If I purchase the phone outright, wouldn't this be willful destruction of property on Motorola's part? Does a company have the right to destroy a purchased product - after the sale - if the consumer doesn't use it in a prescribed manner?
To my knowledge (IANAL etc.) many countries have laws against this, though I don't know about the USA specifically. Generally the line is crossed at the point when there are built-in additional features that serve no purpose other than to cause the product to "break" intentionally, in circumstances that are not advertised and obviously not intended by the user. The latter might be the case for e.g. self-destructing USB sticks and the like (in which case it would be an advertised and obviously intentional feature).
In other words, it's fine to build (shoddy) products that are "designed to have a limited life-time", to put it the corporate speak way, but intentionally adding "self-destruct" components is not - in particular if the customer could not reasonably have known about it (e.g., when that property was not advertised anywhere).
For once, we're hearing about an authentically clever, afaik new physical design which solves a real problem and is actually sanely applicable to be patented. I wasn't expecting that when I clicked on this story. Gotta hand it to Microsoft for this one.
Whenever reading something like this, I cannot help wondering which company they bought the solution from.
It's certainly a clever design, and even if they bought it elsewhere that was a very good decision. Which, if technology blogs are anything to go by, are increasingly rare within Microsoft's management layers.
I see your badger badger badger mushroom, and up you one rathergood.com
Of course, such sites and similar could just be produced as a movie (using HTML5) but (1) that would probably take quite a bit more bandwidth, and (2) I'm not sure it would be easier to produce, because using Flash you can indeed easily do simple animations, duplicate and scale objects, do worse-than-Southpark style animations etc. I'm sure there is software to do this for movies, but it might be more involved/complex than some rainy sunday afternoon Flash hackery.
Btw. I detest Flash, but well...after a couple of beers such websites can make me suspend my hatred for a while.
Don't you hate it when people refuse to accept the premise of a technical question and write long monologues why the submitter is working with false assumptions even though they don't know what exactly they are dealing with?
In fact no, I hate it more when people do not state their actual purpose, especially in cases where what they are asking combined with the fact that they *need* to ask, cannot prevent one from wondering whether they really understand what they're doing, or whether they are addressing the right problem from the right angle (which, in this case, appears extremely unlikely).
The problem with this topic is *exactly* that we don't know what we're dealing with, and the first thing any decent engineer would do is to try and figure that out (in fact, you started out to do just that). Surely the stated goal doesn't stop at writing bits in exact locations just for the sake of it, right?
In fact, if I asked this to a 100 engineers, I'd really expect that at least 99 of them will immediately ask "why the fuck would you want to do that!?". And the one who doesn't probably works at a harddisk manufacturer.
Their names look very Dutch to me (I'm Dutch myself), so I'm guessing the Netherlands (or perhaps Belgium).
You're probably right that "encouraging people to rob a specific person's house is actionable in every first world country". However, that's clearly not their stated intention - to the contrary, in fact.
In the Netherlands, if someone would start a lawsuit about this (could happen, sure), I'm guessing chances are pretty good that the judge will buy the argument of the website authors, especially since burglars can already trivially find the exact same information if they have two half-working brain cells, and their stated purpose is to actually make people aware of this obvious problem. In addition, whoever starts the lawsuit would probably first have to prove actual damages (e.g. being robbed), and that this was caused by this website, and even then there's the obvious counterpoint that they put this information online themselves in the first place, and it might have been trivially found without that website. The apparent intention (of the website authors) matters as well, probably more so than in the USA (this is just a feeling, I may be wrong).
So, it's hard to prove that a robbery was "caused" or "encouraged" by this website, even then it involved your own stupidity in putting that information publicly on the internet in the first place, therefore the chances of winning (as the person who got robbed) seem not that great. In addition to that, mostly everyone here has insurance covering their household effects, meaning they'd get (most of) the money back from an insurance company anyway, so why bother with the lawsuit.
Finally, if you lose, you typically have to pay the legal costs of the defending side - so starting the lawsuit is not without financial risk in the first place.
