There's already a standard for 23" racks widely used in telecom. So now we have to deal with 19, 21, and 23 options? Great.
Perhaps that isn't as great a problem as it sounds. If the overall footprint of all those rack formats is 24" it stands to reason that there would be racks out there where the mounts for the vertical posts have mounting holes to accomodate 19 and 23, and to support 21 would be a matter of putting one more hole in each bracket.
That said, maybe it would've just made sense to say data centres should adopt 23" width and specify different power rail designs to match.
A nuclear reactor that melts down might leave a few square miles uninhabitable for a century.
Except the type of nuclear "micro-reactor" that would fit within a city lot, typically within a facility the size of a typical substation at most, would be incapable of going into meltdown. Furthermore throium-based reactors produce much more "benign" waste products--certainly they are still toxic but disposal and site remediation would be not that far removed from something like decontaminating the site of an old gas station that once handled leaded fuel.
Also, a gas furnace that blows up would in all likelihood leave the house permanently uninhabitable. Almost without exception, when a gas furnace explodes, even if the house is still standing the internal pressure of the exploion "puffs out" the structure and makes it permanently, structurally unsound. In the most optimistic cases repair would not taks days, but rather weeks and months as the uilding is gutted to the frame to repair the damage within. This would not be a problem with what is envisioned in the parent to your post as it would involve a reactor with the capacity to provide service to "maybe just a single subdivision". While that is small, it is not so small it would sit inside anyone's house. As I said, this is something that would sit withiin a substation facility where traditionally transmission lines connect to distribution (but in this case there would be no tie in to a transmission line, but instead directly to a generation unit). That is already not a residintial location.
Until they're willing to back some realistic alternatives to current power generation--other than living like Luddite hippies--I tune these idiots out.
You DO know that fighting environmental causes is a means to a different end right? Greenpeace will fight ANY method of large scale energy supply. If we end up developing totally safe fusion energy on a large scale that would supply us all with abundant power with no CO2 produced, no dangerous wastes, etc they will fight it tooth an nail--even if they have to completely trump up some reason to do so.
Greenpeace are made up of "luddite hippies" who want to force all the world to live like "luddite hippies". That is their final objective--to stop and reverse progress and make the world into one giant hippie commune. It sounds far fetched and unachievable (and it pretty much is), but that would be their ideal goal. It would be unwise to "tune then out" though because there is always the risk they become infiltrated by "eco-terrorists"--there are already a number of activists who believe "the end justifies the means" in any case.
You joined Greenpeace to get a piece of arse? If you are looking for willing co-eds in Greenpeace, lets just say "the odds are good, but the goods are odd". There are two types of Greenpeace enthusiasts:
1. Those who are taking prescription psychoactive medication 2. Those who really SHOULD be on psychoactive medication.
By and large, they are earnest in their concerns for the environment--they really want to do good by people and the earth, but 99 percent of them are ignorant of hard science and emotionally driven. If you hook up with one of these they will drunk dial you and drive by your house and cry at your front door, waking the neighbours. If they are not vegan they may leave a boiling bunny on your stovetop.
The 1 percent remaining are intelligent and very lucid are also very manipulative. They can contort facts better than organisers of an Arnold Swartzenegger election campaign. They will also never go out with you.
Let me don a tinfoil hat of my own at this point. This is really quite a fanciful theory, so don't take it TOO seriously (but there are probably some uncomfortable truths buried in there):
Apple may be guilding the lily a bit with its energy projections, but you can bet the truth is much closer to what Apple claims than what Greenpeace claims. Greenpeace will take the "seed" of truth then mutate it into a tangled weed of mis-stated facts. Because of their history of "defending the earth" for a good cause, and being perceived as "anti-corporate", they can get away with telling lies grown from facts used out-of-context. It is difficult to refute Greenpeace because they target "big corporate evil". A multi-billion dollar company like Apple or Exxon or General Motors garners little sympathy from the public, and when they refute Greenpeace it is seen as an activity done solely in their own interests (even if they are correcting mis-statements). Greenpeace are very clever that way--they get attention by vilifying high-profile, large corporations and because they are a "charity" it is very bad optics to aggressively defend against them (you become even more evil if you sue greenpeace for defamation and so on), so Greenpeace targets are left with little recourse but to meekly defend themselves with less spectacular facts.
Here is another example: The Keystone XL pipeline is being vigourously fought against, and Greenpeace is in the forefront of that fight. The pipeline is not itself the target--concerns about routing through an aquifer have been addressed and there is basically no government opposition--the hangups are largely with a few property owners and not of an environmental nature (mostly protests over right of ways bisecting properties, effects on property values and other economic/logistical matters). The reason they want it killed is because it allows Canadian bitumen to more readily make its way to gulf coast refineries.
The public argument is that Canadian bitumen comes from messy, energy-intensive mining operations--it looks ugly and makes more CO2 than average oil sources. But even that is not REALLY what Greenpeace hates. The REAL reason is that Canadian bitumen is cheaper than west-texas intermediate--the spread is generally even more than the added cost of refining. Also by law of supply and demand, more supply to refineries for the same demand lowers prices overall. The end goal of Greenpeace is to make fossil-fuel sources of energy as expensive as possible, and to do that you must choke supply. The most "ethical" way to get people to curtail their use of fossil fuels is to educate them, convince them to modify their behaviour voluntairly, but that is the hard way. The easier approach is to curtail supply of oil and gas and force people to use less (they work to eliminate nuclear energy much the same way).
Greenpeace's real mandate is to make all energy more expensive (not just renewable--but expensive). If energy gets expensive enough then first-world nations will have to start de-industrialising. As developing nations advance and developed nations regress the world would "equalise" at some point in the middle. The environmental theme is basically the golden good intention pavement on the road leading right to hell.
From the editorial/commentary in the posting for the article:
With the cost of gas and oil on its way up it's a wonder that any one would be against the use of renewable energy sources.
The submitter is very ignorant about energy prices as are most people I suspect. Though crude oil and products refined from it (notably gasoline and diesel) are indeed high and rising, those fuels are never used for large scale electrical power generation. The vast majority of "carbon-based" power generation is from coal and natural gas. While those fuels are not totally "clean" nor renewable they are actually quite cheap. In the case of fuel coal, prices peaked in the mid 1970s to mid 1980s, and in the long term has closely followed inflation (that is, its price has been flat at about US$26 per short ton in year 2000 dollars). The price of natural gas, the second most popular method of carbon-based electricity generation, has not only failed to rise permanently but it has actually DROPPED significantly. They are presently hovering at a TEN and FIFTEEN YEAR LOWS, and adjusted for inflation the price also stays quite steady, with only brief spikes as in the last boom before the bust.
The thing is, though wind power is considered "clean" it is actaully more detrimental to the environment, and also more costly, than many proponents would have you believe. In order to produce the same amount of power as a relatively modest natural gas fired station requires dozens of wind turbines spread out across a much larger area. I live in Alberta, home to both "dirty" oilsands (Fort McMurray) and a significant amount of "clean" wind power generation (Pincher Creek). When news broke of birds perishing in the tailings ponds of oilsands upgraders it made international news, yet a comparable amount of birds are killed by wind farms by area as in the oilsands. There are also concerns about the size of the structures and the amount of low-level noise they make interfering with wildlife migration patterns and habitats. I believe it is important to invest in renewable energy for sure, and in the case of wind power the price has declined over time so that it is just now becoming competitive with more traditional sources of power. However, it should be put under the same scrutiny as any other kind of industrial operation, just as non-conventional oil and gas (heavy oil/bitument, oil and gas drilling in tight formations using fracing, deep-water drilling, etc) have been very heavily and closely scrutinised inthe past few years, so too should any other form of energy technology.
Wind can be used effectively and safely and affordably if done right, but it should not be blindly pursued with critics being shot down for being anti-environment. for those readers from Ontario, I'm sure you know that the province has a VERY poor record on properly managing the electricity industry. Not only has it approved and pushed forward poorly planned wind farms (of such close proximity to residential areas as to kill property values and even disrupt sleep), they've also managed to completely mess up the market with consumers burdened by expensive surcharges to pay for government boondoggles and a spot market for power that is so wild that sometimes the province even has to PAY TONS OF MONEY TO MAKE NEIGHBOURING STATES TAKE THEIR EXCESS POWER.
The story is far more complicated tham most people outside the situation might think. There is more to it than "rah rah for oil and gas" or "that wind farm might give me a tumour" hysteria. Because of the way the Ontario government has mistreated residents affected by past wind projects, in addition to the tragic waste of money on past "green energy" boondoggles in a province already struggling with massive government deficits, there is a lot of resistance to these sort of big expensive government-driven initiatives there right now.
This thread of conversation is about Circuit City, not "The Source". A little background for those outside of Canada:
Radio Shack stores in the US were run by a corporation called Tandy (which a few years ago officially changed its name to match its chain of stores as it consolidated their assets around them). All stores outside the US (almost all in Canada, and a few in UK and Australia I think) were run (after the mid 1980s) by a Canadian-owned and operated company called InterTan. InterTan was not a subsitiary of Tandy/Radio Shack of the US, nor did the US have any ownership stake of any significance. InterTan licensed the Radio Shack brand and sold merchandise for Tandy outside the US in exchange for fees/cut of profit/etc. They signed long terms agreements (10 years I think) and renewing the licensing agreement was usually a formality.
InterTan's ownership has changed at times over the years I think, starting as a Tandy subsidiary but then becoming completely independent in terms of ownership. Intertan eventually ran several tech-focused chains (Radio Shack, Rogers Plus, Batteries Plus, THS Studio...). Intertan struggled after the dot-com-bomb, and sold off all its assets outside Canada, and a few years later sold itself to Circuit City USA in the mid 2000s.
Radio Shack (USA) was not pleased that a competitor (especially one responsible for cutting into its margins in its US operations) was running stores with its brand name and making profits of its products. Despite several years being left in the licensing agreement they took InterTan to court and won--the licensing agreement was nullified due to the major change in Intertan's ownership (and the fact that a major competitor representing itself as another businesses brand is understandably awkward). Intertan was forced to re-brand all the Radio Shacks in Canada (except a very few small-town franchises they didn't own, who mostly went with the US parent to renew their franchise agreements) to "The Source by Circuit City". CC was responsible for some rapid expansion (those "plus" stores) and I think was responsible for some of the strain on the business. However, The Source operated mostly like "old school" radio shacks and continued to be a sustainable business even as CC in the States crashed and burned. The parent company tried to consolidate and suck up as much cash as possible by divesting itself of as many non "Source" assets a possible.
When CC went into liquidation it tried to put InterTan up for sale but that didn't work out--InterTan was put into receivership and ordered to liquidate its assets, not because it was not a viable busienss but because it was more or less ordered to by its parent Circuit City through US bankruptcy proceedings. Within days, Bell Canada put in an offer to buy the entire chain of "The Source" stores from InterTan. By then InterTan had closed almost all its Batteris Plus and THS Studio stores and a bunch of its Rogers Plus stores, along with several underperforming Source locations. Since Bell was a competitor to Rogers it did not want to run stores that licensed its brand so they only bought "The Source". Since there was almost nothing left of InterTan, Rogers took over all its retail operations directly, Batteries Plus and THS disappeared completely and InterTan folded operations completely. "The Source" is now a subsidiary of Bell Canada.
Radio Shack has tried to re-enter the Canadian market but it hasn't been very successful. The InterTan Radioshacks (that became "the source") were not the same as the US ones, and when Radio Shack opened new stores they had different decor and focused on different merchandise--they focused heavily on mobile phones, computer accessories, cables and batteries, whereas the InterTan stores still had a half-decent (if overpriced) electronic parts aisle and a lot bigger variety of gadgets and toys and televisions and satellite gear and so on--and even after they renam
I sat Phtotshop on the top of this lost, and I my first instinct was to mod this down as "Troll". Whenever I see a critical post that starts with mentioning Photoshop I immediately think..no, i KNOW... they are being completely full of crap. This is by no means insightful. This poster is clueless or trying to troll. But maybe it would be more constructive to forego modding and comment on this.
OK I understand that Photoshop is a de-facto industry standard amongst graphic artists and such, but seriously how many "normal users" really use Photoshop? Out of 100 maybe three, and two of them are useing a cracked/pirated they found on some torrent site. Photoshop is NOT a "killer app" outside of graphic design, and 99 percent of users have no use for 99 percent of Photoshop's capabilites. Normal users want to crop or resize or remove redeye or apply a set of basic filters and want to do it easily. Photoshop is NOT the answer any more than GIMP for these people. They will use the rinky-tink software that comes with their camera, and would be happs with a rinky-tink photo editing app bundled with GNOME or KDE. In the case of GNOME, the "shotwell" app is probably the best candidate to address this concern rather than petitioning to have Photoshop ported to Linux (which will never happen with sub-5-percent OS market share).
