You'll probably get flamed for posting your results, but thank you. And FWIW, your stats are in line with the sites I manage, that also attract a non-technical audience.
I'm about 99% convinced the StatCounter figures are completely ridiculous. The W3Schools figures are believable but completely irrelevent, as you'd expect software developers to be using browsers other than the ones that come pre-installed.
Well, fine, but that completely misses the point. In either case the private key would still be released to the public, which would completely remove the usefulness of the key.
No, a private key might be. But there's no reason to believe that the OEM has access to Canonical's private key to begin with. And in order to comply with the license, the OEM merely has to provide the FSF with a private signing key that works, not Canonical's.
The OEM may, of course, be foolish enough not to program anything other than Canonical's original key (and some other similarly unavailable keys too) into its BIOS, in which case the OEM's other option is to default, which means paying statutory damages and ceasing to distribute Ubuntu.
But the OEM certainly can't release something not available to it, it can't compel Canonical to provide the key, so ultimately it can only provide a new key or default. Those are its options.
Maybe someone should produce GILO (Grub LOader - OK, I don't know where the I comes from, I was just being consistent with LILO) that loads Grub, but is licensed under, say, the X11 license.
I can't think of any reason why anyone would object to having a boot loaded load a boot loader that then loads a stub to load a kernel to boot an operating system. (The sad thing is, I really can't. 20 years ago this solution would look ridiculous, today, it's no worse than running an XML widget description language interpreter run over a widget library that runs over a graphics toolkit that runs over a 3D graphics language that runs over a networked graphics terminal system that runs over...)
You know what would be great? If some of this crap were documented somewhere, preferably in a way that makes it easy to understand what files to modify, what to run afterwards, and so on.
And yes, I am hoping someone out there is going to flame me for saying the above - but just know you're a douchebag if you don't actually include a link to said documentation in your flame;-) [and no, Google doesn't count]
P>
It makes sense for a handful of websites but I'd rather blacklist the bad sites than whitelist the good scripts as most of the web just doesn't work otherwise.
There's an add-on called "YesScript" that works exactly the way I want it. If a site's JS is seriously screwed up, you can click on one icon and JS no longer works for it, now or in the future. Otherwise JS is on.
Must admit this one surprises me. iGoogle is so simple in concept it's hard for me to believe that Google needs to devote that much in resources to it. Meanwhile, it's a home page, and until recently at least, web entities prized being someone's home page more than anything else, with good reason. If you start at Google, then you're already using Google.
It has a ten hour battery life. If you're OK with that, or OK with buying a longer life battery (the bigger ones that make the phone look a little weird give you something like a 30 hour battery life) then go ahead.
The thing is though that only GEM copied the Apple UI (and Apple successfully used legal action to change it so the second version was a very poor clone.)
Microsoft Windows had virtually nothing on common with Mac OS until well after it was popular, with Windows 95 being the first version of Windows that used a "Finder" like UI, and with the user interface still having significant differences. When 95 came out, Apple was already on life support. Even worse, it wasn't even doing well in 1990, when DOS ruled supreme. It failed not because anyone copied it, but because users overwhelmingly rejected Apple's approach to the GUI, preferring no GUI at all over a Macintosh.
Android? It's only a clone when it comes to threatening lawsuits. It doesn't work the same way. It doesn't even have the same front end (iOS's front end is a program launcher, Android's is a widget + status + custom launcher thing.) Arguably Apple has copied more - much more - from Android than Google has copied from iOS. And the iPhone wasn't even the first icon-driven touch-based capacitive screen phone (the LG Prada beat it.)
Apple enthusiasts will actually tell you this. They'll tell you that Android sucks, and then give a list of reasons (most of which seem pretty damned peculiar to the rest of us, but I guess it's a personal thing.)
