The specific piece about guardianship is mentioned at the bottom:
"Denise New said Lane moved in with his grandmother about five years ago, after she went through a difficult divorce, was having mental health problems and didn't feel she could provide her son with the supervision he needed."
This is all a bit irrelevant, as it's legal and expected that Google would comply with this. From TFA:
"The Patriot Act introduced by President Bush - which allows US authorities to search telecommunications and email communications to fight the 'war on terror' - was not designed by Google. But complying with it places the company in an awkward position.
Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt admitted the company is at times compelled to share data with the US Government.
Representatives from Google Australia have since confirmed the company's policy of complying with these United States government regulations.
"We're committed to protecting user privacy when faced with law enforcement requests, and have a track record of advocating on behalf of users in the face of such requests," the company told iTnews in a statement. "We scrutinise each one to ensure that it adheres to both the letter and the spirit of the law before complying, and do our best to notify the subject named in any such requests to give them the opportunity to object.
"Like all law-abiding companies, we comply with U.S. laws and legal processes."
The fact that they are building both should be no surprise, especially to a typical/. user. Simply giving your servers a power backup doesn't negate the need for DR, and I see this as no different. Electrical power is a key infrastructure requirement, and I would certainly consider both steps necessary and needed. This is actually a fairly clever implementation. Although battery backups are common for Solar installations to the obvious drawbacks of relying on things like the sun, it makes good sense when the same uncertainties exists with their single power feed.
Has IBM responded to this? I can't imagine they don't recall what was said. I would be VERY interested in the response they come up with, and how they proceed once it's shown that they did indeed say wouldn't leverage those patents.
This summary is misleading. There is little need for more capacity given the current specs for HD and the current utilization on a typical BD movie. These disks will target storage, and the only people who would need to upgrade would be those that needed these higher density disks. It was known before the spec was certified that higher capacity media would be in the pipe. That was one of the strengths of BD-Rom; it had lots of room to grow.
From TFA: "In general, the two new formats will be geared toward broadcast and document archiving, both industries that need to record and store massive libraries of digital content. But consumer versions will be available, 'particularly in those regions where BD recorders have achieved broad consumer acceptance,' the BDA said."
I've tried to put IE7 on Windows 98. It was not possible to install it. Considering even XP needs Service Pack 2 to install IE7, I think your not being quite honest. Mozilla is irrelevant as it isn't an MS product. Ditto for Opera. If the vendor chooses to support a specific version of an OS then there is or isn't much MS could do about it either way. That said, even Mozilla has dropped support for Windows 98.
Apple isn't forcing you to run out and do anything. Your old version of Safari isn't going to stop working, and arguably, there is no requirement to go to Safari 4 that I'm aware of.
I'm assuming it isn't supported on older operating systems due to the conversion to 64 bit as well as the conversion to Intel from the PPC chips. 10.6 doesn't support PPC at all without some sort of emulation. There are probably very real reasons it doesn't install.
I believe the newest browser you can put on Windows 98 is IE5 or IE6. I went through that practice in a virtual machine. IE7 supports only XP and above.
Vendors on the MS side tend to support their 3rd party products longer. Browsers like Firefox, Opera, etc are 3rd party applications, not MS supported apps. You would be hard pressed to find any vendor that sent out software with Windows 98 software support listed in it's specs. Firefox no longer supports Windows 98 either.
Jaguar 10.2 was released 8 years ago. It is not unreasonable that it is no longer supported. They have replaced the processor architecture since then, switching from PPC to Intel. The same goes for 10.3, which was supported under PPC. At some point, it makes sense to drop support for a hardware platform that is no longer actively being produced.
Considering Windows 98 doesn't even make the chart, would you spend time supporting it? What about Windows 2000? It has.6% of the population, which is a fraction of even Linux numbers.
