While it appears not to be a tax on the storage itself, it is a tax on every device which wants to read it. It will be interesting to see if we do hear anything about an Ipod tax... Apple could probably switch to another filesystem as easily as anyone, either switching to udf (the only writable common format I've seen mentioned so far) or by adding the driver install to the iTunes install. It is the like of digital camera makers, printer manufacturers (the ones who stick in card readers for direct printing) and perhaps even all the competing (i.e. non Windows) smart-phone/pda manufacturers who will be put between a rock and a hard place to pay the fat tax... unless udf is the answer for them all?
Which FA are you reading oh Anonymous One? I have never found any mention of such a plan and guess you are refering to "The BBC said it will be releasing further material across other areas over the coming months." I suspect the areas in that sentence refers to things like Documentaries and maybe even Comédy, not geography.
So let me pay for a UK tv license to get equal/equivalent access. Trebly so when they decide to let you watch/download directly. Even if it excluded all non-BBC produced content that would be fine with me. Do they not want lots of virtually free money as I can imagine they could sell millions of extra tv licenses in such a way?
Imho fsck the proprietary drivers. If they want to persuade Ati talk about the Open drivers. If you want to put the fear into MS, do a weather channel and buy a Free driver for a graphics chipset and launch a economic Linux line of machines with that, if nothing else the bargaining positions with MS and the other main video chipset manufacturers would probably make it worthwhile. Given the choice of good power management or 3d I'll take the power management (I have a Dell laptop I bought based on Free driver support, it has an ati m9/r200 graphics chip) so even a "perfect" 2d driver would do. If people _really_ need their 3d acceleration then they probably aren't the average laptop user.
The company formerly known as PalmSource hopes there are many more like you out there. They intend their next OS to be a release of the Palm tools for a Linux core.
Re:If you have any questions, feel free to ask her
on
Linux Boots on Treo 650
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't really know (but guess you do) how many "ports" there are, but it seems to me the LifeDrive, TE(2), Treo650, TT(2|3) and Z72 are all potential targets for the one code-base/distro, it seems the core Palm PXA hardware is all quite similar. Between them it's also quite a range of machines, it will be interesting to see what will/won't work (bluetooth, Z72 camera, LD wifi, Treo Phone) and what uses people will put them to... to ask a question again, do you have a personal itch you are scratching with this (a way to use your treo) or are you simply doing this "because you can"?
Re:If you have any questions, feel free to ask her
on
Linux Boots on Treo 650
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
How much communication is happening amongst the various Palm PXA developers, for example I just noticed the hackndev.com link has arrived on your handhelds.org wiki page. Garux seems to have spawned a lot of interest and it seems the machines are generally quite similar, so could we prehaps see a "distro" released for PXA Palms?
Note this story suggests he covered it up when he discovered it not simply that he didn't know they did it, that should be the end of him. If the original version of the story is true, he pressured at least one researcher to make the donation so again he should go. So perhaps the investigating body did not even care to dispute his new story (perhaps it would be case of one persons word against another) and just said "that's fine, we'll accept your version. Goodbye anyway cause it's still not good enough".
Re:The Colour of Magic is a weird choice...
on
Top 20 Geek Novels
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Actually the group is the Smoking GNU and GNU alone is a magic "packet header" for control messages (G) which are not logged (N) and are turned around and sent back at the end of the line (U). Of course that's something any good 14 year old girl of a clacks operator who had studied her manuals would know and if you aren't one of them how the hell did you ever find this truly bizarre corner of L-Space... is that you Hex, Ponder? Oook?
What makes you think the $100 laptop would not have been an Apple if this had gone ahead? But yes, it does show they were willing to take OSX further then before.
I don't get it. What would I use it for? Is it for people that can't afford laptops but want the web on the move?
How many people is that exactly?
How about people who won't lug about a laptop (weight) but need access to web/email. As others have mentioned, many business applications look viable where browser based clients do the work.