As for the other items on your list:
* Acrobat. Are you talking about the "reader" or the "pro" version? I know even less people who use Acrobat than who use Photoshop--exactly ONE PERSON--a prefessional graphic designer. As for the reader everybody uses? IT SUCKS HARDER THAN A HOOVER AND EVERYBODY DESPISES IT. It is big, bloated slow crapware that continually bugs you with its auto updates to fix nasty security holes. Evince on Linux systems is a far better alternative to view PDFs and there are many alternatives for all platforms to that steaming pile of crap.
* Sharepoint. Perhaps but as a client I've been able to use a sharepoint website from Firefox on a Linux machine well enough to suit my needs. I understand its power exends far past being a fancy web portal but outside of a corporate environment nobody cares about sharepoint in the slightest. As Apple has proven the key to success is to make the public fall in love with your product, which then drives business to accomodate. From a server perspective trying to set up an effective sharepoint system made me want to slit my wrists--it seems like a whole lot of "cumbersome" to do what should be more simple.
* Call of Duty. Perhaps the games issue is the single valid point here, but not "call of duty". Hard core PC gaming is most definitely a small niche market--the market for games like that are served quite successfully by game consoles. If anything though, those consoles represent one of the more serious threats to open computing--MSFT would like nothing better than to make its XBOX the replacement for your home PC. But realistically, for personal computing the games market isn't "call of duty", it is "bejewelled" and "farmville" and the like.
* Quicken. One of the few personal computing apps users might miss if they switch from Windows...oh wait, never mind. The retarded install process notwithstanding, some WINE tweaks/UI improvements could address such things. But there are better programs than Quicken that don't cost a bundle. GnuCash and Money Manager Ex work as good or better, are free (and "Free") and at least the former can import Quicken data. So rather than stuggle to use an inferior product via WINE, use one built for purpose on Linux.
* Turbotax. This is a product that is being reduced to niche or even irrelevancy by web-based applications. I have filed my income tax electronically via the web for four years now from Firefox on a Linux computer.
* As crappy as printing support has been historically, Windows was behind the curve for awhile. when I last installed Debian I didn't ev
I have had windows users with no linux experince ask me to intall Gnome 3 on their computers. That has never happened for me in the past with any desktop.
I've had a very similar experience as a GNOME3 user since June. The transition to Gnome 3 is jarring for someone used to any other "Traditional" desktop environment. However my first experience with it went much MUCH better than my first kick at the can with unity. Unity was such a turnoff for me that I stuck with Lucid and eventually ditched Ubuntu for Debian for my new computer. I can't be alone in that respect--the initial releases of Unity were an unmitgated disaster, though it has improved somewhat. Gnome 3 on the other hand has been by far the most well recieved desktop when I've presented it to computer novices. To a slashdot-like audience "tablet-like on a PC" is an insult--it makes no sense, but to my young niece or my father in his 70s who make the same observation they say it as a complement. Computers are "hard"--iPads and iphones and droids are "easy", or at least "easier". The differences in form factor mean there should be some differences in the user interface obviously, but for "regular folk" incorporating some more appliance-like design makes the computer much less intimidating.
I found that although the initial release of GNOME 3 was quite un-polished there was certainly a sense of where the project is trying to go. Though I don't totally agreee with some of the Tom's Hardware editorialising, I was impressed with the throroughness of its review and that they did at least "get it" at some level. Gnome 3 is striving to cater to the "uninitiated" linux user--indeed to users unaccustomed to computers of any platform. When presented with the Gnome 3 desktop and told to figure out how to do a given task with no assistance, what would a novice user do? That seems to be the approach the designers have taken.
To put yourself in a newbie's shoes: If you want to do anything you'd thing "activities--that must be where I go". There are more efficient ways to bring up the launcher/switcher screen--notably the super/"windows" key but that is something you can learn. It brings to mind a humourous youtube video where an IT blogger/journalist shows his dad the Windows 8 "public preview" and tells him to perform a simple task, ends up getting out of the "metro tile" screen onto an empty desktop, then has no idea how to get back without prompting. Gnome 3 may have its growing pains, but it seems Win 8 will have more than its share of issues with novices and opwer users alike.
So if you aren't a regular computer user what do you do when you are done using a gadget? Well, you turn it off. how do you accomplish this in Gnome 3? They are going to press the power button, and in Gnome 3 when you do that the shutdown dialogue pops up and counts down from 60, just like a Mac. So if you can do that, why bother with a superfluous shutdown icon or menu item on the screen?
As an experienced user with a definitely established set of habits I can certainly say I encounter frustrations with Gnome 3 from time to time, but I find I'm really growing into Gnome 3 quite well. The learning curve is NOT as steep as Tom's might have you believe--admittedly it does present some obsacles if you are trying to "2-ify" the shell to make it conform to your habits. However one thing Tom's very effectively demonstrates is that however flawed you might find the Gnome 3 shell out of the box, as a platform is has fantastic potential, certainly moreso than Unity could ever offer and enough flexibility to hold its own against KDE. The Gnome Shell Extensions are still in their infancy but it makes the new Gnome Shell into a very versatile platform.
I think the jury is still out on whether the strategy of simplification and stepping out of the traditional "desktop box" more than any other GUI is a mistake. I can understand how seasoned Linux users could take offense to the "dumbing down" but perhaps it was the right t
...into an anti-Tory bitchfest. It's insulting to those tho actually ARE oppressed in places from China and Cuba to Sudan and Syria and all in between. C-30 erodes our privacy rights but to say we are on the path to self destrucion at the hands of an insane tyrant is a really big stretch.
Also to clarify, for those who started foaming a the mouth when they saw "C-30" and stopped reading the rest of the article, this "internet security tax" has not been proposed by anyone in government nor by those in the telecoms industry. This was an idea presented by Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police and them alone. Indeed it is not a brand-new idea for them--they've advocated extraction of funds from taxpayers for this purpose in some form or another a time or two before. The Conservatice covernment, as with previous Liberal governments and the NDP opposition have all rejected the CACP's proposals, including this one.
The fact that the Conservatives are preoccupied with "law and order" issues seems to have brought on the assumption that they must be unabashed supporters of the CACP and thus whatever brainwave the CACP has is going to be well received. Those who are Canadian and follow Canadian politics know that the Tories and the CACP do not see eye to eye an quite a number of issues. Most notably the CACP steadfastly advocated the creation and expansion of the federal long gun registry but the Tory government dismantled it. On that issue, the idea of creating a database of long guns (hunting and target shoting rifles, etc) and their owners with unfettered access by police came about through consultations the Liberal government had with the CACP, who presented it as the solution to prevent massacres like the one at Ecole Polytecnique (the incident that called on government to come up with expanded gun control measures in the first place).
But there are a few things that make a "Security tax" on internet use a non-starter:
1. the Tories have made a big effort to present themselves as "anti-tax"--whether you think they are serious or not they advocate public spending restraint over unfettered "stimulous spending" and higher taxation. It would be pretty bad optics to start imposing a tax on internet use
2. Canadians complain about the relatively high cost of telecom services (with good reason), and the government has been making chages in the industry to increase competition and lower costs (spectrum auctions that limit incumbants ability to steamroll over new competition, relaxation of foreign ownership regulations to permit upstarts like Wind Mobile from being blocked or facing bigger hurdles, etc). Imposing taxes on internet use, for any purpose, runs counter to this commitment and would be taken very poorly by the public at large. Not only that, incumbants and new players in the telecom industry alike are already aggravated at the prospect of being responsible to monitor internet traffic for police--having to aggravate their customers with another fee/tax just furthers that.
3. It runs counter to the "small c" conservative philosophy that many of the Tories core supporters have concerning taxation--that is that the people using somehting should be the ones paying for it. That is why they always talk about replacing some broad tax with "user fees". ISP's customers already pay to access the internet, and if the police want to access ISP customers' internet too, well the police should be the ones covering that cost.
4. Many western supporters of the NEW tories--the "old Reform Party" ones most passionate about getting rid of things like the gun registry and the Wheat Board monopoly, are offended by what C-30 represents--just like gun control it treats innocent people like criminals--the gun registry assumed that all people who would own a gun must be intent on using it to commit crimes and so they all must register with the government at great expense to that police can check up on them whenever they feel like it. Bill C-30 assumes all internet users co
There should be a "-1 senseless partisan rhetoric" moderation option. After just a few years of minorty-party rule political discourse in Canada has descended to playground fistfights and bickering--quite sad really.
How soon people forget what it is like to have a majority government in parliament. "PM Harper is a tyrant who will stop at nothing to impose his hidden agenda/corporate lobby buddies wishes/kitten-killing campaign/etc" blah blah blah. Same could've been said about Cretien, or Mulroney, or Trudeau. Big effin deal...Grit or Tory Same Old Story. This is a Tory majority parliament and thus committees are Tory-dominated. Inevitably opposition party amendments will be rejected. If the media content industry really WERE "Harper's corporate buddies" then all those additional requests from industry lobbyists could have easily sailed through, but they didn't. There is no reason at all to "try again in a few months" and every reason to push through contentious legislation you really want RIGHT NOW--early in the government's term so that the electorate's shot memory is more likely to have purged the event.
It is quite clear that SOPA-style control of information is not ever coming back in the life of this government. If there is no appetite to pass such distasteful legislation at this stage in the game--if they fear the wrath of the electorate that much--then it is a completely dead issue at LEAST until the next election. Furthermore copyright legislation will NOT be revisited even after the 2015 election--unless there is extremely concerted, international pressure to do so (and if there is such pressure it won't matter even if it is the Tories or another party who wins election--even the NDP could be coercced by such pressure).
Anti-Tory snipers here should make themselves more familiar with the history of copyright reform in Canada. The whole process started when the LIBERAL gov't of Jean Cretien chose to ratify the WIPO copyrigt treaty in the 1990s. Since that time the pressure has been on from WIPO and Hollywood lobbyists to have Canada "modernise" their copyright laws (ie. in a DMCA-like way). WIPO and the global copyright lobby were already growing very impatient with Canada by the time the next LIBERAL gov't of Paul Martin introduced C-60. It was a minority gov't so C-60 died on the order paper when a no-confidence motion was passed.
Minor adjustments were made and the bill was re-introduced with only minor revision by the CONSERVATIVE minority government as C-61...it too died on the order paper after an election of another minority parliament. The 3rd minority parliament introduced C-32 (tories again) and yet again it ALSO died on the order paper when the election was called.
The grits have quietly supported these bills all along this process, and if Harper really wanted to it could've passed fairly easily with tory-grit support, but with all the minority governments and so many more "important" issues around economy, social programs, taxation, law-and-order and so on it never moved up the order paper fast enough. And all along this long and varied path taken by C-60/61/32/11 the most draconian aspects largely fell away, and copyright lobbying was largely kept at bay. The only significant parts with teeth that are left and are of real concern are the anti-circumvention provisions. But guess what? The Liberals would've passed those just the same. Even the NDP which adamantly oppose them would've eventually done so if they ever came to power. Why is that? Because that is the core of what Canada MUST put into law to meet its obligations under the WIPO copyright treaty signed by Cretien all those years ago. From what I understand Canada's commitment is pretty iron-clad there--can't even weasel out like they did on Kyoto (which had an exit clause of sorts that Canada chose to use).
So whatever you think about Harper and his merry band of Tories it really is remarkable--and a relief--that they really DID listen to the right people here, regardless of who was in power. There seems to have been a pretty concerted effort to make the most minimally intrusive commmitment to WIPO that they could even though they really didn't have to.
This article is absurdly stupid. What about the Newton, arguably the predecessor, dare I say it, tablet to the iPad seems to have come before this guys idea. It's even mentioned in TFA.
Watch the Knight-Ridder video onYouTube. The fact that Apple was not the first to create an oversized PDA is not in dispute. This is a case involving industrial design--Apple accuses Samsung of copying basically the "look and feel" of the iPad specifically. K-R's "newspaper tablet" design bears a strong resemblance to the iPad--much more so than the Newton devices.
Besides that, everyone knows Alan Kay invented the tablet computer design in the 1960's. I personally don't believe the iPad design is patentable and it was a mistake to grant those design patents in the first place.
Apple has never claimed that they invented the tablet. They claim they own the design patents of their tablet in that Samsung's phones and tablet looks too much like theirs.
