All they're doing is modifying the GPS unit to work with a regular computer, while at the same time making the rest of the system (including emergency functions) inoperable. Why not just pay $50 for a basic GPS receiver?
It seems to me that having wardriving componentry integrated into the car is stylish amd more discreet, so it does have value.
I guess the next step will be to add a 802.11b interface to the engine computer and port Linux to it.
The price for this service is around $400 each year. Those who tap into their OnStar systems pay no such fees./I.
$400 per year for onStar suddenly seems very cheap : that's the price of a hour with the lawyer who will defend you against GM during your brutal encounter with the DMCA...
They should have published the Magazine on CD in the first place. Most magazines have back issues on CD.
Oh yes, just imagine if they had published all their issues on CD since 1888...
Seriously though, NGM doesn't have much interest in creating NG photo CDs for 2 reasons:
- They're an old publication, therefore more likely to get away with sticking to dead tree publications
- They print high quality photo, so it's understandable that they're not so excited about digital copies, since it would take a full CD per photo to equal the quality of a good paper print
Greenberg won that award after the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled in March, 2001 that the CD was not a revision, but a "new product, in a new medium, for a new market" since it contained a search engine and other features the magazines do not have.
Copyright law allows publishers to issue revisions of published works without permission from contributors, but not new works. The distinction is at the heart of all the lawsuits.
So, to resume, if the CD had been just a dumb directory full of jpegs from the NG, the publisher would have been in the clear. But instead, he tried to add a search engine, and as a result the CD qualifies as a "new work".
New work? wtf?
A search engine is a feature that I would expect from a multimedia CD. But it should be considered an ancillary function, something that's expected on such a medium, that's not the core of the product. The core stays the pictures.
Similarly, suppose the publisher could release 3D versions of the NG photos, in the form of a 3D viewing box : wouldn't you expect knobs to turn the photo around left and right, and up and down, on the viewing box? should that be considered a new work just because the 3D versions of the same photos have knobs? I don't think so, the core of the work is still the original photos, the viewing knobs are just accessories that should be expected given the type of medium the photos are on.
The basic idea is that photos released on paper, CDs, microfiles,... are all the same work. The fact that the paper release has numbered pages and a summary, that the CD has a search engine (which isn't more than another way to search for a photo quickly, like a summary and page numbers), or a viewing box with scrolling knobs, has nothing to do with the originality of the work.
Therefore, the only thing I have to say is, this "new product" decision is grotesque. Another shining example of why copyright laws aren't adequate for modern media (it's called being multimediocre) and should be revised.
Replay went on to say that if you had a problem with this or your replay was deactivated to just return it to the retailer you purchased it from.
Well, so people have a problem, they got a rotten deal, so they can return it and get their money back. Sounds like basically they have the right to exercise their 3 year warranty immediately.
(By the way, the solution to any ReplayTV problem is called Tivo. Even without dodgy deals, it's always been a better idea to get a Tivo than a ReplayTV)
The EU was using the metric system and the Martians are on the English system. Ft. lbs. != Newton meters.
No, the problem is that none of the European countries have the only real accurate measurement reference in the world, which is the Library of Congress.
(Well I have karma to burn and it's Chrismas, so...)
I'll second that: what a load of disgusting commercial vomit it's turned into. It was once a family get-together occasion, and a religious occasion for those into religion, now it's the time of the year where people in debt feel obliged to go deeper in dept in order to buy enough food to feel adequately sick, children to cram their bedrooms with even more toys than the rest of the year, and stores to go plum crazy with ads and commercial trick to try to increase their sales.
It could be the greatest discovery of all time instead, actually : the discovery of life on the planet Mars.
I mean, think about it, if you lived there and were regularly showered by huge retro-rockety or bouncy things from the monkeys on the planet next door, wouldn't you tear the probes apart with rage ?
Are you referring to this technology as commercial VoIP to differentiate it from some geek just doing it themselves?
Yes.
What's to stop a company which uses VoIP for cheap phone calls from just using it with their own hard/software?
Nothing, but I would think companies doing that would pay more on a bandwidth usage basis.
What's the difference between this and a chat client, or regular internet access?
The tilting point is when that sort of technology is available to Joe Sixpacks at home. If companies do it en-masse, there will be a sizeable bandwidth increase for sure. If the general population does it, there will be a huge enormous incredible never-seen-before bandwidth increase.
Why? I already pay for my internet connection. If the money I pay for my connection doesn't cover the cost of the internet backbone, then my ISP has a bad business model.
Well no, they don't have a bad business model. It's just that, if a majority of the population starts doing VoIP (as opposed to just some people, like today), the internet will become so congested that the entire infrastructure will become inadequate. Widespread VoIP is orders of magnitude more data than today's webpages, low-def TV clips and PDFs.
