The problem is that Intel and Microsoft may be using predatory pricing and other anti-competitive practices to limit choice in the long term. That is, Intel and Microsoft may try to kill XO in the short term, and then go right back to selling underperforming $1000 laptops with Microsoft's bloated and DRM'ed Vista.
Sounds like some crackpot left-wing anti-free-market theory? Well, it isn't. Republicans have frequently been leveling this charge against European and Asian manufacturers of everything from aircraft to steel and imposed fines and sanctions on other nations over it.
Basically, sailors have been out there getting killed by giant waves for decades, but a bunch of scientists decreed that such waves could not exist, and therefor, everything from safety standards, to engineering, to the ships themselves, were all designed in line with what was predicted, but not what was observed
Yes, engineering and safety standards are based on objective evidence, not anecdotal reports. That is the way it should be. Sometimes people's hunches and anecdotes are proven right in retrospect, often, they are proven wrong.
I find it amazing that anyone would blindly trust an academic institution with any matter of policy, regarding climate
I'm sorry you don't understand the purpose of academic or scientific institutions; you are not supposed to "trust" them, you are supposed to look at their evidence and conclusions and then rationally formulate a policy based on it.
If there's a smoking gun that says that scientists find what they want to find, and its not necessarily the truth
Of course, it's "not necessarily the truth". Scientists make hypotheses and inferences based on data, and those are always subject to change.
The best scientific evidence right now says that anthropogenic climate change is happening. That scientific hypothesis may turn out to be wrong, but no alternative hypothesis is even remotely as plausible.
Businesses have been doing this for a long time, using various paper-based methods. While a specific way of doing this might be patentable, merely creating a computer version of this shouldn't be a valid patent.
Because that so-called 'rag tag band of volunteer programmers' is largely paid by Novell, Sun, Oracle, RedHat etc.
No, it isn't "largely paid by Novell, Sun, Oracle, or RedHat". Each of those companies contributes some work to key projects.
The enormous imbalance in resources for development and marketing between Microsoft and Linux remains, and hence, when two products by each group grow a the same rate, it's a failure for Microsoft and a success for Linux.
Any blanket statements like this are almost always either wrong or uninteresting. In this case for example m2943 implicitly implies knowing about *all* possible evidence, so I would say the statement is wrong.
If there were any such evidence (not merely speculation or crackpot theories), it would be the most profound scientific result ever. And even if there were only suggestive evidence, it would be discussed at length in review articles, monographs, and commentaries in major scientific publications. The result would be widely cited by people pushing bizarre and unfounded theories about how the mind works (like Roger Penrose). Since none of those sources cite or mention any such evidence, I can say confidently that such evidence doesn't exist (i.e., is not known to the scientific community).
So, I stand behind my blanket statement. You're welcome to prove me wrong with a reference or two to peer reviewed experimental evidence.
On the contrary, there is a lot of facts that backs up the conspiracy against Lans and this story has received a lot of investigation in Sweden from mainstream media.
Lans started the lawsuits and he screwed up. If people take advantage of his mistake to bankrupt him, that's not a "conspiracy". And given that his first lawsuit was a patent troll, why should anybody even give a damn?
The Swedish government has protested to the US. Even the European Parliament has reacted.
Well, then the Swedish government can pay his legal fees for the first lawsuit and he can keep his second patent. Of course, don't be surprised if that gets challenged in court as well.
I don't care much either way about the Zune or the iPod, but if you look around the Roughly Drafted site, you'll see that it is very biased towards Apple, and doesn't mind playing a little fast and loose with the truth.
When Linux "slowly gains market penetration," it's always a success, because Linux is succeeding despite Microsoft's monopolistic practices, bundling, tying, and dirty tricks..
When Microsoft "slowly gains market penetration," it's always a failure, because Microsoft is failing despite spending billions on marketing, billions more on R&D, and despite their monopolistic practices, bundling, tying, and dirty tricks.
In different words, from a company with the kind of market share, history, and resources that Microsoft has, anything other than overwhelming success is a failure.
There is not a shred of evidence that conscious observation has any effect on matter that differs from systems that evolve without being consciously evolved.
And you seriously think this is different anywhere else? Western European nations, for example, were routinely tapping phone conversations of their own citizens behind the iron curtain, without probable cause or any other justification and nobody even raised much of an eyebrow about it. In the US, people at least make a fuss about it.