Much of this is probably also true in the USA, but the legal costs involved would be higher, and I somehow have a feeling, also the chances of losing. (IANAL, so I may be wrong about that.)
Which means no hulu.com, espn360.com or fancast.com. Somehow Mr. Jobs is touting this as a feature.
Anything that improves the chances of Flash disappearing from the web *IS* a feature.
Apple obviously thinks about this the same way, although likely for different reasons than I do.
They care because they don't control Flash, for technical as well as political reasons; technical: they cannot make it 64 bit, they cannot fix crashes caused by Flash as they can with pretty much everything else in OS X, etc. Political: they don't like someone else to have control and receive licensing fees over something that central to the user experience).
I care because Flash is the only "real" remaining proprietary extension that is pretty much required to experience the "web" currently, if at least you care about A/V on the internet (Youtube etc.). Pretty much everything else can be used without paying royalties to anyone just to use the technology.
Not really. Most companies freely brag about their unreleased products in order to gain hype. Apple has everybody else brag about their products to gain hype.
Exactly, a perfect example can be found here. Look how the article says "Microsoft and H.P. to Reveal Slate PC Ahead of Apple", and then proceeds with "The slate will be made by Hewlett-Packard and possibly available by mid-year, these people said."
Possibly available by mid-year. Right. It's the typical Microsoft strategy of announcing a product before the competitor, hoping that this will deter people from buying the competitors product. At least when Apple announces anything, you know you can order it from the Apple store the next day.
I know most of you guys hate cookies in general, but they are vital for websites to know how people are accessing the sites so they can work out how to shove more targeted ads in the face of the user."
220V is too much for everyday electronics. Why does your vacuum cleaner or table lamp need 220V? I do understand that the amperage is lower (half) for the same wattage. However, if there's a fault in an appliance, and the current carrying lead is exposed, you can touch the conductor without anything more than severe discomfort (wouldn't even call it pain - this has happened to me with a bad light socket). I doubt you could pull this off with 220V.
Unfortunately, you'd be wrong on both accounts.
First of all, current kills, not potential difference (=voltage). Both 110 and 220V are plenty to overcome the resistance of the human body so from that perspective there's hardly a difference.
Secondly, many appliances can *really* do with 220V (actually, it's even 230V). For example: tumble dryer, oven (electrical), washing machine, dish washer, electrical stoves and basically anything that needs to heat water. Nearly all of those are manufactured to draw about 2000-2500W maximum, which makes for a current of about 10A (at 230V). Ovens and stoves may even draw much more - induction stoves can often draw about 7000W. Good luck doing that at 110V...
Remember that story about sexism in the F/OSS world a few weeks back? [slashdot.org] Remember how many people denied that such a thing could exist? Here's your proof.
1) Slashdot != the FOSS community 2) Is it still sexism if it's true? I recently read a report (in the Netherlands) based on compiled statistics from insurance companies: male drivers who own a car (and hence, have to have obligatory insurance against personal liability for accidents involving that car) are involved in accidents on average once per 17 years, whereas for female drivers the average is 14 years.
If anyone would know it's the insurance companies, I'm sure.
a wholly new mechanism that gets rid of the global locking concept and pushes the management of lock access down to the locked resources
So, you're telling me that before Windows 7, the Windows kernel was still using global locks for this kind of purpose? Seriously?
I may be slightly mistaken about the timeframe, but wasn't that kind of thing fixed in the Linux kernel, like, at least 5-10 years ago? I remember reading some LWN articles about it ages ago, at least.
If so, I had no idea Windows development was *that* far behind the times, from a technological perspective.
However for multi-tasking OSes it meant that whatever opened the soundcard first had control until it gave it up. This was problematic for many reasons. Meant that you couldn't even do something simple like play an alert sound from the OS if someone was playing MP3s (not such a problem in the 486 days since those were hard pressed to decode MP3s in realtime).
Actually, yes, I could get sound from multiple sources - at least at some point and not without a serious amount of pain.
