But patents do cover use, so everyone even using x264 in a country with software patents without a license are violating the law no matter what the license is. The only difference is that if you bought a MPEG LA license and x264 was BSD licensed you could ship binaries with a patent license, but the GPL prevents that. In other words, even if Canonical licenses H.264 for OEM builds, they have to ship a different binary with a compatible license. This is quite intentionally so that you can't get a "copyright" over copyleft software via patents. Compare that to the BSD license, even if you write 100% of the code yourself and it's patented and live in the wrong country you can't use it, you can't distribute it but the patent holder can do anything they want using your code.
I think most things would make more sense if geeks coupled it to the fact that most consider their users to suffer from id10-t or PEBCAK problems. While that's not really true either, most people don't want a "computer" the way us geeks look at a computer. They don't want to know about CPU and RAM and GPU and so on, it's kind of like asking them to assemble a car by what engine, transmission, brakes and exhaust system go together. They want a car that solves a transportation problem. => limited models
Likewise with Apple's walled garden, honestly already people DO NOT know how to use their gizmos. Most of them will never ever see the fence, and if they do it'd feel tiny like the borders of North Korea. Geeks are like running full speed towards it and go like "See, there's a fence there" while others are like "Ok whatever, but what's everything else I haven't explored like? There *are* 200k apps here that do all sorts of cool shit." As many have said when they suggest a computer or internet driving licence, people don't know how to administrate their own systems. They depend on others whether it's their geeky kids, friends, family, computer shop or the support line or whatever. What the geeks are saying Apple takes away is something they already feel they have very little knowledge and control over. => don't care about lockdown
Also, geeks have a blind spot for missing user interface disasters, but common users have a blind spot for missing back end disasters. We try something, realize it's crap and move on. They try it, struggle, struggle some more and think computers are really, really hard or that they are dense. They have huge learning costs and only understand function, not concept so each application is almost like new to them. Users like being put in front of one piece of good software, it does not have to be the ultimate software of all time but better than trying to figure out which of five open source clones are actually any good. This is why they always ask for "brand" products like Photoshop, they don't know good from bad but assume that with a famous product it's as easy as it'll get. => iEverything
Apple makes products for the huge group who doesn't "really" want the complexities of those products, which turns out to be most of us. I have to admit that while I'm insanely geeky in some areas, for example my washing machine has more than a dozen programs and 95%+ of the time I use the basic 40 degree program. My photo camera has a bunch of manual settings but 95%+ of the time I just want to use the intelligent everything. Kinda like the Wii, I've managed to get even my parents to try it. They wouldn't touch PC or console games with a 10 foot pole. Any product you make that lets "everyone else" use something will be a huge hit. Just admit you're not in the "everybody else" category.
The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple -- the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."
This is only true if there's no connection between wanting to game and having a jailbroken iPhone, which I assume is very false. Very many people don't care about jailbreaking because they use it with no, free or few applications, the value of jailbreaking to them is very low. On the other hand, if you want to play lots of games (where lots of games * money = lots of money) then jailbreaking has a high value. The data presented doesn't preclude the possibility that 80% of your market is within the 10% that are jailbroken.
The problem is TLDs in the first place, all they've done is create cybersquatting. Here's what they should do:
1. Create a new global TLD.g, minimum name length 3 characters 2. Declare that any domain that doesn't have a two letter TLDs should have.g appended 3. Grandfather in all the dotcom/net/org/biz/whatever as taken subdomains of.g 4. If the base domain is not disputed, grant the [name].g domain.
This way I can type in "mcdonalds" as the domain name -> macdonalds.g For anything disputed you still need "slashdot.com/org/net" -> slashdot.com/org/net.g Country domains are not affected "vg.no" -> vg.no
This way you don't have to go to the global DNS servers on every typo'd query. You would have to go to the.g servers, but I imagine it'd be much like.com today. And TLDs as we know them go bye-bye, I won't miss them.
In fact I'd hazard a guess that Blizzard are actively trying to deter 'Gamers' and attract 'Socialisers'.
Socializers don't go to other games because there's no community, but gamers do because there is a cool new game. I think the gamers are dangerous "trendsetters" so I imagine Blizzard is trying hard to keep them, not for the revenue but to prevent alternative communities from spawning.
Simply keep the endgame a deep tar pit that actually requires some skills and they're essentially playing a completely different game than people that button mash and socialize, despite both being called WoW. Or hell even just the organizational skills of getting a guild of sufficent numbers, classes, equipment, battle plan etc. even if the basic combat is simple.
