Actually, it doesn't say that. What it says is that if they/think/ you are committing a criminal act, they will give your info to the police. There doesn't necessarily have to be any proof. That "sole judgement" part is what scares me.
Right. But as I pointed out, their privacy policy says that they're not going to listen in on your phone calls. So if they're not listening in on your phone calls, what would make them think that you're committing a criminal act? I suppose a really odd useage pattern, like making or receiving hundreds of very short calls a day might do it. But more likely, they're going to "think" that you're acting criminally when the police tell them that they (the police) think you are.
There's no denying that the TOS in question was written by lawyers working for Vonage without a lot of input from lawyers working for their customers. But isn't that the case with most T'sOS?
All I'm saying is that this is a much smaller deal than the original article implied, and than the conclusion that/.-ers immediately jumped to.
Privacy policies are meaningless PR babble. Wasn't there recently a case where the judge said that the privacy policy is not a contract and a company cannot be held to it?
If so, I'm sure the FTC would be interested in hearing about it. If a company says they'll behave one way in their privacy policy and yet they go and do something completely different, they've essentially lied to the customer. Now, maybe that's not illegal, and maybe it's not technically a breach of contract. But it is a bait-and-switch, and the FTC doesn't smile on that sort of thing.
Um, how exactly are drug dealers hurting me again? Selling a product to willing buyers at a price point determined by supply and demand. Damn capitalist pigs! Oh, wait...
Well, for starters, they're using all sorts of publicly funded infrastructure, but they're most likely not paying a dime in taxes. They're drastically increasing the need for health care, mostly among a population that doesn't have any health insurance, and that gets paid for out of your pocket. They tend to be violent and cause direct physical injury to each other and to innocent bystanders, possibly including you someday, and this requires an increase in police resources, which cost money that comes from the taxes that you pay.
We do _NOT_ need to be protected from massive corporations. What we need is for our politicians to _STOP_ protecting big corporations from us.
That's an interesting viewpoint. I'd agree with it to an extent, but I also think that, for example, worker safety laws are pretty damn important. Businesses will intimidate and take advantage of employees and customers if there aren't consequences to those actions.
I heard an interesting report about the towing industry just last night. Apparently, in the Baltimore/Washington DC area, there have been a number of cases where tow truck drivers have towed cars that were parked perfectly legally, kept the cars for months before telling the owners where their cars are, and then demanding that the owners pay "storage fees" if they want their cars back. The industry is essentially unregulated. A few years ago, the towing industry convinced Congress to pass a law giving exclusive authority over the industry to the federal government. And then, it convinced Congress to pass another law which eliminated the federal agency which regulates towing! You've got to hand it to them for shrewdness, but it's not a good situation.
The above could be construed to either affirm or refute your point. On the one hand, the clear problem is that Congress passed two bad laws in a row (probably not a record). On the other hand, there are clearly abuses in the towing industry, and there needs to be some sort of regulation, even if that only means giving states the right to say that it's illegal for tow truck drivers to steal cars.
It does help to read more of the TOS than what's quoted in the/. summary. For example, the section leading up to the quoted part goes like this:
1.3 Lawful Use of Service and Device
1.3.1 Prohibited Uses You agree to use the Service and Device only for lawful purposes. This means that you agree not to use them for transmitting or receiving any communication or material of any kind when in Vonage's sole judgment the transmission, receipt or possession of such communication or material (i) would constitute a criminal offense, give rise to a civil liability, or otherwise violate any applicable local, state, national or international law or (ii) encourages conduct that would constitute a criminal offense, give rise to a civil liability, or otherwise violate any applicable local, state, national or international law.
These are the 'restrictions' they're talking about. What they're saying here is that if you're using their equipment for criminal purposes, and if they know about it, they have the right to terminate your service, call the cops, and tell 'em what they know. I don't see how they have a lot of choice about this: if they did anything else, they'd open themselves up to all sorts of liability.
But it doesn't mean that they're going to monitor all your conversations or drop the hammer when you call your bookie. According to their privacy policy:
Vonage will not read, listen to or disclose to any third parties private e-mail, conversations, or other communications that are transmitted using Vonage services except as required to ensure proper operation of services or as otherwise authorized by law.
They also tell you in their privacy policy that they might use your data in ways you might not like: i.e. tell the cops who you are and where you live:
Vonage may use customer identifiable information to investigate and help prevent potentially unlawful activity or activities that threaten the integrity of service or network integrity or otherwise violate Vonage's Service Level Agreement.
This should come as no surprise to anyone, and any phone company would do the same thing. But what the phone company can (and must) do is well established in both our culture and our laws. Vonage, which for many purposes would probably prefer not to be considered a phone company, is offering a relatively new kind of service, and they really need to make these things explicit.