The other part of this which I find amusing is that Apple started the war with Google themselves. Google was already developing a phone when Apple entered the market, but it's unlikely Google would have gone full speed ahead and concentrated on beating the iPhone rather than beating the Blackberry were it not for a single decision that Apple made from the beginning: they locked down the iPhone. It's five years later, and you still need Apple's permission to install an app on your own device. And Google themselves, even before the competition started, have had problems getting entirely legitimate apps approved.
(This is a reason too why I suspect the recent Facebook + Apple relationship is a very, very, temporary one. Facebook needs the market to be open just as Google did. Facebook doesn't benefit from Apple winning anything, they're just uncomfortable with Apple losing to Google, when Google is their biggest competitor.)
For me, it doesn't, yet, replace the functions of the media PC. It might in the longer term - supposedly Google is touting hackability as a feature - although with no storage and no TV capture, I doubt it'll happen quite like that. (I guess you could implement these as a box on your network, and use the hackability thing to use the Q to access and control the box, but that's not the case yet...)
I seriously doubt Apple will keep Samsung out of the market for 1-2 years, and even if it did there are many other quality Android manufacturers, HTC being the most obvious example.
The thing is that at least one of the patents (I'll be honest and say I don't know the others) is trivially easy to side step: the "slide to unlock" patent. Leaving aside whether the "slide" on ICS is remotely similar (I guess you drift your finger in a pre-determined direction on screen, which might be the way the patent is worded, I don't know), all you have to do is ship the phone such that you unlock it in another way, say, entering a PIN.
It would take Samsung's engineers a few hours to fix that particular problem. They probably haven't yet because (a) It's an ICS feature, and the entire point of the Galaxy Nexus is that it's supposed to be pure ICS, and (b) they, and their lawyers, probably don't see the ICS "drag circle to icon" unlocker as being "slide to unlock".
I seriously doubt that any other patents Apple has thrown in the mix are similarly impossible to workaround. If an injunction hits the GN, and somehow Apple prevails and it's permanent, I think Samsung will come up with an updated version that fixes the issues the very same day.
I actually wonder whether it should be necessary to change the kernel at all for OS updates. While early versions of Android did leave out critical stuff from the kernel, I'm wondering whether anything Android has implemented since 1.0 has required a new kernel _version_ (as opposed to kernel _feature_.)
Perhaps a better solution would be for Google to standardize on a specific kernel version until the next time Android requires significant hardware changes, and for Google to require that kernel be compiled with virtually every feature compiled into it (usually as a loadable module.) That way, an OS update would simply require a userland update.
In this system Google could even push the userland updates, with the update mechanism built into Android.
I can see manufacturers being unhappy about their control over the UI and their ability to ship pre-installed Facebook clients etc, but overall everyone might be happier simply from the point of view that manufacturers just need to supply a decent kernel, and they can hand over the support side entirely to Google.
Alas no, because it's an HD DVD (yes, seriously), and we still have a collection of HD DVDs. At some point I need to get the X-Box HD DVD drive I bought set up so I can rip them to a hard drive.
Has it occurred to you that it's much better for the US to have Sweden smear and punish Assange using a sex crime as the angle, than to have him sent to the US over something politically embarrassing to the US?
Which would you prefer if you were Barack W. Bush?
1. "Mr President, it appears we won't be hearing from that world infamous rapist Assange for a while. Sweden just put him in jail for six months for rape in a high profile case where world infamous rapist Assange was accused of rape, and convicted of rape, and is now jailed for rape. Oh, did I mention the technical legal term that Sweden uses for world infamous rapist Assange's crime is rape? Rape rape rape."
2. "Mr President, people are demanding to know where world famous Wikileaks journalist Julian Assange is, you know, the guy that embarrassed us by distributing footage of our helicopters deliberately killing civilians? They're demanding he be put in trial for distributing footage of our helicopters deliberately killing civilians, or else released and not tried for distributing footage of our helicopters deliberately killing civilians. Mr President? Do we want to put world famous Wikileaks journalist Jullian Assange on trial for distributing footage of our helicopters deliberately killing civilians? Mr President?"
