1. Stop the moves in Europe to lock-down the Internet and install filters at every ISP, which are being pushed by the music, movie, and TV industries in cahoots with the telecoms giants that now control most of the ISP landscape.
2. Bring the Internet to Africa. For crying out loud, enough of the extortion already. Africans need cheap communications to escape their geographic and historic prison, and while GSM was a plausible attempt, it's being strangled by the telcos.
3. Invest in new platforms for free and open digital standards. These are the basis of the Internet and they are being strangled by firms like Microsoft which want to see their own technologies dominate.
So, here's a very simple, useful standardized measurement:
1. Capacity of battery in mAh, when new, after 6 months, and after 12 months. 2. Power consumption of machine when doing video playback with screen set to 75% brightness, and all ports and networks enabled ("high"). 3. Power consumption of machine when surfing the web, with screen at 50%, and wifi enabled ("medium"). 4. Power consumption of machine when doing word processing with screen set to minimum brightness (not off!), and all ports and networks disabled ("low").
Hard to fake, and matches users' typical use cases.
Posting a single "hours" figure is obviously rubbish, it does not count for battery decay, nor the wildly different ways we actually use notebooks when we're informed.
(E.g. until I started using Powertop to measure my battery life I did not realize how important the screen brightness was. Turn this down, turn wifi off, and you add 50% or more battery life.)
If you're going to be pedantic, get it right. Batteries are measured in amp-hours, and if you want to use watts, it would be "watt-hours at X volts", whatever the voltage is that the battery is supplying.
The Lenovo X61 extended battery has 4400 mAh, or 4.4Ah, so if it lasts eight hours at a draw of 9 watts, then it's drawing about 16 volts.
9 watts at 16 volts is 0.55 amperes. 0.55 amperes for 8 hours is 4.4 amp-hours.
It's more fun not having to think this much on a Monday morning.
Properly, we should be told the capacity of the battery and the consumption of the machine at highest and lowest levels.
For example, my Lenovo X61 gets between 4 and 8 hours on its large battery. The difference comes from how I tune the machine.
At least for laptops using Intel chipsets and Linux, powertop makes it very easy to measure battery life, and (more importantly) tune it. I get my 8 hours by by switching off the wifi, usb ports, killing programs that do too many interrupts, turning down the brightness, etc. Powertop shows exactly how many watts the machine is using. The battery has about 70 watt/hours so when I get it down to 9 watts, that gives me about 8 hours.
The real news, not much discussed, is the way that "Major ISPs" are being absorbed into the old telecoms cartels. This news is not about bandwidth at all. It's about turning the heat up on the pirates by blaming them for bad service (which as many posters have explained, is a bogus argument). The attacks on "bad users" of the Internet is part of a campaign to filter, lock down, and shackle the Internet so that it stops being a threat to the telcos and the music / movie / TV industries.
Once the telco/ISPs have isolated the "pirates" as the bad guys, it's simple to keep stretching the border between "good" and "bad" use of the Internet until we're back in 1980 where every thing one did with a telco line had to be sanctioned and paid for, or one was disconnected.
It's about banning VoIP, banning streaming, banning anything that is not part of the profitable communications and media cartel system.
Anyone in doubt at the reality of ISPs + old media vs. the Internet should be aware of the Telecoms Package (4 directives) going through the European Parliament this month. Not nice stuff.
Well, nor the Internet as such but Arpanet, thanks to this little document:
Title: Host Software Author: Steve Crocker Installation: UCLA Date: 7 April 1969 Network Working Group Request for Comment: 1
Does anyone else think that April 7 should be some kind of world-wide special day, "Internet day"?
Perhaps particularly relevant given that the music, movie, TV, and telecoms industries are doing their very damnedest to shut down the free Internet and install some kind of corporate filtered, locked down, pay-per-packet imitation.
... will inevitably evolve WiFi functionality and touch screens (now that the patents on touch screens are expired) and in 12 months or so, we'll see devices exactly like Mike Arrington is thinking of, for $200 and then for $100.
We're only at the start of the "let's see what we can cram into a tiny box and run under Linux" phase of the Chinese computing industry. It's going to be huge IMO.
No way anyone can compete making something by hand but as an experiment, it's very cool.
"The concept, which we're calling "Clutter" for want of a better word, is simple and yet general. First, the desktop is just a large space with random icons, which we call "motes". A mote is represents a link to some resource: a document, a directory, a web site, a BitTorrent link, whatever. Anything you can drag and drop can become a mote."
