Yes, copy protection will annoy a small fraction of legit customers. Tough. That's the price of doing business. Do security guards irritate people in shops?
Yes, they irritate me, and I think they irritate a LARGE fraction of legit "customers". I think the "small fraction" refuse to accept that it's just "tough" or "the price of doing business".
I've done the same sort of thing with my GPL Palm software, Contraction Timer. It isn't nagware or anything, but there's a request for donations in the About box.
I've made a little bit of money from it, mostly when I first released it, but an occasional trickle even today. Not enough to pay my bandwidth bills, but enough to get a few DVDs. Perhaps it just depends on your audience: maybe parents or pregnant people are more generous or honest than others.
Of course, I quickly gained a commercial competitor who released a crippled demo. His program was originally $20, but he dropped it to $10. Perhaps Contraction Timer was stealing his business. But I'm always bitterly suspicious that he made a lot more money than I did.
I never thought I would say this, let alone in a day-old discussion, but the parent (quoted below) really should be moderated up. This has got to be the best of all possible solutions.
Great idea although I'd tackle it without direct confrontation. Organise a student debate make sure both sides are well covered with a mixture of good debaters and the tech and arts students. Don't frame the debate as an attack but as a more general discussion. say "Is IP good for my creative health?"
Then Invite Mr Taylor as a prominate member of a organisation charged with protecting the IP of creative content creaters you would like to take advantage of his insight to moderate and critic the debate. If the debate has covered both sides well then you forfill the purpose of education, also the invited guest either has to acknowledge both sides or show an obvious bias, which prevents any indoctrination.
I know that the risk of that data being abused is very small This demonstrates an incomplete understanding of "privacy", a nebulous term to begin with. Daniel Solove's article was discussed here last week, I believe.
The risk of abuse varies depending on what you consider abuse. By many definitions, the government has already abused a great deal of personal data. And they're the ones that need to be watched most closely, because they're the ones with the power.
On the other hand, both hard drives and electromagnetic tape use tiny magnetic fields. So making this work is just a matter of coating the back with the same material we use for hard drives and setting the bits with a moving head (instead of a moving platter).
While that may not be practical (moving head, what am I thinking?), I did RTFA. The effect is caused by the opposing static and magnetic forces. So, if we can electrostatically increase the static charge on the particles, like we do in an LCD screen, then we can achieve the desired result.
And on the third hand, I sure hope this reflection is more like ink, and less like the reflective screen on a Gameboy Color.
I'm in the process of building an electric car, so I'm excited about this whole development, too. Of course, it won't be ready by the time I buy my batteries, but maybe in a few years I can swap them in. Of course, the way things are going, I'm more likely to go with NiMH.
Not only are they claiming substantially better power densities (that means the rate at which they provide energy, 3000W/kg, not the total energy storage), energy densities (2x over conventional Li-Ion) and charge times (5 minutes),
There are already other batteries (also using nanotech) that promise the kind of power output that EVs need. Energy density, though, is a two-edged sword: the more energy you can store, the farther you can go; but the longer you'll need to charge up. Which brings us to the charge time. I can already charge even lead-acid packs in 5 minutes (it's called dump charging). The trick is providing the entire quota of power, plus losses, in 5 minutes. And of course, the faster you charge, the greater your losses.
EVs use a LOT of power. We're not talking about 100-watt light bulbs here, folks; we're talking about 3,000 pounds of metal and flesh moving at expressway speeds for 30 minutes to an hour. The average power consumption of modern homebuilt EVs is around 250wh per mile. So drive 20 miles to work and you've just used up 5 kilowatt-hours. If you want to put that back in 5 minutes (1/12 of an hour), you'll need an electrical outlet capable of carrying 60kw plus losses. Good luck; let me know when your employer installs one for you, because mine sure won't.
they also claim to operate over a wider temperature range (-30 to + 60 C), have longer lifetimes and have greener (no heavy metals) and safer (less fire/explosion risk) chemistry . For hybrid cars the end result should be more energy captured by the regenerative braking systems, better cold weather performance, less battery weight, better gas mileage, no more battery swapping at 100,000 or so miles and, most important of all, better acceleration!
The temperature range is not that much better than existing LiIon solutions. And I'd really like to know how anyone can claim "the active materials in A123's technology are not combustible and do not release oxygen if exposed to high temperature or in the event of battery failure or mechanical abuse" when we're talking about lithium. Expose it to oxygen, watch it burn! And don't pour water on it: that's just providing oxidizer.
