Steve Jobs said, 'The iPod already works with the No. 1 music service in the world, and the iTunes Music Store works with the No. 1 digital-music player in the world. The No. 2s are so far behind already. Why would we want to work with No. 2?'"
Gee, I don't know... Perhaps to prevent number three from becoming number one?
Come on Steve, we appreciate you for cocreating and running a cool company. Don't start going mad with power on us now! Look further ahead!
In fact, in addition to looking ahead, you should also learn more from the past, as well. Remember when you reversed the decision to license the Apple architecture to clone manufacturers? Look where that left the Mac's market share today!
But then again: what do I know? It's not like I have ever been the CEO of a multibillion dollar enterprise...:(
I even mailed around an initiative based on this idea to a couple of prominent people in the Open-Source/Free-Software world.
I received a response from Richard Stallman.
He mentioned having considered something like a defensive patent foundation before, to come to the conclusion that it would cost [b]a lot of money[/b] to gain patents, and even more money to enforce them.
Still, I am convined that if enough people would be to join such a foundation, we would still have enough clout to make a difference.
If, like me, you're serious about such an initiative, then please contact me at buison01@REMOVEALLTHECAPITALLETTERSie.hva.nl
Around 1998, my Grandpa, who was in his early eighties, increasingly considered purchasing a computer and learning how to use the Internet.
Grandma was reluctant at first, because of the thought of having such a large thing in their (not so big) home didn't appeal to her, but eventually she came around and agreed. Not much later, she started to appreciate the fun and knowledge it was bringing him.
I still remember receiving a snail mail from him containing a letter, produced with his inkjet printer, explaining how he was gradually learning, being somewhat satisfied yet modest about his progress. But I could definitely read his hidden pride between the lines, in spite of a few typos.;)
I remembered thinking "This is cool, he's learning quickly, although it might take a while before I can get him to use email". In fact, he got the hang of sending an receiving email fairly independently in less than a year, and it eventually became a fairly common activity for him.
In the end of december 1999, I received an email from him, inviting all of the family to the traditional New Year's Day Reunion at my grandparent's place. We attended that day, but it turned out not being the joyous and optimistic occasion it was supposed to be: my dear Grandpa had passed away in the early morning of January 1st, 2000. One would almost think that the symbolism in such a date would be too much just to be considered coincedence...
It was (understandably) too painful for Grandma to keep the computer at her house, so she gave it to my aunt.
In spite of the fact that Grandpa lived only a few hours short of seeing the dawn of the New Millenium, he still ended up having experienced the Internet, having participated in it, and having shared the dreams of the many wonderful things to come. For that, I am greatful.
This story may not be entirely on-topic, but I just wanted to share it with you. I would gladly have introduced Linux to Grandpa eventually. And I'm sure he would have been very interested and eager to take up the challenge of learning it.:)
Please let this be a positive example for anyone thinking that he or she may be "too old" to pick up computing and emailing: You're NEVER too old to learn!
This is cool news and all, but does anybody here know if this frequency range will also be made public (or has already been public for that matter) anywhere outside the US?
Not much use making this a universal standard if it can only be exploited in one county.
This had to do with the memory model of the 8086 and 8088 CPU's used in the old XT computers back in the day.
Since the address bus of these CPU's was only 16 bits wide, only 64kbytes could be addressed linearly. In order to facilitate the addressing of up to 1MB of conventional memory (640KB usable), the memory had to be segmented.
That's why the old "real mode" addressing works with 64KB segments. It gets worse even: the segments overlapped as well. It was a real mess.
COM executables were limited to being 64KB for this reason. Later on, DOS started supporting the more sophisticated EXE format, which did support more than 64KB. It had something to do with "near" and "far" memory jumps within assembly code, if I remember correctly.
Thinking about it, I now understand why the demo scene (mostly writing everything in assembly language) tended to prefer the 68000-based Amiga platform.:)
However frustrating this is to all of us (especially those among us that went through the trouble of travelling to Brussels and Strasbourg to make our voices heard and those of us who will be visiting Brussels the coming week): there is a big possibility that The European Commission is going to overrule a democratic process by the European Parliament and will vote in favor of unlimited patentability of ideas, including software.