If the servers are already accessed via strong encryption the location is not very relevant unless the jurisdiction bans such encryption. The main danger to such communities is then the seizure of their equipment by local authorities, on the basis of one or other real or imagined infraction (child pornography, terrorism, patent infringement, copyright infringement, hate crimes, etc.)
I'm not sure Europe is better than the USA in terms of freedom from such seizures. There are surely better locations.
Cloud computing... is a buzzword but is interesting nonetheless. Over time we may see secure or private clouds, which would then correspond to these islands, and which might become fully independent of vulnerable physical servers.
So we may have a future of virtualized, distributed, secure islands connected by a sea of insecurity.
But then again, it's late on a hot Saturday afternnon here in Brussels and it's beer o'clock.:-)
Secure island = set of applications distributed across the Internet that communicate using secure protocols. A lot of these exist already, small and large communities that are behind logins or stronger security, and which could be hosted outside the USA if their users made enough fuss about privacy.
It's inherent in successful FOSS projects that they work with their users, and when these users are businesses, it's usually win-win for the businesses to invest something in the projects they depend on.
* they pay anyhow, and it's better to pay as partners than clients. * their engineers get to learn the insides of the product and so are able to reduce the risks of using it. * they can get their business needs incorporated into the product. * they give their engineers a way to enjoy their work more. * they get access to the community, which respects firms that contribute. * they compete better in the market.
It's a small step from contributing one's own work to a project to sponsoring outside developers to work on a project, a natural form of delegation to experts.
Many small software firms have long understood that open source is about creating profitable ties to the community and market. Larger technology users have realized that close ties to the experts that make their key technologies can save them money and make their businesses work better.
Mostly, FOSS projects that don't need or seek this kind of relationship with business are those with a different market, usually individual users. But even these projects usually welcome funds, and contributions.
... would agree on the goals and vision and then spend years fighting language flame wars. They would create several hundred competing political systems which would then all be bought by Google.
We tend to try to compare individual intelligence but this is probably meaningless. The real reason for our species' success is not that we're individually brilliant, but that we are very good at dividing up large problems to solve collectively. This works thanks to our social instincts: respect for authority, sense of fairness, competitiveness, group belonging, etc. etc. The whole gamut, the reason why we read and post to Slashdot, because we're a social species and bloody good at it.
Neanderthals, larger, individually smarter, were presumably generalists that could do more by themselves but could not compete as well a group of modern humans, when it came to hunting and perhaps fighting.
Of course I'm defining "intelligence" very much in the sense of "how humanity thinks and solves problems". It's easy to claim superiority when one is the species writing history.
Agreed. Don't raise issues for other people to solve, you are just labeling yourself a trouble maker. Raise issues, attach costs to them, and then present yourself as the person with solutions, and ask for budget to solve them. Make a proposal with figures, planning, clear savings, and get approval. Then hire and build a competent team and/or find a good subcontractor. Use open source where possible to save costs. Report your progress and ensure you get budget every year.
Think of ways to turn a profit from the software. Maybe it can be licensed to other firms? If you can earn revenue you will suddenly become much more valuable.
Problem is: you will stop coding and become a manager. But if you do a good job, you can get power in the firm.
If you present a good plan that will solve real problems for the company, and you are not given the green light, then look for another job. If/when things go bad, they won't thank you for it.
The problem is not really whether or not you can be fired, but why your employer is asking for patents in the first place.
Usually, it's because they have received advice from lawyers, or because they feel it will increase the value of the company.
In some markets, holding a patent can be very profitable but only if the conditions are right. Mainly, you need to be the only firm with patents in that area and you need to file patents that are basic enough to capture the full market.
If your firm is not in this position (which is very rare if not impossible today), then filing patents will increase, rather than decrease the chance that the firm will enter into litigation.
Filing software patents makes it more, not less, likely that the firm will be sued for patent infringement. This is worth explaining to your employer. The reasons are ironic: a firm that holds a patent in a lucrative area becomes a competitor to other patent holders, and they typically start a patent ambush by attacking other patent holders. Only when these fights are settled will they go on to attack the market. So it's small patent holders who get the bulk of the most aggressive litigation against them.
If your firm can establish a portfolio of patents this can provide some defense against other product-making firms. But it's useless against a patent troll, and these form the growing majority of patent licensing operations. A firm with patents thus becomes a litigation target for a second reason: it is a way to get the patents for cheap.