Have you even seen the 1990's video? Nobody is disputing that tablets have been around for a long time, but when you see what Fidler's design looks like I can't see how Apple's case has any merit. Both black, flat, rounded-rectangles with a touchscreen that covers substantially the whole front of the device. Where's the novelty in Apple's design then?
Notice that they have not sued others for design patents and they are specifically suing Samsung for certain models.
This is how all patent trolls work. It is more about legal strategy than anything else. If you want to win a battle you stand a better chance if you don't have to fight on multiple fronts, so you pick one enemy to fight at once. Apple deemed them to be the biggest competitive threat--they had more success than any other non-Apple device on the market. Microsoft takes a slightly different approach and picks their battles based upon a candidates resolve and resources to fight vs. settle--a bit of a different strategy but they've been able to use the protection money they've shaken down phone companies for to keep their own platform afloat. Perhaps since Samsung had a supplier relationship with Apple that Jobs and Co. overestimated Samsung's willingness to settle/cooperate. I don't know exactly.
In any case it isn't about Samsing being more of a copycat in any significant way. If that was all it was about why not pick the Motorola Xoom or the HTC Jetstream to put the smackdown on? They all folllow the same design pattern--one thought up by some Knight-Ridder researcher in the mid 1990s.
As for the rectangular tablet thing, Apple like any claimant must describe in detail every single aspect in legalese. The rectangular tablet is one of the many details they had to spell out. They cannot say to a judge "Well look at it, it looks like our product."
It is flat, rectangular with rounded corners and a screen that fills up the front face. There is a limit on how much more detailed you can get. The screen ratio isn't especially unique, and its exact dimensions do differ from the Samsung and other products out there to varying degrees already. Buttons on the devices are in differing locations, they do not have any user-servicable parts that can be interchanged between the products and so on. Seems that as similar looking as tablets all are there isn't a case for Apple here.
I do believe Apple has a fantastic product in the iPad, but it is time for them to stop with the legal shenanigans and compete on the merits of their product. It is bad enough that Apple is being a patent troll. It is ovee the top coming from a company founded by a man who's mantra was "good artists copy, great artists steal".
What does the iPad have to do with it? There were commercial, mass-produced, tablets way before the first iPad.
The iPad has VERY MUCH to do with it. When the iPad was released, Mr. Fidler's concept was so similar to the new product that it moved people to recall his video from years ago. He wrote an essay on the topic when Apple was still pushing out Apple ][+ micros and took inspiration from a sci-fi movie from the 60s.
But in particular the iPad has very much to do with Mr. Fidler because his work from all those years ago has been submitted as prior art by the combatants in the Apple-instigated patent war. Furthermore Fidler claims he approached a few tech companies after departing from Knight-Ridder in an effort to bring his ideas to fruition. One of those companies was Apple. Apple did not respond to his offers but could have sat on the idea for awhile. If there was evidence presented that Apple did indeed receive and retain Fidler's correspondence it would be very damaging to Apple's case.
When Apple was just pushing its first Newton MessagePad, with its half-baked handwriting recognition, monochrome screen and stylus control Fidler's team at Knight-Ridder showcased a tablet that would be immediately familiar to us today. Fidler started writing about the concept ten years before that even. I think it is pretty obvious that as fantastic as the iPad is, that there is little to no validity at all in Apple's design patents filed many years later.
He can't steal footage of Brokaw saying it and use that.
Firstly IT IS NOT STEALING (the point of debate is not about theft, it is about whether rebroadcasting the clip constitutes COPYRIGHT VIOLATION which, although illegal and wrong, is NOT THEFT).
Second, the claim of copyright infringement is very dubious at best. This is less than 30 seconds from the beginning of a considerably longer item on the evening news--originally broadcast many years ago, read by someone who has long since retired as a news anchor (though he still occasionally reports on TV). Also, Brokaw is merely reading facts--it was not a clip from an editorial he was giving. That to me is very reasonable when considering how political ads have commonly used print media content in exactly the same way. It is very common practice for candidates to feature an article headline and a sentence or paragraph as the centrepiece for a televised political ad, complete with citations in fine print (which publication and sometimes the author of the article).
Obviously the practice has been considered fair dealing for some time, because it continues to be done. The fact that in this case it was a video clip instead of a newspaper clip and that you see the reporter's face instead of his name in a citation shouldn't matter in the slightest. The fact that Brokaw is squirming and NBC is steaming just tells me that TV (and even telejournalism these days) is infected to some degree with the "Hollywood disease".
I also think that Brokaw's head is getting too big here--A monkey in a suit could be reading the news for all anyone cares, it is not about making it look like Brokaw endorses or favours any candidate at all. The point of using news clippings (from print or audio or video or any other media) in political ads is to convey the veracity of what is being said. If it was a quote from the evening news, or a national or major daily newspaper it lends credence to what is being said. When something unflattering is said about a candidate by his political opponent directly, well, just how trumped up are those "facts"?
It is important to defend fair dealing, whether or not you like how it is being exploited, because elimination of fair dealing would remove an important check on powers granted to copyright holders to the point where it hinders free expression. Throughout the British commonwealth fair dealing universally mentions "comment, criticism and review" as valid purposes of dealing, and for such dealing these purposes shold be interpreted liberally. From what I understand American fair use provisions are quite a bit more open ended and do not specify exact purposes of use which are appropriate (that each case must be judged on its own merits). If "comment, criticism and review" fall victim to overzealous copyright law, and ownership of media (both of content and means of distribution) become more consolidated, how on earth can freedom of expression stand a chance?
I am more familiar with how Fair Dealing works in Canada, but here is my take on how American fair use provisions work:
1) "purpose of use" - as I pointed out a political ad is not only non-commercial, it also clearly falls under "comment and criticism", so I think that works here
2) "nature of the work" - notwithstanding Brokaw's image and perhaps the NBC logos and titles, the work substantially consists of "facts". Every single word Brokaw uttered pertains to a public record of fact. Facts cannot be copyrighted--only specific "expressions" of facts merit any sort of copyright protection, and this particular "expression" has to be weighed against the "social usefulness" of the work. Political discourse is (or at least should be) "socially useful".
3) "amount of the work used" - Fair dealing in commonwealth nations seems to be easier to figure out here--the US fair use is all over the map and depends on the nature of the use. On one hand the "betamax decision" upheld fair use for full and exact copies of a work t
Once again, Stallman says something controversial, dissenting and even offensive in staunch defense of his personal world view. How dare he do just the sort of thing that Jobs was known to do!
Stallman and Jobs are/were opposing sides of the same coin. Polar opposites in view of all things computing but both are viewed as mavericks who have been passionate and driven and I would argue they both had an equal degree of impact on the world's computing technology.
Cut the guy some slack. You don't have to like the guy but his ideas and works are the foundation of free software. I don't think we would grow as a society without some tolerance for people who speak their mind with little restraint. Can you imagine where we would be without the contributions of Jobs, Stallman, Torvalds, de Raadt and so many others who have offended or stirred controversy? Passion cannot come from those who strive to be inoffensive.
Kick managers in the nuts that ask for a remote connection to the SCADA system or it's PC's running the pretty UI for the plant operators.
Turds run downhill--that middle-manager probably has directives from his boss...or perhaps the government or regulatory body...to obtain data from the SCADA system and so in turn has requested access so he can provide that data.
I don't get much call for remote access to the HMI (operator interface) itself in my projects--but it is my primary purpose in these jobs to provide remote access to these systems for access to alarming/annunciating as well as process historian data. On-call operations personnel "need" to have SMS notification on critical alarms/events. Regulatory bodies need reports for everything from custody transfer to environmental contamination data. It is IMPOSSIBLE to keep a SCADA system truly isolated from all public networks anymore. To be legally compliant much less competitive requires data from SCADA systems to be available off-site. Even with 100% physical separation you'd be shuffling USB drives around which would be just as vulnerable, or using other physical media (DVD-R's etc) but that is not an acceptable solution due to volumes of data and the requirements for timely data (up to near real time in some cases)
Ideally, it would be GREAT if we could play in our own little sandbox but technology moves on and outsude forces beyond our control demand we leverage that technology to boost production, increase efficiency, make the workplace safer and reduce environmental damage-those demands cannot be meant without connectivity in any way at all. So instead of fighting it we MUST address security PROPERLY--not just including perimiter security. That includes not just patching SCADA software but implementing proper system architectures as well as enforcing policies and procedures. Some stuff I rarely see done but should always be done these days include:
* enforce complete ban on shared logins--no more of this "user operator password Operator1" crap. * In windows platform systems make it a policy to elimiate "workgroups" and implement proper domains with group-policy enforced security * disable all removable media access for all but a very few * NEVER put real-time (PLC's/PAC's/controllers) and supervisory (HMI, historian data logging, etc) on the same network! * make security audits and software patches or upgrades part of the maintenance/turnaround schedule with all other equipment--and insist to vendors (with threat of rip and replace) that support for current OSes and sane security policies are a requirement for your business.
Using Windows in ana automation system might be flawed, security might not be built into real-time netowrks, and SCADA software may be full of bugs, but the most immediate threat is how far behind the times automation systems are in implementing security measures compared to business/general IT.
iPad isn't even an impressive tablet, and as an automotive PC it is completely inadequate (and no it cannot be made adequate with the right apps either). You state many good reasons as well--there are even more.
1) Glossy LCD Screen makes it impossible to read in a car
The touch screen is also capacitive. Resistive is much better for this environment, especially in northern climates where you spend half the time wearing gloves--cannot use capacitive screen at all with gloves, and when it is cold and dry even bare fingers don't work right. You might not get multi-touch, but multi-touch cannot be used safely while driving in any case.
Which leads me to cold weather operation. Auto systems are meant to withstand harsher conditions. How well would the iPad handle being stored or used at -40 for a period of up to hours?
6) The screen is huge. Most cars don't have that kind of room in the dashboard without serious modification
and yet the icons and wigits can still be too small for operation with minimal distraction. Proper apps with interfaces for automotive use would have to be made. They can also not rely on multi-touch and gestures to such a high degree when such dexterity is not safely possible in a moving vehicle.
7) The interface, while intuitive, is not great in a car environment. I want to see MPG, the song playing, distance to destination, and more on a single dashboard screen
need a good hands-free, voice-command interface for making phone calls too. How well does iPad work with your phone via bluetooth?
Another is lack of removable media--yes CDs are "quaint" but they are still the primary source of music for normal non-techie people. In my car I can just bring a CD with me and rip the tracks right off it into the internal drive--no messing with the craptacular iTunes or bothering with a computer if I don't want to. Sorry iTunes is total garbage even on a mac and I don't get why people salivate over iPod's OK-but-not-utopian interface--my in-car system has a much superior interface for its purpose (playing media on the dashboard) than iTunes and iPod media management and playback interfaces (android media player is even worse).
And do you honestly expect the typical FB user to do that - set up and manage their own server?
And if specialized service providers sprout up to host this data, wouldn't that be creating the same situation that this software is supposed to be trying to get away from: other having control of your data?
No, only nerds would host their own server at this point (like me). However "normal people" more and more have "appliance" servers in their homes today (home routers, PVRs/digital tv receivers, etc that have the capability and perform some server-like functions) so the day may come where self-hosting your own services becomes fairly common.
This would be like email or generic web servers fro the most part as has been said. ISPs and hosting companies and corporations would host their own public social servers, and an open platform would kill lock-in and enable full interaction amongst users on every server as if they were all on facebook, except without entrusting one giant system with all the data.
Control over your own data doesn't have to mean owning and maintaining the server yourself. The open and distributed nature of the platform gives you the control you need. Just as the case is with any free market you could pull up stakes and move, or maintain different profiles on different sites that can be kept in sync or whatever. None of this nonsense like between Facebook and Apple or IM systems like MSN and Yahoo and AIM changing their protocols for the express purpose of breaking third-party clients that provide inter-operation and so on.
However, I've heard that facebook is basically putting up servers as fast as they can build them.
Facebook could have thousands--it doesn't mater. The point is you must go to facebook.com to get to any of them. Facebook owns all of them, their load balancers tell you which of the boxes handles your requests, they control access to your information and decide for themselves how it is stored, processes, indexed, shared. Facebook can cange the site however they want, even if you don't like it. All the severs are on THEIR network, so if their network goes down we ALL fall down too. The same staff has full access to all the data too--so don't do ANYTHING on facebook you wouldn't do on prime time national TV and expect it to stay private.