There is a massive difference between 'challenging' and 'annoying'. Many game makers have a hard time with this one. Many players have a hard time seeing the difference as well.
Known fact: The more people time people invest, the more emotion they invest. You just have to not lose them on the way, afterwards they can brag on abot the phat l00t they got and look down on everyone else that didn't spend those hours of irritating gameplay.
The industry has moved away from "more horsepower than you'll ever need!" to "uses less power than you can ever imagine!"
Personally I think the form factor will be the defining property, not the power. There's some things you'd rather do on your phone, some you'd rather do on your laptop and some you'd rather have a full size keyboard, mouse, screen etc. for. Maybe there's room for an iPad in that, at least people think there is. Even if all of them would last 12 hours on battery you'd not like to carry a laptop 24/7 or try typing up a novel on a smart phone. I think we will simply have more gadgets, not one even if it runs on thin air.
Funny how you should mention equipment, when a manned mission would have to carry huge, huge amounts of equipment to make sure said squishy little thing doesn't die on the way there from temperature, radiation, lack of air, water or food. Same goes for heat shields, parachutes and thrusters to not get killed during landing - landing like the rovers would leave them a bloody smear. Again all the environmental requirements applies on the planet, you'd need a huge solar panel just to keep the habitat at a survivable temperature. Most likely their operational reach is limited by getting home by nightfall when it's -80C (-110F) at best. Never mind that they probably want a way to return home that'll take even more room for a launch vehicle. In short, the whole expedition is huge long before you have the tiniest bit of scientific equipment.
Why then does reality disagree with you? Or is there someone holding a gun to their head forcing them to use Ubuntu or to use the six month releases over the LTS ones?
Undecided/even: 1. More reliable 2. Smaller 3. Lower power
Disadvantages: 1. Cost 2. Size
Unfortunately, one of the things often touted about SSDs don't quite seem true, they don't really scale down. Big SSDs = more parallel channels = better read/write performance. Which is a shame, because if they could really scale down to 10-20 GB I'd see a huge market for dual storage laptops, SSD for OS and HDD for bulk storage.
OMG are you just bashing Microsoft for NOT pushing their own proprietary Win/IE only solution, and instead going for an industry standard (ITU-T and ISO) video codec? To implement a W3C standard <video> tag? They really can't win, can they... I figure they simply got a good deal with MPEG-LA which makes sure they won't be screwed, or they'd never commit in this fashion. Even Microsoft seems to realize H.264 is the way forward instead of pushing their own VC-1 codec. Mozilla will see IE9 and Chrome eat it alive once HTML5 takes off, it doesn't matter how much they're sulking in the corner about patents they're still going down.
Well, the reality is that people don't want to pay for it - at least not as much as advertisers.
Let's take a brief math example: The superbowl had 62 ad slots which averaged 3 million dollars in 2008 and 98.7 million watched it. That's 1.90$ per person watching, but since it was only 48.1 million households a PPV licence would have to work out to about 4$. But that is assuming there'll still be 98 million viewers and 48 million households, which is unlikely - it's RIAA/MPAA math. First of all, many people just casually interested might not watch at all, those that do would be gathering more and you might see maybe 60 million viewers on 20 million households. Then it's a 9-10$ / PPV license which drives away more people and the numbers work out even worse and so on.
If advertising is simply made unfeasible, there will have to be large cutbacks all around. It's not just that people can get the same thing for free as they get behind the paywall, it's that people value the content much less than the advertisers value the eyeball time. I think this whole scenario that everything will be behind paywalls are ridiculous, the harder it becomes to get eyeball time the more it'll be worth - it's basic supply and demand. Eventually when enough content is behind paywalls it will again be profitable to run ad-based sites. Which I don't even think will happen in the first place.
I don't think it'll work, because I think the average impression by now is that IE is some old crap we have to keep around for intranet purposes. Like for example one "new" install image I know that was being deployed in 2009 with IE6, despite a rather large campaign here in Norway of "please upgrade" on many of the country's most popular websites. I suggested to that company that maybe they should consider including Firefox as well for "normal" browsing and essentially deprecate IE, I don't know if they did but the idea was at least taken very seriously. I think that'll be the solution for most companies, very many of the new web applications are updated very slowly or they don't want to pay for upgrades to the latest version. Give users a different browser for browsing, rename IE as "intranet explorer".
