When you say that your RaLink 2500 based adapter did nothing with "Linux" you should really at least say which Distribution(s) if not version(s). The standard of wireless drivers with a Linux based distribution is far more dependant on the distribution then the upstream kernel developers (for the last while until now anyway). This only stands out as Ralink 2500 cards are/should actually be well supported on Linux.
You espouse the political ideals as your own yet claim that your should not be dragged in to them. The very idea that a programmer could choose to distribute Free Software is in political danger (dmca/eucd, idea patents) and non-free software is being threatened at a political level (government purchasing rules primarily). If you
think it is a good thing that developers have the freedom to release their software under whatever licensing they want
then you should consider how your vote might change the future of these "business models".
In most areas of politics there are no Free Software implications. In fact never forget that things like the Debian Free Software Guidelines make absolutely explicit that the community can never try to cut out any group of people, even terrorists. Free Software is free for all whatever your political ideals, but do not think that this means Free Software is not political, it just limits it's politics to a few key areas which are required for it's continued existence.
As others mention below in replies the phone line is mandated to be connected for the first twelve months of your contract IF you want the subsidised Sky box, if you are willing to pay full price for it you do not have to leave it connected. Sky's line on why this exists is for "Interactive Services" like e-mail for which they actually had a contract with a third party. The fun part was asking them (this was a few years ago) how much it would cost in Ireland to send an email using the box to which the only answer they could provide was "your telephone companies standard charge to send an email" an answer which really failed with me as I was working for my telelphone company at the time and knew with certainty no such pricing exists.
As for what information they gather, well obviously they can only gather what you do with the box, but as the box's evolve (e.g. Sky+ the PVR and HD) they are getting access to more and more information. I assume it is only a matter of time before targeted advertising arrives. I would suspect that before the day they disable the analogue HD outputs on their HD box to enforce HDMI they will probably have used this method to try and check first what % of customers they are likely to annoy.
While your argument has no holes in it, it misses the point. If no BSD option existed for the vendor, they would have to choose between costs, either to develop, buy in or use GPL code. With a BSD option they can leverage the work of others, with no obligation to allow their improvements to be incorporated into the work they base their system upon.
Why remove the paper from the device? Instead use a roll of paper inside the machine viewable through a window. The design would have to ensure that the previous vote is not disclosed but other then that each machine would have a complete paper record of it's votes in an easy to read format which you could feed to a fast scanning machine to verfiy the entire voter trail. In case of any discrepencies the paper version is counted and once enough tally's are tested and accurate results are found you can save the effort of counting all the paper votes, but if that was required it could be done quickly and by multiple independant machines (independant to each other and the voting machine manufacturer).
The voter can understand this system quite easily, your vote is what you can see on the piece of paper in the window of the machine, they hope the machines will accurately count the votes as printed and save the recounting effort but that will be checked and it's what is on the paper that counts. Fitting a maginifying lens over the machine's window would allow a relatively small printout to appear much larger and easy to read (saving paper and/or increasing accessiility).
They do not go into detail but I wager that using a PCMCIA card with a USB port on it, you could load your own data from a thumb/pen drive.
I have an Epson printer which has a PCMCIA slot and it helpfully came with an adapter for compact flash cards. End result one pcmcia hard disk which would be even less obvious then a usb fob sticking out of the device.
Another requirement then would probably be to have a second bank of ram slots for "Video" ram... though this could be a great thing if the gpu becomes generally available as a co-processor as presumably your faster video ram could be used for aonther level of caching? It would also mean you could upgrade your gpu and video ram seperately. The only downside I think I can see is that your video output's are likely to be tied to your motherboard though perhaps that's where pci-* steps back in (so you can pop in a video or audio card which is no more then inputs/outputs using the onboard dsp/ram)? Only thing is this starts to sound like winmodems so getting it all working solidly could be a challenge.
It'll work perfectly. The War on Porn is a guaranteed infinite war.
I can just picture the last person on earth's last words to another human:
"I warned you about taking any more photo's of me from behind you pornorrist!"
Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Sun etc could simply put all these ideas they feel they need defensive patent protection for into a publication of their own "Software Ideas" and give a free subscription to every patent office worldwide (along with an open public website of them).
Regarding online music distribution, note the abusive monopolistic actions Microsoft have been convicted of in this area by the EU. The common hook on that aspect of the case is to talk about the bundling of Windows Media Player but that is only the remedy. The actual problem MS had with the EU is regarding network audio and their attempts to leverage (illegally) their client base to extend their monopoly to dominate network audio servers as well as clients. Remember also that the rest of that case was about local network services and interoperability. As for web tools, imagine ActiveX/.Net had been lauched as if by any other company (i.e. requiring the user to actively download and install it) how much more accessible would the web be today?
Microsoft's current dream seems to be a world where all digital systems pay them (note their eagerness to have their drm and codecs used for next gen DVD systems) and where they can use the EUCD/DMCA to lock competitors out of any market they need to actively maintain control upon to prevent their monopoly from being threatened. Microsoft do not want anyone else to have any control of any section of any market they might be able to blend into their offerings so now they have their own pdf, virtual server and flash to go with their own netscape, playstation, tivo and quicktime.
While trying to provide a piece of software for every requirement under the sun is not a bad thing, how Microsoft has conducted itself has shown no appreciation for the Monopolistic position and as such has been found illegal on both sides of the Atlantic. While I am only speculating about the intentions of Microsoft's manouevers I think history is the only true indicator of anyone's intentions, convicted twice and still fighting (and attacking/consuming industries) is enough for me to repeat "evil".
You may be modded funny but some of those are good ideas!
The accuracy of a voice based lie detector would be questionable (and probably depend on just how powerful a computer the phone is), but you could even train it to people you talk to regularly ("view their past lies and near-lies and mark what was a lie and what wasn't). Video phones could add another level of accuracy with the equivalent increase in required power to take advantage of it.
To make the interest simulator really good might take some investigation into the best ways to gather the sounds to insert and the best ways to time their insertion.
An excuse generator should be trivial, in fact it is just an audio player which can play to the far end of the phone, you record your excuse's and during the call pick which one you want to use and when ready play it to queue your boss saying "get in here NOW" or a dog going mad or your doorbell/landline/other mobile.
Of course there is no reason why these should be "smart phone" programs only, I could use them all on my laptop/desktop.
So isn't the answer a touchscreen with minimal buttons, and your choice of keyboard? From the roll out keyboards to the projecting displays via standard bluetooth/usb keyboards you choose, and of course you should always be able to sacrifice screen space for an on screen keyboard if you so desire. Carry a small portable and have your favourite keyboard waiting for you wherever you do most of your data entry, or just nick one from the nearest pc. I really don't understand why the "tablet pcs" are just hinged laptops with a touchscreen... drop the hinge, drop the keyboard (or at worst make the keyboard an thin, light and removable cover for the screen you can just leave at home if you don't use it for data entry). End result everyone can get what they want.
Take one class, convert one computer to Linux and get the kids to write a web-page about it. Post to your local LUG about the page and project. Sit back and wait for the local MS shill to drop off the Windows software the school would like for free. I know of one case where this happened though the school's intention was not to squeeze software from Microsoft.
Doesn't this help the EU Competition Authority to argue that Microsoft is actively extending their monopoly on desktops into the server market? Does it therefore also suggest that for once a "government" is acting on something in time, saving a market from an extending monopoly before the monopoly covers the second market? It doesn't do anything to make Microsoft comply with court orders though.
I always thought those "do no steal" ads were incredibly odd in the cinema , now you mention them on DVD. Imagine every time you go to Windows Update you were made to sit through a one minute "ad" telling you not to pirate Windows? Perfectly acceptable imho if your computer is only showing it to you because it knows your Windows is not genuine, but if it knows your Windows is genuine/legal/legit then it would just be pissing off your paying customers. Now imagine you have just bought a cinema ticket and had people check it to let you in to watch a film, or you have bought/hired a DVD and you are told "don't be a thief". It doesn't show much respect for your paying customers.