Your argument sounds good on the surface, except for the fact that I don't know a single person who still uses 98, ME, or 2000 for that matter. Why would a company waste dollars supporting an infinitesimal population of hardware when an upgrade is only a few hundred dollars. Add to that, the popularity of laptop computers, which are prohibitively expensive to service. It's usually cheaper to replace them if you have any sort of failure outside of the 'disposable' components like HD's, Memory Sims, or optical drives.
Every business I have worked for in the last 15 years upgrades their PC hardware every 2-4 years. I'm betting most home users do the same but at twice those intervals (4-8 years), either due to desire, or component failure.
The business model would certainly work well for businesses, and also works well for home users. Mac users tend to have more disposable income. It certainly isn't hurting the Apple bottom line, and you get a leaner OS in the bargain.
In the end, the 3rd party vendor support is far more important than the OS itself. The oddest thing is that Apple is far more popular with the home user crowd even though the support model would seem to be more in line with business practices in regards to sunsetting old hardware. I can only assume the Mac users have more disposable income is a factor. Although I'm sure there are still PPC's out there still ticking along, the bulk have probably long since upgraded to an Intel Mac.
No technology can remove the need for a good disaster plan. Any person on/. should know this like the back of their hand.
A simple emergency plan for such cases would alleviate most if not all of those concerns. You will always have remote people that can't be reached in an emergency, but any beaches that are popular with the local population would be easily targeted by such plans. After all, they only have to worry about coastlines in such cases.
Notifying the local government first would be the correct course. The local government could then implement whatever emergency plan that may be, whether it's sirens which can be heard from a very far distance, flashing lights/flares, local notices via local communications net, or whatever is needed.
I'm having a harder time with his age, and his appearance. He's a bit overplucked. Time will tell (no pun intended) if he's up to snuff. I only recently became a fan of the show so I've only seen the last 3 Dr's. He just seemed a bit androgynous and uninteresting. Only speaking of first impressions though. Still waiting for the season opener here in the US. Does SyFy here in the U.S. still plan to air this series, or is it BBC only now? I thought I recalled seeing a date sometime mid march, but perhaps I misheard?
Why would you need USB for a keyboard? Do you like the wires? It does support the bluetooth profile for such. If you had taken 2 minutes to actually read about the product before blindly slamming it, you would make a better argument.
"Wireless With built-in 802.11n, iPad takes advantage of the fastest Wi-Fi networks. It automatically locates available Wi-Fi networks, which you can join with a few taps. iPad also comes with Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, letting you connect to devices like wireless headphones or the Apple Wireless Keyboard."
The only problem with this is that only after the disease has matured in the host and taken time to have a noticeable detrimental affect on the immune system, it's a little late in the game. The virus itself can spend months or even years without bringing the immune system down that low. The entire time, the infected host would be able to spread the disease, all while assuming they were 'clean' if they are not properly educated about the exact metric this test uses.
Although this test might serve a simple function of finding people who have almost moved into full blow A.I.D.S, it does not do enough to detect the disease early enough and it does not remove the need for better testing. At most, it's just a general catch all for the very obvious cases (obvious by immune system function). If anything, this would give a false sense of security.
Well putting flashblock at least stopped the cold lockups. I'm amazed that something actually took down my Mac like that. No keyboard input, no mouse, no nothing. Hard reboot. Amazing feature...
You mean via the same mechanism where you type information into 'Bing', and then 'Bing' responds with your search results?
Most people don't type in 100 character URL's (I don't know of any) they either have it bookmarked, or they search for it via, you guess it, the search engine like Google, Bing, or whatnot.
To add to that, what is to stop a software vendor (MS) from simply gathering the information typed into ANY field in a browser. Whether they are in a combo field or not is irrelevant. What a ridiculous argument.