Ah but you're forgetting Sergey Brin's well known Reality Distortion Effect that will convince Google fanbois to buy... oh wait, no, wrong tech leader and wrong company.
It is a very nice device, and it certainly seems nicer than a Roku, but I don't think the differences are worth $200 more. And I also have the "Wife wouldn't want yet another friggin' box, even a nice round one, in front of the TV" problem. She thinks it's bad enough we have a satellite box/DVR, DVD player, and media PC there.
No because the Nexus Q is a media player (Roku/Apple TV/etc type), not a tablet.
The Q is that black round thing that, at first glance anyway, appears to be a Roku alternative. It's controlled by Android devices rather than a remote, and the idea is that the device is more democratic in its availability and controllability.
For example, at a party, just as someone who wanted to play a song back in the 1980s might take a single with them, and then put it on the record player's play stack thing (I don't know the technical term, but those you old enough to have experienced the wonder of vinyl records knows what I'm talking about), you can do something broadly equivalent with the Q, pairing with it and then selecting something from your Google Play Music collection to add to its playlist.
I must admit to not seeing that feature as worth the extra $200 over a regular media player, but I'm also the person that never thought in a million years that a 10" iPod Touch would sell at $600.
And your momma's so fat she... actually I can't be bothered to sink to your level, so I'll just explain why you're spectacularly wrong.
Most laws are of the "shall not" variety. There are very few that are on the books that deal only with "can"
OK, so that proves the point that this law is something new... how? By your own admission, even if we propose that this law has a radical "can" aspect (it doesn't), and that "can" is radical, there already are laws, just "very few" of them, that do this.
Of course, there's no can. The law provides a basic quid pro quo. You get a tax break from a brand new tax if you buy a particular service. And you get that service subsidized for you if you're poor.
But, no, the law is full of obligations. You mention two. You claim a third "doesn't count" but actually it does, because this is actually about a tax. A tax you don't pay if you buy a service. A tax you also don't pay... if you don't earn income. Which you say is the reason why it doesn't count.
You used to be able to live your life (a very sheltered, boring life) without running into the Gov't compelling you to do anything, much less engage in a transaction with a private-sector business.
Alas that's never been true. The government can sneak in at the worst of times. But supposing it was, the ACA doesn't change the dynamic at all. If you decide to live in a hut in the woods with your pet falcon in Montana, refuse to get a job, and live in Earthworms, or for that matter, if you live in your parent's basement and sponge of them, or any other tax free lifestyle I can think of, you still can, and you still have no obligations to pay for anything.
You're right. Whenever a Congress I elected passes a law I don't like, I think the best way to deal with it is to run over to 9 unelected out-of-touch pensioners and DEMAND they do something about it!
The insurance companies have to prove once a year they've spent 90% of their premiums on healthcare, and refund the difference to customers if they haven't. So, no, your premiums won't raise because the insurers pretend they don't like Romneycare. Uh, I mean Obamacare! Sorry! I forgot temporarily that Romney doesn't like it any more.
The big issue is that now the gov't can tell you what to do vs what not to do. This is a big legal quagmire.
Well, that's something radical and new. I propose we call the statements about what you can and can't do "laws". Has a nice ring to it.
(Seriously, people thought this was unconstitutional? If the ACA had been ruled unconstitutional, I question whether a single law on the books is constitutional. And a reminder: the purpose of the constitution and the supreme court isn't so that nine pensioners can bail us out every time we elect a government that sucks. Elections matter.)
He didn't say the government paid for it, he just said "we" do. Generally speaking, when anyone goes bankrupt, they have a certain portion of their debts "forgiven". That money doesn't appear out of thin air, it just never goes back to the suppliers and banks that the money was owed to. That deficit has to be rectified, ultimately, by charging higher prices to future customers. And so, ultimately, we all pay more for the same services that original, bankrupt, service provider was providing.
