We had the same problem with a BLu Ray of the same series. We exchanged it at Best Buy and got the DVD version. It's a bit sad, I know but I can watch it now.
However, you might be happy to be able to buy a player now that allows you to enjoy better quality now and later. For instance, every time I read about this fight it reminds me of the BBC's Planet Earth series. I have the DVD version and when I watch the amazing pictures I regularly notice something that might be better in HD. But I can't go and buy a player while the format war is still raging and makes it uncertain that I can use the player for anything else in the coming years...
Heck, my in-laws who offered us Planet Earth as Blu-Ray were very dismayed when they realized we could not play it and had to exchange it at Best Buy for the DVD version.
This format war is very damaging and does deprive people of a few good TV moments here and now. This is of course not very important in the grand scheme of things but the entertainment industry is really screwing up on this issue.
The way I see it the OLPC is a huge success. Not because they have achieved all their goals but because they have already changed the world. They have set a benchmark, shown the way which resulted in:
- Asus doing the EEE PC (299$ for the cheapest one. Sucks more juice, the screen is not as good in sunlight etc. But still, it owes its existence to the OLPC)
- Microsoft is busy porting XP to the OLPC and trying to improve their offer for developing countries and education
- many people have OLPCs
- more people are convinced that simple and cheap machines, simple applications can be very useful
Personally, I got an EEE PC because it was extensible and the trade-offs seemed more adequate for me (heck, I am using the Xandros distribution that came with it, I can fire up bash, install Emacs etc.).
I am really grateful to the OLPC project, because they inspired a new wave of smaller, simpler machines that will be very useful for education. Myself, I plan to use my EEE to learn a thing or two on my daily train ride.
The semi platform independence of Flash is actually pretty good. It's available on the Nokia N810 which runs Linux and has an ARM CPU. Not exactly a PC-like device. And that's without mentioning the open source implementations.
So, Microsoft, please provide a very compatible, well supported implementation of Silverlight on the Nokia N810 and a couple of other similar devices and we will consider it. If not, why bother? Flash is ubiquitous, works well and is becoming less proprietary every year if I believe the news.
Well, I found the news interesting. I wouldn't want a report for every data center but I find that this kind of information is newsworthy because:
- it involves a lot of computers
- Microsoft comes from a shrinkwrap background not online business
- Siberia summons images of cold, wild, hostile environments
- This is a datacenter far from where most of the users live and is therefore an interesting consequence of the Internet
So I mod the article up any day and welcome our Siberian overlords.
You might not wait long: Newegg is selling 16GB of Flash for less than 130$ (in CF,USB and SD). This means you could build a little >100G RAID of those for 800$ or so. And I believe the prices go down really fast (I paid 70$ for 2G in May 2006 and thought it was a good deal. Now I could get 8G for that price). I guess you will get your 100GB flash before September 2008:-) Enjoy!
Well, I guess the idea is that you'll have to support both formats because Microsoft is going to push its format whatever happens. And therefore everybody will have to support 2 formats. So they might as well use the standardization process to convince the Microsoft people to write useful documentation and make it public.
So "the more the merrier" reads as : there is going to be differents formats anyway, the more of them go through a standardization process, the better.
I find your ideas interesting. I would add: 5) the OLPC not being "capable" of running Windows makes Windows look bad : a fat system that wastes resources etc. They probably want to show that there OS can run on the OLPC and is therefore not technically inferior to Linux.
So they have a few objective reasons to do that without being ashamed of it.
I agree, it would make sense to have GPL or LGPL OOO without this copyright assignment thing.
Note that this alternative OOO would be able to use any code from Sun and offer developers an added incentive: they don't have to assign ownership to Sun or anybody. And that can be a big incentive these days after a few projects having closed their source (remember sourceforge, that was not pretty... And more recently CUPS was bought by Apple. Which is not bad per se but I could understand that people who spent a few months of their own time working on it might be unhappy that they did not get a cut of the sale price...)
Of course Sun contributed the main code base and you could see the contributions as a reward to them. But it only works if the new contributions from others are small compared to Sun's. When they become big, you can understand that the contributors might want a more democratic way of handling things.
That's why the FSF says you should assign the copyright to them. But recently they showed that they could use that to make everything GPL3, which is hardly a consensual proposal.
So I guess that the Linux way is pretty good: get code from people who prove they own it and make it GPL. Distribute everything under GPL and count on the absence of a single copyright owner to make sure the initial contract (the GPL version X) will be maintained forever.
There is quite are premium to pay here. Flash is at 8$/GB right now (16-17$ for 2GB etc.). So the Flash for a 640GB SSD could be obtained for about 5 thousand dollars. But integrating all that Flash is not that easy.
