Not really - I suspect if you analyze it, driving is complicated enough to be more than one task (one task is operating the car, the other task is watching the road, but it's probably more complicated than that). That may actually be why cellphones are such a problem when driving. The medial prefrontal cortex may already be focusing on two tasks.
I'm betting this is software being used in an educational or other not-for-profit environment. If so, one thing you have going for you is that employees in that sector actually talk to people from other institutions. If disclosing your work-around wouldn't just give away the entire problem, I'd actually publish what you did to protect the application. That way, your peers can decide if they want to do it and get a head start. It puts the vendor on notice that someone is going to notice this problem eventually.
If your workaround gives away the entire problem, that's more difficult. Assuming education / not-for-profit, I'd start by talking (verbally) to peers at schools using the application, and see if you can get some traction that way. A group of pissed-off customers might be more effective. Your CIO may be participating in regional or national organizations, and may be able to talk to his or her peers about the issue as well.
If you just release it on your own in an "in-your-face" way without your bosses signing on, they could decide to take it out on you if the vendor gets pissed or tries to go after you for violating some gag clause in the licensing agreement (some have them) or damaging their business. They shouldn't, but I can think of a couple of really stupid, obnoxious vendors that might.
You mentioned open standards in your original post. You should care about the codec. If you end up with HTML 5 and nothing but an encumbered codec - perhaps one with little support for FOSS in the future, depending on the royalty situation - it may not be much better in the end. This is a bigger issue than just "Flash sucks". You could see Google pay to allow Chrome to use it (but keep it out of Chromium), Apple may pay for its products, Adobe for theirs, etc. It could easily end up with each vendor attempting to force you to use their software. Whenever Apple and Google talk about "open standards", it's usually code for "wear our velvet handcuffs". Sure, Flash sucks. But companies like Apple and Google are playing it up in an attempt to gain influence and control. And that's really what it's about. Neither one of them actually gives a toss about what technology is better for you, they care about maintaining and growing their piece of the action.
H.264 isn't really open - the consortium just isn't charging royalties at this time. They can do so in the future, and they can make rules about the use of the standard.
While I use Cablevision for internet connectivity (they're a good internet provider, actually), I don't use them for TV. I use DirecTV. Cablevision where I am in New Jersey won't carry WLIW (PBS) from Long Island, they won't carry BBC America, and they get into these regular pissing matches with the content providers (see the Food Network / HGTV thing a month or two ago).
If I end up ditching DirecTV, I'd probably use Verizon FIOS because they have BBC America. That'll be cool - Vonage for phone, Verizon for TV and Cablevision for Internet. If you'd told someone 15 years ago they'd be able to do that, they would have thought you were from Bizarro World.
Cablevision doesn't seem to think that channel selection matters - when they initially refused to carry the YES Network (Yankees) a few years ago when the Yankees ditched off the MSG Network (which Cablevision had a financial interest in), we switched to DirecTV and haven't switched back. Customers will switch to keep something they already had - or if they have to switch, pick the option that allows them to keep their shows. And the channel selection differences from area to area (depending on which cable company bought by Cablevision had the area originally) are just annoying.
How will any of us be able to contribute to Slashdot?
Re:They are keeping Opal because they need it
on
A Requiem For Saab
·
· Score: 1
Good point about Ford:)
The Saab thing makes no sense to me - there's almost no dealer network, and they had a few niche manufacturers interested in it. Seems like it would have been some of something, instead of all of nothing. Saturn, yeah, although I was a little surprised the Penkse deal fell through.
So incompetent that they can't even manage to spin off brands that there are potential buyers for? Think about it - they blew selling Saturn and Saab, and they haven't managed to sell Opel - if it weren't for the involvement of the German government, I suspect they'd be shutting Opel down as well. Hummer? Well, we'll see. I suspect the deal with the Chinese company that wants Hummer will fall through in the end as well. Last spring, they claimed they had 16 potential buyers for Saturn and 3 for Saab.
So, either they were greedy as hell and were asking well above the value of these brands for the sale, or they were never interested in selling a unit off to a potential competitor and the entire story of selling the units was done to make it sound like they'd be raising cash through these spin-offs and would be able to pay the government back sooner.
