Birds too, I believe, cannot see things that do not move, and birds are believed to be whats left of dinosours as they evolved to today.
Just a quick sanity check. If birds or dinosaurs truly couldn't see anything that didn't move, don't you think they'd have a lot of trouble constantly running into things like trees and rocks, and today houses and buildings?
The visual system "sees" reflected light from any object. How a given creature responds to reflected light patterns and changes in light, is the question.
Haven't even started, and we already have a mutation.
Re:The iPod will disappear into the cell phone
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Re-Imagining Apple
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People are going to carry around only one thing, once that's possible. The challenge is to to make the user interface of that one thing tolerable.
I disagree, and your second sentence is part of the reason. Once you combine devices with different types of controls, the UI suffers terribly.
The other part is getting the right features. When I look at "convergence" devices I can't find one device that has all the right features. Take a camera phone as an example. Can you find a single one that has all the features you want in a good phone, and has all the features you want in a good, general purpose digital camera?
Heck, my wife and I just bought a new washer and dryer. When looking I soon found that I liked the washer from one company, but the dryer from another company. I couldn't find a "matched" washer and dryer where both had the feature set we wanted unless we spent a lot more. Which of course led to a discussion about wether the washer and dryer really need to match. My wife won that argument so (surprise) the new, very expensive, but matching, washer and dryer arrived just yesterday.
Seriously, whats wrong with a phone being.....a phone?
Same thing that's wrong with a web browser just being a web browser (not email client, file browser, PIM...). That is nothing.
Of course I'm one of those heretics who watches TV on a television, listens to music from CDs played through a stereo system and thinks that photo albums are something you put on a shelf to gather dust, instead of just doing it all on my computer.
But things get really confusing when you start cutting and pasting quotes together. For example, from yesterdays Register article,
Referring to Apple's CEO, Garriques quipped: "Steve's perspective is that you launch a product on Sunday and sell it on Monday." Motorola, by contrast, launches product only when it's ready to go on the market, he said.
I'm still trying to make sense out of that given that Motorola is blaming Apple for the delay.
The GPL is not some kind of "super contract" that overrides everything else. In fact, it's barely been proven in court up to this point.
It has to override, otherwise copyright is useless. If all I have to do to get unrestricted rights to all the GPL software (or any software for that matter) is to hire someone to "accidently" bring it into the company then copyright is useless. Its the guys contract with the company that can't override the license he has with the writers of the GPL'd software.
And actually, according to Eben Moglen (FSF lawyer) the GPL stands up very well in court. So well in fact, that its all over before "infringers" even get in the front door to try to "break" it.
In this instance, the only possible license the company this guy works for has for the original GPL code is the GPL. The guy can't give the company something he doesn't own. So either they use it under the conditions of the GPL or they have no license, in which case they can't use it at all.
They may be able to get damages from the guy who brought the code into the company, but that doesn't give them the rights to the "stolen" code. Only the GPL can give them any copy rights.
How many people in his company do you think modified some code gotten from IBM?
I keep picturing individual programmers in companies all over the country being "called into the office" today to be interrogated about their post to/.
From the article, their definition of affected downloads is "paid downloads." So if you have to pay to download a piece of software, or a song, you have to pay sales tax.
IMO the Ars Technica writup did a great disservice by not pointing out this was for paid downloads only.
Yes, considering the proposal is for 5% of the purchase price. If the purchase price is $0, the tax is zero.
The article (not the Ars Technica writup) specifically states its for purchased downloads. For example, I recently purchased some software online that gave me a choice of either having a CD shipped to me (in which case the cost of shipping was added) or downloading the software for instant gratification. The proposed law would mean that if I chose the download method I would be subject to the same sales tax I would have paid had I chosen to have the CD shipped to me.
I forget which web site it was waaay back when that compared PC hardware to flavors of ice cream -many variations of vanilla. If you want something really differenct (like strawberry different) you needed to get a Mac.
IOW there's no real hardware variety in the "PC" world. The closest you get is AMD/Intel. That's not saying there's any more variety in the Mac world, just that the big difference is Mac vs. PC, not Dell vs. Gateway.
No, seriously, if we all have to pretend that something is property, then its not property.
In which case there is no such thing as "property", intellectual or physical. The only reason the shirt on my back is my property is because "we" as a society have agreed that I've met the requirements to make it my property (I gave the person at the store some funny little pieces of paper).
I seem to remember Eben Moglen making that argement in an article explaining that the GPL has been legally tested over and over again. He argues its essentially a Catch-22 for anyone who violates the GPL. Either they acknowledge the valididy of the GPL and are bound by its restrictions, or they argue the GPL is invalid, in which case they have no valid license and are in violation of copyright law.
