That's actually a bizarre hybrid of eSATA and USB, it allows both a usb and esata port in the same connector. It's still just standard eSATA and standard USB that have a clever cable to allow power to be sucked off of it.
I've only ever seen one computer that supported it. Most don't.
Yeah, textbooks and computer books are terrible on the kindle, because it just doesn't provide the screen space you need. The larger kindles may work for that, but you're still at the mercy of the quality of the ebook.
The reality is, though, that authors will start bypassing publishers altogether, and will start to make a decent living from selling books really cheap.
Ugh.. I dread the day when self-publishing becomes the norm. One valuable sevice publishing houses provide is that they (usually) make sure the book has gone through several rounds of editing and correction, and must meet a standard of quality to be published (yeah, yeah, I know there are lots of crap published books out there, but generally they're well edited crap books).
If anyone can publish any book, in any state of quality, without any kind of quality control.. It's going to be SOOOO hard to find decent material. It's not like you can pick up a hardcover copy in a store and skim it to get a gist of the quality. You might be able to get an excerpt, but excerpts are generally chosen because they're the best part of the book, not the average part of it. Reviews may help, but there will likely be a LOT of unreviewed stuff out there.
It's like when mp3.com or whatever started publishing any music people wanted to publish. But there, a 30 second sample gives a much better impression of the quality of the song than a 2 page excerpt of a book. And the amount of time you have to spend wading through crap to find the gems is staggering.
G.711 is terrible for a lot of reasons. Because it needs 64Kb of bandwidth, that means it's more susceptible to packet loss (UDP) and it requires more packets so latency becomes an issue. If you're calling someone in Bangladesh or Chile then you can see latencies as much as 500ms. That's not even counting people who might be on Satellite internet, or wireless (in many mountainous 3rd world countries they gave up trying to lay cables, and people use wireless systems like WiMax and other proprietary formats).
Most of the other codecs you mention are not supported by most VOIP services, and even if they are, would require transcoding because most physical IP Phones won't support them.
Just a couple of points. USB vs eSATA. USB carries power, and can power most laptop style hard drives, while eSATA does not (meaning you need an extra cable, and possibly an extra power source). So that's an advantage of USB over eSATA.
I agree that it's too early to dismiss Thunderbolt yet. The problem is that it's yet another connector.
The reason NAT is a problem is that SIP embeds IP and port information into the protocol. This means the firewall has to change those values and be SIP aware, or you need a client that plays tricks like using Stun. Either way, this is stuff that most clients need to have configured.
And the codecs are not fine. G.729 requires a paid for license to legally use. H.264 is the same.
Your one-track mind is limiting your comprehension.
Your argument is basically "Nobody would want to target a specific gui" when in fact, if there was only a single GUI people would be writing apps that target it. It's the lack of a single gui that prevents those kinds of apps (or at least makes it much more difficult).
Yes, some apps do in fact target the compositing engine. For example, plug-ins for the compositing engine. They have to be written specifically for that engine, be it XGL, Beryl, Compiz, KWin, etc.. Yes, Beryl may be old, that doesn't mean nobody is using it.
As an example, take a look at Unity, which is written as a plugin to Compiz. If you're not running Compiz, you can't run Unity (Well, you could run Unity 2D, but it's really a different thing). So if you're running KWin, Mutter, or Metacity, you can't use Unity.
SIP and H.323 are fine, but they are only part of the issue. Codec's are a huge problem. The free (as in no license required) codecs are bandwidth hungry.
The real issue though, is one of configuration. Using a strict SIP or H.323 client means the user has to understand issues like addressing, ports, etc.. This is fine for geeks, but end users want a point and click, it's done kind of system. That means having a central service that not only provides default configurations and service, but address books, and more importantly, doesn't allow just anyone to connect and voice spam the shit out of them.
Open systems are prone to spam, closed systems have a lot more control over that. That is, most likely, why Google voice doesn't allow sip connections (they did at first, then turned it off).
That's, in large part, the fault of Linux not having a lot of standard features that Windows and Mac have. By that, I mean there are 20 competing technologies for things that are standard on Windows or Mac.
The fact that you can replace your GUI with something else is great, from an end user perspective.. but terrible from a developer perspective. You have to have a base set of features you can rely on, and LSB isnt' anywhere close to that. Take, for example, desktop compositing. This is something that a developer can count on to be there, and have a single API, both in Windows and MacOS. In Linux, it might or might not be there, and if it is there, there might bet half a dozen different API's.
You might say "That's what dependancies are for", but many things are mutually exclusive. If you already have Beryl installed, then having a Compiz dependancy is pointless.