Is there any reason why a router couldn't toy with the packet delivery timing to deliver equitable latency to all competitors (or rather all competitors who can achieve some reasonable latency if their packets are untouched, not slowing everyone down to the slowest competitor but setting a baseline no-one can go below)?
Real-time graphics require you to sit there watching them constantly. If this audio was not too distracting (and I suspect no matter what you would learn to tune out the normal operational sounds) you could actually hae people working on something while monitoring the network, rather then simply employing people to act like a desk security guard wathing the screens. Of course is anything sounds funny it time to have a look. I wonder if they have done any work with time-compression on this audio generation technique, so people could produce a X minute audio clip every Y minutes, could be handy to listen to a 5 minute track every day to get a quick outline of how a day went.
If the lack of a bios is the problem... how about performing the equivalent of loadlin by loading windows from osx/darwin letting it take care of dealing with the initialisation of the hardware? A program could "emulate" gathering the information a bios would supply and pass that to windows? I hearby suggest the name iloadwin:-D
I honestly believe that anyone approaching DiscWorld with a screen in mind had better be thinking about making a lot of films otherwise the economics of it all will probably make it difficult. Once you have done the work to create all the races and scenery involved you may as well use it.
Where to start is a difficult question, but I may well choose the very book you dismiss, as it establishes Ankh-Morpork and the Assassains Guild to start with, and then moves into a standalone plot which shows the nature of Discworld as a medium to parody our own cultures. Otherwise you may be able to start with Guards Guards and make a whole *logy of movies following Vimes and Carrot.
The problem is that so many of the plotlines intermingle that any starting point other then the beginning (The Colour of Magic) will naturally mean reworking all sorts of twists or dropping all sorts of otherwise brilliant moments as the backstory is missing. While writing this comment I've been looking at the Discworld reading order and being underwhelmed at how it fails to recognise so many of the intertanglings which make the world so complete (e.g. Carpe Jugulum and The Fifth Elephant are an Uberwald series of their own, Moving Pictures would to me be a sybling to both the Pyramids/Small Gods line and the whole Ankh amalgam (guards and wizards) and how can you disentangle The Truth from the Guards).
Nobody is yet ready to put a billion on the line to bank-roll a dozen or so DiscWorld movies, pity because anyone attempting to jump in half way will probably be doomed, and anyone starting at the beginning without following it up will likely lose their shirt on the deal. But this article is not about the quest to make the above films, but the hope of exploiting the Childrens works.
Are baseball stats facts? Would 100 independent viewers of a baseball match all produce the same stats? My understanding is no as things like errors are included in baseball statistics, and these are purely subjective. Therefore these are the official statistics for a game rather then the factual statistics of the game. I do not fully understand baseball statistics so I do not know how much of the stats these subjective judgements impact. In contrast I can tell you that in cricket there are no subjective statistics and therefore anyone attempting this would have a much harder time. Soccer stats are also subjective, even to the simplest and most vital of statistics, who scored the goal?
Having said all that I think the players are insane, they had a deal, they were being paid and now I think it is safe to say that they will lose this money, instead some lawyers will get it and the fantasy leagues will do whatever they can do without paying up. Of course they may think that they can win this case based on the use of player (and team) names alone in which case all journalism and reporting on individuals will just have become impossible without their permission which is an extreme idea which would see a lot more lawyers being paid to fight it, and another bunch fighting for it as they would see lifetimes of work ahead of them.
Slashdot Mirror
When you say that your RaLink 2500 based adapter did nothing with "Linux" you should really at least say which Distribution(s) if not version(s). The standard of wireless drivers with a Linux based distribution is far more dependant on the distribution then the upstream kernel developers (for the last while until now anyway). This only stands out as Ralink 2500 cards are/should actually be well supported on Linux.