Although we must continue to resist this as much as legally possible, we must also look further forward and think about how to battle the evil of software patents if they become a reality in Europe as well.
Granted, the current patent system currently works almost excusively in favor of large corporationas and empowers them to squash any newcomers, therefore allowing the large corporations to permanently consolidate their market share and influence.
Let's look at allegories in our past: the exploitation of the working class individual by large corporations during the Industrial Revolution. One man was no match against the large corporations. After all, if someone did not agree to the working conditions, the working hours and the meager salary, they'd just throw him out. There were more than enough others available that were eager to take his place in spite of all this.
The answer to this was found in Trade Unions. One man could not make a difference, but a large group of men could. With the founding of Trade Unions, the companies were forced to negotiate with the Trade Unions and offer better conditions and more reasonable pay.
Now suppose we used the Labor Union example as a model to form a similar foundation. An Open Source Community Patent Trust. (Everyone here that can think of a better name, please step in.;) )
I've been impressed with many new true innovations coming from the Open Source development community lately. Everytime I saw a cool new idea being developed by someone or some group within the Open Source community, my enthusiasm about the coolness of the innovation would be further enhanced by an additional sense of relief: "The Open Source community developed this first and put it on the map. There's no way anyone can take this away from us, now that we have demonstrated prior art."
The point is that we underestimate as well as fail to harness all these impressive innovations.
Now if we founded a International Non-profit organisation that any developer could subscribe to (which would require a periodic subscription fee, just as labor unions do) and would use the subscription money to finance as much patents on Open Source software innovations as possible, then its patent portfolio (which it would manage and protect on behalf of the entire community) whould steadily grow and grow.
A comittee (consisting of both developers and enlightened law experts such as the good people at Groklaw) would evaluate which of the donated ideas would we worth patenting, constantly keeping the current budget for expensive patent applications in mind.
Now in order to prevent all major corporations from collectively turning on this foundation, it would be a very important guideline for it to work purely defensively on behalf of itself and its members. It simply couldn't afford picking unnecessary fights, especially not early on in its existence.
As soon as a member of the foundation were bullied by a company accusing them of patent infringement, the foundation could then bring the entire worldwide community's collective patent portfolio to bear against this company. Alternatively, the foundation could spend some money from its defense fund to fund the victim's legal expenses. That way, the victim could more easily decide to go ahead with a lawsuit, instead of having to back off purely because of the threat of litigation. That alone could force many companies to think twice about starting an infringement case, since actually going ahead with the case could also res
It consumes too much power to keep it on anyway. Although it would be cool if CeBIT provided wireless internet access through Bluetooth througout the terrain. I know they did have an 802.11b network running last year, which was freely accessible to visitors.
One cool thing this year was the availibility of the CeBIT Mobile Fair Planner for Symbian-based phones. It was available for download on the CeBIT site (altough access to it required free registration). No more thick guide to plough through in order to find the exhibitors you're looking for. An exhibitor list (including search functionality), interior maps of the buildings hosting the fair, everything in my phone!
It was the first time I actually felt myself living in the twentyfirst century.:)
Now I hope that Nokia will soon release a Bluesnarfing-proof firmware update for my phone.
The girl in the article mentioned among other things not having any cellular coverage there.
Since Chernobyl was permanently evacuated long before public cellular networks became prevalent in Easter Europe, no cellular towers were ever placed in that area.
The parent has a point: she's alone, quite a distance away from civilization in a desolate region, with no means of communication with the outside world. Comtemplating all of this, it is a bit scary indeed.
It might be a good idea to bring along a satellite phone next time, just in case.
She's a very brave young lady to undertake such an adventure! She sure has my respect.
Nokia should've launched it at CeBIT 2004
on
N-Gage 2 Announced
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't get it. If Nokia was actually planning to announcce this N-Gage 2 this quarter, then why didn't they do so at the annual CeBIT tradeshow in Hannover this week? That would've been the ideal public launch platform. Nokia is one of the most popular exhibitors there every year.
In fact, Nokia was still marketing the N-Gage 1 really heavily at that fair.
This could very well be an April Fool's joke, if you ask me...
It is impressive to see an MPEG4-compliant codec being developed under the GPL-license that is of such a high quality that it rivals most commercial MPEG4-implementations.
