Courts interpretations might be -- litigated?
on
LGPL is Viral for Java
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Has the GPL or the LGPL ever been litigated? With the opportunity for interpretation being what it is, you would think someone would push the envelope and wind up in court. Have they?
I don't think this apparently contradictory two-tier sales technique is all that uncommon. Tier I, the main company, wants big bucks for their product, and the marginal utility is far greater for the deluxe version which is quite expensive.
However, the utility of the basic version is much lower but the marginal cost compared to a competitor's product is quite high.
The Tier II sales people get you to buy the basic product with the promise that for a few extra dollars you will be able to cheat and enjoy the increased marginal utility of the deluxe product without having to actually pay for it.
The reality is that the "cheats" are long-term ineffective, eliminating most of the gain but without erasing the otherwise high costs of purchase and service for the basic product.
It's possible for Tier I to quietly tolerate this as it leads to higher sales of the high-margin equipment and the basic fee rates. Tier II doesn't care because they make their money and then some selling the initial product and the cheats.
The only person who loses is the mark who bought the sales pitch in the first place.
I found this to be true as well, at least when I did my last comparison. The + media was unreadable by anything other than the Sony DRU500 drive I had. I think the -RW media was just about as bad with the exception of one drive. Although the caveat is that almost all of the DVD ROM drives I tried it in were about 16 to 18 months old.
The -R media worked pretty much everywhere. A colleague who uses a Pioneer DVD deck (vcr-like device that can write DVDs) says the same about -R and -RW media in DVD players.
I presume that all of this will not matter in two years when the dual-format drives are the only things made.
What I want to know is why do the devices have copy protection at all? You're just recording stuff off of the cable channels which presumably you've paid for. People record shows to VHS tapes all the time and even *gasp* share them among friends who may have missed an episode here or there. Why is the fact that it records to a hard drive any different? If these companies had any marketing brains they'd put DVD burners in them to let you save shows to DVD or SVCD format to trade with your friends or to archive for your collection.
I think the long-term goal is a universal pay-per-use system, where every "consumption" of a unit of entertainment requires payment of a fee.
Remember the commercial "DIVX" DVD-like format that "sold" you a disc for $5 that was only watchable for 24 hours or something, and each subsequent watching required a payment (via dialup from the player)?
This is probably their hope for future earnings growth, as they likely see each viewing of something as a lost revenue. And when you're re-watching something, you're not buying new material, either. Piracy is just a red flag they use to justify it all.
Walter Library at my alma mater, the University of Minnesota, was a big old, unrenovated building with a huge "stacks" area in the back where many of the books were. These stacks were a series of floors of about 7' in height filled with bookshelves and small, out-of-the-way study areas.
The stacks weren't well-traveled and you could get yourself into some nooks and crannies where you could hang out and not see a soul for hours (or even days I'd wager).
Well, needless to say, it was trivial to bring booze into the stacks for a little post-study cocktail, and since the windows actually opened, even a few pulls from a pinch-hitter was pretty easily done as well. My girlfriend and I even discovered that even a quickie wasn't out of the question they were so abandoned.
So not only can you enjoy the library, you can enjoy some of college life's distractions *in* the library!
Long story short, something is seriously stinking about those numbers. They defy common sense and just don't mesh at all with current market conditions.
I think this is the biggest stumbling block for any PC-based PVR device. Tivo has its codec integrated into the CPU silicon (IIRC).
I have been really unimpressed with the lack of quality and flexibilty of PC TV tuner cards. Almost always the TV tuner and video capabilities of these cards are limited, from the quantity and type of inputs and outputs, to the quality, to the need for the data to be worked on by the CPU too often.
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: Mozilla is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Mozilla community when IDC confirmed that Mozilla market share has dropped yet again. Now it is down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all browsers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Mozilla has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Mozilla is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Mozilla's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Mozilla faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Mozilla because Mozilla is dying. Things are looking very bad for Mozilla. As many of us are already aware, Mozilla continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Netscape is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Netscape developers only serves to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Netscape is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Due to the troubles of AOL, abysmal sales and so on, Netscape went out of business and was taken over by AOL who sell another troubled service. Now AOL is also nearly dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Mozilla has steadily declined in market share. Mozilla is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Mozilla is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Mozilla continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Mozilla is dead.
Fact: Mozilla is dying
(With apologies to the original *BSD is dying troll).
That's the new reality. It's half. Whatever you were getting before or thought you deserved before, it's now half. And it's not ever getting any better than that.
