If they are en- and decoded the same (from a software perspective) the signal coming from a 16-bit sound card should be identical to any other. The sound card doesn't do the decoding
That would depend on the quality of the componenets used in the Dell box. If they use the sort of cheap massmarket IC's used in most soundcards then, agreed, there ought to be no discernable increase in quality.
But, on the other hand, if they're serious about selling into the HiFi marketplace they will have to use 'audio quality' components, preferably all discrete components rather than IC's, no electrolytic capacitors, milspec tolerances, ideally wiring looms rather than PCB's. In particular they ought to either use highest quality DACs and/or provide a SPDIF (and i can't recall where the '/' goes) output so i can use my own DAC.
If they take this approach then they can get better output than a direct soundcard-amp connection - the PCM 'wav' output from the mp3 decoder should be identical, but the analog signal going to the amp could potentially be a whole lot better.
That's if you believe that Dell are doing this from a hifi perspective (which would require outsourcing or a lot of new facilities for just one product) rather than looking at a way to bundle a whole lot of stuff they already make into a new format for a different market. In which case, yup, should be no different from soundcard output, which we already have.
If the CIA 'developed' LSD, then I reckon Dr Robert Hoffman of Sandoz Labs in Switzerland might like to see you take the quotemarks off the word 'Innovate' when discussing M$
MS started out as only a OS company suckering many into developing for it. Then they decide to start releasing applications when consumers and businesses are already hooked.
No. Microsoft started as a Developer Tools / Language company (Altair BASIC onwards). They got into OS when IBM asked them to tender for a BASIC interpreter for their new PC product, and Gary Kildall of DR was arrogant enough to not have the common courtesy of turning up for his appointemnt to discuss OS's, letting Bill say 'oh yes of course we can do you an OS', which they then bought from a third party in what later became the standard MS way.
And when you look at the scripting, the VBA in every app and so forth, I sometimes wonder if they still see themselves as a devtools company.
Now as I was taught, the first description of something functionally equivalent to hypertext was "As We May Think" by Roosevelt's Science Advisor Vannevar Bush in 1945.
then there's Engelbart's "oNLine System" (NLS) first prototyped some time in the in 1960's.
When you add in Ted Nelson's first use of the term "hypertext" in print, in 1965 (Project Xanadu, the greatest piece of vaporware in history, and Tim Berners-Lee's self-confessed inspiration for enquire Within, which became the Web when it was adapted for WAN use), it gets even more doubtful.
Enquire Within was in use at CERN from 1980.
So it certainly can't be a patent on hyperlinking as such. Actually reading the patent it seems to be more of a patent on Use Of A Markup Language In Computer Networking. Which is definitely pushing it.
...searching for "the the" (most sites let you use quotes)...
unless, of course, 'the' is on their stoplist. As it is at altavista, northernlight, google, and amazon to name a few. Some handle stoplist words in quoted phrases reasonably, some just strip them out and look for the phrase that's left, not what you requested (which makes a librarian like me VERY cross). From The The's point of view, what seemed like a nice witty idea ten years ago now begins to look like career suicide:)
one should also keep in mind the lifespan of aircraft. I recently got my private pilots licence in Canada (an expensive hobby, but worth it, IMHO), and I did my training on a 1969 Cessna 172
Most of the original 1969 747's are still in service. No-one throws away something that costly if they can avoid it. And when i did my pilot training in the early 1980's we started out in 1947 De Havilland Chipmunks. If it's still flying, someone will still be flying it. So the rules on cellphones need to deal with anything from surviving DC3's to the most recent 'glass-cockpit, fly-by-wire' offerings from Airbus and Boeing.
Also, it's not a case of looking for proof that cellphones should be banned from aeroplanes: this is safety-critical-world, and what matters is demonstrable safety, not absence of demonstrable danger, if that makes sense.
Shouldn't they all be retro-fitted with RF-tolerant wiring and equipment?
