Hopefully this will be friendly, but people have to respect intellectual property.
To that I say, Hopefully, this will be friendly, but Creative has to respect the idea that a patent based on the idea of pushing a button to navigate a hierarchy on a display and the idea that this can be considered to be anybody's property, intellectual or otherwise, is total bullshit.
You call me, or write, and I'll likely be able to explain anything about touchscreens and/or point of sale that you feel you need to know. I can stand yet another Slashdot 'article' and comments featuring end-to-end ignorance and frustration about touchscreens, GUI's and vertical market software but when ignorance about point of sale is added to the mix then the situation becomes so ridiculous as to be dangerous and the professional intervention option has to be invoked. For people who are not confused or frustrated about both touchscreens and point of sale, just add 'touchscreen' or 'touch screen' to google's custom news search for relevant news.
After the page loads its text, in a final step of page presentation, some words in the article, ''water', 'gas', 'environment', 'research' and 'scientists' become hyperlinks. If you click on 'gas' you don't get an explanation of what gas is. Instead, you get a link to http://www.bankerspetroleum.com/s/Home.asp With water, a click takes you to http://www.owaters.com/order.html?=ya+water&OVRAW= water&OVKEY=water&OVMTC=content It's enough to make you seriously doubt the integrity of the people behind a site called "Science Daily". I don't see how this could be anything but a revenue scheme for the Science Daily web site.
I wish that the Slashdot submitter had linked to the original article instead. It doesn't have these crazy advertizing gimmicks embedded in the text. http://www.tigr.org/news/pr_12_02_05.shtml
No, I'm NOT talking about the ads at the bottom under the 'Ads by Google' disclaimer. I'm talking about the hijacking of the hyperlinks themselves as an advertising gimmick, a gimmick which is introduced at the cost of the article actually having any hyperlinked text.
You're telling me that I should read all the disclaimers at the bottom of every page first? That's a joke, right? Or are you one of those people who thinks that the answer to dealing with confusion on a page is to educate the whole world as to how to not let a confusing page confuse them instead of simply fixing what's confusing on the page? I know people who feel the way you do. I fired one of them last week.
I'm running Firefox. Let me know how to disable what this web site's screwing around with the hyperlink concept. I'm sure a lot of us would like to know. On the other hand, I'm betting that you don't know how to do this, and that it can't be done, and that you are just bullshitting us all (or thinking that you are, anyway).
I have a customer with Linux POS in about 75 locations, all across Canada. The customer's IT dept has exactly one person in it, a very sharp fellow by the name of Doug deLeeuw. Doug can open up a graphical (as in natively rendered) X session even from a sailboat in Toronto Harbor and provide tech support. He's installed nagios over openVPN and knows if any of those locations are beyond any of dozens of threshholds before the people at the locations have any idea that anything needs attention. He can address pretty much any issue from there. He even has web cams on the network to watch the people and better understand the people in the context of their situations. There's not a better untold story in all of POS than the efficiency and the effectiveness of what Doug is doing for his employer, Made in Japan - The Teriyaki Experience. I doubt that it's possible that there could be lower TCO than this company is enjoying because of Linux, X, and Doug's skill.
Microtouch makes its own displays and they're available all over the place. Why not just get one from them? They're priced very competitively these days. I've found that the higher the resolution, the better, and the M170's outside measurements (17" lcd) are exactly the same as the M150's are (15" lcd), so moving to 17" 1280x1024 doesn't mean the display itself will be any larger at all. The warrenty is 3 years. Email me and I'll help you out with the xconfig issues.
I recommend Microtouch (especially if you're using Debian) with a serial port. You won't have to pay any attention to how the serial port is set up (baud rate, bit length, stop bit, etc) because the Microtouch controller is smart enough to figure out what it's doing and align itself to it. Because of this there's no need to write anything to the touchscreen controller, either. You plug it in - it works. Done.
Damn, I hate to come in so late on a POS discussion. Linux POS is my specialty; I've been writing POS software since 1977. Even here in my home I can touch an icon on my touchscreen X terminal display and open a remote graphic to any of my customers' sites. With a couple of touches I can order a beer in Texas, a pizza in Florida or a burrito in California. I can put a wireless touchscreen X terminal display in your hand or build one into a restaurant table table that will let a customer do the same thing - enter & pay for their own order. POS has come a long way. What's ahead will be even better.
