How many of the companies being sued HAVEN'T used patents as an offense rather than a defense? These days, legal departments are profit centres, and are more important than engineering departments; engineers' jobs are being outsourced and offshored while lawyers are rubbing their dirty little hands and laughing all the way to the bank.
I suspect most of the 'victims' of Apple's attempted sleight-of-hand are simply reaping what they've sown. The whole litigious nature of doing business today has gotten out of hand, but I can't say I feel terribly sorry for any of the players involved.
A society that believes lawsuits are the path to riches, and rewards people for spilling hot coffee on themselves or not watching where they're walking, can't help but devolve into this kind of crap. In the end it's a zero-sum game, and a tremendous drain on our resources. I'm surprised it's taking us so long to figure that out.
Evince isn't wonderful, even under Linux. When it opens a document it auto-sizes its window, (usually inappropriately), regardless of the window size it was last set to, which in my case is always 'maximized'. And it doesn't have tabs, (it seems that none of the Linux readers does), which is really a pain when you have 10 or more documents open at once, as I often do.
I've tried all or almost all of the PDF readers available for Linux, and I have yet to find one that I'd even call OK, much less good. I don't like Foxit as a company, and their product has suffered from some bloat as well over the past few years. But honestly, Foxit Reader is one of the things I miss about Windows, and I wish their Linux implementation wasn't a bad joke. If Foxit's Windows functionality was available for Linux, I'd use it and never look back. Heck, I'd even buy it - not very 'Linuxy' of me I know, but there you have it.
...leads to increased vulnerability, whether in biology or in software.
Although there are alternatives to Adobe Reader, none of them is good enough to gain significant market share. And Adobe does everything it can to make competing with it more difficult. So a key piece of software used by a large majority of computer users is bloated beyond belief and so riddled with vulnerabilities that it seems there's a new every day. It sucks, but it's hardly surprising.
On the web, as in politics, we get what we deserve - or, in this case, we get what other web users deserve, because they vastly outnumber us.
I hope Google doesn't pull the plug on Firefox - that would result in less choice, and fewer people would be happy with their browsing experiences. The more browsers the merrier, I say.
I really like Firefox, and the last time I tried Chrome I couldn't find any way to customise it to suit my needs. Also, does Chrome, (or will it ever), have an add-on equivalent to Flashblock? (No, the recent addition of similar functionality to NoScript isn't a viable replacement). What about "Long URL please", "FontFinder", "Add 'n' Edit Cookies", "Tab Mix Plus", or "Video Download Helper"?
I generally don't like bloat, but Chrome is way too spartan for my needs. With Firefox, I gladly suffer a little bloat to get the ultimate in customisability. I have no confidence that Chrome will ever be as flexible.
All computers emit RF radiation when they're running, whether or not they even have WiFi installed. Regulations require manufacturers to limit this radiation, but it's still there; and with a computer in very close proximity to a test subject, (spermatozoon, human, or otherwise), it's probably a toss-up as to whether any effects attributable to RF radiation are a result of WiFi, or of the 1GHz+ processor, the switching power supplies, and any of several other possible sources of radio frequency energy.
Except that the perfectly usable 5GHz spectrum... has enough non-interfering channel space to make that "little while" into a matter of a decade or two.
Does that estimate take into account the likely exponential growth of wireless in the home?
In my area Rogers, a cable/internet/cellular provider, is advertising home security systems, with notifications going to the user via cell phone instead of to a monitoring service. I suspect this will make home security systems more popular, and with crowding at lower frequencies I predict that door and window monitors and motion sensors will start to use 5GHz spectrum.
Add in the WiFi that's starting to migrate to 5GHz, the DECT phones that are already there, web-enabled appliances, and whatever new latest-and-greatest that comes along in the meantime, and that 'decade or two' may be more like a 'decade or half'.
Better design and manufacturing will help, but at some point we're simply running out of room in a given slice of spectrum. More complex modulation schemes, better-engineered RF stages, and things like TDMA and CDMA, along with more computing power, have resulted in huge improvements in efficient spectrum usage over the past few decades. But we're probably getting close to the limit of what can be done to shoehorn more data into a given bandwidth. Even if consumers are willing, (or forced), to pay more for better hardware, that only postpones the problem for a little while.