This seems on the face of it a reasonable suggestion. Unfortunately, its precluded by the way large aircraft are constructed. It's not like a car where the chassis and bodywork are built first and then a wiring loom is installed. It's a lot more like a nervous system - to get at some of the cabling you would need to entirely dismantle the aircraft - take off the wings, remove the fuel tanks, tear out several structural bulkheads, that sort of thing.
There's another, far more pressing, reason to do this anyway - the insulation material used in the 60's and 70's is both prone to disintegration, and prone to causing sparks once it starts to disintegrate. It's been implicated in a number of in-air fires, and desperately needs fixing but for some obscure reason (yeah) the industry seems reluctant to deal with it.
Oh, and another reason the altitude becomes a problem is that cellphones tend to up their power if they can't handshake a base station. So if you're 35 kilofeet from the nearest base station the handset will be emitting at its absolute peak in a desperate attempt to make contact.
If it weren't for antitrust laws, you would now be paying five bucks a gallon for gas (like in England)
The reason we pay over 70 pence a litre is nothing to do with market forces and competition. It is a simple consequence of the fact that petrol incurs duty at about 65 pence a litre. There's plenty of competition but the margins are so tiny that the only way the petrol companies can offer discounts is on the lines of '1 p less per litre if you buy 20 litres or more'.
Also note that it's possible to have Regulated Monopolies. In the UK, in any given area there are effective monopolies on water, gas, electricity (not strict monopolies but huge legacy market shares), but these companies are limited by powerful Regulators who can for instance set the percentage of profits which must be reinvested in service improvements, the maximum annual price changes, and so on.
Shareholders made out like bandits after the breakup and the economy boomed
... for a decade after which just look what happened. This is not to validify monopolies, just to point out the incompleteness of this comment
apparently Bill Gates (again, unsure whther he has gone through a "real" company eg. Microsoft to do this) has purchased the broadcasting rights for English Premier League soccer. They used to be owned by Murdoch's Sky B (if I remember correctly).
According to Radio 5 Live (a BBC news/sport channel), it's a bid by NTL (cable company), the offer is around £40 billion over ten years, giving NTL rights to broadcast on demand from every match played. Gates owns 5% of NTL
it's still a bid though, the announcement isn't due for a while. Whoever gets it will have a license to print money, if Sky's record is anything to go by.
what the hell are you doing on an open source advocacy site?
This gets tedious. We're not. We're on a site that offers 'news for nerds. stuff that matters', whose constituency includes a large number of open source advocates, many of whose discussions concern open source and free software issues, and which uses open source software. Just because all elephants are gray, it doesn't mean anything gray is an elephant.
Factor in cost-of-living such as petrol, electricity, bandwidth, food, etc., and California doesn't look that bad at all.
It's just astonishing in the UK over the last few years. Or at least in the south-east. While whole cities in the north are withering away, just take a look at the figures in this BBC News item - >15% increase in a year nationally, >20% in London.
Then bear in mind that the average household income is nearer £30k IIRC. Conclusion - only people who already own a house have any chance in the housing market, and even then, don't think about moving southwards/eastwards.
I'm in Oxford. 2 bed flat in the nice bit, 1/4 million quid. But that was a month ago, so it's probably out of date by now.
Incidentally, if you're moving to London, forget petrol, you really don't want to drive around London, and the parking will haemorrhage money. Not that the Tube's not outrageous too, but it's a sight more convenient.
After all, what does the actions of one petty dictatorship in the back end of Europe really mean to us? Nothing, that's what. Who had ever heard of Serbia or Bosnia before the wars over there?
Which wars? I'll assume (because it will annoy you immensely) that you mean the Great War ('First World War') which arose from the assassination of the heir to a petty dictatorship ('the Habsburg empire') by a Serbian nationalist (Gavrilo Princip) in the capital of Bosnia (Sarajevo). The results included millions of deaths, the founding of the League of Nations, the tragically misjudged Treaty of Versailles, the collapse of the Tsars and the rise of Bolshevism in Russia, the second world war as a consequence of the bungling of the first, massive european immigration to the USA, the cold war between the USA and the USSR (see above under 'bolshevism'), the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Bay of Pigs (see above under 'cold war'), the wasting of (n.b. Sagan NEVER said it...) billions and billions of US tax dollars on a stupid arms race, McCarthyism,....
