You might be able to claim that your implicit permission was based on the equally implicit assumption that the rest of the code would become part of the same (open source?) code base.
no written or verbal agreement was ever made to transfer copyright over to my employer
No contract = no copyright transference. I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, talk to a lawyer before doing anything else; but in my opinion, the employer doesn't have a leg to stand on in this instance.
Qwest apparently "only" pushes 20mbps downstream with less than 1mbps upstream (that upstream cap is on on all tiers, how odd), whereas Comcast offers 50mbps down and 10mbps up, which could exceed the 54mbps limit of Wireless G. Note that all figures are labelled with asterisks, including 802.11g, that link to a disclaimer saying that all speeds are "theoretical maximums". In a typical usage scenario, you can flood out a Wireless G router's *actual and available* bandwidth with less than 30mbps.
There is a third provider in my area, called Utopia, but they were just in the local paper because it looks like they're about to fold. Apparently, if they sold off all their assets, they would still be over one hundred million dollars in the hole... and they still owe service to nearly a dozen (bond-holding) cities. I walked in the front door about a year ago, and inquired as to how I could get their inexpensive fiber-to-the-premises service, and they brushed me off as if they didn't have time to deal with such a small-potatoes project (interesting point, here: I am the "computer guy" for about a half-dozen households and businesses who treat my word as law when it comes to anything with flashing lights on the front or wires coming out the back; so by blowing me off, they ditched at least 6 new customers, never mind any word-of-mouth advertising they may have gotten from those new clients - several of whom work with or in local and state government - good job, folks!). It's really too bad their in-person customer service is so bad, or they might be able to hit those magical subscriber-base numbers they need so desperately. Until I read that article, I assumed they were doing fine... since they obviously couldn't be bothered lifting a finger to get *my* business...
Side note: the 7gbps wireless connection described in the article is pretty much short-range, line-of-sight only - it would be more likely to be a bluetooth replacement, usable only for local connections, probably limited to devices in the same room with the access point. As others have pointed out, 60Ghz is too short a wavelength to have much penetration at all, and would be blocked by anything more substantial than ambient air at a range of about 10 feet or so. Local devices would probably be the target market here; printers, input devices, storage devices, that sort of thing.
... I actually don't mind going out and buying good movies that I enjoy. I almost never unwrap them or play the disks, but I don't mind supporting the people who make good things happen that genuinely entertain me. I've actually watched more movies and bought more movies as a result of this then I ever have before. And I can pretty much do what I please with the disks afterwards, too (rip them to PMP, archive them on my media server, etc).
Quoted for truth. This pretty much sums up my response to DRM (Download it, go buy it if I like it, toss the shrink-wrapped DVD/CD into the box in the closet with the others (my "rainy day cache", for when the authorities come busting down my door because I'm torrenting, and must be an evil pirate. Hope they enjoy explaining to the jury how the 18 different linux distros I'm seeding are "copyright evasion tools").
I have yet to see a home built PVR with the capabilities of the PVR that comes from the cable company. Until it does, home rolled PVRs are just an interesting project, but not a viable alternative (for me anyway).
What capabilities are you not seeing in the DIY version? I haven't seen any DIY PVR systems that didn't have every feature under the sun (unless they were "lemme see what I can do with this old 486" versions). Seems to me that rather than whining about "missing features", it might do some good to specify which features you feel are missing - perhaps someone will suggest solution that escaped your notice, or perhaps a bored coder will be inspired to implement it.
Admittedly, I have yet to actually use a PVR/DVR/whatever, since I haven't owned a television in years, and my cable bill has been internet-only for nearly a decade...
I thought kite-power dealt with using the rotation of the kites themselves, not from moving the kite up and down, or whatever it is you're talking about with your 10 meters per day... "Informative" is not nearly as ideal a moderation as "completely wrong" would be.
Except that you could use that 18,000 lbs of hair to soak up 18,000 quarts of oil in a minute... repeat every hour and soak up that 100,000 [gallons] per day...
Quarts, gallons, what's the difference? (Hint: one is four times as large as the other.)
Actually, now that I've done the maths... it would only require 16,667 quarts per hour of clean-up to keep pace with a 100,000 gallon per day leak (100,000 gallons = 400,000 quarts; 400,000 quarts divided by 24 hours = 16,666.6(repeating)). Therefore, 18,000 quarts per hour *would* be enough to get ahead of a 100,000 gallon per day leak, not only cleaning the new leakage, but also incrementally cleaning the existing mess. Of course, this assumes a constant rate of clean-up, with no room for inaccuracy/mishaps, no "half-soaked" hairs, 24 hours per day, etc. Assuming (not sure where the figure actually came from, quite possibly the linked article which I haven't read yet) that you could soak 18,000 quarts per minute, clean-up could be a snap - according to my maths, it would take less than 4 hours to clean up 100,000 gallons of spill using this method (in a perfect world).