Additionally, although the FCC says a device "must accept any and all interference", it does NOT say it "must accept any and all interference AND CONTINUE TO FUNCTION TO THE USER'S SATISFACTION". The FCC may have the power of law, but it has no power over the laws of physics.
Even if the fundamental is only around 5 kHz, (and it could be higher), there will be a very large number of harmonics, likely of sufficient amplitude to wreak havoc on ham and other communications. And even when a radio signal is well outside a receiver's frequency range, if it's sufficiently strong it can still cause interference by overloading the front end.
You really DON'T want a multi-story Tesla coil operating within many miles of your radios and other sensitive electronic equipment.
The gibbering paranoiac in me is whispering that the government either has developed, or knows of, a new strain of smallpox against which the old vaccine won't be effective. I'm just sayin'...
I agree with everything you've said here, and I only have one question to add. Who's more pathetic - Israel and Palestine, or the other countries that step on their own dicks in their headlong rush to support one side or the other?
in an electromagnetically charged TUBE is still unfun...
True, but the reduced time makes it less likely that there'll be 'motion blur'. This will result in better diagnoses on the average, and will also make it less likely that you'll have to endure a repeat experience "in an electromagnetically charged TUBE".
I always get refurbished Thinkpads. 1) you get cheap high end hardware that lasts and lasts and lasts,... and is actually designed to be opened up for maintenance. 2) there's good linux hardware support since you're not on the bleeding marketing edge. 3) The nipple rocks.
Right on, dude! I even do CAD work with the TrackPoint - can't do that with a pad. And their keyboards are among the best too.
They just need their power limited. To do that, we need to separate the money from the government.
Hear, hear! I agree with everything else you said, but this point in particular really resonates with me. And a good start would be to drastically slash election campaign contribution and spending limits. These days elections aren't won, they're bought. And it's not the elected politicians who set policy and enact laws - that's done by the people who buy the elections.
Of course it does! That's why the middle class is shrinking over most of the globe - those who have power and money are doing their damnedest to concentrate both in their own hands, and the most efficient way to do that is to co-operate among themselves and work together to achieve world domination. And the fastest route to domination is via absolute economic control.
...but on the hardware side I'd definitely go with the reference design, especially if your quantities aren't huge. In today's world hardware requirements change rapidly, and so does the availability of silicon. A chip that's just-past-bleeding-edge today may be obsolete, or at least hard to get, in a year or two - then you're looking at a re-design. Whereas if you're on the reference design path and a key piece of silicon becomes scarce, you have a bigger, faster, more experienced, better funded team working on the next reference design. And by studying a reference design, using it, and gaining experience with it, you'll be in a better position to design your own hardware from scratch down the road if the need should arise. Also, using an already-proven design will allow you te get to market faster, as well as leaving more resources for the software, documentation, marketing, support, etc.
Although this will be great for motorists being bagged by overly zealous traffic cops, I don't think it will be much use at demonstrations. Government agencies have already demonstrated their willingness and ability to shut down cellular infrastructure or use jammers in order to disrupt protesters' ability to communicate, and this trend will only escalate in the coming years.
I've been saying the same thing for years - as soon as any technology reaches the stage where it becomes essential infrastructure, ownership should gradually transfer to the public. And to those of you who say, "What about capitalism and free enterprise", I say "What about all the tax breaks, government handouts, favourable legislation, and public rights-of-way that these 'free market' 'capitalist' companies took advantage of to get where they are?"
It strikes me that privatized infrastructure is like patents and copyrights in this regard. A period of full ownership and control is required in order to ensure a fair return on investment and to incentivize creation; after that period expires, the thing created belongs to the public. Everyone who complains about the screwed-up patent and copyright systems ought also to be complaining about the continued private, for-profit ownership of such things as communications infrastructure.
Yes, tapes suck, although some are better than others. The main reason tapes deteriorate is that the fields from the (data-containing) magnetic domains on one 'layer' of tape can affect domains on adjacent layers, thereby slowly corrupting the data.
So the thickness of the tape, (along with the specific formulation of the magnetic material, and the signal strength and bias applied when the tape was written), can have a drastic effect on tape's longevity. Then there's the problem of extraneous magnetic fields...
