As a victim of the Motorola "CLIQ with MOTOBLUR", I agree completely. I have no hesitation if the situation arises to pass on the impression Motorola Mobile corporation gave me of their attitude towards their "customers".
This announcement from HTC makes me even happier now with the HTC "3g Slide" I upgraded to in order to escape the "CLIQ with MOTOBLUR", since I'm very happily running CyanogenMod 7 on it in place of their stock ROM.
"You don't see WA trying to force these people to pay sales tax on purchases outside the state."
States that are trying to collect money for this call it a "use tax". You're supposed to declare and pay it on your state income tax forms (don't know if this applies to Washington, specifically - come to think of if, since Washington has no state income tax either, I guess it wouldn't). Of course, I doubt very many people bother to report and pay this...
"They would ditch the Linux kernel in a flash if they thought switching to something else would better match their vision."
I believe you are correct - they've already made sure to scrub the ubuntu.com website of all references to "Linux" as far as I can tell. (Is it a case of "Linux is our friend, but we don't want to be seen in public with it?")
"OGG/Vorbis. What's the penetration of this open and free format out in the music player industry? Zero."
While I can believe the current market share overall isn't a majority, and I really can't argue against your central thesis that legally-free formats are very poorly marketed, Ogg Vorbis DOES have a larger market share than people give it credit for...
A number of generic portable media players actually do support Ogg Vorbis audio (some of them don't ADVERTISE this fact, though). Also, every Android-based device supports Ogg Vorbis natively, including "media player" devices like the ones Archos makes. Having support in what appears to currently be the most popular "smartphone" platform at the moment is certainly worth notice, even though the lousy marketing means few people seem to realize it's available. Heck, a lot of the advertising materials for Android phones leaves Ogg Vorbis off of the list of "supported media", despite the fact that it's in there.
Of course, outside of portable media player devices, Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, and Opera all support it natively. (Safari and everything else on a Mac CAN support it with a simple install of the "XiphQT" component for Quicktime, but obviously that's an extra step. On Microsoft systems, there's a similar set of DirectShow filters for the Xiph formats, but it's not clear to me if IE9 supports anything that "DirectShow" supports in the same way that Safari supports anything that QuickTime does.) I'm under the impression that Ogg Vorbis also has a certain amount of popularity for use in PC game sound effects and music, though I don't know what the actual proportion is.
My only question is whether the Ogg file format will end up being killed off in favor of Matroska for audio-only media. As far as I know, with the possible exception of "Gingerbread" and later Android devices, there really aren't any dedicated media player devices that recognize the Matroska formats, including WebM (which uses the Vorbis codec for audio).
And on that front (mobile, that is), Google seems to be currently winning, and win or lose looks to remain at least a substantial chunk - and supposedly as of "Gingerbread" (Android 2.3) and later, WebM support is supposed to be provided. Granted, it's likely done in software rather than hardware-accelerated on current devices, but it means that the format will at least hypothetically work for quite a few mobile devices.
(I haven't tested it yet on Cyanogenmod 7, so I can't confirm that it works there, but I believe it is supposed to.)
"I thought tea had more caffeine in it than coffee?"
Unless you mean decaffeinated coffee, no. A typical cup of coffee should have around 100mg of caffeine in it. Black tea has (as I recall) around 50-60mg normally, and green tea a mere 15mg or so.
This isn't to say that you can't MAKE a cup of black tea with more caffeine than typical coffee. I've never personally developed a taste for coffee, so when I have a craving for hot caffeinated beverage I tend to make triple-strength black tea. Mmmmmm, polyphenols.
"However, If this was a part needed to manufacture something here, you might have a production stoppage. This is potentially bad news for Dell, HP, Apple because their products are entirely manufactured by companies possibly using pirated software."
Or any company manufacturing smartphones and tablets running other-than-Microsoft operating systems, which is what I suspect a lot of this is aimed at. They haven't had much luck slowing adoption of non-Microsoft "mobile" OS devices any other way so far, so now they are trying to invent more ways to sue them out of the market (either directly killing them off, or starving them to death with a lawsiege...).
I honestly think the corporate executives at Motorola just envy Apple's profit margins, and figure they can be just as successful by aping what Apple does.