In conclusion: taking software patents can be very dangerous, and explaining the risks can be a good way to educate your employer to share your view on software patents.
The only useful reason for software patents I know of is to get tax benefits, and this can be done with patents in areas that no-one cares about and where litigation is unlikely.
Sorry to be pedantic, but it's EUR or Euro or that funny lowercase 'e' that my keyboard does not type.
The main reason prices are higher in Europe is that the market for translated software has less competition and people place a higher value on getting stuff in their own language than in US English.
Also, maybe because Europeans are nicer and less willing to complain when they get ripped off.
Anyhow, the price reflects the market, not the product.
Cotonou is particularly lucky. I've never been there. My experience is Nigeria, Congo, Angola, Rwanda, Burkina Faso, Togo.
Eight coastal cities join the West African fiber network. That Internet link does not stretch far inland, and in most of those cities, is tightly run by the state monopoly telco. So probably less than a single percent of Africans have any chance of getting those prices you mentioned.
Bandwidth costs in Africa are rising, not falling. As soon as you leave that coastal city you depend on satellite (V-SAT).
The only challenger to this iron grip that the telcos have are the mobile phone companies, but these are more and more being bought by the same telcos, and it's uncertain whether they will finally bring Internet to the remote parts of Africa or whether they will simply become a heavy tax on the emerging African middle classes.
Same goes for most of Africa, where Internet costs upwards $10,000 a month for a 256K link by fiber (if you're in one of the eight coastal cities that get it) or by VSAT. Typically a 256K link is shared by 10 cybercafes, each with up to 50 users at once. Note also that average earnings are 20-40 times lower than in the USA or Europe, making the Internet about 40,000 times more costly.
This is not because of any technical difficulties, it's because of cartel pricing that keeps competition out.
Slashdot Mirror
Good catch. This was also reported by Stop Software Patents about a week ago.
1. Stop the moves in Europe to lock-down the Internet and install filters at every ISP, which are being pushed by the music, movie, and TV industries in cahoots with the telecoms giants that now control most of the ISP landscape.
2. Bring the Internet to Africa. For crying out loud, enough of the extortion already. Africans need cheap communications to escape their geographic and historic prison, and while GSM was a plausible attempt, it's being strangled by the telcos.
3. Invest in new platforms for free and open digital standards. These are the basis of the Internet and they are being strangled by firms like Microsoft which want to see their own technologies dominate.
So, here's a very simple, useful standardized measurement:
1. Capacity of battery in mAh, when new, after 6 months, and after 12 months.
2. Power consumption of machine when doing video playback with screen set to 75% brightness, and all ports and networks enabled ("high").
3. Power consumption of machine when surfing the web, with screen at 50%, and wifi enabled ("medium").
4. Power consumption of machine when doing word processing with screen set to minimum brightness (not off!), and all ports and networks disabled ("low").
Hard to fake, and matches users' typical use cases.
Posting a single "hours" figure is obviously rubbish, it does not count for battery decay, nor the wildly different ways we actually use notebooks when we're informed.
(E.g. until I started using Powertop to measure my battery life I did not realize how important the screen brightness was. Turn this down, turn wifi off, and you add 50% or more battery life.)
If you're going to be pedantic, get it right. Batteries are measured in amp-hours, and if you want to use watts, it would be "watt-hours at X volts", whatever the voltage is that the battery is supplying.
The Lenovo X61 extended battery has 4400 mAh, or 4.4Ah, so if it lasts eight hours at a draw of 9 watts, then it's drawing about 16 volts.
9 watts at 16 volts is 0.55 amperes. 0.55 amperes for 8 hours is 4.4 amp-hours.
It's more fun not having to think this much on a Monday morning.
Properly, we should be told the capacity of the battery and the consumption of the machine at highest and lowest levels.
For example, my Lenovo X61 gets between 4 and 8 hours on its large battery. The difference comes from how I tune the machine.
At least for laptops using Intel chipsets and Linux, powertop makes it very easy to measure battery life, and (more importantly) tune it. I get my 8 hours by by switching off the wifi, usb ports, killing programs that do too many interrupts, turning down the brightness, etc. Powertop shows exactly how many watts the machine is using. The battery has about 70 watt/hours so when I get it down to 9 watts, that gives me about 8 hours.
The real news, not much discussed, is the way that "Major ISPs" are being absorbed into the old telecoms cartels. This news is not about bandwidth at all. It's about turning the heat up on the pirates by blaming them for bad service (which as many posters have explained, is a bogus argument). The attacks on "bad users" of the Internet is part of a campaign to filter, lock down, and shackle the Internet so that it stops being a threat to the telcos and the music / movie / TV industries.
