The author could have done some research on battery packs instead of hacking up a laptop pack as he did. There is a company called batteryspace.com that sells multi-cell Li-ion packs with a protection circuit built in. They're not cheap, but they are reasonably safe.
As with anything, the person in question could have done many things differently. So what? The fact stands that this person actually did *something*, which is infinitely better than doing nothing other than telling him why he supposedly did something wrong.
I'll take one not-quite-perfect nerd project like this that actually gets created over a million permutations that *might* be slightly better in one way or another but don't actually exist.
Its good to see they are finally out with a new version and I hope it gains some ground but it would be hard at this point to become the #1 WM.
Well, that's one of the great things about Linux, isn't it? That it doesn't matter if it's #1 or not. It just has to exist and be sufficiently interesting. And given the very low friction involved in switching between WMs, it actually can become #1, if it's good enough, even though it doesn't have to.
Your content disproves your subject line. Even if we take as given the absurd notion that access to/etc/hosts is somehow intrinsically tied to "free speech" (it *can* be used to affect speech, granted, but Apple doesn't do anything that would trigger that, so it's a non-sequitur claim on your part), the fact that you engage in a work-around demonstrates that using iOS 6, in fact, does not mean the very thing you claim it does.
Ironically, telling people what OS to use or not use, actually is much more of a free speech issue than the one you brought up.
For the same reason Android "fanbois" do the same on Apple-loving forums, because they have to correct some ignorant troll from the "home team". In this case, it's the hating on Apple Maps bandwagon that fits with the Slashdot bias. Over on Macrumors, it would be an Android "fanboi" correcting a post about Android not being suited for tablets, or fragmentation, or something similar.
Oh, and let's stop with the "fanboi" bullshit if we could.
That's exactly his point. There may be more Android phones than iPhones (though this tends to ignore iPods and iPads), *some* of those Android phones are cheap phones on cheap plans (I'd wager it's a fairly significant "some"), while pretty much *none* of those iPhones are cheap phones on cheap plans (the percentage of iPhone owners skirting around getting a data plan is functionally nil).
What's far more interesting than Android vs iPhone (or even the superior Android vs iOS), is high end Android vs iOS. The people who buy Android phones, but don't make use of apps or data really don't count. They don't count for Google (ads), they don't count for developers (users), they don't count for web developers (ad impressions, site design considerations).
Unfortunately, that's much harder to measure. In terms of "where it counts", I suspect iOS is doing much better than Android, though Android has made great strides over the last year. I'd like to see Android do better still.
No, Facebook is a red herring on your part. Google *is* the web's largest privacy violation (far more than Facebook, and yes, Facebook is bad, but at least there you know you are doing things in public!), and yes, *we* (Slashdotters in general) support them, whereas we tend to be much less supporting of Facebook.
You seem to have a problem with the original first poster for posting his opinion, yet have not, in any of your replies, done anything to rebut his opinion, but merely stated your own. All the while seemingly oblivious to the irony of it all.
Betting on people wanting iPhones (what the OP was referring to) is a no-brainer. It's as sound a bet as one can make. It's only the financial execution that is in question (which is what you are referring to). But the premise that people want iPhones is sound.
On the financial side of things, Sprint doesn't even have to make all that money back in the short term, all they have to do is lose less money having done this than if they didn't do this. If the iPhone can even just slow their decline, it's helping them.
The only gamble here is whether that money could have been better spent elsewhere. Using it to acquire the top selling phone seems quite rational. Do you have any better suggestions?
Apple like any software developer like Linus or Microsoft can impose conditions on the use of their software.
And that's exactly the problem: no other seller can dictate how "their" product is used; why should software developers be any different?
It's not the seller that sets these rules, it's the copyright holders. Anything under copyright can be limited in some ways. That's the way it's *supposed* to work.
Discarding scientific knowledge because of a book written originally for a nomadic group of shepherds is ridiculous.
This is correct.
Discarding the moral teachings that have been handed down over thousands of years is equally ridiculous.