I honestly don't feel that much difference anymore. A year ago it was something like 30% non-IE browsers, now it's 40% non-IE. Both are too big to ignore and many replacements of old IE-only systems from when they had 90% market share probably would have happened anyway. From here to about 80-90% non-IE where you can consider dropping IE support you are supporting the same anyway.
From WP: The JWST's primary scientific mission has four main components: to search for light from the first stars and galaxies which formed in the Universe after the Big Bang, to study the formation and evolution of galaxies, to understand the formation of stars and planetary systems, and to study planetary systems and the origins of life.
In fact, I recall that there was a case where the BS open WiFi argument was quashed (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/04/child-porn-case-shows-that-an-open-wifi-network-is-no-defense.ars).
I wonder if you have even read the link you post. They were convicted by the huge stacks of CDs in their room. It had nothing do to with "beyond a reasonable doubt" or even "preponderance of evidence", they tried to use their wifi as reason why the police had no "probable cause" and the warrant is invalid. A wifi network the police of course had no idea existed, so despite illegal material being traced to their IP the police should do nothing on the possibility that there be might an open wifi network that someone else might have used. This despite any sane person would see that this is the obvious lead where the police might find more evidence relevant to the case, whether it was them or someone on their wifi. If I had mod points I'd call this trolling.
However, even so privacy and anonymity are not entirely the same. I think it's most obvious if you compare "private letter" with "anonymous letter". Privacy protects the contents, anonymity the sender. Most of the privacy rights come from a reading of the 14th amendment that the state may not restrict your liberty. Some various supreme court quotes:
"While this court has not attempted to define with exactness the liberty thus guaranteed, the term has received much consideration and some of the included things have been definitely stated. Without doubt, it denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men."
"Whatever may be the justifications for other statutes regulating obscenity, we do not think they reach into the privacy of one's own home. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds."
"These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define ones own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life....The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. Their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government. 'It is a promise of the Constitution that there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter.'
All of those deal with whether the state can regulate your personal life. There aren't really that many cases on whether you have a right to be anonymous while doing it.
Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.
That's not to say that everyone doing anything bad is protected by anonymity. But it should put strong bonds on whether the government can force a company (your ISP) to disclose your personal information to a third party. For example imagine that someone anonymous is coming with scolding political criticism and you file a slander case against them, not with any intent of winning only with the intent of exposing that person. But no, the word "anonymity" is not in the constitution so the question is very much real and on topic. Shame on the moderators.
Each page shows about 10 to 20 patent numbers, or around 700 by a quick calculation.
That is unfortunately the reality, there's a forest of patents. And Theora claims to have found a landing spot with not a single tree, not a twig. Despite that Xiph surely has good intentions, the state of software patents makes that hard to believe. I don't know what Steve Jobs has heard, but I can understand him being a skeptic too. Maybe he is given FUD by the current patent holders of H.264 as they have a vested self-interest in keeping Apple on that format, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a core of truth to it.
Remember that Apple is shipping a lot of hardware, imagine the iPod/iPhone/iPad getting hit with patent lawsuits or ugly licencing demands. They can't just rebound like the open source community tp write out the infringing parts, they're pretty much stuck to continue selling content and shipping decoders in the now patented format. H.264 has all the usual suspects on board in the patent pool and it seems unlikely there will be any big surprises. Finally, a lot of people will not consider a PC that can't do H.264 decoding a fully functional PC anyway, Theora or not. BluRays come in H.264, my new video camera records in H.264 so you're not getting rid of any codec, you are just adding more. You can fight this long and very uphill battle, but the end result is that I'd still want H.264.
Microsoft and Apple already licence H.264, normal Linux users don't care about software patents anyway and if you're a corporate user you can get it legally from Fluendo. Mozilla is trying very hard to ignore that pretty much everyone have a H.264 decoder already or could get one by downloading flash. Personally I'd much rather see an embedded mplayer so all my videos play the same than some hackjob integration into my browser. Isn't it the *nix/OSS way to do one thing and do it well? Mozilla is the one desperately trying to forget those roots.
What does that have to do with micro vs. monolithic kernel?
Technically nothing, but I imagine a micro kernel would have a much more persistent API/ABI in practice. Linux changes the kernel module interface very often so it's a lot more practical to have the source in the main kernel and let the kernel maintainers update the driver than to keep up with a binary driver. The nvidia and catalyst drivers are exceptions because they're huge graphics processing engines but all the other hardware is really better off in the kernel because of it.
