If you only use it now and then, the last thing you want is to be charged based on the assumption that you are using the maximum rate 24/7.
Well then you'd better complain to every single utility company in the world, because that is exaclt how billing for electricity, water and gas are billed w.r.t. "access fees".
Reason: even if you used the maximum rate for just a few minutes one time in the whole month, the service provider has to provide infrastructure capable of delivering that data rate the entire month so it is there for you to use--they cannot exactly swap in an upgraded router and string a temporary fibre line to your home for a few minutes so you can view the latest cat video on youtube in highest HD quality without skipping or excessive buffering times.
Internet service is very much like any other utility.
Internet consists of a rate and quanitiy component just like every other utility:
With water, you have service fee based upon a 19mm line entering your house with a minimum guaranteed pressure (that is the same as Mbps for internet) and most nowadays have a meter and are billed by the cubic metre (same as GB transferred every month).
Gas is identical--you have a certain size line and minimum guaranteed pressure, and pay based upon joules, etc..
Electricity, same thing--you have a big copper line that can handle peak currrent typically 100A and a main breaker to enforce that limit, and you pay a fixed "access fee" to get the amps (Mbps) and "cost of energy" for the kWh you use (GB each month)
You contend that the more power/gas/water you use the more reources you use and that this is not the case with the internet. You are wrong. If no customers are transferring any bits, then there are no bits going through their wires or being routed. The lower the number of packets being sent through their systems the less hard routers etc. have to work and potentially the less energy consumed (the the ISP has to pay for). Plus without metering ISPs cannot "oversubscribe" to the same degree and have to build out data centres and backbones and such faster than otherwise.
In many respects it is like water service. Historically for many it was billed at a flat rate because of just the argument you made vs. other utilities--Waterworks didn't pay for the water it treated and delivered by volume, so why would you install meters and bill customers that way. Well, as cities grew they learned why: give customers unmetered access to water and they'll use it without regard to real need or consequences of overconsumption, and the utilities also recognised as their treatment facilities neared capacity that the more water they treat the more it costs them (energy consumption, more maintenance costs, expaning water treatment facilities, etc).
Since water service metering started in the city I lived in the population has doubled and literally water consumtion rates completely stopped growing. When it started people complained that it was just to gouge them but adjusted for inflation water bills have stayed quite static as well (in fact they've gone DOWN slightly!). No it is just accepted as a fact that you pay for water by the cubic metre, you don't have to wash the car in your drive way and leave the hose on the whole time, you don't need to water your lawn 3 times a week and so on.
I hope someday soon telecoms wortks the same. Bits are bits and the WWW, television, telephone, radio...its all bits and in a great many cases they are transmitted over the same kind of infrastructure. So how come telephone bits are so incredibly expensive when television bits are so cheap and WWW is somewhere in the middle? To me it just makes sense that ISP would be just another utility and all of that media would just go through that and you'd pay like all the other utilities, so I have no problem with Bell emulating that billing model. What I have issue with is that Bell bills way different for TV or voice phone service and what the rates themselves are unreasonably high for the quality of service they offer.
The powerco doesn't "rate limit" me depending on what I do with the electricity I use
Actually yes they do. It is a requirement to have a meter plus a main disconnect breaker on your electrical service. If you for some reason were to exceed your permitted service capacity (think of amperage as being equivalent to your bandwidth like Mbps) of say 100A then the breaker would trip and cut you off the grid. The meter is there so the utility can bill you the cost of energy (kWh == GB) and if you use a lot you get a big bill.
Industrial power customers have contracts based on "peak demand" and the utility can reserver the right to cap your demand (cut off service/rotating blackouts) if peak demand reaches intolerable levels. Plus they also have (very large) breakers at their incomers just like a big version of what is in your home. If your demand were to go above what the utilities' infrastructure can handle the breaker trips and cuts you off. I know of a couple of occasions firsthand where an industrial customer was ORDERED by the electrical utility to shut down production becasue of lack of capactiy (a large genereating station was off-line for scheduled maintenance and another had a unit trip unexptectedly) or pay hefty fines and face possible disconnection. This action was allowed based upon the terms of contract and is completely justafiable (cut off one factory or institute rolling blackouts of 100s or 1000s of homes at a time...).
Billing-wise is where peak demand REALLY gets expensive. If you're sucking (for example) 1MVA out of the grid for just ONE 15 MINUTE interval in the ENTIRE BILLING CYCLE you pay your "connection fee" portion of the power bill based on that maximum even if your normal daily peak demand is a small fraction of that. For one factory that can add to many thousands of dollars on a power bill because of mismanaging your power consumption for 15 minutes!
People are actually quite ignorant about the details of delivering their utilities (or how industrial is different from residential) even though everyone pays for it every month one way or another. The diffference with the Internet is that it SHOULD be billed in the same way (albeit without the complex "riders" and fees utilitiessometimes add) but if electrical service was like internet service is today the cut off wouldn't be 100A it would be 15A for your whole house and you'd get cut off or billed heavy surcharges if you happened to use the stove and microwave at the same time one day, and the cost of electricity would be a factor of 10 higher.
And then what? install Ignatieff as our new dictator? Layton's defence of keeping info free is admirable but he is out of touch with reality on so many other fronts as to be unelectable. Duceppe only has aspirations to lead Quebec..right out of Canada. Liz May? First she has to get a Green MP a seat. Then she might have a the chance a snowball has in hell to affect change.
The root of the problem is not HArper. It is thos who do not vote, and perhaps even worse, those who make ill-informed voting choices (mum and dad voted this way and so must I....or dude A looks shifty and I like dude B but dude C is polling #2 so I'll vote for him cuz dude A's shifty eyes make me nervous..but I don't know any of their policies...)
Seriously... the void left by voter apathy is ALWAYS filled by money. Abe the USA bullies with money.
You don't have to go as far as making people connect to a terminal server IMO but I think you've got the right idea. Basically treat IE6 as what it now really is: a proprietary, lecagy client application. IE6 == 5250 terminal emulator is as charitable as you should get...in any case an enterprise app that uses IE6 (and no later version) is a proprietary, legacy application no different from those other old, early client-server systems with pre-WWW proprietary client apps.
Some corporate setups do indeed put legacy/proprietary apps on a Citrix or terminal services server te ease administration and deployment. Others deploy client emiages with pre-configured setups and the client app or terminal emulator runs locally. In any case IE6 should NO LONGER be considered a WEB browser, so configure it as it should be: Legacy client. Use Group Policy to lock down IE6 to only your intranet servers that require IE6. Then deploy Firefox since you cannot *reliably* install multiple IE versions on one computer, and set it to the default browser and make sure in no uncertain terms that users know Firefox IS "the internet". Remove the generic "big blue E" and only put shortcut(s) that open IE to the required lecgacy app(s) (bonus if you can change the icon to something else so as not to confuse users who think "big blue E" == internet).
I wish this was the strategy corporate IT would've taken. Not only would it be more secure than letting user's browse the public WWW with IE6, it would erode IE's market share even faster and really light a fire under Ballmer's butt.
Basically, it isn't "PowerPoint makes us stupid", it is "Stupid people make us use PowerPoint". But that's true in some ways about the entire suite of MS Office products:
* You haven't worked in an enterprise environment until you've been forced to use MS Excel worksheets as database tables, by managers of the kind who use a $2 calculator to work out the solution before typing that solution into the cell. As these "tables" become unwieldy they are augmented by elabourate macros crafted by the boss' secretary (secretaries wield Excel like witches yield black magic).
* All documentation must be authored in MS Word, even 1000 page technical tomes where Word is ill-suited for the task. All doumentation must be passed around via email, until it clogs the server and someone comes up with the idea of an intranet portal (perhaps even Sharepoint! ooooh! aaaah!). Corporate intranet turns into 90%+.doc content.
* The more forward-thinking bosses realise that MS Excel is not a database (perhaps because their pet.xls file hit the 65k row limits before Excel 2007 was released). Stupid non-normalised tables imported straight from Excel into Access. Secretary learns how to build even more amazingly byzantine forms and macros, and eventually a whole department relies on a creaky Access.mdb on a network drive with no security where a dozen people run giant queries on un-indexed columns where a proper database server would be more appropriate.
And of course, the whole thing must be supported by an IT person who had no role in crafting this mess.
Powerpoint wasn't designed to make people stupid. Just like the rest of MS Office, it has been comandeered by idiots and forced to their mind-numbing bidding. MSFT products may be low in efficiency and reliability, high on resource consumption and vendor lock-in but they are quite easy to pick up even if they lack the "taste" on famous Steve seems to crave. ON one hand it has helped bring computing to the masses. The other edge of that sword is that it has enabled the semi-literate to misapply all of those applications with minimal effort.
Stop wasting time blaming the Clean Air Act and look at practical ways to cut carbon emissions in ways that don't knock us back to the stone age.
Haven't you figured it out yet? For many in climate change politics, that is the ultimate goal...thus the reason for the strong negative response to all technologies that promise to do just what you ask.
History repeating itself?
on
Apple To Buy ARM?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
As has been stated before, Apple has had a relationship with ARM holdings since it was founded (as Apple had equity in the company when it was founded out of the ashes of the Acorn computer company). Apple didn't abuse its position then. Of course, Apple wasn't so big and successful at the time, whereas now it dominates in mobile media players and holds a great deal of market share with the iPhone.
Here is an interesting thing though...history seems to be repeating itself, just with different players. In the 1970s MOS technologies created the 6500 series of microprocessors--the 6502 being the famous, very long lived design. They had a fab and produced their own designs but also ended up licensing the design out to others (the two biggest being Rockwell International and Western Design Center, the latter was founded by a former MOS employee who held a patent on part of the 6502 design that entitled him to a license). Just as the 6502 started taking off in the desktop calculator market Texas Instruments went and started making calculators too--using their own chips that suddenly became much more expensive for third parties.
Jack Tramiel at Commodore was facing possible extinction of his entire electronics line because of the TI-induced shakeout (Older folks, especially from Canada, might remember Commodore as a maker of typewriters and filing cabinets and calulators). Pretty much all calculator makers who used TI chips suddenly found it impossible to compete with TI and those who couldn't re-engineer their designs quickly or rely on other products quickly died (MITS probably wouldn't have been pushed to do the Altair if it hadn't been pushed out of the calculator market by TI). Jack didn't want to fall victim to a bullying chip maker and figured to compete Commodore had to make its own chips like TI, so Commodore bought MOS technology.
Here is an interesting fact: Commodore continued licensing to Rockwell and WDC, and continued to make and sell chips openly on the market, including to direct competitors in the personal computer market. Every single Apple I and Apple II and 8-bit Atari (from the 2600 game up to the 130XE computer) and 8-bit Acorn/BBC Micro was built around a chip design controlled ny Commodore (and maybe even manufactured in their fab). Though Commodore made for a very tough competitor, there is no evidence they overtly abused their position as a chip supplier to dominate the market and in fact Apple and Atari both outlived Commodore. So, it is possible that with Apple owning ARM this scenario could happen again.