You could buy a bunch of USB flash drives and use software RAID to make a big drive. If you have plenty of USB ports on your PC, you might connect 6 flash drives of 8GB which would offer 48GB at 400$ or so.
Another idea I had was to buy CF flash and CF-IDE adapters and connect them to an Areca RAID card. But the power supplies would be a pain in the butt most CF-IDE adapters seem to require floppy power connectors, so you would have to buy N power cables and run them in your box which would be unpleasant with N above 6. But anyway most RAID cards only handle 8 drives, so you would need several of them.
All in all, this company seems to offer a pretty good deal since it is all well packaged, simple and not so easy to replicate for DIY guys.
Actually, there is something to be said for reducing the value of the stolen good. If you make it more dangerous to resell and purchase stolen laptops through identification techniques (engravings, serial ID marked stolen in the laptop vendor's customer service database etc.), you reduce the incentive for stealing them in the first place. Just buying insurance does nothing to improve the situation, it just mitigates your own risk (which is good). Encryption and backups are good too, of course.
Microsoft has an agreement with Novell to distribute Suse Linux. They are therefore in the business of distributing Linux (see the whole GPL3/Microsoft/Novell/Patent deal controversies). Of course, I wouldn't bet that they really push hard to distribute Linux.
You can already get 8GB SDHC (SD High Capacity) cards for less than 100$. I have read that SDHC compatible kernels are available for the N800. Also, the N800 is supposed to have two SD slots (one is easily accessible, the other is more "internal"). The N800 still sells for 350$. This sounds like a nice combo.
I believe the description is a bit wrong. The FCC probably mandates that it be impossible for the end-user to change the application. This is meant to avoid people changing the software to use spectrum that they are not supposed too. Example : a WIFI transmitter might be able to transmit at 2.5GHz, outside of the WIFI band. The only thing that prevents that might be a software check. So if you can update the software, you can do something that the FCC does not allow you to.
So they are arguing that it might be impossible to legally make a software radio with GPL V3 software (unless you enforce the mandatory checks at a hardware level so that the modified software is safe from an FCC perspective).
Replying to myself as I hit submit by mistake. Sorry.
What I meant is that many people are in different situations. Many people who are not considering Linux this week might in couple of months.
This means that many people will wake up some day, want to install Linux and realize that Linux can or cannot manage their hardware. They will react in different ways : fix the problem by using the ndiswrapper, installing other hardware, go back to Windows or OS X etc.
So, buying the right hardware from the start is only an option for people like us who already know they want Linux. Of course it helps as it rewards the good hardware makes who are Linux friendly, but it does not solve the problem instantly.
As TFA said, OEM might bring a big solution : DELL/HP wants to offer Linux laptop, so they choose compatible hardware. Then they want to use the same components across the line of products, so they ditch a few incompatible components. This brings benefits on two sides :
- The hardware/chipset makers then realize they need to be selected for the Linux to avoid being excluded from markets bigger than the Linux market that have suddenly become tied to the Linux market
- The people who bought the non-Linux computers, got Linux compatible hardware anyway which makes their potential switch easier.
So, there are many big stories playing out here and I can understand why people would want to discuss them on Slashdot.
I have moderation points at the moment and thought of rating you as a troll. But I thought better of it and will just state a few points that you seem to have missed :
1) the guy has solved the problem by shelling some money.
2) the money he is paying is only 100$ more than my commute costs. And I guess his house is much bigger and cheaper than anything I could find in NY. So he probably was wise to pay that price.
3) he offered to pay all the connnection costs for the cable company and they refused.
So, I really can relate to this guy and think he really is the good guy here.
Actually, there is a penalty. The people who proposed the law look like fools. The titles in the newspapers are generally not kind when a law is struck down.
Also, the balance of power between the legislators and the judges requires that there is no penalty. The congressmen represent us : they discuss the issue, do their best to make up their mind and vote. They should not be punished for being wrong. No more than you and I should be punished for voting for the 'wrong' candidate on election day.
Slashdot Mirror
Google says: ... VIA C7 @ 1.2 GHz LV (TDP 7 W). VIA C7 @ 1.0 GHz LV (TDP 5 W)
Support VIA C7 @ 1.5 GHz D (TDP 25 W). VIA C7 @ 1.5 GHz (TDP 12 W). VIA C7 @ 1.3 GHz (TDP
So the C7 can be a 5W part too. Which is not too bad for a 1GHz CPU.
I guess the ISAIAH will have such a version too. Sounds interesting, doesn't it?
We had the same problem with a BLu Ray of the same series. We exchanged it at Best Buy and got the DVD version.
It's a bit sad, I know but I can watch it now.
You don't need to upgrade everything.