If Facebook finds it expensive and inconvenient to mail out physical CDs, they could agree to allow at least optional delivery by other means, such as over the internet.
If Facebook finds it expensive and inconvenient to mail out physical CDs, they could agree to simply not collect and store all that data.
If anyone has a chance it's KDE (maybe), XFCE (likely), IceWM (highly likely), or LXDE (good contender). GNOME and Unity are just too unpolished, too not ready for the masses to take this opportunity.
I agree with what you've said, except for two points. The last time I used LXDE it seemed to have a LOT of Gnome dependencies, so I wonder if it can even survive the advent of Gnome 3. And IceWM? Speaking as an immigrant from Windows to Debian, and as a GUI suck, I say with some confidence that IceWM has no chance. I won't use IceWM, and I'm at least capable of messing with config files and using a terminal - I just really don't like it. The average Windows users has no experience of such things and isn't about to take the time to learn them. IceWM is too minimalist and requires too much CLI-fu for the majority of Windows/Mac users.
Have you specifically enabled google history? If not then there is nothing to leak.
People like you who have Google accounts tend to forget about those of us who choose NOT to have anything to do with Google beyond using their search engine. Because I don't subscribe to Gmail or any other Google services, I have to turn search history off regularly - I still haven't figured out when and how Google decides to silently 'opt me back in' to this odious 'feature', and there's no indication that it's turned on, so if I forget to check, then my history is being logged and my search results are geographically skewed. And don't forget that even if you have a Google account, failing to log into it means that web history is automatically enabled by default and must be turned off manually if you don't want it.
Google is like Bell - I hate it, but there's not much choice but to either use it or choose some equally evil alternative.
So you are training your children to accept censorship and to run to authority figures whenever they need to discuss certain topics? If your school district were in a country like China or Myanmar or America, this policy might make sense.
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How many of the companies being sued HAVEN'T used patents as an offense rather than a defense? These days, legal departments are profit centres, and are more important than engineering departments; engineers' jobs are being outsourced and offshored while lawyers are rubbing their dirty little hands and laughing all the way to the bank.
I suspect most of the 'victims' of Apple's attempted sleight-of-hand are simply reaping what they've sown. The whole litigious nature of doing business today has gotten out of hand, but I can't say I feel terribly sorry for any of the players involved.
A society that believes lawsuits are the path to riches, and rewards people for spilling hot coffee on themselves or not watching where they're walking, can't help but devolve into this kind of crap. In the end it's a zero-sum game, and a tremendous drain on our resources. I'm surprised it's taking us so long to figure that out.
Evince isn't wonderful, even under Linux. When it opens a document it auto-sizes its window, (usually inappropriately), regardless of the window size it was last set to, which in my case is always 'maximized'. And it doesn't have tabs, (it seems that none of the Linux readers does), which is really a pain when you have 10 or more documents open at once, as I often do.
I've tried all or almost all of the PDF readers available for Linux, and I have yet to find one that I'd even call OK, much less good. I don't like Foxit as a company, and their product has suffered from some bloat as well over the past few years. But honestly, Foxit Reader is one of the things I miss about Windows, and I wish their Linux implementation wasn't a bad joke. If Foxit's Windows functionality was available for Linux, I'd use it and never look back. Heck, I'd even buy it - not very 'Linuxy' of me I know, but there you have it.
...leads to increased vulnerability, whether in biology or in software.
Although there are alternatives to Adobe Reader, none of them is good enough to gain significant market share. And Adobe does everything it can to make competing with it more difficult. So a key piece of software used by a large majority of computer users is bloated beyond belief and so riddled with vulnerabilities that it seems there's a new every day. It sucks, but it's hardly surprising.
On the web, as in politics, we get what we deserve - or, in this case, we get what other web users deserve, because they vastly outnumber us.
I hope Google doesn't pull the plug on Firefox - that would result in less choice, and fewer people would be happy with their browsing experiences. The more browsers the merrier, I say.