So how will history repeat itself? Apple cannot ever revoke current licensees rights to use their current designs, but they could "pull a TI" (even against TI ironically) and either make it very expensive to continue licensing or could refuce to renew, meaning competitors/third-parties could not make NEW ARM-based chips. Alternatively, they could go the "Commodore way" and maintain ARM as a separate (though wholly owned) company that keeps operating as normal, and all our Android phones would be safe.
Of course, Jobs runs the show and being the techno-Nazi that he is might be tempted to go for world domination/industry control by cutting android hardware sales off at the knees. However he is still pretty smart and knows that would be a very bad idea. Consider:
* ARM designs are used EVERYWHERE. Industrial processors, embedded computer systems and so on where Apple doesn't compete--in fact the majority of ARMs revenue relies on non-mobile/wireless business. They'd lose more than they'd gain by shutting out those licensees.
* If they were overtly selective in suppliying chips or licensing their IP to others then they'd face the wrath of antitrust regulators that are much more aware and active in high-tech now.
* They could cut out Android or WinMo hardware makers but both those platforms can be ported quite easily to other hardware. In fact those platforms already run on non-ARM platofrms. Apple could run roughshod over HTC but it
They care that it works with the corporate standard which is IE.
You got it backwards. IE is the corporate browser because they've heavily invested financially and politically in crappy, brittle enterprise systems that break when you move away from IE6. Nobody picked enterprise software because of the browser it ran on.
I deal a lot with corporate IT management types. Seriously IE--in particular IE6 which is the standard that is the issue--has NO redeeming qualities WHATSOEVER. IE6 does not conform to standards. IE6 is insecure. IE6 is slow. IE6 is obsolete. In places where IE is mandated it has NOTHING to do with it being superior. Hell, it doesn't even have anything to do with it being welded to the MSFT OS--when you already have to create a corporate image with things like Citrix, 3270 emulation, notes client, VPN, in-house apps, etc etc. what is the big deal adding Firefox? You have to slipstream in service packs and countless security updates to make IE even marginally acceptable anyways.
Corporate types make IE the standard because some pointy-haired boss 10+ years ago made the decision to invest millions into SAP or similar big gigantic ERP mess that included web portal functionality that was built against IE6. Some of these ERP abominations even involved the deployment of ActriveX controls and other toxic, proprietary IE only garbage. Back then they didn't care--Netscape was dying, Firefox didn't exist and the new Gecko engine was not even halfway finished baking. IE was indeed the "best" (and being built in rather convenient) option and arguments from IT people were considered academic to PHBs and thus fell on deaf ears. If the business software was really kick-ass and it required Netscape they sure as heck would've went to the effort to deploy netscape, but there was no such software out there for the enterprise.
Now IE6 is widely recognised as being the garbage it is, there are real, honestly superior alternatives out there and even MSFT has moved on with IE7 and IE8 barely supporting IE6 style behaviour because it is saddled with the IE6 legacy it shot itself in the foot with in its other products..
IT managers who are not idiots realise what IE is, and know IE is not a standard. XHTML 1.x and HTML5 ad CSS2.x and so on are standards. If they pick Sharepoint it has nothing to do with it working with IE--it is becasue they are a MSFT house and they just cannot bother to fight lock-in (or they are contend being locked into their guilded cages). Of you use MS Windows for your client AND server OSes, MS Exchange for communication, MS Office for document creation, MS SQL for your database, IIS for your intranet, MS Forefront for security/antivirus......why stop there? Certainly Sharepoint would be easiest to integrate, easiest to use, etc. At least from an end-user perspective.
The thing is Sharepoint works GOOD ENOUGH with non-IE/standards-based browsers, but the coolest stuff about it isn't the web portal anyways it is how it integrates with Office and Visual Studio/Team Foundation Server and so on. If it had seious standards-compliant issues that made it rely heavily on IE, I seiously doubt ANY competent IT manager would go near it--they'd remember the hell they've had to go through because of th IE6 lock-in the've had to deal with the last couple of years.
Yeah exactly like with Mono. If Microsoft was really wanting to launch a patent assault over mono they would have done it years ago
Why would MSFT be in such a rush? There is (unfortunately) a very long statute of limitations on software patents (it is effectively the 20 year lifespan of the patent). There is no patent system equivalent to "trademark dilution" whereby lack of enforcement can jeopardise validity. In fact the longer the patent troll--er...holder--waits to litigate the more dramatic the impact.
MSFT has in fact implicitly shown signs of its true intentions regarding Mono. Do you think it was completely out of their minds when they forged an IP "cross licensing" deal with Novell (who has a track record of being the prime champion of Mono?). The longer you wait, and the more ovratures are made in terms of vague IP agrements are made, the more "ammunition" there is for litigation. Plus, MSFT could be waiting for enough mass adoption of MONO or "moonlight" or whatever before they pounce. Maybe they want a whole bunch of critical components of GNOME to be built atop MONO, then get distributed widely in every distro from Ubuntu to Fedora and in between, perhaps convincing the LSB team to include it as a requirement for compliance some day...and then when multiple vendors rely on it sufficiently MSFT can call its trolls out from under the bridge to go SCO on the arses of Red Hat and Canonical and others. However, right now, there just wouldn't be the impact were they to issue an injunction stopping those distros from using Mono without paying protection money, because their OSes are still "too useful" without Mono to make them fold easily.
That is why I worry MORE the longer MSFT waits, not less.
You might ponder why Novell would associate itself with Microsoft--a business of the kind Novell most think would be best to stay far away from. I think that in this case we've seen the story play out in the automotive industry. Perhaps Novel should've heeded the lesson.
Novell is like Chrysler. At one time, not so long ago, both companies were "second bananas" in their respective industries that despite past troubles and having to face major crossroads were showing promise and were prosperous and improving...
Novell: it was direction-less and fighting a losing battle with Microsoft. The flagship products like Netware and the stepchildren it acquired like WordPerfect were starting to look antiquated and were losing market share to WinNT and MSOffice. Then at some point they remade themselves. They embraced open source and did a stellar job acquiring SuSE and Ximian in the face of doubters to building a sustainable, quality business around their Free software and though they've never achieved #1 spot over Red Hat they became a very respectable part of the "big three" Linux-based OSes.
Chrysler: it was direction-less and fighting a losing battle with imports from Asia and Europe. When OPEC was closing the taps and drivers had to hunt for pumps that hadn't run dry and cute, little round imports like the Beetle and the Civic and the Corolla were taking America by storm...and there was Chrysler building big, thirsty, stodgy boxy road boats. Finally facing the prospect of bankruptcy and pleading for a government bailout (the first time) they were forced to face reality. Iaccoca came in as chairman and embraced an whole new set of smaller more efficient front-wheel-drive platforms resulting in early successes like the Aries and Caravan. Chrysler did a stellar job in acquiring AMC from Renault and making the Jeep brand part of a sustainable, increasingly quality business that though far from #1 was a leader in design and once again a respectable part of the "big three" American-based automotive companies.
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Novell: at the peak of its game it started to lose momentum again and though still in a very good financial condition felt the pressure to shake things up again and find a new growth strategy. This time, however they lost sight of their customers and the culture of the company. Someone who clearly didn't "get it" decided Novell should associate themselves with Microsoft. The flawed logic was that as the IP trolls gained prevalence and MS seemed here to stay for eternity that Novell would be the "safe harbour" from litigation and the Linux you could go with for superior interoperability with Windows infrastructure. But the cultures of the two partners could never mix and Linux customers were about OPEN systems and were offended that Novell would poison that openness just to get some cash and potentially check off some boxes on "the facts" list. Furthermore, for all the bad will the deal generated that hurt Novell's business Microsoft did nothing to promote the use of Linux amongst those that received its "SuSE Certificates". In the end MSFT did more to damage Novell than to nurture it.
Chrysler: They finally had more products that scored above average than below in performance and reliability, and it was the "cab forward" era when the cars were sleek, roomy and comfortable without being big lumbering boats. However they were hitting a plateau and needed investment to keep relevant and growing. Against common wisdom they chose to get with Daimler--a company that serves a completely different market segment, were known for quality but rather stodgy designs based in a country with a much more button-down way of doing business. Mopar fans' reactions were rarely favourable to the idea and nobody seriously thought Daimler REALLY thought of Chrysler as an "equal partner". Instead of getting the best of both worlds we got the worst--Chrysler's level of quality and MB's design influences! As the "cab forward" era ended MB did NOTHING to help Chrysler and in fact starved it
...and as such "they win" in terms of precedence regarding trademark (note that this is probably NOT a copytight case--it is strictly TRADEMARK I'm talking about and there are significant legal differences between those forms of IP).
In Canadian legal parlance a "public authority" is a body with some official governing status. This includes governments ranging from local to national and international bodies like the UN.
As such, the use of Olympic marks is given the same protection afforded to such marks as Royal Warrants, names and logos of government departments, logos depicting police badges and so on. The rights of public authorities supercede ALL OTHER RIGHTS and do so retroactively, rendering any trademark rights afforded by sponsorship agreements with third parties void. They can assert their rights over the use of Olympic-affiliated emblems, words, names and phrases in Canada the same way the RCMP can exercise its authority over the use of the iconic red serge uniform and the Queen can allow the use of the phrase "By appointment to the Queen..." phrase on a bottle of HP.
The IOC, COA and/or VANOC, as public authorities, may not even have to make any public assertion regarding an athletes' name as a trademark, nor would they have to establish an agreement regarding the use of an athlete's name. A case could be made (unreasonable or not) for "ambush marketing" where a registered trademark isn't explicitly used but a name, word, phrase or symbol that could even be INFERRED to be associated with the games IS used to imply some official connection. This is what UVEX was accused of--they did not commit any money, time or other resources to the olympic games themselves--they are strictly sponsors of Ms. Vonn. Yes, it does look to be an unreasonable case as most intelligent people wouldn't make the logical leap that they were "THE official supplier of product x" based on their simple announcement, but litigation isn't about being reasonable.
Incidentally this isn't a politically partisan issue and isn't associated with Canada or these games in particular. This is strictly the path taken by the IOC in actions taken in the lead-up to the 1984 summer games in LA. Starting in that year, the IOC mandated as a requirement that host nations and local governments give olympic organisers just the kind of status equivalent to that bestowed upon "public authorities" in Canada. Prior to 1984 the Olympics actively distanced itself from corporate affiliation, but starting in the '70s the games started growing in scale and opulence to a point that governmental and other non-corporate sponsorship could not sustain them. By 1976 the situation became intolerable--the Montreal games were plagued with corruption, poorly constructed facilities that were still under construction right through the actual games themselves and massive budget overruns and debts (the 1976 olympics finally reached break-even status in 2006, and the roof of the stadium was never completed as designed!). On top of that, private businesses were using the work Olympic and affiliated marks rampantly to profit from those games while offical organisers swam in red ink.
In 1980 the free world boycotted the '80 summer games, and the winter games were still small enough to lack profile, but in 1984 the IOC was determined to make the games financially viable and asserted serious control over its brand for the first time--selling the rights to to be official sponsors to bidders for massive amounts of money to meet their goal. In order to make official sponsorship worth such a high value required very draconian enforcement of its rights to prevent free, unofficial use from devaluing the brand. As such, so long as any olympics remains a massive, spectacular hype machine that saturates the world's media you are going to have this sort of activity. It closely parallels the way media cartels and closed software companies build or maintain illegitimate or obsolete business models atop flawed IP law.