Once the telco/ISPs have isolated the "pirates" as the bad guys, it's simple to keep stretching the border between "good" and "bad" use of the Internet until we're back in 1980 where every thing one did with a telco line had to be sanctioned and paid for, or one was disconnected.
It's about banning VoIP, banning streaming, banning anything that is not part of the profitable communications and media cartel system.
Anyone in doubt at the reality of ISPs + old media vs. the Internet should be aware of the Telecoms Package (4 directives) going through the European Parliament this month. Not nice stuff.
Well, mods may give you -1, but I LOLd. Thanks.
Well, nor the Internet as such but Arpanet, thanks to this little document:
Title: Host Software
Author: Steve Crocker
Installation: UCLA
Date: 7 April 1969
Network Working Group Request for Comment: 1
Does anyone else think that April 7 should be some kind of world-wide special day, "Internet day"?
Perhaps particularly relevant given that the music, movie, TV, and telecoms industries are doing their very damnedest to shut down the free Internet and install some kind of corporate filtered, locked down, pay-per-packet imitation.
... will inevitably evolve WiFi functionality and touch screens (now that the patents on touch screens are expired) and in 12 months or so, we'll see devices exactly like Mike Arrington is thinking of, for $200 and then for $100.
We're only at the start of the "let's see what we can cram into a tiny box and run under Linux" phase of the Chinese computing industry. It's going to be huge IMO.
No way anyone can compete making something by hand but as an experiment, it's very cool.
Wow... I wonder how far the Clutter project was inspired by this:
http://slashdot.org/~heironymouscoward/journal/50829
"The concept, which we're calling "Clutter" for want of a better word, is simple and yet general. First, the desktop is just a large space with random icons, which we call "motes". A mote is represents a link to some resource: a document, a directory, a web site, a BitTorrent link, whatever. Anything you can drag and drop can become a mote."
From November 2003.
If the servers are already accessed via strong encryption the location is not very relevant unless the jurisdiction bans such encryption. The main danger to such communities is then the seizure of their equipment by local authorities, on the basis of one or other real or imagined infraction (child pornography, terrorism, patent infringement, copyright infringement, hate crimes, etc.)
I'm not sure Europe is better than the USA in terms of freedom from such seizures. There are surely better locations.
Cloud computing... is a buzzword but is interesting nonetheless. Over time we may see secure or private clouds, which would then correspond to these islands, and which might become fully independent of vulnerable physical servers.
So we may have a future of virtualized, distributed, secure islands connected by a sea of insecurity.
But then again, it's late on a hot Saturday afternnon here in Brussels and it's beer o'clock. :-)
Secure island = set of applications distributed across the Internet that communicate using secure protocols. A lot of these exist already, small and large communities that are behind logins or stronger security, and which could be hosted outside the USA if their users made enough fuss about privacy.
Over time the Internet will turn into islands of privacy and security, in a sea of spam, surveillance, and people who at one time would have used AOL.
It's inherent in successful FOSS projects that they work with their users, and when these users are businesses, it's usually win-win for the businesses to invest something in the projects they depend on.
* they pay anyhow, and it's better to pay as partners than clients.
* their engineers get to learn the insides of the product and so are able to reduce the risks of using it.
* they can get their business needs incorporated into the product.
* they give their engineers a way to enjoy their work more.
* they get access to the community, which respects firms that contribute.
* they compete better in the market.
It's a small step from contributing one's own work to a project to sponsoring outside developers to work on a project, a natural form of delegation to experts.
Many small software firms have long understood that open source is about creating profitable ties to the community and market. Larger technology users have realized that close ties to the experts that make their key technologies can save them money and make their businesses work better.
Mostly, FOSS projects that don't need or seek this kind of relationship with business are those with a different market, usually individual users. But even these projects usually welcome funds, and contributions.
... would agree on the goals and vision and then spend years fighting language flame wars. They would create several hundred competing political systems which would then all be bought by Google.
... would be smart enough to see that the political system does not work, and would start their own.
Eats, shoots, and leaves? Yes, of course, leaves. My inbiult speling cheker faild me agian. Need a software upgrad.
Even the largest tree has leafs.