Because now, anyone can blow off getting health insurance till they have some expensive medical bills
No, you can't. That's the entire point. That's why all the teabaggers were so upset. You can't, any more, blow off getting insurance without penalty. If you don't get insurance, you'll pay a tax used to cover the costs of your "freeloading" (to use the term used earlier in the thread.)
Slashdot Mirror
You'll probably get flamed for posting your results, but thank you. And FWIW, your stats are in line with the sites I manage, that also attract a non-technical audience.
I'm about 99% convinced the StatCounter figures are completely ridiculous. The W3Schools figures are believable but completely irrelevent, as you'd expect software developers to be using browsers other than the ones that come pre-installed.
I dunno, maybe they should buy Nokia?
That's good for,you, but when someone Googles my name, they get the "Terrorist of the Month" page at Al-Qaeda.com!
No, a private key might be. But there's no reason to believe that the OEM has access to Canonical's private key to begin with. And in order to comply with the license, the OEM merely has to provide the FSF with a private signing key that works, not Canonical's.
The OEM may, of course, be foolish enough not to program anything other than Canonical's original key (and some other similarly unavailable keys too) into its BIOS, in which case the OEM's other option is to default, which means paying statutory damages and ceasing to distribute Ubuntu.
But the OEM certainly can't release something not available to it, it can't compel Canonical to provide the key, so ultimately it can only provide a new key or default. Those are its options.
Maybe someone should produce GILO (Grub LOader - OK, I don't know where the I comes from, I was just being consistent with LILO) that loads Grub, but is licensed under, say, the X11 license.
I can't think of any reason why anyone would object to having a boot loaded load a boot loader that then loads a stub to load a kernel to boot an operating system. (The sad thing is, I really can't. 20 years ago this solution would look ridiculous, today, it's no worse than running an XML widget description language interpreter run over a widget library that runs over a graphics toolkit that runs over a 3D graphics language that runs over a networked graphics terminal system that runs over...)
You know what would be great? If some of this crap were documented somewhere, preferably in a way that makes it easy to understand what files to modify, what to run afterwards, and so on.
And yes, I am hoping someone out there is going to flame me for saying the above - but just know you're a douchebag if you don't actually include a link to said documentation in your flame ;-) [and no, Google doesn't count]
There's an add-on called "YesScript" that works exactly the way I want it. If a site's JS is seriously screwed up, you can click on one icon and JS no longer works for it, now or in the future. Otherwise JS is on.
my.yahoo.com?
Must admit this one surprises me. iGoogle is so simple in concept it's hard for me to believe that Google needs to devote that much in resources to it. Meanwhile, it's a home page, and until recently at least, web entities prized being someone's home page more than anything else, with good reason. If you start at Google, then you're already using Google.
Yeah, but on the other hand while you may be stuck with your iPhone 4, I'll be using my fPhone 23. Uh, wait, hold on, sorry fPhone 24.
Crap, need to reboot the phone, I've used up all its memory again...
It has a ten hour battery life. If you're OK with that, or OK with buying a longer life battery (the bigger ones that make the phone look a little weird give you something like a 30 hour battery life) then go ahead.
Also note: no SD card slot.
The thing is though that only GEM copied the Apple UI (and Apple successfully used legal action to change it so the second version was a very poor clone.)
Microsoft Windows had virtually nothing on common with Mac OS until well after it was popular, with Windows 95 being the first version of Windows that used a "Finder" like UI, and with the user interface still having significant differences. When 95 came out, Apple was already on life support. Even worse, it wasn't even doing well in 1990, when DOS ruled supreme. It failed not because anyone copied it, but because users overwhelmingly rejected Apple's approach to the GUI, preferring no GUI at all over a Macintosh.