"Europe Main article: Software patents under the European Patent Convention Within European Union member states, the EPO and other national patent offices have issued many patents for inventions involving software since the European Patent Convention (EPC) came into force in the late 1970s. Article 52 EPC excludes "programs for computers" from patentability (Art. 52(2)) to the extent that a patent application relates to a computer program "as such" (Art. 52(3)). This has been interpreted to mean that any invention which makes a non-obvious "technical contribution" or solves a "technical problem" in a non-obvious way is patentable even if that technical problem is solved by running a computer program.[12] Computer-implemented inventions which only solve a business problem using a computer, rather than a technical problem, are considered unpatentable as lacking an inventive step (see T 258/03). Nevertheless, the fact that an invention is useful in business does not mean it is not patentable if it also solves a technical problem."
No one said anything about increasing pixel density. I'm said it was sufficient, meaning the display resolution is adequate for the display size. Just throwing a higher resolution display on it for the sake of some sales point, without at least maintaining the same pixel density is a waste of time.
Most computers have common PPI numbers in the 100-130 range. The iPhone currently has 161 or thereabouts. Cramming higher resolutions into such a tiny display is wasted effort IMO if you can't see the difference. The human eye loses the ability to see any gaps at fairly low PPI.
Here here. There is no need for Flash on a touch phone for starters (it just doesn't work), it kills the battery on pretty much any non-ac powered device, and HTML 5 looks far more promising to me.
As to the rumored phone features, I'm 'meh' about the higher resolution (pixel density is already good for that size screen) although it would make converting DVD's a bit easier as I wouldn't have to resize from the stock resolutions. The front facing camera will make self portraits a bit easier. I don't have any plans to utilize video chat. I never use it on my PC's, and I doubt I would ever use it on a phone.
Most of these selling points just seem like must haves just because someone thought they sounded like a good idea and not because they really add a 'must have' feature. I dont' know how much real world value they will bring but I'll reserve judgement until I see one. I also don't use any apps that require multi-tasking outside of the core apps, although I suppose listening to streaming radio might be a nice change from my own tunes at the gym. I think the only multi-tasking I would find handy is answering a text message without having to exit what I'm currently in. Happens at the gym fairly often. Minor inconvenience.
I'm also satisfied with the speed on the 3GS, so I don't know what the A4 will bring to the table. Possibly to better handle video chat? I suppose the only item of interest for me are the rumors of 4G support, and hopefully 'N' wireless.
I don't see any pressing need to replace any other Adobe tools as there is plenty of market competition in those areas (ie. Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, etc). Not so much with flash for specific implementations.
It does make a difference. In one scenario, they are asking people who do want to keep permanent copies of the content to buy them. In your preferred scenario, everyone pays for them (via higher fees), even if they don't want to buy them.
Agreed. Any CEO who claims he's not worried about his products future isn't a very good CEO. On the Video front, there is a very real possibility that Flash will be replaced, and rightly so. I don't care about flash games. Any smart phone worth it's weight will have apps to fill that void. It's the video I'm interested in.
Flash is annoying, and wasteful. Install flashblock and look at how many simple 'text' menus are now flash based. Why? Because developers are lazy. You can't tell me that a simple text tag doesn't work on any platform...
That is one opinion I strongly agree with. I believe that all content providers should be separate from the content delivery. There will always be a conflict of interest in such cases.
In the US for instance, media conglomerates own content delivery and providers, and they often combine them to the detriment of the consumer.
I can't say that I disagree with the BBC model of requiring public support in the form of a tax/fee, as it seems to give you much better quality than our somewhat equivalent PBS, but I have to agree that separating the content creators from the delivery is always a good decision to my way of thinking.
I think the change in attitudes happened with the switch to digital. Under the old analog copying systems, you could get a copy, but it was never very good. With the advent of digital, you can get an exact copy, and copy it an unlimited number of times.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is a better article with a bit more meat than the original posted in TFA.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36216614/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/
The specific piece about guardianship is mentioned at the bottom:
"Denise New said Lane moved in with his grandmother about five years ago, after she went through a difficult divorce, was having mental health problems and didn't feel she could provide her son with the supervision he needed."