"strength in numbers" isn't the whole point of this thing--personal control and prevention of lock-in are what appeal even more. Whether you are a personal user of facebook who wants more freedom or a business that wants their own "in house" social networking server/site to do social marketing, customer support/service, etc. that has to be pretty enticing to a lot of people.
...they can keep their house of cards until it collapses. To compete with facebook doesn't have to mean you are a facebook clone. Besides, I think in the long term (perhaps way out there many years, but eventually) technology will develop and enough people will clue in--"get it" about what the internet should be--that facebook will be obsolete anyways. Why aspire to be a dinosaur?
People HAVE "got it" to some degree for decades now I think--it's just that it isn't all one big picture yet. Think about the way the internet came to be--designed to be fault-tolerant, distributed, many relatively autonomous, small components working together. Client-server vs. mainframe timeshare systems and serial terminals--the big mainframes replaced with smaller servers and clients growing from dumb units to capable computers. Think the "UNIX way", where all the tools are small and work together piping data amongst each other. Object oriented programming, shared libraries and so on--the pattern is to make the blocks smaller and stronger and more numerous, instead of carving your creation out of a giant granite boulder.
Facebook doesn't fit the paradigm of the future. Facebook is a mainframe, or a giant boulder, or the Titanic, or a 1973 Ford Thunderbird. It is big, slow lumbering and dinosaur-like. "Full featured" can be a competitive disadvantage at that point. Remember when the Web was still kind of like the internet was intended? Lots of smaller websites, personal pages dedicated to people's interests that resided on Freenet servers or university systems or local mom-and-pop ISPs. Corporations HAD websites. Today it seems the hip thing to do is regress to the dark days of mainframes. Instead of people having their own web page, URL or email address they have a facebook page, twitter ccount and a GMail address, almost creating an internet run by three companies. Isn't that what the creators of the internet, www and personal computers were trying to avoid?
I think if the infamous three get too big, too complicated and leave people feeling like they've lost too much control over their online presence they'll implode--especially should more distributed alternatives arise. For example, should Diaspora take off like, say, the Apache HTTP server, and it stays open and has a consistent interface that encourages following and sharing and interacting between different Diaspora sites then what would the point of Facebook be? Same with StatusNet--if enough of those servers were out there why put up with Twitter fail whales? Small distributed parts are much better than the "barge with barnacles" approach taken by Facebook any day.
Think about it: If Facebook changes something and you don't like it you just have to get used to it, or else give up facebook and lose all the content you've created, all the links you've made with others and so on. If it was a million Diaspora's instead of one Facebook you could just move to another server--take your whole profile with you--because it is YOUR data and it is a platform NOT controlled by one large entity with a vested interest in doing as much as possible to keep you from moving. If facebook has technical problems huge swaths of users suffer. If it was a million Diaspora's and one goes down nobody would notice beyond the dozens or hundreds on that site.
Such a social network model means that Diaspora doesn't have to cater to FOSS folks only. You could have many Diaspora-based sites that cater to different interests or communities or corporations or whatever,, but since the platform is open it could be a consistent/standard platform allowing full interactivity amongst the different sites. Your profile could reside on a FOSS social network site and your sister could have her profile on, say, a gardening social net site, and you could be both on each others contacts and chat and interact and share and follow and EVERYTHING that you can do between users within facebook if you realy wanted to.
If Diaspora evolves to have a well-defined API for apps
Ah, the irony of Slashdot UID's - it's the only dick measuring contest where the winner is the smallest one...
Interesting coincidence though that in the/. digits contest most people are around six though. Plus, I've heard people have paid to enhance their UID (sure four digits might be worth braggin about but paying to have yours made one digit is absurd).
It provides some interesting things. Instead of the metadata hidden in a big binary blob it moves things to be loaded by the standard tools.
You could do musical notation like this with already-established standards, without plugins, without deploying BLOBs. You could use XHTML and SVG and any one of a good selection of javascript frameworks (jquery is referenced in the demo but not at all involved in the actual rendering of the musical notes) to make it all dynamic. In fact not only could you do it, it would be a technically superior solution (canvas is easier to use as it is in the demo, but SVG is far more sophisticated and powerful).
It has been stuck on 1998 for years now. It is like HTML4 came out and everyone went 'ok were done'
I think it's more like you've been hiding under a rock since 1998. The W3C didn't say "we're done" they said "this is a mess, let's clean it up for real" and created XHTML1, then fixed a couple of things to issue XHTML1.1. See HTML is a bastardised form of SGML and traditionally was implemented as "tag soup". XHTML made the rules more concrete--it insisted on being well-formed XML so XML parsers could consistenly parse it, and the use of a dtd so that user-agents could be directed on how to render it, etc. XHTML made the source behind web pages sane again.
But then something fell of the rails at W3C. They started working on XHTML2.0 and figured that they had to throw the baby out with the bathwater AGAIN. Problem is that XHTML2 mostly solved problems web developers didn't have (XHTML1.1 could server the purpose for the most part) and where it did address weaknesses it was grossly overengineered (hello XFORMS). Compound that with the fact that they decided to overhaul a spec (breaking some compatability on the way) that developers of browsers had only started to adopt and the process of standardising took SOOOO long. XHTML2 is an idea that should never have existed.
So, now you have all these web browser developers saying "this sucks you keep changing things too fast and breaking what we use!". Plus I think they were all a bit lazy or stuck with code that was hard to manage (make a full and proper XML parser or code generator? too hard!) but above all else large content developers were DEFINITELY lazy (we like our tag soup! we're too dumb to care about case sensitivity and closing brackets like real programmers have to!). This with XHTML2 the W3C goaded borwser makers and content creators into forming the WHATWG faction, who figured they'd maker their OWN standard--HTML5--using HTML4-like "Tag soup" as the foundation.
HTML5 is very nearly as bad a mistake as XHTML2 (the ONLY thing that is better is the pace of developing the standard and its adoption rate). They tossed away all the benefits of being an XML-based spec and wound the clock back years to re-invent things in an "easier" but more hackish way. WHY OH WHY couldn't have the compromise between W3C and WHATWG be..I dunno...maybe XHTML1.2??? I think that the formal mention of the "XHTML5" variant (ie. HTML5 beaten into XML submission) is tacit admission that tag soup is a mistake.
I guess I cant get everything I want...at least HTML5 is an open, unencumbered standard as cruddy as it is.
The developer is just using the Google mirror to load the jQuery AJAX framework library. jQuery is NOT a Google property--it is a widely used Free software library that is available everywhere.
The google hosted mirror is often referenced to reduce the bandwidth on servers that are struggling to handle volume (it is probably keeping the demo site from succumbing to a slashdotting). If you don't want an "external dependency" then just download jquery.min.js file from the jquery.org website onto your own server, then change the URL to reference your own copy.
Production sites use the "MINified" version of the library to save bandwidth. If you want to see the inner workings you can because it is open source--the non-MINified version of full source is at jquery.org as well.
jQuery itself doesn't provide music notation--it is a general-purpose AJAX library probably being used to provide an easy/concise way to traverse the DOM and/or handle page events (since plain old javascript can sometimes be tedious to use). Please follow the advice of the post and REALLY read the source! The "dirty work" of rendering the notes is done by the code in "vexnotation.js". That file doesn't seem to indicate that the musical notation rendering itself depends on jquery in any way. It wouldn't take much effort to remove the jquery dependency from the demo from what I can tell.
Interestingly creating a network like this means you have convince everyone to forget about Facebook and move to this platform.
Thing is this isn't equivalent to Facebook; it isn't a replacement-in-kind. Diaspora (sorry--Diaspora* whatever the asterisk means) seems to aspire to be a BETTER ALTERNATIVE. It is far to early to know how things will turn out as there is no complete and public implmenetation of their concept yet, however in my mind it is promising that there are motivated developers and financial backers who actually *GET* how the internet is supposed to work. See, so few people "get it" (and I fear that many powerful, smart people actually DO "get it" but are trying to STOP it because they crave power and money *cough*zuckerburg*cough*).
The Internet is dangerously close to being reduced to a mere digital version of the telephone system--the mere transport infrastructure for a small number of very large, segregated, proprietary, centralised "service providers". We broke open the medieval/feudal system of AOL/compuserve/prodigy/MSN/etc-over-dialup with the rise if the WWW. Internet-based innovation has the potential to free us even more from silos, information-pushing, walled gardens and such but clever people keep building more of them and the masses clamour to buy in, so now we have Facebook and Twitter and Apple and Google and they all have their own kingdoms and can only taks to each other in tightly controlled ways that serve the masters best interests and feed data through their own servers to be taken and used as they please.
The goal of Diaspora* does not appear to be to establish a "diaspora.com" internet presence that is intended to grow into another one of these fiefdoms. They don't even begin to have such asperations. The goal is to create a truly open social networking application server--think "Diaspora* is to Facebook what StatusNet is to Twitter". The features of such a system may be comparable to what Facebook offers but the architecture is specifically designed to ALLOW interaction, federation between hosts. They want to kill facebook with not another one big facebook, but with dozens, hundreds, thousands of "mini facebooks", hosted by everyone from geeks' personal servers in ther basements to ISPs and hosting companies to corporate web servers. These people's servers couldn't ever grow tot he size of the actual facebook (some might only host the profiles of a geek's family, or even just one person), but they wouldn't have to becasue it doesn't matter--you could find old firends, add them to your friend's list, see their status, subscribe to their feeds, whatever...without giving the server or hosting company a second thought. It'd be like email--we don't worry if we can send do email addresses on different domains or servers or ISPs after all.
If it was done right why would it be so hard to convince people to abandon Facebook? If you are Joe Schmoe typical internet user and your ISP had its own Diaspora* where all customers were automatically members that was the default homepage and you could just log in, check your email, find that old buddy from high school who is on a different Diaspora* server, see your sister's "tweets", look at the picture your cousin posted of his trip to Barcelona...why bother with Facebook? It would seem so....limited.
This is the same as when internet service became commercially available. People--even very smart and "visionary" people like Bill Gates--argued exactly what you did--essentially "you have to convince everyone to forget about AOL, Compuserve Progidy, etc and move to the internet". The internet was geeky and academic, user hostile and a difficult place to find information if you didn't know where to look (this was when Gopher was the height of user friendliness, the WWW was just becoming graphical, most Windows versions had no TCP/IP stack built in, searching meant using Archie and Veronica and there was no index of the WWW yet...). Right up to Windows 95 was release
IANAL, but my guess is that if it's in your contract
From the original post:
And, since no written or verbal agreement was ever made to transfer copyright over to my employer, I question whether they can claim that they now own the extended version of the project.
The software in question began as a hobby project by a graduate student "on his own". It was based upon GPLed libraries of code by others (who have their own copyrights on that code) as well as code he developed prior to his employment (on which he holds the copyright).
Though any code this person developed under the employ of the university (ie. on their dime) is most likely under the copyright of said employer there was no agreement to transfer copyright of any PRE-EXISTING code and the employer cannot limit the original copyright holder's distribution rights.
HOWEVER, any derivative work done on the employer's dime WOULD have the employer's copyright attached. So, although the university has NO right to block the distribution of the ORIGINAL code or the unmodified libraries on which it is based it CAN prevent the derivative work from being distributed. The university should be aware that by employing this student and using his GPLed code as the basis for the derivative work they've agreed to the terms of the GPL. Those terms give the university full rights to restrict or permit distribution as they see fit. BUT because they are bounded by the terms of GPL if the university decided to sell or otherwise distribute this product to anyone else THEY MUST DO SO UNDER THE SAME GPL TERMS. This means full disclosure of source code to those that receive the software plus the rights to redistribute under GPL terms. If they make binary-only copies or place furher restriction that is copyright violation and software piracy no different than downloading a cracked Windows 7 torrent.
The path of least legal resistance would be to capitulate and let the university have what they have, but to release the code as it existed before the term of employment started as a project on sorceforge or google code or wherever as the basis of a "community development" fork. Because no transfer of copyright agreement was signed the employer would have no recourse, however if you want the added functionality of the later product it would have to be re-implemented in a meaningfully different way.
If you have the time and money or a generous lawyer friend (right there next to your hen's tooth lol) then it might help to remind the those employers who are resistant to the isea of the terms of the GPL, just in case their reasoning behind blocking distribution is because they want to commercialise the software itself. However, they might have legitimate reasons to keep the software to themselves. For example, the nature of the software's functionality might betray a proprietary business or technological process, or some other "trade secret". GPL is there to protect the freedom of software, not to thumb the nose of all IP law and ruin business plans.
