Nothing stops them, except they need the money and the will to do it. This was commonplace in Cold War days, when the Evil Empire was jamming all the time.
Iraq shortwave broadcasting exists but is "erratic",
they say.
In olden days PHB's would not consider minicomputers, like DEC's. They said nobody ever lost their job because they bought IBM mainframes. (It may still be true!)
It's probably also true that nobody loses their job for choosing Microsoft, alas.
The big payoff is at the low end. Minimum Linux system $391 (900 MHz Duron, minimum Windows $498 (1.3GHz Celeron). That goes along with predictions that Windows is priced out of the market at the low end. However, for a lot of users I know, that $100 will translate into pain, if they try to save it.
On the other hand, people may find alternative, "inexpensive" ways to load some kind of Windows.
This is nothing new. I worked for a government lab in Australia that had a special crew hired to go around and clean people's telephone handsets periodically.
Good hygeine doesn't come cheap.:-)
Keyboards (and mice) are a lot harder to clean than phone receivers. There's money to be made here.
The question is what is the link protocol and what's in the "remote display". They're not sending raw video (or X11) over WiFi, and the box has the ability to show jpegs locally. Hopefully it's not running Windows, but it might be -- using Windows Terminal Server or whatever that's called in the XP world. Surely that's what the MS Mira will do.
The portable display (along with a portable keyboard/pointer) is the missing link in my home network. I carry around a laptop with WiFi sometimes, but this is overkill. I want the smarts in the "house server" and the remote terminal to be comfortable to carry, nice to look at, and not too expensive.
I think you're right and 95% of the comments here are off-topic. It's not about poor tech support or saving a buck on CD's, it's about Microsoft's desire to eliminate "piracy" of its OS product.
And beyond that, it's about the Gov placing intellectual property law above personal freedom of the do-it-yourself & hacker community.
Agreed that what we are talking about is contract law, not "theft" of property. The problem is not whether PhotoShop or any other app is worth $600, but that the contract I have to "sign" to get any app is one that the vendor's lawyers write. It is not the result of a negotiation between comparable entities.
The larger the buyer is, the more negotiating power and the lower the prices and more favorable the terms. Logically, we individual consumers ought to be able to form a buying association for major software to get the T&C's we want. (If we could ever agree.)
The other thing that's asymmetric is that those licenses are written by high-power lawyers and are quite complicated. What makes you or I think that we really know what we can and can't do under their terms? What is "reverse engineering"? What is a "backup copy"? What about files on a fileserver? Etc. A "prudent person" (with the cash) would ask his favorite lawyer to research the subject before purchasing or loading the software.
And in the end, your lawyer can't tell you what you can get away with. That is only determined in a law court after the fact.
This is more than theoretical. As a university employee setting up software licensing programs, I am fairly often in the situation of interpreting license terms that really ought to be handled by an expert lawyer, but it's often too much trouble to do that. At some point, you make a "reasonable person" decision.
One of Forth's main "wins" in the 70's was as control software for radio telescope pointing and data systems. That was of course very much pre-GUI. There were no real-time operating systems, no interactive editors, and not even disk drives. (like the SDS-930) Memory was enormously expensive.
Forth could work really effectively in that environment, and Chuck got traction. But I think he is on a mission of a higher level, which I struggled to understand as a radio astronomer. It was about complexity before there was "complexity" as a theory. It's also about being "green" - using the hardware's capability fully. No bit or gate goes unused. No more RAM or I/O than is minimally required. It's about using your brains - it's a good thing to spend a whole day getting one line of code right.
So my question to an old friend - is the meaning in the Destination or in the Journey? Does Forth's market penetration matter at all? Or is it the fact that a few of us see the world a little more clearly?
The error bars are indicated on the current NIST datum. Let's put it this way - in 100 million years or so, the model's predictions should be significant using today's measurement error bars.
It would be better to ask why we are using this functional form - predicting alpha = 0 at t = 20 M yr, for example.
Look, the Telco can't make DSL work reliably at 384 kbs @ 10,000 feet where I am. Using the same tired, marginal infrastructure for higher bit rates seems like a loser.
The big advantage of fiber, if it happens, is that it is a technology designed for data, and BW is limited only by how much terminal electronics you can afford. My question is, who is going to provide it? The traditional Telcos have failed, and the cable companies aren't much better.
The last mile is always going to be a problem. Wireless is way to bypass that. Maybe when we get 4G wireless networks...
One thing Cringely did not go into was the service agreement he or his co-conspirator signed when they got PacBell's DSP. Almost certainly it is verboten to resell connectivity if you are on a consumer DSP contract. Now that he has blurted this all over the 'net, I expect to see a future column on how the law and PacBell comes down on him.