There's a lot of pressure on the FCC right now to regulate VOIP providers and make them make their networks easily tappable by law enforcement agencies. That's not entirely unreasonable... you don't want drug dealers and terrorists to have an untappable, portable, fast, cheap communications system with fixed cost long distance to boot.
Our role as citizens that have some understanding of the tech involved is to make sure our representatives know that for tapping purposes, law enforcement should treat VOIP just like POTS service. Essentially, they should have to jump through exactly the same hoops in order to get permission to tap VOIP that they do to tap POTS or cell service.
IANAL, but it would seem that the mere fact that they say it doesn't necessarily make it true. Take the bit about changing terms becoming effective as soon as they're posted on their web site. If they go and dramatically change their terms of service, and then the find that you're in violation of the new TOS, they'd have a hard time showing that you actually agreed to the TOS.
I'm sure this gives them a big stick to chase customers around with, but I doubt they'd ever let a case get to court where their TOS might actually be tested.
Without comparable increases in capacity, it seems inevitable that total software development capacity is destined to fall far short of total demand by the end of the decade.
There are a lot of unemployed sofware engineers out there who will be glad to hear this bit of news.
Of course, if market forces have free play, this will not actually happen, since the enlightened self interest of software suppliers will provide the capacity required to satisfy the demand.
Is it just me, or is it terribly ironic that Microsoft is talking about letting "market forces have free play"?
Yesterday when I first checked there were over 300 reviews, most of them negative and the book scored only 2 stars total. Today, the book has 81 reviews with an average rating of 3 1/2 stars.
Weird. This is the first instance I'm aware of where slashdotting actually decreases the response to the target!
Replacing Windows with Linux? I haven't heard of that one, but who knows.
There are those who consider that any PC with Windows installed is "broken" in any number of ways and can only be fixed by means of drastic measures. The point, of course, is that in order to require "repair men" to obtain a license, you'd have to come up with some sort of definition of what constitutes a "repair," or of the conditions under which a computer is "broken."
I'm not saying old people are dumb, it's just hard for them sometimes to understand what a desktop is.
Okay, I'll bite: what's a desktop?
Answer: the desktop is an illusion, and a vague metaphor. Back in the early days of Macintosh, the metaphor a bit more concrete than it is now. In addition to the Trash and document icons that looked like sheets of paper, we had desk accessories similar to those you might find on a real desk (scrap book, puzzle, clock, note pad, etc.) and applications that tried hard to support the "desktop" metaphor. Most importantly, Apple shipped an introductory program which explained the metaphor and taught people to do things like point, click, drag, and use menus. These days, GUI's are a lot more complicated, and there's an awful lot that doesn't fit into the desktop metaphor at all. Many, if not most, applications are designed with complete disregard for the metaphor. In short, the "desktop" notion has pretty well outlived its usefulness. It's no surprise that new users (young or old) have a hard time figuring out what a "desktop" is, because today's interfaces give you darn little clue.
I can't wait in 50 years when most people will have grown up with computers and the basics of them will be familiar.
Fifty years from now, we'll have about as much clue about the tech du jour as our grandparents have now. Stuff most people would consider "basics" will almost certainly change. The "desktop" business will surely have given up the ghost by then, and people will have a hard time undestanding why you'd want to have a "central" processing unit. New tech based on multistate circuitry could make binary computing seem quaint. Global warming and astronomically expensive energy may give people some badly needed perspective and actually reduce our reliance on electronics. Who knows?
So the first time you hear yourself tell your grandchildren "Back when I was your age, we used machines called 'computers' to do that...", just remember: you heard it here first.
Backing up a hard drive? Swapping one hard drive for another? Swapping one hard drive for another because the first had failed? Re-installing Windows? Replacing Windows with Linux? Modifying the Windows registry? Unplugging one mouse and plugging in another? Brushing dirt from the lens of a (optical) mouse? Moving files around?
There are so many ways that a computer can "break" that don't require getting out your soldering iron... I'd think it'd be difficult to differentiate between someone who "repairs" computers and someone who "supports" computers.
Clearly, the laptop with the longest battery life is this 800 MHz Titanium PowerBook G4 I'm using. The battery has run down so far that there's a single blinking LED when I press the button on the battery, which is supposed to mean "empty", and the battery status item in the menu bar has an X in it, signifying that the PowerBook doesn't even think there's a battery there at all. It's been running like this for at least 40 minutes and shows no sign of giving up. This after several hours running with Airport enabled, the screen turned up, and a USB-powered scanner attached and running.
You wanna know what I think? Maybe not. Anyway, here's what I think...
I think a bunch of marketting types have been watching Star Trek twenty-four hours a day for several years now in an effort to get to know their most covetted target audience, the alpha geeks. They've come to the conclusion that we technical types fantasize about an all-knowing, all-powerful tricorder type of device which confers success, smartness, and admiration upon its owner.