The people working on XVID must be really talented and motivated to deliver such high quality code. In my opinion, it's a shame that these developers don't put their efforts in the Theora-project instead, because of the patent-related restrictions involved with the MPEG4-standard.
Couldn't it be possible to merge all NON-PATENTED technology from the XVID-project into the Theora-project?
That way, the Theora could benefit from XVID as much as possible, while remaining free from patent-restrictions.
The advisory committee is expected to approve a remedy requiring the U.S. firm to share more of its protocols with rivals, charging a reasonable royalty. It will be left to Microsoft to work out the precise solution, with close oversight by the Commission, the sources said.
If Microsoft is still allowed to demand royalties for sharing API's and protocols (no matter how 'reasonable'), the sanctions will still be useless to Open Source and Free Software developers. What good is this to the SAMBA team? And you can forget about Red Hat finally adding NTFS-compatibility to its distributions! >:(
Even Kernel 2.4.6 still locks up frequently on my Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard unless I specify the options "noapic nolapic" at boot time. Then the system runs flawlessly (even with ACPI-support).
I read somewhere that the problem currently lies in the BIOS, rather than in the kernel, and that some vendors have already released proper BIOS updates that add a "C1 disconnect" option, which supposedly does the trick.
Unfortunately, Asus has released no such update as of yet.
Does anyone here (perhaps one of the kernel developers involved) have any more details on this?
Can this problem eventually be solved in the kernel, even without any BIOS updates?
After all, as far as I understood it, the BIOS pretty much takes a back seat as soon as the kernel is running, right?
As a suitable allegory, let's consider the South Park episode "The Chicken Lover".
(***A little spoiler-warning here for those among you who have not yet seen this episode.***)
Officer Barbrady comes out with the secret that he is in fact illiterate. This is a humongous blow for his self-esteem, and he is no longer convinced that he can maintain L&O througout the town with this impediment.
Of course, this couldn't have come at a worse time, since the town is meanwhile being terorized by an as of yet unidentified Chicken Fucker.
A weird hippy-type bookmobile worker gets involved and provides the Officer with clues, forcing the Officer to learn how to read in order for the clues to be useful to him.
To sum up this long story, Officer Barbrady eventually tracks down and apprehends the Chicken Fucker, revealing his true identity. To the shock of the people on the scene, he turns out to be none other than the bookmobile worker himself!
As it turns out, he purposely started performing those heinous crimes and passing on clues, in order to encourage the Officer to learn how to read. Successfully, as it now turned out. The Officer can now read (albeit barely) and has regained the respect of the good townspeople of South Park, by removing a dangerous freak from the streets.
Unfortunately for the "Chicken Lover", no one ends up sympathizing with him, in spite of his good intentions. He ends up sacrificing his freedom and whatever standing he had in the community in order to help the Officer. Even the latter doesn't show any appreciation as he ruthlessly hauls the perpetrator's sorry ass to prison.
So I was thinking, Darl McBride possibly knew all along this SCO lawsuit would be bogus (after all, what individual with even a spec of a brain wouldn't, right?).
Perhaps he knew that in order to protect Linux from future lawsuits, the best thing he could do was to sacrifice his company (which was going downhill anyway) as well as himself by setting a precedent with a lawsuit so outrageous, that Linux would HAVE to come out on top, deterring any future legal action by other parties.
In the end, SCO will most likely have been crushed beneath IBM's elite legal team, while Darl McBride will have lost all respect and sympathy throughout the software industry. He might even go to jail. If he purposely went through with the anti-Linux-campaign while realizing all of this in advance, then it will have been a brave, selfless, yet unrecognized act of self-sacrifice for the good of the open-source community.
LucasArts has published numerous Star Wars games so far, in almost every thinkable genre (FPS, TPS, RTS, racing, spacesim, RPG), except the adventure game genre.
If it's true that a Star Wars game would always sell and would therefore be a safe bet, then I guess a perfect solution for both LucasArts and the advanture game fans among us would be a SCUMM game set in the Star Wars Universe.
They made Indiana Jones adventures, right? Why not Star Wars adventures?