However, you might be happy to be able to buy a player now that allows you to enjoy better quality now and later. For instance, every time I read about this fight it reminds me of the BBC's Planet Earth series. I have the DVD version and when I watch the amazing pictures I regularly notice something that might be better in HD. But I can't go and buy a player while the format war is still raging and makes it uncertain that I can use the player for anything else in the coming years...
Heck, my in-laws who offered us Planet Earth as Blu-Ray were very dismayed when they realized we could not play it and had to exchange it at Best Buy for the DVD version.
This format war is very damaging and does deprive people of a few good TV moments here and now. This is of course not very important in the grand scheme of things but the entertainment industry is really screwing up on this issue.
You might want to read the Groklaw interview. It is said there that her new company is licensing the tech she developed for OLPC from OLPC.
As you see, your post is plain wrong and very unfair to Ms. Jepsen. Too bad it was modded +3...
Exactly. And Slashdot relies on people like you to write insightful comments that add something to the news however old and repeated it may be ;-)
The way I see it the OLPC is a huge success. Not because they have achieved all their goals but because they have already changed the world. They have set a benchmark, shown the way which resulted in:
- Asus doing the EEE PC (299$ for the cheapest one. Sucks more juice, the screen is not as good in sunlight etc. But still, it owes its existence to the OLPC)
- Microsoft is busy porting XP to the OLPC and trying to improve their offer for developing countries and education
- many people have OLPCs
- more people are convinced that simple and cheap machines, simple applications can be very useful
Personally, I got an EEE PC because it was extensible and the trade-offs seemed more adequate for me (heck, I am using the Xandros distribution that came with it, I can fire up bash, install Emacs etc.).
I am really grateful to the OLPC project, because they inspired a new wave of smaller, simpler machines that will be very useful for education. Myself, I plan to use my EEE to learn a thing or two on my daily train ride.
Hi,
The semi platform independence of Flash is actually pretty good. It's available on the Nokia N810 which runs Linux and has an ARM CPU. Not exactly a PC-like device.
And that's without mentioning the open source implementations.
So, Microsoft, please provide a very compatible, well supported implementation of Silverlight on the Nokia N810 and a couple of other similar devices and we will consider it. If not, why bother? Flash is ubiquitous, works well and is becoming less proprietary every year if I believe the news.
Hi,
I have an 8GB SDHC and one of my coworker got 16GB on his EEE.
It works.
SVG would be great. Think of all the HTML maps that could be replaced with SVG with embedded links. UML, floor plans, little map etc.
Yes, SVG support should be mandatory. Where do we sign?
Well, I found the news interesting. I wouldn't want a report for every data center but I find that this kind of information is newsworthy because:
- it involves a lot of computers
- Microsoft comes from a shrinkwrap background not online business
- Siberia summons images of cold, wild, hostile environments
- This is a datacenter far from where most of the users live and is therefore an interesting consequence of the Internet
So I mod the article up any day and welcome our Siberian overlords.
You might not wait long: Newegg is selling 16GB of Flash for less than 130$ (in CF,USB and SD). :-)
This means you could build a little >100G RAID of those for 800$ or so.
And I believe the prices go down really fast (I paid 70$ for 2G in May 2006 and thought it was a good deal. Now I could get 8G for that price).
I guess you will get your 100GB flash before September 2008
Enjoy!
Well, I guess the idea is that you'll have to support both formats because Microsoft is going to push its format whatever happens.
And therefore everybody will have to support 2 formats. So they might as well use the standardization process to convince the Microsoft people to write useful documentation and make it public.
So "the more the merrier" reads as : there is going to be differents formats anyway, the more of them go through a standardization process, the better.
I find your ideas interesting. I would add:
5) the OLPC not being "capable" of running Windows makes Windows look bad : a fat system that wastes resources etc. They probably want to show that there OS can run on the OLPC and is therefore not technically inferior to Linux.
So they have a few objective reasons to do that without being ashamed of it.
I agree, it would make sense to have GPL or LGPL OOO without this copyright assignment thing.
Note that this alternative OOO would be able to use any code from Sun and offer developers an added incentive: they don't have to assign ownership to Sun or anybody. And that can be a big incentive these days after a few projects having closed their source (remember sourceforge, that was not pretty... And more recently CUPS was bought by Apple. Which is not bad per se but I could understand that people who spent a few months of their own time working on it might be unhappy that they did not get a cut of the sale price...)
Of course Sun contributed the main code base and you could see the contributions as a reward to them. But it only works if the new contributions from others are small compared to Sun's. When they become big, you can understand that the contributors might want a more democratic way of handling things.
That's why the FSF says you should assign the copyright to them. But recently they showed that they could use that to make everything GPL3, which is hardly a consensual proposal.