This is all a bit irrelevant, as it's legal and expected that Google would comply with this. From TFA:
"The Patriot Act introduced by President Bush - which allows US authorities to search telecommunications and email communications to fight the 'war on terror' - was not designed by Google. But complying with it places the company in an awkward position.
Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt admitted the company is at times compelled to share data with the US Government.
Representatives from Google Australia have since confirmed the company's policy of complying with these United States government regulations.
"We're committed to protecting user privacy when faced with law enforcement requests, and have a track record of advocating on behalf of users in the face of such requests," the company told iTnews in a statement. "We scrutinise each one to ensure that it adheres to both the letter and the spirit of the law before complying, and do our best to notify the subject named in any such requests to give them the opportunity to object.
"Like all law-abiding companies, we comply with U.S. laws and legal processes."
The fact that they are building both should be no surprise, especially to a typical /. user. Simply giving your servers a power backup doesn't negate the need for DR, and I see this as no different. Electrical power is a key infrastructure requirement, and I would certainly consider both steps necessary and needed. This is actually a fairly clever implementation. Although battery backups are common for Solar installations to the obvious drawbacks of relying on things like the sun, it makes good sense when the same uncertainties exists with their single power feed.
Has IBM responded to this? I can't imagine they don't recall what was said. I would be VERY interested in the response they come up with, and how they proceed once it's shown that they did indeed say wouldn't leverage those patents.
This summary is misleading. There is little need for more capacity given the current specs for HD and the current utilization on a typical BD movie. These disks will target storage, and the only people who would need to upgrade would be those that needed these higher density disks. It was known before the spec was certified that higher capacity media would be in the pipe. That was one of the strengths of BD-Rom; it had lots of room to grow.
From TFA: "In general, the two new formats will be geared toward broadcast and document archiving, both industries that need to record and store massive libraries of digital content. But consumer versions will be available, 'particularly in those regions where BD recorders have achieved broad consumer acceptance,' the BDA said."
I've tried to put IE7 on Windows 98. It was not possible to install it. Considering even XP needs Service Pack 2 to install IE7, I think your not being quite honest. Mozilla is irrelevant as it isn't an MS product. Ditto for Opera. If the vendor chooses to support a specific version of an OS then there is or isn't much MS could do about it either way. That said, even Mozilla has dropped support for Windows 98.
Apple isn't forcing you to run out and do anything. Your old version of Safari isn't going to stop working, and arguably, there is no requirement to go to Safari 4 that I'm aware of.
I'm assuming it isn't supported on older operating systems due to the conversion to 64 bit as well as the conversion to Intel from the PPC chips. 10.6 doesn't support PPC at all without some sort of emulation. There are probably very real reasons it doesn't install.
I believe the newest browser you can put on Windows 98 is IE5 or IE6. I went through that practice in a virtual machine. IE7 supports only XP and above.
Vendors on the MS side tend to support their 3rd party products longer. Browsers like Firefox, Opera, etc are 3rd party applications, not MS supported apps. You would be hard pressed to find any vendor that sent out software with Windows 98 software support listed in it's specs. Firefox no longer supports Windows 98 either.
Jaguar 10.2 was released 8 years ago. It is not unreasonable that it is no longer supported. They have replaced the processor architecture since then, switching from PPC to Intel. The same goes for 10.3, which was supported under PPC. At some point, it makes sense to drop support for a hardware platform that is no longer actively being produced.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
Considering Windows 98 doesn't even make the chart, would you spend time supporting it? What about Windows 2000? It has .6% of the population, which is a fraction of even Linux numbers.
Your argument sounds good on the surface, except for the fact that I don't know a single person who still uses 98, ME, or 2000 for that matter. Why would a company waste dollars supporting an infinitesimal population of hardware when an upgrade is only a few hundred dollars. Add to that, the popularity of laptop computers, which are prohibitively expensive to service. It's usually cheaper to replace them if you have any sort of failure outside of the 'disposable' components like HD's, Memory Sims, or optical drives.