If such a Star Wars adventure would turn out to be a hit, that might persuade LucasArts that perhaps the Adventure game genre isn't really all that dead yet, and they might then reconsider games like Full Throttle 2 and Sam & Max 2.
In Europe, the 900MHz and 1800MHz ranges have been reserved (exclusively) for GSM networks for quite a few years. No standards other than GSM are allowed on these frequencies. Countries in Asia and Africa that also adopted the GSM standard ended up licensing the same frequency bands for compatibility reasons.
In North-America, the 1900MHz range was reserved for digital cellular networks. The US chose not to define a single mandatory cellular standard for use with this frequency. As a result, there are currently three different and incompatible standards in the US that are deployed in the 1900MHz range: TDMA, CDMA and GSM. All 1900MHz digital cellular networks (using any standard) are generally referred to as "PCS". TDMA is now considered to be obsolete and is gradually being replaced by GSM.
The 850MHz band is also available for cellular communications in the US. If I remember correctly, this freqency was already used for analog networks before digital cellular technology was introduced.
Digital technology offers many advantages over analog technology (security, bandwidth utilization efficiency, data services, quality of service). Therefore, cellular network providers desired to upgrade their analog networks to digital networks as much and quickly as possible. The 850Mhz licenses were still valuable, since the companies had payed a lot of money for them, and because lower frequencies offer a greater range (with the same transmitting power) than higher frequencies. In practice that means that a 850MHz network would require less antennas than a 1900MHz network within the same area of coverage.
Because of this, the GSM850 (sub)standard was officially ratified. This allowed GSM technology to be deployed in 850MHz networks.
One thing I did notice was that the major cellular phone manufacturers have sofar been slow with introducing 850MHz-compatibility in their new models.
Of course, it took some years for triband phones (900MHz/1800MHz/1900MHz) to become generally available, providing reasonable coverage in North America and excellent coverage in most of the rest of the world.
As far as I know, there are still no quadband phones (800MHz/850MHz/1800MHz/1900MHz), although I'm sure that that will be simply a matter of time. Those would be the ultimate roaming phones for frequent transatlantic travellers.:-)
The only two countries with mobile networks that don't have any GSM coverage are South-Korea and Japan.
This could be an excellent move for Macromedia, since the Linux-platform is currently (still) being ignored by its archrival Adobe.
I'm an optimist, so I am sure that Adobe will eventually be convinced by the increased marketshare of Linux to port their applications over as well. But the sooner Macromedia gets a foothold in Linux in the meantime, the more of an advantage it will have when the time comes for Adobe to follow suit.
Since we're talking about Macromedia and Flash anyway: does anyone here know why the open-source Flash plugin hasn't been developed further by anyone? Macromedia's binary-only plugin lacks performance (and often stability) as well as platform-support, is currently still at version 6. Besides, the Flash 7 specs are publicly available anyway, so we wouldn't even have to reverse engineer the format to reimplement the plugin, right?
Perhaps such an open-source plugin could eventually even be integrated in the Mozilla directly? Or would that somehow be an undesirable idea?
For the interested folks who are impressed by the quality of its GUI under various Operating Systems: Audacity makes use of the wxWind...Oops, wxWidgets-toolkit. AFAIK, this is one of the most prominent applications based on this toolkit. It really shows off the quality of wxWidgets as a cross-platform GUI toolkit.
wxWidgets is released under the LGPL-license, making it suitable for both open- and closed-source application development.
Audacity is such a cool and useful tool. Linux NEEDS more quality applications like this. Excellent work, Audacity developers! Keep up the good work!:-)
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Make sure the machine is not connected to the Internet when the installation completes!
Otherwise, you'll get a virus anyway, even if you don't touch the computer.
Yes, my friends: it's that pathetic.
Steve Jobs said, 'The iPod already works with the No. 1 music service in the world, and the iTunes Music Store works with the No. 1 digital-music player in the world. The No. 2s are so far behind already. Why would we want to work with No. 2?'"
:(
Gee, I don't know... Perhaps to prevent number three from becoming number one?
Come on Steve, we appreciate you for cocreating and running a cool company. Don't start going mad with power on us now! Look further ahead!
In fact, in addition to looking ahead, you should also learn more from the past, as well. Remember when you reversed the decision to license the Apple architecture to clone manufacturers? Look where that left the Mac's market share today!