So I guess that the Linux way is pretty good: get code from people who prove they own it and make it GPL. Distribute everything under GPL and count on the absence of a single copyright owner to make sure the initial contract (the GPL version X) will be maintained forever.
Or it can access a Wifi hotspot. Whichever is the most convenient to you ;-)
There is quite are premium to pay here. Flash is at 8$/GB right now (16-17$ for 2GB etc.).
So the Flash for a 640GB SSD could be obtained for about 5 thousand dollars.
But integrating all that Flash is not that easy.
You could buy a bunch of USB flash drives and use software RAID to make a big drive. If you have plenty of USB ports on your PC, you might connect 6 flash drives of 8GB which would offer 48GB at 400$ or so.
Another idea I had was to buy CF flash and CF-IDE adapters and connect them to an Areca RAID card. But the power supplies would be a pain in the butt most CF-IDE adapters seem to require floppy power connectors, so you would have to buy N power cables and run them in your box which would be unpleasant with N above 6. But anyway most RAID cards only handle 8 drives, so you would need several of them.
All in all, this company seems to offer a pretty good deal since it is all well packaged, simple and not so easy to replicate for DIY guys.
Actually, there is something to be said for reducing the value of the stolen good. If you make it more dangerous to resell and purchase stolen laptops through identification techniques (engravings, serial ID marked stolen in the laptop vendor's customer service database etc.), you reduce the incentive for stealing them in the first place.
Just buying insurance does nothing to improve the situation, it just mitigates your own risk (which is good). Encryption and backups are good too, of course.
Microsoft has an agreement with Novell to distribute Suse Linux. They are therefore in the business of distributing Linux (see the whole GPL3/Microsoft/Novell/Patent deal controversies). Of course, I wouldn't bet that they really push hard to distribute Linux.
You can already get 8GB SDHC (SD High Capacity) cards for less than 100$.
I have read that SDHC compatible kernels are available for the N800.
Also, the N800 is supposed to have two SD slots (one is easily accessible, the other is more "internal").
The N800 still sells for 350$.
This sounds like a nice combo.
I believe the description is a bit wrong. The FCC probably mandates that it be impossible for the end-user to change the application. This is meant to avoid people changing the software to use spectrum that they are not supposed too. Example : a WIFI transmitter might be able to transmit at 2.5GHz, outside of the WIFI band. The only thing that prevents that might be a software check. So if you can update the software, you can do something that the FCC does not allow you to.
So they are arguing that it might be impossible to legally make a software radio with GPL V3 software (unless you enforce the mandatory checks at a hardware level so that the modified software is safe from an FCC perspective).
Replying to myself as I hit submit by mistake. Sorry.
What I meant is that many people are in different situations. Many people who are not considering Linux this week might in couple of months.
This means that many people will wake up some day, want to install Linux and realize that Linux can or cannot manage their hardware. They will react in different ways : fix the problem by using the ndiswrapper, installing other hardware, go back to Windows or OS X etc.
So, buying the right hardware from the start is only an option for people like us who already know they want Linux. Of course it helps as it rewards the good hardware makes who are Linux friendly, but it does not solve the problem instantly.
As TFA said, OEM might bring a big solution : DELL/HP wants to offer Linux laptop, so they choose compatible hardware. Then they want to use the same components across the line of products, so they ditch a few incompatible components.
This brings benefits on two sides :
- The hardware/chipset makers then realize they need to be selected for the Linux to avoid being excluded from markets bigger than the Linux market that have suddenly become tied to the Linux market
- The people who bought the non-Linux computers, got Linux compatible hardware anyway which makes their potential switch easier.
So, there are many big stories playing out here and I can understand why people would want to discuss them on Slashdot.
Well you are right in some way, but there is no end in sight as many and many
Have you tried to get a VSAT provider ?
I had heard about prices under a 100$ a month, decent bandwidth, reasonable installation costs (under a 1000$).
Of course the latency sucks since they are using satellites, but still, this could be a good option for rural America.
I have moderation points at the moment and thought of rating you as a troll. But I thought better of it and will just state a few points that you seem to have missed :
1) the guy has solved the problem by shelling some money.
2) the money he is paying is only 100$ more than my commute costs. And I guess his house is much bigger and cheaper than anything I could find in NY. So he probably was wise to pay that price.
3) he offered to pay all the connnection costs for the cable company and they refused.
So, I really can relate to this guy and think he really is the good guy here.
Actually, there is a penalty. The people who proposed the law look like fools. The titles in the newspapers are generally not kind when a law is struck down.
Also, the balance of power between the legislators and the judges requires that there is no penalty. The congressmen represent us : they discuss the issue, do their best to make up their mind and vote. They should not be punished for being wrong. No more than you and I should be punished for voting for the 'wrong' candidate on election day.