According to Moglen, when faced with the reality that they can't win the court case, they settle (which means they comply with the terms of the GPL). So, paraphrasing Moglen, the GPL has been legally tested many times, the only reason it hasn't made it to a court case is because violaters soon realize they don't have a chance in court.
And the part I'm wondering about is. lets say I pay the $50 they're asking and request the source code, which they send to me. Based on the GPL am I not allowed to then compile my own version, call it PearryOS and give it away, undermining their "business"?
I'm no licensing guru by any stretch of the imagination, but...
I thought one of the main differences between GPL and licenses like the BSD license was that GPL prevented companies from taking the code and selling it as their own. Isn't that essentially what's being done here?
I'm with you two. Sounds like what's needed is some heavy duty vector processing horsepower with a good physics API. IMO IBM already has the hardware part of the solution with their recently announced Cell processor, which may actually be better suited to the role of a co-processor than as a CPU. The cool part is you could put several Cell processors on a single expansion card, and also use several expansion cards.
The other advantage of this approach is when you're done playing your game, the same cell processor(s) can be used to encode a video feed to be burned to DVD in real time.
What I would hope for is that the chip interfaces support having farms or arrays of them such that a thread for each modeled object gets its own physics context. Except for a controller that would have to ride hurd on the object collisions,
Wasn't there a discussion of IBM's upcoming Cell processor just a week or two ago? These things would theoretically be cheap enough a gamer could plug a PCI card or two in, each containing 1-4 cell processors to boost all aspects of game play. The cool part is they're general purpose enough they might even be able to help the next version of Word run at an acceptable speed.
And if game developers can do as good a job as Hollywood:
Explosions in space will come with ear-splitting surround sound as ships "whoosh" by. The flash of light and sound of the explosion will occur at the same time -even if occuring a solar system away. There will be realistic flames burning away the outside of the ship. All space ships on screen will be properly oriented with the top of the ship "up" unless the ship is disabled, in which case it will by slightly askew. And many more Hollywood special effects.
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Birds too, I believe, cannot see things that do not move, and birds are believed to be whats left of dinosours as they evolved to today.
Just a quick sanity check. If birds or dinosaurs truly couldn't see anything that didn't move, don't you think they'd have a lot of trouble constantly running into things like trees and rocks, and today houses and buildings?
The visual system "sees" reflected light from any object. How a given creature responds to reflected light patterns and changes in light, is the question.
Haven't even started, and we already have a mutation.
People are going to carry around only one thing, once that's possible. The challenge is to to make the user interface of that one thing tolerable.
I disagree, and your second sentence is part of the reason. Once you combine devices with different types of controls, the UI suffers terribly.
The other part is getting the right features. When I look at "convergence" devices I can't find one device that has all the right features. Take a camera phone as an example. Can you find a single one that has all the features you want in a good phone, and has all the features you want in a good, general purpose digital camera?
Heck, my wife and I just bought a new washer and dryer. When looking I soon found that I liked the washer from one company, but the dryer from another company. I couldn't find a "matched" washer and dryer where both had the feature set we wanted unless we spent a lot more. Which of course led to a discussion about wether the washer and dryer really need to match. My wife won that argument so (surprise) the new, very expensive, but matching, washer and dryer arrived just yesterday.
IMO neither the design or the features were very "Apple-like" or very compelling. They all look like something other companies (like Sony) might do.
Which makes me wonder when we'll be able to "skin" hollywood movies the way some games can be....
Seriously, whats wrong with a phone being.....a phone?
Same thing that's wrong with a web browser just being a web browser (not email client, file browser, PIM...). That is nothing.
Of course I'm one of those heretics who watches TV on a television, listens to music from CDs played through a stereo system and thinks that photo albums are something you put on a shelf to gather dust, instead of just doing it all on my computer.
But things get really confusing when you start cutting and pasting quotes together. For example, from yesterdays Register article,
Referring to Apple's CEO, Garriques quipped: "Steve's perspective is that you launch a product on Sunday and sell it on Monday." Motorola, by contrast, launches product only when it's ready to go on the market, he said.
I'm still trying to make sense out of that given that Motorola is blaming Apple for the delay.
The GPL is not some kind of "super contract" that overrides everything else. In fact, it's barely been proven in court up to this point.
It has to override, otherwise copyright is useless. If all I have to do to get unrestricted rights to all the GPL software (or any software for that matter) is to hire someone to "accidently" bring it into the company then copyright is useless. Its the guys contract with the company that can't override the license he has with the writers of the GPL'd software.
And actually, according to Eben Moglen (FSF lawyer) the GPL stands up very well in court. So well in fact, that its all over before "infringers" even get in the front door to try to "break" it.
In this instance, the only possible license the company this guy works for has for the original GPL code is the GPL. The guy can't give the company something he doesn't own. So either they use it under the conditions of the GPL or they have no license, in which case they can't use it at all.