But then again: what do I know? It's not like I have ever been the CEO of a multibillion dollar enterprise...
I wholeheartedly agree with the idea that we must "beat them at their own game".
In fact, I suggested something very similar less than a week ago.
I even mailed around an initiative based on this idea to a couple of prominent people in the Open-Source/Free-Software world.
I received a response from Richard Stallman.
He mentioned having considered something like a defensive patent foundation before, to come to the conclusion that it would cost [b]a lot of money[/b] to gain patents, and even more money to enforce them.
Still, I am convined that if enough people would be to join such a foundation, we would still have enough clout to make a difference.
If, like me, you're serious about such an initiative, then please contact me at buison01@REMOVEALLTHECAPITALLETTERSie.hva.nl
Hmmm... Screwing Humanity Since 1948...
:D
They got that right!
Around 1998, my Grandpa, who was in his early eighties, increasingly considered purchasing a computer and learning how to use the Internet.
;)
:)
:)
Grandma was reluctant at first, because of the thought of having such a large thing in their (not so big) home didn't appeal to her, but eventually she came around and agreed. Not much later, she started to appreciate the fun and knowledge it was bringing him.
I still remember receiving a snail mail from him containing a letter, produced with his inkjet printer, explaining how he was gradually learning, being somewhat satisfied yet modest about his progress. But I could definitely read his hidden pride between the lines, in spite of a few typos.
I remembered thinking "This is cool, he's learning quickly, although it might take a while before I can get him to use email". In fact, he got the hang of sending an receiving email fairly independently in less than a year, and it eventually became a fairly common activity for him.
In the end of december 1999, I received an email from him, inviting all of the family to the traditional New Year's Day Reunion at my grandparent's place. We attended that day, but it turned out not being the joyous and optimistic occasion it was supposed to be: my dear Grandpa had passed away in the early morning of January 1st, 2000. One would almost think that the symbolism in such a date would be too much just to be considered coincedence...
It was (understandably) too painful for Grandma to keep the computer at her house, so she gave it to my aunt.
In spite of the fact that Grandpa lived only a few hours short of seeing the dawn of the New Millenium, he still ended up having experienced the Internet, having participated in it, and having shared the dreams of the many wonderful things to come. For that, I am greatful.
This story may not be entirely on-topic, but I just wanted to share it with you. I would gladly have introduced Linux to Grandpa eventually. And I'm sure he would have been very interested and eager to take up the challenge of learning it.
Please let this be a positive example for anyone thinking that he or she may be "too old" to pick up computing and emailing: You're NEVER too old to learn!
Rest in Peace, Opa.
Good grieve, man! Don't just stand there, get your butt to the patent office right away!
:)
The USPTO needs people with at least a hint of a clue especially now more than ever!
This is cool news and all, but does anybody here know if this frequency range will also be made public (or has already been public for that matter) anywhere outside the US?
Not much use making this a universal standard if it can only be exploited in one county.
This had to do with the memory model of the 8086 and 8088 CPU's used in the old XT computers back in the day.
:)
Since the address bus of these CPU's was only 16 bits wide, only 64kbytes could be addressed linearly. In order to facilitate the addressing of up to 1MB of conventional memory (640KB usable), the memory had to be segmented.
That's why the old "real mode" addressing works with 64KB segments. It gets worse even: the segments overlapped as well. It was a real mess.
COM executables were limited to being 64KB for this reason. Later on, DOS started supporting the more sophisticated EXE format, which did support more than 64KB. It had something to do with "near" and "far" memory jumps within assembly code, if I remember correctly.
Thinking about it, I now understand why the demo scene (mostly writing everything in assembly language) tended to prefer the 68000-based Amiga platform.
However frustrating this is to all of us (especially those among us that went through the trouble of travelling to Brussels and Strasbourg to make our voices heard and those of us who will be visiting Brussels the coming week): there is a big possibility that The European Commission is going to overrule a democratic process by the European Parliament and will vote in favor of unlimited patentability of ideas, including software.
;) )
Although we must continue to resist this as much as legally possible, we must also look further forward and think about how to battle the evil of software patents if they become a reality in Europe as well.