Guys making $100k? Try $50k. Making $60k? It's $30k. It's half.
Had a 2 BR apartment? Enjoy 1BR. Had a 1BR? It's studio time for you. It's half.
Had a BMW? Enjoy your Civic. Had a Civic? I've got a use Kia or a bus pass. It's half.
I don't like it anymore than you do, but I'm afraid it IS the new economic reality.
We've decided that the enemy is the guy sending a mail message to my inbox, which is exactly the wrong enemy, and the hardest to catch for all the reasons EU officials think it won't work (overseas mailers, hijacked systems, etc).
The enemy is the person operating an ongoing fraudulent enterprise which motivates the guy sending the mail to do that. This is also the EASIEST person to catch, since they have to get paid somehow and the money CAN be followed.
If governments were willing to actually police the fraud, the market for spam-senders would shrink dramatically.
What mystifies me is why they're not willing to do this. Is it some BS gung-ho pro-sales "caveat emptor" mentality? I find this hard to believe, since I don't think any of the products I've seen turn up in ~/mail/bogofiltered are even remotely legitimate -- quack potions, stock and money schemes, 419 scams, et al. We're not talking about laundry soap that really doesn't get my whites their whitest, we're talking about products that are prima faciae nonfunctional.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised about this, though, since at least the US government doesn't really care about fraud generally. How long have we been putting up with slamming and cramming? Has anyone gone to jail, or just "admitted no wrongdoing and paid a small fine"? Shit, even the number of culpable execs who deliberately and systematically lied and lined their own pockets on Wall Street who actually will end up in jail is probably countable on my two hands.
Overall I think if the government actually was interested in prosecuting the fraudulent practices and business contained in spam, spam itself would have a serious dent in it.
Instead, they do nothing, letting the spam problem get so far out of hand that the only thing left is to implement heavy regulation of email -- why do I seem to see John Ashcroft smirking in the corner during the otherwise laughable keystone-cops debates on spam?
In other news, scientists from the English speaking world are concerned about the increasing rarity of regsitered trademark symbols. Overharvesting for use in press releases and other marketing mediums is considered a prime cause of this shortage.
The MP3s from CD are of a higher audio quality than the original vinyl, so you are not getting substantially the same product when you download them, but rather a superior one. You have to pay for that.
The CD is only substantially different if special effort has been made to enhance the original recordings. However, if the material has only been remastered to the extent necessary to do compact disc manufacturing, then I would argue that it is *not* substantially different than the vinyl version.
For example, I have two velvet Underground "Loaded" CDs. One is identical to the LP (which I also own) and has no special mastering of enhancements I'm aware of. Same track list, same tracks; in my opinon someone took the "final mix master" and used it as the source material for both the LP and the CD.
I also own, though, "Fully Loaded", which claims to have been completely remastered from the best available master tapes. This album also includes alternate takes and other material, which would make it substantially different than the original LP. Extra effort was taken to find better masters and spent remastering to ensure the best fidelity.
Even if the RIAA claims that any generic CD has been "remastered" to make it better than the LP, I honestly wonder how much "extra" effort it REALLY took above and beyond what was necessary to provide inputs for the CD manufacturing process. I'm guessing that making a CD always requires steps A, B, and C and that the effort required to remaster an LP to CD involves those same steps; it's not EXTRA work, it's the SAME work that just happens to involve dynamics/noise or other processing that makes it "sound better"; it's a coincidental improvement that comes from making ANY CD and it's disingenuous to consider it "special remastering".
Not that I'm advocating it, but I'm surprised there haven't been more episodes of vigilante justice in the spirit of HBO's Tony Soprano.
I'd wager that if enough of these guys got their hands smashed, their cars torched or their apartments trashed, they'd start thinking about a different career.
My feeling is that the main difference between FreeBSD and Linux distros is that FreeBSD is a complete *system*. Linux too often feels like a GUI glued onto an operating environment that itself is a kernel glued onto a bunch of utilities.
FreeBSD seems like somebody paid more attention to the components, and a good number are unique to FreeBSD and not GNU parts. Even the contrib aspects of FreeBSD (gcc, sendmail, etc) are well integrated and not just bolted on.
I am suprised AIX didn't show up in the top five I must admit
Are there hosting providers using AIX in their hosting environments? I would think that RS6000s would be just too expensive in comparison to blades or generic 1 or 2U x86s for hosting environments.