Heh, KOffice 2.0.0 was released on May 28th 2009 so that has been out a looooooooong time. On the other hand, they also said in the release notes:
Targeted Audience
Our goal for now is to release a first preview of what we have accomplished. This release is mainly aimed at developers, testers and early adopters. It is not aimed at end users, and we do not recommend Linux distributions to package it as the default office suite yet.
And no, the bold outline is not mine. Maybe we should wait for the first release that sees any wide testing by normal linux distro users first? And for a review on Tom's Hardware I'd wait until the next release after that when the nastiest bugs are cleaned up. I imagine any review they'd do now would do more harm than good...
The problem is your "ownership" is derived from management's ownership of that hardware and software. So if they demand access, you do not have the authority to deny it. A boss can not authorize access to a system that that boss doesn't have authority to access himself. For security reasons they might not have an account or password, but they still have authority.
Depending on how anally the company is set up, management as a whole may have that power but it is not certain that power is delegated to your direct superior. Take for example the military where your boss may reassign people, but it is probably not his decision to grant clearance. Also his clearance may be less than yours, it is not like the generals have total clearance so even if he asks for the master passwords for himself it may violate policy. I don't know of any company that wants to inflict that much pain on themselves though.
If he had said as much and told why he didn't recognize the chain of command and who he would give the logins to, I might have sympathy. Instead he went to great lengths to avoid giving anybody access, effectively holding their system hostage. Try imagining a physical equivalent: Your building superintendent is reassigned to work on something completely different, hands people a dummy key on the way out and takes with him the only master key because he feels no one is authorized to have it so everybody is locked out. At this point you can tell all the tales you want on how unclear the policies are, but I'd call the cops on him immediately. No reasonable person could think that this key should not be handed over but rather be kept by deception by someone who no longer has any job duty or authorization to have it.
Slashdot Mirror
But patents do cover use, so everyone even using x264 in a country with software patents without a license are violating the law no matter what the license is. The only difference is that if you bought a MPEG LA license and x264 was BSD licensed you could ship binaries with a patent license, but the GPL prevents that. In other words, even if Canonical licenses H.264 for OEM builds, they have to ship a different binary with a compatible license. This is quite intentionally so that you can't get a "copyright" over copyleft software via patents. Compare that to the BSD license, even if you write 100% of the code yourself and it's patented and live in the wrong country you can't use it, you can't distribute it but the patent holder can do anything they want using your code.
I think most things would make more sense if geeks coupled it to the fact that most consider their users to suffer from id10-t or PEBCAK problems. While that's not really true either, most people don't want a "computer" the way us geeks look at a computer. They don't want to know about CPU and RAM and GPU and so on, it's kind of like asking them to assemble a car by what engine, transmission, brakes and exhaust system go together. They want a car that solves a transportation problem. => limited models
Likewise with Apple's walled garden, honestly already people DO NOT know how to use their gizmos. Most of them will never ever see the fence, and if they do it'd feel tiny like the borders of North Korea. Geeks are like running full speed towards it and go like "See, there's a fence there" while others are like "Ok whatever, but what's everything else I haven't explored like? There *are* 200k apps here that do all sorts of cool shit." As many have said when they suggest a computer or internet driving licence, people don't know how to administrate their own systems. They depend on others whether it's their geeky kids, friends, family, computer shop or the support line or whatever. What the geeks are saying Apple takes away is something they already feel they have very little knowledge and control over. => don't care about lockdown
Also, geeks have a blind spot for missing user interface disasters, but common users have a blind spot for missing back end disasters. We try something, realize it's crap and move on. They try it, struggle, struggle some more and think computers are really, really hard or that they are dense. They have huge learning costs and only understand function, not concept so each application is almost like new to them. Users like being put in front of one piece of good software, it does not have to be the ultimate software of all time but better than trying to figure out which of five open source clones are actually any good. This is why they always ask for "brand" products like Photoshop, they don't know good from bad but assume that with a famous product it's as easy as it'll get. => iEverything
Apple makes products for the huge group who doesn't "really" want the complexities of those products, which turns out to be most of us. I have to admit that while I'm insanely geeky in some areas, for example my washing machine has more than a dozen programs and 95%+ of the time I use the basic 40 degree program. My photo camera has a bunch of manual settings but 95%+ of the time I just want to use the intelligent everything. Kinda like the Wii, I've managed to get even my parents to try it. They wouldn't touch PC or console games with a 10 foot pole. Any product you make that lets "everyone else" use something will be a huge hit. Just admit you're not in the "everybody else" category.