And its not like you can just use it anywhere. You're either using it on your home network, where it would be a toy not a tool (why wouldn't you use your real computer?) or your using it in an expensive access point, or do they expect you to steal other people's connection?
First, I could see myself using one of these at home, the alternative is to lug around the laptop, or cover the house in a bluetooth netork for pdas (unpleasent to surf on anyway) or put a computer in every room! Use it as a remote for mythtv, read email or/. while you eat breakfast and check imdb to settle a bet on what films the actor you are watching is in.
As for where else to use it... Work. Many free/cheap hotspots abound (e.g. some MacDonalds here would let you online for buying anything). Your friends/business partners may let you onto networks. It has it's own storage so it doesn't need to be online to be useful and finally you could just use your mobile when you have to get online and have no other choice.
3 hours battery life?
3 hours of surfing on 802.11 wireless sounds fine to me! I'd rather not carry around too much weight, and if I had to have longer battery life I suspect I could carry extra batteries. The entire unit probably weighs less then the two batteries I have in my laptop, in fact it's probably about the weight of one.
$400?
Yes, $400. Look at the prices of mobile phones (not subsidised ones), pda's and laptops. The 800x480 touchscreen alone is worth $100 in my book, any general computer (as opposed to a locked device) another $100, another $100 for low weight, power and small form factor and you can choose to argue the last $100's worth (is the software, or even just supporting the idea of it, worth it or perhaps the 802.11/bluetooth).
Whenever a form factor like this starts to become popular you can expect a rapid price drop as I'm sure the main part of the costs are the attempts to recover the fixed costs and the marginal price is low. At present screen options were probably few and far between for nokia, but if 10cm 800x480 touchscreens (or any size/format/resolution) take hold another manufacturer (of both the screens and devices) will likely appear quickly. Right now there's still a bit of "early adopter" to the price.
I guess this might appeal to PDA people, but don't they have everything that this offers for less, in a smaller package with the same or better battery life?
Show me a PDA with a comparable screen? It's as simple as that, what size/resolution screen do you want to surf the web with. 800 pixels wide should mean you are using something more akin to a laptop web browser then a pda one and make things much more pleasant.
If the hardware is built well, and the OS is Linux, you should be able to tell it to turn everything off and go down to minimal power consumption, don't even bother ringing or displaying anything, you're psychic, you'll know when to answer and who it is! No need for the microphone or speaker either, your friends are just like you:-P
I personally don't want a smartphone, I want something like the Nokia 770 except it should be a usb2, firewire and exapansion card host also. I want one which can hold many mobile network connections simultaneoulsy to route all traffic the way I want. Not just multiple wireless ip devices, but support for multiple cell networks voice/data. A true wireless call should be rare, more often voip via a local wireless/bluetooth network, but if I do want to make a call, I want to have full purchasing power to decide who gets that cash!
And of course, I can buffer actions to where, when and how I want them to happen, not pay through the nose to get the truetone of the single I just bought from the album that stops me ripping my discs (not that I could get anything onto the phone anyway). Screw laptops and even desktops, one of these as a thin client (perhaps with a wired dock into a video card and more expansion ports) to a decent machine when you need more power, could actually see people benfit from the last 20 years technology advances?
As for power, just make sure they are all good and rugged and let natural motion maintain a charge away from power... if you need more juice just bounce it off the walls a few times! That or clockwork to try and do something for the first-worlds obesity problem while addressing energy consumption!
All the people who would rather save any cash and run a pirate copy of windows. All the people who would rather run Linux/BSD/whatever but aren't interested in hardware (i.e. won't build their own). People who may not themselves be "geeks" but who have plenty friends who look after their systems for them anyway. People who want to run a version of Windows not available from Dell. People who want to use the machines as (thick) thin clients. And finally and most importantly, people who want to choose their paid for OS themselves, e.g. Suse, Xandros, Linspire or even a direct MS supported Windows who will get their support from their software supplier.