You're taking both my comments and Jo's out of context. Nothing that's in the core mono stuff is considered "scary" or "unsafe". Not all of it is in the standard, but there's a difference between "high risk" and "non-standard". The stuff that's high risk is seperated. The stuff that is highly unlikely to be legally risky is still included in the core.
But, be that as it may, it's quite possible to simply strip out the contested namespaces with a few shell scripts. So that's not really a major issue. Whether or not Mono would still work is debateable, but in the case of such a situation it would be safe to say that other alternatives would get written quickly if that were the case.
Bull, you can build apps that work perfectly on Linux, Mac and Windows without using anything from the proprietary.NET stack. You use GTK# instead of Winforms, and you use Tao instead of DirectX, and you use ServiceStack instead of WCF.
So you complaint is that Mono isn't "a complete.net" and even if it was, then it would be bad because it's "a complete.net".
Am I reading you right?
Mono has addressed the legal issues by seperating the Microsoft proprietary stuff from the ISO standard stuff, and supplying non-proprietary alternatives to several parts of the system. If Microsoft sues, they can easily jettison the proprietary stuff. If you're concerned about it, don't write to the proprietary API's.
I'd suggest asking your boss if he really needs an office. Think how much money would be saved by converting it to cubicles. What costs more, an office or a second monitor?
How exactly can this technique be used to fight tuberculosis, which lives in the lungs? The sugar in the antibiotic would be absorbed into the blood stream before the antibiotic could get to the infection. Unless they're talking about inhaling the antibiotic with the sugar.. which I suppose is a possibility.
Maybe it's some kind of bonding process that bonds the sugar to the antibiotic? I suppose I could read the article if I was that curious.
There's a difference between a conspiracy, and a conspiracy theory. A theory is not proven, and is just allegations (often without any evidence, or selective evidence that ignores contrary evidence).
If there was credible evidence, then there would be credible people pursuing it.
So you're really trying to say that Java is an innovative open source project? Despite the fact that Java was entirely developed by a corporation and then donated under the GPL? That's just being dishonest. Java was a proprietary technology that is now open source (or at least parts of it).
What i'm saying is that there is a difference between technology developed by a company like Red Hat, which is an open source company, and Sun which was not, or Oracle today.
Let's take OpenOffice, for instance. OpenOffice is an open source project, but it's a project that is almost entirely run by corporate mandate. They take few patches from the community. Almost all work is done by paid developers, and it is based on a proprietary product that was made open source. That's mostly why the source code for OpenOffice sucks so bad. Because it hasn't had any real community involvement for most of its life.
LibreOffice, on the other hand is doing a lot of new stuff and is letting the community help. Things that LibreOffice are doing to the source may be considered a real open source project. When I refer to an open source project, I'm referring to the Bazaar form of development, not the Cathedral form (which OpenOffice and many other so called open source projects are).
Maybe you can explain what you consider "innovative" about a project like Joomla. What "technology" does Joomla represent? It's a CMS that does pretty much what dozens of other CMS's do. And most of it's functionality does what thousands of other CMS's do.
But, it was not a war between France and England. That's my point.
The Vietnam war was a war between North and South Vietname. It was not a war between the US and North Vietname. The US was supporting the South Vietnamese.
You really have no idea what you're talking about. Your comment about "double billing" is a prime example. No, Microsoft doesn't "double bill" them, because they don't have a 10,000 seat license. They have a 10,000 seat "upgrade" license. These licenses allow them to upgrade from the Home version to the Enterprise version, and the pricing is reduced because it reflects the fact they've already bought a license from Dell for the home version.
But, if you actually had any idea of how the licenses are bought, and what the contracts say (I Know, i used to work in IT for a.edu), then your theories wouldn't be so popular in your head.
Prison labor? Even if it's true, Prisoners do work for the community all the time. They get paid for it too.
And no, Dell is not forced to not sell competing products, and in fact they DO sell competing products. The only thing Microsoft did not allow is shipping more than one OS on the same computer, if that computer included Windows.
And no, I doubt very much that Microsoft is going to sue every linux company, hell, I doubt they'll even sue more than a dozen. Barnes and noble refused to license the patents their using, if they'd paid the licenseing fee that Microsoft legally can charge, they wouldn't be being sued.
We'll see how they prevail on the lawsuit. If it turns out that B&N did infringe their patents, then Microsoft was in their right to sue them.
Are you seriously suggesting that Patents and Copyright enforcement is evil? If that's the case, then anyone suing for GPL violations is evil. Oopps, but that's different...
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That's actually a bizarre hybrid of eSATA and USB, it allows both a usb and esata port in the same connector. It's still just standard eSATA and standard USB that have a clever cable to allow power to be sucked off of it.
I've only ever seen one computer that supported it. Most don't.
I was not talking about Thunderbolt. I was commenting on the claim that USB held no advantage over eSATA.