Imagine how useful this camera would be if Kodak would put an X server in it. The camera would become a wireless graphical X display terminal. I'd buy one immediately.
The future will be about the user interface to all of the benefits of tech and about the freedom of information and control that the user interface allows. User interfaces must be useful, intuitive, personal, adaptive and free (of control by patents, etc). All other issues are temporary and relatively insignificant. Articles like this one are basically useless, unfortunately.
Indeed, what does piracy have to do with listening to music? It used to have nothing to do with it. What it has to do with it today is - everything.
I said that I can remember when listening to music was not a crime. We never used to think about whether the concept of criminality applied to listening to music, or playing music, or singing. Today we have to consider whether criminality is a part of these things because the laws have been dramatically extended to encompass this.
If I entertained my friends in 1948 by emulating a Jack Benny Routine that I heard on the radio (without anybody's permission!), was I doing something illegal or something I should have paid somebody in California for? The idea was preposterous. Nobody had a reason to even imagine it. Today, however, it's against all kinds of laws. Something has changed, and it hasn't been for the better. The laws used to allow me to do that. If they don't do that now then who is served by that? It isn't the people, those whom you call freeloaders. People just want to enjoy their heritage of arts without a few corporations constantly collecting admission at the gate over and over again. I'm not dismissing you. I'm dismissing your assertion that there's a difference between an old man making a tape recording in 1955 and a bunch of 8-year-olds singing happy birthday to a playmate in 2005. There's no difference except in the minds of someone who sees corporations and the laws they pay our lawmakers to pass which restrict our rights to make music and arts a part of our daily lives. What makes me uncomfortable here is the comfort you take in describing pretty much everybody who uses technology to enjoy the arts as a bunch of freeloaders. It's people with such an attitude who write these crazy laws which benefit corporations at the expense of the people of the world.
What's happening is that we are yet again changing the way we think. When we developed spoken languages it changed the way we think. When we developed written languages it changed the way we think. When we developed mathematical, chemical, financial and engineering languages it changed the way we think. Now we're developing graphical languages and that will again change the way we think, not to mention the way we communicate, work and create. This is really what the article hints at and this is why it's tremendously significant. When a person uses a graphical language instead of a text language it's an entirely different process, approach and result.
The issues and discussions are inseparable. When corporations make the laws under which peoples' rights are taken from them, and prescribe the penalties which apply, then it gets all messy beyond comprehension. That's the first thing that I object to. It isn't even just about music, of course. It's ultimately about the quality of life itself. This is just one of the more illustrative sideshows.
You're not the corporate exec who wrote those letters to the girl scouts, boy scouts and camfire organizations telling them that they could legally sing songs like America The Beautiful and Happy Birthday at the campfire if each local council would just send $600 to the corporations holding the copyrights, are you?
If your logic were followed the Funk Brothers (to whom ASCAP paid NOTHING) wouldn't have been able to even go to the Detroit jazz clubs evenings and play together without being guilty of failing to pay ASCAP for the right to play the music that they themselves had created. Honestly, reality is not that neat, tidy box of chocolates that you would have us believe it is.
As I mentioned above, Copyright law has changed significantly. Copyright law as it was first defined in the US no longer exists. It has been replaced by other laws which little resemble it except in name.
The reason I'm not lying is because the laws used to be different than they are now. The laws of the future are going to be different than they are now, too. You might think about that instead of getting all pissy about a moderator's click or about the fact that laws change and you would like to think of them as never-changing.
I have purchased tens of thousands of tunes over the decades. Why should I have to pay for them again and again every time the media changes?
It's too fucking, bad, really, that you are pissed at the moderator. You need to learn to deal with the fact that life is not fair the way you would like it to be fair. There was life before you and I got here, and there will be after we're gone. I probably have several decades of a head start on you and I'll be damned if I'm going to let you blame me for that.
Copyright laws are indeed new. There have been numerous extensions to them. Copyrights were originally created to last for 14 years and belonged to individuals. Now they last virtually forever and belong to corporations. That's new. And - News Flash! - that's what this is all about.
Your assumption is wrong. I'm talking about reel to reel tape recorders that were available in the 50's, and about recordings of all kinds of audio arts that were broadcast.