Granted, the current patent system currently works almost excusively in favor of large corporationas and empowers them to squash any newcomers, therefore allowing the large corporations to permanently consolidate their market share and influence.
Let's look at allegories in our past: the exploitation of the working class individual by large corporations during the Industrial Revolution. One man was no match against the large corporations. After all, if someone did not agree to the working conditions, the working hours and the meager salary, they'd just throw him out. There were more than enough others available that were eager to take his place in spite of all this.
The answer to this was found in Trade Unions. One man could not make a difference, but a large group of men could. With the founding of Trade Unions, the companies were forced to negotiate with the Trade Unions and offer better conditions and more reasonable pay.
Now suppose we used the Labor Union example as a model to form a similar foundation. An Open Source Community Patent Trust. (Everyone here that can think of a better name, please step in.
I've been impressed with many new true innovations coming from the Open Source development community lately. Everytime I saw a cool new idea being developed by someone or some group within the Open Source community, my enthusiasm about the coolness of the innovation would be further enhanced by an additional sense of relief: "The Open Source community developed this first and put it on the map. There's no way anyone can take this away from us, now that we have demonstrated prior art."
The point is that we underestimate as well as fail to harness all these impressive innovations.
Now if we founded a International Non-profit organisation that any developer could subscribe to (which would require a periodic subscription fee, just as labor unions do) and would use the subscription money to finance as much patents on Open Source software innovations as possible, then its patent portfolio (which it would manage and protect on behalf of the entire community) whould steadily grow and grow.
A comittee (consisting of both developers and enlightened law experts such as the good people at Groklaw) would evaluate which of the donated ideas would we worth patenting, constantly keeping the current budget for expensive patent applications in mind.
Now in order to prevent all major corporations from collectively turning on this foundation, it would be a very important guideline for it to work purely defensively on behalf of itself and its members. It simply couldn't afford picking unnecessary fights, especially not early on in its existence.
As soon as a member of the foundation were bullied by a company accusing them of patent infringement, the foundation could then bring the entire worldwide community's collective patent portfolio to bear against this company. Alternatively, the foundation could spend some money from its defense fund to fund the victim's legal expenses. That way, the victim could more easily decide to go ahead with a lawsuit, instead of having to back off purely because of the threat of litigation. That alone could force many companies to think twice about starting an infringement case, since actually going ahead with the case could also res
This picture confirms our worst fears!
But I had Bluetooth switched off.
:)
It consumes too much power to keep it on anyway. Although it would be cool if CeBIT provided wireless internet access through Bluetooth througout the terrain. I know they did have an 802.11b network running last year, which was freely accessible to visitors.
One cool thing this year was the availibility of the CeBIT Mobile Fair Planner for Symbian-based phones. It was available for download on the CeBIT site (altough access to it required free registration). No more thick guide to plough through in order to find the exhibitors you're looking for. An exhibitor list (including search functionality), interior maps of the buildings hosting the fair, everything in my phone!
It was the first time I actually felt myself living in the twentyfirst century.
Now I hope that Nokia will soon release a Bluesnarfing-proof firmware update for my phone.
The girl in the article mentioned among other things not having any cellular coverage there.
Since Chernobyl was permanently evacuated long before public cellular networks became prevalent in Easter Europe, no cellular towers were ever placed in that area.
The parent has a point: she's alone, quite a distance away from civilization in a desolate region, with no means of communication with the outside world. Comtemplating all of this, it is a bit scary indeed.
It might be a good idea to bring along a satellite phone next time, just in case.
She's a very brave young lady to undertake such an adventure! She sure has my respect.
I don't get it. If Nokia was actually planning to announcce this N-Gage 2 this quarter, then why didn't they do so at the annual CeBIT tradeshow in Hannover this week? That would've been the ideal public launch platform. Nokia is one of the most popular exhibitors there every year.
In fact, Nokia was still marketing the N-Gage 1 really heavily at that fair.
This could very well be an April Fool's joke, if you ask me...
It is impressive to see an MPEG4-compliant codec being developed under the GPL-license that is of such a high quality that it rivals most commercial MPEG4-implementations.
The people working on XVID must be really talented and motivated to deliver such high quality code. In my opinion, it's a shame that these developers don't put their efforts in the Theora-project instead, because of the patent-related restrictions involved with the MPEG4-standard.