And the battery-swap at 100,000 miles is rapidly becoming a myth. The Toyota RAV4 EVs used NiMH packs that achieved 100 miles per charge, and were still above 80% capacity when the majority of them were turned in off lease. (Even Wikipedia has some information on that.)
So let's consider it from the point of view of Loki games. The companies involved were obviously willing to give up the source code, as long as they gave it to a company. I assume Loki paid for it, and expected to recoup their expenses in sales (which obviously didn't work out so well).
Perhaps we could do the same thing for drivers? Would you buy drivers from a Loki-like company, which provided only binaries, as long as they worked on Linux?
After all, I switched when I had everything else I needed under Windows. God knows I'm not in it for the desktop. Especially not when I have to deal with artsd.
I switched because I didn't want to deal with Windows viruses anymore, nor with undocumented incompatibilities. I knew Linux would support everything I used, since everything I used was Linux software ported to Windows. Once the decision to switch was made, the destination was obvious.
I really don't think we're ever going to get anyone to switch because we've got better software or better desktops. People only switch when they're forced to. Many IE users buy popup-blocking software, when all they have to do is switch to FireFox.
If you want people to switch to Linux, the best you can do (IMHO) is to provide the obvious destination, and wait for them to switch for their own reasons.
Ummm... in the Debian package lsb, this disclaimer exists (from your own link):
The intent of this package is to provide a best current practice way of installing and running LSB packages on Debian GNU/Linux. Its presence does not imply that we believe that Debian fully complies with the Linux Standard Base, and should not be construed as a statement that Debian is LSB-compliant.
So they support LSB, but they specifically say they're not LSB-compliant.
Too bad. I was already feeling superior with my sid installation.
Without Doom conceiving the multiplayer deathmatch, it could be radically touted that the PC today would be an abandoned platform insofar as gaming is concerned.
The multiplayer deathmatch credit bothers me. I know Doom was really popular, and I don't argue that it advanced the industry, and I can see where we might have fled to dedicated gaming hardware if not for some amazing game like Doom. But really... we were all doing multiplayer deathmatch in text mode with nSnipes shortly after the first networks were born. And Macs were running Bolo before Doom was ever around.
Couldn't agree with the parent more. I find math in almost everything I program. Even in straight design, you have to deal with complexity issues. Usability is the only thing I can think of that you might want to investigate.
Then again, with JavaBeans and a good visual IDE, you might manage to get some development done.
Actually, I'm building an EV right now. (You can check out my conversion diary at my website.) With big enough chargers, we can charge modern batteries quite quickly; one hour is enough to get 80% charge, and the other 20% can be obtained in two more hours. The two problems are the heat (you can boil/melt your battery pack) and the low current capacity of most wall outlets.
Still, I'd love to have these batteries. With their severe discharge capabilities, I could be breaking axles drag racing at NEDRA activities. Watch out, Wayland!
I thought so too. Then I bought a Zaurus. It was beautiful for carrying around browsing, documents, pictures, games... but lousy for actual PDA software. The Sharp stuff was too simplistic, and the Linux stuff wouldn't run my 5+ years of data in the limited resources.
It was so bad I started writing a calendar/todo application for it, but my wife bought me a Clie before I finished, then washed the Z. The market is so small I didn't have any other incentive to finish it.
Having worked with multiple CM systems, I can confidently say that ClearCase has been a dream. We even renamed 1/3 of our code base lately, and all we had to do was "cleartool mv ". Maybe you're thinking of an older version?
It is fast (4 - 10 times faster than TeamConnect), easy to understand, and even includes graphical tools for those who don't want to learn the command line.
I find the implementation to be elegant: they made the whole program a device driver, so it appears as a new drive. Only those with password access can do anything to the underlying database. Very cool.
While I can't say much about C++ on the PowerPC, I did just purchase a Sharp Zaurus ($200 refurb at TigerDirect, sometimes cheaper at other places). It can handle an install of gcc 2.95.1, so it would be capable of the coding you desire.
Really, the discussion is about building your own PVR; I'd mod you offtopic, but the metamoderators wouldn't really understand.
Some of us are reading the topic because we are more interested in not paying a "lifetime" fee to a company that might go under (I've already done that once), computing on our TVs, copying to DVD/CDROM, playing games, streaming Vorbis, and writing our own custom control scripts. We'd spend the extra $100 for those capabilities. Knowing that your proprietary box has only the TV capabilities for a slightly lower price isn't contributing to the discussion.
I got mine from TigerDirect on April 2. Pick 2-day shipping; it took almost a week to get here UPS Ground. No problems with it at all.
Unfortunately, the migration from Palm has been less than smooth so far. The default built-in applications lack certain features Palm applications do have. In particular, the to-do on the Zaurus won't allow you to attach a note, and the default apps don't let you see your to-do items and appointments at the same time.