Feel free to check my maths, I hold no illusions as to my perfection in any department.
Oh, and get these people some boats so they can deploy.
-- What is the difference between "in theory" and "in practice"? Well... in theory, there isn't any.
No, the referenced post didn't specify. In point of fact, grammatical structure dictates that the "they" in the statement "They're non-profit" is actually a reference to BP (as they are the only previously-mentioned entity), due to a failure on the GGP's part to indicate that he may have been describing the non-profit that is actually gathering the hair.
pfft, $15 / month over the phone line, very basic 1.5 Mbit ADSL.
Is that Canadian dollars or Australian dollars? The article is about the United States market, and U.S. providers don't appear to make such an offer. Where I live, the phone company is Verizon, and the ADSL offer is $29.99/mo for 1 Mbps for customers without Verizon home phone service.
There are several companies in the greater Salt Lake Valley area offering anything from 1.5mbps up to 7mbps service for anywhere from US$10 to US$25 per month. More money can be spent on higher tiers, of course.
I haven't owned a television in years, never mind cable TV service. My cable bill is ~$80/month for internet-only, but that's beside the point. According to a calorie burn calculator I just checked, a 180 pound human will burn approximately 81-86 calories per hour while watching TV. The same amount of time spent sleeping (depending on which calculator you use) will burn 96-155 calories.
I want something $200 that can browse the full web
Part of the problem here would be that "the full web" includes things like flash - which can bring a reasonably decent machine to its knees without too much effort. Flash games, such as those made by Zynga (think Cafe World and Farmville) are especially heinous in this regard - I've seen 60% CPU usage and 0.5GB RAM sucked up by a single instance of firefox (with a single tab/window) running their bloated, poorly-coded flash games. This was on a machine that, while not top-of-the-line, is quite adequate for pushing World of Warcraft at a playable framerate (even in Dalaran, instances, and battlegrounds, for those of you for whom this metric will mean anything).
Do I have any rights to sue Activision for ruining my potential profits?
As a matter of fact, yes.
Can I do anything to have Kotick and crew ousted?
Depends... just how many shares do you hold, or can you get access to? A large enough percentage could just swing a vote... or even cause one to be raised in the first place.
-- This is not legal advice. Use your favorite search engine for more information, or contact an actual lawyer.
I hate to break it do you, but a huge portion of PC users DON'T play anything more intensive than Farmville on their systems - if they game at all.
Ya know... I've seen Cafe World bring a dual-core with 4 gigs of RAM to its knees. 60% CPU usage, with half a gig of RAM in use for Firefox alone... with no other apps running, nor even any other browser windows/tabs open. Hell, it's sluggish and choppy on the quad-core 2.8 in my living room. Farmville is a little better on most days, but still. Browser-based Flash Game != low-powered app. Might not be graphics intensive, admittedly... but Zynga really needs a head check when it comes to resource usage.
Alternatively, fire all the Chinese employees for being "economically unviable", pull out of China, and publish a list of all of the Chinese employees (and their current status) so that when they start having "accidents", people notice. Follow that action with publishing all the crap that China doesn't want Google to publish, and making a global laughingstock of the Chinese government (not to mention potential international outrage and/or human rights investigations at what was being censored).
It would suck for the people who are suddenly out a job, but it would also give some small measure of protection to those same people from the Chinese government "disappearing" them...
"So, where has all my correspondance with Hai Phang gone? I haven't heard from him in weeks..." "That is a state secret, you round-eyed gaijin!" "Oh, so you're denying that you have imprisoned him for the crime of getting fired from a company that disagreed with your policies?" "..."
-- This could have been much more eloquent, but that would have required thinking it through first.
March 22, 2010: Google starts redirecting all traffic to their uncensored Google Hong Kong.
March 30, 2010: Mainland China blocks all Google service. The block only lasted a day.
Beijing used a lot of harsh words, but in the end Google and all their employee in PRC were not prosecuted and they continue to operate without censorship on Chinese soil. Google - 1, China - 0 so far.
I'd like to be all snarky and groupthink, and throw out a "[citation needed]", but in all honesty, I'd just like links to verify the information. Yeah, yeah, I could "just google it", but why should I go to all that effort, when I haven't even bothered to actually read the article?