They're chipping away at it in the UK as well - there's a proposal in Scotland to get rid of the rule for murder and rape cases. Of course, we know that the police never focus on the wrong person, ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
Well, also, there's a revenue problem - right now, a huge chunk of online ad revenue goes to companies like Google, not to the organization providing the content. Part of Schmidt's problem - and he isn't about to admit it - is that in the absence of good content (and no, good content doesn't just happen), Google's search engine isn't worth nearly as much. The search engine is just an ad delivery mechanism - for Google.
He's claiming to be the solution, and that's not an obvious conclusion. Google's arguably a "bad parasite". Google may be the IT version of Wal-mart, both in content and infrastructure. They're trying to drive everyone else out, or squeeze them and keep the revenue all to themselves.
Then again Schmidt wants to profile everyone in enough detail to be able to answer questions like "what career should I choose?" (seriously, he said that in an interview). Rupert looks like a model of sanity and reason compared to that level of creepy / crazy.
Terrorists don't always like sat phones. Makes it easier for the NSA, and they may have been used in the past to actually target attacks on people using them.
Cellphones in a densely-populated area make more sense. It's easier to hide in the noise.
Yeah, I think he's a greedy jack***, and I disagree with his politics, but I really don't see why Google should be allowed to scrape someone else's content and serve it up out of a search interface where they're making the ad revenue. And the argument that it drives more poeple to a site, raising their ad revenue doesn't really hold either. After all, Google is the biggest fish in that business as well - they get paid both ends. And they really turn remarkably little over to the web site in question.
And while a lot of Slashdot readers might not like News Corp, plenty of folks do.
Google never should have been allowed to buy Doubleclick, for starters. They need to learn to be a "good parasite". They haven't figured it out yet.
I'll point out one thing that you are indirectly stating - people aren't buying netbooks as netbooks. They're buying netbooks as cheap notebooks or sub-notebooks. That's why Linux netbooks are really failing, and why Windows XP Home did so well when Microsoft started selling it for use on netbooks. And why Chrome OS won't help. They're selling to people who want a cheap computer, not a netbook as a concept. They actually do want (or need) to run their own applications.
Netbook video - 1024x600 sucks. Anything below 1366x768 in widescreen just doesn't give you enough real estate for a lot of modern applications. It's the vertical resolution that gets you. A lot of apps are designed for a minimum of 768 vertically.
I suspect that we're going to see a new category cropping up - take a look at things like the Acer Timeline series. $600 can land you a Core 2 Duo SU7300, 11.6" 1366x768 screen with LED backlight, 4GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive, gigabit ethernet, bluetooth and b/g/n wireles. Oh, yeah, S/PDIF and HDMI output as well as VGA, 3 USB ports and an integrated card reader. And it weighs 3.08 pounds with a 6-cell battery with (supposedly) 8 hours of battery life. Assuming it's 60% of the rating, that's still not bad. And that's not much more money than the "better" netbooks. Once you bulk out a Mini 10v with an upgraded processor, hard drive, bluetooth, etc. you're up over $400. Also, comes with a 64-bit Home Premium version of Windows 7, not 32-bit Starter. That's a good computer for a lot of people.
I also think you're overstating your case - an N270 or N280 is not as fast as a Core 2 Duo that came out 3 years ago. Sure, go back to the Pentium-D perhaps. Maybe.
It's a joke. Why the hell would I want to watch a TV newsperson read a web page or twitter feed? It's just dumb. Putting them in front of giant touch displays is also stupid. I don't want to watch someone operate a computer - actually put the damn graphic on the viewer's feed so we can see it straight on without some blow-dried suited idiot in front of it.
Seriously, Scalia's "pop culture" reference is a radio show that went off the air in the mid 50's? Seriously? When he's talking about cars, does he compare everything to a 1954 DeSoto?
Don't they have law clerks that can help them line up snappy references? For example, "Professor Farnsworth" comes to mind. Sure, it's obscure, but not much more than his reference.
And even if you do, unless you check, it's possible the ground isn't good anyway. That's a common problem in older rental properties. Heck, I've seen ungrounded 3-prong outlets.
It's about potential damages. There have been a hell of a lot more microcomputers sold in the past 10 to 12 years than network switches. They're going to try to claim damages for each one if companies don't settle.