Here is a special installation problem. There are probably a few of us radio amateur dinosaurs out there who are trying to build LANs. The problem is electromagnetic compatibility - EMC. Hams can transmit at up to 1 kW in various frequency bands from 1.8 MHz to daylight, and they also need to operate sensitive receivers.
I installed a 100 baseT cat5 LAN between my first and second floors, with a Linksys 10/100 hub, a Linksys DSL router, and an Efficient Networks DSL modem. The first problem was that when I transmitted only 100 W at 3.5 MHz ("80 meters"), my Linksys hub lit up like a Christmas tree. Even when transmission stopped, some of the ports remained hung up until I reset the power.
The remediation here was to go to shielded Cat5 lines, which use grounded RJ-45 connectors and help to keep RF out of the signal path. Further, I added ferrite chokes (like you see on monitor cables) to help block common mode RF. This seemed to tame the problem for the most part, but if I were to run a kilowatt, it might not be enough.
On the other side, it turns out that my receiver was quite noisy, again on the 80-m band. Often this comes from AC power line interference, so I tried selectively shutting things off. In the end, it turns out that my 100 baseT run upstairs was increasing my receiver's noise level by 10-15 dB.
The upshot: 100 baseT interacts with radios in the 3.5 - 4.0 MHz band (and possibly others), both transmitting and receiving. Switching back to 10 baseT seems to have reduced the problem quite a bit.
Absolutely. In the mid-70's I worked with an SDS-920 which had a vector display unit using an acoustic delay line memory. Here are pictures of another delay line device: http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~collinsr/p203/.
Free space is even cheaper than fiber as a storage medium. If you bounce a 1 Gb/s bit stream off the Moon, you have stored something over 200 MB.
All serial storage has an access time problem, however. You may have to wait a couple of seconds to get the data you want from the moonbounce recirculation.
According to the news, Gates will put $100B into this foundation, and it will support medical research (and treatment?).
An endowment of that size would throw off $5B a year in income, using my university's 5% rule. What can you do with $5B? You could endow a new Yale University _every year_.
So much money chasing a narrow research area will seriously distort the "market". Alternatively, it will give the foundation enormous control over how biomedical research develops.
Control is Microsoft's middle name, I guess.
How this $100B is managed will mean a lot more to the world than any software that will come out of Redmond.
CDMA samples, blocks, and interleaves your audio in a tricky way. This gets the best quality and reliability, but the trade-off is processing delay. Your audio packet only goes out after ~50 msec, I think. Same thing on audio coming back to you, so it's like a short satellite delay.
Normally, it's not a problem, but when the destination phone does not have good echo cancellation, you notice a muted, highly distorted echo coming back to you. If there was no propagation delay, you probably wouldn't notice the echo. That's my interpretation, anyway.
Good tech info on CDMA at http://people.qualcomm.com/karn/cai/Overview.ps.gz
Linux on the Jornada: great! Has anyone reverse engineered these boxes? I bet they use software driven video & modem interfaces. Why else would WinCE be so slow on a 190 MHz StrongARM?
We will need WinCE-WINE to run some of the canned apps. And a SAMBA port. This could be a lifetime job for the right person...
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Iraq shortwave broadcasting exists but is "erratic", they say.
- AA6E
It's probably also true that nobody loses their job for choosing Microsoft, alas.
On the other hand, people may find alternative, "inexpensive" ways to load some kind of Windows.
-MSE
http://carbane.eng.yale.edu/alpha.html
AA6E
Good hygeine doesn't come cheap. :-)
Keyboards (and mice) are a lot harder to clean than phone receivers. There's money to be made here.
-aa6e
The portable display (along with a portable keyboard/pointer) is the missing link in my home network. I carry around a laptop with WiFi sometimes, but this is overkill. I want the smarts in the "house server" and the remote terminal to be comfortable to carry, nice to look at, and not too expensive.
So who's doing this in the OpenSource world?
--Martin
Not at all: The end of one atom on earth. An antiparticle or anti atom can only anihilate one normal particle or atom, giving off a gamma ray.
And beyond that, it's about the Gov placing intellectual property law above personal freedom of the do-it-yourself & hacker community.
-Soon to be EFF member.
The larger the buyer is, the more negotiating power and the lower the prices and more favorable the terms. Logically, we individual consumers ought to be able to form a buying association for major software to get the T&C's we want. (If we could ever agree.)
The other thing that's asymmetric is that those licenses are written by high-power lawyers and are quite complicated. What makes you or I think that we really know what we can and can't do under their terms? What is "reverse engineering"? What is a "backup copy"? What about files on a fileserver? Etc. A "prudent person" (with the cash) would ask his favorite lawyer to research the subject before purchasing or loading the software.