And I think they're mostly right. Most of us want success, smartness, and admiration, and we'll happily pay for a device that'll bring it instantly. The perfect all-in-one gadget is the holy grail that geeks sought long before the invention of the transistor. It's the reason for the constant evolution of the Swiss Army knife, and the Leatherman. It's the reason that people keep building cars that fly, sort of. The gadget that beats all other gadgets is the nerd version of a no-hassle weight loss system, hair growing tonic, love potion #9, etc.
But ultimately, they're wrong. When we get over our dreams of world domination and ultimate hipness, most of us realize that what's really important is having the right tool for the job, not some feature-laden gadget that flies, sort of.
After all, true fans realize that even on Star Trek, the tricorder, camera, phaser, etc. are all different devices.
The article cites labor costs as the main impetus for creating these self-fastening fasteners, but I think it's much more interesting to consider new applications.
One thing about nuts and bolts is that in order to use them, you have to place them where you have access and enough clearance to be able to attach a tool. You couldn't use nuts and bolts to fasten two blocks together, for example, unless you have holes extending through at least one of the blocks. With these things, you can bolt two blocks together with no obvious access points, and you can unbolt them at any time.
The benefits of totally blind fastening aren't completely obvious because we've worked out other solutions to the problem. Basically, we either weld things together, or we use some sort of snap-fit system, or we leave access holes if we might need to reverse the attachment. But I expect there will be some interesting applications for these things in the future.
I don't care a bit about the malware makers at Real, but what's uncool is people massively buying iPods instead of players that support multiple, vendor-neutral standards.
iPod supports multiple, vendor-neutral standards (or perhaps a better words is "formats"). MP3, AAC, WAV, AIFF.
I want my player to be a big file system in a small box that supports OGG, MP3, FLAC, WAV, SPEEX,
iPod is pretty much that... a big file system in a small box. You can store whatever data you want on it, including OGG, FLAC, SPEEX, but if you want the file system to also play music, you'd best stick with MP3, AAC, etc.
and eventually popular video formats, HTML, etc. as well.
Again, you can store whatever you want on an iPod. As for video, I hear that Peter Jackson used a bunch of iPods for transferring digital video from the set to the editing facility during production of the Lord of the Rings movies. If it's good enough for storing LOTR scenes, it's good enough for carrying around clips of my dog.
Now as far as actually playing the video, I think you'd be disappointed with the fidelity of the current iPod's screen. Black and white, comparatively low resolution... it just wouldn't do. But don't think that Apple isn't a few steps ahead of you on this idea.
HTML... again, you can certainly store all the HTML you want on your iPod (up to 20GB), but displaying it, not so much. Would you really want to view 20GB of HTML on a small black and white screen?
I want it to be able to record to those formats, too, off the built-in AM/FM radio and from line-in.
Your issue here isn't so much with Apple as it is with the record companies. As I understand it, they're not so keen on giving music away. If you can come up with a reasonable (as defined by them) DRM and licensing scheme that benefits their bottom lines, you might have something.
I want it to support downloadable codec plug-ins.
What you really want is for Apple to give you the API for writing your own codecs.
If it holds "several thousand songs" and I buy that many at a dollar a piece from an online store, I want my wife to be able to play them, too,
So far, so good. You can download songs from iTMS onto as many iPods as you want if I'm not mistaken. (Haven't tried it with large numbers of iPods, but small numbers are okay.) And you can share tunes with other machines on your network, up to a small-ish limit.
Frankly, it seems that your issues really revolve around Apple's DRM. And all the legit stores and players use DRM, it's just a matter of whose. If you want music without DRM, you'll have to fight with the copyright owners, and they haven't been friendly these last few years.
I don't want to take anything away from IBM or The Open Group, indeed, I'd applaud them for their work on the side of goodness and light. But doesn't something along these lines seem to happen every few years? It feels like El Niño is back again.
Open standards are a good thing when the alternative is a proprietary "standard" that someone else controls, or when there's no standard at all. Open standards are not so good when you control (and maybe license to others) the de facto standard. Microsoft and others have shown us many times that control over a standard is power, and can be leveraged to gain more power. Conversely, open standards tend to level the playing field and lower barriers to entry into a market.
Therefore, a dominant vendor in a given market can be counted on to resist open standards, and will only support them when customers demand it or when attempting to move into a new market where it is not currently dominant. Marketplace underdogs will push for open standards, and if enough of them get together and agree on a standard, together they may have enough influence to bully the dominant player into going along. Or, if there are two or three players all vying for a leading position, an open standard may be adopted quickly as one tries to get a step ahead of the others, and the others quickly follow suit.