Let the rest of the world go down the toilet, it's none of our concern
Shamanic Wisdom 101: 'Everything is part of everything else'. You need people to trade with. You need a halfway habitable planet. Let's say Libya decides to nuke Israel, or vice versa. May be miles away, but the damage would be worldwide. No sunlight for a few months. No potable water. Crops dying, livestock dying. At some point you need to be involved, because regardless of your intentions you are involved.
When our grandfathers went to war, they were prepared to kill. But they were also prepared to die. What I find really hard to stomach is soldiers who are plenty happy to 'kill, kill, kill, burn women chidren and villages', but draw the line at the possibility of getting injured, let alone killed. War is a filthy business, and that's basically a good thing, IMHO
Imagine a world where Lawn Boy figured out a way to control a lawnmower engine so that it'd only mow a particular type of grass. Got St. Augustine in the front yard and Bermuda out back? Fine, just buy the St. Augustine lawnmower for the front yard and the Bermuda mower for the back. Lawn Boy would of course license the technology to every other lawn mower manufacturer, all of whom would be ecstatic to have such a sales-boosting technology at their disposal. Then, of course, they'd all get together and tell the government that people who tinker with their lawnmowers to disable the "Grass Security System" are just doing it because they want to kidnap children and use the modified mowers for terrorist acts and drug-related murders. As a society, we must stand up to the criminal element and outlaw illegal mower mutilation.
substitute "soya" for "grass" and "herbicide" for "lawnmower".
Now imagine a world in which a manufacturer had devised a way of making a particular strain of soya resistant to a particular herbicide
And that way, not only can't we watch DVD's in an unauthorised fashion, or mow one company's grass with another's mower. That way, the manufacturer of the herbicide can get a stranglehold on the whole agriculture game.
What if those "consumers" actually considered themselves as citizens, and, for example, got a law passed by the means of a referendum? Say, 60% of the citizens of a country vote "yes" to ban GM foods from their countries
Then, as the WTO stands at the moment, the country will be penalised, fines will be imposed, the country trying to export the GM will be entitled to punitive countermeasures, it's just crazy...
The WTO is about as profoundly antidemocratic an institution as money can buy. It's an abomination, no question, but until we're shot of it, all we can do is exploit the way it works. As a savagely rightwing prime minister of the UK once said, "you can't buck the market". And I for one would like to see her choke on those words.
What this means politically to the industry is a different matter entirely, everything we have seen with DeCSS and such shows that the movie industry is seeking to control video distribution formats, the existence of a loss-less digital out on domestic DVD player will further take control from them
..and since the hack wasn't done in the US, the MPAA can't use the US's DMCA to prevent its manufacture, sale and distribution everywhere but the USA. At which point, US consumers will have a very strong case that the organisation (MPAA) and/or the law (DMCA) are restricting their market freedoms to buy a quality product available to all other consumers worldwide. Similarly, US manufactureres will have a strong case for arguing restraint of trade and general commercial harm done by both the cartel and its recently purchased legislators.
The free trade regime could be very empowering if consumers knew how to use it. The great thing about the WTO rules is that they bind Governments, not companies or consumers. So for example the UK government can't ban a product (e.g. GM foods), but if UK consumers choose to boycott the retailers selling the products, and those retailers then choose to refuse to buy the products, the WTO has no way of involving itself.
And that's why things like DMCA will eventually fail, if we can only get the message across
A trial without a jury is not by definition unfair.
and indeed a trial with a jury is not by definition fair, either.
But one of the great strengths of the jury system is that it can allow some much valued flexibility. The jury's verdict is their own, and is binding. This is one of the ways junk laws get altered. Juries allow debugging of the legal system.