Macs can get away with that. PC Users, however, bitch that their 10 year old external drives no longer work, or require an expensive adapter.
Yeah, textbooks and computer books are terrible on the kindle, because it just doesn't provide the screen space you need. The larger kindles may work for that, but you're still at the mercy of the quality of the ebook.
Ugh.. I dread the day when self-publishing becomes the norm. One valuable sevice publishing houses provide is that they (usually) make sure the book has gone through several rounds of editing and correction, and must meet a standard of quality to be published (yeah, yeah, I know there are lots of crap published books out there, but generally they're well edited crap books).
If anyone can publish any book, in any state of quality, without any kind of quality control.. It's going to be SOOOO hard to find decent material. It's not like you can pick up a hardcover copy in a store and skim it to get a gist of the quality. You might be able to get an excerpt, but excerpts are generally chosen because they're the best part of the book, not the average part of it. Reviews may help, but there will likely be a LOT of unreviewed stuff out there.
It's like when mp3.com or whatever started publishing any music people wanted to publish. But there, a 30 second sample gives a much better impression of the quality of the song than a 2 page excerpt of a book. And the amount of time you have to spend wading through crap to find the gems is staggering.
G.711 is terrible for a lot of reasons. Because it needs 64Kb of bandwidth, that means it's more susceptible to packet loss (UDP) and it requires more packets so latency becomes an issue. If you're calling someone in Bangladesh or Chile then you can see latencies as much as 500ms. That's not even counting people who might be on Satellite internet, or wireless (in many mountainous 3rd world countries they gave up trying to lay cables, and people use wireless systems like WiMax and other proprietary formats).
Most of the other codecs you mention are not supported by most VOIP services, and even if they are, would require transcoding because most physical IP Phones won't support them.
Seriously, not everyone has great broadband.
Just a couple of points. USB vs eSATA. USB carries power, and can power most laptop style hard drives, while eSATA does not (meaning you need an extra cable, and possibly an extra power source). So that's an advantage of USB over eSATA.
I agree that it's too early to dismiss Thunderbolt yet. The problem is that it's yet another connector.
The reason NAT is a problem is that SIP embeds IP and port information into the protocol. This means the firewall has to change those values and be SIP aware, or you need a client that plays tricks like using Stun. Either way, this is stuff that most clients need to have configured.
And the codecs are not fine. G.729 requires a paid for license to legally use. H.264 is the same.
Your one-track mind is limiting your comprehension.
Your argument is basically "Nobody would want to target a specific gui" when in fact, if there was only a single GUI people would be writing apps that target it. It's the lack of a single gui that prevents those kinds of apps (or at least makes it much more difficult).
Yes, some apps do in fact target the compositing engine. For example, plug-ins for the compositing engine. They have to be written specifically for that engine, be it XGL, Beryl, Compiz, KWin, etc.. Yes, Beryl may be old, that doesn't mean nobody is using it.
As an example, take a look at Unity, which is written as a plugin to Compiz. If you're not running Compiz, you can't run Unity (Well, you could run Unity 2D, but it's really a different thing). So if you're running KWin, Mutter, or Metacity, you can't use Unity.
And the long answer. All you can do is firewall, and use things like fail2ban.
SIP and H.323 are fine, but they are only part of the issue. Codec's are a huge problem. The free (as in no license required) codecs are bandwidth hungry.
The real issue though, is one of configuration. Using a strict SIP or H.323 client means the user has to understand issues like addressing, ports, etc.. This is fine for geeks, but end users want a point and click, it's done kind of system. That means having a central service that not only provides default configurations and service, but address books, and more importantly, doesn't allow just anyone to connect and voice spam the shit out of them.
Open systems are prone to spam, closed systems have a lot more control over that. That is, most likely, why Google voice doesn't allow sip connections (they did at first, then turned it off).
That's, in large part, the fault of Linux not having a lot of standard features that Windows and Mac have. By that, I mean there are 20 competing technologies for things that are standard on Windows or Mac.
The fact that you can replace your GUI with something else is great, from an end user perspective.. but terrible from a developer perspective. You have to have a base set of features you can rely on, and LSB isnt' anywhere close to that. Take, for example, desktop compositing. This is something that a developer can count on to be there, and have a single API, both in Windows and MacOS. In Linux, it might or might not be there, and if it is there, there might bet half a dozen different API's.
You might say "That's what dependancies are for", but many things are mutually exclusive. If you already have Beryl installed, then having a Compiz dependancy is pointless.
You're taking both my comments and Jo's out of context. Nothing that's in the core mono stuff is considered "scary" or "unsafe". Not all of it is in the standard, but there's a difference between "high risk" and "non-standard". The stuff that's high risk is seperated. The stuff that is highly unlikely to be legally risky is still included in the core.