I really like Firefox, and the last time I tried Chrome I couldn't find any way to customise it to suit my needs. Also, does Chrome, (or will it ever), have an add-on equivalent to Flashblock? (No, the recent addition of similar functionality to NoScript isn't a viable replacement). What about "Long URL please", "FontFinder", "Add 'n' Edit Cookies", "Tab Mix Plus", or "Video Download Helper"?
I generally don't like bloat, but Chrome is way too spartan for my needs. With Firefox, I gladly suffer a little bloat to get the ultimate in customisability. I have no confidence that Chrome will ever be as flexible.
All computers emit RF radiation when they're running, whether or not they even have WiFi installed. Regulations require manufacturers to limit this radiation, but it's still there; and with a computer in very close proximity to a test subject, (spermatozoon, human, or otherwise), it's probably a toss-up as to whether any effects attributable to RF radiation are a result of WiFi, or of the 1GHz+ processor, the switching power supplies, and any of several other possible sources of radio frequency energy.
Except that the perfectly usable 5GHz spectrum... has enough non-interfering channel space to make that "little while" into a matter of a decade or two.
Does that estimate take into account the likely exponential growth of wireless in the home?
In my area Rogers, a cable/internet/cellular provider, is advertising home security systems, with notifications going to the user via cell phone instead of to a monitoring service. I suspect this will make home security systems more popular, and with crowding at lower frequencies I predict that door and window monitors and motion sensors will start to use 5GHz spectrum.
Add in the WiFi that's starting to migrate to 5GHz, the DECT phones that are already there, web-enabled appliances, and whatever new latest-and-greatest that comes along in the meantime, and that 'decade or two' may be more like a 'decade or half'.
Better design and manufacturing will help, but at some point we're simply running out of room in a given slice of spectrum. More complex modulation schemes, better-engineered RF stages, and things like TDMA and CDMA, along with more computing power, have resulted in huge improvements in efficient spectrum usage over the past few decades. But we're probably getting close to the limit of what can be done to shoehorn more data into a given bandwidth. Even if consumers are willing, (or forced), to pay more for better hardware, that only postpones the problem for a little while.
Additionally, although the FCC says a device "must accept any and all interference", it does NOT say it "must accept any and all interference AND CONTINUE TO FUNCTION TO THE USER'S SATISFACTION". The FCC may have the power of law, but it has no power over the laws of physics.
Even if the fundamental is only around 5 kHz, (and it could be higher), there will be a very large number of harmonics, likely of sufficient amplitude to wreak havoc on ham and other communications. And even when a radio signal is well outside a receiver's frequency range, if it's sufficiently strong it can still cause interference by overloading the front end. You really DON'T want a multi-story Tesla coil operating within many miles of your radios and other sensitive electronic equipment.
The gibbering paranoiac in me is whispering that the government either has developed, or knows of, a new strain of smallpox against which the old vaccine won't be effective. I'm just sayin'...
I agree with everything you've said here, and I only have one question to add. Who's more pathetic - Israel and Palestine, or the other countries that step on their own dicks in their headlong rush to support one side or the other?
in an electromagnetically charged TUBE is still unfun...
True, but the reduced time makes it less likely that there'll be 'motion blur'. This will result in better diagnoses on the average, and will also make it less likely that you'll have to endure a repeat experience "in an electromagnetically charged TUBE".
I always get refurbished Thinkpads. 1) you get cheap high end hardware that lasts and lasts and lasts,... and is actually designed to be opened up for maintenance. 2) there's good linux hardware support since you're not on the bleeding marketing edge. 3) The nipple rocks.
Right on, dude! I even do CAD work with the TrackPoint - can't do that with a pad. And their keyboards are among the best too.
They just need their power limited. To do that, we need to separate the money from the government.
Hear, hear! I agree with everything else you said, but this point in particular really resonates with me. And a good start would be to drastically slash election campaign contribution and spending limits. These days elections aren't won, they're bought. And it's not the elected politicians who set policy and enact laws - that's done by the people who buy the elections.
...does this mean we have a global oligarchy?
Of course it does! That's why the middle class is shrinking over most of the globe - those who have power and money are doing their damnedest to concentrate both in their own hands, and the most efficient way to do that is to co-operate among themselves and work together to achieve world domination. And the fastest route to domination is via absolute economic control.