If the infrastructure needs to be upgraded, someone will have to pay for it, and I don't think VoIP companies should then be absolved from participating, being the cause of that upgrade.
If you use Vonage, you're supporting Canopy (some money goes to them) and therefore are supporting SCO.
While I agree that supporting Canopy is bad (I know Canopy well enough due to my previous employment), I reckon the second argument is specious. I mean, sure it's true, but if you reason like that, you'll stop paying your taxes because you give money to the government, and in turn some of that money goes to the war in Iraq, if you disagree with it.
Everything is tied to everything else money-wise. If you follow down the ties of who gives to whom, you'll always end up finding someone you don't like getting money from you, but that's no reason to turn into an hermit and stop exchanging money...
Commercial VoIP is an artificial market. By that, I mean that it only has a reason to exist because of a circumstancial state of affairs, the one dictating that commercial phone companies (traditional land-line based phones) are taxed and must maintain their network with the proceed of their sales, while VoIP companies don't pay taxes and rely on people paying their own internet connections.
I mean, apart from the cost of calls, there are precious few technological advantages in placing VoIP calls instead of normal phone calls (I'm just talking about national calls to simplify). If VoIP companies suddenly were taxed or had to pay a fee to internet providers for the extra bandwidth, this "quickly maturing" market would vanish instantly.
In any case, there's little difference between a VoIP company and a phone company : they both use digitally encoding to transport voice, it's just that the latter uses (and pays for) its own dedicated lines, while the other doesn't.
3 things are likely to happen:
- The feds step in and consider VoIP companies as normal phone companies (which they are), and tax them
- VoIP companies are asked to share the cost of maintaining IP infrastructure, in return for the burden they impose on it
- Traditional phone companies start providing "free" internet with their phone services, in which case customers have phone and internet for the same price, nulling VoIP companies' value
In all cases, VoIP companies die.
I don't see how VoIP companies will survive in the long run. They're the product of the fact that the internet is much younger, therefore much less regulated and taxed, than traditional phone networks. This will soon change no doubt, and they're actually helping the government realize that the internet is a tax loophole. I think they'll all disappear soon and actually hurt the freedom (free as in beer) of the internet in the long run by their very existence.
The first and easily the best known is SETI@home, which since 1999 has enlisted half a million people to analyse data from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, looking for signs of alien life.
I'm bracing for the 2034 Y2K (or is it Y2KATF) bug, the one that'll overflow the Unix time() function.
You think I'm trying to be funny ? well let's see : people were worried that systems built in the 80s and before would display the 99 Cobol date bug, and/or the 2-digit date bug in 2000. 1980 and before is 20+ years ago, and there weren't that many computers/microcontroller around during those 20 years compared to what's to come, and operating systems weren't very unified. Today in 2004, we have kajillions of Unix machines around : how much do you bet a lot of these will still be running 30 years from now ?
This said, I'm not bracing quite yet to tell the truth...
Is Slashdot going to start making articles now whenever Alan/Linus/RMS/Bruce make a bowel movement?
In other news : Linus Torvalds died in a terrible accident under the Alma Bridge Tunnel in Paris. The Ritz Hotel's driver, who was alledgedly inebriated, was driving Linus' Mercedes exceedingly fast to try to evade several Sun and other trash newspaper reporters. The paparazzi were chasing the fast luxury car to get a photo of Linus in Alan Cox's arms, after rumors of a new affair between the two Unix kernel clone superstars. Previously, Linus had repeatedly said that fame and attention were "very tiring". This tragic accident poses the question of the reponsability of the press when covering the life of stars and famous people.
But what I don't understand is: if geeks are so smart, why can't they realize that appearance counts in the business world?
You don't understand : if you take a smelly unkept geek, strategically shave him and place him into a suit, you won't end up someone with a good appearance, you'll just end up with a clean geek in a suit.
Geekiness is not about looks, it's an attitude. I personally know a lot of clean 3-piece suited geeks, as well as female geeks, one of which is a stay-at-home mom who previously had a brilliant career in the perfume industry, and I guarantee you if you don't know them and you put them behind an IRC client, you'll imagine them as Alan Coxes or Richard Stallmans.
There's a je-ne-sais-quoi that makes a geek a geek regardless of his/her outside appearances.
Slashdot Mirror
the cost of a DVD is several hours pay where I am.
Here's a photo of the poster
All they're doing is modifying the GPS unit to work with a regular computer, while at the same time making the rest of the system (including emergency functions) inoperable. Why not just pay $50 for a basic GPS receiver?
It seems to me that having wardriving componentry integrated into the car is stylish amd more discreet, so it does have value.
I guess the next step will be to add a 802.11b interface to the engine computer and port Linux to it.
When I went in the Site counter was
0000032
Remember, it's a site dedicated to cars. They just rolled back the counter before selling the page to Slashdot, that's all.