I'm sure there's some popularity in ASP environments where you're providing an entire application (interface, DB, logic, etc), but for basic hosting it sounds like it'd be unaffordable to use RS6000.
Either that site's selection criteria are too vague or the candidates really are all the same. I ran through it and my top 6 matches (all > 80%) were:
Kerry, Kucinich, Gephardt, Lieberman, Bush and Libertarian Candidate.
Since I don't believe that Gephardt, Bush and Libertarians are anywhere near within 6% of each other on any set of issues, I can only presume that the selectsmart analysis criteria are just too small to be meaningful.
One of many things that drove me to FreeBSD from Linux was binary packages, specifically RPMs. I built enough stuff from tarballs by hand to know that outside of a few smaller sysutils, many things have a ton of compile-time configurables that aren't modifiable at run-time, such as config file locations, logging options and other sundries, not the least of which might be compiler optimizations, linking options and other things.
Mostly you have no idea what options the binary package builder chose. Some could be stupid, some could be 100% opposite of what you actually want. I always wished there had been a rpm --build-option that would have printed out a summary of the options chosen by the person building the package.
I eventually just took to unpacking SRPMs and building stuff myself, but even that became tedious.
AFIAC it's another bit in FreeBSD ports' favor. I can make extract, check out the build options tweak them and then install the application; a good combination between building it by hand from tarballs (and hoping autoconf or something works right) and accepting a binary that may have been built by someone like me...
I'd almost buy that except that the sound quality of the other parties was very good.
I'd expect a pretty harsh high-pass filter and/or timeslew effects from the effective loss of 50% of bandwidth.
My memory is hazy, but at this moment I'm thinking that the effect happened most commonly when picking up the phone. I wonder if there wasn't some switching problem which caused a line selector to grab an in-use circuit instead of an unused one.
Your explanation would make more sense if it happened exclusively in-call.
I've been hearing about (and see more and more on sale) CO2 based mosquito traps that are supposed to actually be effective at controlling mosquitos.
They burn propane to generate CO2, which is supposed to be a significant attractant of mosquitos. When the bugs get close, they get sucked in by a vacuum into a bag.
A recent newspaper story about this said that there had been some studies overseas (er, outside the US) that showed some effectiveness of this and a lot of reliable anecdotel evidence that they worked.
AFAIC nothing works better than staying indoors, long pants and DEET (although not necessarily in that combination).
We used to frequently have this kind of "crossed wires" occurance at my parents house. Sometimes we could converse with the people on the other end, sometimes we could just hear them, sometimes we could only hear one party.
When I moved back home (to the parents' basement, no less) during college, I called the phone company to get the service on the second line reconnected. I reconnected the phone immediately to the jack and picked it up, surprised to find that I had a dialtone already. As it turns out, the pairs carrying the old second line to the neighborhood had been re-used for a second line elsewhere in the neighborhood and the tech that did it just neglected to disconnect our drop from those pairs.
I've never gotten a good explanation for the crossed-wires syndrome, though. This happened to us at least as late as the mid-1980s. I would have presumed that metropolitan switching in Minneapolis would have been all-electronic at that point in time. I can only imagine water spilling into junction points or something.
These books should also come with a political section. At least once a month I get queries (often thinly-veiled demands from more senior executives) to make some network application "work through the firewall", when the applications in question are programs running on desktops or a milieu of non-business related functions (including one guy who wanted to run a game server "only over lunch").
From a technical perspective it's trivial to deny these requests, but from a political perspective it can get more challenging, particularly when the application has some kind of business application but needs either particular security scrutiny that hinders "ease of use" or is just a plain bad idea (ie, anonymous writable ftp site inside of a firewall).
Explaining the security implications in terms that non-technical users can understand is often impossible, particularly when the users are pre-convinced you just want to be a BOFH; they seem to only hear "blahblah you're stupid, blahblah I'm the boss and you can't have it".
Some, of course, are better than others and we're able to implement what they want to do in a way that satisfies security and functionality, but too often it just turns into political football.
It seems that PDAs are in two camps. The original Palm philsophy of "simple-is-better" and the "full-fledged computer" camp, where complete OS functionality and compatibility is desired.
Plus, "it runs Linux" and we all know how important *that* is...
Slashdot Mirror
And I would have thought it was toothpaste...
Has the GPL or the LGPL ever been litigated? With the opportunity for interpretation being what it is, you would think someone would push the envelope and wind up in court. Have they?