Re:Lol (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward writes: on Monday April 19, @02:08PM (#31900426) Obligatory post pointing out that nobody cares what an AC says... including this post.
<pendantic>I believe the term you are looking for is constitutional republic...
And I believe the word you were reaching for is pedantic, as pendantic isn't even defined in the urban dictionary, much less any that contain factual material.
-- Using real words is a surefire way to make yourself look less like an ass.
Anyone who cares most about "making calls" is living in the last century. I almost don't give a shit if my phone makes calls via the phone network. It's more important to me that it can Skype via WiFi. It's more important to me that it can check my email, run a Web browser, check my bank accounts, post to my blog, view what's in my Dropbox on the go, take notes, and manage my calendar and to-do lists.
It is a "phone" only because that name was grandfathered in over several generations. In fact, the "phone" is the LEAST important part of these mobile devices for me. The most important are data accessibility, ease of backing up/upgrades, and the features of built-in applications and installable apps vis-a-vis the network and network service/information providers of various types.
No. It is a "phone" because it makes "phone calls". You want it to do all these other things that phones do not necessarily do... that's fine, but you need to buy a netbook and STFU.
I want my phone to make phone calls. If I want to do all the other things you mention, I use devices intended for those purposes. A phone makes calls, anything else is fluff.
You can EASILY extract the license key from a windows machine using a registry query...
Erm, actually you can't. As of XP, the CD key is no longer stored in the registry, just the "license number" which is derived from it (IIUC) via a one-way hashing function.
Slashdot Mirror
You might be able to claim that your implicit permission was based on the equally implicit assumption that the rest of the code would become part of the same (open source?) code base.
Oooh, that could be a sweet end-run.
The key words here are:
no written or verbal agreement was ever made to transfer copyright over to my employer
No contract = no copyright transference. I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, talk to a lawyer before doing anything else; but in my opinion, the employer doesn't have a leg to stand on in this instance.
Are there any home use providers in the US that would give you anything approaching speeds where even G couldn't keep up?
The two major residential broadband providers in my area:
Comcast and Qwest
Qwest apparently "only" pushes 20mbps downstream with less than 1mbps upstream (that upstream cap is on on all tiers, how odd), whereas Comcast offers 50mbps down and 10mbps up, which could exceed the 54mbps limit of Wireless G. Note that all figures are labelled with asterisks, including 802.11g, that link to a disclaimer saying that all speeds are "theoretical maximums". In a typical usage scenario, you can flood out a Wireless G router's *actual and available* bandwidth with less than 30mbps.
There is a third provider in my area, called Utopia, but they were just in the local paper because it looks like they're about to fold. Apparently, if they sold off all their assets, they would still be over one hundred million dollars in the hole... and they still owe service to nearly a dozen (bond-holding) cities. I walked in the front door about a year ago, and inquired as to how I could get their inexpensive fiber-to-the-premises service, and they brushed me off as if they didn't have time to deal with such a small-potatoes project (interesting point, here: I am the "computer guy" for about a half-dozen households and businesses who treat my word as law when it comes to anything with flashing lights on the front or wires coming out the back; so by blowing me off, they ditched at least 6 new customers, never mind any word-of-mouth advertising they may have gotten from those new clients - several of whom work with or in local and state government - good job, folks!). It's really too bad their in-person customer service is so bad, or they might be able to hit those magical subscriber-base numbers they need so desperately. Until I read that article, I assumed they were doing fine... since they obviously couldn't be bothered lifting a finger to get *my* business...
Side note: the 7gbps wireless connection described in the article is pretty much short-range, line-of-sight only - it would be more likely to be a bluetooth replacement, usable only for local connections, probably limited to devices in the same room with the access point. As others have pointed out, 60Ghz is too short a wavelength to have much penetration at all, and would be blocked by anything more substantial than ambient air at a range of about 10 feet or so. Local devices would probably be the target market here; printers, input devices, storage devices, that sort of thing.
... I actually don't mind going out and buying good movies that I enjoy. I almost never unwrap them or play the disks, but I don't mind supporting the people who make good things happen that genuinely entertain me. I've actually watched more movies and bought more movies as a result of this then I ever have before. And I can pretty much do what I please with the disks afterwards, too (rip them to PMP, archive them on my media server, etc).
Quoted for truth. This pretty much sums up my response to DRM (Download it, go buy it if I like it, toss the shrink-wrapped DVD/CD into the box in the closet with the others (my "rainy day cache", for when the authorities come busting down my door because I'm torrenting, and must be an evil pirate. Hope they enjoy explaining to the jury how the 18 different linux distros I'm seeding are "copyright evasion tools").