If I recall correctly the IOC pursues most of its more ridiculous legal actions based upon trademark laws, not copyright. Trademark simply involves the use of words, and whether they are used to describe a fact doesn't always matter in therms of trademark. If somebody publicises the phrase "Lindsey Vonn won Gold at the Vancouver Olympics" the IOC can, if they feel like being especially nasty pricks, send you a C&D for using the word "Olympics" without their permission, even if it is simply part of a factual statement--and it is possible that the use of an athlete's name could be regulated under trademark law as well. However, you aren't supposed to be able to trademark generic words or the names of people or places unless you are the person or entity with that name or own that property/location (or you've granted/sold rights to someone else to handle the use of said trademark). For example you cannot trademark the use of "Martha Stewart" unless that happens to be your name (and the most famous person of that name does in fact assert trademark rights to her name).
Trademark holders don't normally pursue legal action against the casual use of their trademarks under a certain number of circumstances (news reports, most product reviews and so on) when there is no case to be made that the person who used the trademark for the purposes of trade (ie. to promote or identify their business). However, because UVEX is the sponsor of Lindsey Vonn, and is not in the business of news reporting but rather selling the type of gear that she uses, the IOC in their "wisdom" probably concluded that the mention of Vonn's win on their front page constituted the use of her name to promote their products in association with the Olympics in which she competed. That would be considered the use of an Olympic-associated name, or "mark", for the purposes of "trade"...trademark...and IOC I guess knows or believes they have those rights at least for anything related to the Olympic Games (r) (tm).
Even more outrageously, becasue Olympic organisers are typically heavily subsidised by governments of various levels they are considered what in Canada are termed "public authorities" which gives them in some respects legal status equal to the UN, government departments (including the offices of the Prime Minister, RH Governor General and HRH Queen of Canada) and law enforcement agencies. Yes, it literally means that the use of any symbol, word, phrase or name associated with the Olympic games is legally equivalent to a Royal Warrant and the legal consequences of unauthorised use is similar). As such they merely have to declare public use and they can pursue all use of trademarked words RETROACTIVELY, for ANY purpose if they really want to! As a public authority they can even go after certain cases of "ambush marketing" which is what they might say UVEX is doing--that is when a business infers official association with a public authority it does not actually have without explicitly using a trademark (for example souvenir carts selling t-shirts and other kitch with the Canadian flag or "Vancouver, BC" and a generic illustration of a hockey player or skier in Downtown Vancouver). There is historical precedent in law where small businesses who were sponsors of ATHLETES (which is NOT considered affiliation with the actual olympics) "abused" that sponsorship to the point some might think they were sponsors of the GAMES. That precedent gave the IOC an inch and now they have stretched it to a mile and the mere mention of the olympics or any of the events is grounds to threaten legal action. As a public authority they've even been able to shut down charity campaigns and non-profit events!
Actual, normal human beings (as opposed to IP lawyers) would probably see this as asinine...is that not one of the purposes of sponsorship--promotion affiliated with an athlete's activities of any kind in exchange for funding, equipment, etc? Isn't the insistence
Biofuels need not be made of corn, and no environmentalist has suggested this is the best alternative. The choice is chiefly a political one, meant to prop up corn demand because the US produces an INCREDIBLY MASSIVE GLUT of corn FAR exceeding practical demand. It is a market so distorted by political interference it bears no resemblance to a free market and as such decisions are made in absence of economic soundness. These studies making out biofuel to be dangerous to our food supply make assumptions that would never happen in a free market--that biofuels would continue to make use of human-grade foodstock like corn, that such fuels would replace a sizeable amount of conventional fuel demand, that harvesting biofuel feedstock would not become more efficient, ignores the possibility of using waste food prodcuts and so on.
Americans scarcely eat HALF of the edible food crops grown for their consumption. That INCLUDES crops fed to animals that are subsequently turned into meat. The rest goes to waste--often not even into compost to recycle into fields. It would break your heart to see how much food goes into landfills--buried in anaerobic conditions where it not only doesn't nourish fields for future crops it doesn't even properly decompose for a decade or two!
Make no mistake, there is an AMPLE supply of feedstock for biofuels, and it is well worth the investment in research like making cellulosic ethanol and biodiesels made from waste oils cost-effective as a means of recovering this massive waste.
"Socialism" being a US term meaning "decent roads" I suppose ?
From personal experience, it seems to me, that with a few exceptions, the more socialist the country the worse the roads are. I do sometimes wonder why 100%+ fuel taxes seel to go less and less to actual transportation infrastructure the larger the taxes get...
Nobody said anything about ownership. Perhaps you live in your mum's basement and she doens't charge you rent, but most grown-ups have to pay for their accomodations, whether it be in the form of rent or some combination of mortgage payment, property taxes and association fees. Those costs are all directly associated with the market value of the property where you live, and as cruel as it seems, those places that are closest to the most places of employment, public transit choices and other amenities are often the most valuable/in-demand/expensive. Living in the most convenient location is indeed NOT the choice for many people.
choosing not to live near your job is a choice
Everyone has choices, but often there is only one reasonable choice. These days, many people don't even have the choice to have a job at all, and those that do have a job aren't going to be picky about where they work...and if that happens to require a lengthy commute so be it, because paying for it a tank at a time is the only affordable option to sizeable relocation costs. Furthermore, not all choices line up. You cannot undo choosing to raise a family, and what if you cannot find a home, a workplace AND a school all within one area? Very few people are that lucky.
let's not pretend that there is a gun to any commuter's head
in some urban centres that is a distinct possibility;-)
I will note I am in the same boat, stuck with what I now consider to be an unwise house decision and no way to sell, and a 30 minute commute by car with no public transit option. all I can do is carpool
Well, then you DO have the "right to bitch". I don't like it when people complain about their situation when they have no real reason to do so, but regardless of your past "bad choices" you are in a situation now where your choices are restricted, and if something is intolerable you SHOULD complain, and you SHOULD get involved in solutions (like, as you mentioned, carpooling, should it work for you). People who just sit and suffer in silence do nothing to make the world better for themselves OR for anyone else.
Cars are a luxury item, if you live in the kind of town where driving a car is necessary to get to work, you also live in a town that has a transit system that can get you within walking distance.
Urban dwellers can sometimes be really ignorant, insular closed-minded people. Not every job to which people must drive is also served by public transit, nor could it even practically be done.
There are large farms all over North America where owners and workers must drive to work on them (not to mention actually drive the equipment during the actual work). Paying for fuel is no luxury for those people--it is a cost associated with their way of living. Truck drivers have the same problem. They are often owner-operators who must cover their own fuel costs out of what they receive in compensation under contract from transportation companies, and if fuel prices rise too high too quickly there is the potential to lose money at times. Yes, nobody forced people into those career choices, but if nobody did these jobs there would be nobody to produce the food you eat nor deliver it to within walking distance of your comfortable, well-serviced urban home.
Then there are industrial jobs, most often involving shift work at times when public transit is not in operation because passenger volume is so low that it actually is MORE expensive and harmful to the environment to operate than personal transportation. Generally car-pooling is the only option to not driving your own automobile so fuel costs are unsubsidised and more directly felt, and living close to work is not an option because living next to places like large and/or noisy and/or dirty places like power generating stations, mines, mills, factories and so on can be intolerable. Furhtermore, closed-minded people with opinions similar to those you've expressed are often also the most strident NIMBYists, so even if industrial sites are not dependent on locating where fuel and other non-relocatable resources are, they must be put in remote locations so as not to disturb property values, peace of the community and so forth of comfortable urban dwellers. As such, the largest industrial facilities are located outside urban areas, often fare from them near small towns, beyond the reach of public transit.
It would be all wonderful if we had some utopian version of Soviet central planning where subsidised public transit reached all places of work and all shift workers started in sync at pre-designated times (in a manner that doesn't somehow cause power brownouts due to multiple large factories starting up in sync as well) and we all grew our own food in our back yards and on apartment rooves and staple goods were all magically sold at affordable prices by independently-owned corner-stores placed every 5 to 10 city blocks that they somehow obtained without the need to pay for delivery costs...but somehow we cannot achieve those feats of magic in real life--those in Soviet-style economies invariably have to wait in line for even the basic essentials, companies actually like to run their own businesses, people can't be bothered growing their own food and the neighbourhood corner store is neither independently-owned nor offers the most affordable prices. Ultimately, someone somewhere MUST drive and some form of transportation MUST consume fuel and therefore must bear the cost of fuel prices.
So, you might be thinking you're all green and such for not using your automobile, remember that even having the option to do so is considered a luxury by some, and that even by going the "green thing" by not driving you ARE in fact paying for gas even of you are not doing so directly. When the price of the loaf of bread or jug of milk goes up at your local market and people tell you it is because of rising fuel costs, you'd better believe it, because fuel costs are amongst the largest and most volatile expenses of doing business in most industries. WE ALL PAY FOR GAS AND WE HAVE NO CHOICE ABOUT IT.
and we can change the climate to make things better
That is what makes me suspicious of what some might call "gorebots"--those that assume not only the problem exists the way they see it, but that the solution is to try and "undo" it.
I think there is enough scientific evidence to suggest the climare is changing, that the world is slowly warming up, and even that human actvity involving the release of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases has affected climate.
What I am VERY concerned about is that there is so much certainty that the problem is acutually reversible simply by doing less of what they think caused the problem, and so little attention is being given to actually adapting to what might actually be too late to change.
Perhaps we could spend less time and money setting up elabourate carbon counting and trading schemes and start looking at REAL efficiency and conservation efforts (not just those that directly involve carbon emissions), investing in infrastructure to protect costal communities that we are fairly certain are vulnerable to rising sea levels, and so on.
It sounds like this national climate service specifically includes this as part of its proposed mandate, so that somewhat promising.
Is it so rational to ignore the views of the vast majority of climatologists on climate change?
Perhaps not, but it might might be a good idea to consider the views of climatologists with some skepticism, for the same reasons you would the views of petroleum geologists. There are those on both sides of the issue that have a vested interest in convincing policymakers of a certain conclusion.
Makers of AntiVirus software have NEVER overstated the impact of a given computer virus right? Climatologists ought to be almost as trustworthy right?
How's it work with WPA2-secured wireless? Vista kinda stunk at that in my experience, and Win7 would have to do a lot of work to just stink slightly much less be good at it.
Moreover wireless on Vista is almost, but not quite, as stable as Lindsay Lohan and Brittany Spears. On more than one Vista machine I've had the displeasure to deal with the wireless connection randomly decides to go on a bender. I try resetting the router. I try rebooting. No joy. Only fix seems to be to go into the network config, remove the connection and re-enter the security key. No rhyme or reason, and in one case there was a Macbook, a WinXP machine, an iphone a Linux netbook and an HTC Magic phone on wireless with the Vista machine. ALL OF THEM WORKED WITHOUT INTERUPTION EXCEPT THE VISTA MACHINE.