This is not. Unless you kill people for eating the wrong foods, adultery, children for talking back to parents, being gay, or the wrong religion, etc. And make women subservient to men, and countless other moral absurdities contained in just *one* book of just *one* religion.
Of course, there are *some* morals in the various religions of the world that are worthy of keeping, but a lot of ancient nonsense that needs to be cast off.
However, it is also widely believed that Apple wants to license the FRAND patents WITHOUT allowing other companies to cross-license Apple's patents.
You don't get access to all a companies patents. They only get access to the patents that are related to the standard in question. The design patents Apple holds for their phones and tablets are not part of 3G, not related to 3G, and not even critical in the making of phones or tablets.
Just because you own IP that's in a standard doesn't necessarily mean that you should have to give up your rights to use it defensively.
Defensively? No, of course you have the right to defend your right to royalties.
But that's not what Samsung is doing. They are using their patent offensively. They are using it as a counter-attack, and that is a right they very much gave up in order to have their patents used in a worldwide telecom standard. That's exactly what FRAND is all about.
...who wants to block sales of a device because it has rounded corners.
[citations needed]
Apple is suing Samsung for stealing their design style. Rounded corners are *one part* of that design, but it's perfectly possible to create a tablet with rounded corners without violating Apple's patents. There are far too many counterexamples to take your claim seriously.
The tab ultimately got temporarily banned because of the gallery application: It is not allowed to display thumbnails, that when tapped are displayed fullscreen, where it is then possible to scroll horizontally to the next/previous.
Again, your information is incomplete. The way the scrolling interaction worked was also part of it. Plus there's the fact that Apple owns these patents.
Apple put a lot of work into their mulitiouch implementation. Other companies quite simply do not have the legal right to just up and copy them. There are plenty of ways to design a photo app. Apple has theirs.
My point is: Apple is a hypocrite. Yes, I know there is no way around RAND patents and that there IS a way around rounded corners, but it's equally absurd.
Wait, they are a hypocrite, but the two things are fundamentally different? Isn't that the very definition of *not* being a hypocrite?
Samsung is obliged to license the patents in question to Apple. Apple is not obliged to license their patents to Samsung. Samsung agreed to this when they got their patented technology included as a critical component of an international standard. They are getting guaranteed royalties from every single 3G phone on the planet. That's the deal. Too bad they apparently have no integrity. They can't come up with their own designs, and they can't even honor their own business deals.
The words Free, Reasonable, Non-Discriminatory oblige them to not single out Apple for any reason, especially one so vindictive as a countersuit.
Apple is suing Samsung for copying their designs. There are many designs and Apple has chosen theirs, most other tablet makers have also chosen their own. Samsung, however, has decided against that and chosen to use Apple's. Violating their FRAND obligations is not a valid defense on Samsung's part. Coming up with their own designs is.
Ultimately, the phone/tablet market will probably eat the e-reader market. Look what happened to standalone PDAs.
Except that e-readers offer a screen fundamentally different from those on general-purpose tablets.
It all comes down to how many devices people are willing to buy and deal with. Consolidation of devices is a clear trend. Presently, there's a compelling argument in favor of eInk based readers for reading books (but no other function), but it's a tough sell over an iPad or in addition to an iPad in the general market. As it stands, the iPad is a fantastic tablet, and a pretty good ebook reader (with compelling book related features as well). And the benefits of an eReader are going to be less and less notable as the iPad, and possibly other tablets, improve over time.
I mean, I could read e-books on an iPad, but I'd rather stick with en e-ink screen that won't make my eyes hurt after an hour.
Why would your eyes hurt after an hour? I see people say things like this, and it's always on text-based forums by people who most certainly spend hours reading text on their computers without issue.
As long as people are required to pay for the use of the codec, it can't be in Firefox or any other free browser without somebody infringing on the patent.
Firefox can use patented codecs (like H.264 and WebM) just fine. You mentioned FUD before, but what exactly do you call your false claims?
So, "resist" is not the reason why OSS isn't selling. The problem is more about the lack of sales and marketing.
The lack of success of Open Source software has nothing to do with marketing. It has to do with the software not meeting people's needs and preferences.