They may be able to get damages from the guy who brought the code into the company, but that doesn't give them the rights to the "stolen" code. Only the GPL can give them any copy rights.
How many people in his company do you think modified some code gotten from IBM?
/.
I keep picturing individual programmers in companies all over the country being "called into the office" today to be interrogated about their post to
I believe once something is in the public domain, it can't be removed from people with grabby fingers.
But once its in the public domain it also loses all its GPL protections/limitations. Not sure if that's what's wanted either.
From the article, their definition of affected downloads is "paid downloads." So if you have to pay to download a piece of software, or a song, you have to pay sales tax.
IMO the Ars Technica writup did a great disservice by not pointing out this was for paid downloads only.
Also FTFA
5% tax on paid downloads.
No, the critical part is that its a tax on purchased downloads.
And IIRC from reading the article earlier, its not voluntary. It relies on the honor system. There's a big difference there.
Yes, considering the proposal is for 5% of the purchase price. If the purchase price is $0, the tax is zero.
The article (not the Ars Technica writup) specifically states its for purchased downloads. For example, I recently purchased some software online that gave me a choice of either having a CD shipped to me (in which case the cost of shipping was added) or downloading the software for instant gratification. The proposed law would mean that if I chose the download method I would be subject to the same sales tax I would have paid had I chosen to have the CD shipped to me.
There is no proposal to tax all downloads.
receive a satisfactory experience on windows, linux, macos, or a number of other operating systems
Well, if all you want is a "satisfactory experience"....
Pretty much explains why IE, Windows and Office have the userbase they do. Why be "good" or "great" when people will buy "satisfactory"?
I forget which web site it was waaay back when that compared PC hardware to flavors of ice cream -many variations of vanilla. If you want something really differenct (like strawberry different) you needed to get a Mac.
IOW there's no real hardware variety in the "PC" world. The closest you get is AMD/Intel. That's not saying there's any more variety in the Mac world, just that the big difference is Mac vs. PC, not Dell vs. Gateway.
I agree. I assume developers choose the BSD license instead of GPL precisely because of the differences.
No, seriously, if we all have to pretend that something is property, then its not property.
In which case there is no such thing as "property", intellectual or physical. The only reason the shirt on my back is my property is because "we" as a society have agreed that I've met the requirements to make it my property (I gave the person at the store some funny little pieces of paper).
Its all pretend.
I seem to remember Eben Moglen making that argement in an article explaining that the GPL has been legally tested over and over again. He argues its essentially a Catch-22 for anyone who violates the GPL. Either they acknowledge the valididy of the GPL and are bound by its restrictions, or they argue the GPL is invalid, in which case they have no valid license and are in violation of copyright law.
According to Moglen, when faced with the reality that they can't win the court case, they settle (which means they comply with the terms of the GPL). So, paraphrasing Moglen, the GPL has been legally tested many times, the only reason it hasn't made it to a court case is because violaters soon realize they don't have a chance in court.
And the part I'm wondering about is. lets say I pay the $50 they're asking and request the source code, which they send to me. Based on the GPL am I not allowed to then compile my own version, call it PearryOS and give it away, undermining their "business"?
I'm no licensing guru by any stretch of the imagination, but...
I thought one of the main differences between GPL and licenses like the BSD license was that GPL prevented companies from taking the code and selling it as their own. Isn't that essentially what's being done here?
because obviously English is WRONG
No English isn't wrong. Just the idea that it is governed by rules.
I'm with you two. Sounds like what's needed is some heavy duty vector processing horsepower with a good physics API. IMO IBM already has the hardware part of the solution with their recently announced Cell processor, which may actually be better suited to the role of a co-processor than as a CPU. The cool part is you could put several Cell processors on a single expansion card, and also use several expansion cards.
The other advantage of this approach is when you're done playing your game, the same cell processor(s) can be used to encode a video feed to be burned to DVD in real time.
What I would hope for is that the chip interfaces support having farms or arrays of them such that a thread for each modeled object gets its own physics context. Except for a controller that would have to ride hurd on the object collisions,
Wasn't there a discussion of IBM's upcoming Cell processor just a week or two ago? These things would theoretically be cheap enough a gamer could plug a PCI card or two in, each containing 1-4 cell processors to boost all aspects of game play. The cool part is they're general purpose enough they might even be able to help the next version of Word run at an acceptable speed.
Even "in space" there are physics at play.
And if game developers can do as good a job as Hollywood:
Explosions in space will come with ear-splitting surround sound as ships "whoosh" by.
The flash of light and sound of the explosion will occur at the same time -even if occuring a solar system away.
There will be realistic flames burning away the outside of the ship.
All space ships on screen will be properly oriented with the top of the ship "up" unless the ship is disabled, in which case it will by slightly askew.
And many more Hollywood special effects.