What's wrong with a hand-held GPS unit and a map?
...
The answer is contained in your question : "hand-held" and "map".
And some people wonder why there are so many road accidents
The price for this service is around $400 each year. Those who tap into their OnStar systems pay no such fees./I.
...
$400 per year for onStar suddenly seems very cheap : that's the price of a hour with the lawyer who will defend you against GM during your brutal encounter with the DMCA
They should have published the Magazine on CD in the first place. Most magazines have back issues on CD.
...
Oh yes, just imagine if they had published all their issues on CD since 1888
Seriously though, NGM doesn't have much interest in creating NG photo CDs for 2 reasons:
- They're an old publication, therefore more likely to get away with sticking to dead tree publications
- They print high quality photo, so it's understandable that they're not so excited about digital copies, since it would take a full CD per photo to equal the quality of a good paper print
Greenberg won that award after the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled in March, 2001 that the CD was not a revision, but a "new product, in a new medium, for a new market" since it contained a search engine and other features the magazines do not have.
... are all the same work. The fact that the paper release has numbered pages and a summary, that the CD has a search engine (which isn't more than another way to search for a photo quickly, like a summary and page numbers), or a viewing box with scrolling knobs, has nothing to do with the originality of the work.
Copyright law allows publishers to issue revisions of published works without permission from contributors, but not new works. The distinction is at the heart of all the lawsuits.
So, to resume, if the CD had been just a dumb directory full of jpegs from the NG, the publisher would have been in the clear. But instead, he tried to add a search engine, and as a result the CD qualifies as a "new work".
New work? wtf?
A search engine is a feature that I would expect from a multimedia CD. But it should be considered an ancillary function, something that's expected on such a medium, that's not the core of the product. The core stays the pictures.
Similarly, suppose the publisher could release 3D versions of the NG photos, in the form of a 3D viewing box : wouldn't you expect knobs to turn the photo around left and right, and up and down, on the viewing box? should that be considered a new work just because the 3D versions of the same photos have knobs? I don't think so, the core of the work is still the original photos, the viewing knobs are just accessories that should be expected given the type of medium the photos are on.
The basic idea is that photos released on paper, CDs, microfiles,
Therefore, the only thing I have to say is, this "new product" decision is grotesque. Another shining example of why copyright laws aren't adequate for modern media (it's called being multimediocre) and should be revised.
Shouldn't the poster's name and his wonderful history of past postings tell you something?
Hint: the keyword in his name is "troll". You've been had, and that goes for the moderator who modded him up.
Replay went on to say that if you had a problem with this or your replay was deactivated to just return it to the retailer you purchased it from.
Well, so people have a problem, they got a rotten deal, so they can return it and get their money back. Sounds like basically they have the right to exercise their 3 year warranty immediately.
(By the way, the solution to any ReplayTV problem is called Tivo. Even without dodgy deals, it's always been a better idea to get a Tivo than a ReplayTV)
The EU was using the metric system and the Martians are on the English system. Ft. lbs. != Newton meters.
No, the problem is that none of the European countries have the only real accurate measurement reference in the world, which is the Library of Congress.
Once we perfect unmanned missions, we can try to go there ourselfes.
...
Right. Good thing we sent all these probes to the moon so we could realize it wasn't safe to send men there
If it was running FreeBSD it would not have failed!
Well the probe is dead isn't it? It must have been running BSD then...
(Well I have karma to burn and it's Chrismas, so ...)
I'll second that: what a load of disgusting commercial vomit it's turned into. It was once a family get-together occasion, and a religious occasion for those into religion, now it's the time of the year where people in debt feel obliged to go deeper in dept in order to buy enough food to feel adequately sick, children to cram their bedrooms with even more toys than the rest of the year, and stores to go plum crazy with ads and commercial trick to try to increase their sales.
yuk yuk. Good riddance Christmas.
the failure is seen as a major setback
It could be the greatest discovery of all time instead, actually : the discovery of life on the planet Mars.
I mean, think about it, if you lived there and were regularly showered by huge retro-rockety or bouncy things from the monkeys on the planet next door, wouldn't you tear the probes apart with rage ?
Are you referring to this technology as commercial VoIP to differentiate it from some geek just doing it themselves?
Yes.
What's to stop a company which uses VoIP for cheap phone calls from just using it with their own hard/software?
Nothing, but I would think companies doing that would pay more on a bandwidth usage basis.
What's the difference between this and a chat client, or regular internet access?
The tilting point is when that sort of technology is available to Joe Sixpacks at home. If companies do it en-masse, there will be a sizeable bandwidth increase for sure. If the general population does it, there will be a huge enormous incredible never-seen-before bandwidth increase.
Why? I already pay for my internet connection. If the money I pay for my connection doesn't cover the cost of the internet backbone, then my ISP has a bad business model.