An therein lies the rub: if for any reason you must open that wreched user interface to do ANY config task of ANY kind--whether it be simple troubleshooting, selecting the SSID, entering a key, putting in fixed network settings, the Windows network config UI is the suckiest, most regressive, confusing mess on ANY modern operating system WITHOUT QUESTION. If you want to convince someone that Linux is not harder than Windows, the best way you can do it is to show them how to manage network connections in Vista compared to any current Linux OS.
I imagine that Win7 has made improvements--at least in stability...but that interface? Complete FAIL! I don't care if they've refined it--a polished turd still stinks. It needs to be completely redone again. I know "technical details" can intimidate novices but they should still be accessible. It baffles me as to why the basic details like IP address, netmask, default gateway and DNS entries being made HARDER to find than in XP is considered an IMPROVEMENT.
It seems to me that is an argument FOR "the UNIX Way" today. Think about why this "way" came about. You had expensive mainframe or mini computers with computational abilities probably even more limited than today's mobile phones, with a user interface with limited display capabilites tied to that system therough a slow serial link with constrained bandwidth, and CPU cycles were a limited, sometimes expensive commodity offered by a limited number of organisations.
Fast forward to today, and what Google is trying to achieve:
Google has this, well, expAnsive array of servers worldwide to provide applications and services in "the cloud" to potentially hundreds of millions of users--limiting computational ability afforded to each user. The user interface is supposed to be this mobile device--again with limited computational resources--with limited display capabilities tied to the "cloud" through a relatively slow wireless link with constrained bandwidth. Megabytes of throughput on this network of wireless links are a limited, sometimes expensive commodity offered by a limited number of carriers.
Seems to me I remember something about history and repetition and being doomed...but I forget the rest;-)
I'm not familiar enough with the Android platform SDK to say if it is good or bad (whatever "way" a system is architected, the implementation may be good or bad), but I do remember the "Unix Way" worked well in those "dark ages", so if one was, um, INTENT on recreating such a situation it'd probably make sense to do what worked very well in the past.
Not really. MSFT just picks and chooses when to do so. MSFT doesn't believe in rules restricting molopolistic business practices--it has been a belief deeply ingrained within their executive team, including Gates and Ballmer. That belief extends to their resistance to conform with the spirit, if not the letter, of rulings pertaining to those practices including its attempts at tight integration of application-level programming into its OS (Internet Explorer, Media Player), lack of interoperability/closed protocols (bastardised directory services, Exchange...) and so forth. There is a sense of entitlement there--basically they worked damn hard to be industry leaders and they did it by their own hard work, and damn any government who decides how to run their business especially if it hobbles their ability to "compete" and "innovate". Post-Gates this hard-line is changing--albeit at a galcially slow pace--as MSFT tries to show a bit of goodwill in its voluntary contributions to open source. There will be no epic game-changing event (the way Apple had completely overhauled both hardware and software architectures of its flagship product line more than once, or a business strategy equivalent anyways) untill Ballmer retires...if ever.
If this event is news at all, it isn't surprising in the slightest though. MSFT might have fought hard to win its case and it might not think the patent has merit, but when it comes to IP law they very higly respect and conform to it, at least when they are caught with their hand in the patent cookie-jar. Unlike in anti-trust cases, they will only appeal for so long, and they will very willingly comply with rulings not only to the letter, but within the spirit as well (ie. the decision to pull MacOS versions even though they weren't specifically mentioned--because the ruling "probably" covers ALL versions of word). So why the different attitude? MSFT knows it is still a software-centric company and that patentability of software concepts gives them enhanced ability to restrict competition not available with copyright (where IMO software IP should be handled exclusively). No matter what MSFT says critically about the shortcomings of patent law, it wants REFORM, not elimination, of software patents.
If it was in their interest, MSFT would've thrown a billion dollars at lawyers to fight for a ruling in its favour--even if complying was cheaper, but it isn't in their interest in this case. If they slayed this dragon, they know they've set a Bilski-like legal precident exposing a vast amount of their patent library to legal challenge, perhaps even some directly pertaining to its cash-cow MS Office.
Please, direct me to a ARM-based Linux netbook I can buy from a store right now.
Better late than never...
Costco has had such netbooks in stock for some time, but they come with a craptacular pure-vanilla WinCE installation with a half-arsed attempt to make it useful with a handful of basic productivity software and low-quality games (it seems to be marketed as a toy for "tween" kids).
In Canada there is something called the "very personal computer" (VPC) a 7" netbook with a 400MHz embedded processor (I think it is ARM but could be MIPS--I'm 100 percent sure it isn't x86 based). A Canadian company called "fidelity electronics" has them built in hong-kong. It sells on Alibaba for US$135 currently, but is $199 retail from their website, but that isn't where I first saw it: I discovered it at Zellers (a Canadian department store very similar to, but pre-dating and not affiliated with, Target in the US), and I've heard it has shown up at Canadian Tire (I've never seen a store exactly like Canadian Tire outside of Canada actually--their scrip, "Canadian Tire money", is part of our culture) but at an inflated price. At Zellers it is on sale right now basically at cost: CA$139 if I recall. That one most certainly DOES run Linux--nothing totally standard from what it appears but it could be Debian-based. If I didn't have my HP Mini I'd have got it to check it out...
ARM and MIPS netbooks are all over Alibaba et al that "Support" both Linux and WinCE, and in N American retail they are making small inroads (as it gets harder to find Atom netbooks without Windows there seems to be an accompanying rise in the availability of ARM and MIPS cheapies, and as often (or more) than not they run Linux. The stage is set for a watershed moment for such devices: if a big-brand vendor, or several more "fidelity" sized outfits, pick up these cheap Chinese models and package/markets them appropriately they could establish themselves enough to worry MSFT. Some things that are needed for success:
1) they need to be marketed honestly by all vendors: Fidelity on their website seems to be honest but there is precious little information or knowledge at Zellers on the unit, not even a warning that it is not a Windows PC. You'd think they'd learn from competitor Walmart about improper product support and marketing in this area
2) the hardware can come from China but don't let them do the software, documentation or retail packaging for the N American market. I think an interface like Moblin2's would be ideal is given the right polish (I run Moblin 2.1 on my HP Mini and I think it is elegant enough to compete very well with Apple, but it IS still glitchy (once in a while an app will hard crash (but never had total system lock-up), I had to get my infamous Broadcom wireless going by putting in a blob-driver myself...). The stuff is there to make a Linux netbook kick butt on WinCE or even the latest WinMo eye candy is already invented--it just needs to be factory tuned and installed.
3) don't try to be everything to everyone and don't be a "me-too" product--copy Apple's strategy NOT its design. Apple "does its own thing"--its designs are not derivatives of anything. Nothing like an iPod existed until after Apple designed it, and computers were all beige boxes until Apple cape up with something off-the-wall. Despite the fact that Apple's hardware is often quite far below cutting-edge their elegant designs, brilliant marketing and polished user experience garner fierce loyalty and big profits.
Hey if one company can make billions on a bunch of product lines based on an open-source kernel that is incompatible with Windows then why not someone else?
The thing is, many electronics vendors DO void warranty work for harsh operating environments. If your mobile phone gets just damp enough to turn the litmus sticker red you are SOL. If it can be determined that dust or temperature extremes were the root cause of failure then many devices are not covered.
Besides that, from my own personal experience, tobacco smoke residue has to be the second most hazardous substance on electronics I have encountered (the first being corrosive sulphur dust). I have seen computers in coal mines covered in black soot that were much less affected than computers from point of sale systems used at pubs when smoking was allowed there. At the mine computers easily lasted twice as long with simple maintenance with an aerosol dusted can. NOTHING could clean that nicotine and tar sludge out of those smokers computers!
I am actually surprised that, with all the conditions that can void a warranty on electronics, that anyone would be surprised that smoking would void a warranty. The only thing that I find surprising was the really lame excuse that it was a biohazard. Apple should just be honest and say the real reason: tobacco sludge in your computer made it break, and since you put it there it isn't our problem and you have to pay for it. I guess since some heavily addicted smokers have thin skins such a policy should be clearly but diplomatically pointed out at time of purchase.
Funny how most of the time, an unregulated market increases the cost of items taht should be dirt-cheap, until they're an unaffordable luxury to most people.
Markets are NEVER "unregulated". Free markets by their nature become "self regulated" over time, otherwise they are non-free markets regulated by outside forces like the Government, cartels and so on. Most of the time, in fact, free markets COMMODITISE goods. If goods become unaffordable it becomes economically feasible for competitors to offer goods at a lower cost. As a market grows economies of scale make the cost to make goods lower. If supply outpaces demand the cost is driven so low that the weakest players leave the market and prices come back, and over time an equilibrium is reached. The personal computer hardware market is relatively unregulated, and though one architecture dominates no one manufacturer does, and computers are most certainly NOT "unaffordable luxuries".
And how the quality of the products and services doesn't matter, so long as you can dupe or force people into buying it.
So basically, you must resort to unethical, deceptive and destructive behavior to escape the economic balance of supply and demand. Libertairans aren't all anarchists. If you are forcing people to buy your crap it is extortion, of you dupe them it is fraud. Not only is that unethical it is criminal. Libertarians generally seek to protect personal liberties, and the bulk of criminal law is designed on the basis of protecting the personal liberties of one party against abusive behaviour of another party seeking to remove the liberties of others. That's quite different from regulation.
In fact, non-free software (e.g., Windows and other Microsoft wares) is a great example of this. Is Office 7 worth $400? Nope, but because it's a free market, the price gets inflated to this point.
Closed software is a great example of a NON-free, protected and regulated market. As opposed to the hardware market, where PCs are commoditised and cheap and the market is competitive, the software industry is a "false market". The entire business model of Microsoft relies completely on government regulations protecting corporate "intellectual property". MSFT depends on skewed copyright and patent protections and contracts that remove as many individual property rightas as possible. If If regulation was "right sized" and based on a foundation of protecting one party from removing the liberties of another partry (as opposed to empowering them to remove others' liberties) then MSFT would probably not exist in the form it does today, if at all.
MSOffice costs $400 because MSFT can hide source code, sue people who try to reverse engineer or interoperate on their own terms, and extort "licensing fees" from those who imitate the appearance or functionality of their software--almost none of which is a "novel invention" or real innovation. MSFT's monopoly, high prices and poor quality products have nothing to do with free markets or even capitalism in general. Their monopoly came into being because they used flawed regulations to their advantage. Establishing a free market is the CURE to the MSFT problem, NOT the cause!
Remember, the "free market" is not free. It is manipulated like a puppet by those who hold the reins, those who do not care about your wellbeing or options in life.
That "selfishness" causes the most damage when it is not kept in balance. The reason we have markets that do not operate freely is because the liberties of all players are not protected equally. That is why MSFT can charge $400 for a product that now costs them $4 to produce, and why movies can make hundreds of millions and celebrities can make millions play acting, ad nauseum.
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If you only use it now and then, the last thing you want is to be charged based on the assumption that you are using the maximum rate 24/7.