I have yet to see a home built PVR with the capabilities of the PVR that comes from the cable company. Until it does, home rolled PVRs are just an interesting project, but not a viable alternative (for me anyway).
What capabilities are you not seeing in the DIY version? I haven't seen any DIY PVR systems that didn't have every feature under the sun (unless they were "lemme see what I can do with this old 486" versions). Seems to me that rather than whining about "missing features", it might do some good to specify which features you feel are missing - perhaps someone will suggest solution that escaped your notice, or perhaps a bored coder will be inspired to implement it.
Admittedly, I have yet to actually use a PVR/DVR/whatever, since I haven't owned a television in years, and my cable bill has been internet-only for nearly a decade...
I thought kite-power dealt with using the rotation of the kites themselves, not from moving the kite up and down, or whatever it is you're talking about with your 10 meters per day...
"Informative" is not nearly as ideal a moderation as "completely wrong" would be.
Some information sources to explain how this concept actually works:
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/10/71908
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/05/06/energy.tidal.power.kite/
In case anyone is interested, the second link is in the summary.
Except that you could use that 18,000 lbs of hair to soak up 18,000 quarts of oil in a minute... repeat every hour and soak up that 100,000 [gallons] per day...
Quarts, gallons, what's the difference? (Hint: one is four times as large as the other.)
Actually, now that I've done the maths... it would only require 16,667 quarts per hour of clean-up to keep pace with a 100,000 gallon per day leak (100,000 gallons = 400,000 quarts; 400,000 quarts divided by 24 hours = 16,666.6(repeating)). Therefore, 18,000 quarts per hour *would* be enough to get ahead of a 100,000 gallon per day leak, not only cleaning the new leakage, but also incrementally cleaning the existing mess. Of course, this assumes a constant rate of clean-up, with no room for inaccuracy/mishaps, no "half-soaked" hairs, 24 hours per day, etc. Assuming (not sure where the figure actually came from, quite possibly the linked article which I haven't read yet) that you could soak 18,000 quarts per minute, clean-up could be a snap - according to my maths, it would take less than 4 hours to clean up 100,000 gallons of spill using this method (in a perfect world).
Feel free to check my maths, I hold no illusions as to my perfection in any department.
Oh, and get these people some boats so they can deploy.
--
What is the difference between "in theory" and "in practice"?
Well... in theory, there isn't any.
You're misreading the GP.
No, the referenced post didn't specify. In point of fact, grammatical structure dictates that the "they" in the statement "They're non-profit" is actually a reference to BP (as they are the only previously-mentioned entity), due to a failure on the GGP's part to indicate that he may have been describing the non-profit that is actually gathering the hair.
Mean what you say, and say what you mean.
Perhaps this will be enough to push Linux to the desktop... err... server... uhm, workstation?
pfft, $15 / month over the phone line, very basic 1.5 Mbit ADSL.
Is that Canadian dollars or Australian dollars? The article is about the United States market, and U.S. providers don't appear to make such an offer. Where I live, the phone company is Verizon, and the ADSL offer is $29.99/mo for 1 Mbps for customers without Verizon home phone service.
There are several companies in the greater Salt Lake Valley area offering anything from 1.5mbps up to 7mbps service for anywhere from US$10 to US$25 per month. More money can be spent on higher tiers, of course.
If you track more than five shows, that means you're watching more than 20 hours of programming in less than a month...
Most US households watch more than 20 hours of programming in a week. Did you have a point?
I haven't owned a television in years, never mind cable TV service. My cable bill is ~$80/month for internet-only, but that's beside the point. According to a calorie burn calculator I just checked, a 180 pound human will burn approximately 81-86 calories per hour while watching TV. The same amount of time spent sleeping (depending on which calculator you use) will burn 96-155 calories.
When you are watching TV, your brain turns off.
I want something $200 that can browse the full web
Part of the problem here would be that "the full web" includes things like flash - which can bring a reasonably decent machine to its knees without too much effort. Flash games, such as those made by Zynga (think Cafe World and Farmville) are especially heinous in this regard - I've seen 60% CPU usage and 0.5GB RAM sucked up by a single instance of firefox (with a single tab/window) running their bloated, poorly-coded flash games. This was on a machine that, while not top-of-the-line, is quite adequate for pushing World of Warcraft at a playable framerate (even in Dalaran, instances, and battlegrounds, for those of you for whom this metric will mean anything).