You espouse the political ideals as your own yet claim that your should not be dragged in to them. The very idea that a programmer could choose to distribute Free Software is in political danger (dmca/eucd, idea patents) and non-free software is being threatened at a political level (government purchasing rules primarily). If you
then you should consider how your vote might change the future of these "business models".In most areas of politics there are no Free Software implications. In fact never forget that things like the Debian Free Software Guidelines make absolutely explicit that the community can never try to cut out any group of people, even terrorists. Free Software is free for all whatever your political ideals, but do not think that this means Free Software is not political, it just limits it's politics to a few key areas which are required for it's continued existence.
As others mention below in replies the phone line is mandated to be connected for the first twelve months of your contract IF you want the subsidised Sky box, if you are willing to pay full price for it you do not have to leave it connected. Sky's line on why this exists is for "Interactive Services" like e-mail for which they actually had a contract with a third party. The fun part was asking them (this was a few years ago) how much it would cost in Ireland to send an email using the box to which the only answer they could provide was "your telephone companies standard charge to send an email" an answer which really failed with me as I was working for my telelphone company at the time and knew with certainty no such pricing exists.
As for what information they gather, well obviously they can only gather what you do with the box, but as the box's evolve (e.g. Sky+ the PVR and HD) they are getting access to more and more information. I assume it is only a matter of time before targeted advertising arrives. I would suspect that before the day they disable the analogue HD outputs on their HD box to enforce HDMI they will probably have used this method to try and check first what % of customers they are likely to annoy.
While your argument has no holes in it, it misses the point. If no BSD option existed for the vendor, they would have to choose between costs, either to develop, buy in or use GPL code. With a BSD option they can leverage the work of others, with no obligation to allow their improvements to be incorporated into the work they base their system upon.
You could try hackndev.com to get Linux onto your Palm, though it is still in relatively early stages.
Why remove the paper from the device? Instead use a roll of paper inside the machine viewable through a window. The design would have to ensure that the previous vote is not disclosed but other then that each machine would have a complete paper record of it's votes in an easy to read format which you could feed to a fast scanning machine to verfiy the entire voter trail. In case of any discrepencies the paper version is counted and once enough tally's are tested and accurate results are found you can save the effort of counting all the paper votes, but if that was required it could be done quickly and by multiple independant machines (independant to each other and the voting machine manufacturer).
The voter can understand this system quite easily, your vote is what you can see on the piece of paper in the window of the machine, they hope the machines will accurately count the votes as printed and save the recounting effort but that will be checked and it's what is on the paper that counts. Fitting a maginifying lens over the machine's window would allow a relatively small printout to appear much larger and easy to read (saving paper and/or increasing accessiility).
Another requirement then would probably be to have a second bank of ram slots for "Video" ram ... though this could be a great thing if the gpu becomes generally available as a co-processor as presumably your faster video ram could be used for aonther level of caching? It would also mean you could upgrade your gpu and video ram seperately. The only downside I think I can see is that your video output's are likely to be tied to your motherboard though perhaps that's where pci-* steps back in (so you can pop in a video or audio card which is no more then inputs/outputs using the onboard dsp/ram)? Only thing is this starts to sound like winmodems so getting it all working solidly could be a challenge.
It'll work perfectly. The War on Porn is a guaranteed infinite war.
I can just picture the last person on earth's last words to another human: "I warned you about taking any more photo's of me from behind you pornorrist!"
Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Sun etc could simply put all these ideas they feel they need defensive patent protection for into a publication of their own "Software Ideas" and give a free subscription to every patent office worldwide (along with an open public website of them).
Regarding online music distribution, note the abusive monopolistic actions Microsoft have been convicted of in this area by the EU. The common hook on that aspect of the case is to talk about the bundling of Windows Media Player but that is only the remedy. The actual problem MS had with the EU is regarding network audio and their attempts to leverage (illegally) their client base to extend their monopoly to dominate network audio servers as well as clients. Remember also that the rest of that case was about local network services and interoperability. As for web tools, imagine ActiveX/.Net had been lauched as if by any other company (i.e. requiring the user to actively download and install it) how much more accessible would the web be today?