Networking technologies like TCP/IP, ethernet, 10baseT, and 802.11x seem so firmly entrenched now that it's hard to imagine working without them. But there was a time for each of those standards when it wasn't clear at all that that's the standard that would win. The same can surely be said of all sorts of other things that we take completely for granted now, like NTSC video, 110 VAC, ASCII, 8-bit bytes, etc. Look into the history of any real standard and you'll doubtless find a plethora of proprietary standards and an industry movement to adopt an open, unpropriatery standard.
The Newton Community is a very interesting case of users continuing to support a product which for all intents and purposes should have died years ago.
Why, exactly, should Newton "have died years ago"? You buy a product to satsify a need. If the product satisfies that need, and continues to do so, why stop using it?
Most of us have literally bought into the notion that only the latest, greatest version of a product can possibly meet our needs. Along with that comes the idea that only a product that's actively supported by its manufacturer is suitable for use. We're "consumers" because we buy a thing and use it until it's all used up -- we "consume" it -- and then we go buy another thing. This is great for an industry whose financial health is based on "upgrades." If we didn't all go buy new computers every few years, the computer industry would be in much worse shape than it is. But it's not necessarily in our own best interests.
Newton is a case where a product designed well and implemented well served its purpose well, and continues to do so. The manufacturer no longer supports it, but that doesn't really make a difference to those for whom Newton currently works.
If Nokia suddenly went out of business, would you instantly run out and buy a new phone? If Palm went belly-up, would you trash your Tungsten and buy something else? And if you would, why?
Seems to me, as someone who doesn't wear glasses and may therefore be completely unqualified to answer, that there are some tradeoffs to consider:
1. There's a tradeoff between having the surgery now and putting it off. Having it now, you risk missing out on better technology and better procedures in a few years. Putting it off, you lose out on having improved vision for however long you put it off.
2. There's a huge, important tradeoff between spending your lump-o-cash now and investing it. If you spend it now, you won't have it later. If you invest it wisely now, you can have a lot more later to spend on things like eye surgery and whatever else.
3. In having the surgery, you're trading risk (of worse vision than you have now) for potential convenience (of having better vision than you have now).
Yeah, I know the above doesn't give you any answers, but maybe it'll help frame the questions.
they must believe they have a really strong case to go up against two of the biggest cash reserves in the entire Western hemisphere at the same time.
I'm sure that for the past year or two you've either been vacationing on another planet, or else in head-down mode working on your latest project. Else, you'd have heard about SCO suing not only IBM and Novell, but also Red Hat, Autozone, and DaimlerChrysler Corporation, and also threatening to sue 1500 other companies, all based on essentially zero evidence and some very shaky legal theory.
See, the plan in the SCO case and probably in this one as well is for the small company to sue a larger one for enough money to get the larger company to either settle or buiy the small company out, but not so much money that the large company calls the small company's bluff and decides to fight the suit.
SCO apparently misjudged the ratio of lawsuit scariness to pleasant settlement options, and the result is that it's getting its ass kicked in five different cases. Maybe this company will be a little less greedy. Maybe Microsoft and Apple won't take kindly to being pushed around. You never know, but it'll be interesting to see how it shapes up.
They aren't. In none of their claims in any of their lawsuits do they ever accuse anyone of infringing their copyrights by putting their stuff into Linux.
According to the article, these ELF charges are part of two new documents filed in the IBM case.
One can only conclude that this is a SCO shenanigan aimed at blocking IBM's motion for summary judgement regarding noninfringment of SCO's copyrights. IANAL, but Autozone's lawyers (and the folks over at Groklaw) seem to think that if IBM gets the declaration, SCO will instantly lose its case against Autozone (and probably DaimlerChrysler and Red Hat, too). So SCO really needs to delay that judgement as long as possible.
On the other hand, if SCO was serious about this ELF stuff, you'd think they should have brought it up a year ago when it filed against IBM, or at some point fairly early on in discovery.
Frankly, I can't believe anyone would pay $1M for a coding error. Hell, the guys I work with make coding errors all the time, and practically for free!
Pointing to Creative's Nomad line as iPod knockoffs is far from accurate.
Whatever you think of the quality of either iPod or Creative's Zen Touch, it's hard to debate that the Zen Touch is a "cheaper knockoff" of the iPod. It's obviously cheaper (i.e. less expensive) and a look at it's picture shows clearly that it's a knockoff, (i.e a copy of something popular). The UI as depicted looks quite like that of the iPod, and the form is about the same. Really, the only thing it appears to be missing is Apple's scroll wheel interface, and Apple probably has a patent on that.
So if you prefer the phrase "uncostly imitation" to "cheaper knockoff," that's fine with me.