Additionally, only the (crappy-looking) IntelliSync desktop will convert Palm data, and it doesn't convert your Memo notes.
I'm looking into OpenZaurus and the P2Z data translator. There's obviously a lot of work to be done in making PIM applications for the Z.
Okay, I'm a father of three girls, aged 8, 5, and 6 months (oh, what I'm in for). Everyone thinks they're perfect angels, except me. And it's too late for me to get modded up, so you know this is advice from the heart.
As far a the pregnancy goes, we went with natural births at a birth center. It was a lot less stressful than the hospital, as evidenced by my sister's experience. And I've written a nice Palm program to help you with the labor; just Google for Palm Contraction Timer.
There are two things to know about after the birth that no one will tell you: First, you will be become a pack mule. There's a lot of stuff to carry in those diaper bags. Second, very young kids can sleep through anything. Our first slept through Batman (the movie) at two days of age. We knocked down a wall in the same room as the second, and she never even rolled over.
Finally, breastfeeding and a family bed is a beautiful thing. The kids will eventually sleep in their own beds; meanwhile co-sleeping is extremely convenient, and sex can be had anywhere.
Okay, now for the hard part.
We made up jobs for everybody. The parents' job are, in order:
1) Keep kids safe. 2) Teach kids how to be a part of civilization. 3) Make kids happy.
The kids' jobs are, in order:
1) Hurt no one. 2) Obey parents. 3) Have fun.
Unfortunately, they learn almost exclusively by example. No matter what I say, they do what they've seen me (or whoever they're paying attention to at their age) do. Here are the things you'll want to do, so you know they'll be doing them, too:
1) Never interrupt anyone. 2) Take responsibility for your actions. 3) Don't make a big deal about other people's mistakes. 4) Do ensure that all mistakes are retified as much as possible. 5) Never, ever, under any circumstances, pretend that hurting somene is justified. 6) Use some consistent conflict resolution method. Actually use it yourself, even though it seems childish. 7) Actually look in your child's eyes while she speaks with you. Not only does it let them know you're listening, it gives the impression you're interested. And they'll look at you while you talk.
Actually, 7) was a trial with the youngest. I would squat down so I could watch her talk, and she would squat in front of me, emulating my posture. Funny, but occasionally counterproductive.
In conclusion, here are the most useful tools I have in my parenting toolbox:
"When you <x>, I feel <y>, because <z>."
"Can you please <x>? Will you please <x>? Thank you."
"Stop, I don't like that. <pause> If you don't stop, I'll tell Mom. <pause> <I tell Mom>."
And Natural Consequences: when something would be inconvenient, but not actually dangerous, I tell them what could happen. If they insist on doing it anyway, I warn them that I won't help them when the Natural Consequence of their actions occurs. Usually this is sufficient to stop them; if not, I let them suffer. They seldom insist on doing things they shouldn't, and when they do, it's because they've decided it's worth it.
Good luck. Enjoy her while she's a baby, cuz it gets tough later on. I'm looking forward to the teenage years with anticipation and fear.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, they irritate me, and I think they irritate a LARGE fraction of legit "customers". I think the "small fraction" refuse to accept that it's just "tough" or "the price of doing business".
Thanks to Michael Righi for testing if the "rights" of those businesses trump his Constitutional rights. He was on Slashdot not long ago, you remember: he was arrested for refusing to show his ID after refusing to be searched by the store manager.
Why not go leave him a donation to his legal fund for defending your rights?
I've done the same sort of thing with my GPL Palm software, Contraction Timer. It isn't nagware or anything, but there's a request for donations in the About box.
I've made a little bit of money from it, mostly when I first released it, but an occasional trickle even today. Not enough to pay my bandwidth bills, but enough to get a few DVDs. Perhaps it just depends on your audience: maybe parents or pregnant people are more generous or honest than others.
Of course, I quickly gained a commercial competitor who released a crippled demo. His program was originally $20, but he dropped it to $10. Perhaps Contraction Timer was stealing his business. But I'm always bitterly suspicious that he made a lot more money than I did.
Although you can still produce a lightshow with those energies. It's just an electrical one, not necessarily a combustible one.
:)
There's a reason he's nicknamed "Plasma Boy", after all.
The risk of abuse varies depending on what you consider abuse. By many definitions, the government has already abused a great deal of personal data. And they're the ones that need to be watched most closely, because they're the ones with the power.
Oh, my $DEITY. How did I miss a Niven reference? I apologize.