Well no, they don't have a bad business model. It's just that, if a majority of the population starts doing VoIP (as opposed to just some people, like today), the internet will become so congested that the entire infrastructure will become inadequate. Widespread VoIP is orders of magnitude more data than today's webpages, low-def TV clips and PDFs.
If the infrastructure needs to be upgraded, someone will have to pay for it, and I don't think VoIP companies should then be absolved from participating, being the cause of that upgrade.
If you use Vonage, you're supporting Canopy (some money goes to them) and therefore are supporting SCO.
...
While I agree that supporting Canopy is bad (I know Canopy well enough due to my previous employment), I reckon the second argument is specious. I mean, sure it's true, but if you reason like that, you'll stop paying your taxes because you give money to the government, and in turn some of that money goes to the war in Iraq, if you disagree with it.
Everything is tied to everything else money-wise. If you follow down the ties of who gives to whom, you'll always end up finding someone you don't like getting money from you, but that's no reason to turn into an hermit and stop exchanging money
Commercial VoIP is an artificial market. By that, I mean that it only has a reason to exist because of a circumstancial state of affairs, the one dictating that commercial phone companies (traditional land-line based phones) are taxed and must maintain their network with the proceed of their sales, while VoIP companies don't pay taxes and rely on people paying their own internet connections.
I mean, apart from the cost of calls, there are precious few technological advantages in placing VoIP calls instead of normal phone calls (I'm just talking about national calls to simplify). If VoIP companies suddenly were taxed or had to pay a fee to internet providers for the extra bandwidth, this "quickly maturing" market would vanish instantly.
In any case, there's little difference between a VoIP company and a phone company : they both use digitally encoding to transport voice, it's just that the latter uses (and pays for) its own dedicated lines, while the other doesn't.
3 things are likely to happen:
- The feds step in and consider VoIP companies as normal phone companies (which they are), and tax them
- VoIP companies are asked to share the cost of maintaining IP infrastructure, in return for the burden they impose on it
- Traditional phone companies start providing "free" internet with their phone services, in which case customers have phone and internet for the same price, nulling VoIP companies' value
In all cases, VoIP companies die.
I don't see how VoIP companies will survive in the long run. They're the product of the fact that the internet is much younger, therefore much less regulated and taxed, than traditional phone networks. This will soon change no doubt, and they're actually helping the government realize that the internet is a tax loophole. I think they'll all disappear soon and actually hurt the freedom (free as in beer) of the internet in the long run by their very existence.
The first and easily the best known is SETI@home, which since 1999 has enlisted half a million people to analyse data from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, looking for signs of alien life.
Better than Seti@home and BOINC: Yeti@home.
I'm bracing for the 2034 Y2K (or is it Y2KATF) bug, the one that'll overflow the Unix time() function.
...
You think I'm trying to be funny ? well let's see : people were worried that systems built in the 80s and before would display the 99 Cobol date bug, and/or the 2-digit date bug in 2000. 1980 and before is 20+ years ago, and there weren't that many computers/microcontroller around during those 20 years compared to what's to come, and operating systems weren't very unified. Today in 2004, we have kajillions of Unix machines around : how much do you bet a lot of these will still be running 30 years from now ?
This said, I'm not bracing quite yet to tell the truth
Is Slashdot going to start making articles now whenever Alan/Linus/RMS/Bruce make a bowel movement?
In other news : Linus Torvalds died in a terrible accident under the Alma Bridge Tunnel in Paris. The Ritz Hotel's driver, who was alledgedly inebriated, was driving Linus' Mercedes exceedingly fast to try to evade several Sun and other trash newspaper reporters. The paparazzi were chasing the fast luxury car to get a photo of Linus in Alan Cox's arms, after rumors of a new affair between the two Unix kernel clone superstars. Previously, Linus had repeatedly said that fame and attention were "very tiring". This tragic accident poses the question of the reponsability of the press when covering the life of stars and famous people.
But what I don't understand is: if geeks are so smart, why can't they realize that appearance counts in the business world?
You don't understand : if you take a smelly unkept geek, strategically shave him and place him into a suit, you won't end up someone with a good appearance, you'll just end up with a clean geek in a suit.
Geekiness is not about looks, it's an attitude. I personally know a lot of clean 3-piece suited geeks, as well as female geeks, one of which is a stay-at-home mom who previously had a brilliant career in the perfume industry, and I guarantee you if you don't know them and you put them behind an IRC client, you'll imagine them as Alan Coxes or Richard Stallmans.
There's a je-ne-sais-quoi that makes a geek a geek regardless of his/her outside appearances.
The New-York "registration required" Times running an article on people fishing for other people's personal information, that's amusing ...
This is /. by God. We shall never be held by the "requirements" of simpletons!
...
Hope springs eternal
It'll be about the only thing for sale at Walmart with a price that doesn't end with .99.