And in the end, your lawyer can't tell you what you can get away with. That is only determined in a law court after the fact.
This is more than theoretical. As a university employee setting up software licensing programs, I am fairly often in the situation of interpreting license terms that really ought to be handled by an expert lawyer, but it's often too much trouble to do that. At some point, you make a "reasonable person" decision.
- Bromo
Forth could work really effectively in that environment, and Chuck got traction. But I think he is on a mission of a higher level, which I struggled to understand as a radio astronomer. It was about complexity before there was "complexity" as a theory. It's also about being "green" - using the hardware's capability fully. No bit or gate goes unused. No more RAM or I/O than is minimally required. It's about using your brains - it's a good thing to spend a whole day getting one line of code right.
So my question to an old friend - is the meaning in the Destination or in the Journey? Does Forth's market penetration matter at all? Or is it the fact that a few of us see the world a little more clearly?
-Martin Ewing
It would be better to ask why we are using this functional form - predicting alpha = 0 at t = 20 M yr, for example.
The answer is, why not?
- The Happy Physicist
The big advantage of fiber, if it happens, is that it is a technology designed for data, and BW is limited only by how much terminal electronics you can afford. My question is, who is going to provide it? The traditional Telcos have failed, and the cable companies aren't much better.
The last mile is always going to be a problem. Wireless is way to bypass that. Maybe when we get 4G wireless networks...
-Lost in CT
One thing Cringely did not go into was the service agreement he or his co-conspirator signed when they got PacBell's DSP. Almost certainly it is verboten to resell connectivity if you are on a consumer DSP contract. Now that he has blurted this all over the 'net, I expect to see a future column on how the law and PacBell comes down on him.
I installed a 100 baseT cat5 LAN between my first and second floors, with a Linksys 10/100 hub, a Linksys DSL router, and an Efficient Networks DSL modem. The first problem was that when I transmitted only 100 W at 3.5 MHz ("80 meters"), my Linksys hub lit up like a Christmas tree. Even when transmission stopped, some of the ports remained hung up until I reset the power.
The remediation here was to go to shielded Cat5 lines, which use grounded RJ-45 connectors and help to keep RF out of the signal path. Further, I added ferrite chokes (like you see on monitor cables) to help block common mode RF. This seemed to tame the problem for the most part, but if I were to run a kilowatt, it might not be enough.
On the other side, it turns out that my receiver was quite noisy, again on the 80-m band. Often this comes from AC power line interference, so I tried selectively shutting things off. In the end, it turns out that my 100 baseT run upstairs was increasing my receiver's noise level by 10-15 dB.
The upshot: 100 baseT interacts with radios in the 3.5 - 4.0 MHz band (and possibly others), both transmitting and receiving. Switching back to 10 baseT seems to have reduced the problem quite a bit.
Martin, AA6E
-bromo
All serial storage has an access time problem, however. You may have to wait a couple of seconds to get the data you want from the moonbounce recirculation.
-Martin
I've always wanted to know what was on the back side of those icons & windows. Maybe a little stamp saying "made in Redmond"?
Yes, Stallman should be giving an award to Linus for contributions to GNU. :-)
According to the news, Gates will put $100B into this foundation, and it will support medical research (and treatment?).
An endowment of that size would throw off $5B a year in income, using my university's 5% rule. What can you do with $5B? You could endow a new Yale University _every year_.
So much money chasing a narrow research area will seriously distort the "market". Alternatively, it will give the foundation enormous control over how biomedical research develops.
Control is Microsoft's middle name, I guess.
How this $100B is managed will mean a lot more to the world than any software that will come out of Redmond.
Enough
CDMA samples, blocks, and interleaves your audio in a tricky way. This gets the best quality and reliability, but the trade-off is processing delay. Your audio packet only goes out after ~50 msec, I think. Same thing on audio coming back to you, so it's like a short satellite delay.
z
Normally, it's not a problem, but when the destination phone does not have good echo cancellation, you notice a muted, highly distorted echo coming back to you. If there was no propagation delay, you probably wouldn't notice the echo. That's my interpretation, anyway.
Good tech info on CDMA at http://people.qualcomm.com/karn/cai/Overview.ps.g
Linux on the Jornada: great! Has anyone reverse engineered these boxes? I bet they use software driven video & modem interfaces. Why else would WinCE be so slow on a 190 MHz StrongARM?
We will need WinCE-WINE to run some of the canned apps. And a SAMBA port. This could be a lifetime job for the right person...