On the other hand, both hard drives and electromagnetic tape use tiny magnetic fields. So making this work is just a matter of coating the back with the same material we use for hard drives and setting the bits with a moving head (instead of a moving platter).
While that may not be practical (moving head, what am I thinking?), I did RTFA. The effect is caused by the opposing static and magnetic forces. So, if we can electrostatically increase the static charge on the particles, like we do in an LCD screen, then we can achieve the desired result.
And on the third hand, I sure hope this reflection is more like ink, and less like the reflective screen on a Gameboy Color.
Actually, when the words begin with vowels, it's assonance, not alliteration.
I apologize for the content of this post. It was a knee-jerk reaction.
EVs use a LOT of power. We're not talking about 100-watt light bulbs here, folks; we're talking about 3,000 pounds of metal and flesh moving at expressway speeds for 30 minutes to an hour. The average power consumption of modern homebuilt EVs is around 250wh per mile. So drive 20 miles to work and you've just used up 5 kilowatt-hours. If you want to put that back in 5 minutes (1/12 of an hour), you'll need an electrical outlet capable of carrying 60kw plus losses. Good luck; let me know when your employer installs one for you, because mine sure won't.
The temperature range is not that much better than existing LiIon solutions. And I'd really like to know how anyone can claim "the active materials in A123's technology are not combustible and do not release oxygen if exposed to high temperature or in the event of battery failure or mechanical abuse" when we're talking about lithium. Expose it to oxygen, watch it burn! And don't pour water on it: that's just providing oxidizer.And the battery-swap at 100,000 miles is rapidly becoming a myth. The Toyota RAV4 EVs used NiMH packs that achieved 100 miles per charge, and were still above 80% capacity when the majority of them were turned in off lease. (Even Wikipedia has some information on that.)
So let's consider it from the point of view of Loki games. The companies involved were obviously willing to give up the source code, as long as they gave it to a company. I assume Loki paid for it, and expected to recoup their expenses in sales (which obviously didn't work out so well).
Perhaps we could do the same thing for drivers? Would you buy drivers from a Loki-like company, which provided only binaries, as long as they worked on Linux?
Yeah, I think I would have switched.
After all, I switched when I had everything else I needed under Windows. God knows I'm not in it for the desktop. Especially not when I have to deal with artsd.
I switched because I didn't want to deal with Windows viruses anymore, nor with undocumented incompatibilities. I knew Linux would support everything I used, since everything I used was Linux software ported to Windows. Once the decision to switch was made, the destination was obvious.
I really don't think we're ever going to get anyone to switch because we've got better software or better desktops. People only switch when they're forced to. Many IE users buy popup-blocking software, when all they have to do is switch to FireFox.
If you want people to switch to Linux, the best you can do (IMHO) is to provide the obvious destination, and wait for them to switch for their own reasons.
I switched to Linux. If I had never tried OpenOffice and the Gimp, I would have stuck with Windows.
I'm still having sound problems, but other that, I'm happy. And it's because of the applications that ran on Windows.
And of course, their #1 "topsite" is porn. Like we didn't know what it would be used for.
No, I don't think I'm interested in listening to a bunch of space-hogging attention-whoring avatars while I surf, thanks.
The multiplayer deathmatch credit bothers me. I know Doom was really popular, and I don't argue that it advanced the industry, and I can see where we might have fled to dedicated gaming hardware if not for some amazing game like Doom. But really... we were all doing multiplayer deathmatch in text mode with nSnipes shortly after the first networks were born. And Macs were running Bolo before Doom was ever around.
Couldn't agree with the parent more. I find math in almost everything I program. Even in straight design, you have to deal with complexity issues. Usability is the only thing I can think of that you might want to investigate.
Then again, with JavaBeans and a good visual IDE, you might manage to get some development done.
That heavy discharge capacity is exactly what you want when you're drag racing an electric car. Check out NEDRA to see what I mean.
Still, I'd love to have these batteries. With their severe discharge capabilities, I could be breaking axles drag racing at NEDRA activities. Watch out, Wayland!
I thought so too. Then I bought a Zaurus. It was beautiful for carrying around browsing, documents, pictures, games... but lousy for actual PDA software. The Sharp stuff was too simplistic, and the Linux stuff wouldn't run my 5+ years of data in the limited resources.
It was so bad I started writing a calendar/todo application for it, but my wife bought me a Clie before I finished, then washed the Z. The market is so small I didn't have any other incentive to finish it.
Having worked with multiple CM systems, I can confidently say that ClearCase has been a dream. We even renamed 1/3 of our code base lately, and all we had to do was "cleartool mv ". Maybe you're thinking of an older version?