If you're only 34 you have just arrived recently. I am from an era when we would pass around sheet music. That would be a crime today. You should try to imagine how far down the rabbit hole the corporations have taken us and are intent on taking us. You need to consider if you are not already in Wonderland.
My thinking fondly, in public, about the way life used to be is a real pain in the ass for you to deal with, isn't it? Gosh, you are one judgemental, condescending asshole, the way I see it. I guess you would understand what is hyperbole and what is thoughtless, though, intellectual giant that you see yourself as.
I remember when we would make a tape recording of radio broadcasts and pirating wasn't something anybody talked about. Nobody was talking about GPL (which was a few decades in the future, or about copyrights that would last virtually forever. What people talked about was - oh, wait a minute - you are too busy pretending you know what we talked about to actually care. Never mind.
I remember when you didn't have to buy music from a store.
Some of us here are much, much older than the rest of you are. That's kind of a hard concept for some (not you, necessarily) here to get their heads around.
I think that in the future when music is released it will be made available in discrete, granular format. The basic tracks will be provided along with the means to play them back according to the 'standard' mix which is identical to what you get now. What's new, though, is that you are able to play the music back according to whatever mix you prefer. It's similar in effect to what you can do now with bass & treble, balance and equalizer buttons. Instead, though, you're manipulating the individual tracks and storing your preferences for each musical piece. You're the mixing engineer, the conductor and the conductor. Your mix is your business. All it takes is for the person(s) who record the music in the first place to provide you with the music in discrete track format, a software tool to allow you to mix your own, and a way for you to hear it the way they would have mixed it if you were getting the music mixed for you, like it's always been.
There's a fellow, Lance, from Fort Worth, who takes apart The Beatles music and remixes it to great effect, and delight. If only he didn't have to take the tracks apart in the first place because the music was provided in discrete track format.
There you go. What few understand, unfortunately, is the power of a handheld running an X server and capable of opening a window on any program(s) the network/Internet have to offer. We are moving toward the era of network-driven content & apps, including ones that don't have to bother with browsers, but it will be a while longer. I have customers who have made the move and they're saving $millions each year.
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully this will be friendly, but people have to respect intellectual property.
To that I say, Hopefully, this will be friendly, but Creative has to respect the idea that a patent based on the idea of pushing a button to navigate a hierarchy on a display and the idea that this can be considered to be anybody's property, intellectual or otherwise, is total bullshit.
You call me, or write, and I'll likely be able to explain anything about touchscreens and/or point of sale that you feel you need to know. I can stand yet another Slashdot 'article' and comments featuring end-to-end ignorance and frustration about touchscreens, GUI's and vertical market software but when ignorance about point of sale is added to the mix then the situation becomes so ridiculous as to be dangerous and the professional intervention option has to be invoked. For people who are not confused or frustrated about both touchscreens and point of sale, just add 'touchscreen' or 'touch screen' to google's custom news search for relevant news.
I had my .com domain name extended to .eur by providing a European address. Simple.
After the page loads its text, in a final step of page presentation, some words in the article, ''water', 'gas', 'environment', 'research' and 'scientists' become hyperlinks. If you click on 'gas' you don't get an explanation of what gas is. Instead, you get a link to http://www.bankerspetroleum.com/s/Home.asp With water, a click takes you to http://www.owaters.com/order.html?=ya+water&OVRAW= water&OVKEY=water&OVMTC=content
It's enough to make you seriously doubt the integrity of the people behind a site called "Science Daily".
I don't see how this could be anything but a revenue scheme for the Science Daily web site.
I wish that the Slashdot submitter had linked to the original article instead. It doesn't have these crazy advertizing gimmicks embedded in the text.
http://www.tigr.org/news/pr_12_02_05.shtml
No, I'm NOT talking about the ads at the bottom under the 'Ads by Google' disclaimer. I'm talking about the hijacking of the hyperlinks themselves as an advertising gimmick, a gimmick which is introduced at the cost of the article actually having any hyperlinked text.
You're telling me that I should read all the disclaimers at the bottom of every page first? That's a joke, right? Or are you one of those people who thinks that the answer to dealing with confusion on a page is to educate the whole world as to how to not let a confusing page confuse them instead of simply fixing what's confusing on the page? I know people who feel the way you do. I fired one of them last week.