Couldn't it be possible to merge all NON-PATENTED technology from the XVID-project into the Theora-project?
That way, the Theora could benefit from XVID as much as possible, while remaining free from patent-restrictions.
Barber: I simply have to get my hands on that.
Thidney: You do mean my hair?
The advisory committee is expected to approve a remedy requiring the U.S. firm to share more of its protocols with rivals, charging a reasonable royalty. It will be left to Microsoft to work out the precise solution, with close oversight by the Commission, the sources said.
If Microsoft is still allowed to demand royalties for sharing API's and protocols (no matter how 'reasonable'), the sanctions will still be useless to Open Source and Free Software developers. What good is this to the SAMBA team? And you can forget about Red Hat finally adding NTFS-compatibility to its distributions! >:(
Dude, you just described an episode of The Lone Gunmen, called Planet Of The Frohikes (or: A Short History Of My Demeaning Captivity).
You know? The one with the chimp who knows how to operate a laptop running Linux?
Even Kernel 2.4.6 still locks up frequently on my Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard unless I specify the options "noapic nolapic" at boot time. Then the system runs flawlessly (even with ACPI-support).
I read somewhere that the problem currently lies in the BIOS, rather than in the kernel, and that some vendors have already released proper BIOS updates that add a "C1 disconnect" option, which supposedly does the trick.
Unfortunately, Asus has released no such update as of yet.
Does anyone here (perhaps one of the kernel developers involved) have any more details on this?
Can this problem eventually be solved in the kernel, even without any BIOS updates?
After all, as far as I understood it, the BIOS pretty much takes a back seat as soon as the kernel is running, right?
So this makes me believe it should be available in Europe as well.
Does anybody here know what GSM frequencies this phone will support?
I assume it's going to be a GSM phone, since the article talks about GPRS support.
But I can't find anything on future plans to release this phone in Europe.
Will this be a tri-band or quad-band phone, allowing for international roaming?
Oh well, I shouldn't complain. I bought a Nokia 6600 a few weeks ago.
No, seriously, folks. Hear me out.
As a suitable allegory, let's consider the South Park episode "The Chicken Lover".
(***A little spoiler-warning here for those among you who have not yet seen this episode.***)
Officer Barbrady comes out with the secret that he is in fact illiterate. This is a humongous blow for his self-esteem, and he is no longer convinced that he can maintain L&O througout the town with this impediment.
Of course, this couldn't have come at a worse time, since the town is meanwhile being terorized by an as of yet unidentified Chicken Fucker.
A weird hippy-type bookmobile worker gets involved and provides the Officer with clues, forcing the Officer to learn how to read in order for the clues to be useful to him.
To sum up this long story, Officer Barbrady eventually tracks down and apprehends the Chicken Fucker, revealing his true identity. To the shock of the people on the scene, he turns out to be none other than the bookmobile worker himself!
As it turns out, he purposely started performing those heinous crimes and passing on clues, in order to encourage the Officer to learn how to read. Successfully, as it now turned out. The Officer can now read (albeit barely) and has regained the respect of the good townspeople of South Park, by removing a dangerous freak from the streets.
Unfortunately for the "Chicken Lover", no one ends up sympathizing with him, in spite of his good intentions. He ends up sacrificing his freedom and whatever standing he had in the community in order to help the Officer. Even the latter doesn't show any appreciation as he ruthlessly hauls the perpetrator's sorry ass to prison.
So I was thinking, Darl McBride possibly knew all along this SCO lawsuit would be bogus (after all, what individual with even a spec of a brain wouldn't, right?).
Perhaps he knew that in order to protect Linux from future lawsuits, the best thing he could do was to sacrifice his company (which was going downhill anyway) as well as himself by setting a precedent with a lawsuit so outrageous, that Linux would HAVE to come out on top, deterring any future legal action by other parties.
In the end, SCO will most likely have been crushed beneath IBM's elite legal team, while Darl McBride will have lost all respect and sympathy throughout the software industry. He might even go to jail. If he purposely went through with the anti-Linux-campaign while realizing all of this in advance, then it will have been a brave, selfless, yet unrecognized act of self-sacrifice for the good of the open-source community.