The most obvious examples have tended to be in cases with political overtones - here in the UK juries have refused to convict, despite unarguable factual evidence:
Civil servants breaking the Official Secrets Act to whistleblow on criminal activities by their departments
Protestors who vandalised a shipment of Hawk aircraft about to be sent to Indonesia for use in 'policing' East Timor
Women who finally snapped after decades of abuse and killed their husbands - since these jury decisions the laws have been changed so that other charges can be used instead of murder in these cases
In general, the whole point of a jury is that it is a jury 'of one's peers' - not selected because they are in any way specially qualified for the case, or rejected because they are specially disqualified (excepting direct vested interests)
I think not. The Internet is a public communications network, and as such public officials should be able to step in when the threat of it not being public anymore arises. Legally enforcing Open Standards on the Internet will lead to a set-it-and-forget-it solution to keeping the Internet open and free for all.
on the right lines, but you just fell into the old US-centric trap again.
The internet is an international communications network, and there are no international public officials - there's no appropriate jurisdiction. One country, no matter how extensive its technical and economic leadership, enforcing open standards on the internet will not lead to a set-it-and-forget-it solution to keeping the internet open and free for anyone. I only post this because of your emphasis on the word all
Minesweeper's for left-click, right-click, and both-click.
Solitaire's for double-click and drag-and-drop
Win3.11 gained Hearts to teach about networking.
I suppose Active Directory needs something based on the old [3 cups and one walnut, watch carefully as I shuffle the cups, can you tell which cup the walnut's under now] game.
How did Netscape make money? (I mean, before it was bought by AOL)
[...]
Maybe they'll be forced to sell IE. Maybe they just do a public offereing. More likely, they'll start selling web server software to support their IE product
Netscape used to make its money from the server software. Which was why they used to do so much 'embrace and extend' on the HTML standard. Which is part of why their browser share collapsed (obviously there are other reasons including MS including IE with Windows, and NS4 being a buggy piece of...)
But surely the whole thrust of the likely judgement suggests that the browser company wouldn't be allowed to do server software for, what was it, ten years from the judgement? Otherwise you might as well let the OS company write apps and the apps company write an OS.
And it would also be interesting to see what the judge considers to be browser, and what he considers OS. After all, you could argue that by including TCP/IP in Windows, MS destroyed the market for products like Trumpet Winsock (thankfully).
What happens if you own a TV and you don't pay the fee
thousand pound fine and (recently) your address on a billboard near you.
BUT: the detector vans have these highly directional aeriels to detect the equipment, and they're so badly maintained that if you ask to see the Calibration Records for the detector equipment, the case tends to fall down.
If you don't pay the fine, eventually prison. But you'd not get much sympathy from the majority of us who've paid up.
The Beeb is financed by taxes taken by force and violence from the pockets of UK citizens by the UK government.
The BBC is financed by a licence fee levied on each household operating TV receiving equipment in the UK. If you don't want to pay the licence fee, no-one's using 'force and violence' to extract the fee. TV is not an essential survival item. I've survived periods of several years without one. The licence fee comes to about 30 pence a day, and ensures that anyone with a TV is guaranteed a minimum amount of quality material. It also ensures that the commercial channels have a benchmark against which to compete on grounds of quality, rather than just profitability.
Incidentally, you probably compromise your ability to get your point across by your use of gratuitously confrontational language. The license fee is given to the TV licensing authority from the bank accounts of UK citizens. There's no force or violence involved, and the phrase 'from the pockets' is merely fanciful.
Slashdot Mirror
That would depend on the quality of the componenets used in the Dell box. If they use the sort of cheap massmarket IC's used in most soundcards then, agreed, there ought to be no discernable increase in quality.
But, on the other hand, if they're serious about selling into the HiFi marketplace they will have to use 'audio quality' components, preferably all discrete components rather than IC's, no electrolytic capacitors, milspec tolerances, ideally wiring looms rather than PCB's. In particular they ought to either use highest quality DACs and/or provide a SPDIF (and i can't recall where the '/' goes) output so i can use my own DAC.