Well then you'd better complain to every single utility company in the world, because that is exaclt how billing for electricity, water and gas are billed w.r.t. "access fees".
Reason: even if you used the maximum rate for just a few minutes one time in the whole month, the service provider has to provide infrastructure capable of delivering that data rate the entire month so it is there for you to use--they cannot exactly swap in an upgraded router and string a temporary fibre line to your home for a few minutes so you can view the latest cat video on youtube in highest HD quality without skipping or excessive buffering times.
Internet service is very much like any other utility.
Internet consists of a rate and quanitiy component just like every other utility:
With water, you have service fee based upon a 19mm line entering your house with a minimum guaranteed pressure (that is the same as Mbps for internet) and most nowadays have a meter and are billed by the cubic metre (same as GB transferred every month).
Gas is identical--you have a certain size line and minimum guaranteed pressure, and pay based upon joules, etc..
Electricity, same thing--you have a big copper line that can handle peak currrent typically 100A and a main breaker to enforce that limit, and you pay a fixed "access fee" to get the amps (Mbps) and "cost of energy" for the kWh you use (GB each month)
You contend that the more power/gas/water you use the more reources you use and that this is not the case with the internet. You are wrong. If no customers are transferring any bits, then there are no bits going through their wires or being routed. The lower the number of packets being sent through their systems the less hard routers etc. have to work and potentially the less energy consumed (the the ISP has to pay for). Plus without metering ISPs cannot "oversubscribe" to the same degree and have to build out data centres and backbones and such faster than otherwise.
In many respects it is like water service. Historically for many it was billed at a flat rate because of just the argument you made vs. other utilities--Waterworks didn't pay for the water it treated and delivered by volume, so why would you install meters and bill customers that way. Well, as cities grew they learned why: give customers unmetered access to water and they'll use it without regard to real need or consequences of overconsumption, and the utilities also recognised as their treatment facilities neared capacity that the more water they treat the more it costs them (energy consumption, more maintenance costs, expaning water treatment facilities, etc).
Since water service metering started in the city I lived in the population has doubled and literally water consumtion rates completely stopped growing. When it started people complained that it was just to gouge them but adjusted for inflation water bills have stayed quite static as well (in fact they've gone DOWN slightly!). No it is just accepted as a fact that you pay for water by the cubic metre, you don't have to wash the car in your drive way and leave the hose on the whole time, you don't need to water your lawn 3 times a week and so on.
I hope someday soon telecoms wortks the same. Bits are bits and the WWW, television, telephone, radio...its all bits and in a great many cases they are transmitted over the same kind of infrastructure. So how come telephone bits are so incredibly expensive when television bits are so cheap and WWW is somewhere in the middle? To me it just makes sense that ISP would be just another utility and all of that media would just go through that and you'd pay like all the other utilities, so I have no problem with Bell emulating that billing model. What I have issue with is that Bell bills way different for TV or voice phone service and what the rates themselves are unreasonably high for the quality of service they offer.
The powerco doesn't "rate limit" me depending on what I do with the electricity I use
Actually yes they do. It is a requirement to have a meter plus a main disconnect breaker on your electrical service. If you for some reason were to exceed your permitted service capacity (think of amperage as being equivalent to your bandwidth like Mbps) of say 100A then the breaker would trip and cut you off the grid. The meter is there so the utility can bill you the cost of energy (kWh == GB) and if you use a lot you get a big bill.
Industrial power customers have contracts based on "peak demand" and the utility can reserver the right to cap your demand (cut off service/rotating blackouts) if peak demand reaches intolerable levels. Plus they also have (very large) breakers at their incomers just like a big version of what is in your home. If your demand were to go above what the utilities' infrastructure can handle the breaker trips and cuts you off. I know of a couple of occasions firsthand where an industrial customer was ORDERED by the electrical utility to shut down production becasue of lack of capactiy (a large genereating station was off-line for scheduled maintenance and another had a unit trip unexptectedly) or pay hefty fines and face possible disconnection. This action was allowed based upon the terms of contract and is completely justafiable (cut off one factory or institute rolling blackouts of 100s or 1000s of homes at a time...).
Billing-wise is where peak demand REALLY gets expensive. If you're sucking (for example) 1MVA out of the grid for just ONE 15 MINUTE interval in the ENTIRE BILLING CYCLE you pay your "connection fee" portion of the power bill based on that maximum even if your normal daily peak demand is a small fraction of that. For one factory that can add to many thousands of dollars on a power bill because of mismanaging your power consumption for 15 minutes!
People are actually quite ignorant about the details of delivering their utilities (or how industrial is different from residential) even though everyone pays for it every month one way or another. The diffference with the Internet is that it SHOULD be billed in the same way (albeit without the complex "riders" and fees utilitiessometimes add) but if electrical service was like internet service is today the cut off wouldn't be 100A it would be 15A for your whole house and you'd get cut off or billed heavy surcharges if you happened to use the stove and microwave at the same time one day, and the cost of electricity would be a factor of 10 higher.
Would somebody please take a stab at Harper?
And then what? install Ignatieff as our new dictator? Layton's defence of keeping info free is admirable but he is out of touch with reality on so many other fronts as to be unelectable. Duceppe only has aspirations to lead Quebec..right out of Canada. Liz May? First she has to get a Green MP a seat. Then she might have a the chance a snowball has in hell to affect change.
The root of the problem is not HArper. It is thos who do not vote, and perhaps even worse, those who make ill-informed voting choices (mum and dad voted this way and so must I....or dude A looks shifty and I like dude B but dude C is polling #2 so I'll vote for him cuz dude A's shifty eyes make me nervous..but I don't know any of their policies...)
Seriously... the void left by voter apathy is ALWAYS filled by money. Abe the USA bullies with money.
...it is a LEGACY CLIENT APPLICATION.
You don't have to go as far as making people connect to a terminal server IMO but I think you've got the right idea. Basically treat IE6 as what it now really is: a proprietary, lecagy client application. IE6 == 5250 terminal emulator is as charitable as you should get...in any case an enterprise app that uses IE6 (and no later version) is a proprietary, legacy application no different from those other old, early client-server systems with pre-WWW proprietary client apps.
Some corporate setups do indeed put legacy/proprietary apps on a Citrix or terminal services server te ease administration and deployment. Others deploy client emiages with pre-configured setups and the client app or terminal emulator runs locally. In any case IE6 should NO LONGER be considered a WEB browser, so configure it as it should be: Legacy client. Use Group Policy to lock down IE6 to only your intranet servers that require IE6. Then deploy Firefox since you cannot *reliably* install multiple IE versions on one computer, and set it to the default browser and make sure in no uncertain terms that users know Firefox IS "the internet". Remove the generic "big blue E" and only put shortcut(s) that open IE to the required lecgacy app(s) (bonus if you can change the icon to something else so as not to confuse users who think "big blue E" == internet).
I wish this was the strategy corporate IT would've taken. Not only would it be more secure than letting user's browse the public WWW with IE6, it would erode IE's market share even faster and really light a fire under Ballmer's butt.
PowerPoint exposes how stupid we already are.
Basically, it isn't "PowerPoint makes us stupid", it is "Stupid people make us use PowerPoint". But that's true in some ways about the entire suite of MS Office products:
* You haven't worked in an enterprise environment until you've been forced to use MS Excel worksheets as database tables, by managers of the kind who use a $2 calculator to work out the solution before typing that solution into the cell. As these "tables" become unwieldy they are augmented by elabourate macros crafted by the boss' secretary (secretaries wield Excel like witches yield black magic).
* All documentation must be authored in MS Word, even 1000 page technical tomes where Word is ill-suited for the task. All doumentation must be passed around via email, until it clogs the server and someone comes up with the idea of an intranet portal (perhaps even Sharepoint! ooooh! aaaah!). Corporate intranet turns into 90%+ .doc content.
* The more forward-thinking bosses realise that MS Excel is not a database (perhaps because their pet .xls file hit the 65k row limits before Excel 2007 was released). Stupid non-normalised tables imported straight from Excel into Access. Secretary learns how to build even more amazingly byzantine forms and macros, and eventually a whole department relies on a creaky Access .mdb on a network drive with no security where a dozen people run giant queries on un-indexed columns where a proper database server would be more appropriate.
And of course, the whole thing must be supported by an IT person who had no role in crafting this mess.
Powerpoint wasn't designed to make people stupid. Just like the rest of MS Office, it has been comandeered by idiots and forced to their mind-numbing bidding. MSFT products may be low in efficiency and reliability, high on resource consumption and vendor lock-in but they are quite easy to pick up even if they lack the "taste" on famous Steve seems to crave. ON one hand it has helped bring computing to the masses. The other edge of that sword is that it has enabled the semi-literate to misapply all of those applications with minimal effort.
Stop wasting time blaming the Clean Air Act and look at practical ways to cut carbon emissions in ways that don't knock us back to the stone age.
Haven't you figured it out yet? For many in climate change politics, that is the ultimate goal...thus the reason for the strong negative response to all technologies that promise to do just what you ask.
As has been stated before, Apple has had a relationship with ARM holdings since it was founded (as Apple had equity in the company when it was founded out of the ashes of the Acorn computer company). Apple didn't abuse its position then. Of course, Apple wasn't so big and successful at the time, whereas now it dominates in mobile media players and holds a great deal of market share with the iPhone.
Here is an interesting thing though...history seems to be repeating itself, just with different players. In the 1970s MOS technologies created the 6500 series of microprocessors--the 6502 being the famous, very long lived design. They had a fab and produced their own designs but also ended up licensing the design out to others (the two biggest being Rockwell International and Western Design Center, the latter was founded by a former MOS employee who held a patent on part of the 6502 design that entitled him to a license). Just as the 6502 started taking off in the desktop calculator market Texas Instruments went and started making calculators too--using their own chips that suddenly became much more expensive for third parties.
Jack Tramiel at Commodore was facing possible extinction of his entire electronics line because of the TI-induced shakeout (Older folks, especially from Canada, might remember Commodore as a maker of typewriters and filing cabinets and calulators). Pretty much all calculator makers who used TI chips suddenly found it impossible to compete with TI and those who couldn't re-engineer their designs quickly or rely on other products quickly died (MITS probably wouldn't have been pushed to do the Altair if it hadn't been pushed out of the calculator market by TI). Jack didn't want to fall victim to a bullying chip maker and figured to compete Commodore had to make its own chips like TI, so Commodore bought MOS technology.
Here is an interesting fact: Commodore continued licensing to Rockwell and WDC, and continued to make and sell chips openly on the market, including to direct competitors in the personal computer market. Every single Apple I and Apple II and 8-bit Atari (from the 2600 game up to the 130XE computer) and 8-bit Acorn/BBC Micro was built around a chip design controlled ny Commodore (and maybe even manufactured in their fab). Though Commodore made for a very tough competitor, there is no evidence they overtly abused their position as a chip supplier to dominate the market and in fact Apple and Atari both outlived Commodore. So, it is possible that with Apple owning ARM this scenario could happen again.