I used to have a Terratec card that supported hardware mixing, and this was sorta-kinda-mostly-supported by unstable/development/self-compiled versions of ALSA (which for inexplicable reasons stayed in development/unstable/etc. pretty much forever), and in that case you could simply open/dev/dsp multiple times and sounds would play simultaneously. Since the mixing is done by the hardware, no sound daemon was involved.
But yeah, you want a uniform API even if not all cards can do that (for some unfathomable reason that probably involves it costing more than $0.05 to implement). Why we still don't appear to have such a stable interface today is exactly the question I'm asking. PulseAudio may or may not be to blame, but whether or not this is the case is completely besides the point.
The point should be: why hasn't this problem been adressed in Linux, in 2009, whereas all other major OS's solved this problem at least 10 years ago?
It'll work fine, if designed well, implemented well, and not fucked with. You can't change the spec every other week. It needs to be laid out and stuck with.
This isn't theoretical, as I said OS-X and Windows do it, and have been doing it for some time.
While Poettering admits PulseAudio itself is not bug-free, he believes the majority of issues are being triggered by misbehaving drivers or applications.
Even if he may be 100% right about that: way not to get the point!
I don't care whether problems are caused by the kernel, a driver, an application, the phase of the moon, or whatever. The thing is, if some "trivial" piece of hardware which has been part of mostly every computer since about 1990, still *does not fucking work* correctly today, I don't give a rat's ass whose fault that is. Especially if it appears the same "problems" have been solved satisfactorily at least 10 years ago on every other OS in mainstream use.
In the meantime, Linux has changed both the audio driver model (ALSA, OSS, who knows what else), and in addition to that, the "application interfaces" (arts, esd, PulseAudio, etc.) so frequently, that it is hardly any wonder that application developers are taking the piss and not updating their software to match the bugs/workarounds to whatever the current "flavor of the week" API for audio interfacing is.
Perhaps PulseAudio is just getting most of the "blame" because it is the most recently changed part of the audio subsystem, so if things used to work before, and now they don't, of course you're going to blame PulseAudio. Even if it is not by itself the "real" culprit.
As Scott Adams says; "The Holodeck will be mankind's last great invention". I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to work out why we'd never ever want to leave.
David Foster Wallace worked out this theme (among others) in great detail - 1200 pages - in his novel "Infinite Jest".
(Unfortunately, and ironically perhaps, he committed suicide sometime last year.)
But marketdroid lies notwithstanding, the underlying technology behind Vista wasn't bad: far from it, actually.
If you don't think Vista has severe technology-related problems, you must either (1) have never used it, or (2) have never used anything else so you just don't know any better.
To start with, it absolutely does not run normally with anything less than (at the very least) 2 GB of RAM, whereas XP, Mac OS X *and* Linux work fine with 1 GB. I for one would certainly call this a technology-related problem. (And yes, I have watched Vista crawl on a semi-recent cheap HP laptop with only 1 GB of RAM. It works just great with XP).
Also, I'm sure all those oft-reported reasons regarding high CPU usage during network transfers, *extremely* slow network file copying (sure...somewhat addressed in later SP's) have absolutely nothing to do with technology, but are just due to "bad marketing" then?
I'm not even going to go into the further user interface experience.
But, I'm sure everything is OK if you just keep drinking the Kool-aid.
then I'm afraid you're still stuck in the very early 90's.
Because, like I said, this *did* take place in the 90's. The point being that even back then, computers, mice and e-mail where already common enough that six year old girls knew how to use them, and also, indeed, computers were common enough that they were obviously out of "stereotypical computer nerd" or "business-only" territory, either of which category didn't include many six year old girls last time I checked (at the very least, certainly not back then).
BTW, as an aside, I am NOT in favor of laughing at the exploitation of foolish/stupid/careless people.
Me neither, I also nowhere implied I was laughing about the awkwardness of that guy around a computer mouse, neither did I call anyone stupid. If anything, I'd be crying, since these are the people making decisions about laws etc. that directly affect the internet. From that perspective, I certainly don't see anything to be laughing about, although I will admit to considering it somewhat funny that the head of the FBI doesn't appear to have the first clue about trust, authentication, identity theft and scams in the realm of electronic devices, in this age and century.