Every business I have worked for in the last 15 years upgrades their PC hardware every 2-4 years. I'm betting most home users do the same but at twice those intervals (4-8 years), either due to desire, or component failure.
The business model would certainly work well for businesses, and also works well for home users. Mac users tend to have more disposable income. It certainly isn't hurting the Apple bottom line, and you get a leaner OS in the bargain.
In the end, the 3rd party vendor support is far more important than the OS itself. The oddest thing is that Apple is far more popular with the home user crowd even though the support model would seem to be more in line with business practices in regards to sunsetting old hardware. I can only assume the Mac users have more disposable income is a factor. Although I'm sure there are still PPC's out there still ticking along, the bulk have probably long since upgraded to an Intel Mac.
No technology can remove the need for a good disaster plan. Any person on /. should know this like the back of their hand.
A simple emergency plan for such cases would alleviate most if not all of those concerns. You will always have remote people that can't be reached in an emergency, but any beaches that are popular with the local population would be easily targeted by such plans. After all, they only have to worry about coastlines in such cases.
Notifying the local government first would be the correct course. The local government could then implement whatever emergency plan that may be, whether it's sirens which can be heard from a very far distance, flashing lights/flares, local notices via local communications net, or whatever is needed.
Wouldn't it be a little cheaper, and a bit more sure way to communicate with the locals if they just issued sat phones to the local government?
I'm having a harder time with his age, and his appearance. He's a bit overplucked. Time will tell (no pun intended) if he's up to snuff. I only recently became a fan of the show so I've only seen the last 3 Dr's. He just seemed a bit androgynous and uninteresting. Only speaking of first impressions though. Still waiting for the season opener here in the US. Does SyFy here in the U.S. still plan to air this series, or is it BBC only now? I thought I recalled seeing a date sometime mid march, but perhaps I misheard?
Why would you need USB for a keyboard? Do you like the wires? It does support the bluetooth profile for such. If you had taken 2 minutes to actually read about the product before blindly slamming it, you would make a better argument.
"Wireless
With built-in 802.11n, iPad takes advantage of the fastest Wi-Fi networks. It automatically locates available Wi-Fi networks, which you can join with a few taps. iPad also comes with Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, letting you connect to devices like wireless headphones or the Apple Wireless Keyboard."
http://www.apple.com/ipad/design/
The only problem with this is that only after the disease has matured in the host and taken time to have a noticeable detrimental affect on the immune system, it's a little late in the game. The virus itself can spend months or even years without bringing the immune system down that low. The entire time, the infected host would be able to spread the disease, all while assuming they were 'clean' if they are not properly educated about the exact metric this test uses.
Although this test might serve a simple function of finding people who have almost moved into full blow A.I.D.S, it does not do enough to detect the disease early enough and it does not remove the need for better testing. At most, it's just a general catch all for the very obvious cases (obvious by immune system function). If anything, this would give a false sense of security.
Why was this in court to begin with? I know that an individual can be slandered against, but an organization? I didn't know they had such rights.
Is there a lawyer in the house to explain?
Well putting flashblock at least stopped the cold lockups. I'm amazed that something actually took down my Mac like that. No keyboard input, no mouse, no nothing. Hard reboot. Amazing feature...
This 'feature' locks up my Mac cold when I view this via Chrome. I've never had a hard lock on this until today. I'm scrambling to addblock it.
Congratulations ./
You mean via the same mechanism where you type information into 'Bing', and then 'Bing' responds with your search results?
Most people don't type in 100 character URL's (I don't know of any) they either have it bookmarked, or they search for it via, you guess it, the search engine like Google, Bing, or whatnot.
To add to that, what is to stop a software vendor (MS) from simply gathering the information typed into ANY field in a browser. Whether they are in a combo field or not is irrelevant. What a ridiculous argument.