I don't think this apparently contradictory two-tier sales technique is all that uncommon. Tier I, the main company, wants big bucks for their product, and the marginal utility is far greater for the deluxe version which is quite expensive.
However, the utility of the basic version is much lower but the marginal cost compared to a competitor's product is quite high.
The Tier II sales people get you to buy the basic product with the promise that for a few extra dollars you will be able to cheat and enjoy the increased marginal utility of the deluxe product without having to actually pay for it.
The reality is that the "cheats" are long-term ineffective, eliminating most of the gain but without erasing the otherwise high costs of purchase and service for the basic product.
It's possible for Tier I to quietly tolerate this as it leads to higher sales of the high-margin equipment and the basic fee rates. Tier II doesn't care because they make their money and then some selling the initial product and the cheats.
The only person who loses is the mark who bought the sales pitch in the first place.
I found this to be true as well, at least when I did my last comparison. The + media was unreadable by anything other than the Sony DRU500 drive I had. I think the -RW media was just about as bad with the exception of one drive. Although the caveat is that almost all of the DVD ROM drives I tried it in were about 16 to 18 months old.
The -R media worked pretty much everywhere. A colleague who uses a Pioneer DVD deck (vcr-like device that can write DVDs) says the same about -R and -RW media in DVD players.
I presume that all of this will not matter in two years when the dual-format drives are the only things made.
What I want to know is why do the devices have copy protection at all? You're just recording stuff off of the cable channels which presumably you've paid for. People record shows to VHS tapes all the time and even *gasp* share them among friends who may have missed an episode here or there. Why is the fact that it records to a hard drive any different? If these companies had any marketing brains they'd put DVD burners in them to let you save shows to DVD or SVCD format to trade with your friends or to archive for your collection.
I think the long-term goal is a universal pay-per-use system, where every "consumption" of a unit of entertainment requires payment of a fee.
Remember the commercial "DIVX" DVD-like format that "sold" you a disc for $5 that was only watchable for 24 hours or something, and each subsequent watching required a payment (via dialup from the player)?
This is probably their hope for future earnings growth, as they likely see each viewing of something as a lost revenue. And when you're re-watching something, you're not buying new material, either. Piracy is just a red flag they use to justify it all.
Walter Library at my alma mater, the University of Minnesota, was a big old, unrenovated building with a huge "stacks" area in the back where many of the books were. These stacks were a series of floors of about 7' in height filled with bookshelves and small, out-of-the-way study areas.
The stacks weren't well-traveled and you could get yourself into some nooks and crannies where you could hang out and not see a soul for hours (or even days I'd wager).
Well, needless to say, it was trivial to bring booze into the stacks for a little post-study cocktail, and since the windows actually opened, even a few pulls from a pinch-hitter was pretty easily done as well. My girlfriend and I even discovered that even a quickie wasn't out of the question they were so abandoned.
So not only can you enjoy the library, you can enjoy some of college life's distractions *in* the library!
Long story short, something is seriously stinking about those numbers. They defy common sense and just don't mesh at all with current market conditions.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
Well of course -- I just s/*BSD/Mozilla/* from a "*BSD is dying" troll.
I was trying for +5 Funny, not +5 Informative...
I think this is the biggest stumbling block for any PC-based PVR device. Tivo has its codec integrated into the CPU silicon (IIRC).
I have been really unimpressed with the lack of quality and flexibilty of PC TV tuner cards. Almost always the TV tuner and video capabilities of these cards are limited, from the quantity and type of inputs and outputs, to the quality, to the need for the data to be worked on by the CPU too often.
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: Mozilla is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Mozilla community when IDC confirmed that Mozilla market share has dropped yet again. Now it is down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all browsers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Mozilla has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Mozilla is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Mozilla's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Mozilla faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Mozilla because Mozilla is dying. Things are looking very bad for Mozilla. As many of us are already aware, Mozilla continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Netscape is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Netscape developers only serves to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Netscape is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Due to the troubles of AOL, abysmal sales and so on, Netscape went out of business and was taken over by AOL who sell another troubled service. Now AOL is also nearly dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Mozilla has steadily declined in market share. Mozilla is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Mozilla is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Mozilla continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Mozilla is dead.
Fact: Mozilla is dying
(With apologies to the original *BSD is dying troll).
if you're trying to scale best-of-breed users to engage proactive content,
What does that clause mean?
Are you trying to make eugenically superior people even larger to do some task, or what?