First, not everyone is a domain expert in everything: can you save yourself from your own knowledge from being ripped off on your car? Your doctor? Your bank account? Your computer? The law? Second, being smart/knowledgeable is IN PART a function of being BORN with a GOOD BRAIN. That's pure luck.
I nowhere mentioned anything about being dumb, rather it's a case of just being hopelessly behind the times (which is not at all the same thing). Anyway, whether or not we should have compassion for the dumb, that's a completely different discussion, and I *do* hope it wouldn't be used to argue that we should make someone prime minister or head of the FBI. Just sayin'.
Finally, I hope you'll agree that there is a difference between not knowing enough about cars not to get ripped off by a sleazy salesman, and not knowing, say, how to switch channels on a TV in 1990. Or indeed, knowing the basics of browsing the web in 2009.
Slashdot Mirror
To my knowledge (IANAL etc.) many countries have laws against this, though I don't know about the USA specifically. Generally the line is crossed at the point when there are built-in additional features that serve no purpose other than to cause the product to "break" intentionally, in circumstances that are not advertised and obviously not intended by the user. The latter might be the case for e.g. self-destructing USB sticks and the like (in which case it would be an advertised and obviously intentional feature).
In other words, it's fine to build (shoddy) products that are "designed to have a limited life-time", to put it the corporate speak way, but intentionally adding "self-destruct" components is not - in particular if the customer could not reasonably have known about it (e.g., when that property was not advertised anywhere).
Whenever reading something like this, I cannot help wondering which company they bought the solution from.
It's certainly a clever design, and even if they bought it elsewhere that was a very good decision. Which, if technology blogs are anything to go by, are increasingly rare within Microsoft's management layers.
I see your badger badger badger mushroom, and up you one rathergood.com
Of course, such sites and similar could just be produced as a movie (using HTML5) but (1) that would probably take quite a bit more bandwidth, and (2) I'm not sure it would be easier to produce, because using Flash you can indeed easily do simple animations, duplicate and scale objects, do worse-than-Southpark style animations etc. I'm sure there is software to do this for movies, but it might be more involved/complex than some rainy sunday afternoon Flash hackery.
Btw. I detest Flash, but well...after a couple of beers such websites can make me suspend my hatred for a while.
Well, the worst that could happen is that visiting the site will feel like watching paint dry.
Uhm, what? Linux distributions do this all the time.
(However, they are not usually installed in firmware, I'll admit).
Don't forget that these engines sustained $50-60M worth of damage in the process though. That ain't pretty.
In fact no, I hate it more when people do not state their actual purpose, especially in cases where what they are asking combined with the fact that they *need* to ask, cannot prevent one from wondering whether they really understand what they're doing, or whether they are addressing the right problem from the right angle (which, in this case, appears extremely unlikely).
The problem with this topic is *exactly* that we don't know what we're dealing with, and the first thing any decent engineer would do is to try and figure that out (in fact, you started out to do just that). Surely the stated goal doesn't stop at writing bits in exact locations just for the sake of it, right?
In fact, if I asked this to a 100 engineers, I'd really expect that at least 99 of them will immediately ask "why the fuck would you want to do that!?". And the one who doesn't probably works at a harddisk manufacturer.
Their names look very Dutch to me (I'm Dutch myself), so I'm guessing the Netherlands (or perhaps Belgium).
You're probably right that "encouraging people to rob a specific person's house is actionable in every first world country". However, that's clearly not their stated intention - to the contrary, in fact.
In the Netherlands, if someone would start a lawsuit about this (could happen, sure), I'm guessing chances are pretty good that the judge will buy the argument of the website authors, especially since burglars can already trivially find the exact same information if they have two half-working brain cells, and their stated purpose is to actually make people aware of this obvious problem. In addition, whoever starts the lawsuit would probably first have to prove actual damages (e.g. being robbed), and that this was caused by this website, and even then there's the obvious counterpoint that they put this information online themselves in the first place, and it might have been trivially found without that website. The apparent intention (of the website authors) matters as well, probably more so than in the USA (this is just a feeling, I may be wrong).