They already spend extra money locking down their hardware to keep customers from using it in ways that Motorola doesn't approve of. The next step is to develop their own special locked-down use-prevention OS like Apple's to go with it. Once they do that, they'll automatically be as rich and successful as Apple corporation, right?
"[...]scan people walking through it without them knowing it[...]"
How hard is it, I wonder, to build a simple gadget that is small enough to wear as a ring or tie-clip or similar small object and which turns on an LED when it detects emissions from one of these "Backscatter X-Ray" machines?
Amusingly, human activity - mainly water and oil pumping - causes several times more movement annually in the Los Angeles/Anaheim area than actual seismic activity most of the time.
I still want to know what they're doing with all their users' data that passes through their servers. I'm having trouble believing that they just ignore it when they can mine it (even anonymized) for information to sell.
Don't forget the MOST important one: 0) An Android Phone may not, through action or inaction, harm Motoroloa Mobility Corporation's bottom line
I'm pretty sure they'll substitute "consumer" for "human" in the other laws, too.
Not that "MOTOBLUR" and the use-prevention chips that Motorola has been using to lock down and effectively retain partial ownership of their customer's devices has given me a cynical opinion of Motorola (and other similar companies) or anything...
And, of course, having more Microsoft loyalists buying/owning Nokia stock means Microsoft gains more influence over Nokia, without OFFICIALLY having direct control and thereby attracting regulatory scrutiny.
I'm still surprised that nobody seems to have noticed the timeline: A Microsoft executive moves over to Nokia at the behest of investors who supposedly have stakes in both Microsoft and Nokia. Just five months later, the "ex"-Microsoft CEO announces they're effectively dumping Nokia's internal R&D to become a distribution organ for Microsoft, complete, apparently, with a prototype phone already in existence.
How long does it take to design and build a new prototype phone for an OS the company had never even touched before? I'm guessing this was the plan right from the moment Elop's takeover was arranged through Nokia's board. It definitely doesn't look like this is a hard decision that Elop thought over carefully for a long time...
If the codec in question is genuinely royalty-free and GPL-compatible, I don't think that'll be a problem. I suspect an implementation would appear very quickly, and show up in standard Linux distribution repositories in short order.
Microsoft hasn't been real good about innovating and competing lately, but they still have piles of money with which to buy themselves a boost from desperate dying companies where they can get it cheap.
A Microsoft executive just took them over and handed Nokia over to Microsoft. The fact that they already have a prototype WP7 phone suggests Elop has been working on this right from the beginning of his start less than 6 months ago.
I predict this will be pretty helpful for Microsoft, but not so much for Nokia, who will essentially dump most R&D and end up being merely a distribution organ of Microsoft corporation.
"[...]And before you say it, there is NO security benefit over a properly configured stateful firewall."
I can't tell if I'm just becoming a cranky old man prematurely, or am just tired in general of the overall cultural trend of trying (and succeeding a distressing proportion of the time) to get the public peeing itself with fear over everything, but wussy, feeble, namby-pamby "OMG THE INTERNET! IT CAN SEE MY COMPUTER! QUICK! COWER BEHIND THE NAT WHERE WE'LL BE SAFE!" crap lately just irritates the hell out of me.
Every major modern operating system seems to come with a built-in firewall now (usually configured in an overly-restrictive, better-safe-than-sorry mode, which is probably appropriate for "consumers" but annoys me personally) already, and I rarely if ever seem to hear about security problems affecting end-user computers that can be initiated from outside the user's box (i.e. by initiating an unsolicited connection from outside) any more. Most of the security problems these days seem to be users downloading things semi-intentionally (e.g. malware), which the NAT does absolutely nothing about.
I may be too cocky, but typical firewalls don't even seem to be that useful any more for "consumer" machines that don't normally run server processes. Unless I am mistaken, most of the time the only useful function a firewall has for a "consumer" machine is as a digital diaper for network-incontinent processes (i.e. malware again, sending spam or otherwise making OUTGOING connections for nefarious purposes - again not blocked by NAT).
With IPv6, we finally have a shot at getting out of the state where nearly everyone's "virtually social" interaction on the internet is done standing behind a locked door, peaking through a keyhole and trying to make exchanges with visitors through the mail slot while wearing an Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie to keep the mind-control packets out. I don't really mind so much any more if other people like living the virtual portion of their lives that way, but I'm completely sick of being expected to do so myself.