OSS does often meet the needs and preferences of nerds, which is why it's so popular with the Slashdot crowd, but most people have different preferences. For the market that OSS is a good match for, it does rather well. But that market is not the general consumer market, and that has nothing to do with lack of getting the "message" out there, or branding, or anything like that whatsoever. It's entirely down to the fact that the general consumer market has different preferences.
That goes for everything in life. Everybody only ever does anything for themselves. For example, if you help someone, you do it because it helps build the sort of society you want to live in and because it makes you feel good about yourself. On a fundamental level, nobody ever does anything for any reason other than that it benefits themself in some way.
That is absolutely false. I (and I'm pretty sure, just about everyone who ever existed) have helped people for no reason other than that they needed help. There was no overarching intention to create a better society or anything like that.
I'm no expert here but I think the general market embraces FOSS software.
No, the general market embraces software which works for them. That's rarely, but sometimes, open source software. Even the most successful open source software (Firefox) is used by a minority of users.
I mean look at firefox, openoffice, vlc, mpc-hc...
Firefox is the only real success there, where regular people actually chose it on its merits in large numbers. OpenOffice is only used by "normal" people to the very small extent it is because it's free. If MS Office were also free (but not open source), OpenOffice usage would be even lower still.
VLC is kind of an in-between. Most people have never heard of it (like OO.o, but unlike Firefox), but is highly popular among geeks and middle-ground users. Not because it's all that great, but because it plays pretty much anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of spending $391 to make a kludge of shit, you could spend half that and get a netbook.
Setting aside for the moment that netbooks themselves are kludges of shit...
I've tried to understand why people want a Raspberry Pi, but I just still don't get it, I guess.
For fun, why else?
The author could have done some research on battery packs instead of hacking up a laptop pack as he did. There is a company called batteryspace.com that sells multi-cell Li-ion packs with a protection circuit built in. They're not cheap, but they are reasonably safe.
As with anything, the person in question could have done many things differently. So what? The fact stands that this person actually did *something*, which is infinitely better than doing nothing other than telling him why he supposedly did something wrong.
I'll take one not-quite-perfect nerd project like this that actually gets created over a million permutations that *might* be slightly better in one way or another but don't actually exist.
Its good to see they are finally out with a new version and I hope it gains some ground but it would be hard at this point to become the #1 WM.
Well, that's one of the great things about Linux, isn't it? That it doesn't matter if it's #1 or not. It just has to exist and be sufficiently interesting. And given the very low friction involved in switching between WMs, it actually can become #1, if it's good enough, even though it doesn't have to.
I, too, can't wait to try it out.
Your content disproves your subject line. Even if we take as given the absurd notion that access to /etc/hosts is somehow intrinsically tied to "free speech" (it *can* be used to affect speech, granted, but Apple doesn't do anything that would trigger that, so it's a non-sequitur claim on your part), the fact that you engage in a work-around demonstrates that using iOS 6, in fact, does not mean the very thing you claim it does.
Ironically, telling people what OS to use or not use, actually is much more of a free speech issue than the one you brought up.
For the same reason Android "fanbois" do the same on Apple-loving forums, because they have to correct some ignorant troll from the "home team". In this case, it's the hating on Apple Maps bandwagon that fits with the Slashdot bias. Over on Macrumors, it would be an Android "fanboi" correcting a post about Android not being suited for tablets, or fragmentation, or something similar.
Oh, and let's stop with the "fanboi" bullshit if we could.
That's exactly his point. There may be more Android phones than iPhones (though this tends to ignore iPods and iPads), *some* of those Android phones are cheap phones on cheap plans (I'd wager it's a fairly significant "some"), while pretty much *none* of those iPhones are cheap phones on cheap plans (the percentage of iPhone owners skirting around getting a data plan is functionally nil).
What's far more interesting than Android vs iPhone (or even the superior Android vs iOS), is high end Android vs iOS. The people who buy Android phones, but don't make use of apps or data really don't count. They don't count for Google (ads), they don't count for developers (users), they don't count for web developers (ad impressions, site design considerations).