I'm running Firefox. Let me know how to disable what this web site's screwing around with the hyperlink concept. I'm sure a lot of us would like to know. On the other hand, I'm betting that you don't know how to do this, and that it can't be done, and that you are just bullshitting us all (or thinking that you are, anyway).
OSDL's mobile initiative will fail if it doesn't require that devices contain an X server than can automatically discover X client applications.
I have a customer with Linux POS in about 75 locations, all across Canada. The customer's IT dept has exactly one person in it, a very sharp fellow by the name of Doug deLeeuw. Doug can open up a graphical (as in natively rendered) X session even from a sailboat in Toronto Harbor and provide tech support. He's installed nagios over openVPN and knows if any of those locations are beyond any of dozens of threshholds before the people at the locations have any idea that anything needs attention. He can address pretty much any issue from there. He even has web cams on the network to watch the people and better understand the people in the context of their situations. There's not a better untold story in all of POS than the efficiency and the effectiveness of what Doug is doing for his employer, Made in Japan - The Teriyaki Experience. I doubt that it's possible that there could be lower TCO than this company is enjoying because of Linux, X, and Doug's skill.
Microtouch makes its own displays and they're available all over the place. Why not just get one from them? They're priced very competitively these days. I've found that the higher the resolution, the better, and the M170's outside measurements (17" lcd) are exactly the same as the M150's are (15" lcd), so moving to 17" 1280x1024 doesn't mean the display itself will be any larger at all. The warrenty is 3 years. Email me and I'll help you out with the xconfig issues.
I recommend Microtouch (especially if you're using Debian) with a serial port. You won't have to pay any attention to how the serial port is set up (baud rate, bit length, stop bit, etc) because the Microtouch controller is smart enough to figure out what it's doing and align itself to it. Because of this there's no need to write anything to the touchscreen controller, either. You plug it in - it works. Done.
Damn, I hate to come in so late on a POS discussion. Linux POS is my specialty; I've been writing POS software since 1977. Even here in my home I can touch an icon on my touchscreen X terminal display and open a remote graphic to any of my customers' sites. With a couple of touches I can order a beer in Texas, a pizza in Florida or a burrito in California. I can put a wireless touchscreen X terminal display in your hand or build one into a restaurant table table that will let a customer do the same thing - enter & pay for their own order. POS has come a long way. What's ahead will be even better.
Imagine how useful this camera would be if Kodak would put an X server in it. The camera would become a wireless graphical X display terminal. I'd buy one immediately.
The future will be about the user interface to all of the benefits of tech and about the freedom of information and control that the user interface allows. User interfaces must be useful, intuitive, personal, adaptive and free (of control by patents, etc). All other issues are temporary and relatively insignificant. Articles like this one are basically useless, unfortunately.
Indeed, what does piracy have to do with listening to music? It used to have nothing to do with it. What it has to do with it today is - everything.
I said that I can remember when listening to music was not a crime. We never used to think about whether the concept of criminality applied to listening to music, or playing music, or singing. Today we have to consider whether criminality is a part of these things because the laws have been dramatically extended to encompass this.
If I entertained my friends in 1948 by emulating a Jack Benny Routine that I heard on the radio (without anybody's permission!), was I doing something illegal or something I should have paid somebody in California for? The idea was preposterous. Nobody had a reason to even imagine it. Today, however, it's against all kinds of laws. Something has changed, and it hasn't been for the better. The laws used to allow me to do that. If they don't do that now then who is served by that? It isn't the people, those whom you call freeloaders. People just want to enjoy their heritage of arts without a few corporations constantly collecting admission at the gate over and over again. I'm not dismissing you. I'm dismissing your assertion that there's a difference between an old man making a tape recording in 1955 and a bunch of 8-year-olds singing happy birthday to a playmate in 2005. There's no difference except in the minds of someone who sees corporations and the laws they pay our lawmakers to pass which restrict our rights to make music and arts a part of our daily lives.
What makes me uncomfortable here is the comfort you take in describing pretty much everybody who uses technology to enjoy the arts as a bunch of freeloaders. It's people with such an attitude who write these crazy laws which benefit corporations at the expense of the people of the world.
What's happening is that we are yet again changing the way we think. When we developed spoken languages it changed the way we think. When we developed written languages it changed the way we think. When we developed mathematical, chemical, financial and engineering languages it changed the way we think. Now we're developing graphical languages and that will again change the way we think, not to mention the way we communicate, work and create. This is really what the article hints at and this is why it's tremendously significant. When a person uses a graphical language instead of a text language it's an entirely different process, approach and result.