So, it's hard to prove that a robbery was "caused" or "encouraged" by this website, even then it involved your own stupidity in putting that information publicly on the internet in the first place, therefore the chances of winning (as the person who got robbed) seem not that great. In addition to that, mostly everyone here has insurance covering their household effects, meaning they'd get (most of) the money back from an insurance company anyway, so why bother with the lawsuit.
Finally, if you lose, you typically have to pay the legal costs of the defending side - so starting the lawsuit is not without financial risk in the first place.
Much of this is probably also true in the USA, but the legal costs involved would be higher, and I somehow have a feeling, also the chances of losing. (IANAL, so I may be wrong about that.)
Doubt it, since they obviously don't live in the USA. Good for them, then :)
Anything that improves the chances of Flash disappearing from the web *IS* a feature.
Apple obviously thinks about this the same way, although likely for different reasons than I do.
They care because they don't control Flash, for technical as well as political reasons; technical: they cannot make it 64 bit, they cannot fix crashes caused by Flash as they can with pretty much everything else in OS X, etc. Political: they don't like someone else to have control and receive licensing fees over something that central to the user experience).
I care because Flash is the only "real" remaining proprietary extension that is pretty much required to experience the "web" currently, if at least you care about A/V on the internet (Youtube etc.). Pretty much everything else can be used without paying royalties to anyone just to use the technology.
Worse, a change from 6% to 5% "real mail", if that is indeed the case, isn't a "very minor change", it's a 20% difference!
Exactly, a perfect example can be found here. Look how the article says "Microsoft and H.P. to Reveal Slate PC Ahead of Apple", and then proceeds with "The slate will be made by Hewlett-Packard and possibly available by mid-year, these people said."
Possibly available by mid-year. Right. It's the typical Microsoft strategy of announcing a product before the competitor, hoping that this will deter people from buying the competitors product. At least when Apple announces anything, you know you can order it from the Apple store the next day.
Exactly.
There, fixed.
I, too, was wondering how to distinguish between "very good" and merely "average quality" snake oil.
Unfortunately, you'd be wrong on both accounts.
First of all, current kills, not potential difference (=voltage). Both 110 and 220V are plenty to overcome the resistance of the human body so from that perspective there's hardly a difference.
Secondly, many appliances can *really* do with 220V (actually, it's even 230V). For example: tumble dryer, oven (electrical), washing machine, dish washer, electrical stoves and basically anything that needs to heat water. Nearly all of those are manufactured to draw about 2000-2500W maximum, which makes for a current of about 10A (at 230V). Ovens and stoves may even draw much more - induction stoves can often draw about 7000W. Good luck doing that at 110V...
1) Slashdot != the FOSS community
2) Is it still sexism if it's true? I recently read a report (in the Netherlands) based on compiled statistics from insurance companies: male drivers who own a car (and hence, have to have obligatory insurance against personal liability for accidents involving that car) are involved in accidents on average once per 17 years, whereas for female drivers the average is 14 years.
If anyone would know it's the insurance companies, I'm sure.
So, you're telling me that before Windows 7, the Windows kernel was still using global locks for this kind of purpose? Seriously?
I may be slightly mistaken about the timeframe, but wasn't that kind of thing fixed in the Linux kernel, like, at least 5-10 years ago? I remember reading some LWN articles about it ages ago, at least.
If so, I had no idea Windows development was *that* far behind the times, from a technological perspective.
Actually, yes, I could get sound from multiple sources - at least at some point and not without a serious amount of pain.
I used to have a Terratec card that supported hardware mixing, and this was sorta-kinda-mostly-supported by unstable/development/self-compiled versions of ALSA (which for inexplicable reasons stayed in development/unstable/etc. pretty much forever), and in that case you could simply open /dev/dsp multiple times and sounds would play simultaneously. Since the mixing is done by the hardware, no sound daemon was involved.