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent
"Europe
Main article: Software patents under the European Patent Convention
Within European Union member states, the EPO and other national patent offices have issued many patents for inventions involving software since the European Patent Convention (EPC) came into force in the late 1970s. Article 52 EPC excludes "programs for computers" from patentability (Art. 52(2)) to the extent that a patent application relates to a computer program "as such" (Art. 52(3)). This has been interpreted to mean that any invention which makes a non-obvious "technical contribution" or solves a "technical problem" in a non-obvious way is patentable even if that technical problem is solved by running a computer program.[12]
Computer-implemented inventions which only solve a business problem using a computer, rather than a technical problem, are considered unpatentable as lacking an inventive step (see T 258/03). Nevertheless, the fact that an invention is useful in business does not mean it is not patentable if it also solves a technical problem."
No one said anything about increasing pixel density. I'm said it was sufficient, meaning the display resolution is adequate for the display size. Just throwing a higher resolution display on it for the sake of some sales point, without at least maintaining the same pixel density is a waste of time.
Most computers have common PPI numbers in the 100-130 range. The iPhone currently has 161 or thereabouts. Cramming higher resolutions into such a tiny display is wasted effort IMO if you can't see the difference. The human eye loses the ability to see any gaps at fairly low PPI.
Here here. There is no need for Flash on a touch phone for starters (it just doesn't work), it kills the battery on pretty much any non-ac powered device, and HTML 5 looks far more promising to me.
As to the rumored phone features, I'm 'meh' about the higher resolution (pixel density is already good for that size screen) although it would make converting DVD's a bit easier as I wouldn't have to resize from the stock resolutions. The front facing camera will make self portraits a bit easier. I don't have any plans to utilize video chat. I never use it on my PC's, and I doubt I would ever use it on a phone.
Most of these selling points just seem like must haves just because someone thought they sounded like a good idea and not because they really add a 'must have' feature. I dont' know how much real world value they will bring but I'll reserve judgement until I see one. I also don't use any apps that require multi-tasking outside of the core apps, although I suppose listening to streaming radio might be a nice change from my own tunes at the gym. I think the only multi-tasking I would find handy is answering a text message without having to exit what I'm currently in. Happens at the gym fairly often. Minor inconvenience.
I'm also satisfied with the speed on the 3GS, so I don't know what the A4 will bring to the table. Possibly to better handle video chat? I suppose the only item of interest for me are the rumors of 4G support, and hopefully 'N' wireless.
I don't see any pressing need to replace any other Adobe tools as there is plenty of market competition in those areas (ie. Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, etc). Not so much with flash for specific implementations.
It does make a difference. In one scenario, they are asking people who do want to keep permanent copies of the content to buy them. In your preferred scenario, everyone pays for them (via higher fees), even if they don't want to buy them.
Agreed. Any CEO who claims he's not worried about his products future isn't a very good CEO. On the Video front, there is a very real possibility that Flash will be replaced, and rightly so. I don't care about flash games. Any smart phone worth it's weight will have apps to fill that void. It's the video I'm interested in.
Flash is annoying, and wasteful. Install flashblock and look at how many simple 'text' menus are now flash based. Why? Because developers are lazy. You can't tell me that a simple text tag doesn't work on any platform...
That is one opinion I strongly agree with. I believe that all content providers should be separate from the content delivery. There will always be a conflict of interest in such cases.
In the US for instance, media conglomerates own content delivery and providers, and they often combine them to the detriment of the consumer.
I can't say that I disagree with the BBC model of requiring public support in the form of a tax/fee, as it seems to give you much better quality than our somewhat equivalent PBS, but I have to agree that separating the content creators from the delivery is always a good decision to my way of thinking.
I think the change in attitudes happened with the switch to digital. Under the old analog copying systems, you could get a copy, but it was never very good. With the advent of digital, you can get an exact copy, and copy it an unlimited number of times.