Supply the machine blank, but with a Linux bootable read-only disc in the box which they have confirmed works with the customers configuration. Make it clear the customer is buying the hardware only and will have no software support, but the same bootable disc can be used both as a day to day OS if the user desires and as a hardware test suite for support (i.e. instead of saying "re-install windows" to see if the hardware is ok say "reboot with the supplied disc"). Surely Dell can save money by not supplying software they have to support.
I know the fsf did stop their official call to boycott amazon but I for one have never bought a thing from them. Maybe they aren't attacking everyone with their patents, but for me just giving the US Patents Office the filing fees for this rubbish is enough to keep me saying no.
Well it seems already that their is a content protection mechanism on these new shows (which expires them when the next episode airs) so any attempt to record those shows on anything other then an authorised (by the protector) player is illegal thanks to the DMCA/EUCD (EUCD only applying in countries who have modified their laws to adopt it, which includes all of the new EU member states as it was part of their accession treaties). No need to pass laws to make recording TV illegal, the law is there already. All they need to do is to apply some form of copy protection to any broadcast and it cannot legally be recorded, just like you cannot legally strip the protection from a DVD.
slashdot doesn't actually edit the submitted story for a change
Another poster suggests each purchase through that link is worth around $125 btw.
Perhaps slashdot should setup referer accounts for all the sites it pimps, and then publish and use the revenue to create some form of slash fund, perhaps paying lawyers to fight some of the laws slashdot readers seem to hate so much, or funding development on slash dependencies or...
Please show me the damage the release of the Free fglrx driver had on ATI? You are grossly overcomplicating things, it is really a simple case of "show me the money". In the fglrx/r200 case you can thank the Weather Channel for paying the bill and I think that in itself is a demonstration that Ati did not value it too highly.
Your moderated Funny, and it is, but that doesn't me it may not actually be completely valid! Monitoring the cow's responses to music could let you build predictive pictures of the best music to play. It may vary by time of day or it may just be that some cows like more variety then others but I imagine given a reasonable number of inputs that over time such a system could develop a model for picking the music to play at any time. If someone out there hasn't run experiments on this yet then no doubt someone will!
Slashdot Mirror
While it appears not to be a tax on the storage itself, it is a tax on every device which wants to read it. It will be interesting to see if we do hear anything about an Ipod tax ... Apple could probably switch to another filesystem as easily as anyone, either switching to udf (the only writable common format I've seen mentioned so far) or by adding the driver install to the iTunes install. It is the like of digital camera makers, printer manufacturers (the ones who stick in card readers for direct printing) and perhaps even all the competing (i.e. non Windows) smart-phone/pda manufacturers who will be put between a rock and a hard place to pay the fat tax ... unless udf is the answer for them all?
Which FA are you reading oh Anonymous One? I have never found any mention of such a plan and guess you are refering to "The BBC said it will be releasing further material across other areas over the coming months." I suspect the areas in that sentence refers to things like Documentaries and maybe even Comédy, not geography.
So let me pay for a UK tv license to get equal/equivalent access. Trebly so when they decide to let you watch/download directly. Even if it excluded all non-BBC produced content that would be fine with me. Do they not want lots of virtually free money as I can imagine they could sell millions of extra tv licenses in such a way?
Imho fsck the proprietary drivers. If they want to persuade Ati talk about the Open drivers. If you want to put the fear into MS, do a weather channel and buy a Free driver for a graphics chipset and launch a economic Linux line of machines with that, if nothing else the bargaining positions with MS and the other main video chipset manufacturers would probably make it worthwhile. Given the choice of good power management or 3d I'll take the power management (I have a Dell laptop I bought based on Free driver support, it has an ati m9/r200 graphics chip) so even a "perfect" 2d driver would do. If people _really_ need their 3d acceleration then they probably aren't the average laptop user.
SD/SDIO on Linux was explained recently at linuxdvices.com.
The company formerly known as PalmSource hopes there are many more like you out there. They intend their next OS to be a release of the Palm tools for a Linux core.