When I attach the GPLv3 to code that I have written and you don't like the GPLv3, you're no worse off than if I had never existed. (Furthermore, even though you may not like the GPLv3, but it still is a lot less restrictive than just about any commercial license for copyrighted materials.)
When Burst takes out bogus patents on digital video transmission, everybody is worse off because Bust can now prevent other people from doing things.
but when MegaCorp or someone else who owns IP tries to enforce terms of ownership, it's an evil bad thing...
There is nothing evil about enforcing legitimate property rights; quite to the contrary.
What is evil is that these companies obtained these "rights" in the first place due to a breakdown of the patent system.
For your information, Apple licensed the Lans color graphics patent as did IBM and others.
Heck, I was using color graphics displays prior to 1979; anybody who filed a patent on this in 1979 was a patent troll. If Apple paid for it, it simply means that he was asking for a small enough sum not to be worth fighting--a typical patent troll strategy.
There is a very, very interesting (and scandalous) background story here.
The guy was trying to claim infringement on a patent he knew he didn't own, and judges are right to come down hard on that. Maybe it really was stupidity on his part, but that doesn't change the severity of the offense.
The rest of that "scandalous" story is a conspiracy theory with no proof to back it up.
You mean the guy who filed a patent on bitmapped color graphics displays a year after the Apple II shipped with the feature? (Not to mention other uses prior to that.)
None of my cell phones will give me that unless I actually buy a plan from a provider myself and pay for it. Nor do I know of other devices that use the cell phone network, without fees at all that provide me such access.
I can use my cell phone for free at home because it includes WiFi. I can make VoIP calls, read RSS feeds, check my mail, etc. without paying my wireless provider, or without even a SIM card.
The problem with the Kindle is not that they charge for EVDO, it is that the system deliberately was designed to lack means of conveniently accessing content through other channels. A second problem is that, while I can pick a different provider with my phone, you can't even pick a different provider. Saying "we have to charge for EVDO because nobody gives EVDO access away for free" is a bogus excuse because Amazon could have put WiFi and Bluetooth on there for almost no extra cost. Heck, even the iPhone has WiFi.
The Kindle is a bad deal: it's a proprietary system deliberately designed to work conveniently only with Amazon. It's evil. Don't support that kind of garbage. There are enough alternatives you can get.
I'd also like to point out (and see if I get any constructive responses) that this patent isn't that broad, and not worth of the fear-mongering it has induced over the years. Here's the first claim of the patent (I added the numbers):
You can't determine how broad a patent is by counting how many elements a claim has. Most of the elements of the claims of the Amazon patent don't limit the claims. Despite your verbal acrobatics and distortions, the patent is broad.
(And those are not "claims" those are "elements".)
Generate a custom newspaper with RSS feeds and synchroinize it via USB with Cybook. [...] It uses wi-fi, but not EVDO.
Both have WiFi.
I know it reads.txt,.png,.gif.. according to some comparison charts, but, it's not clear if it supports more.
It may "read" them after conversion on your desktop or at Amazon. The first version of the Sony reader had such a messed up system.
I don't know if the Kindle can do that for free over USB, but I assume they do.
That's not what TFA says, and I think it's dangerous to assume that.
EVDO being a mobile phone network technology costs money. I doubt the carriers would give Amazon users 100% free use of their network.
So what? At issue is not that the thing has EVDO, at issue is that it lacks WiFi and that it may require desktop or server-side conversion of content.
399USD for lifetime free access with your little tablet-like thing to Wikipedia? I don't know... I think I would get it just for that alone (provided it actually worked in the UK).
You get that easily on several other devices costing around the same. You also get it from any decent cell phone.
There are good, open players in the eBook market; Amazon, as usual, is being evil.
Maybe the problem is that the "application" you speak of isn't an application at all, it's a one sided contract that the bank is under no obligation to honor, but that you are.
You're absolutely right that it's a contract. There's nothing "one-sided" about it as a contract: both sides are bound by it once agreed upon. And as with all other contracts, one side signs first, then the other. With credit card companies, you happen to be the first one.
With jobs, the employment contract is customarily signed by the company first, and then you sign it second--or not.
Actually, they are charging money for connecting you to those blogs,
My impression from the article is that they're charging money no matter how I connect, i.e., even my own WiFi.