Slashdot Mirror
There's already a standard for 23" racks widely used in telecom. So now we have to deal with 19, 21, and 23 options? Great.
Perhaps that isn't as great a problem as it sounds. If the overall footprint of all those rack formats is 24" it stands to reason that there would be racks out there where the mounts for the vertical posts have mounting holes to accomodate 19 and 23, and to support 21 would be a matter of putting one more hole in each bracket.
That said, maybe it would've just made sense to say data centres should adopt 23" width and specify different power rail designs to match.
A nuclear reactor that melts down might leave a few square miles uninhabitable for a century.
Except the type of nuclear "micro-reactor" that would fit within a city lot, typically within a facility the size of a typical substation at most, would be incapable of going into meltdown. Furthermore throium-based reactors produce much more "benign" waste products--certainly they are still toxic but disposal and site remediation would be not that far removed from something like decontaminating the site of an old gas station that once handled leaded fuel.
Also, a gas furnace that blows up would in all likelihood leave the house permanently uninhabitable. Almost without exception, when a gas furnace explodes, even if the house is still standing the internal pressure of the exploion "puffs out" the structure and makes it permanently, structurally unsound. In the most optimistic cases repair would not taks days, but rather weeks and months as the uilding is gutted to the frame to repair the damage within. This would not be a problem with what is envisioned in the parent to your post as it would involve a reactor with the capacity to provide service to "maybe just a single subdivision". While that is small, it is not so small it would sit inside anyone's house. As I said, this is something that would sit withiin a substation facility where traditionally transmission lines connect to distribution (but in this case there would be no tie in to a transmission line, but instead directly to a generation unit). That is already not a residintial location.
Until they're willing to back some realistic alternatives to current power generation--other than living like Luddite hippies--I tune these idiots out.
You DO know that fighting environmental causes is a means to a different end right? Greenpeace will fight ANY method of large scale energy supply. If we end up developing totally safe fusion energy on a large scale that would supply us all with abundant power with no CO2 produced, no dangerous wastes, etc they will fight it tooth an nail--even if they have to completely trump up some reason to do so.
Greenpeace are made up of "luddite hippies" who want to force all the world to live like "luddite hippies". That is their final objective--to stop and reverse progress and make the world into one giant hippie commune. It sounds far fetched and unachievable (and it pretty much is), but that would be their ideal goal. It would be unwise to "tune then out" though because there is always the risk they become infiltrated by "eco-terrorists"--there are already a number of activists who believe "the end justifies the means" in any case.
You joined Greenpeace to get a piece of arse? If you are looking for willing co-eds in Greenpeace, lets just say "the odds are good, but the goods are odd". There are two types of Greenpeace enthusiasts:
1. Those who are taking prescription psychoactive medication
2. Those who really SHOULD be on psychoactive medication.
By and large, they are earnest in their concerns for the environment--they really want to do good by people and the earth, but 99 percent of them are ignorant of hard science and emotionally driven. If you hook up with one of these they will drunk dial you and drive by your house and cry at your front door, waking the neighbours. If they are not vegan they may leave a boiling bunny on your stovetop.
The 1 percent remaining are intelligent and very lucid are also very manipulative. They can contort facts better than organisers of an Arnold Swartzenegger election campaign. They will also never go out with you.
Let me don a tinfoil hat of my own at this point. This is really quite a fanciful theory, so don't take it TOO seriously (but there are probably some uncomfortable truths buried in there):
Apple may be guilding the lily a bit with its energy projections, but you can bet the truth is much closer to what Apple claims than what Greenpeace claims. Greenpeace will take the "seed" of truth then mutate it into a tangled weed of mis-stated facts. Because of their history of "defending the earth" for a good cause, and being perceived as "anti-corporate", they can get away with telling lies grown from facts used out-of-context. It is difficult to refute Greenpeace because they target "big corporate evil". A multi-billion dollar company like Apple or Exxon or General Motors garners little sympathy from the public, and when they refute Greenpeace it is seen as an activity done solely in their own interests (even if they are correcting mis-statements). Greenpeace are very clever that way--they get attention by vilifying high-profile, large corporations and because they are a "charity" it is very bad optics to aggressively defend against them (you become even more evil if you sue greenpeace for defamation and so on), so Greenpeace targets are left with little recourse but to meekly defend themselves with less spectacular facts.
Here is another example: The Keystone XL pipeline is being vigourously fought against, and Greenpeace is in the forefront of that fight. The pipeline is not itself the target--concerns about routing through an aquifer have been addressed and there is basically no government opposition--the hangups are largely with a few property owners and not of an environmental nature (mostly protests over right of ways bisecting properties, effects on property values and other economic/logistical matters). The reason they want it killed is because it allows Canadian bitumen to more readily make its way to gulf coast refineries.
The public argument is that Canadian bitumen comes from messy, energy-intensive mining operations--it looks ugly and makes more CO2 than average oil sources. But even that is not REALLY what Greenpeace hates. The REAL reason is that Canadian bitumen is cheaper than west-texas intermediate--the spread is generally even more than the added cost of refining. Also by law of supply and demand, more supply to refineries for the same demand lowers prices overall. The end goal of Greenpeace is to make fossil-fuel sources of energy as expensive as possible, and to do that you must choke supply. The most "ethical" way to get people to curtail their use of fossil fuels is to educate them, convince them to modify their behaviour voluntairly, but that is the hard way. The easier approach is to curtail supply of oil and gas and force people to use less (they work to eliminate nuclear energy much the same way).
Greenpeace's real mandate is to make all energy more expensive (not just renewable--but expensive). If energy gets expensive enough then first-world nations will have to start de-industrialising. As developing nations advance and developed nations regress the world would "equalise" at some point in the middle. The environmental theme is basically the golden good intention pavement on the road leading right to hell.
From the editorial/commentary in the posting for the article:
With the cost of gas and oil on its way up it's a wonder that any one would be against the use of renewable energy sources.
The submitter is very ignorant about energy prices as are most people I suspect. Though crude oil and products refined from it (notably gasoline and diesel) are indeed high and rising, those fuels are never used for large scale electrical power generation. The vast majority of "carbon-based" power generation is from coal and natural gas. While those fuels are not totally "clean" nor renewable they are actually quite cheap. In the case of fuel coal, prices peaked in the mid 1970s to mid 1980s, and in the long term has closely followed inflation (that is, its price has been flat at about US$26 per short ton in year 2000 dollars). The price of natural gas, the second most popular method of carbon-based electricity generation, has not only failed to rise permanently but it has actually DROPPED significantly. They are presently hovering at a TEN and FIFTEEN YEAR LOWS, and adjusted for inflation the price also stays quite steady, with only brief spikes as in the last boom before the bust.
The thing is, though wind power is considered "clean" it is actaully more detrimental to the environment, and also more costly, than many proponents would have you believe. In order to produce the same amount of power as a relatively modest natural gas fired station requires dozens of wind turbines spread out across a much larger area. I live in Alberta, home to both "dirty" oilsands (Fort McMurray) and a significant amount of "clean" wind power generation (Pincher Creek). When news broke of birds perishing in the tailings ponds of oilsands upgraders it made international news, yet a comparable amount of birds are killed by wind farms by area as in the oilsands. There are also concerns about the size of the structures and the amount of low-level noise they make interfering with wildlife migration patterns and habitats. I believe it is important to invest in renewable energy for sure, and in the case of wind power the price has declined over time so that it is just now becoming competitive with more traditional sources of power. However, it should be put under the same scrutiny as any other kind of industrial operation, just as non-conventional oil and gas (heavy oil/bitument, oil and gas drilling in tight formations using fracing, deep-water drilling, etc) have been very heavily and closely scrutinised inthe past few years, so too should any other form of energy technology.
Wind can be used effectively and safely and affordably if done right, but it should not be blindly pursued with critics being shot down for being anti-environment. for those readers from Ontario, I'm sure you know that the province has a VERY poor record on properly managing the electricity industry. Not only has it approved and pushed forward poorly planned wind farms (of such close proximity to residential areas as to kill property values and even disrupt sleep), they've also managed to completely mess up the market with consumers burdened by expensive surcharges to pay for government boondoggles and a spot market for power that is so wild that sometimes the province even has to PAY TONS OF MONEY TO MAKE NEIGHBOURING STATES TAKE THEIR EXCESS POWER.
The story is far more complicated tham most people outside the situation might think. There is more to it than "rah rah for oil and gas" or "that wind farm might give me a tumour" hysteria. Because of the way the Ontario government has mistreated residents affected by past wind projects, in addition to the tragic waste of money on past "green energy" boondoggles in a province already struggling with massive government deficits, there is a lot of resistance to these sort of big expensive government-driven initiatives there right now.
I remember back when they were still Radio Shack.
This thread of conversation is about Circuit City, not "The Source". A little background for those outside of Canada:
Radio Shack stores in the US were run by a corporation called Tandy (which a few years ago officially changed its name to match its chain of stores as it consolidated their assets around them). All stores outside the US (almost all in Canada, and a few in UK and Australia I think) were run (after the mid 1980s) by a Canadian-owned and operated company called InterTan. InterTan was not a subsitiary of Tandy/Radio Shack of the US, nor did the US have any ownership stake of any significance. InterTan licensed the Radio Shack brand and sold merchandise for Tandy outside the US in exchange for fees/cut of profit/etc. They signed long terms agreements (10 years I think) and renewing the licensing agreement was usually a formality.
InterTan's ownership has changed at times over the years I think, starting as a Tandy subsidiary but then becoming completely independent in terms of ownership. Intertan eventually ran several tech-focused chains (Radio Shack, Rogers Plus, Batteries Plus, THS Studio...). Intertan struggled after the dot-com-bomb, and sold off all its assets outside Canada, and a few years later sold itself to Circuit City USA in the mid 2000s.
Radio Shack (USA) was not pleased that a competitor (especially one responsible for cutting into its margins in its US operations) was running stores with its brand name and making profits of its products. Despite several years being left in the licensing agreement they took InterTan to court and won--the licensing agreement was nullified due to the major change in Intertan's ownership (and the fact that a major competitor representing itself as another businesses brand is understandably awkward). Intertan was forced to re-brand all the Radio Shacks in Canada (except a very few small-town franchises they didn't own, who mostly went with the US parent to renew their franchise agreements) to "The Source by Circuit City". CC was responsible for some rapid expansion (those "plus" stores) and I think was responsible for some of the strain on the business. However, The Source operated mostly like "old school" radio shacks and continued to be a sustainable business even as CC in the States crashed and burned. The parent company tried to consolidate and suck up as much cash as possible by divesting itself of as many non "Source" assets a possible.
When CC went into liquidation it tried to put InterTan up for sale but that didn't work out--InterTan was put into receivership and ordered to liquidate its assets, not because it was not a viable busienss but because it was more or less ordered to by its parent Circuit City through US bankruptcy proceedings. Within days, Bell Canada put in an offer to buy the entire chain of "The Source" stores from InterTan. By then InterTan had closed almost all its Batteris Plus and THS Studio stores and a bunch of its Rogers Plus stores, along with several underperforming Source locations. Since Bell was a competitor to Rogers it did not want to run stores that licensed its brand so they only bought "The Source". Since there was almost nothing left of InterTan, Rogers took over all its retail operations directly, Batteries Plus and THS disappeared completely and InterTan folded operations completely. "The Source" is now a subsidiary of Bell Canada.
Radio Shack has tried to re-enter the Canadian market but it hasn't been very successful. The InterTan Radioshacks (that became "the source") were not the same as the US ones, and when Radio Shack opened new stores they had different decor and focused on different merchandise--they focused heavily on mobile phones, computer accessories, cables and batteries, whereas the InterTan stores still had a half-decent (if overpriced) electronic parts aisle and a lot bigger variety of gadgets and toys and televisions and satellite gear and so on--and even after they renam
I sat Phtotshop on the top of this lost, and I my first instinct was to mod this down as "Troll". Whenever I see a critical post that starts with mentioning Photoshop I immediately think..no, i KNOW... they are being completely full of crap. This is by no means insightful. This poster is clueless or trying to troll. But maybe it would be more constructive to forego modding and comment on this.
OK I understand that Photoshop is a de-facto industry standard amongst graphic artists and such, but seriously how many "normal users" really use Photoshop? Out of 100 maybe three, and two of them are useing a cracked/pirated they found on some torrent site. Photoshop is NOT a "killer app" outside of graphic design, and 99 percent of users have no use for 99 percent of Photoshop's capabilites. Normal users want to crop or resize or remove redeye or apply a set of basic filters and want to do it easily. Photoshop is NOT the answer any more than GIMP for these people. They will use the rinky-tink software that comes with their camera, and would be happs with a rinky-tink photo editing app bundled with GNOME or KDE. In the case of GNOME, the "shotwell" app is probably the best candidate to address this concern rather than petitioning to have Photoshop ported to Linux (which will never happen with sub-5-percent OS market share).