I don't really know (but guess you do) how many "ports" there are, but it seems to me the LifeDrive, TE(2), Treo650, TT(2|3) and Z72 are all potential targets for the one code-base/distro, it seems the core Palm PXA hardware is all quite similar. Between them it's also quite a range of machines, it will be interesting to see what will/won't work (bluetooth, Z72 camera, LD wifi, Treo Phone) and what uses people will put them to ... to ask a question again, do you have a personal itch you are scratching with this (a way to use your treo) or are you simply doing this "because you can"?
How much communication is happening amongst the various Palm PXA developers, for example I just noticed the hackndev.com link has arrived on your handhelds.org wiki page. Garux seems to have spawned a lot of interest and it seems the machines are generally quite similar, so could we prehaps see a "distro" released for PXA Palms?
Perhaps this may offer one valid reason for not choosing sd. Not sure that RS-MMC is any better mind.
How many average PC users are able to maintain a Windows box? The question should not be about an average PC user, but about the average OS admin.
We've already seen it in exactly this case.
Note this story suggests he covered it up when he discovered it not simply that he didn't know they did it, that should be the end of him. If the original version of the story is true, he pressured at least one researcher to make the donation so again he should go. So perhaps the investigating body did not even care to dispute his new story (perhaps it would be case of one persons word against another) and just said "that's fine, we'll accept your version. Goodbye anyway cause it's still not good enough".
Actually the group is the Smoking GNU and GNU alone is a magic "packet header" for control messages (G) which are not logged (N) and are turned around and sent back at the end of the line (U). Of course that's something any good 14 year old girl of a clacks operator who had studied her manuals would know and if you aren't one of them how the hell did you ever find this truly bizarre corner of L-Space ... is that you Hex, Ponder? Oook?
What makes you think the $100 laptop would not have been an Apple if this had gone ahead? But yes, it does show they were willing to take OSX further then before.
First, I could see myself using one of these at home, the alternative is to lug around the laptop, or cover the house in a bluetooth netork for pdas (unpleasent to surf on anyway) or put a computer in every room! Use it as a remote for mythtv, read email or /. while you eat breakfast and check imdb to settle a bet on what films the actor you are watching is in.
As for where else to use it ... Work. Many free/cheap hotspots abound (e.g. some MacDonalds here would let you online for buying anything). Your friends/business partners may let you onto networks. It has it's own storage so it doesn't need to be online to be useful and finally you could just use your mobile when you have to get online and have no other choice.
3 hours of surfing on 802.11 wireless sounds fine to me! I'd rather not carry around too much weight, and if I had to have longer battery life I suspect I could carry extra batteries. The entire unit probably weighs less then the two batteries I have in my laptop, in fact it's probably about the weight of one.Yes, $400. Look at the prices of mobile phones (not subsidised ones), pda's and laptops. The 800x480 touchscreen alone is worth $100 in my book, any general computer (as opposed to a locked device) another $100, another $100 for low weight, power and small form factor and you can choose to argue the last $100's worth (is the software, or even just supporting the idea of it, worth it or perhaps the 802.11/bluetooth).
Whenever a form factor like this starts to become popular you can expect a rapid price drop as I'm sure the main part of the costs are the attempts to recover the fixed costs and the marginal price is low. At present screen options were probably few and far between for nokia, but if 10cm 800x480 touchscreens (or any size/format/resolution) take hold another manufacturer (of both the screens and devices) will likely appear quickly. Right now there's still a bit of "early adopter" to the price.
Show me a PDA with a comparable screen? It's as simple as that, what size/resolution screen do you want to surf the web with. 800 pixels wide should mean you are using something more akin to a laptop web browser then a pda one and make things much more pleasant.