Android? It's only a clone when it comes to threatening lawsuits. It doesn't work the same way. It doesn't even have the same front end (iOS's front end is a program launcher, Android's is a widget + status + custom launcher thing.) Arguably Apple has copied more - much more - from Android than Google has copied from iOS. And the iPhone wasn't even the first icon-driven touch-based capacitive screen phone (the LG Prada beat it.)
Apple enthusiasts will actually tell you this. They'll tell you that Android sucks, and then give a list of reasons (most of which seem pretty damned peculiar to the rest of us, but I guess it's a personal thing.)
The other part of this which I find amusing is that Apple started the war with Google themselves. Google was already developing a phone when Apple entered the market, but it's unlikely Google would have gone full speed ahead and concentrated on beating the iPhone rather than beating the Blackberry were it not for a single decision that Apple made from the beginning: they locked down the iPhone. It's five years later, and you still need Apple's permission to install an app on your own device. And Google themselves, even before the competition started, have had problems getting entirely legitimate apps approved.
(This is a reason too why I suspect the recent Facebook + Apple relationship is a very, very, temporary one. Facebook needs the market to be open just as Google did. Facebook doesn't benefit from Apple winning anything, they're just uncomfortable with Apple losing to Google, when Google is their biggest competitor.)
For me, it doesn't, yet, replace the functions of the media PC. It might in the longer term - supposedly Google is touting hackability as a feature - although with no storage and no TV capture, I doubt it'll happen quite like that. (I guess you could implement these as a box on your network, and use the hackability thing to use the Q to access and control the box, but that's not the case yet...)
I seriously doubt Apple will keep Samsung out of the market for 1-2 years, and even if it did there are many other quality Android manufacturers, HTC being the most obvious example.
The thing is that at least one of the patents (I'll be honest and say I don't know the others) is trivially easy to side step: the "slide to unlock" patent. Leaving aside whether the "slide" on ICS is remotely similar (I guess you drift your finger in a pre-determined direction on screen, which might be the way the patent is worded, I don't know), all you have to do is ship the phone such that you unlock it in another way, say, entering a PIN.
It would take Samsung's engineers a few hours to fix that particular problem. They probably haven't yet because (a) It's an ICS feature, and the entire point of the Galaxy Nexus is that it's supposed to be pure ICS, and (b) they, and their lawyers, probably don't see the ICS "drag circle to icon" unlocker as being "slide to unlock".
I seriously doubt that any other patents Apple has thrown in the mix are similarly impossible to workaround. If an injunction hits the GN, and somehow Apple prevails and it's permanent, I think Samsung will come up with an updated version that fixes the issues the very same day.
I think the most obvious solution to this is to rewrite our code of law to be a collection of car analogies...
I actually wonder whether it should be necessary to change the kernel at all for OS updates. While early versions of Android did leave out critical stuff from the kernel, I'm wondering whether anything Android has implemented since 1.0 has required a new kernel _version_ (as opposed to kernel _feature_.)
Perhaps a better solution would be for Google to standardize on a specific kernel version until the next time Android requires significant hardware changes, and for Google to require that kernel be compiled with virtually every feature compiled into it (usually as a loadable module.) That way, an OS update would simply require a userland update.
In this system Google could even push the userland updates, with the update mechanism built into Android.
I can see manufacturers being unhappy about their control over the UI and their ability to ship pre-installed Facebook clients etc, but overall everyone might be happier simply from the point of view that manufacturers just need to supply a decent kernel, and they can hand over the support side entirely to Google.
Alas no, because it's an HD DVD (yes, seriously), and we still have a collection of HD DVDs. At some point I need to get the X-Box HD DVD drive I bought set up so I can rip them to a hard drive.
Has it occurred to you that it's much better for the US to have Sweden smear and punish Assange using a sex crime as the angle, than to have him sent to the US over something politically embarrassing to the US?
Which would you prefer if you were Barack W. Bush?