I wouldn't expect that of any company. Does apple give free internet service with their handhelds? Does anyone?
No, but I expect that I can use my handheld to connect through my WiFi to someone's site without Amazon taking a cut; as I read the description, I can't.
The guy is complaining that a bank can post charges to an "unactivated card". Well, whether you activate a card or not is irrelevant: if you signed the application form, you have a card and are responsible for any charges you signed up for, whether you activate it or not. If you don't want it anymore, you need to cancel it. Activation is just an extra protection mechanism. By analogy, if you buy a car and throw away the keys, you still bought the car.
We'd know if we had leaks because we test, and we'd know because our very large telecom and ISP customers would scream at us.
Of course, you can avoid memory leaks in C; that's not the issue. The issue is the cost of doing so, and the cost is extra development time, poor performance, and extra bugs relative to systems that automate these issues. That is what the Firefox experience tells you, and it applies to you as well. Firefox shipping with memory leaks isn't the point; the point is the amount of time and effort between shipping a version with memory related bugs and fixing the bugs, because you're spending that kind of time in your projects as well.
As for your supposed corporate credentials, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and all the big, experienced guys are using and shipping C software with pointer errors and memory leaks. All of them have seen the light: Apple added garbage collection to Objective-C, Microsoft is pushing for C#, and Oracle and IBM are pushing for Java. Software developers like you resist the change, and the existence of large codebases is making it difficult to switch overnight, but it is happening. (Java, unfortunately, is a pretty poor choice, but that's a different discussion.)
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that Intel and Microsoft may be using predatory pricing and other anti-competitive practices to limit choice in the long term. That is, Intel and Microsoft may try to kill XO in the short term, and then go right back to selling underperforming $1000 laptops with Microsoft's bloated and DRM'ed Vista.
Sounds like some crackpot left-wing anti-free-market theory? Well, it isn't. Republicans have frequently been leveling this charge against European and Asian manufacturers of everything from aircraft to steel and imposed fines and sanctions on other nations over it.
Basically, sailors have been out there getting killed by giant waves for decades, but a bunch of scientists decreed that such waves could not exist, and therefor, everything from safety standards, to engineering, to the ships themselves, were all designed in line with what was predicted, but not what was observed
Yes, engineering and safety standards are based on objective evidence, not anecdotal reports. That is the way it should be. Sometimes people's hunches and anecdotes are proven right in retrospect, often, they are proven wrong.
I find it amazing that anyone would blindly trust an academic institution with any matter of policy, regarding climate
I'm sorry you don't understand the purpose of academic or scientific institutions; you are not supposed to "trust" them, you are supposed to look at their evidence and conclusions and then rationally formulate a policy based on it.
If there's a smoking gun that says that scientists find what they want to find, and its not necessarily the truth
Of course, it's "not necessarily the truth". Scientists make hypotheses and inferences based on data, and those are always subject to change.
The best scientific evidence right now says that anthropogenic climate change is happening. That scientific hypothesis may turn out to be wrong, but no alternative hypothesis is even remotely as plausible.
Businesses have been doing this for a long time, using various paper-based methods. While a specific way of doing this might be patentable, merely creating a computer version of this shouldn't be a valid patent.
Because that so-called 'rag tag band of volunteer programmers' is largely paid by Novell, Sun, Oracle, RedHat etc.
No, it isn't "largely paid by Novell, Sun, Oracle, or RedHat". Each of those companies contributes some work to key projects.
The enormous imbalance in resources for development and marketing between Microsoft and Linux remains, and hence, when two products by each group grow a the same rate, it's a failure for Microsoft and a success for Linux.
Any blanket statements like this are almost always either wrong or uninteresting. In this case for example m2943 implicitly implies knowing about *all* possible evidence, so I would say the statement is wrong.
If there were any such evidence (not merely speculation or crackpot theories), it would be the most profound scientific result ever. And even if there were only suggestive evidence, it would be discussed at length in review articles, monographs, and commentaries in major scientific publications. The result would be widely cited by people pushing bizarre and unfounded theories about how the mind works (like Roger Penrose). Since none of those sources cite or mention any such evidence, I can say confidently that such evidence doesn't exist (i.e., is not known to the scientific community).
So, I stand behind my blanket statement. You're welcome to prove me wrong with a reference or two to peer reviewed experimental evidence.