The issues and discussions are inseparable. When corporations make the laws under which peoples' rights are taken from them, and prescribe the penalties which apply, then it gets all messy beyond comprehension. That's the first thing that I object to. It isn't even just about music, of course. It's ultimately about the quality of life itself. This is just one of the more illustrative sideshows.
You're not the corporate exec who wrote those letters to the girl scouts, boy scouts and camfire organizations telling them that they could legally sing songs like America The Beautiful and Happy Birthday at the campfire if each local council would just send $600 to the corporations holding the copyrights, are you?
If your logic were followed the Funk Brothers (to whom ASCAP paid NOTHING) wouldn't have been able to even go to the Detroit jazz clubs evenings and play together without being guilty of failing to pay ASCAP for the right to play the music that they themselves had created. Honestly, reality is not that neat, tidy box of chocolates that you would have us believe it is.
As I mentioned above, Copyright law has changed significantly. Copyright law as it was first defined in the US no longer exists. It has been replaced by other laws which little resemble it except in name.
The reason I'm not lying is because the laws used to be different than they are now. The laws of the future are going to be different than they are now, too. You might think about that instead of getting all pissy about a moderator's click or about the fact that laws change and you would like to think of them as never-changing.
I have purchased tens of thousands of tunes over the decades. Why should I have to pay for them again and again every time the media changes?
It's too fucking, bad, really, that you are pissed at the moderator. You need to learn to deal with the fact that life is not fair the way you would like it to be fair. There was life before you and I got here, and there will be after we're gone. I probably have several decades of a head start on you and I'll be damned if I'm going to let you blame me for that.
All those strawmen - and I'm supposed to knock them all down for you? I don't think so.
Copyright laws are indeed new. There have been numerous extensions to them. Copyrights were originally created to last for 14 years and belonged to individuals. Now they last virtually forever and belong to corporations. That's new. And - News Flash! - that's what this is all about.
Your assumption is wrong. I'm talking about reel to reel tape recorders that were available in the 50's, and about recordings of all kinds of audio arts that were broadcast.
If you're only 34 you have just arrived recently. I am from an era when we would pass around sheet music. That would be a crime today. You should try to imagine how far down the rabbit hole the corporations have taken us and are intent on taking us. You need to consider if you are not already in Wonderland.
My thinking fondly, in public, about the way life used to be is a real pain in the ass for you to deal with, isn't it? Gosh, you are one judgemental, condescending asshole, the way I see it. I guess you would understand what is hyperbole and what is thoughtless, though, intellectual giant that you see yourself as.
I remember when we would make a tape recording of radio broadcasts and pirating wasn't something anybody talked about. Nobody was talking about GPL (which was a few decades in the future, or about copyrights that would last virtually forever. What people talked about was - oh, wait a minute - you are too busy pretending you know what we talked about to actually care. Never mind.
I remember when you didn't have to buy music from a store.
Some of us here are much, much older than the rest of you are. That's kind of a hard concept for some (not you, necessarily) here to get their heads around.
I remember when it didn't used to be a crime to listen to music.
I think that in the future when music is released it will be made available in discrete, granular format. The basic tracks will be provided along with the means to play them back according to the 'standard' mix which is identical to what you get now. What's new, though, is that you are able to play the music back according to whatever mix you prefer. It's similar in effect to what you can do now with bass & treble, balance and equalizer buttons. Instead, though, you're manipulating the individual tracks and storing your preferences for each musical piece. You're the mixing engineer, the conductor and the conductor. Your mix is your business. All it takes is for the person(s) who record the music in the first place to provide you with the music in discrete track format, a software tool to allow you to mix your own, and a way for you to hear it the way they would have mixed it if you were getting the music mixed for you, like it's always been.
There's a fellow, Lance, from Fort Worth, who takes apart The Beatles music and remixes it to great effect, and delight. If only he didn't have to take the tracks apart in the first place because the music was provided in discrete track format.
There you go. What few understand, unfortunately, is the power of a handheld running an X server and capable of opening a window on any program(s) the network/Internet have to offer. We are moving toward the era of network-driven content & apps, including ones that don't have to bother with browsers, but it will be a while longer. I have customers who have made the move and they're saving $millions each year.