That's the new reality. It's half. Whatever you were getting before or thought you deserved before, it's now half. And it's not ever getting any better than that.
Guys making $100k? Try $50k. Making $60k? It's $30k. It's half.
Had a 2 BR apartment? Enjoy 1BR. Had a 1BR? It's studio time for you. It's half.
Had a BMW? Enjoy your Civic. Had a Civic? I've got a use Kia or a bus pass. It's half.
I don't like it anymore than you do, but I'm afraid it IS the new economic reality.
We've decided that the enemy is the guy sending a mail message to my inbox, which is exactly the wrong enemy, and the hardest to catch for all the reasons EU officials think it won't work (overseas mailers, hijacked systems, etc).
The enemy is the person operating an ongoing fraudulent enterprise which motivates the guy sending the mail to do that. This is also the EASIEST person to catch, since they have to get paid somehow and the money CAN be followed.
If governments were willing to actually police the fraud, the market for spam-senders would shrink dramatically.
What mystifies me is why they're not willing to do this. Is it some BS gung-ho pro-sales "caveat emptor" mentality? I find this hard to believe, since I don't think any of the products I've seen turn up in ~/mail/bogofiltered are even remotely legitimate -- quack potions, stock and money schemes, 419 scams, et al. We're not talking about laundry soap that really doesn't get my whites their whitest, we're talking about products that are prima faciae nonfunctional.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised about this, though, since at least the US government doesn't really care about fraud generally. How long have we been putting up with slamming and cramming? Has anyone gone to jail, or just "admitted no wrongdoing and paid a small fine"? Shit, even the number of culpable execs who deliberately and systematically lied and lined their own pockets on Wall Street who actually will end up in jail is probably countable on my two hands.
Overall I think if the government actually was interested in prosecuting the fraudulent practices and business contained in spam, spam itself would have a serious dent in it.
Instead, they do nothing, letting the spam problem get so far out of hand that the only thing left is to implement heavy regulation of email -- why do I seem to see John Ashcroft smirking in the corner during the otherwise laughable keystone-cops debates on spam?
In other news, scientists from the English speaking world are concerned about the increasing rarity of regsitered trademark symbols. Overharvesting for use in press releases and other marketing mediums is considered a prime cause of this shortage.
The MP3s from CD are of a higher audio quality than the original vinyl, so you are not getting substantially the same product when you download them, but rather a superior one. You have to pay for that.
The CD is only substantially different if special effort has been made to enhance the original recordings. However, if the material has only been remastered to the extent necessary to do compact disc manufacturing, then I would argue that it is *not* substantially different than the vinyl version.
For example, I have two velvet Underground "Loaded" CDs. One is identical to the LP (which I also own) and has no special mastering of enhancements I'm aware of. Same track list, same tracks; in my opinon someone took the "final mix master" and used it as the source material for both the LP and the CD.
I also own, though, "Fully Loaded", which claims to have been completely remastered from the best available master tapes. This album also includes alternate takes and other material, which would make it substantially different than the original LP. Extra effort was taken to find better masters and spent remastering to ensure the best fidelity.
Even if the RIAA claims that any generic CD has been "remastered" to make it better than the LP, I honestly wonder how much "extra" effort it REALLY took above and beyond what was necessary to provide inputs for the CD manufacturing process. I'm guessing that making a CD always requires steps A, B, and C and that the effort required to remaster an LP to CD involves those same steps; it's not EXTRA work, it's the SAME work that just happens to involve dynamics/noise or other processing that makes it "sound better"; it's a coincidental improvement that comes from making ANY CD and it's disingenuous to consider it "special remastering".
Not that I'm advocating it, but I'm surprised there haven't been more episodes of vigilante justice in the spirit of HBO's Tony Soprano.
I'd wager that if enough of these guys got their hands smashed, their cars torched or their apartments trashed, they'd start thinking about a different career.
Or have I just been watching too much HBO?
My feeling is that the main difference between FreeBSD and Linux distros is that FreeBSD is a complete *system*. Linux too often feels like a GUI glued onto an operating environment that itself is a kernel glued onto a bunch of utilities.
FreeBSD seems like somebody paid more attention to the components, and a good number are unique to FreeBSD and not GNU parts. Even the contrib aspects of FreeBSD (gcc, sendmail, etc) are well integrated and not just bolted on.