We tend to try to compare individual intelligence but this is probably meaningless. The real reason for our species' success is not that we're individually brilliant, but that we are very good at dividing up large problems to solve collectively. This works thanks to our social instincts: respect for authority, sense of fairness, competitiveness, group belonging, etc. etc. The whole gamut, the reason why we read and post to Slashdot, because we're a social species and bloody good at it.
Neanderthals, larger, individually smarter, were presumably generalists that could do more by themselves but could not compete as well a group of modern humans, when it came to hunting and perhaps fighting.
Of course I'm defining "intelligence" very much in the sense of "how humanity thinks and solves problems". It's easy to claim superiority when one is the species writing history.
Agreed. Don't raise issues for other people to solve, you are just labeling yourself a trouble maker. Raise issues, attach costs to them, and then present yourself as the person with solutions, and ask for budget to solve them. Make a proposal with figures, planning, clear savings, and get approval. Then hire and build a competent team and/or find a good subcontractor. Use open source where possible to save costs. Report your progress and ensure you get budget every year.
Think of ways to turn a profit from the software. Maybe it can be licensed to other firms? If you can earn revenue you will suddenly become much more valuable.
Problem is: you will stop coding and become a manager. But if you do a good job, you can get power in the firm.
If you present a good plan that will solve real problems for the company, and you are not given the green light, then look for another job. If/when things go bad, they won't thank you for it.
The problem is not really whether or not you can be fired, but why your employer is asking for patents in the first place.
Usually, it's because they have received advice from lawyers, or because they feel it will increase the value of the company.
In some markets, holding a patent can be very profitable but only if the conditions are right. Mainly, you need to be the only firm with patents in that area and you need to file patents that are basic enough to capture the full market.
If your firm is not in this position (which is very rare if not impossible today), then filing patents will increase, rather than decrease the chance that the firm will enter into litigation.
Filing software patents makes it more, not less, likely that the firm will be sued for patent infringement. This is worth explaining to your employer. The reasons are ironic: a firm that holds a patent in a lucrative area becomes a competitor to other patent holders, and they typically start a patent ambush by attacking other patent holders. Only when these fights are settled will they go on to attack the market. So it's small patent holders who get the bulk of the most aggressive litigation against them.
If your firm can establish a portfolio of patents this can provide some defense against other product-making firms. But it's useless against a patent troll, and these form the growing majority of patent licensing operations. A firm with patents thus becomes a litigation target for a second reason: it is a way to get the patents for cheap.
In conclusion: taking software patents can be very dangerous, and explaining the risks can be a good way to educate your employer to share your view on software patents.
The only useful reason for software patents I know of is to get tax benefits, and this can be done with patents in areas that no-one cares about and where litigation is unlikely.
Isn't the history of civilization generally based around water for animals, agriculture, transport, industry?
Maybe time to start treating our seas with respect. I was on a beach in Togo last week and every day the ocean washes up plastic bags.
Sorry to be pedantic, but it's EUR or Euro or that funny lowercase 'e' that my keyboard does not type.
The main reason prices are higher in Europe is that the market for translated software has less competition and people place a higher value on getting stuff in their own language than in US English.
Also, maybe because Europeans are nicer and less willing to complain when they get ripped off.
Anyhow, the price reflects the market, not the product.
Cotonou is particularly lucky. I've never been there. My experience is Nigeria, Congo, Angola, Rwanda, Burkina Faso, Togo.
Eight coastal cities join the West African fiber network. That Internet link does not stretch far inland, and in most of those cities, is tightly run by the state monopoly telco. So probably less than a single percent of Africans have any chance of getting those prices you mentioned.
Bandwidth costs in Africa are rising, not falling. As soon as you leave that coastal city you depend on satellite (V-SAT).
Read some of the comments on http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4787422.stm.
The ad on this page - http://www.jtecsolutions.com/satcom/index.htm - shows a VSAT option for $9999.
The only challenger to this iron grip that the telcos have are the mobile phone companies, but these are more and more being bought by the same telcos, and it's uncertain whether they will finally bring Internet to the remote parts of Africa or whether they will simply become a heavy tax on the emerging African middle classes.
Same goes for most of Africa, where Internet costs upwards $10,000 a month for a 256K link by fiber (if you're in one of the eight coastal cities that get it) or by VSAT. Typically a 256K link is shared by 10 cybercafes, each with up to 50 users at once. Note also that average earnings are 20-40 times lower than in the USA or Europe, making the Internet about 40,000 times more costly.
This is not because of any technical difficulties, it's because of cartel pricing that keeps competition out.