Poor Darl... Darl, the Chicken Fucker...
LucasArts has published numerous Star Wars games so far, in almost every thinkable genre (FPS, TPS, RTS, racing, spacesim, RPG), except the adventure game genre.
If it's true that a Star Wars game would always sell and would therefore be a safe bet, then I guess a perfect solution for both LucasArts and the advanture game fans among us would be a SCUMM game set in the Star Wars Universe.
They made Indiana Jones adventures, right? Why not Star Wars adventures?
If such a Star Wars adventure would turn out to be a hit, that might persuade LucasArts that perhaps the Adventure game genre isn't really all that dead yet, and they might then reconsider games like Full Throttle 2 and Sam & Max 2.
800MHz was supposed to be 900MHz.
;-) )
(Murmures something about proofreading...
In Europe, the 900MHz and 1800MHz ranges have been reserved (exclusively) for GSM networks for quite a few years. No standards other than GSM are allowed on these frequencies. Countries in Asia and Africa that also adopted the GSM standard ended up licensing the same frequency bands for compatibility reasons.
:-)
In North-America, the 1900MHz range was reserved for digital cellular networks. The US chose not to define a single mandatory cellular standard for use with this frequency. As a result, there are currently three different and incompatible standards in the US that are deployed in the 1900MHz range: TDMA, CDMA and GSM. All 1900MHz digital cellular networks (using any standard) are generally referred to as "PCS". TDMA is now considered to be obsolete and is gradually being replaced by GSM.
The 850MHz band is also available for cellular communications in the US. If I remember correctly, this freqency was already used for analog networks before digital cellular technology was introduced.
Digital technology offers many advantages over analog technology (security, bandwidth utilization efficiency, data services, quality of service). Therefore, cellular network providers desired to upgrade their analog networks to digital networks as much and quickly as possible. The 850Mhz licenses were still valuable, since the companies had payed a lot of money for them, and because lower frequencies offer a greater range (with the same transmitting power) than higher frequencies. In practice that means that a 850MHz network would require less antennas than a 1900MHz network within the same area of coverage.
Because of this, the GSM850 (sub)standard was officially ratified. This allowed GSM technology to be deployed in 850MHz networks.
One thing I did notice was that the major cellular phone manufacturers have sofar been slow with introducing 850MHz-compatibility in their new models.
Of course, it took some years for triband phones (900MHz/1800MHz/1900MHz) to become generally available, providing reasonable coverage in North America and excellent coverage in most of the rest of the world.
As far as I know, there are still no quadband phones (800MHz/850MHz/1800MHz/1900MHz), although I'm sure that that will be simply a matter of time. Those would be the ultimate roaming phones for frequent transatlantic travellers.
The only two countries with mobile networks that don't have any GSM coverage are South-Korea and Japan.
This could be an excellent move for Macromedia, since the Linux-platform is currently (still) being ignored by its archrival Adobe.
I'm an optimist, so I am sure that Adobe will eventually be convinced by the increased marketshare of Linux to port their applications over as well. But the sooner Macromedia gets a foothold in Linux in the meantime, the more of an advantage it will have when the time comes for Adobe to follow suit.
Since we're talking about Macromedia and Flash anyway: does anyone here know why the open-source Flash plugin hasn't been developed further by anyone? Macromedia's binary-only plugin lacks performance (and often stability) as well as platform-support, is currently still at version 6. Besides, the Flash 7 specs are publicly available anyway, so we wouldn't even have to reverse engineer the format to reimplement the plugin, right?
Perhaps such an open-source plugin could eventually even be integrated in the Mozilla directly? Or would that somehow be an undesirable idea?
For the interested folks who are impressed by the quality of its GUI under various Operating Systems: Audacity makes use of the wxWind...Oops, wxWidgets-toolkit. AFAIK, this is one of the most prominent applications based on this toolkit. It really shows off the quality of wxWidgets as a cross-platform GUI toolkit.
:-)
wxWidgets is released under the LGPL-license, making it suitable for both open- and closed-source application development.
Audacity is such a cool and useful tool. Linux NEEDS more quality applications like this. Excellent work, Audacity developers! Keep up the good work!