Unfortunately, that's much harder to measure. In terms of "where it counts", I suspect iOS is doing much better than Android, though Android has made great strides over the last year. I'd like to see Android do better still.
No, Facebook is a red herring on your part. Google *is* the web's largest privacy violation (far more than Facebook, and yes, Facebook is bad, but at least there you know you are doing things in public!), and yes, *we* (Slashdotters in general) support them, whereas we tend to be much less supporting of Facebook.
You seem to have a problem with the original first poster for posting his opinion, yet have not, in any of your replies, done anything to rebut his opinion, but merely stated your own. All the while seemingly oblivious to the irony of it all.
Betting on people wanting iPhones (what the OP was referring to) is a no-brainer. It's as sound a bet as one can make. It's only the financial execution that is in question (which is what you are referring to). But the premise that people want iPhones is sound.
On the financial side of things, Sprint doesn't even have to make all that money back in the short term, all they have to do is lose less money having done this than if they didn't do this. If the iPhone can even just slow their decline, it's helping them.
The only gamble here is whether that money could have been better spent elsewhere. Using it to acquire the top selling phone seems quite rational. Do you have any better suggestions?
Guess they're banking on the public loving apple, let's see how that bet holds out.
Yeah, what a craaaaazy bet that would be!
And that's exactly the problem: no other seller can dictate how "their" product is used; why should software developers be any different?
It's not the seller that sets these rules, it's the copyright holders. Anything under copyright can be limited in some ways. That's the way it's *supposed* to work.
Symbian, while declining, still outsells iPhone by a pretty respectable margin.
Symbian isn't a phone.
Overall iPhone has only an 18% market share but I'm sure there is some other excuse why iPhone is actually #1.
"Excuse"? iPhone *is* #1 in pretty much every metric. Market share, revenue, profits, customer satisfaction...
I like that Firefox is just a good, solid product without ulterior motives.
Then you haven't been paying attention to Firefox's politicking during the ongoing HTML5 <video> debate.
PROTIP: He didn't say "open source".
Google yanked H.264 support from Chrome in order to match their "open" ideals for the project.
Discarding scientific knowledge because of a book written originally for a nomadic group of shepherds is ridiculous.
This is correct.
Discarding the moral teachings that have been handed down over thousands of years is equally ridiculous.
This is not. Unless you kill people for eating the wrong foods, adultery, children for talking back to parents, being gay, or the wrong religion, etc. And make women subservient to men, and countless other moral absurdities contained in just *one* book of just *one* religion.
Of course, there are *some* morals in the various religions of the world that are worthy of keeping, but a lot of ancient nonsense that needs to be cast off.
This is more about rendering time. In 1-2 years tablets will be able to easily render todays webpages.
Tablets can already easily render web pages today.
However, it is also widely believed that Apple wants to license the FRAND patents WITHOUT allowing other companies to cross-license Apple's patents.
You don't get access to all a companies patents. They only get access to the patents that are related to the standard in question. The design patents Apple holds for their phones and tablets are not part of 3G, not related to 3G, and not even critical in the making of phones or tablets.
Just because you own IP that's in a standard doesn't necessarily mean that you should have to give up your rights to use it defensively.
Defensively? No, of course you have the right to defend your right to royalties.
But that's not what Samsung is doing. They are using their patent offensively. They are using it as a counter-attack, and that is a right they very much gave up in order to have their patents used in a worldwide telecom standard. That's exactly what FRAND is all about.
...who wants to block sales of a device because it has rounded corners.
[citations needed]
Apple is suing Samsung for stealing their design style. Rounded corners are *one part* of that design, but it's perfectly possible to create a tablet with rounded corners without violating Apple's patents. There are far too many counterexamples to take your claim seriously.
The tab ultimately got temporarily banned because of the gallery application: It is not allowed to display thumbnails, that when tapped are displayed fullscreen, where it is then possible to scroll horizontally to the next/previous.
Again, your information is incomplete. The way the scrolling interaction worked was also part of it. Plus there's the fact that Apple owns these patents.