As for the other items on your list:
* Acrobat. Are you talking about the "reader" or the "pro" version? I know even less people who use Acrobat than who use Photoshop--exactly ONE PERSON--a prefessional graphic designer. As for the reader everybody uses? IT SUCKS HARDER THAN A HOOVER AND EVERYBODY DESPISES IT. It is big, bloated slow crapware that continually bugs you with its auto updates to fix nasty security holes. Evince on Linux systems is a far better alternative to view PDFs and there are many alternatives for all platforms to that steaming pile of crap.
* Sharepoint. Perhaps but as a client I've been able to use a sharepoint website from Firefox on a Linux machine well enough to suit my needs. I understand its power exends far past being a fancy web portal but outside of a corporate environment nobody cares about sharepoint in the slightest. As Apple has proven the key to success is to make the public fall in love with your product, which then drives business to accomodate. From a server perspective trying to set up an effective sharepoint system made me want to slit my wrists--it seems like a whole lot of "cumbersome" to do what should be more simple.
* Call of Duty. Perhaps the games issue is the single valid point here, but not "call of duty". Hard core PC gaming is most definitely a small niche market--the market for games like that are served quite successfully by game consoles. If anything though, those consoles represent one of the more serious threats to open computing--MSFT would like nothing better than to make its XBOX the replacement for your home PC. But realistically, for personal computing the games market isn't "call of duty", it is "bejewelled" and "farmville" and the like.
* Quicken. One of the few personal computing apps users might miss if they switch from Windows...oh wait, never mind. The retarded install process notwithstanding, some WINE tweaks/UI improvements could address such things. But there are better programs than Quicken that don't cost a bundle. GnuCash and Money Manager Ex work as good or better, are free (and "Free") and at least the former can import Quicken data. So rather than stuggle to use an inferior product via WINE, use one built for purpose on Linux.
* Turbotax. This is a product that is being reduced to niche or even irrelevancy by web-based applications. I have filed my income tax electronically via the web for four years now from Firefox on a Linux computer.
* As crappy as printing support has been historically, Windows was behind the curve for awhile. when I last installed Debian I didn't ev
I have had windows users with no linux experince ask me to intall Gnome 3 on their computers. That has never happened for me in the past with any desktop.
I've had a very similar experience as a GNOME3 user since June. The transition to Gnome 3 is jarring for someone used to any other "Traditional" desktop environment. However my first experience with it went much MUCH better than my first kick at the can with unity. Unity was such a turnoff for me that I stuck with Lucid and eventually ditched Ubuntu for Debian for my new computer. I can't be alone in that respect--the initial releases of Unity were an unmitgated disaster, though it has improved somewhat. Gnome 3 on the other hand has been by far the most well recieved desktop when I've presented it to computer novices. To a slashdot-like audience "tablet-like on a PC" is an insult--it makes no sense, but to my young niece or my father in his 70s who make the same observation they say it as a complement. Computers are "hard"--iPads and iphones and droids are "easy", or at least "easier". The differences in form factor mean there should be some differences in the user interface obviously, but for "regular folk" incorporating some more appliance-like design makes the computer much less intimidating.
I found that although the initial release of GNOME 3 was quite un-polished there was certainly a sense of where the project is trying to go. Though I don't totally agreee with some of the Tom's Hardware editorialising, I was impressed with the throroughness of its review and that they did at least "get it" at some level. Gnome 3 is striving to cater to the "uninitiated" linux user--indeed to users unaccustomed to computers of any platform. When presented with the Gnome 3 desktop and told to figure out how to do a given task with no assistance, what would a novice user do? That seems to be the approach the designers have taken.
To put yourself in a newbie's shoes: If you want to do anything you'd thing "activities--that must be where I go". There are more efficient ways to bring up the launcher/switcher screen--notably the super/"windows" key but that is something you can learn. It brings to mind a humourous youtube video where an IT blogger/journalist shows his dad the Windows 8 "public preview" and tells him to perform a simple task, ends up getting out of the "metro tile" screen onto an empty desktop, then has no idea how to get back without prompting. Gnome 3 may have its growing pains, but it seems Win 8 will have more than its share of issues with novices and opwer users alike.
So if you aren't a regular computer user what do you do when you are done using a gadget? Well, you turn it off. how do you accomplish this in Gnome 3? They are going to press the power button, and in Gnome 3 when you do that the shutdown dialogue pops up and counts down from 60, just like a Mac. So if you can do that, why bother with a superfluous shutdown icon or menu item on the screen?
As an experienced user with a definitely established set of habits I can certainly say I encounter frustrations with Gnome 3 from time to time, but I find I'm really growing into Gnome 3 quite well. The learning curve is NOT as steep as Tom's might have you believe--admittedly it does present some obsacles if you are trying to "2-ify" the shell to make it conform to your habits. However one thing Tom's very effectively demonstrates is that however flawed you might find the Gnome 3 shell out of the box, as a platform is has fantastic potential, certainly moreso than Unity could ever offer and enough flexibility to hold its own against KDE. The Gnome Shell Extensions are still in their infancy but it makes the new Gnome Shell into a very versatile platform.
I think the jury is still out on whether the strategy of simplification and stepping out of the traditional "desktop box" more than any other GUI is a mistake. I can understand how seasoned Linux users could take offense to the "dumbing down" but perhaps it was the right t
...into an anti-Tory bitchfest. It's insulting to those tho actually ARE oppressed in places from China and Cuba to Sudan and Syria and all in between. C-30 erodes our privacy rights but to say we are on the path to self destrucion at the hands of an insane tyrant is a really big stretch.
Also to clarify, for those who started foaming a the mouth when they saw "C-30" and stopped reading the rest of the article, this "internet security tax" has not been proposed by anyone in government nor by those in the telecoms industry. This was an idea presented by Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police and them alone. Indeed it is not a brand-new idea for them--they've advocated extraction of funds from taxpayers for this purpose in some form or another a time or two before. The Conservatice covernment, as with previous Liberal governments and the NDP opposition have all rejected the CACP's proposals, including this one.
The fact that the Conservatives are preoccupied with "law and order" issues seems to have brought on the assumption that they must be unabashed supporters of the CACP and thus whatever brainwave the CACP has is going to be well received. Those who are Canadian and follow Canadian politics know that the Tories and the CACP do not see eye to eye an quite a number of issues. Most notably the CACP steadfastly advocated the creation and expansion of the federal long gun registry but the Tory government dismantled it. On that issue, the idea of creating a database of long guns (hunting and target shoting rifles, etc) and their owners with unfettered access by police came about through consultations the Liberal government had with the CACP, who presented it as the solution to prevent massacres like the one at Ecole Polytecnique (the incident that called on government to come up with expanded gun control measures in the first place).
But there are a few things that make a "Security tax" on internet use a non-starter:
1. the Tories have made a big effort to present themselves as "anti-tax"--whether you think they are serious or not they advocate public spending restraint over unfettered "stimulous spending" and higher taxation. It would be pretty bad optics to start imposing a tax on internet use
2. Canadians complain about the relatively high cost of telecom services (with good reason), and the government has been making chages in the industry to increase competition and lower costs (spectrum auctions that limit incumbants ability to steamroll over new competition, relaxation of foreign ownership regulations to permit upstarts like Wind Mobile from being blocked or facing bigger hurdles, etc). Imposing taxes on internet use, for any purpose, runs counter to this commitment and would be taken very poorly by the public at large. Not only that, incumbants and new players in the telecom industry alike are already aggravated at the prospect of being responsible to monitor internet traffic for police--having to aggravate their customers with another fee/tax just furthers that.
3. It runs counter to the "small c" conservative philosophy that many of the Tories core supporters have concerning taxation--that is that the people using somehting should be the ones paying for it. That is why they always talk about replacing some broad tax with "user fees". ISP's customers already pay to access the internet, and if the police want to access ISP customers' internet too, well the police should be the ones covering that cost.
4. Many western supporters of the NEW tories--the "old Reform Party" ones most passionate about getting rid of things like the gun registry and the Wheat Board monopoly, are offended by what C-30 represents--just like gun control it treats innocent people like criminals--the gun registry assumed that all people who would own a gun must be intent on using it to commit crimes and so they all must register with the government at great expense to that police can check up on them whenever they feel like it. Bill C-30 assumes all internet users co
There should be a "-1 senseless partisan rhetoric" moderation option. After just a few years of minorty-party rule political discourse in Canada has descended to playground fistfights and bickering--quite sad really.
How soon people forget what it is like to have a majority government in parliament. "PM Harper is a tyrant who will stop at nothing to impose his hidden agenda/corporate lobby buddies wishes/kitten-killing campaign/etc" blah blah blah. Same could've been said about Cretien, or Mulroney, or Trudeau. Big effin deal...Grit or Tory Same Old Story. This is a Tory majority parliament and thus committees are Tory-dominated. Inevitably opposition party amendments will be rejected. If the media content industry really WERE "Harper's corporate buddies" then all those additional requests from industry lobbyists could have easily sailed through, but they didn't. There is no reason at all to "try again in a few months" and every reason to push through contentious legislation you really want RIGHT NOW--early in the government's term so that the electorate's shot memory is more likely to have purged the event.
It is quite clear that SOPA-style control of information is not ever coming back in the life of this government. If there is no appetite to pass such distasteful legislation at this stage in the game--if they fear the wrath of the electorate that much--then it is a completely dead issue at LEAST until the next election. Furthermore copyright legislation will NOT be revisited even after the 2015 election--unless there is extremely concerted, international pressure to do so (and if there is such pressure it won't matter even if it is the Tories or another party who wins election--even the NDP could be coercced by such pressure).
Anti-Tory snipers here should make themselves more familiar with the history of copyright reform in Canada. The whole process started when the LIBERAL gov't of Jean Cretien chose to ratify the WIPO copyrigt treaty in the 1990s. Since that time the pressure has been on from WIPO and Hollywood lobbyists to have Canada "modernise" their copyright laws (ie. in a DMCA-like way). WIPO and the global copyright lobby were already growing very impatient with Canada by the time the next LIBERAL gov't of Paul Martin introduced C-60. It was a minority gov't so C-60 died on the order paper when a no-confidence motion was passed.
Minor adjustments were made and the bill was re-introduced with only minor revision by the CONSERVATIVE minority government as C-61...it too died on the order paper after an election of another minority parliament. The 3rd minority parliament introduced C-32 (tories again) and yet again it ALSO died on the order paper when the election was called.
The grits have quietly supported these bills all along this process, and if Harper really wanted to it could've passed fairly easily with tory-grit support, but with all the minority governments and so many more "important" issues around economy, social programs, taxation, law-and-order and so on it never moved up the order paper fast enough. And all along this long and varied path taken by C-60/61/32/11 the most draconian aspects largely fell away, and copyright lobbying was largely kept at bay. The only significant parts with teeth that are left and are of real concern are the anti-circumvention provisions. But guess what? The Liberals would've passed those just the same. Even the NDP which adamantly oppose them would've eventually done so if they ever came to power. Why is that? Because that is the core of what Canada MUST put into law to meet its obligations under the WIPO copyright treaty signed by Cretien all those years ago. From what I understand Canada's commitment is pretty iron-clad there--can't even weasel out like they did on Kyoto (which had an exit clause of sorts that Canada chose to use).
So whatever you think about Harper and his merry band of Tories it really is remarkable--and a relief--that they really DID listen to the right people here, regardless of who was in power. There seems to have been a pretty concerted effort to make the most minimally intrusive commmitment to WIPO that they could even though they really didn't have to.
This article is absurdly stupid. What about the Newton, arguably the predecessor, dare I say it, tablet to the iPad seems to have come before this guys idea. It's even mentioned in TFA.
Watch the Knight-Ridder video onYouTube. The fact that Apple was not the first to create an oversized PDA is not in dispute. This is a case involving industrial design--Apple accuses Samsung of copying basically the "look and feel" of the iPad specifically. K-R's "newspaper tablet" design bears a strong resemblance to the iPad--much more so than the Newton devices.
Besides that, everyone knows Alan Kay invented the tablet computer design in the 1960's. I personally don't believe the iPad design is patentable and it was a mistake to grant those design patents in the first place.