So how will history repeat itself? Apple cannot ever revoke current licensees rights to use their current designs, but they could "pull a TI" (even against TI ironically) and either make it very expensive to continue licensing or could refuce to renew, meaning competitors/third-parties could not make NEW ARM-based chips. Alternatively, they could go the "Commodore way" and maintain ARM as a separate (though wholly owned) company that keeps operating as normal, and all our Android phones would be safe.
Of course, Jobs runs the show and being the techno-Nazi that he is might be tempted to go for world domination/industry control by cutting android hardware sales off at the knees. However he is still pretty smart and knows that would be a very bad idea. Consider:
* ARM designs are used EVERYWHERE. Industrial processors, embedded computer systems and so on where Apple doesn't compete--in fact the majority of ARMs revenue relies on non-mobile/wireless business. They'd lose more than they'd gain by shutting out those licensees.
* If they were overtly selective in suppliying chips or licensing their IP to others then they'd face the wrath of antitrust regulators that are much more aware and active in high-tech now.
* They could cut out Android or WinMo hardware makers but both those platforms can be ported quite easily to other hardware. In fact those platforms already run on non-ARM platofrms. Apple could run roughshod over HTC but it
They care that it works with the corporate standard which is IE.
You got it backwards. IE is the corporate browser because they've heavily invested financially and politically in crappy, brittle enterprise systems that break when you move away from IE6. Nobody picked enterprise software because of the browser it ran on.
I deal a lot with corporate IT management types. Seriously IE--in particular IE6 which is the standard that is the issue--has NO redeeming qualities WHATSOEVER. IE6 does not conform to standards. IE6 is insecure. IE6 is slow. IE6 is obsolete. In places where IE is mandated it has NOTHING to do with it being superior. Hell, it doesn't even have anything to do with it being welded to the MSFT OS--when you already have to create a corporate image with things like Citrix, 3270 emulation, notes client, VPN, in-house apps, etc etc. what is the big deal adding Firefox? You have to slipstream in service packs and countless security updates to make IE even marginally acceptable anyways.
Corporate types make IE the standard because some pointy-haired boss 10+ years ago made the decision to invest millions into SAP or similar big gigantic ERP mess that included web portal functionality that was built against IE6. Some of these ERP abominations even involved the deployment of ActriveX controls and other toxic, proprietary IE only garbage. Back then they didn't care--Netscape was dying, Firefox didn't exist and the new Gecko engine was not even halfway finished baking. IE was indeed the "best" (and being built in rather convenient) option and arguments from IT people were considered academic to PHBs and thus fell on deaf ears. If the business software was really kick-ass and it required Netscape they sure as heck would've went to the effort to deploy netscape, but there was no such software out there for the enterprise.
Now IE6 is widely recognised as being the garbage it is, there are real, honestly superior alternatives out there and even MSFT has moved on with IE7 and IE8 barely supporting IE6 style behaviour because it is saddled with the IE6 legacy it shot itself in the foot with in its other products..
IT managers who are not idiots realise what IE is, and know IE is not a standard. XHTML 1.x and HTML5 ad CSS2.x and so on are standards. If they pick Sharepoint it has nothing to do with it working with IE--it is becasue they are a MSFT house and they just cannot bother to fight lock-in (or they are contend being locked into their guilded cages). Of you use MS Windows for your client AND server OSes, MS Exchange for communication, MS Office for document creation, MS SQL for your database, IIS for your intranet, MS Forefront for security/antivirus......why stop there? Certainly Sharepoint would be easiest to integrate, easiest to use, etc. At least from an end-user perspective.
The thing is Sharepoint works GOOD ENOUGH with non-IE/standards-based browsers, but the coolest stuff about it isn't the web portal anyways it is how it integrates with Office and Visual Studio/Team Foundation Server and so on. If it had seious standards-compliant issues that made it rely heavily on IE, I seiously doubt ANY competent IT manager would go near it--they'd remember the hell they've had to go through because of th IE6 lock-in the've had to deal with the last couple of years.
Yeah exactly like with Mono. If Microsoft was really wanting to launch a patent assault over mono they would have done it years ago
Why would MSFT be in such a rush? There is (unfortunately) a very long statute of limitations on software patents (it is effectively the 20 year lifespan of the patent). There is no patent system equivalent to "trademark dilution" whereby lack of enforcement can jeopardise validity. In fact the longer the patent troll--er...holder--waits to litigate the more dramatic the impact.
MSFT has in fact implicitly shown signs of its true intentions regarding Mono. Do you think it was completely out of their minds when they forged an IP "cross licensing" deal with Novell (who has a track record of being the prime champion of Mono?). The longer you wait, and the more ovratures are made in terms of vague IP agrements are made, the more "ammunition" there is for litigation. Plus, MSFT could be waiting for enough mass adoption of MONO or "moonlight" or whatever before they pounce. Maybe they want a whole bunch of critical components of GNOME to be built atop MONO, then get distributed widely in every distro from Ubuntu to Fedora and in between, perhaps convincing the LSB team to include it as a requirement for compliance some day...and then when multiple vendors rely on it sufficiently MSFT can call its trolls out from under the bridge to go SCO on the arses of Red Hat and Canonical and others. However, right now, there just wouldn't be the impact were they to issue an injunction stopping those distros from using Mono without paying protection money, because their OSes are still "too useful" without Mono to make them fold easily.
That is why I worry MORE the longer MSFT waits, not less.
You might ponder why Novell would associate itself with Microsoft--a business of the kind Novell most think would be best to stay far away from. I think that in this case we've seen the story play out in the automotive industry. Perhaps Novel should've heeded the lesson.
Novell is like Chrysler. At one time, not so long ago, both companies were "second bananas" in their respective industries that despite past troubles and having to face major crossroads were showing promise and were prosperous and improving...
Novell: it was direction-less and fighting a losing battle with Microsoft. The flagship products like Netware and the stepchildren it acquired like WordPerfect were starting to look antiquated and were losing market share to WinNT and MSOffice. Then at some point they remade themselves. They embraced open source and did a stellar job acquiring SuSE and Ximian in the face of doubters to building a sustainable, quality business around their Free software and though they've never achieved #1 spot over Red Hat they became a very respectable part of the "big three" Linux-based OSes.
Chrysler: it was direction-less and fighting a losing battle with imports from Asia and Europe. When OPEC was closing the taps and drivers had to hunt for pumps that hadn't run dry and cute, little round imports like the Beetle and the Civic and the Corolla were taking America by storm...and there was Chrysler building big, thirsty, stodgy boxy road boats. Finally facing the prospect of bankruptcy and pleading for a government bailout (the first time) they were forced to face reality. Iaccoca came in as chairman and embraced an whole new set of smaller more efficient front-wheel-drive platforms resulting in early successes like the Aries and Caravan. Chrysler did a stellar job in acquiring AMC from Renault and making the Jeep brand part of a sustainable, increasingly quality business that though far from #1 was a leader in design and once again a respectable part of the "big three" American-based automotive companies.
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Novell: at the peak of its game it started to lose momentum again and though still in a very good financial condition felt the pressure to shake things up again and find a new growth strategy. This time, however they lost sight of their customers and the culture of the company. Someone who clearly didn't "get it" decided Novell should associate themselves with Microsoft. The flawed logic was that as the IP trolls gained prevalence and MS seemed here to stay for eternity that Novell would be the "safe harbour" from litigation and the Linux you could go with for superior interoperability with Windows infrastructure. But the cultures of the two partners could never mix and Linux customers were about OPEN systems and were offended that Novell would poison that openness just to get some cash and potentially check off some boxes on "the facts" list. Furthermore, for all the bad will the deal generated that hurt Novell's business Microsoft did nothing to promote the use of Linux amongst those that received its "SuSE Certificates". In the end MSFT did more to damage Novell than to nurture it.
Chrysler: They finally had more products that scored above average than below in performance and reliability, and it was the "cab forward" era when the cars were sleek, roomy and comfortable without being big lumbering boats. However they were hitting a plateau and needed investment to keep relevant and growing. Against common wisdom they chose to get with Daimler--a company that serves a completely different market segment, were known for quality but rather stodgy designs based in a country with a much more button-down way of doing business. Mopar fans' reactions were rarely favourable to the idea and nobody seriously thought Daimler REALLY thought of Chrysler as an "equal partner". Instead of getting the best of both worlds we got the worst--Chrysler's level of quality and MB's design influences! As the "cab forward" era ended MB did NOTHING to help Chrysler and in fact starved it
...and as such "they win" in terms of precedence regarding trademark (note that this is probably NOT a copytight case--it is strictly TRADEMARK I'm talking about and there are significant legal differences between those forms of IP).
In Canadian legal parlance a "public authority" is a body with some official governing status. This includes governments ranging from local to national and international bodies like the UN.
As such, the use of Olympic marks is given the same protection afforded to such marks as Royal Warrants, names and logos of government departments, logos depicting police badges and so on. The rights of public authorities supercede ALL OTHER RIGHTS and do so retroactively, rendering any trademark rights afforded by sponsorship agreements with third parties void. They can assert their rights over the use of Olympic-affiliated emblems, words, names and phrases in Canada the same way the RCMP can exercise its authority over the use of the iconic red serge uniform and the Queen can allow the use of the phrase "By appointment to the Queen..." phrase on a bottle of HP.
The IOC, COA and/or VANOC, as public authorities, may not even have to make any public assertion regarding an athletes' name as a trademark, nor would they have to establish an agreement regarding the use of an athlete's name. A case could be made (unreasonable or not) for "ambush marketing" where a registered trademark isn't explicitly used but a name, word, phrase or symbol that could even be INFERRED to be associated with the games IS used to imply some official connection. This is what UVEX was accused of--they did not commit any money, time or other resources to the olympic games themselves--they are strictly sponsors of Ms. Vonn. Yes, it does look to be an unreasonable case as most intelligent people wouldn't make the logical leap that they were "THE official supplier of product x" based on their simple announcement, but litigation isn't about being reasonable.
Incidentally this isn't a politically partisan issue and isn't associated with Canada or these games in particular. This is strictly the path taken by the IOC in actions taken in the lead-up to the 1984 summer games in LA. Starting in that year, the IOC mandated as a requirement that host nations and local governments give olympic organisers just the kind of status equivalent to that bestowed upon "public authorities" in Canada. Prior to 1984 the Olympics actively distanced itself from corporate affiliation, but starting in the '70s the games started growing in scale and opulence to a point that governmental and other non-corporate sponsorship could not sustain them. By 1976 the situation became intolerable--the Montreal games were plagued with corruption, poorly constructed facilities that were still under construction right through the actual games themselves and massive budget overruns and debts (the 1976 olympics finally reached break-even status in 2006, and the roof of the stadium was never completed as designed!). On top of that, private businesses were using the work Olympic and affiliated marks rampantly to profit from those games while offical organisers swam in red ink.
In 1980 the free world boycotted the '80 summer games, and the winter games were still small enough to lack profile, but in 1984 the IOC was determined to make the games financially viable and asserted serious control over its brand for the first time--selling the rights to to be official sponsors to bidders for massive amounts of money to meet their goal. In order to make official sponsorship worth such a high value required very draconian enforcement of its rights to prevent free, unofficial use from devaluing the brand. As such, so long as any olympics remains a massive, spectacular hype machine that saturates the world's media you are going to have this sort of activity. It closely parallels the way media cartels and closed software companies build or maintain illegitimate or obsolete business models atop flawed IP law.
since when can the IOC claim copyright on a fact?