It is fast (4 - 10 times faster than TeamConnect), easy to understand, and even includes graphical tools for those who don't want to learn the command line.
I find the implementation to be elegant: they made the whole program a device driver, so it appears as a new drive. Only those with password access can do anything to the underlying database. Very cool.
While I can't say much about C++ on the PowerPC, I did just purchase a Sharp Zaurus ($200 refurb at TigerDirect, sometimes cheaper at other places). It can handle an install of gcc 2.95.1, so it would be capable of the coding you desire.
Now THAT is a cool idea. Sometimes you just wish everybody had the time to talk to everybody else. Or are you in a position to be heard on this topic?
So buy a Tivo, if you don't want to build one.
Really, the discussion is about building your own PVR; I'd mod you offtopic, but the metamoderators wouldn't really understand.
Some of us are reading the topic because we are more interested in not paying a "lifetime" fee to a company that might go under (I've already done that once), computing on our TVs, copying to DVD/CDROM, playing games, streaming Vorbis, and writing our own custom control scripts. We'd spend the extra $100 for those capabilities. Knowing that your proprietary box has only the TV capabilities for a slightly lower price isn't contributing to the discussion.
I got mine from TigerDirect on April 2. Pick 2-day shipping; it took almost a week to get here UPS Ground. No problems with it at all.
Unfortunately, the migration from Palm has been less than smooth so far. The default built-in applications lack certain features Palm applications do have. In particular, the to-do on the Zaurus won't allow you to attach a note, and the default apps don't let you see your to-do items and appointments at the same time.
Additionally, only the (crappy-looking) IntelliSync desktop will convert Palm data, and it doesn't convert your Memo notes.
I'm looking into OpenZaurus and the P2Z data translator. There's obviously a lot of work to be done in making PIM applications for the Z.
Okay, I'm a father of three girls, aged 8, 5, and 6 months (oh, what I'm in for). Everyone thinks they're perfect angels, except me. And it's too late for me to get modded up, so you know this is advice from the heart.
As far a the pregnancy goes, we went with natural births at a birth center. It was a lot less stressful than the hospital, as evidenced by my sister's experience. And I've written a nice Palm program to help you with the labor; just Google for Palm Contraction Timer.
There are two things to know about after the birth that no one will tell you: First, you will be become a pack mule. There's a lot of stuff to carry in those diaper bags. Second, very young kids can sleep through anything. Our first slept through Batman (the movie) at two days of age. We knocked down a wall in the same room as the second, and she never even rolled over.
Finally, breastfeeding and a family bed is a beautiful thing. The kids will eventually sleep in their own beds; meanwhile co-sleeping is extremely convenient, and sex can be had anywhere.
Okay, now for the hard part.
We made up jobs for everybody. The parents' job are, in order:
1) Keep kids safe.
2) Teach kids how to be a part of civilization.
3) Make kids happy.
The kids' jobs are, in order:
1) Hurt no one.
2) Obey parents.
3) Have fun.
Unfortunately, they learn almost exclusively by example. No matter what I say, they do what they've seen me (or whoever they're paying attention to at their age) do. Here are the things you'll want to do, so you know they'll be doing them, too:
1) Never interrupt anyone.
2) Take responsibility for your actions.
3) Don't make a big deal about other people's mistakes.
4) Do ensure that all mistakes are retified as much as possible.
5) Never, ever, under any circumstances, pretend that hurting somene is justified.
6) Use some consistent conflict resolution method. Actually use it yourself, even though it seems childish.
7) Actually look in your child's eyes while she speaks with you. Not only does it let them know you're listening, it gives the impression you're interested. And they'll look at you while you talk.
Actually, 7) was a trial with the youngest. I would squat down so I could watch her talk, and she would squat in front of me, emulating my posture. Funny, but occasionally counterproductive.
In conclusion, here are the most useful tools I have in my parenting toolbox:
"When you <x>, I feel <y>, because <z>."
"Can you please <x>? Will you please <x>? Thank you."
"Stop, I don't like that. <pause> If you don't stop, I'll tell Mom. <pause> <I tell Mom>."
And Natural Consequences: when something would be inconvenient, but not actually dangerous, I tell them what could happen. If they insist on doing it anyway, I warn them that I won't help them when the Natural Consequence of their actions occurs. Usually this is sufficient to stop them; if not, I let them suffer. They seldom insist on doing things they shouldn't, and when they do, it's because they've decided it's worth it.
Good luck. Enjoy her while she's a baby, cuz it gets tough later on. I'm looking forward to the teenage years with anticipation and fear.
Judebert