple would even consider forcing all new ipods to also be phones so you will be able to buy your plain old ipod to play music and have a seperate phone. Having said that ...
Is it hard to imagine that someone could build an audio player/phone combo where the user would decide what happens to calls when audio is playing? From mixing the two to pausing/muting the audio to take the call to putting the phone on silent, preferably with tweakability based on whether a number is in your phone book, what group(s) or even just if it has a CallerId or not.
Next, if Apple made a cell phone I would imagine they are far more likely to design it for the end user then most mobile manufacturers who design them for the networks. As a result you may even be able to turn off your phone/network without powering the whole device on and off (don't waste battery on the cellular network along with not being interupted). They may even (but I doubt it) build a unit to take two sim cards and allow you to have multiple networks (preferably simultaneously) so you could turn off your business/personal line at suitable times.
As for whats with the eggs in one basket ... simple, why carry multiple devices? Why not carry a swiss army knife instead of a dedicated blade, screwdrivers, pliers, corkscrew etc (if it is suitable for your needs)? Why have to backup multiple devices when you can backup one (and why don't mobile phones have a standard irda/bluetooth/card/cable dump and restore function, to a common open format).
Bottom line is the mobile industry is screwy, and will remain so until the end users take the purchasing power (curiously I've heard reports that bundling/subsidising phones with network contracts is illegal in Norway, the home of Nokia). Until then the phones you can buy will only be the phones the networks want you to be able to buy.
If Access/PalmSource get people to build devices based on their upcoming Linux based OS you may have your next best thing. A Linux based device, with gstreamer and a palmos api to build applications against. A full suite of Palm apps on launch and most likely a rapid development of ports of Free apps after release. But then again it might be rubbish/locked down or unused by any manufacturers.
I'm sure the idea goes back even further in time but I still find it interesting to see that the technique taken by knoppix, embraced by Kanotix and finally mimiced by Ubuntu is now being used by MS. The question is will you be able to carry around these vista images as a live system taking advantage of it's hardware detection to run your own copy of windows on any machine (real or virtual)? If not officially, will someone be able to produce a neat hack to do it? I would have thought everyone would like to have their own liveDVD of their system, featuring all the stuff they wanted installed and all their settings.
You should probably be sharing the blame out betwen OpenSUSE and ATI. I spent many long hours trying to coax an ATI driver into working on various distros a few years ago (just to compare it's performance to the Free driver as I have r2*0 chips), then I discovered Kanotix where you can simply issue one Kanotix command and have it install the non-free driver perfectly for you (or upgrade it to the latest). No more worrying about the interactions of ATI's blob with your system as the distro team have taken care of it for you. Of course I only ever used it on throwaway test systems as I preferred to stick with the free drivers (and it's why I bought those machines/cards).
Of course it would be nicer if people didn't feel the need to contaminate their systems with binary drivers but there do not seem to be an alternative if you want current card to give you anything like it's potential 3d performance. Time to start lobbying AMD to provide documentation for their next video chip (and even for past and current ones) and maybe even to try and organise an interested group to pay them to provide the documentation and support to create a good open driver (there must be more companies like the weather channel out there who will pay some cash to have good 3d support for a chip on linux).
Rather then fund a rival manufacturer, raise bounties for deals like the Weather Channel deal which brought us the free r200 drivers. Allow people to put up money for a specific card/manufacturer, range of cards, feature set (play doom3@res*fps) or FSFs pick and have a very public page where shareholders can come and get an idea of how much money is there for the taking. I suspect most people could be convinced to pledge their cash for the FSF selection (which means the FSF has a budget to negotiate with any manufacturer over any chipsets) so it would be a giant slush-fund to bring cash from people who want free drivers to manufacturers who co-operate and to pay for the work.
If one manufacturer takes a punt and claims the bounty to pay some developers to write drivers for their next chipset, with documents in advance, how many extra cards with that device will be sold based on it? How would the product sales life-cycle look (I can picture a stronger then normal purchase of the initial expensive cards and longer then normal sales unless other chipsets have the same treatment)?
You could use this to boot from an ntfs partition if you wanted, just use a kernel based read-only driver to get to an initial ramdisk which includes enough support to remount the partition with this. Even without this you should be able to use a loopback filesystem on ntfs even with the older ntfs drivers as their write support is at least meant to be solid if you are not creating or changing the size of files.
adesso
Just the first two found from a googling. Trackpad or touchscreen would seem the obvious solutions to me.cirque
Corel did release Corel Draw for Linux a little while after they had released the WordPerfect Office Suite.
If the Corel/Borland merger had gone through things could have been very different as one company would then have had a Linux OS (Corel Linux), Office Suite (Corel's WP Office Suite), Graphics Suite (Corel Draw and Photopaint were both "ported") and Development Suite (Borland's Kylix). It didn't happen though as between the time Corel/Borland announced the intention and the time when it would hae come to fruition the realtive values of the companies by the market had changed too much to let the deal go through.
As to your second point, Corel put work and money into Debian, KDE and Wine. Quantifying the benefits any of these really got from Corel's actions is a tough question.
Welcome to the PalmSource/Access vision. Here you will have a choice of writing programs with GTK, Java or Palm 68k interfaces. The result should be to allow their devices access the full Palm and Java range of programs out there as well as leaving a new open route with GTK (and GStreamer) which should be fairly source compatible with other GTK based systems (e.g. Maemo from the N770). Of course nothing has been released yet so it remains to see how this will pan out in practice.
How about Catalyst-View-PHP.
If you have a startup sound then you are far less likely to suddenly be blasted out of it by some random noises your computer is inspired to make. That startup sound both tells you that your soundcard and speakers are working as well as reminding you what volume you have left them at.
As for a shutdown noise, as long as it is fed out to play away without interupting the speedy shutdown of your machine what does it matter? You could argue that here it also serves to remind you what volume you are leaving the speakers at for the next person to boot it up.
Then of course there are the implications for people with sight problems to whom these noises are probably far more useful.