Microsoft's current dream seems to be a world where all digital systems pay them (note their eagerness to have their drm and codecs used for next gen DVD systems) and where they can use the EUCD/DMCA to lock competitors out of any market they need to actively maintain control upon to prevent their monopoly from being threatened. Microsoft do not want anyone else to have any control of any section of any market they might be able to blend into their offerings so now they have their own pdf, virtual server and flash to go with their own netscape, playstation, tivo and quicktime.
While trying to provide a piece of software for every requirement under the sun is not a bad thing, how Microsoft has conducted itself has shown no appreciation for the Monopolistic position and as such has been found illegal on both sides of the Atlantic. While I am only speculating about the intentions of Microsoft's manouevers I think history is the only true indicator of anyone's intentions, convicted twice and still fighting (and attacking/consuming industries) is enough for me to repeat "evil".
You may be modded funny but some of those are good ideas!
The accuracy of a voice based lie detector would be questionable (and probably depend on just how powerful a computer the phone is), but you could even train it to people you talk to regularly ("view their past lies and near-lies and mark what was a lie and what wasn't). Video phones could add another level of accuracy with the equivalent increase in required power to take advantage of it.
To make the interest simulator really good might take some investigation into the best ways to gather the sounds to insert and the best ways to time their insertion.
An excuse generator should be trivial, in fact it is just an audio player which can play to the far end of the phone, you record your excuse's and during the call pick which one you want to use and when ready play it to queue your boss saying "get in here NOW" or a dog going mad or your doorbell/landline/other mobile.
Of course there is no reason why these should be "smart phone" programs only, I could use them all on my laptop/desktop.
So isn't the answer a touchscreen with minimal buttons, and your choice of keyboard? From the roll out keyboards to the projecting displays via standard bluetooth/usb keyboards you choose, and of course you should always be able to sacrifice screen space for an on screen keyboard if you so desire. Carry a small portable and have your favourite keyboard waiting for you wherever you do most of your data entry, or just nick one from the nearest pc. I really don't understand why the "tablet pcs" are just hinged laptops with a touchscreen ... drop the hinge, drop the keyboard (or at worst make the keyboard an thin, light and removable cover for the screen you can just leave at home if you don't use it for data entry). End result everyone can get what they want.
Use a headset/handsfree? Or do you want to hold a pda in one hand, phone in the other and the pen in your mouth?
Take one class, convert one computer to Linux and get the kids to write a web-page about it. Post to your local LUG about the page and project. Sit back and wait for the local MS shill to drop off the Windows software the school would like for free. I know of one case where this happened though the school's intention was not to squeeze software from Microsoft.
Well done, you've already written your slashdot submission for the next round in the battle of EU V MS :-P
fuse = filesystem in userspace = in Linux post 2.6.14 (afair)
Doesn't this help the EU Competition Authority to argue that Microsoft is actively extending their monopoly on desktops into the server market? Does it therefore also suggest that for once a "government" is acting on something in time, saving a market from an extending monopoly before the monopoly covers the second market? It doesn't do anything to make Microsoft comply with court orders though.
I always thought those "do no steal" ads were incredibly odd in the cinema , now you mention them on DVD. Imagine every time you go to Windows Update you were made to sit through a one minute "ad" telling you not to pirate Windows? Perfectly acceptable imho if your computer is only showing it to you because it knows your Windows is not genuine, but if it knows your Windows is genuine/legal/legit then it would just be pissing off your paying customers. Now imagine you have just bought a cinema ticket and had people check it to let you in to watch a film, or you have bought/hired a DVD and you are told "don't be a thief". It doesn't show much respect for your paying customers.
Is there any reason why a router couldn't toy with the packet delivery timing to deliver equitable latency to all competitors (or rather all competitors who can achieve some reasonable latency if their packets are untouched, not slowing everyone down to the slowest competitor but setting a baseline no-one can go below)?