If the hardware is built well, and the OS is Linux, you should be able to tell it to turn everything off and go down to minimal power consumption, don't even bother ringing or displaying anything, you're psychic, you'll know when to answer and who it is! No need for the microphone or speaker either, your friends are just like you :-P
I personally don't want a smartphone, I want something like the Nokia 770 except it should be a usb2, firewire and exapansion card host also. I want one which can hold many mobile network connections simultaneoulsy to route all traffic the way I want. Not just multiple wireless ip devices, but support for multiple cell networks voice/data. A true wireless call should be rare, more often voip via a local wireless/bluetooth network, but if I do want to make a call, I want to have full purchasing power to decide who gets that cash!
And of course, I can buffer actions to where, when and how I want them to happen, not pay through the nose to get the truetone of the single I just bought from the album that stops me ripping my discs (not that I could get anything onto the phone anyway). Screw laptops and even desktops, one of these as a thin client (perhaps with a wired dock into a video card and more expansion ports) to a decent machine when you need more power, could actually see people benfit from the last 20 years technology advances?
As for power, just make sure they are all good and rugged and let natural motion maintain a charge away from power ... if you need more juice just bounce it off the walls a few times! That or clockwork to try and do something for the first-worlds obesity problem while addressing energy consumption!
All the people who would rather save any cash and run a pirate copy of windows. All the people who would rather run Linux/BSD/whatever but aren't interested in hardware (i.e. won't build their own). People who may not themselves be "geeks" but who have plenty friends who look after their systems for them anyway. People who want to run a version of Windows not available from Dell. People who want to use the machines as (thick) thin clients. And finally and most importantly, people who want to choose their paid for OS themselves, e.g. Suse, Xandros, Linspire or even a direct MS supported Windows who will get their support from their software supplier.
Supply the machine blank, but with a Linux bootable read-only disc in the box which they have confirmed works with the customers configuration. Make it clear the customer is buying the hardware only and will have no software support, but the same bootable disc can be used both as a day to day OS if the user desires and as a hardware test suite for support (i.e. instead of saying "re-install windows" to see if the hardware is ok say "reboot with the supplied disc"). Surely Dell can save money by not supplying software they have to support.
I know the fsf did stop their official call to boycott amazon but I for one have never bought a thing from them. Maybe they aren't attacking everyone with their patents, but for me just giving the US Patents Office the filing fees for this rubbish is enough to keep me saying no.
Well it seems already that their is a content protection mechanism on these new shows (which expires them when the next episode airs) so any attempt to record those shows on anything other then an authorised (by the protector) player is illegal thanks to the DMCA/EUCD (EUCD only applying in countries who have modified their laws to adopt it, which includes all of the new EU member states as it was part of their accession treaties). No need to pass laws to make recording TV illegal, the law is there already. All they need to do is to apply some form of copy protection to any broadcast and it cannot legally be recorded, just like you cannot legally strip the protection from a DVD.
Would you rather:
- slashdot.org took the referer fees
- amazon pocketed the extra cash
- slashdot doesn't actually edit the submitted story for a change
Another poster suggests each purchase through that link is worth around $125 btw.Perhaps slashdot should setup referer accounts for all the sites it pimps, and then publish and use the revenue to create some form of slash fund, perhaps paying lawyers to fight some of the laws slashdot readers seem to hate so much, or funding development on slash dependencies or ...
Please show me the damage the release of the Free fglrx driver had on ATI? You are grossly overcomplicating things, it is really a simple case of "show me the money". In the fglrx/r200 case you can thank the Weather Channel for paying the bill and I think that in itself is a demonstration that Ati did not value it too highly.
I hope you equally as appalled by attempts to circumvent other laws ... http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/ ... http://www.grandtimes.com/rosa.html
The next time MS claims it fixes security holes faster then anyone else ...
Your moderated Funny, and it is, but that doesn't me it may not actually be completely valid! Monitoring the cow's responses to music could let you build predictive pictures of the best music to play. It may vary by time of day or it may just be that some cows like more variety then others but I imagine given a reasonable number of inputs that over time such a system could develop a model for picking the music to play at any time. If someone out there hasn't run experiments on this yet then no doubt someone will!