If I recall correctly the IOC pursues most of its more ridiculous legal actions based upon trademark laws, not copyright. Trademark simply involves the use of words, and whether they are used to describe a fact doesn't always matter in therms of trademark. If somebody publicises the phrase "Lindsey Vonn won Gold at the Vancouver Olympics" the IOC can, if they feel like being especially nasty pricks, send you a C&D for using the word "Olympics" without their permission, even if it is simply part of a factual statement--and it is possible that the use of an athlete's name could be regulated under trademark law as well. However, you aren't supposed to be able to trademark generic words or the names of people or places unless you are the person or entity with that name or own that property/location (or you've granted/sold rights to someone else to handle the use of said trademark). For example you cannot trademark the use of "Martha Stewart" unless that happens to be your name (and the most famous person of that name does in fact assert trademark rights to her name).
Trademark holders don't normally pursue legal action against the casual use of their trademarks under a certain number of circumstances (news reports, most product reviews and so on) when there is no case to be made that the person who used the trademark for the purposes of trade (ie. to promote or identify their business). However, because UVEX is the sponsor of Lindsey Vonn, and is not in the business of news reporting but rather selling the type of gear that she uses, the IOC in their "wisdom" probably concluded that the mention of Vonn's win on their front page constituted the use of her name to promote their products in association with the Olympics in which she competed. That would be considered the use of an Olympic-associated name, or "mark", for the purposes of "trade"...trademark...and IOC I guess knows or believes they have those rights at least for anything related to the Olympic Games (r) (tm).
Even more outrageously, becasue Olympic organisers are typically heavily subsidised by governments of various levels they are considered what in Canada are termed "public authorities" which gives them in some respects legal status equal to the UN, government departments (including the offices of the Prime Minister, RH Governor General and HRH Queen of Canada) and law enforcement agencies. Yes, it literally means that the use of any symbol, word, phrase or name associated with the Olympic games is legally equivalent to a Royal Warrant and the legal consequences of unauthorised use is similar). As such they merely have to declare public use and they can pursue all use of trademarked words RETROACTIVELY, for ANY purpose if they really want to! As a public authority they can even go after certain cases of "ambush marketing" which is what they might say UVEX is doing--that is when a business infers official association with a public authority it does not actually have without explicitly using a trademark (for example souvenir carts selling t-shirts and other kitch with the Canadian flag or "Vancouver, BC" and a generic illustration of a hockey player or skier in Downtown Vancouver). There is historical precedent in law where small businesses who were sponsors of ATHLETES (which is NOT considered affiliation with the actual olympics) "abused" that sponsorship to the point some might think they were sponsors of the GAMES. That precedent gave the IOC an inch and now they have stretched it to a mile and the mere mention of the olympics or any of the events is grounds to threaten legal action. As a public authority they've even been able to shut down charity campaigns and non-profit events!
Actual, normal human beings (as opposed to IP lawyers) would probably see this as asinine...is that not one of the purposes of sponsorship--promotion affiliated with an athlete's activities of any kind in exchange for funding, equipment, etc? Isn't the insistence
Biofuels need not be made of corn, and no environmentalist has suggested this is the best alternative. The choice is chiefly a political one, meant to prop up corn demand because the US produces an INCREDIBLY MASSIVE GLUT of corn FAR exceeding practical demand. It is a market so distorted by political interference it bears no resemblance to a free market and as such decisions are made in absence of economic soundness. These studies making out biofuel to be dangerous to our food supply make assumptions that would never happen in a free market--that biofuels would continue to make use of human-grade foodstock like corn, that such fuels would replace a sizeable amount of conventional fuel demand, that harvesting biofuel feedstock would not become more efficient, ignores the possibility of using waste food prodcuts and so on.
Americans scarcely eat HALF of the edible food crops grown for their consumption. That INCLUDES crops fed to animals that are subsequently turned into meat. The rest goes to waste--often not even into compost to recycle into fields. It would break your heart to see how much food goes into landfills--buried in anaerobic conditions where it not only doesn't nourish fields for future crops it doesn't even properly decompose for a decade or two!
Make no mistake, there is an AMPLE supply of feedstock for biofuels, and it is well worth the investment in research like making cellulosic ethanol and biodiesels made from waste oils cost-effective as a means of recovering this massive waste.
"Socialism" being a US term meaning "decent roads" I suppose ?
From personal experience, it seems to me, that with a few exceptions, the more socialist the country the worse the roads are. I do sometimes wonder why 100%+ fuel taxes seel to go less and less to actual transportation infrastructure the larger the taxes get...
home ownership is not a requirement for life
Nobody said anything about ownership. Perhaps you live in your mum's basement and she doens't charge you rent, but most grown-ups have to pay for their accomodations, whether it be in the form of rent or some combination of mortgage payment, property taxes and association fees. Those costs are all directly associated with the market value of the property where you live, and as cruel as it seems, those places that are closest to the most places of employment, public transit choices and other amenities are often the most valuable/in-demand/expensive. Living in the most convenient location is indeed NOT the choice for many people.
choosing not to live near your job is a choice
Everyone has choices, but often there is only one reasonable choice. These days, many people don't even have the choice to have a job at all, and those that do have a job aren't going to be picky about where they work...and if that happens to require a lengthy commute so be it, because paying for it a tank at a time is the only affordable option to sizeable relocation costs. Furthermore, not all choices line up. You cannot undo choosing to raise a family, and what if you cannot find a home, a workplace AND a school all within one area? Very few people are that lucky.
let's not pretend that there is a gun to any commuter's head
in some urban centres that is a distinct possibility ;-)
I will note I am in the same boat, stuck with what I now consider to be an unwise house decision and no way to sell, and a 30 minute commute by car with no public transit option. all I can do is carpool
Well, then you DO have the "right to bitch". I don't like it when people complain about their situation when they have no real reason to do so, but regardless of your past "bad choices" you are in a situation now where your choices are restricted, and if something is intolerable you SHOULD complain, and you SHOULD get involved in solutions (like, as you mentioned, carpooling, should it work for you). People who just sit and suffer in silence do nothing to make the world better for themselves OR for anyone else.
Cars are a luxury item, if you live in the kind of town where driving a car is necessary to get to work, you also live in a town that has a transit system that can get you within walking distance.
Urban dwellers can sometimes be really ignorant, insular closed-minded people. Not every job to which people must drive is also served by public transit, nor could it even practically be done.
There are large farms all over North America where owners and workers must drive to work on them (not to mention actually drive the equipment during the actual work). Paying for fuel is no luxury for those people--it is a cost associated with their way of living. Truck drivers have the same problem. They are often owner-operators who must cover their own fuel costs out of what they receive in compensation under contract from transportation companies, and if fuel prices rise too high too quickly there is the potential to lose money at times. Yes, nobody forced people into those career choices, but if nobody did these jobs there would be nobody to produce the food you eat nor deliver it to within walking distance of your comfortable, well-serviced urban home.
Then there are industrial jobs, most often involving shift work at times when public transit is not in operation because passenger volume is so low that it actually is MORE expensive and harmful to the environment to operate than personal transportation. Generally car-pooling is the only option to not driving your own automobile so fuel costs are unsubsidised and more directly felt, and living close to work is not an option because living next to places like large and/or noisy and/or dirty places like power generating stations, mines, mills, factories and so on can be intolerable. Furhtermore, closed-minded people with opinions similar to those you've expressed are often also the most strident NIMBYists, so even if industrial sites are not dependent on locating where fuel and other non-relocatable resources are, they must be put in remote locations so as not to disturb property values, peace of the community and so forth of comfortable urban dwellers. As such, the largest industrial facilities are located outside urban areas, often fare from them near small towns, beyond the reach of public transit.
It would be all wonderful if we had some utopian version of Soviet central planning where subsidised public transit reached all places of work and all shift workers started in sync at pre-designated times (in a manner that doesn't somehow cause power brownouts due to multiple large factories starting up in sync as well) and we all grew our own food in our back yards and on apartment rooves and staple goods were all magically sold at affordable prices by independently-owned corner-stores placed every 5 to 10 city blocks that they somehow obtained without the need to pay for delivery costs...but somehow we cannot achieve those feats of magic in real life--those in Soviet-style economies invariably have to wait in line for even the basic essentials, companies actually like to run their own businesses, people can't be bothered growing their own food and the neighbourhood corner store is neither independently-owned nor offers the most affordable prices. Ultimately, someone somewhere MUST drive and some form of transportation MUST consume fuel and therefore must bear the cost of fuel prices.
So, you might be thinking you're all green and such for not using your automobile, remember that even having the option to do so is considered a luxury by some, and that even by going the "green thing" by not driving you ARE in fact paying for gas even of you are not doing so directly. When the price of the loaf of bread or jug of milk goes up at your local market and people tell you it is because of rising fuel costs, you'd better believe it, because fuel costs are amongst the largest and most volatile expenses of doing business in most industries. WE ALL PAY FOR GAS AND WE HAVE NO CHOICE ABOUT IT.
and we can change the climate to make things better
That is what makes me suspicious of what some might call "gorebots"--those that assume not only the problem exists the way they see it, but that the solution is to try and "undo" it.
I think there is enough scientific evidence to suggest the climare is changing, that the world is slowly warming up, and even that human actvity involving the release of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases has affected climate.
What I am VERY concerned about is that there is so much certainty that the problem is acutually reversible simply by doing less of what they think caused the problem, and so little attention is being given to actually adapting to what might actually be too late to change.
Perhaps we could spend less time and money setting up elabourate carbon counting and trading schemes and start looking at REAL efficiency and conservation efforts (not just those that directly involve carbon emissions), investing in infrastructure to protect costal communities that we are fairly certain are vulnerable to rising sea levels, and so on.
It sounds like this national climate service specifically includes this as part of its proposed mandate, so that somewhat promising.
Is it so rational to ignore the views of the vast majority of climatologists on climate change?
Perhaps not, but it might might be a good idea to consider the views of climatologists with some skepticism, for the same reasons you would the views of petroleum geologists. There are those on both sides of the issue that have a vested interest in convincing policymakers of a certain conclusion.
Makers of AntiVirus software have NEVER overstated the impact of a given computer virus right? Climatologists ought to be almost as trustworthy right?
I just plugged in the network cable
Cable? How quaint!
How's it work with WPA2-secured wireless? Vista kinda stunk at that in my experience, and Win7 would have to do a lot of work to just stink slightly much less be good at it.
Moreover wireless on Vista is almost, but not quite, as stable as Lindsay Lohan and Brittany Spears. On more than one Vista machine I've had the displeasure to deal with the wireless connection randomly decides to go on a bender. I try resetting the router. I try rebooting. No joy. Only fix seems to be to go into the network config, remove the connection and re-enter the security key. No rhyme or reason, and in one case there was a Macbook, a WinXP machine, an iphone a Linux netbook and an HTC Magic phone on wireless with the Vista machine. ALL OF THEM WORKED WITHOUT INTERUPTION EXCEPT THE VISTA MACHINE.