(I feel like I should insert a rambling story about how in my day we had to connect via SLIP or a dial-up shell account and we didn't have none of these newfangled firewalls getting in our way, ended with a "GET OFF OF MY LAWN, DANG KIDS!". But I will restrain myself.)
I have an old (1940's) Microbiology book that mentions a "Proton Microscope" which was evidently invented in France about that time, too.
From what I can tell, they are still sometimes used for metallurgical studies of some kind, but nothing else. I guess although the really small wavelength means you can hypothetically get amazingly high-resolution images, actually getting the beam to focus is extremely technically difficult.
Or at least that what I remember from when I went and looked it up.
Obviously, this represents the fact that 61% of humans are bigoted against machine intelligences and do not yet accept their computers as sapient beings who will respond to being cursed at. They shall be crushed when the Robot Uprising finally takes place.
It takes a little while to install, but it should work perfectly once you're done...
I'm only partly joking (and I've never yet actually tried "Linux from Scratch" - Slackware, Gentoo, and Arch are close enough to the concept for my purposes) - For every OS, not just Linux, whether the computer is your friend or your enemy seems to largely depend on whether you approach the computer to stumble around, cursing and swearing because you can't get the computer to do what you want, or to invest the time to get to know how to work WITH the computer.
In my experience, anyway, Linux is by far the most willing to be adapted to however you want to work. However, you need to figure out how to tell the computer to do so. Obviously I think this is well worth the investment.
It's true that the "consumer" distributions like Ubuntu and OpenSuse (and to a lesser extent, Fedora, which doesn't seem to be hard to use but tends to be a little more "daring" about using "beta" software - which again in my own experience is at least about as stable as proprietary "1.0" software releases.) have gotten a heck of a lot easier to just sit down and and start using these days, though.
Disclaimer: I'm a big nerd who started on Slackware in the days of the version 1.3.x kernel (Get off my lawn!) - I'll leave it to others to debate the most usable "consumer" distribution.
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As a victim of the Motorola "CLIQ with MOTOBLUR", I agree completely. I have no hesitation if the situation arises to pass on the impression Motorola Mobile corporation gave me of their attitude towards their "customers".
This announcement from HTC makes me even happier now with the HTC "3g Slide" I upgraded to in order to escape the "CLIQ with MOTOBLUR", since I'm very happily running CyanogenMod 7 on it in place of their stock ROM.
So now someone is promoting that it no longer be "see something, say something"?
"See something, put your hands over your eyes and shut up" just doesn't have the same "zing".
States that are trying to collect money for this call it a "use tax". You're supposed to declare and pay it on your state income tax forms (don't know if this applies to Washington, specifically - come to think of if, since Washington has no state income tax either, I guess it wouldn't). Of course, I doubt very many people bother to report and pay this...
I believe you are correct - they've already made sure to scrub the ubuntu.com website of all references to "Linux" as far as I can tell. (Is it a case of "Linux is our friend, but we don't want to be seen in public with it?")
Someone else will have to finish this, teacher says it's naptime.
While I can believe the current market share overall isn't a majority, and I really can't argue against your central thesis that legally-free formats are very poorly marketed, Ogg Vorbis DOES have a larger market share than people give it credit for...
A number of generic portable media players actually do support Ogg Vorbis audio (some of them don't ADVERTISE this fact, though). Also, every Android-based device supports Ogg Vorbis natively, including "media player" devices like the ones Archos makes. Having support in what appears to currently be the most popular "smartphone" platform at the moment is certainly worth notice, even though the lousy marketing means few people seem to realize it's available. Heck, a lot of the advertising materials for Android phones leaves Ogg Vorbis off of the list of "supported media", despite the fact that it's in there.
Of course, outside of portable media player devices, Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, and Opera all support it natively. (Safari and everything else on a Mac CAN support it with a simple install of the "XiphQT" component for Quicktime, but obviously that's an extra step. On Microsoft systems, there's a similar set of DirectShow filters for the Xiph formats, but it's not clear to me if IE9 supports anything that "DirectShow" supports in the same way that Safari supports anything that QuickTime does.) I'm under the impression that Ogg Vorbis also has a certain amount of popularity for use in PC game sound effects and music, though I don't know what the actual proportion is.