The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple -- the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."
This is only true if there's no connection between wanting to game and having a jailbroken iPhone, which I assume is very false. Very many people don't care about jailbreaking because they use it with no, free or few applications, the value of jailbreaking to them is very low. On the other hand, if you want to play lots of games (where lots of games * money = lots of money) then jailbreaking has a high value. The data presented doesn't preclude the possibility that 80% of your market is within the 10% that are jailbroken.
The problem is TLDs in the first place, all they've done is create cybersquatting. Here's what they should do:
1. Create a new global TLD .g, minimum name length 3 characters .g appended .g
2. Declare that any domain that doesn't have a two letter TLDs should have
3. Grandfather in all the dotcom/net/org/biz/whatever as taken subdomains of
4. If the base domain is not disputed, grant the [name].g domain.
This way I can type in "mcdonalds" as the domain name -> macdonalds.g
For anything disputed you still need "slashdot.com/org/net" -> slashdot.com/org/net.g
Country domains are not affected "vg.no" -> vg.no
This way you don't have to go to the global DNS servers on every typo'd query. You would have to go to the .g servers, but I imagine it'd be much like .com today. And TLDs as we know them go bye-bye, I won't miss them.
In fact I'd hazard a guess that Blizzard are actively trying to deter 'Gamers' and attract 'Socialisers'.
Socializers don't go to other games because there's no community, but gamers do because there is a cool new game. I think the gamers are dangerous "trendsetters" so I imagine Blizzard is trying hard to keep them, not for the revenue but to prevent alternative communities from spawning.
Simply keep the endgame a deep tar pit that actually requires some skills and they're essentially playing a completely different game than people that button mash and socialize, despite both being called WoW. Or hell even just the organizational skills of getting a guild of sufficent numbers, classes, equipment, battle plan etc. even if the basic combat is simple.
There is a massive difference between 'challenging' and 'annoying'. Many game makers have a hard time with this one. Many players have a hard time seeing the difference as well.
Known fact: The more people time people invest, the more emotion they invest. You just have to not lose them on the way, afterwards they can brag on abot the phat l00t they got and look down on everyone else that didn't spend those hours of irritating gameplay.
Also called "putting all the eggs in one basket"...
So how exactly is this different than DVI, HDMI and DP which are also digital? I think this has great potential...
The industry has moved away from "more horsepower than you'll ever need!" to "uses less power than you can ever imagine!"
Personally I think the form factor will be the defining property, not the power. There's some things you'd rather do on your phone, some you'd rather do on your laptop and some you'd rather have a full size keyboard, mouse, screen etc. for. Maybe there's room for an iPad in that, at least people think there is. Even if all of them would last 12 hours on battery you'd not like to carry a laptop 24/7 or try typing up a novel on a smart phone. I think we will simply have more gadgets, not one even if it runs on thin air.
Funny how you should mention equipment, when a manned mission would have to carry huge, huge amounts of equipment to make sure said squishy little thing doesn't die on the way there from temperature, radiation, lack of air, water or food. Same goes for heat shields, parachutes and thrusters to not get killed during landing - landing like the rovers would leave them a bloody smear. Again all the environmental requirements applies on the planet, you'd need a huge solar panel just to keep the habitat at a survivable temperature. Most likely their operational reach is limited by getting home by nightfall when it's -80C (-110F) at best. Never mind that they probably want a way to return home that'll take even more room for a launch vehicle. In short, the whole expedition is huge long before you have the tiniest bit of scientific equipment.
A "Perfect 10" is 36-24-36, if 10-10-10 is your idea of it seek professional help ;)
Hardly anyone wants to "upgrade" that often
Why then does reality disagree with you? Or is there someone holding a gun to their head forcing them to use Ubuntu or to use the six month releases over the LTS ones?
1. cheap
2. big
3. reliable
Choose two!
Please tell me where I can get cheap big SSDs.
The advantages I've seen:
1. Performance
2. Silent
3. Light
4. Higher shock resistance
Undecided/even:
1. More reliable
2. Smaller
3. Lower power
Disadvantages:
1. Cost
2. Size
Unfortunately, one of the things often touted about SSDs don't quite seem true, they don't really scale down. Big SSDs = more parallel channels = better read/write performance. Which is a shame, because if they could really scale down to 10-20 GB I'd see a huge market for dual storage laptops, SSD for OS and HDD for bulk storage.