But, be that as it may, it's quite possible to simply strip out the contested namespaces with a few shell scripts. So that's not really a major issue. Whether or not Mono would still work is debateable, but in the case of such a situation it would be safe to say that other alternatives would get written quickly if that were the case.
I'm not talking about taking Windows apps and running them on Linux, yes, that will need the proprietary stuff.
I'm talking about building apps designed to run on all 3 major platforms that do not use the proprietary stack.
Microsoft can threaten legal action on anything. Nothing special about Mono in that regard.
Bull, you can build apps that work perfectly on Linux, Mac and Windows without using anything from the proprietary .NET stack. You use GTK# instead of Winforms, and you use Tao instead of DirectX, and you use ServiceStack instead of WCF.
You remember incorrectly. Mono has developed replacements that work the same on all OS's, such as GTK# to replace Windows Forms.
So you complaint is that Mono isn't "a complete .net" and even if it was, then it would be bad because it's "a complete .net".
Am I reading you right?
Mono has addressed the legal issues by seperating the Microsoft proprietary stuff from the ISO standard stuff, and supplying non-proprietary alternatives to several parts of the system. If Microsoft sues, they can easily jettison the proprietary stuff. If you're concerned about it, don't write to the proprietary API's.
I'd suggest asking your boss if he really needs an office. Think how much money would be saved by converting it to cubicles. What costs more, an office or a second monitor?
How exactly can this technique be used to fight tuberculosis, which lives in the lungs? The sugar in the antibiotic would be absorbed into the blood stream before the antibiotic could get to the infection. Unless they're talking about inhaling the antibiotic with the sugar.. which I suppose is a possibility.
Maybe it's some kind of bonding process that bonds the sugar to the antibiotic? I suppose I could read the article if I was that curious.
There's a difference between a conspiracy, and a conspiracy theory. A theory is not proven, and is just allegations (often without any evidence, or selective evidence that ignores contrary evidence).
If there was credible evidence, then there would be credible people pursuing it.
So you're really trying to say that Java is an innovative open source project? Despite the fact that Java was entirely developed by a corporation and then donated under the GPL? That's just being dishonest. Java was a proprietary technology that is now open source (or at least parts of it).
What i'm saying is that there is a difference between technology developed by a company like Red Hat, which is an open source company, and Sun which was not, or Oracle today.
Let's take OpenOffice, for instance. OpenOffice is an open source project, but it's a project that is almost entirely run by corporate mandate. They take few patches from the community. Almost all work is done by paid developers, and it is based on a proprietary product that was made open source. That's mostly why the source code for OpenOffice sucks so bad. Because it hasn't had any real community involvement for most of its life.
LibreOffice, on the other hand is doing a lot of new stuff and is letting the community help. Things that LibreOffice are doing to the source may be considered a real open source project. When I refer to an open source project, I'm referring to the Bazaar form of development, not the Cathedral form (which OpenOffice and many other so called open source projects are).
Maybe you can explain what you consider "innovative" about a project like Joomla. What "technology" does Joomla represent? It's a CMS that does pretty much what dozens of other CMS's do. And most of it's functionality does what thousands of other CMS's do.
What's innovative about VLC?
But, it was not a war between France and England. That's my point.
The Vietnam war was a war between North and South Vietname. It was not a war between the US and North Vietname. The US was supporting the South Vietnamese.
Sounds like a lot of conspiracy theory to me. doesn' mean it's not true, but I see no evidence to support it.
You really have no idea what you're talking about. Your comment about "double billing" is a prime example. No, Microsoft doesn't "double bill" them, because they don't have a 10,000 seat license. They have a 10,000 seat "upgrade" license. These licenses allow them to upgrade from the Home version to the Enterprise version, and the pricing is reduced because it reflects the fact they've already bought a license from Dell for the home version.
But, if you actually had any idea of how the licenses are bought, and what the contracts say (I Know, i used to work in IT for a .edu), then your theories wouldn't be so popular in your head.
Prison labor? Even if it's true, Prisoners do work for the community all the time. They get paid for it too.
And no, Dell is not forced to not sell competing products, and in fact they DO sell competing products. The only thing Microsoft did not allow is shipping more than one OS on the same computer, if that computer included Windows.
And no, I doubt very much that Microsoft is going to sue every linux company, hell, I doubt they'll even sue more than a dozen. Barnes and noble refused to license the patents their using, if they'd paid the licenseing fee that Microsoft legally can charge, they wouldn't be being sued.
We'll see how they prevail on the lawsuit. If it turns out that B&N did infringe their patents, then Microsoft was in their right to sue them.
Are you seriously suggesting that Patents and Copyright enforcement is evil? If that's the case, then anyone suing for GPL violations is evil. Oopps, but that's different...