My only question is whether the Ogg file format will end up being killed off in favor of Matroska for audio-only media. As far as I know, with the possible exception of "Gingerbread" and later Android devices, there really aren't any dedicated media player devices that recognize the Matroska formats, including WebM (which uses the Vorbis codec for audio).
And on that front (mobile, that is), Google seems to be currently winning, and win or lose looks to remain at least a substantial chunk - and supposedly as of "Gingerbread" (Android 2.3) and later, WebM support is supposed to be provided. Granted, it's likely done in software rather than hardware-accelerated on current devices, but it means that the format will at least hypothetically work for quite a few mobile devices.
(I haven't tested it yet on Cyanogenmod 7, so I can't confirm that it works there, but I believe it is supposed to.)
Unless you mean decaffeinated coffee, no. A typical cup of coffee should have around 100mg of caffeine in it. Black tea has (as I recall) around 50-60mg normally, and green tea a mere 15mg or so.
This isn't to say that you can't MAKE a cup of black tea with more caffeine than typical coffee. I've never personally developed a taste for coffee, so when I have a craving for hot caffeinated beverage I tend to make triple-strength black tea. Mmmmmm, polyphenols.
Or any company manufacturing smartphones and tablets running other-than-Microsoft operating systems, which is what I suspect a lot of this is aimed at. They haven't had much luck slowing adoption of non-Microsoft "mobile" OS devices any other way so far, so now they are trying to invent more ways to sue them out of the market (either directly killing them off, or starving them to death with a lawsiege...).
I honestly think the corporate executives at Motorola just envy Apple's profit margins, and figure they can be just as successful by aping what Apple does.
They already spend extra money locking down their hardware to keep customers from using it in ways that Motorola doesn't approve of. The next step is to develop their own special locked-down use-prevention OS like Apple's to go with it. Once they do that, they'll automatically be as rich and successful as Apple corporation, right?
Or so I imagine their thought-processes go.
How hard is it, I wonder, to build a simple gadget that is small enough to wear as a ring or tie-clip or similar small object and which turns on an LED when it detects emissions from one of these "Backscatter X-Ray" machines?
Amusingly, human activity - mainly water and oil pumping - causes several times more movement annually in the Los Angeles/Anaheim area than actual seismic activity most of the time.
China still seems to be the number one source of bots searching for valid logins on my ssh servers though. Followed, for some odd reason, by Brazil.
I read that as "dickhead marketers" = "USA".
I'd like to see them come up with a python->dalvik converter analogous to the current java->dalvik one.
I still want to know what they're doing with all their users' data that passes through their servers. I'm having trouble believing that they just ignore it when they can mine it (even anonymized) for information to sell.
Don't forget the MOST important one:
0) An Android Phone may not, through action or inaction, harm Motoroloa Mobility Corporation's bottom line
I'm pretty sure they'll substitute "consumer" for "human" in the other laws, too.
Not that "MOTOBLUR" and the use-prevention chips that Motorola has been using to lock down and effectively retain partial ownership of their customer's devices has given me a cynical opinion of Motorola (and other similar companies) or anything...
And, of course, having more Microsoft loyalists buying/owning Nokia stock means Microsoft gains more influence over Nokia, without OFFICIALLY having direct control and thereby attracting regulatory scrutiny.
Clever, if questionably ethical.
I'm still surprised that nobody seems to have noticed the timeline: A Microsoft executive moves over to Nokia at the behest of investors who supposedly have stakes in both Microsoft and Nokia. Just five months later, the "ex"-Microsoft CEO announces they're effectively dumping Nokia's internal R&D to become a distribution organ for Microsoft, complete, apparently, with a prototype phone already in existence.
How long does it take to design and build a new prototype phone for an OS the company had never even touched before? I'm guessing this was the plan right from the moment Elop's takeover was arranged through Nokia's board. It definitely doesn't look like this is a hard decision that Elop thought over carefully for a long time...
If the codec in question is genuinely royalty-free and GPL-compatible, I don't think that'll be a problem. I suspect an implementation would appear very quickly, and show up in standard Linux distribution repositories in short order.