If they take this approach then they can get better output than a direct soundcard-amp connection - the PCM 'wav' output from the mp3 decoder should be identical, but the analog signal going to the amp could potentially be a whole lot better.
That's if you believe that Dell are doing this from a hifi perspective (which would require outsourcing or a lot of new facilities for just one product) rather than looking at a way to bundle a whole lot of stuff they already make into a new format for a different market. In which case, yup, should be no different from soundcard output, which we already have.
TomV
If the CIA 'developed' LSD, then I reckon Dr Robert Hoffman of Sandoz Labs in Switzerland might like to see you take the quotemarks off the word 'Innovate' when discussing M$
TomV
No. Microsoft started as a Developer Tools / Language company (Altair BASIC onwards). They got into OS when IBM asked them to tender for a BASIC interpreter for their new PC product, and Gary Kildall of DR was arrogant enough to not have the common courtesy of turning up for his appointemnt to discuss OS's, letting Bill say 'oh yes of course we can do you an OS', which they then bought from a third party in what later became the standard MS way.
And when you look at the scripting, the VBA in every app and so forth, I sometimes wonder if they still see themselves as a devtools company.
TomV
then there's Engelbart's "oNLine System" (NLS) first prototyped some time in the in 1960's.
When you add in Ted Nelson's first use of the term "hypertext" in print, in 1965 (Project Xanadu, the greatest piece of vaporware in history, and Tim Berners-Lee's self-confessed inspiration for enquire Within, which became the Web when it was adapted for WAN use), it gets even more doubtful.
Enquire Within was in use at CERN from 1980.
So it certainly can't be a patent on hyperlinking as such. Actually reading the patent it seems to be more of a patent on Use Of A Markup Language In Computer Networking. Which is definitely pushing it.
TomV
unless, of course, 'the' is on their stoplist. As it is at altavista, northernlight, google, and amazon to name a few. Some handle stoplist words in quoted phrases reasonably, some just strip them out and look for the phrase that's left, not what you requested (which makes a librarian like me VERY cross). From The The's point of view, what seemed like a nice witty idea ten years ago now begins to look like career suicide :)
TomV
It's already unsearchable on a lot of sites. Can you see a little snag?
TomV
TomV
Most of the original 1969 747's are still in service. No-one throws away something that costly if they can avoid it. And when i did my pilot training in the early 1980's we started out in 1947 De Havilland Chipmunks. If it's still flying, someone will still be flying it. So the rules on cellphones need to deal with anything from surviving DC3's to the most recent 'glass-cockpit, fly-by-wire' offerings from Airbus and Boeing.
Also, it's not a case of looking for proof that cellphones should be banned from aeroplanes: this is safety-critical-world, and what matters is demonstrable safety, not absence of demonstrable danger, if that makes sense.
TomV
This seems on the face of it a reasonable suggestion. Unfortunately, its precluded by the way large aircraft are constructed. It's not like a car where the chassis and bodywork are built first and then a wiring loom is installed. It's a lot more like a nervous system - to get at some of the cabling you would need to entirely dismantle the aircraft - take off the wings, remove the fuel tanks, tear out several structural bulkheads, that sort of thing.
There's another, far more pressing, reason to do this anyway - the insulation material used in the 60's and 70's is both prone to disintegration, and prone to causing sparks once it starts to disintegrate. It's been implicated in a number of in-air fires, and desperately needs fixing but for some obscure reason (yeah) the industry seems reluctant to deal with it.
Oh, and another reason the altitude becomes a problem is that cellphones tend to up their power if they can't handshake a base station. So if you're 35 kilofeet from the nearest base station the handset will be emitting at its absolute peak in a desperate attempt to make contact.
TomV
and here's where they've hidden it. Aren't they sneaky? I only found it because I've got 2 PhD's and Bill's home phone number.
TomV
The reason we pay over 70 pence a litre is nothing to do with market forces and competition. It is a simple consequence of the fact that petrol incurs duty at about 65 pence a litre. There's plenty of competition but the margins are so tiny that the only way the petrol companies can offer discounts is on the lines of '1 p less per litre if you buy 20 litres or more'.