Apple has never claimed that they invented the tablet. They claim they own the design patents of their tablet in that Samsung's phones and tablet looks too much like theirs.
Have you even seen the 1990's video? Nobody is disputing that tablets have been around for a long time, but when you see what Fidler's design looks like I can't see how Apple's case has any merit. Both black, flat, rounded-rectangles with a touchscreen that covers substantially the whole front of the device. Where's the novelty in Apple's design then?
Notice that they have not sued others for design patents and they are specifically suing Samsung for certain models.
This is how all patent trolls work. It is more about legal strategy than anything else. If you want to win a battle you stand a better chance if you don't have to fight on multiple fronts, so you pick one enemy to fight at once. Apple deemed them to be the biggest competitive threat--they had more success than any other non-Apple device on the market. Microsoft takes a slightly different approach and picks their battles based upon a candidates resolve and resources to fight vs. settle--a bit of a different strategy but they've been able to use the protection money they've shaken down phone companies for to keep their own platform afloat. Perhaps since Samsung had a supplier relationship with Apple that Jobs and Co. overestimated Samsung's willingness to settle/cooperate. I don't know exactly.
In any case it isn't about Samsing being more of a copycat in any significant way. If that was all it was about why not pick the Motorola Xoom or the HTC Jetstream to put the smackdown on? They all folllow the same design pattern--one thought up by some Knight-Ridder researcher in the mid 1990s.
As for the rectangular tablet thing, Apple like any claimant must describe in detail every single aspect in legalese. The rectangular tablet is one of the many details they had to spell out. They cannot say to a judge "Well look at it, it looks like our product."
It is flat, rectangular with rounded corners and a screen that fills up the front face. There is a limit on how much more detailed you can get. The screen ratio isn't especially unique, and its exact dimensions do differ from the Samsung and other products out there to varying degrees already. Buttons on the devices are in differing locations, they do not have any user-servicable parts that can be interchanged between the products and so on. Seems that as similar looking as tablets all are there isn't a case for Apple here.
I do believe Apple has a fantastic product in the iPad, but it is time for them to stop with the legal shenanigans and compete on the merits of their product. It is bad enough that Apple is being a patent troll. It is ovee the top coming from a company founded by a man who's mantra was "good artists copy, great artists steal".
What does the iPad have to do with it? There were commercial, mass-produced, tablets way before the first iPad.
The iPad has VERY MUCH to do with it. When the iPad was released, Mr. Fidler's concept was so similar to the new product that it moved people to recall his video from years ago. He wrote an essay on the topic when Apple was still pushing out Apple ][+ micros and took inspiration from a sci-fi movie from the 60s.
But in particular the iPad has very much to do with Mr. Fidler because his work from all those years ago has been submitted as prior art by the combatants in the Apple-instigated patent war. Furthermore Fidler claims he approached a few tech companies after departing from Knight-Ridder in an effort to bring his ideas to fruition. One of those companies was Apple. Apple did not respond to his offers but could have sat on the idea for awhile. If there was evidence presented that Apple did indeed receive and retain Fidler's correspondence it would be very damaging to Apple's case.
When Apple was just pushing its first Newton MessagePad, with its half-baked handwriting recognition, monochrome screen and stylus control Fidler's team at Knight-Ridder showcased a tablet that would be immediately familiar to us today. Fidler started writing about the concept ten years before that even. I think it is pretty obvious that as fantastic as the iPad is, that there is little to no validity at all in Apple's design patents filed many years later.
He can't steal footage of Brokaw saying it and use that.
Firstly IT IS NOT STEALING (the point of debate is not about theft, it is about whether rebroadcasting the clip constitutes COPYRIGHT VIOLATION which, although illegal and wrong, is NOT THEFT).
Second, the claim of copyright infringement is very dubious at best. This is less than 30 seconds from the beginning of a considerably longer item on the evening news--originally broadcast many years ago, read by someone who has long since retired as a news anchor (though he still occasionally reports on TV). Also, Brokaw is merely reading facts--it was not a clip from an editorial he was giving. That to me is very reasonable when considering how political ads have commonly used print media content in exactly the same way. It is very common practice for candidates to feature an article headline and a sentence or paragraph as the centrepiece for a televised political ad, complete with citations in fine print (which publication and sometimes the author of the article).
Obviously the practice has been considered fair dealing for some time, because it continues to be done. The fact that in this case it was a video clip instead of a newspaper clip and that you see the reporter's face instead of his name in a citation shouldn't matter in the slightest. The fact that Brokaw is squirming and NBC is steaming just tells me that TV (and even telejournalism these days) is infected to some degree with the "Hollywood disease".
I also think that Brokaw's head is getting too big here--A monkey in a suit could be reading the news for all anyone cares, it is not about making it look like Brokaw endorses or favours any candidate at all. The point of using news clippings (from print or audio or video or any other media) in political ads is to convey the veracity of what is being said. If it was a quote from the evening news, or a national or major daily newspaper it lends credence to what is being said. When something unflattering is said about a candidate by his political opponent directly, well, just how trumped up are those "facts"?
It is important to defend fair dealing, whether or not you like how it is being exploited, because elimination of fair dealing would remove an important check on powers granted to copyright holders to the point where it hinders free expression. Throughout the British commonwealth fair dealing universally mentions "comment, criticism and review" as valid purposes of dealing, and for such dealing these purposes shold be interpreted liberally. From what I understand American fair use provisions are quite a bit more open ended and do not specify exact purposes of use which are appropriate (that each case must be judged on its own merits). If "comment, criticism and review" fall victim to overzealous copyright law, and ownership of media (both of content and means of distribution) become more consolidated, how on earth can freedom of expression stand a chance?
I am more familiar with how Fair Dealing works in Canada, but here is my take on how American fair use provisions work:
1) "purpose of use" - as I pointed out a political ad is not only non-commercial, it also clearly falls under "comment and criticism", so I think that works here
2) "nature of the work" - notwithstanding Brokaw's image and perhaps the NBC logos and titles, the work substantially consists of "facts". Every single word Brokaw uttered pertains to a public record of fact. Facts cannot be copyrighted--only specific "expressions" of facts merit any sort of copyright protection, and this particular "expression" has to be weighed against the "social usefulness" of the work. Political discourse is (or at least should be) "socially useful".
3) "amount of the work used" - Fair dealing in commonwealth nations seems to be easier to figure out here--the US fair use is all over the map and depends on the nature of the use. On one hand the "betamax decision" upheld fair use for full and exact copies of a work t
Once again, Stallman says something controversial, dissenting and even offensive in staunch defense of his personal world view. How dare he do just the sort of thing that Jobs was known to do!
Stallman and Jobs are/were opposing sides of the same coin. Polar opposites in view of all things computing but both are viewed as mavericks who have been passionate and driven and I would argue they both had an equal degree of impact on the world's computing technology.
Cut the guy some slack. You don't have to like the guy but his ideas and works are the foundation of free software. I don't think we would grow as a society without some tolerance for people who speak their mind with little restraint. Can you imagine where we would be without the contributions of Jobs, Stallman, Torvalds, de Raadt and so many others who have offended or stirred controversy? Passion cannot come from those who strive to be inoffensive.
Kick managers in the nuts that ask for a remote connection to the SCADA system or it's PC's running the pretty UI for the plant operators.
Turds run downhill--that middle-manager probably has directives from his boss...or perhaps the government or regulatory body...to obtain data from the SCADA system and so in turn has requested access so he can provide that data.
I don't get much call for remote access to the HMI (operator interface) itself in my projects--but it is my primary purpose in these jobs to provide remote access to these systems for access to alarming/annunciating as well as process historian data. On-call operations personnel "need" to have SMS notification on critical alarms/events. Regulatory bodies need reports for everything from custody transfer to environmental contamination data. It is IMPOSSIBLE to keep a SCADA system truly isolated from all public networks anymore. To be legally compliant much less competitive requires data from SCADA systems to be available off-site. Even with 100% physical separation you'd be shuffling USB drives around which would be just as vulnerable, or using other physical media (DVD-R's etc) but that is not an acceptable solution due to volumes of data and the requirements for timely data (up to near real time in some cases)
Ideally, it would be GREAT if we could play in our own little sandbox but technology moves on and outsude forces beyond our control demand we leverage that technology to boost production, increase efficiency, make the workplace safer and reduce environmental damage-those demands cannot be meant without connectivity in any way at all. So instead of fighting it we MUST address security PROPERLY--not just including perimiter security. That includes not just patching SCADA software but implementing proper system architectures as well as enforcing policies and procedures. Some stuff I rarely see done but should always be done these days include:
* enforce complete ban on shared logins--no more of this "user operator password Operator1" crap.
* In windows platform systems make it a policy to elimiate "workgroups" and implement proper domains with group-policy enforced security
* disable all removable media access for all but a very few
* NEVER put real-time (PLC's/PAC's/controllers) and supervisory (HMI, historian data logging, etc) on the same network!
* make security audits and software patches or upgrades part of the maintenance/turnaround schedule with all other equipment--and insist to vendors (with threat of rip and replace) that support for current OSes and sane security policies are a requirement for your business.
Using Windows in ana automation system might be flawed, security might not be built into real-time netowrks, and SCADA software may be full of bugs, but the most immediate threat is how far behind the times automation systems are in implementing security measures compared to business/general IT.
iPad isn't even an impressive tablet, and as an automotive PC it is completely inadequate (and no it cannot be made adequate with the right apps either). You state many good reasons as well--there are even more.
1) Glossy LCD Screen makes it impossible to read in a car
The touch screen is also capacitive. Resistive is much better for this environment, especially in northern climates where you spend half the time wearing gloves--cannot use capacitive screen at all with gloves, and when it is cold and dry even bare fingers don't work right. You might not get multi-touch, but multi-touch cannot be used safely while driving in any case.
Which leads me to cold weather operation. Auto systems are meant to withstand harsher conditions. How well would the iPad handle being stored or used at -40 for a period of up to hours?
6) The screen is huge. Most cars don't have that kind of room in the dashboard without serious modification
and yet the icons and wigits can still be too small for operation with minimal distraction. Proper apps with interfaces for automotive use would have to be made. They can also not rely on multi-touch and gestures to such a high degree when such dexterity is not safely possible in a moving vehicle.
7) The interface, while intuitive, is not great in a car environment. I want to see MPG, the song playing, distance to destination, and more on a single dashboard screen
need a good hands-free, voice-command interface for making phone calls too. How well does iPad work with your phone via bluetooth?
Another is lack of removable media--yes CDs are "quaint" but they are still the primary source of music for normal non-techie people. In my car I can just bring a CD with me and rip the tracks right off it into the internal drive--no messing with the craptacular iTunes or bothering with a computer if I don't want to. Sorry iTunes is total garbage even on a mac and I don't get why people salivate over iPod's OK-but-not-utopian interface--my in-car system has a much superior interface for its purpose (playing media on the dashboard) than iTunes and iPod media management and playback interfaces (android media player is even worse).
And do you honestly expect the typical FB user to do that - set up and manage their own server?
And if specialized service providers sprout up to host this data, wouldn't that be creating the same situation that this software is supposed to be trying to get away from: other having control of your data?
No, only nerds would host their own server at this point (like me). However "normal people" more and more have "appliance" servers in their homes today (home routers, PVRs/digital tv receivers, etc that have the capability and perform some server-like functions) so the day may come where self-hosting your own services becomes fairly common.
This would be like email or generic web servers fro the most part as has been said. ISPs and hosting companies and corporations would host their own public social servers, and an open platform would kill lock-in and enable full interaction amongst users on every server as if they were all on facebook, except without entrusting one giant system with all the data.
Control over your own data doesn't have to mean owning and maintaining the server yourself. The open and distributed nature of the platform gives you the control you need. Just as the case is with any free market you could pull up stakes and move, or maintain different profiles on different sites that can be kept in sync or whatever. None of this nonsense like between Facebook and Apple or IM systems like MSN and Yahoo and AIM changing their protocols for the express purpose of breaking third-party clients that provide inter-operation and so on.
However, I've heard that facebook is basically putting up servers as fast as they can build them.
Facebook could have thousands--it doesn't mater. The point is you must go to facebook.com to get to any of them. Facebook owns all of them, their load balancers tell you which of the boxes handles your requests, they control access to your information and decide for themselves how it is stored, processes, indexed, shared. Facebook can cange the site however they want, even if you don't like it. All the severs are on THEIR network, so if their network goes down we ALL fall down too. The same staff has full access to all the data too--so don't do ANYTHING on facebook you wouldn't do on prime time national TV and expect it to stay private.