We have a few towns with municipal power utilities - you generally pay less for electricity, but the local utility run by the town doesn't really want to buy power back from you, nor do they want to make it easy for you to not buy power from them. It's a way of defraying municipal expenses and (in the case of not-for-profit institutions like churches and schools) a way to generate revenue from tax-exempt organizations that wouldn't be paying property taxes. Basically, they buy power in bulk with long-term contracts and then mark it up, but not as much as the larger utility companies do in the rest of the state.
Well, in all fairness, Stallman isn't exactly great at working with others. The arguments over the years vs. other licenses, complaining that the OpenBSD project actually distributed a couple of closed source apps that a user could choose to install as an option, etc. I halfway think their new push on Microsoft is to smooth over the fact that they spent the last couple of years acting like they wanted to conduct an ideological purge.
Seriously, it's like the bit it "Life of Brian" where they're arguing over the "Judean People's Front" vs. the "People's Front of Judea" and the "Judean Popular Peoples Front". Frankly, as soon as Stallman is gone, the "movement" is going to deteriorate into a bunch of splinter groups shouting over which one is the true continuation of his mission. Kind of like the followers of the gourd vs. the shoe.
Google is going to be the Wal-Mart of the industry - both on services (trying to get everyone to rely on them instead of having their own IT organizations) and on information (the ridiculous, likely-treaty-violating WGA deal, for example), etc. Relying on content from web sites to deliver ads, but then sharing little of the revenue, etc.
They haven't figured out how to be a "good parasite" yet - but few have noticed, because they're just becoming big enough to kill the ecosystem they're relying on. Trust me - Google is Wal-Mart. And as much as I really don't care for Apple, they'd be smart to keep Google at arms length.
The way I understand it, you've got to exempt yourself, through the mechanism to do that here in the US.
If you're an author in another country, you register your copyright THERE, and as long as your country has ratified the same copyright convention as most other western countries, you're done.
Google isn't the next Microsoft - Google is trying to Wal-mart information and IT. Enjoy what's left when they're done.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really - I suspect if you analyze it, driving is complicated enough to be more than one task (one task is operating the car, the other task is watching the road, but it's probably more complicated than that). That may actually be why cellphones are such a problem when driving. The medial prefrontal cortex may already be focusing on two tasks.
I'm betting this is software being used in an educational or other not-for-profit environment. If so, one thing you have going for you is that employees in that sector actually talk to people from other institutions. If disclosing your work-around wouldn't just give away the entire problem, I'd actually publish what you did to protect the application. That way, your peers can decide if they want to do it and get a head start. It puts the vendor on notice that someone is going to notice this problem eventually.
If your workaround gives away the entire problem, that's more difficult. Assuming education / not-for-profit, I'd start by talking (verbally) to peers at schools using the application, and see if you can get some traction that way. A group of pissed-off customers might be more effective. Your CIO may be participating in regional or national organizations, and may be able to talk to his or her peers about the issue as well.
If you just release it on your own in an "in-your-face" way without your bosses signing on, they could decide to take it out on you if the vendor gets pissed or tries to go after you for violating some gag clause in the licensing agreement (some have them) or damaging their business. They shouldn't, but I can think of a couple of really stupid, obnoxious vendors that might.
You mentioned open standards in your original post. You should care about the codec. If you end up with HTML 5 and nothing but an encumbered codec - perhaps one with little support for FOSS in the future, depending on the royalty situation - it may not be much better in the end. This is a bigger issue than just "Flash sucks". You could see Google pay to allow Chrome to use it (but keep it out of Chromium), Apple may pay for its products, Adobe for theirs, etc. It could easily end up with each vendor attempting to force you to use their software. Whenever Apple and Google talk about "open standards", it's usually code for "wear our velvet handcuffs". Sure, Flash sucks. But companies like Apple and Google are playing it up in an attempt to gain influence and control. And that's really what it's about. Neither one of them actually gives a toss about what technology is better for you, they care about maintaining and growing their piece of the action.
H.264 isn't really open - the consortium just isn't charging royalties at this time. They can do so in the future, and they can make rules about the use of the standard.