Also note that it's possible to have Regulated Monopolies. In the UK, in any given area there are effective monopolies on water, gas, electricity (not strict monopolies but huge legacy market shares), but these companies are limited by powerful Regulators who can for instance set the percentage of profits which must be reinvested in service improvements, the maximum annual price changes, and so on.
Shareholders made out like bandits after the breakup and the economy boomed
TomV
According to Radio 5 Live (a BBC news/sport channel), it's a bid by NTL (cable company), the offer is around £40 billion over ten years, giving NTL rights to broadcast on demand from every match played. Gates owns 5% of NTL
it's still a bid though, the announcement isn't due for a while. Whoever gets it will have a license to print money, if Sky's record is anything to go by.
TomV
This gets tedious. We're not. We're on a site that offers 'news for nerds. stuff that matters', whose constituency includes a large number of open source advocates, many of whose discussions concern open source and free software issues, and which uses open source software. Just because all elephants are gray, it doesn't mean anything gray is an elephant.
TomV
It's just astonishing in the UK over the last few years. Or at least in the south-east. While whole cities in the north are withering away, just take a look at the figures in this BBC News item - >15% increase in a year nationally, >20% in London.
Then bear in mind that the average household income is nearer £30k IIRC. Conclusion - only people who already own a house have any chance in the housing market, and even then, don't think about moving southwards/eastwards.
I'm in Oxford. 2 bed flat in the nice bit, 1/4 million quid. But that was a month ago, so it's probably out of date by now.
Incidentally, if you're moving to London, forget petrol, you really don't want to drive around London, and the parking will haemorrhage money. Not that the Tube's not outrageous too, but it's a sight more convenient.
TomV
Which wars? I'll assume (because it will annoy you immensely) that you mean the Great War ('First World War') which arose from the assassination of the heir to a petty dictatorship ('the Habsburg empire') by a Serbian nationalist (Gavrilo Princip) in the capital of Bosnia (Sarajevo). The results included millions of deaths, the founding of the League of Nations, the tragically misjudged Treaty of Versailles, the collapse of the Tsars and the rise of Bolshevism in Russia, the second world war as a consequence of the bungling of the first, massive european immigration to the USA, the cold war between the USA and the USSR (see above under 'bolshevism'), the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Bay of Pigs (see above under 'cold war'), the wasting of (n.b. Sagan NEVER said it...) billions and billions of US tax dollars on a stupid arms race, McCarthyism, ....
Let the rest of the world go down the toilet, it's none of our concern
Shamanic Wisdom 101: 'Everything is part of everything else'. You need people to trade with. You need a halfway habitable planet. Let's say Libya decides to nuke Israel, or vice versa. May be miles away, but the damage would be worldwide. No sunlight for a few months. No potable water. Crops dying, livestock dying. At some point you need to be involved, because regardless of your intentions you are involved.
When our grandfathers went to war, they were prepared to kill. But they were also prepared to die. What I find really hard to stomach is soldiers who are plenty happy to 'kill, kill, kill, burn women chidren and villages', but draw the line at the possibility of getting injured, let alone killed. War is a filthy business, and that's basically a good thing, IMHO
TomV
substitute "soya" for "grass" and "herbicide" for "lawnmower".
Now imagine a world in which a manufacturer had devised a way of making a particular strain of soya resistant to a particular herbicide
And that way, not only can't we watch DVD's in an unauthorised fashion, or mow one company's grass with another's mower. That way, the manufacturer of the herbicide can get a stranglehold on the whole agriculture game.
Nice planet we're heading for, isn't it?
TomV
Then, as the WTO stands at the moment, the country will be penalised, fines will be imposed, the country trying to export the GM will be entitled to punitive countermeasures, it's just crazy...
The WTO is about as profoundly antidemocratic an institution as money can buy. It's an abomination, no question, but until we're shot of it, all we can do is exploit the way it works. As a savagely rightwing prime minister of the UK once said, "you can't buck the market". And I for one would like to see her choke on those words.