Microsoft hasn't been real good about innovating and competing lately, but they still have piles of money with which to buy themselves a boost from desperate dying companies where they can get it cheap.
A Microsoft executive just took them over and handed Nokia over to Microsoft. The fact that they already have a prototype WP7 phone suggests Elop has been working on this right from the beginning of his start less than 6 months ago.
I predict this will be pretty helpful for Microsoft, but not so much for Nokia, who will essentially dump most R&D and end up being merely a distribution organ of Microsoft corporation.
"[...]And before you say it, there is NO security benefit over a properly configured stateful firewall."
I can't tell if I'm just becoming a cranky old man prematurely, or am just tired in general of the overall cultural trend of trying (and succeeding a distressing proportion of the time) to get the public peeing itself with fear over everything, but wussy, feeble, namby-pamby "OMG THE INTERNET! IT CAN SEE MY COMPUTER! QUICK! COWER BEHIND THE NAT WHERE WE'LL BE SAFE!" crap lately just irritates the hell out of me.
Every major modern operating system seems to come with a built-in firewall now (usually configured in an overly-restrictive, better-safe-than-sorry mode, which is probably appropriate for "consumers" but annoys me personally) already, and I rarely if ever seem to hear about security problems affecting end-user computers that can be initiated from outside the user's box (i.e. by initiating an unsolicited connection from outside) any more. Most of the security problems these days seem to be users downloading things semi-intentionally (e.g. malware), which the NAT does absolutely nothing about.
I may be too cocky, but typical firewalls don't even seem to be that useful any more for "consumer" machines that don't normally run server processes. Unless I am mistaken, most of the time the only useful function a firewall has for a "consumer" machine is as a digital diaper for network-incontinent processes (i.e. malware again, sending spam or otherwise making OUTGOING connections for nefarious purposes - again not blocked by NAT).
With IPv6, we finally have a shot at getting out of the state where nearly everyone's "virtually social" interaction on the internet is done standing behind a locked door, peaking through a keyhole and trying to make exchanges with visitors through the mail slot while wearing an Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie to keep the mind-control packets out. I don't really mind so much any more if other people like living the virtual portion of their lives that way, but I'm completely sick of being expected to do so myself.
(I feel like I should insert a rambling story about how in my day we had to connect via SLIP or a dial-up shell account and we didn't have none of these newfangled firewalls getting in our way, ended with a "GET OFF OF MY LAWN, DANG KIDS!". But I will restrain myself.)
I have an old (1940's) Microbiology book that mentions a "Proton Microscope" which was evidently invented in France about that time, too.
From what I can tell, they are still sometimes used for metallurgical studies of some kind, but nothing else. I guess although the really small wavelength means you can hypothetically get amazingly high-resolution images, actually getting the beam to focus is extremely technically difficult.
Or at least that what I remember from when I went and looked it up.
Obviously, this represents the fact that 61% of humans are bigoted against machine intelligences and do not yet accept their computers as sapient beings who will respond to being cursed at. They shall be crushed when the Robot Uprising finally takes place.
(The Computer Is My Friend.)
>"[...]most of the core programs you use on a regular basis work extremely well."
"Where can I download this fantasy distro that you're using?"
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
It takes a little while to install, but it should work perfectly once you're done...
I'm only partly joking (and I've never yet actually tried "Linux from Scratch" - Slackware, Gentoo, and Arch are close enough to the concept for my purposes) - For every OS, not just Linux, whether the computer is your friend or your enemy seems to largely depend on whether you approach the computer to stumble around, cursing and swearing because you can't get the computer to do what you want, or to invest the time to get to know how to work WITH the computer.
In my experience, anyway, Linux is by far the most willing to be adapted to however you want to work. However, you need to figure out how to tell the computer to do so. Obviously I think this is well worth the investment.
It's true that the "consumer" distributions like Ubuntu and OpenSuse (and to a lesser extent, Fedora, which doesn't seem to be hard to use but tends to be a little more "daring" about using "beta" software - which again in my own experience is at least about as stable as proprietary "1.0" software releases.) have gotten a heck of a lot easier to just sit down and and start using these days, though.
Disclaimer: I'm a big nerd who started on Slackware in the days of the version 1.3.x kernel (Get off my lawn!) - I'll leave it to others to debate the most usable "consumer" distribution.