While I use Cablevision for internet connectivity (they're a good internet provider, actually), I don't use them for TV. I use DirecTV. Cablevision where I am in New Jersey won't carry WLIW (PBS) from Long Island, they won't carry BBC America, and they get into these regular pissing matches with the content providers (see the Food Network / HGTV thing a month or two ago).
If I end up ditching DirecTV, I'd probably use Verizon FIOS because they have BBC America. That'll be cool - Vonage for phone, Verizon for TV and Cablevision for Internet. If you'd told someone 15 years ago they'd be able to do that, they would have thought you were from Bizarro World.
Cablevision doesn't seem to think that channel selection matters - when they initially refused to carry the YES Network (Yankees) a few years ago when the Yankees ditched off the MSG Network (which Cablevision had a financial interest in), we switched to DirecTV and haven't switched back. Customers will switch to keep something they already had - or if they have to switch, pick the option that allows them to keep their shows. And the channel selection differences from area to area (depending on which cable company bought by Cablevision had the area originally) are just annoying.
Well, supposedly so is wearing wool and linen at the same time. I don't remember seeing flash and javascript on the rather extensive list, however.
License the name to another company for use in another product - say, a sex toy. Something Google really doesn't want to be associated with.
Sure, maybe the estate doesn't either, but it'll bother Google a whole lot more.
How will any of us be able to contribute to Slashdot?
Good point about Ford :)
The Saab thing makes no sense to me - there's almost no dealer network, and they had a few niche manufacturers interested in it. Seems like it would have been some of something, instead of all of nothing. Saturn, yeah, although I was a little surprised the Penkse deal fell through.
So incompetent that they can't even manage to spin off brands that there are potential buyers for? Think about it - they blew selling Saturn and Saab, and they haven't managed to sell Opel - if it weren't for the involvement of the German government, I suspect they'd be shutting Opel down as well. Hummer? Well, we'll see. I suspect the deal with the Chinese company that wants Hummer will fall through in the end as well. Last spring, they claimed they had 16 potential buyers for Saturn and 3 for Saab.
So, either they were greedy as hell and were asking well above the value of these brands for the sale, or they were never interested in selling a unit off to a potential competitor and the entire story of selling the units was done to make it sound like they'd be raising cash through these spin-offs and would be able to pay the government back sooner.
They're chipping away at it in the UK as well - there's a proposal in Scotland to get rid of the rule for murder and rape cases. Of course, we know that the police never focus on the wrong person, ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
The State can't appeal a not guilty verdict. They'd have to find another, related charge that wasn't brought up in the first trial.
He's claiming to be the solution, and that's not an obvious conclusion. Google's arguably a "bad parasite". Google may be the IT version of Wal-mart, both in content and infrastructure. They're trying to drive everyone else out, or squeeze them and keep the revenue all to themselves.
Then again Schmidt wants to profile everyone in enough detail to be able to answer questions like "what career should I choose?" (seriously, he said that in an interview). Rupert looks like a model of sanity and reason compared to that level of creepy / crazy.
Terrorists don't always like sat phones. Makes it easier for the NSA, and they may have been used in the past to actually target attacks on people using them.
Cellphones in a densely-populated area make more sense. It's easier to hide in the noise.
Yeah, I think he's a greedy jack***, and I disagree with his politics, but I really don't see why Google should be allowed to scrape someone else's content and serve it up out of a search interface where they're making the ad revenue. And the argument that it drives more poeple to a site, raising their ad revenue doesn't really hold either. After all, Google is the biggest fish in that business as well - they get paid both ends. And they really turn remarkably little over to the web site in question.
And while a lot of Slashdot readers might not like News Corp, plenty of folks do.
Google never should have been allowed to buy Doubleclick, for starters. They need to learn to be a "good parasite". They haven't figured it out yet.
I'll point out one thing that you are indirectly stating - people aren't buying netbooks as netbooks. They're buying netbooks as cheap notebooks or sub-notebooks. That's why Linux netbooks are really failing, and why Windows XP Home did so well when Microsoft started selling it for use on netbooks. And why Chrome OS won't help. They're selling to people who want a cheap computer, not a netbook as a concept. They actually do want (or need) to run their own applications.