OMG are you just bashing Microsoft for NOT pushing their own proprietary Win/IE only solution, and instead going for an industry standard (ITU-T and ISO) video codec? To implement a W3C standard <video> tag? They really can't win, can they... I figure they simply got a good deal with MPEG-LA which makes sure they won't be screwed, or they'd never commit in this fashion. Even Microsoft seems to realize H.264 is the way forward instead of pushing their own VC-1 codec. Mozilla will see IE9 and Chrome eat it alive once HTML5 takes off, it doesn't matter how much they're sulking in the corner about patents they're still going down.
Well, the reality is that people don't want to pay for it - at least not as much as advertisers.
Let's take a brief math example: The superbowl had 62 ad slots which averaged 3 million dollars in 2008 and 98.7 million watched it. That's 1.90$ per person watching, but since it was only 48.1 million households a PPV licence would have to work out to about 4$. But that is assuming there'll still be 98 million viewers and 48 million households, which is unlikely - it's RIAA/MPAA math. First of all, many people just casually interested might not watch at all, those that do would be gathering more and you might see maybe 60 million viewers on 20 million households. Then it's a 9-10$ / PPV license which drives away more people and the numbers work out even worse and so on.
If advertising is simply made unfeasible, there will have to be large cutbacks all around. It's not just that people can get the same thing for free as they get behind the paywall, it's that people value the content much less than the advertisers value the eyeball time. I think this whole scenario that everything will be behind paywalls are ridiculous, the harder it becomes to get eyeball time the more it'll be worth - it's basic supply and demand. Eventually when enough content is behind paywalls it will again be profitable to run ad-based sites. Which I don't even think will happen in the first place.
I don't think it'll work, because I think the average impression by now is that IE is some old crap we have to keep around for intranet purposes. Like for example one "new" install image I know that was being deployed in 2009 with IE6, despite a rather large campaign here in Norway of "please upgrade" on many of the country's most popular websites. I suggested to that company that maybe they should consider including Firefox as well for "normal" browsing and essentially deprecate IE, I don't know if they did but the idea was at least taken very seriously. I think that'll be the solution for most companies, very many of the new web applications are updated very slowly or they don't want to pay for upgrades to the latest version. Give users a different browser for browsing, rename IE as "intranet explorer".
I honestly don't feel that much difference anymore. A year ago it was something like 30% non-IE browsers, now it's 40% non-IE. Both are too big to ignore and many replacements of old IE-only systems from when they had 90% market share probably would have happened anyway. From here to about 80-90% non-IE where you can consider dropping IE support you are supporting the same anyway.
From WP: The JWST's primary scientific mission has four main components: to search for light from the first stars and galaxies which formed in the Universe after the Big Bang, to study the formation and evolution of galaxies, to understand the formation of stars and planetary systems, and to study planetary systems and the origins of life.
In fact, I recall that there was a case where the BS open WiFi argument was quashed (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/04/child-porn-case-shows-that-an-open-wifi-network-is-no-defense.ars).
I wonder if you have even read the link you post. They were convicted by the huge stacks of CDs in their room. It had nothing do to with "beyond a reasonable doubt" or even "preponderance of evidence", they tried to use their wifi as reason why the police had no "probable cause" and the warrant is invalid. A wifi network the police of course had no idea existed, so despite illegal material being traced to their IP the police should do nothing on the possibility that there be might an open wifi network that someone else might have used. This despite any sane person would see that this is the obvious lead where the police might find more evidence relevant to the case, whether it was them or someone on their wifi. If I had mod points I'd call this trolling.
However, even so privacy and anonymity are not entirely the same. I think it's most obvious if you compare "private letter" with "anonymous letter". Privacy protects the contents, anonymity the sender. Most of the privacy rights come from a reading of the 14th amendment that the state may not restrict your liberty. Some various supreme court quotes:
"While this court has not attempted to define with exactness the liberty thus guaranteed, the term has received much consideration and some of the included things have been definitely stated. Without doubt, it denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men."
"Whatever may be the justifications for other statutes regulating obscenity, we do not think they reach into the privacy of one's own home. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds."
"These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define ones own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life....The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. Their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government. 'It is a promise of the Constitution that there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter.'