But heck, the Zen can't even play AAC files! You can't use it with the world's most popular online music store! And it's not even all that much less expensive. I think I'll stick with "cheaper knockoff," thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny... until flat screen televisions came out, 99.99% of all video was "projected" onto curved surfaces.
Actually, it doesn't say that. What it says is that if they /think/ you are committing a criminal act, they will give your info to the police. There doesn't necessarily have to be any proof. That "sole judgement" part is what scares me.
/.-ers immediately jumped to.
Right. But as I pointed out, their privacy policy says that they're not going to listen in on your phone calls. So if they're not listening in on your phone calls, what would make them think that you're committing a criminal act? I suppose a really odd useage pattern, like making or receiving hundreds of very short calls a day might do it. But more likely, they're going to "think" that you're acting criminally when the police tell them that they (the police) think you are.
There's no denying that the TOS in question was written by lawyers working for Vonage without a lot of input from lawyers working for their customers. But isn't that the case with most T'sOS?
All I'm saying is that this is a much smaller deal than the original article implied, and than the conclusion that
Privacy policies are meaningless PR babble. Wasn't there recently a case where the judge said that the privacy policy is not a contract and a company cannot be held to it?
If so, I'm sure the FTC would be interested in hearing about it. If a company says they'll behave one way in their privacy policy and yet they go and do something completely different, they've essentially lied to the customer. Now, maybe that's not illegal, and maybe it's not technically a breach of contract. But it is a bait-and-switch, and the FTC doesn't smile on that sort of thing.
Um, how exactly are drug dealers hurting me again? Selling a product to willing buyers at a price point determined by supply and demand. Damn capitalist pigs! Oh, wait...
Well, for starters, they're using all sorts of publicly funded infrastructure, but they're most likely not paying a dime in taxes. They're drastically increasing the need for health care, mostly among a population that doesn't have any health insurance, and that gets paid for out of your pocket. They tend to be violent and cause direct physical injury to each other and to innocent bystanders, possibly including you someday, and this requires an increase in police resources, which cost money that comes from the taxes that you pay.
And, um, oh yeah... they're poisoning our children.
We do _NOT_ need to be protected from massive corporations. What we need is for our politicians to _STOP_ protecting big corporations from us.
That's an interesting viewpoint. I'd agree with it to an extent, but I also think that, for example, worker safety laws are pretty damn important. Businesses will intimidate and take advantage of employees and customers if there aren't consequences to those actions.
I heard an interesting report about the towing industry just last night. Apparently, in the Baltimore/Washington DC area, there have been a number of cases where tow truck drivers have towed cars that were parked perfectly legally, kept the cars for months before telling the owners where their cars are, and then demanding that the owners pay "storage fees" if they want their cars back. The industry is essentially unregulated. A few years ago, the towing industry convinced Congress to pass a law giving exclusive authority over the industry to the federal government. And then, it convinced Congress to pass another law which eliminated the federal agency which regulates towing! You've got to hand it to them for shrewdness, but it's not a good situation.
The above could be construed to either affirm or refute your point. On the one hand, the clear problem is that Congress passed two bad laws in a row (probably not a record). On the other hand, there are clearly abuses in the towing industry, and there needs to be some sort of regulation, even if that only means giving states the right to say that it's illegal for tow truck drivers to steal cars.
These are the 'restrictions' they're talking about. What they're saying here is that if you're using their equipment for criminal purposes, and if they know about it, they have the right to terminate your service, call the cops, and tell 'em what they know. I don't see how they have a lot of choice about this: if they did anything else, they'd open themselves up to all sorts of liability.
But it doesn't mean that they're going to monitor all your conversations or drop the hammer when you call your bookie. According to their privacy policy:
They also tell you in their privacy policy that they might use your data in ways you might not like: i.e. tell the cops who you are and where you live:
This should come as no surprise to anyone, and any phone company would do the same thing. But what the phone company can (and must) do is well established in both our culture and our laws. Vonage, which for many purposes would probably prefer not to be considered a phone company, is offering a relatively new kind of service, and they really need to make these things explicit.
There's a lot of pressure on the FCC right now to regulate VOIP providers and make them make their networks easily tappable by law enforcement agencies. That's not entirely unreasonable... you don't want drug dealers and terrorists to have an untappable, portable, fast, cheap communications system with fixed cost long distance to boot.
Our role as citizens that have some understanding of the tech involved is to make sure our representatives know that for tapping purposes, law enforcement should treat VOIP just like POTS service. Essentially, they should have to jump through exactly the same hoops in order to get permission to tap VOIP that they do to tap POTS or cell service.
IANAL, but it would seem that the mere fact that they say it doesn't necessarily make it true. Take the bit about changing terms becoming effective as soon as they're posted on their web site. If they go and dramatically change their terms of service, and then the find that you're in violation of the new TOS, they'd have a hard time showing that you actually agreed to the TOS.