So what you're saying is that Nixon was standing up for our P2P rights with Watergate. He truly was a pioneer!
Quite obviously false - he was *destroying* information!
It is called Mac Remote Desktop (surprised?)
Yes, I am. I would have expected it to be called iRDP.
Do I have any rights to sue Activision for ruining my potential profits?
As a matter of fact, yes.
Can I do anything to have Kotick and crew ousted?
Depends... just how many shares do you hold, or can you get access to? A large enough percentage could just swing a vote... or even cause one to be raised in the first place.
--
This is not legal advice. Use your favorite search engine for more information, or contact an actual lawyer.
You can take along either the luggage or the kids. Not both.
This is a feature, not a bug.
I hate to break it do you, but a huge portion of PC users DON'T play anything more intensive than Farmville on their systems - if they game at all.
Ya know... I've seen Cafe World bring a dual-core with 4 gigs of RAM to its knees. 60% CPU usage, with half a gig of RAM in use for Firefox alone... with no other apps running, nor even any other browser windows/tabs open.
Hell, it's sluggish and choppy on the quad-core 2.8 in my living room. Farmville is a little better on most days, but still.
Browser-based Flash Game != low-powered app. Might not be graphics intensive, admittedly... but Zynga really needs a head check when it comes to resource usage.
Alternatively, fire all the Chinese employees for being "economically unviable", pull out of China, and publish a list of all of the Chinese employees (and their current status) so that when they start having "accidents", people notice. Follow that action with publishing all the crap that China doesn't want Google to publish, and making a global laughingstock of the Chinese government (not to mention potential international outrage and/or human rights investigations at what was being censored).
It would suck for the people who are suddenly out a job, but it would also give some small measure of protection to those same people from the Chinese government "disappearing" them...
"So, where has all my correspondance with Hai Phang gone? I haven't heard from him in weeks..."
"That is a state secret, you round-eyed gaijin!"
"Oh, so you're denying that you have imprisoned him for the crime of getting fired from a company that disagreed with your policies?"
"..."
--
This could have been much more eloquent, but that would have required thinking it through first.
For once, really for this once...
...Googol is getting a thumbs-up from me. WTG Mountain View !
--
Did you read your daily poem ? [google.com]
"Just this once!" says the guy with the google link in his sig... uh huh.
March 22, 2010: Google starts redirecting all traffic to their uncensored Google Hong Kong.
March 30, 2010: Mainland China blocks all Google service. The block only lasted a day.
Beijing used a lot of harsh words, but in the end Google and all their employee in PRC were not prosecuted and they continue to operate without censorship on Chinese soil. Google - 1, China - 0 so far.
I'd like to be all snarky and groupthink, and throw out a "[citation needed]", but in all honesty, I'd just like links to verify the information. Yeah, yeah, I could "just google it", but why should I go to all that effort, when I haven't even bothered to actually read the article?
Re:Lol (Score:0) ... including this post.
by Anonymous Coward writes: on Monday April 19, @02:08PM (#31900426)
Obligatory post pointing out that nobody cares what an AC says
Where are my mod points?!?
<pendantic>I believe the term you are looking for is constitutional republic...
And I believe the word you were reaching for is pedantic, as pendantic isn't even defined in the urban dictionary, much less any that contain factual material.
--
Using real words is a surefire way to make yourself look less like an ass.
Anyone who cares most about "making calls" is living in the last century. I almost don't give a shit if my phone makes calls via the phone network. It's more important to me that it can Skype via WiFi. It's more important to me that it can check my email, run a Web browser, check my bank accounts, post to my blog, view what's in my Dropbox on the go, take notes, and manage my calendar and to-do lists.
It is a "phone" only because that name was grandfathered in over several generations. In fact, the "phone" is the LEAST important part of these mobile devices for me. The most important are data accessibility, ease of backing up/upgrades, and the features of built-in applications and installable apps vis-a-vis the network and network service/information providers of various types.
No. It is a "phone" because it makes "phone calls". You want it to do all these other things that phones do not necessarily do... that's fine, but you need to buy a netbook and STFU.
I want my phone to make phone calls. If I want to do all the other things you mention, I use devices intended for those purposes. A phone makes calls, anything else is fluff.
You can EASILY extract the license key from a windows machine using a registry query...
Erm, actually you can't. As of XP, the CD key is no longer stored in the registry, just the "license number" which is derived from it (IIUC) via a one-way hashing function.
Never heard of Magical Jellybean KeyFinder, I take it?