But yeah, you want a uniform API even if not all cards can do that (for some unfathomable reason that probably involves it costing more than $0.05 to implement). Why we still don't appear to have such a stable interface today is exactly the question I'm asking. PulseAudio may or may not be to blame, but whether or not this is the case is completely besides the point.
The point should be: why hasn't this problem been adressed in Linux, in 2009, whereas all other major OS's solved this problem at least 10 years ago?
I couldn't agree more.
Even if he may be 100% right about that: way not to get the point!
I don't care whether problems are caused by the kernel, a driver, an application, the phase of the moon, or whatever. The thing is, if some "trivial" piece of hardware which has been part of mostly every computer since about 1990, still *does not fucking work* correctly today, I don't give a rat's ass whose fault that is. Especially if it appears the same "problems" have been solved satisfactorily at least 10 years ago on every other OS in mainstream use.
In the meantime, Linux has changed both the audio driver model (ALSA, OSS, who knows what else), and in addition to that, the "application interfaces" (arts, esd, PulseAudio, etc.) so frequently, that it is hardly any wonder that application developers are taking the piss and not updating their software to match the bugs/workarounds to whatever the current "flavor of the week" API for audio interfacing is.
Perhaps PulseAudio is just getting most of the "blame" because it is the most recently changed part of the audio subsystem, so if things used to work before, and now they don't, of course you're going to blame PulseAudio. Even if it is not by itself the "real" culprit.
David Foster Wallace worked out this theme (among others) in great detail - 1200 pages - in his novel "Infinite Jest".
(Unfortunately, and ironically perhaps, he committed suicide sometime last year.)
If you don't think Vista has severe technology-related problems, you must either
(1) have never used it, or
(2) have never used anything else so you just don't know any better.
To start with, it absolutely does not run normally with anything less than (at the very least) 2 GB of RAM, whereas XP, Mac OS X *and* Linux work fine with 1 GB. I for one would certainly call this a technology-related problem. (And yes, I have watched Vista crawl on a semi-recent cheap HP laptop with only 1 GB of RAM. It works just great with XP).
Also, I'm sure all those oft-reported reasons regarding high CPU usage during network transfers, *extremely* slow network file copying (sure...somewhat addressed in later SP's) have absolutely nothing to do with technology, but are just due to "bad marketing" then?
I'm not even going to go into the further user interface experience.
But, I'm sure everything is OK if you just keep drinking the Kool-aid.
He he he ;)
At least your reply made me smile, much unlike moderators who don't even know the difference between "flamebait" and "troll" :P
I mean, someone else posted this:
Seriously, how naive can anyone be?
Right, "consuming the experience of ads".
Please, do humanity a favor and kill yourself.
No, seriously.
Because, like I said, this *did* take place in the 90's. The point being that even back then, computers, mice and e-mail where already common enough that six year old girls knew how to use them, and also, indeed, computers were common enough that they were obviously out of "stereotypical computer nerd" or "business-only" territory, either of which category didn't include many six year old girls last time I checked (at the very least, certainly not back then).
Me neither, I also nowhere implied I was laughing about the awkwardness of that guy around a computer mouse, neither did I call anyone stupid. If anything, I'd be crying, since these are the people making decisions about laws etc. that directly affect the internet. From that perspective, I certainly don't see anything to be laughing about, although I will admit to considering it somewhat funny that the head of the FBI doesn't appear to have the first clue about trust, authentication, identity theft and scams in the realm of electronic devices, in this age and century.
I nowhere mentioned anything about being dumb, rather it's a case of just being hopelessly behind the times (which is not at all the same thing). Anyway, whether or not we should have compassion for the dumb, that's a completely different discussion, and I *do* hope it wouldn't be used to argue that we should make someone prime minister or head of the FBI. Just sayin'.
Finally, I hope you'll agree that there is a difference between not knowing enough about cars not to get ripped off by a sleazy salesman, and not knowing, say, how to switch channels on a TV in 1990. Or indeed, knowing the basics of browsing the web in 2009.