An therein lies the rub: if for any reason you must open that wreched user interface to do ANY config task of ANY kind--whether it be simple troubleshooting, selecting the SSID, entering a key, putting in fixed network settings, the Windows network config UI is the suckiest, most regressive, confusing mess on ANY modern operating system WITHOUT QUESTION. If you want to convince someone that Linux is not harder than Windows, the best way you can do it is to show them how to manage network connections in Vista compared to any current Linux OS.
I imagine that Win7 has made improvements--at least in stability...but that interface? Complete FAIL! I don't care if they've refined it--a polished turd still stinks. It needs to be completely redone again. I know "technical details" can intimidate novices but they should still be accessible. It baffles me as to why the basic details like IP address, netmask, default gateway and DNS entries being made HARDER to find than in XP is considered an IMPROVEMENT.
fine for terminal applications 30+ years ago
It seems to me that is an argument FOR "the UNIX Way" today. Think about why this "way" came about. You had expensive mainframe or mini computers with computational abilities probably even more limited than today's mobile phones, with a user interface with limited display capabilites tied to that system therough a slow serial link with constrained bandwidth, and CPU cycles were a limited, sometimes expensive commodity offered by a limited number of organisations.
Fast forward to today, and what Google is trying to achieve:
Google has this, well, expAnsive array of servers worldwide to provide applications and services in "the cloud" to potentially hundreds of millions of users--limiting computational ability afforded to each user. The user interface is supposed to be this mobile device--again with limited computational resources--with limited display capabilities tied to the "cloud" through a relatively slow wireless link with constrained bandwidth. Megabytes of throughput on this network of wireless links are a limited, sometimes expensive commodity offered by a limited number of carriers.
Seems to me I remember something about history and repetition and being doomed...but I forget the rest ;-)
I'm not familiar enough with the Android platform SDK to say if it is good or bad (whatever "way" a system is architected, the implementation may be good or bad), but I do remember the "Unix Way" worked well in those "dark ages", so if one was, um, INTENT on recreating such a situation it'd probably make sense to do what worked very well in the past.
M$ complying with the law is news.
Not really. MSFT just picks and chooses when to do so. MSFT doesn't believe in rules restricting molopolistic business practices--it has been a belief deeply ingrained within their executive team, including Gates and Ballmer. That belief extends to their resistance to conform with the spirit, if not the letter, of rulings pertaining to those practices including its attempts at tight integration of application-level programming into its OS (Internet Explorer, Media Player), lack of interoperability/closed protocols (bastardised directory services, Exchange...) and so forth. There is a sense of entitlement there--basically they worked damn hard to be industry leaders and they did it by their own hard work, and damn any government who decides how to run their business especially if it hobbles their ability to "compete" and "innovate". Post-Gates this hard-line is changing--albeit at a galcially slow pace--as MSFT tries to show a bit of goodwill in its voluntary contributions to open source. There will be no epic game-changing event (the way Apple had completely overhauled both hardware and software architectures of its flagship product line more than once, or a business strategy equivalent anyways) untill Ballmer retires...if ever.
If this event is news at all, it isn't surprising in the slightest though. MSFT might have fought hard to win its case and it might not think the patent has merit, but when it comes to IP law they very higly respect and conform to it, at least when they are caught with their hand in the patent cookie-jar. Unlike in anti-trust cases, they will only appeal for so long, and they will very willingly comply with rulings not only to the letter, but within the spirit as well (ie. the decision to pull MacOS versions even though they weren't specifically mentioned--because the ruling "probably" covers ALL versions of word). So why the different attitude? MSFT knows it is still a software-centric company and that patentability of software concepts gives them enhanced ability to restrict competition not available with copyright (where IMO software IP should be handled exclusively). No matter what MSFT says critically about the shortcomings of patent law, it wants REFORM, not elimination, of software patents.
If it was in their interest, MSFT would've thrown a billion dollars at lawyers to fight for a ruling in its favour--even if complying was cheaper, but it isn't in their interest in this case. If they slayed this dragon, they know they've set a Bilski-like legal precident exposing a vast amount of their patent library to legal challenge, perhaps even some directly pertaining to its cash-cow MS Office.
Please, direct me to a ARM-based Linux netbook I can buy from a store right now.
Better late than never...
Costco has had such netbooks in stock for some time, but they come with a craptacular pure-vanilla WinCE installation with a half-arsed attempt to make it useful with a handful of basic productivity software and low-quality games (it seems to be marketed as a toy for "tween" kids).
In Canada there is something called the "very personal computer" (VPC) a 7" netbook with a 400MHz embedded processor (I think it is ARM but could be MIPS--I'm 100 percent sure it isn't x86 based). A Canadian company called "fidelity electronics" has them built in hong-kong. It sells on Alibaba for US$135 currently, but is $199 retail from their website, but that isn't where I first saw it: I discovered it at Zellers (a Canadian department store very similar to, but pre-dating and not affiliated with, Target in the US), and I've heard it has shown up at Canadian Tire (I've never seen a store exactly like Canadian Tire outside of Canada actually--their scrip, "Canadian Tire money", is part of our culture) but at an inflated price. At Zellers it is on sale right now basically at cost: CA$139 if I recall. That one most certainly DOES run Linux--nothing totally standard from what it appears but it could be Debian-based. If I didn't have my HP Mini I'd have got it to check it out...
ARM and MIPS netbooks are all over Alibaba et al that "Support" both Linux and WinCE, and in N American retail they are making small inroads (as it gets harder to find Atom netbooks without Windows there seems to be an accompanying rise in the availability of ARM and MIPS cheapies, and as often (or more) than not they run Linux. The stage is set for a watershed moment for such devices: if a big-brand vendor, or several more "fidelity" sized outfits, pick up these cheap Chinese models and package/markets them appropriately they could establish themselves enough to worry MSFT. Some things that are needed for success:
1) they need to be marketed honestly by all vendors: Fidelity on their website seems to be honest but there is precious little information or knowledge at Zellers on the unit, not even a warning that it is not a Windows PC. You'd think they'd learn from competitor Walmart about improper product support and marketing in this area
2) the hardware can come from China but don't let them do the software, documentation or retail packaging for the N American market. I think an interface like Moblin2's would be ideal is given the right polish (I run Moblin 2.1 on my HP Mini and I think it is elegant enough to compete very well with Apple, but it IS still glitchy (once in a while an app will hard crash (but never had total system lock-up), I had to get my infamous Broadcom wireless going by putting in a blob-driver myself...). The stuff is there to make a Linux netbook kick butt on WinCE or even the latest WinMo eye candy is already invented--it just needs to be factory tuned and installed.
3) don't try to be everything to everyone and don't be a "me-too" product--copy Apple's strategy NOT its design. Apple "does its own thing"--its designs are not derivatives of anything. Nothing like an iPod existed until after Apple designed it, and computers were all beige boxes until Apple cape up with something off-the-wall. Despite the fact that Apple's hardware is often quite far below cutting-edge their elegant designs, brilliant marketing and polished user experience garner fierce loyalty and big profits.
Hey if one company can make billions on a bunch of product lines based on an open-source kernel that is incompatible with Windows then why not someone else?
The thing is, many electronics vendors DO void warranty work for harsh operating environments. If your mobile phone gets just damp enough to turn the litmus sticker red you are SOL. If it can be determined that dust or temperature extremes were the root cause of failure then many devices are not covered.
Besides that, from my own personal experience, tobacco smoke residue has to be the second most hazardous substance on electronics I have encountered (the first being corrosive sulphur dust). I have seen computers in coal mines covered in black soot that were much less affected than computers from point of sale systems used at pubs when smoking was allowed there. At the mine computers easily lasted twice as long with simple maintenance with an aerosol dusted can. NOTHING could clean that nicotine and tar sludge out of those smokers computers!
I am actually surprised that, with all the conditions that can void a warranty on electronics, that anyone would be surprised that smoking would void a warranty. The only thing that I find surprising was the really lame excuse that it was a biohazard. Apple should just be honest and say the real reason: tobacco sludge in your computer made it break, and since you put it there it isn't our problem and you have to pay for it. I guess since some heavily addicted smokers have thin skins such a policy should be clearly but diplomatically pointed out at time of purchase.
Funny how most of the time, an unregulated market increases the cost of items taht should be dirt-cheap, until they're an unaffordable luxury to most people.
Markets are NEVER "unregulated". Free markets by their nature become "self regulated" over time, otherwise they are non-free markets regulated by outside forces like the Government, cartels and so on. Most of the time, in fact, free markets COMMODITISE goods. If goods become unaffordable it becomes economically feasible for competitors to offer goods at a lower cost. As a market grows economies of scale make the cost to make goods lower. If supply outpaces demand the cost is driven so low that the weakest players leave the market and prices come back, and over time an equilibrium is reached. The personal computer hardware market is relatively unregulated, and though one architecture dominates no one manufacturer does, and computers are most certainly NOT "unaffordable luxuries".
And how the quality of the products and services doesn't matter, so long as you can dupe or force people into buying it.
So basically, you must resort to unethical, deceptive and destructive behavior to escape the economic balance of supply and demand. Libertairans aren't all anarchists. If you are forcing people to buy your crap it is extortion, of you dupe them it is fraud. Not only is that unethical it is criminal. Libertarians generally seek to protect personal liberties, and the bulk of criminal law is designed on the basis of protecting the personal liberties of one party against abusive behaviour of another party seeking to remove the liberties of others. That's quite different from regulation.
In fact, non-free software (e.g., Windows and other Microsoft wares) is a great example of this. Is Office 7 worth $400? Nope, but because it's a free market, the price gets inflated to this point.
Closed software is a great example of a NON-free, protected and regulated market. As opposed to the hardware market, where PCs are commoditised and cheap and the market is competitive, the software industry is a "false market". The entire business model of Microsoft relies completely on government regulations protecting corporate "intellectual property". MSFT depends on skewed copyright and patent protections and contracts that remove as many individual property rightas as possible. If If regulation was "right sized" and based on a foundation of protecting one party from removing the liberties of another partry (as opposed to empowering them to remove others' liberties) then MSFT would probably not exist in the form it does today, if at all.
MSOffice costs $400 because MSFT can hide source code, sue people who try to reverse engineer or interoperate on their own terms, and extort "licensing fees" from those who imitate the appearance or functionality of their software--almost none of which is a "novel invention" or real innovation. MSFT's monopoly, high prices and poor quality products have nothing to do with free markets or even capitalism in general. Their monopoly came into being because they used flawed regulations to their advantage. Establishing a free market is the CURE to the MSFT problem, NOT the cause!
Remember, the "free market" is not free. It is manipulated like a puppet by those who hold the reins, those who do not care about your wellbeing or options in life.
That "selfishness" causes the most damage when it is not kept in balance. The reason we have markets that do not operate freely is because the liberties of all players are not protected equally. That is why MSFT can charge $400 for a product that now costs them $4 to produce, and why movies can make hundreds of millions and celebrities can make millions play acting, ad nauseum.