I'm sure this gives them a big stick to chase customers around with, but I doubt they'd ever let a case get to court where their TOS might actually be tested.
According to the article:
Without comparable increases in capacity, it seems inevitable that total software development capacity is destined to fall far short of total demand by the end of the decade.
There are a lot of unemployed sofware engineers out there who will be glad to hear this bit of news.
Of course, if market forces have free play, this will not actually happen, since the enlightened self interest of software suppliers will provide the capacity required to satisfy the demand.
Is it just me, or is it terribly ironic that Microsoft is talking about letting "market forces have free play"?
Yesterday when I first checked there were over 300 reviews, most of them negative and the book scored only 2 stars total. Today, the book has 81 reviews with an average rating of 3 1/2 stars.
Weird. This is the first instance I'm aware of where slashdotting actually decreases the response to the target!
Replacing Windows with Linux? I haven't heard of that one, but who knows.
There are those who consider that any PC with Windows installed is "broken" in any number of ways and can only be fixed by means of drastic measures. The point, of course, is that in order to require "repair men" to obtain a license, you'd have to come up with some sort of definition of what constitutes a "repair," or of the conditions under which a computer is "broken."
I'm not saying old people are dumb, it's just hard for them sometimes to understand what a desktop is.
Okay, I'll bite: what's a desktop?
Answer: the desktop is an illusion, and a vague metaphor. Back in the early days of Macintosh, the metaphor a bit more concrete than it is now. In addition to the Trash and document icons that looked like sheets of paper, we had desk accessories similar to those you might find on a real desk (scrap book, puzzle, clock, note pad, etc.) and applications that tried hard to support the "desktop" metaphor. Most importantly, Apple shipped an introductory program which explained the metaphor and taught people to do things like point, click, drag, and use menus. These days, GUI's are a lot more complicated, and there's an awful lot that doesn't fit into the desktop metaphor at all. Many, if not most, applications are designed with complete disregard for the metaphor. In short, the "desktop" notion has pretty well outlived its usefulness. It's no surprise that new users (young or old) have a hard time figuring out what a "desktop" is, because today's interfaces give you darn little clue.
I can't wait in 50 years when most people will have grown up with computers and the basics of them will be familiar.
Fifty years from now, we'll have about as much clue about the tech du jour as our grandparents have now. Stuff most people would consider "basics" will almost certainly change. The "desktop" business will surely have given up the ghost by then, and people will have a hard time undestanding why you'd want to have a "central" processing unit. New tech based on multistate circuitry could make binary computing seem quaint. Global warming and astronomically expensive energy may give people some badly needed perspective and actually reduce our reliance on electronics. Who knows?
So the first time you hear yourself tell your grandchildren "Back when I was your age, we used machines called 'computers' to do that...", just remember: you heard it here first.
What specific actions constitute a "repair"?
Backing up a hard drive?
Swapping one hard drive for another?
Swapping one hard drive for another because the first had failed?
Re-installing Windows?
Replacing Windows with Linux?
Modifying the Windows registry?
Unplugging one mouse and plugging in another?
Brushing dirt from the lens of a (optical) mouse?
Moving files around?
There are so many ways that a computer can "break" that don't require getting out your soldering iron... I'd think it'd be difficult to differentiate between someone who "repairs" computers and someone who "supports" computers.
Clearly, the laptop with the longest battery life is this 800 MHz Titanium PowerBook G4 I'm using. The battery has run down so far that there's a single blinking LED when I press the button on the battery, which is supposed to mean "empty", and the battery status item in the menu bar has an X in it, signifying that the PowerBook doesn't even think there's a battery there at all. It's been running like this for at least 40 minutes and shows no sign of giving up. This after several hours running with Airport enabled, the screen turned up, and a USB-powered scanner attached and running.
Three cheers for Li+ batteries!
You wanna know what I think? Maybe not. Anyway, here's what I think...
I think a bunch of marketting types have been watching Star Trek twenty-four hours a day for several years now in an effort to get to know their most covetted target audience, the alpha geeks. They've come to the conclusion that we technical types fantasize about an all-knowing, all-powerful tricorder type of device which confers success, smartness, and admiration upon its owner.
And I think they're mostly right. Most of us want success, smartness, and admiration, and we'll happily pay for a device that'll bring it instantly. The perfect all-in-one gadget is the holy grail that geeks sought long before the invention of the transistor. It's the reason for the constant evolution of the Swiss Army knife, and the Leatherman. It's the reason that people keep building cars that fly, sort of. The gadget that beats all other gadgets is the nerd version of a no-hassle weight loss system, hair growing tonic, love potion #9, etc.