TomV
from the article:
Darned right there isn't.
BTW, does that mean we've got 'freedeom to innovate' over here ;) ?
TomV
The free trade regime could be very empowering if consumers knew how to use it. The great thing about the WTO rules is that they bind Governments, not companies or consumers. So for example the UK government can't ban a product (e.g. GM foods), but if UK consumers choose to boycott the retailers selling the products, and those retailers then choose to refuse to buy the products, the WTO has no way of involving itself.
And that's why things like DMCA will eventually fail, if we can only get the message across
TomV
and indeed a trial with a jury is not by definition fair, either.
But one of the great strengths of the jury system is that it can allow some much valued flexibility. The jury's verdict is their own, and is binding. This is one of the ways junk laws get altered. Juries allow debugging of the legal system.
The most obvious examples have tended to be in cases with political overtones - here in the UK juries have refused to convict, despite unarguable factual evidence:
- Civil servants breaking the Official Secrets Act to whistleblow on criminal activities by their departments
- Protestors who vandalised a shipment of Hawk aircraft about to be sent to Indonesia for use in 'policing' East Timor
- Women who finally snapped after decades of abuse and killed their husbands - since these jury decisions the laws have been changed so that other charges can be used instead of murder in these cases
In general, the whole point of a jury is that it is a jury 'of one's peers' - not selected because they are in any way specially qualified for the case, or rejected because they are specially disqualified (excepting direct vested interests)TomV
on the right lines, but you just fell into the old US-centric trap again.
The internet is an international communications network, and there are no international public officials - there's no appropriate jurisdiction. One country, no matter how extensive its technical and economic leadership, enforcing open standards on the internet will not lead to a set-it-and-forget-it solution to keeping the internet open and free for anyone. I only post this because of your emphasis on the word all
TomV
Minesweeper's for left-click, right-click, and both-click.
Solitaire's for double-click and drag-and-drop
Win3.11 gained Hearts to teach about networking.
I suppose Active Directory needs something based on the old [3 cups and one walnut, watch carefully as I shuffle the cups, can you tell which cup the walnut's under now] game.
TomV
[...]
Maybe they'll be forced to sell IE. Maybe they just do a public offereing. More likely, they'll start selling web server software to support their IE product
Netscape used to make its money from the server software. Which was why they used to do so much 'embrace and extend' on the HTML standard. Which is part of why their browser share collapsed (obviously there are other reasons including MS including IE with Windows, and NS4 being a buggy piece of...)
But surely the whole thrust of the likely judgement suggests that the browser company wouldn't be allowed to do server software for, what was it, ten years from the judgement? Otherwise you might as well let the OS company write apps and the apps company write an OS.
And it would also be interesting to see what the judge considers to be browser, and what he considers OS. After all, you could argue that by including TCP/IP in Windows, MS destroyed the market for products like Trumpet Winsock (thankfully).
TomV
thousand pound fine and (recently) your address on a billboard near you.
BUT: the detector vans have these highly directional aeriels to detect the equipment, and they're so badly maintained that if you ask to see the Calibration Records for the detector equipment, the case tends to fall down.
If you don't pay the fine, eventually prison. But you'd not get much sympathy from the majority of us who've paid up.
TomV
The BBC is financed by a licence fee levied on each household operating TV receiving equipment in the UK. If you don't want to pay the licence fee, no-one's using 'force and violence' to extract the fee. TV is not an essential survival item. I've survived periods of several years without one. The licence fee comes to about 30 pence a day, and ensures that anyone with a TV is guaranteed a minimum amount of quality material. It also ensures that the commercial channels have a benchmark against which to compete on grounds of quality, rather than just profitability.
Incidentally, you probably compromise your ability to get your point across by your use of gratuitously confrontational language. The license fee is given to the TV licensing authority from the bank accounts of UK citizens. There's no force or violence involved, and the phrase 'from the pockets' is merely fanciful.
TomV