On the contrary, there is a lot of facts that backs up the conspiracy against Lans and this story has received a lot of investigation in Sweden from mainstream media.
Lans started the lawsuits and he screwed up. If people take advantage of his mistake to bankrupt him, that's not a "conspiracy". And given that his first lawsuit was a patent troll, why should anybody even give a damn?
The Swedish government has protested to the US. Even the European Parliament has reacted.
Well, then the Swedish government can pay his legal fees for the first lawsuit and he can keep his second patent. Of course, don't be surprised if that gets challenged in court as well.
I don't care much either way about the Zune or the iPod, but if you look around the Roughly Drafted site, you'll see that it is very biased towards Apple, and doesn't mind playing a little fast and loose with the truth.
When Linux "slowly gains market penetration," it's always a success, because Linux is succeeding despite Microsoft's monopolistic practices, bundling, tying, and dirty tricks..
When Microsoft "slowly gains market penetration," it's always a failure, because Microsoft is failing despite spending billions on marketing, billions more on R&D, and despite their monopolistic practices, bundling, tying, and dirty tricks.
In different words, from a company with the kind of market share, history, and resources that Microsoft has, anything other than overwhelming success is a failure.
There is not a shred of evidence that conscious observation has any effect on matter that differs from systems that evolve without being consciously evolved.
And you seriously think this is different anywhere else? Western European nations, for example, were routinely tapping phone conversations of their own citizens behind the iron curtain, without probable cause or any other justification and nobody even raised much of an eyebrow about it. In the US, people at least make a fuss about it.
It's funny how
There's nothing odd about it.
When I attach the GPLv3 to code that I have written and you don't like the GPLv3, you're no worse off than if I had never existed. (Furthermore, even though you may not like the GPLv3, but it still is a lot less restrictive than just about any commercial license for copyrighted materials.)
When Burst takes out bogus patents on digital video transmission, everybody is worse off because Bust can now prevent other people from doing things.
but when MegaCorp or someone else who owns IP tries to enforce terms of ownership, it's an evil bad thing...
There is nothing evil about enforcing legitimate property rights; quite to the contrary.
What is evil is that these companies obtained these "rights" in the first place due to a breakdown of the patent system.
Web application developers/promoters seem to think we are living in a utopian society, with free Fiber-like speeds everywhere.
Appliance manufacturers seem to think we are living in a utopian society, with free, reliable electricity everywhere. Those silly bastards.
For your information, Apple licensed the Lans color graphics patent as did IBM and others.
Heck, I was using color graphics displays prior to 1979; anybody who filed a patent on this in 1979 was a patent troll. If Apple paid for it, it simply means that he was asking for a small enough sum not to be worth fighting--a typical patent troll strategy.
There is a very, very interesting (and scandalous) background story here.
The guy was trying to claim infringement on a patent he knew he didn't own, and judges are right to come down hard on that. Maybe it really was stupidity on his part, but that doesn't change the severity of the offense.
The rest of that "scandalous" story is a conspiracy theory with no proof to back it up.
You mean the guy who filed a patent on bitmapped color graphics displays a year after the Apple II shipped with the feature? (Not to mention other uses prior to that.)
None of my cell phones will give me that unless I actually buy a plan from a provider myself and pay for it. Nor do I know of other devices that use the cell phone network, without fees at all that provide me such access.
I can use my cell phone for free at home because it includes WiFi. I can make VoIP calls, read RSS feeds, check my mail, etc. without paying my wireless provider, or without even a SIM card.
The problem with the Kindle is not that they charge for EVDO, it is that the system deliberately was designed to lack means of conveniently accessing content through other channels. A second problem is that, while I can pick a different provider with my phone, you can't even pick a different provider. Saying "we have to charge for EVDO because nobody gives EVDO access away for free" is a bogus excuse because Amazon could have put WiFi and Bluetooth on there for almost no extra cost. Heck, even the iPhone has WiFi.
The Kindle is a bad deal: it's a proprietary system deliberately designed to work conveniently only with Amazon. It's evil. Don't support that kind of garbage. There are enough alternatives you can get.
I'd also like to point out (and see if I get any constructive responses) that this patent isn't that broad, and not worth of the fear-mongering it has induced over the years. Here's the first claim of the patent (I added the numbers):
You can't determine how broad a patent is by counting how many elements a claim has. Most of the elements of the claims of the Amazon patent don't limit the claims. Despite your verbal acrobatics and distortions, the patent is broad.