But ultimately, they're wrong. When we get over our dreams of world domination and ultimate hipness, most of us realize that what's really important is having the right tool for the job, not some feature-laden gadget that flies, sort of.
After all, true fans realize that even on Star Trek, the tricorder, camera, phaser, etc. are all different devices.
Article claims it would be good for National Security...
I'm pretty sure that however much a 12-foot monitor costs, the money could be much better spent on funding homeland security efforts in our cities.
The article cites labor costs as the main impetus for creating these self-fastening fasteners, but I think it's much more interesting to consider new applications.
One thing about nuts and bolts is that in order to use them, you have to place them where you have access and enough clearance to be able to attach a tool. You couldn't use nuts and bolts to fasten two blocks together, for example, unless you have holes extending through at least one of the blocks. With these things, you can bolt two blocks together with no obvious access points, and you can unbolt them at any time.
The benefits of totally blind fastening aren't completely obvious because we've worked out other solutions to the problem. Basically, we either weld things together, or we use some sort of snap-fit system, or we leave access holes if we might need to reverse the attachment. But I expect there will be some interesting applications for these things in the future.
In fact, engineers don't give a predicted lifespan on these models.
I'm not sure that fact would comfort me were I to need one of these things.
I don't care a bit about the malware makers at Real, but what's uncool is people massively buying iPods instead of players that support multiple, vendor-neutral standards.
iPod supports multiple, vendor-neutral standards (or perhaps a better words is "formats"). MP3, AAC, WAV, AIFF.
I want my player to be a big file system in a small box that supports OGG, MP3, FLAC, WAV, SPEEX,
iPod is pretty much that... a big file system in a small box. You can store whatever data you want on it, including OGG, FLAC, SPEEX, but if you want the file system to also play music, you'd best stick with MP3, AAC, etc.
and eventually popular video formats, HTML, etc. as well.
Again, you can store whatever you want on an iPod. As for video, I hear that Peter Jackson used a bunch of iPods for transferring digital video from the set to the editing facility during production of the Lord of the Rings movies. If it's good enough for storing LOTR scenes, it's good enough for carrying around clips of my dog.
Now as far as actually playing the video, I think you'd be disappointed with the fidelity of the current iPod's screen. Black and white, comparatively low resolution... it just wouldn't do. But don't think that Apple isn't a few steps ahead of you on this idea.
HTML... again, you can certainly store all the HTML you want on your iPod (up to 20GB), but displaying it, not so much. Would you really want to view 20GB of HTML on a small black and white screen?
I want it to be able to record to those formats, too, off the built-in AM/FM radio and from line-in.
Your issue here isn't so much with Apple as it is with the record companies. As I understand it, they're not so keen on giving music away. If you can come up with a reasonable (as defined by them) DRM and licensing scheme that benefits their bottom lines, you might have something.
I want it to support downloadable codec plug-ins.
What you really want is for Apple to give you the API for writing your own codecs.
If it holds "several thousand songs" and I buy that many at a dollar a piece from an online store, I want my wife to be able to play them, too,
So far, so good. You can download songs from iTMS onto as many iPods as you want if I'm not mistaken. (Haven't tried it with large numbers of iPods, but small numbers are okay.) And you can share tunes with other machines on your network, up to a small-ish limit.
Frankly, it seems that your issues really revolve around Apple's DRM. And all the legit stores and players use DRM, it's just a matter of whose. If you want music without DRM, you'll have to fight with the copyright owners, and they haven't been friendly these last few years.
I don't want to take anything away from IBM or The Open Group, indeed, I'd applaud them for their work on the side of goodness and light. But doesn't something along these lines seem to happen every few years? It feels like El Niño is back again.
Open standards are a good thing when the alternative is a proprietary "standard" that someone else controls, or when there's no standard at all. Open standards are not so good when you control (and maybe license to others) the de facto standard. Microsoft and others have shown us many times that control over a standard is power, and can be leveraged to gain more power. Conversely, open standards tend to level the playing field and lower barriers to entry into a market.
Therefore, a dominant vendor in a given market can be counted on to resist open standards, and will only support them when customers demand it or when attempting to move into a new market where it is not currently dominant. Marketplace underdogs will push for open standards, and if enough of them get together and agree on a standard, together they may have enough influence to bully the dominant player into going along. Or, if there are two or three players all vying for a leading position, an open standard may be adopted quickly as one tries to get a step ahead of the others, and the others quickly follow suit.
Networking technologies like TCP/IP, ethernet, 10baseT, and 802.11x seem so firmly entrenched now that it's hard to imagine working without them. But there was a time for each of those standards when it wasn't clear at all that that's the standard that would win. The same can surely be said of all sorts of other things that we take completely for granted now, like NTSC video, 110 VAC, ASCII, 8-bit bytes, etc. Look into the history of any real standard and you'll doubtless find a plethora of proprietary standards and an industry movement to adopt an open, unpropriatery standard.