Apple put a lot of work into their mulitiouch implementation. Other companies quite simply do not have the legal right to just up and copy them. There are plenty of ways to design a photo app. Apple has theirs.
My point is: Apple is a hypocrite.
Yes, I know there is no way around RAND patents and that there IS a way around rounded corners, but it's equally absurd.
Wait, they are a hypocrite, but the two things are fundamentally different? Isn't that the very definition of *not* being a hypocrite?
Samsung is obliged to license the patents in question to Apple. Apple is not obliged to license their patents to Samsung. Samsung agreed to this when they got their patented technology included as a critical component of an international standard. They are getting guaranteed royalties from every single 3G phone on the planet. That's the deal. Too bad they apparently have no integrity. They can't come up with their own designs, and they can't even honor their own business deals.
The words Free, Reasonable, Non-Discriminatory oblige them to not single out Apple for any reason, especially one so vindictive as a countersuit.
Apple is suing Samsung for copying their designs. There are many designs and Apple has chosen theirs, most other tablet makers have also chosen their own. Samsung, however, has decided against that and chosen to use Apple's. Violating their FRAND obligations is not a valid defense on Samsung's part. Coming up with their own designs is.
Ultimately, the phone/tablet market will probably eat the e-reader market. Look what happened to standalone PDAs.
Except that e-readers offer a screen fundamentally different from those on general-purpose tablets.
It all comes down to how many devices people are willing to buy and deal with. Consolidation of devices is a clear trend. Presently, there's a compelling argument in favor of eInk based readers for reading books (but no other function), but it's a tough sell over an iPad or in addition to an iPad in the general market. As it stands, the iPad is a fantastic tablet, and a pretty good ebook reader (with compelling book related features as well). And the benefits of an eReader are going to be less and less notable as the iPad, and possibly other tablets, improve over time.
I mean, I could read e-books on an iPad, but I'd rather stick with en e-ink screen that won't make my eyes hurt after an hour.
Why would your eyes hurt after an hour? I see people say things like this, and it's always on text-based forums by people who most certainly spend hours reading text on their computers without issue.
As long as people are required to pay for the use of the codec, it can't be in Firefox or any other free browser without somebody infringing on the patent.
Firefox can use patented codecs (like H.264 and WebM) just fine. You mentioned FUD before, but what exactly do you call your false claims?
So, "resist" is not the reason why OSS isn't selling. The problem is more about the lack of sales and marketing.
The lack of success of Open Source software has nothing to do with marketing. It has to do with the software not meeting people's needs and preferences.
OSS does often meet the needs and preferences of nerds, which is why it's so popular with the Slashdot crowd, but most people have different preferences. For the market that OSS is a good match for, it does rather well. But that market is not the general consumer market, and that has nothing to do with lack of getting the "message" out there, or branding, or anything like that whatsoever. It's entirely down to the fact that the general consumer market has different preferences.
That goes for everything in life. Everybody only ever does anything for themselves. For example, if you help someone, you do it because it helps build the sort of society you want to live in and because it makes you feel good about yourself. On a fundamental level, nobody ever does anything for any reason other than that it benefits themself in some way.
That is absolutely false. I (and I'm pretty sure, just about everyone who ever existed) have helped people for no reason other than that they needed help. There was no overarching intention to create a better society or anything like that.
I'm no expert here but I think the general market embraces FOSS software.
No, the general market embraces software which works for them. That's rarely, but sometimes, open source software. Even the most successful open source software (Firefox) is used by a minority of users.
I mean look at firefox, openoffice, vlc, mpc-hc...
Firefox is the only real success there, where regular people actually chose it on its merits in large numbers. OpenOffice is only used by "normal" people to the very small extent it is because it's free. If MS Office were also free (but not open source), OpenOffice usage would be even lower still.
VLC is kind of an in-between. Most people have never heard of it (like OO.o, but unlike Firefox), but is highly popular among geeks and middle-ground users. Not because it's all that great, but because it plays pretty much anything.
Yes, Apple was the first ever company to sue someone for infringing upon their patents...