All of those deal with whether the state can regulate your personal life. There aren't really that many cases on whether you have a right to be anonymous while doing it.
This is what the supreme court said in 1995:
Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.
That's not to say that everyone doing anything bad is protected by anonymity. But it should put strong bonds on whether the government can force a company (your ISP) to disclose your personal information to a third party. For example imagine that someone anonymous is coming with scolding political criticism and you file a slander case against them, not with any intent of winning only with the intent of exposing that person. But no, the word "anonymity" is not in the constitution so the question is very much real and on topic. Shame on the moderators.
Each page shows about 10 to 20 patent numbers, or around 700 by a quick calculation.
That is unfortunately the reality, there's a forest of patents. And Theora claims to have found a landing spot with not a single tree, not a twig. Despite that Xiph surely has good intentions, the state of software patents makes that hard to believe. I don't know what Steve Jobs has heard, but I can understand him being a skeptic too. Maybe he is given FUD by the current patent holders of H.264 as they have a vested self-interest in keeping Apple on that format, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a core of truth to it.
Remember that Apple is shipping a lot of hardware, imagine the iPod/iPhone/iPad getting hit with patent lawsuits or ugly licencing demands. They can't just rebound like the open source community tp write out the infringing parts, they're pretty much stuck to continue selling content and shipping decoders in the now patented format. H.264 has all the usual suspects on board in the patent pool and it seems unlikely there will be any big surprises. Finally, a lot of people will not consider a PC that can't do H.264 decoding a fully functional PC anyway, Theora or not. BluRays come in H.264, my new video camera records in H.264 so you're not getting rid of any codec, you are just adding more. You can fight this long and very uphill battle, but the end result is that I'd still want H.264.
Microsoft and Apple already licence H.264, normal Linux users don't care about software patents anyway and if you're a corporate user you can get it legally from Fluendo. Mozilla is trying very hard to ignore that pretty much everyone have a H.264 decoder already or could get one by downloading flash. Personally I'd much rather see an embedded mplayer so all my videos play the same than some hackjob integration into my browser. Isn't it the *nix/OSS way to do one thing and do it well? Mozilla is the one desperately trying to forget those roots.
What does that have to do with micro vs. monolithic kernel?
Technically nothing, but I imagine a micro kernel would have a much more persistent API/ABI in practice. Linux changes the kernel module interface very often so it's a lot more practical to have the source in the main kernel and let the kernel maintainers update the driver than to keep up with a binary driver. The nvidia and catalyst drivers are exceptions because they're huge graphics processing engines but all the other hardware is really better off in the kernel because of it.
Heh, KOffice 2.0.0 was released on May 28th 2009 so that has been out a looooooooong time. On the other hand, they also said in the release notes:
Targeted Audience
Our goal for now is to release a first preview of what we have accomplished. This release is mainly aimed at developers, testers and early adopters. It is not aimed at end users, and we do not recommend Linux distributions to package it as the default office suite yet.
And no, the bold outline is not mine. Maybe we should wait for the first release that sees any wide testing by normal linux distro users first? And for a review on Tom's Hardware I'd wait until the next release after that when the nastiest bugs are cleaned up. I imagine any review they'd do now would do more harm than good...
The problem is your "ownership" is derived from management's ownership of that hardware and software. So if they demand access, you do not have the authority to deny it. A boss can not authorize access to a system that that boss doesn't have authority to access himself. For security reasons they might not have an account or password, but they still have authority.
Depending on how anally the company is set up, management as a whole may have that power but it is not certain that power is delegated to your direct superior. Take for example the military where your boss may reassign people, but it is probably not his decision to grant clearance. Also his clearance may be less than yours, it is not like the generals have total clearance so even if he asks for the master passwords for himself it may violate policy. I don't know of any company that wants to inflict that much pain on themselves though.
If he had said as much and told why he didn't recognize the chain of command and who he would give the logins to, I might have sympathy. Instead he went to great lengths to avoid giving anybody access, effectively holding their system hostage. Try imagining a physical equivalent: Your building superintendent is reassigned to work on something completely different, hands people a dummy key on the way out and takes with him the only master key because he feels no one is authorized to have it so everybody is locked out. At this point you can tell all the tales you want on how unclear the policies are, but I'd call the cops on him immediately. No reasonable person could think that this key should not be handed over but rather be kept by deception by someone who no longer has any job duty or authorization to have it.