Real-time graphics require you to sit there watching them constantly. If this audio was not too distracting (and I suspect no matter what you would learn to tune out the normal operational sounds) you could actually hae people working on something while monitoring the network, rather then simply employing people to act like a desk security guard wathing the screens. Of course is anything sounds funny it time to have a look. I wonder if they have done any work with time-compression on this audio generation technique, so people could produce a X minute audio clip every Y minutes, could be handy to listen to a 5 minute track every day to get a quick outline of how a day went.
So when walking by a cinema or DVD rental/retailer how about all Americans start singing:
"It's fun to fuck with the DMCA,
you know it takes all your rights away,
don't buy a DVD or go see a Movie,
while their buying your laws today.
WIPO, they love corporate whores,
WIPO, our hidden overlords,
I say WIPO, who the fuck are they
to think they'll take my rights today"
And for the Europeans:
"It's fun to fuck with the EUCD,
That's why there's no more movies for me,
don't buy a DVD or go see a Movie,
while they take your rights away"
I'm sure DRM could even get a verse:
"DRM, it's an infection you see,
DRM is not for you and me,
DRM takes all your backups away,
And yes it's legal here today"
And maybe even CSS?
"CSS, it doesn't stop a copy,
CSS, it just makes a criminal of me,
CSS, control the market I say,
Fuck you you won't get another penny"
Or VLC?
"VLC, am I a criminal yet,
videolan, it's so easy to get,
VLC, it's a Free project,
plays any DVD you can get"
And yes, all to the lovely tune of the Village People's YMCA (in case anyone couldn't spot it).
If the lack of a bios is the problem ... how about performing the equivalent of loadlin by loading windows from osx/darwin letting it take care of dealing with the initialisation of the hardware? A program could "emulate" gathering the information a bios would supply and pass that to windows? I hearby suggest the name iloadwin :-D
I honestly believe that anyone approaching DiscWorld with a screen in mind had better be thinking about making a lot of films otherwise the economics of it all will probably make it difficult. Once you have done the work to create all the races and scenery involved you may as well use it.
Where to start is a difficult question, but I may well choose the very book you dismiss, as it establishes Ankh-Morpork and the Assassains Guild to start with, and then moves into a standalone plot which shows the nature of Discworld as a medium to parody our own cultures. Otherwise you may be able to start with Guards Guards and make a whole *logy of movies following Vimes and Carrot.
The problem is that so many of the plotlines intermingle that any starting point other then the beginning (The Colour of Magic) will naturally mean reworking all sorts of twists or dropping all sorts of otherwise brilliant moments as the backstory is missing. While writing this comment I've been looking at the Discworld reading order and being underwhelmed at how it fails to recognise so many of the intertanglings which make the world so complete (e.g. Carpe Jugulum and The Fifth Elephant are an Uberwald series of their own, Moving Pictures would to me be a sybling to both the Pyramids/Small Gods line and the whole Ankh amalgam (guards and wizards) and how can you disentangle The Truth from the Guards).
Nobody is yet ready to put a billion on the line to bank-roll a dozen or so DiscWorld movies, pity because anyone attempting to jump in half way will probably be doomed, and anyone starting at the beginning without following it up will likely lose their shirt on the deal. But this article is not about the quest to make the above films, but the hope of exploiting the Childrens works.
Are baseball stats facts? Would 100 independent viewers of a baseball match all produce the same stats? My understanding is no as things like errors are included in baseball statistics, and these are purely subjective. Therefore these are the official statistics for a game rather then the factual statistics of the game. I do not fully understand baseball statistics so I do not know how much of the stats these subjective judgements impact. In contrast I can tell you that in cricket there are no subjective statistics and therefore anyone attempting this would have a much harder time. Soccer stats are also subjective, even to the simplest and most vital of statistics, who scored the goal?
Having said all that I think the players are insane, they had a deal, they were being paid and now I think it is safe to say that they will lose this money, instead some lawyers will get it and the fantasy leagues will do whatever they can do without paying up. Of course they may think that they can win this case based on the use of player (and team) names alone in which case all journalism and reporting on individuals will just have become impossible without their permission which is an extreme idea which would see a lot more lawyers being paid to fight it, and another bunch fighting for it as they would see lifetimes of work ahead of them.