(And those are not "claims" those are "elements".)
Generate a custom newspaper with RSS feeds and synchroinize it via USB with Cybook. [...] It uses wi-fi, but not EVDO.
.txt, .png, .gif.. according to some comparison charts, but, it's not clear if it supports more.
Both have WiFi.
I know it reads
It may "read" them after conversion on your desktop or at Amazon. The first version of the Sony reader had such a messed up system.
I don't know if the Kindle can do that for free over USB, but I assume they do.
That's not what TFA says, and I think it's dangerous to assume that.
EVDO being a mobile phone network technology costs money. I doubt the carriers would give Amazon users 100% free use of their network.
So what? At issue is not that the thing has EVDO, at issue is that it lacks WiFi and that it may require desktop or server-side conversion of content.
399USD for lifetime free access with your little tablet-like thing to Wikipedia? I don't know... I think I would get it just for that alone (provided it actually worked in the UK).
You get that easily on several other devices costing around the same. You also get it from any decent cell phone.
There are good, open players in the eBook market; Amazon, as usual, is being evil.
I must have applied to 50 jobs last time I was looking for work, where are all my paychecks?
Job "applications" aren't credit card "applications".
Maybe the problem is that the "application" you speak of isn't an application at all, it's a one sided contract that the bank is under no obligation to honor, but that you are.
You're absolutely right that it's a contract. There's nothing "one-sided" about it as a contract: both sides are bound by it once agreed upon. And as with all other contracts, one side signs first, then the other. With credit card companies, you happen to be the first one.
With jobs, the employment contract is customarily signed by the company first, and then you sign it second--or not.
Major other readers don't have wifi or evdo.
Bullshit.
http://www.bookeen.com/ebook/ebook-reading-device.aspx
http://www.irextechnologies.com/
Both of those run Linux and are programmable! They can download and render PDF, blogs, and HTML on their own, free.
You have to download content to your computer and transfer it to your reader. You can do the same thing with kindle for free.
It's not clear that the Kindle can even do that; does it even read standard formats without a separate "conversion step"?
The Kindle seems like a giant step backwards.
Even worse.
The fact remains: Amazon is trying to create an environment where they are charging for access to free content, while major other readers don't.
Actually, they are charging money for connecting you to those blogs,
My impression from the article is that they're charging money no matter how I connect, i.e., even my own WiFi.
I wouldn't expect that of any company. Does apple give free internet service with their handhelds? Does anyone?
No, but I expect that I can use my handheld to connect through my WiFi to someone's site without Amazon taking a cut; as I read the description, I can't.
Other handhelds let me do that.
They're charging money to read open Internet content like blogs, and it appears even for your own PDFs.
This is evil, in particular for an unsubsidized $399 device.
There are several reading devices for not much more money that give you free access to free content and are even programmable.
The guy is complaining that a bank can post charges to an "unactivated card". Well, whether you activate a card or not is irrelevant: if you signed the application form, you have a card and are responsible for any charges you signed up for, whether you activate it or not. If you don't want it anymore, you need to cancel it. Activation is just an extra protection mechanism. By analogy, if you buy a car and throw away the keys, you still bought the car.
We'd know if we had leaks because we test, and we'd know because our very large telecom and ISP customers would scream at us.
Of course, you can avoid memory leaks in C; that's not the issue. The issue is the cost of doing so, and the cost is extra development time, poor performance, and extra bugs relative to systems that automate these issues. That is what the Firefox experience tells you, and it applies to you as well. Firefox shipping with memory leaks isn't the point; the point is the amount of time and effort between shipping a version with memory related bugs and fixing the bugs, because you're spending that kind of time in your projects as well.
As for your supposed corporate credentials, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and all the big, experienced guys are using and shipping C software with pointer errors and memory leaks. All of them have seen the light: Apple added garbage collection to Objective-C, Microsoft is pushing for C#, and Oracle and IBM are pushing for Java. Software developers like you resist the change, and the existence of large codebases is making it difficult to switch overnight, but it is happening. (Java, unfortunately, is a pretty poor choice, but that's a different discussion.)
I'm a darwinist, I think the problem will take care of itself.
Obesesity doesn't kill people fast enough to keep them from reproducing.