"strength in numbers" isn't the whole point of this thing--personal control and prevention of lock-in are what appeal even more. Whether you are a personal user of facebook who wants more freedom or a business that wants their own "in house" social networking server/site to do social marketing, customer support/service, etc. that has to be pretty enticing to a lot of people.
...they can keep their house of cards until it collapses. To compete with facebook doesn't have to mean you are a facebook clone. Besides, I think in the long term (perhaps way out there many years, but eventually) technology will develop and enough people will clue in--"get it" about what the internet should be--that facebook will be obsolete anyways. Why aspire to be a dinosaur?
People HAVE "got it" to some degree for decades now I think--it's just that it isn't all one big picture yet. Think about the way the internet came to be--designed to be fault-tolerant, distributed, many relatively autonomous, small components working together. Client-server vs. mainframe timeshare systems and serial terminals--the big mainframes replaced with smaller servers and clients growing from dumb units to capable computers. Think the "UNIX way", where all the tools are small and work together piping data amongst each other. Object oriented programming, shared libraries and so on--the pattern is to make the blocks smaller and stronger and more numerous, instead of carving your creation out of a giant granite boulder.
Facebook doesn't fit the paradigm of the future. Facebook is a mainframe, or a giant boulder, or the Titanic, or a 1973 Ford Thunderbird. It is big, slow lumbering and dinosaur-like. "Full featured" can be a competitive disadvantage at that point. Remember when the Web was still kind of like the internet was intended? Lots of smaller websites, personal pages dedicated to people's interests that resided on Freenet servers or university systems or local mom-and-pop ISPs. Corporations HAD websites. Today it seems the hip thing to do is regress to the dark days of mainframes. Instead of people having their own web page, URL or email address they have a facebook page, twitter ccount and a GMail address, almost creating an internet run by three companies. Isn't that what the creators of the internet, www and personal computers were trying to avoid?
I think if the infamous three get too big, too complicated and leave people feeling like they've lost too much control over their online presence they'll implode--especially should more distributed alternatives arise. For example, should Diaspora take off like, say, the Apache HTTP server, and it stays open and has a consistent interface that encourages following and sharing and interacting between different Diaspora sites then what would the point of Facebook be? Same with StatusNet--if enough of those servers were out there why put up with Twitter fail whales? Small distributed parts are much better than the "barge with barnacles" approach taken by Facebook any day.
Think about it: If Facebook changes something and you don't like it you just have to get used to it, or else give up facebook and lose all the content you've created, all the links you've made with others and so on. If it was a million Diaspora's instead of one Facebook you could just move to another server--take your whole profile with you--because it is YOUR data and it is a platform NOT controlled by one large entity with a vested interest in doing as much as possible to keep you from moving. If facebook has technical problems huge swaths of users suffer. If it was a million Diaspora's and one goes down nobody would notice beyond the dozens or hundreds on that site.
Such a social network model means that Diaspora doesn't have to cater to FOSS folks only. You could have many Diaspora-based sites that cater to different interests or communities or corporations or whatever,, but since the platform is open it could be a consistent/standard platform allowing full interactivity amongst the different sites. Your profile could reside on a FOSS social network site and your sister could have her profile on, say, a gardening social net site, and you could be both on each others contacts and chat and interact and share and follow and EVERYTHING that you can do between users within facebook if you realy wanted to.
If Diaspora evolves to have a well-defined API for apps
Ah, the irony of Slashdot UID's - it's the only dick measuring contest where the winner is the smallest one...
Interesting coincidence though that in the /. digits contest most people are around six though. Plus, I've heard people have paid to enhance their UID (sure four digits might be worth braggin about but paying to have yours made one digit is absurd).
It provides some interesting things. Instead of the metadata hidden in a big binary blob it moves things to be loaded by the standard tools.
You could do musical notation like this with already-established standards, without plugins, without deploying BLOBs. You could use XHTML and SVG and any one of a good selection of javascript frameworks (jquery is referenced in the demo but not at all involved in the actual rendering of the musical notes) to make it all dynamic. In fact not only could you do it, it would be a technically superior solution (canvas is easier to use as it is in the demo, but SVG is far more sophisticated and powerful).
It has been stuck on 1998 for years now. It is like HTML4 came out and everyone went 'ok were done'
I think it's more like you've been hiding under a rock since 1998. The W3C didn't say "we're done" they said "this is a mess, let's clean it up for real" and created XHTML1, then fixed a couple of things to issue XHTML1.1. See HTML is a bastardised form of SGML and traditionally was implemented as "tag soup". XHTML made the rules more concrete--it insisted on being well-formed XML so XML parsers could consistenly parse it, and the use of a dtd so that user-agents could be directed on how to render it, etc. XHTML made the source behind web pages sane again.
But then something fell of the rails at W3C. They started working on XHTML2.0 and figured that they had to throw the baby out with the bathwater AGAIN. Problem is that XHTML2 mostly solved problems web developers didn't have (XHTML1.1 could server the purpose for the most part) and where it did address weaknesses it was grossly overengineered (hello XFORMS). Compound that with the fact that they decided to overhaul a spec (breaking some compatability on the way) that developers of browsers had only started to adopt and the process of standardising took SOOOO long. XHTML2 is an idea that should never have existed.
So, now you have all these web browser developers saying "this sucks you keep changing things too fast and breaking what we use!". Plus I think they were all a bit lazy or stuck with code that was hard to manage (make a full and proper XML parser or code generator? too hard!) but above all else large content developers were DEFINITELY lazy (we like our tag soup! we're too dumb to care about case sensitivity and closing brackets like real programmers have to!). This with XHTML2 the W3C goaded borwser makers and content creators into forming the WHATWG faction, who figured they'd maker their OWN standard--HTML5--using HTML4-like "Tag soup" as the foundation.
HTML5 is very nearly as bad a mistake as XHTML2 (the ONLY thing that is better is the pace of developing the standard and its adoption rate). They tossed away all the benefits of being an XML-based spec and wound the clock back years to re-invent things in an "easier" but more hackish way. WHY OH WHY couldn't have the compromise between W3C and WHATWG be..I dunno...maybe XHTML1.2??? I think that the formal mention of the "XHTML5" variant (ie. HTML5 beaten into XML submission) is tacit admission that tag soup is a mistake.
I guess I cant get everything I want...at least HTML5 is an open, unencumbered standard as cruddy as it is.
Block google and see how well it works.
The developer is just using the Google mirror to load the jQuery AJAX framework library. jQuery is NOT a Google property--it is a widely used Free software library that is available everywhere.
The google hosted mirror is often referenced to reduce the bandwidth on servers that are struggling to handle volume (it is probably keeping the demo site from succumbing to a slashdotting). If you don't want an "external dependency" then just download jquery.min.js file from the jquery.org website onto your own server, then change the URL to reference your own copy.
Production sites use the "MINified" version of the library to save bandwidth. If you want to see the inner workings you can because it is open source--the non-MINified version of full source is at jquery.org as well.
jQuery itself doesn't provide music notation--it is a general-purpose AJAX library probably being used to provide an easy/concise way to traverse the DOM and/or handle page events (since plain old javascript can sometimes be tedious to use). Please follow the advice of the post and REALLY read the source! The "dirty work" of rendering the notes is done by the code in "vexnotation.js". That file doesn't seem to indicate that the musical notation rendering itself depends on jquery in any way. It wouldn't take much effort to remove the jquery dependency from the demo from what I can tell.
Interestingly creating a network like this means you have convince everyone to forget about Facebook and move to this platform.
Thing is this isn't equivalent to Facebook; it isn't a replacement-in-kind. Diaspora (sorry--Diaspora* whatever the asterisk means) seems to aspire to be a BETTER ALTERNATIVE. It is far to early to know how things will turn out as there is no complete and public implmenetation of their concept yet, however in my mind it is promising that there are motivated developers and financial backers who actually *GET* how the internet is supposed to work. See, so few people "get it" (and I fear that many powerful, smart people actually DO "get it" but are trying to STOP it because they crave power and money *cough*zuckerburg*cough*).
The Internet is dangerously close to being reduced to a mere digital version of the telephone system--the mere transport infrastructure for a small number of very large, segregated, proprietary, centralised "service providers". We broke open the medieval/feudal system of AOL/compuserve/prodigy/MSN/etc-over-dialup with the rise if the WWW. Internet-based innovation has the potential to free us even more from silos, information-pushing, walled gardens and such but clever people keep building more of them and the masses clamour to buy in, so now we have Facebook and Twitter and Apple and Google and they all have their own kingdoms and can only taks to each other in tightly controlled ways that serve the masters best interests and feed data through their own servers to be taken and used as they please.
The goal of Diaspora* does not appear to be to establish a "diaspora.com" internet presence that is intended to grow into another one of these fiefdoms. They don't even begin to have such asperations. The goal is to create a truly open social networking application server--think "Diaspora* is to Facebook what StatusNet is to Twitter". The features of such a system may be comparable to what Facebook offers but the architecture is specifically designed to ALLOW interaction, federation between hosts. They want to kill facebook with not another one big facebook, but with dozens, hundreds, thousands of "mini facebooks", hosted by everyone from geeks' personal servers in ther basements to ISPs and hosting companies to corporate web servers. These people's servers couldn't ever grow tot he size of the actual facebook (some might only host the profiles of a geek's family, or even just one person), but they wouldn't have to becasue it doesn't matter--you could find old firends, add them to your friend's list, see their status, subscribe to their feeds, whatever...without giving the server or hosting company a second thought. It'd be like email--we don't worry if we can send do email addresses on different domains or servers or ISPs after all.
If it was done right why would it be so hard to convince people to abandon Facebook? If you are Joe Schmoe typical internet user and your ISP had its own Diaspora* where all customers were automatically members that was the default homepage and you could just log in, check your email, find that old buddy from high school who is on a different Diaspora* server, see your sister's "tweets", look at the picture your cousin posted of his trip to Barcelona...why bother with Facebook? It would seem so....limited.
This is the same as when internet service became commercially available. People--even very smart and "visionary" people like Bill Gates--argued exactly what you did--essentially "you have to convince everyone to forget about AOL, Compuserve Progidy, etc and move to the internet". The internet was geeky and academic, user hostile and a difficult place to find information if you didn't know where to look (this was when Gopher was the height of user friendliness, the WWW was just becoming graphical, most Windows versions had no TCP/IP stack built in, searching meant using Archie and Veronica and there was no index of the WWW yet...). Right up to Windows 95 was release
IANAL, but my guess is that if it's in your contract
From the original post:
And, since no written or verbal agreement was ever made to transfer copyright over to my employer, I question whether they can claim that they now own the extended version of the project.
The software in question began as a hobby project by a graduate student "on his own". It was based upon GPLed libraries of code by others (who have their own copyrights on that code) as well as code he developed prior to his employment (on which he holds the copyright).
Though any code this person developed under the employ of the university (ie. on their dime) is most likely under the copyright of said employer there was no agreement to transfer copyright of any PRE-EXISTING code and the employer cannot limit the original copyright holder's distribution rights.
HOWEVER, any derivative work done on the employer's dime WOULD have the employer's copyright attached. So, although the university has NO right to block the distribution of the ORIGINAL code or the unmodified libraries on which it is based it CAN prevent the derivative work from being distributed. The university should be aware that by employing this student and using his GPLed code as the basis for the derivative work they've agreed to the terms of the GPL. Those terms give the university full rights to restrict or permit distribution as they see fit. BUT because they are bounded by the terms of GPL if the university decided to sell or otherwise distribute this product to anyone else THEY MUST DO SO UNDER THE SAME GPL TERMS. This means full disclosure of source code to those that receive the software plus the rights to redistribute under GPL terms. If they make binary-only copies or place furher restriction that is copyright violation and software piracy no different than downloading a cracked Windows 7 torrent.
The path of least legal resistance would be to capitulate and let the university have what they have, but to release the code as it existed before the term of employment started as a project on sorceforge or google code or wherever as the basis of a "community development" fork. Because no transfer of copyright agreement was signed the employer would have no recourse, however if you want the added functionality of the later product it would have to be re-implemented in a meaningfully different way.
If you have the time and money or a generous lawyer friend (right there next to your hen's tooth lol) then it might help to remind the those employers who are resistant to the isea of the terms of the GPL, just in case their reasoning behind blocking distribution is because they want to commercialise the software itself. However, they might have legitimate reasons to keep the software to themselves. For example, the nature of the software's functionality might betray a proprietary business or technological process, or some other "trade secret". GPL is there to protect the freedom of software, not to thumb the nose of all IP law and ruin business plans.