Netbook video - 1024x600 sucks. Anything below 1366x768 in widescreen just doesn't give you enough real estate for a lot of modern applications. It's the vertical resolution that gets you. A lot of apps are designed for a minimum of 768 vertically.
I suspect that we're going to see a new category cropping up - take a look at things like the Acer Timeline series. $600 can land you a Core 2 Duo SU7300, 11.6" 1366x768 screen with LED backlight, 4GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive, gigabit ethernet, bluetooth and b/g/n wireles. Oh, yeah, S/PDIF and HDMI output as well as VGA, 3 USB ports and an integrated card reader. And it weighs 3.08 pounds with a 6-cell battery with (supposedly) 8 hours of battery life. Assuming it's 60% of the rating, that's still not bad. And that's not much more money than the "better" netbooks. Once you bulk out a Mini 10v with an upgraded processor, hard drive, bluetooth, etc. you're up over $400. Also, comes with a 64-bit Home Premium version of Windows 7, not 32-bit Starter. That's a good computer for a lot of people.
I also think you're overstating your case - an N270 or N280 is not as fast as a Core 2 Duo that came out 3 years ago. Sure, go back to the Pentium-D perhaps. Maybe.
It's a joke. Why the hell would I want to watch a TV newsperson read a web page or twitter feed? It's just dumb. Putting them in front of giant touch displays is also stupid. I don't want to watch someone operate a computer - actually put the damn graphic on the viewer's feed so we can see it straight on without some blow-dried suited idiot in front of it.
Seriously, Scalia's "pop culture" reference is a radio show that went off the air in the mid 50's? Seriously? When he's talking about cars, does he compare everything to a 1954 DeSoto?
Don't they have law clerks that can help them line up snappy references? For example, "Professor Farnsworth" comes to mind. Sure, it's obscure, but not much more than his reference.
And even if you do, unless you check, it's possible the ground isn't good anyway. That's a common problem in older rental properties. Heck, I've seen ungrounded 3-prong outlets.
It's about potential damages. There have been a hell of a lot more microcomputers sold in the past 10 to 12 years than network switches. They're going to try to claim damages for each one if companies don't settle.
We have a few towns with municipal power utilities - you generally pay less for electricity, but the local utility run by the town doesn't really want to buy power back from you, nor do they want to make it easy for you to not buy power from them. It's a way of defraying municipal expenses and (in the case of not-for-profit institutions like churches and schools) a way to generate revenue from tax-exempt organizations that wouldn't be paying property taxes. Basically, they buy power in bulk with long-term contracts and then mark it up, but not as much as the larger utility companies do in the rest of the state.
Well, in all fairness, Stallman isn't exactly great at working with others. The arguments over the years vs. other licenses, complaining that the OpenBSD project actually distributed a couple of closed source apps that a user could choose to install as an option, etc. I halfway think their new push on Microsoft is to smooth over the fact that they spent the last couple of years acting like they wanted to conduct an ideological purge.
Seriously, it's like the bit it "Life of Brian" where they're arguing over the "Judean People's Front" vs. the "People's Front of Judea" and the "Judean Popular Peoples Front". Frankly, as soon as Stallman is gone, the "movement" is going to deteriorate into a bunch of splinter groups shouting over which one is the true continuation of his mission. Kind of like the followers of the gourd vs. the shoe.
It's pretty clear they won't. And Google always reserves the right to change the terms.
Google is going to be the Wal-Mart of the industry - both on services (trying to get everyone to rely on them instead of having their own IT organizations) and on information (the ridiculous, likely-treaty-violating WGA deal, for example), etc. Relying on content from web sites to deliver ads, but then sharing little of the revenue, etc.
They haven't figured out how to be a "good parasite" yet - but few have noticed, because they're just becoming big enough to kill the ecosystem they're relying on. Trust me - Google is Wal-Mart. And as much as I really don't care for Apple, they'd be smart to keep Google at arms length.
The way I understand it, you've got to exempt yourself, through the mechanism to do that here in the US.
If you're an author in another country, you register your copyright THERE, and as long as your country has ratified the same copyright convention as most other western countries, you're done.
Google isn't the next Microsoft - Google is trying to Wal-mart information and IT. Enjoy what's left when they're done.