The Newton Community is a very interesting case of users continuing to support a product which for all intents and purposes should have died years ago.
Why, exactly, should Newton "have died years ago"? You buy a product to satsify a need. If the product satisfies that need, and continues to do so, why stop using it?
Most of us have literally bought into the notion that only the latest, greatest version of a product can possibly meet our needs. Along with that comes the idea that only a product that's actively supported by its manufacturer is suitable for use. We're "consumers" because we buy a thing and use it until it's all used up -- we "consume" it -- and then we go buy another thing. This is great for an industry whose financial health is based on "upgrades." If we didn't all go buy new computers every few years, the computer industry would be in much worse shape than it is. But it's not necessarily in our own best interests.
Newton is a case where a product designed well and implemented well served its purpose well, and continues to do so. The manufacturer no longer supports it, but that doesn't really make a difference to those for whom Newton currently works.
If Nokia suddenly went out of business, would you instantly run out and buy a new phone? If Palm went belly-up, would you trash your Tungsten and buy something else? And if you would, why?
Seems to me, as someone who doesn't wear glasses and may therefore be completely unqualified to answer, that there are some tradeoffs to consider:
1. There's a tradeoff between having the surgery now and putting it off. Having it now, you risk missing out on better technology and better procedures in a few years. Putting it off, you lose out on having improved vision for however long you put it off.
2. There's a huge, important tradeoff between spending your lump-o-cash now and investing it. If you spend it now, you won't have it later. If you invest it wisely now, you can have a lot more later to spend on things like eye surgery and whatever else.
3. In having the surgery, you're trading risk (of worse vision than you have now) for potential convenience (of having better vision than you have now).
Yeah, I know the above doesn't give you any answers, but maybe it'll help frame the questions.
What's the difference between a device that can be used to copy music legally and a device that can be used to copy music illegally?
None, other than the intention of the owner.
The DMCA already makes it illegal to circumvent copy protection measures, so what's the need for another law?
they must believe they have a really strong case to go up against two of the biggest cash reserves in the entire Western hemisphere at the same time.
I'm sure that for the past year or two you've either been vacationing on another planet, or else in head-down mode working on your latest project. Else, you'd have heard about SCO suing not only IBM and Novell, but also Red Hat, Autozone, and DaimlerChrysler Corporation, and also threatening to sue 1500 other companies, all based on essentially zero evidence and some very shaky legal theory.
See, the plan in the SCO case and probably in this one as well is for the small company to sue a larger one for enough money to get the larger company to either settle or buiy the small company out, but not so much money that the large company calls the small company's bluff and decides to fight the suit.
SCO apparently misjudged the ratio of lawsuit scariness to pleasant settlement options, and the result is that it's getting its ass kicked in five different cases. Maybe this company will be a little less greedy. Maybe Microsoft and Apple won't take kindly to being pushed around. You never know, but it'll be interesting to see how it shapes up.
They aren't. In none of their claims in any of their lawsuits do they ever accuse anyone of infringing their copyrights by putting their stuff into Linux.
According to the article, these ELF charges are part of two new documents filed in the IBM case.
One can only conclude that this is a SCO shenanigan aimed at blocking IBM's motion for summary judgement regarding noninfringment of SCO's copyrights. IANAL, but Autozone's lawyers (and the folks over at Groklaw) seem to think that if IBM gets the declaration, SCO will instantly lose its case against Autozone (and probably DaimlerChrysler and Red Hat, too). So SCO really needs to delay that judgement as long as possible.
On the other hand, if SCO was serious about this ELF stuff, you'd think they should have brought it up a year ago when it filed against IBM, or at some point fairly early on in discovery.
How Would You Handle a $1,000,000 Coding Error?
Frankly, I can't believe anyone would pay $1M for a coding error. Hell, the guys I work with make coding errors all the time, and practically for free!
(That's free, as in beer.)
Pointing to Creative's Nomad line as iPod knockoffs is far from accurate.
Whatever you think of the quality of either iPod or Creative's Zen Touch, it's hard to debate that the Zen Touch is a "cheaper knockoff" of the iPod. It's obviously cheaper (i.e. less expensive) and a look at it's picture shows clearly that it's a knockoff, (i.e a copy of something popular). The UI as depicted looks quite like that of the iPod, and the form is about the same. Really, the only thing it appears to be missing is Apple's scroll wheel interface, and Apple probably has a patent on that.
So if you prefer the phrase "uncostly imitation" to "cheaper knockoff," that's fine with me.
But heck, the Zen can't even play AAC files! You can't use it with the world's most popular online music store! And it's not even all that much less expensive. I think I'll stick with "cheaper knockoff," thanks.