...but on the hardware side I'd definitely go with the reference design, especially if your quantities aren't huge. In today's world hardware requirements change rapidly, and so does the availability of silicon. A chip that's just-past-bleeding-edge today may be obsolete, or at least hard to get, in a year or two - then you're looking at a re-design. Whereas if you're on the reference design path and a key piece of silicon becomes scarce, you have a bigger, faster, more experienced, better funded team working on the next reference design. And by studying a reference design, using it, and gaining experience with it, you'll be in a better position to design your own hardware from scratch down the road if the need should arise. Also, using an already-proven design will allow you te get to market faster, as well as leaving more resources for the software, documentation, marketing, support, etc.
Although this will be great for motorists being bagged by overly zealous traffic cops, I don't think it will be much use at demonstrations. Government agencies have already demonstrated their willingness and ability to shut down cellular infrastructure or use jammers in order to disrupt protesters' ability to communicate, and this trend will only escalate in the coming years.
...investment in plastic surgery practices has soared!
I've been saying the same thing for years - as soon as any technology reaches the stage where it becomes essential infrastructure, ownership should gradually transfer to the public. And to those of you who say, "What about capitalism and free enterprise", I say "What about all the tax breaks, government handouts, favourable legislation, and public rights-of-way that these 'free market' 'capitalist' companies took advantage of to get where they are?"
It strikes me that privatized infrastructure is like patents and copyrights in this regard. A period of full ownership and control is required in order to ensure a fair return on investment and to incentivize creation; after that period expires, the thing created belongs to the public. Everyone who complains about the screwed-up patent and copyright systems ought also to be complaining about the continued private, for-profit ownership of such things as communications infrastructure.
...I might just suspect Microsoft's hand in this somewhere.
Yes, tapes suck, although some are better than others. The main reason tapes deteriorate is that the fields from the (data-containing) magnetic domains on one 'layer' of tape can affect domains on adjacent layers, thereby slowly corrupting the data.
So the thickness of the tape, (along with the specific formulation of the magnetic material, and the signal strength and bias applied when the tape was written), can have a drastic effect on tape's longevity. Then there's the problem of extraneous magnetic fields...
If Facebook finds it expensive and inconvenient to mail out physical CDs, they could agree to allow at least optional delivery by other means, such as over the internet.
If Facebook finds it expensive and inconvenient to mail out physical CDs, they could agree to simply not collect and store all that data.
There - fixed that for you!
If anyone has a chance it's KDE (maybe), XFCE (likely), IceWM (highly likely), or LXDE (good contender). GNOME and Unity are just too unpolished, too not ready for the masses to take this opportunity.
I agree with what you've said, except for two points. The last time I used LXDE it seemed to have a LOT of Gnome dependencies, so I wonder if it can even survive the advent of Gnome 3. And IceWM? Speaking as an immigrant from Windows to Debian, and as a GUI suck, I say with some confidence that IceWM has no chance. I won't use IceWM, and I'm at least capable of messing with config files and using a terminal - I just really don't like it. The average Windows users has no experience of such things and isn't about to take the time to learn them. IceWM is too minimalist and requires too much CLI-fu for the majority of Windows/Mac users.
Have you specifically enabled google history? If not then there is nothing to leak.
People like you who have Google accounts tend to forget about those of us who choose NOT to have anything to do with Google beyond using their search engine. Because I don't subscribe to Gmail or any other Google services, I have to turn search history off regularly - I still haven't figured out when and how Google decides to silently 'opt me back in' to this odious 'feature', and there's no indication that it's turned on, so if I forget to check, then my history is being logged and my search results are geographically skewed. And don't forget that even if you have a Google account, failing to log into it means that web history is automatically enabled by default and must be turned off manually if you don't want it.
Google is like Bell - I hate it, but there's not much choice but to either use it or choose some equally evil alternative.
So you are training your children to accept censorship and to run to authority figures whenever they need to discuss certain topics? If your school district were in a country like China or Myanmar or America, this policy might make sense.
There - fixed that for you!
Mod parent up! I was just about to say the same thing, but you said it better.
And when did it become OK to shift responsibility and blame to anywhere and everywhere except the people who actually committed the crimes?