I am suprised AIX didn't show up in the top five I must admit
Are there hosting providers using AIX in their hosting environments? I would think that RS6000s would be just too expensive in comparison to blades or generic 1 or 2U x86s for hosting environments.
I'm sure there's some popularity in ASP environments where you're providing an entire application (interface, DB, logic, etc), but for basic hosting it sounds like it'd be unaffordable to use RS6000.
Either that site's selection criteria are too vague or the candidates really are all the same. I ran through it and my top 6 matches (all > 80%) were:
Kerry, Kucinich, Gephardt, Lieberman, Bush and Libertarian Candidate.
Since I don't believe that Gephardt, Bush and Libertarians are anywhere near within 6% of each other on any set of issues, I can only presume that the selectsmart analysis criteria are just too small to be meaningful.
One of many things that drove me to FreeBSD from Linux was binary packages, specifically RPMs. I built enough stuff from tarballs by hand to know that outside of a few smaller sysutils, many things have a ton of compile-time configurables that aren't modifiable at run-time, such as config file locations, logging options and other sundries, not the least of which might be compiler optimizations, linking options and other things.
Mostly you have no idea what options the binary package builder chose. Some could be stupid, some could be 100% opposite of what you actually want. I always wished there had been a rpm --build-option that would have printed out a summary of the options chosen by the person building the package.
I eventually just took to unpacking SRPMs and building stuff myself, but even that became tedious.
AFIAC it's another bit in FreeBSD ports' favor. I can make extract, check out the build options tweak them and then install the application; a good combination between building it by hand from tarballs (and hoping autoconf or something works right) and accepting a binary that may have been built by someone like me...
I'd almost buy that except that the sound quality of the other parties was very good.
I'd expect a pretty harsh high-pass filter and/or timeslew effects from the effective loss of 50% of bandwidth.
My memory is hazy, but at this moment I'm thinking that the effect happened most commonly when picking up the phone. I wonder if there wasn't some switching problem which caused a line selector to grab an in-use circuit instead of an unused one.
Your explanation would make more sense if it happened exclusively in-call.
I've been hearing about (and see more and more on sale) CO2 based mosquito traps that are supposed to actually be effective at controlling mosquitos.
They burn propane to generate CO2, which is supposed to be a significant attractant of mosquitos. When the bugs get close, they get sucked in by a vacuum into a bag.
A recent newspaper story about this said that there had been some studies overseas (er, outside the US) that showed some effectiveness of this and a lot of reliable anecdotel evidence that they worked.
AFAIC nothing works better than staying indoors, long pants and DEET (although not necessarily in that combination).
We used to frequently have this kind of "crossed wires" occurance at my parents house. Sometimes we could converse with the people on the other end, sometimes we could just hear them, sometimes we could only hear one party.
When I moved back home (to the parents' basement, no less) during college, I called the phone company to get the service on the second line reconnected. I reconnected the phone immediately to the jack and picked it up, surprised to find that I had a dialtone already. As it turns out, the pairs carrying the old second line to the neighborhood had been re-used for a second line elsewhere in the neighborhood and the tech that did it just neglected to disconnect our drop from those pairs.
I've never gotten a good explanation for the crossed-wires syndrome, though. This happened to us at least as late as the mid-1980s. I would have presumed that metropolitan switching in Minneapolis would have been all-electronic at that point in time. I can only imagine water spilling into junction points or something.
Give me a break. Somebody gets paid for doing that kind of work, and a title like "Senior Analyst"?
These books should also come with a political section. At least once a month I get queries (often thinly-veiled demands from more senior executives) to make some network application "work through the firewall", when the applications in question are programs running on desktops or a milieu of non-business related functions (including one guy who wanted to run a game server "only over lunch").
From a technical perspective it's trivial to deny these requests, but from a political perspective it can get more challenging, particularly when the application has some kind of business application but needs either particular security scrutiny that hinders "ease of use" or is just a plain bad idea (ie, anonymous writable ftp site inside of a firewall).
Explaining the security implications in terms that non-technical users can understand is often impossible, particularly when the users are pre-convinced you just want to be a BOFH; they seem to only hear "blahblah you're stupid, blahblah I'm the boss and you can't have it".
Some, of course, are better than others and we're able to implement what they want to do in a way that satisfies security and functionality, but too often it just turns into political football.
It seems that PDAs are in two camps. The original Palm philsophy of "simple-is-better" and the "full-fledged computer" camp, where complete OS functionality and compatibility is desired.
Plus, "it runs Linux" and we all know how important *that* is...