1. "Mr President, it appears we won't be hearing from that world infamous rapist Assange for a while. Sweden just put him in jail for six months for rape in a high profile case where world infamous rapist Assange was accused of rape, and convicted of rape, and is now jailed for rape. Oh, did I mention the technical legal term that Sweden uses for world infamous rapist Assange's crime is rape? Rape rape rape."
2. "Mr President, people are demanding to know where world famous Wikileaks journalist Julian Assange is, you know, the guy that embarrassed us by distributing footage of our helicopters deliberately killing civilians? They're demanding he be put in trial for distributing footage of our helicopters deliberately killing civilians, or else released and not tried for distributing footage of our helicopters deliberately killing civilians. Mr President? Do we want to put world famous Wikileaks journalist Jullian Assange on trial for distributing footage of our helicopters deliberately killing civilians? Mr President?"
Do you need me to answer that one?
Ah but you're forgetting Sergey Brin's well known Reality Distortion Effect that will convince Google fanbois to buy... oh wait, no, wrong tech leader and wrong company.
It is a very nice device, and it certainly seems nicer than a Roku, but I don't think the differences are worth $200 more. And I also have the "Wife wouldn't want yet another friggin' box, even a nice round one, in front of the TV" problem. She thinks it's bad enough we have a satellite box/DVR, DVD player, and media PC there.
No because the Nexus Q is a media player (Roku/Apple TV/etc type), not a tablet.
The Q is that black round thing that, at first glance anyway, appears to be a Roku alternative. It's controlled by Android devices rather than a remote, and the idea is that the device is more democratic in its availability and controllability.
For example, at a party, just as someone who wanted to play a song back in the 1980s might take a single with them, and then put it on the record player's play stack thing (I don't know the technical term, but those you old enough to have experienced the wonder of vinyl records knows what I'm talking about), you can do something broadly equivalent with the Q, pairing with it and then selecting something from your Google Play Music collection to add to its playlist.
I must admit to not seeing that feature as worth the extra $200 over a regular media player, but I'm also the person that never thought in a million years that a 10" iPod Touch would sell at $600.
And your momma's so fat she... actually I can't be bothered to sink to your level, so I'll just explain why you're spectacularly wrong.
OK, so that proves the point that this law is something new... how? By your own admission, even if we propose that this law has a radical "can" aspect (it doesn't), and that "can" is radical, there already are laws, just "very few" of them, that do this.
Of course, there's no can. The law provides a basic quid pro quo. You get a tax break from a brand new tax if you buy a particular service. And you get that service subsidized for you if you're poor.
But, no, the law is full of obligations. You mention two. You claim a third "doesn't count" but actually it does, because this is actually about a tax. A tax you don't pay if you buy a service. A tax you also don't pay... if you don't earn income. Which you say is the reason why it doesn't count.
Alas that's never been true. The government can sneak in at the worst of times. But supposing it was, the ACA doesn't change the dynamic at all. If you decide to live in a hut in the woods with your pet falcon in Montana, refuse to get a job, and live in Earthworms, or for that matter, if you live in your parent's basement and sponge of them, or any other tax free lifestyle I can think of, you still can, and you still have no obligations to pay for anything.
You're right. Whenever a Congress I elected passes a law I don't like, I think the best way to deal with it is to run over to 9 unelected out-of-touch pensioners and DEMAND they do something about it!
The insurance companies have to prove once a year they've spent 90% of their premiums on healthcare, and refund the difference to customers if they haven't. So, no, your premiums won't raise because the insurers pretend they don't like Romneycare. Uh, I mean Obamacare! Sorry! I forgot temporarily that Romney doesn't like it any more.
Well, that's something radical and new. I propose we call the statements about what you can and can't do "laws". Has a nice ring to it.
(Seriously, people thought this was unconstitutional? If the ACA had been ruled unconstitutional, I question whether a single law on the books is constitutional. And a reminder: the purpose of the constitution and the supreme court isn't so that nine pensioners can bail us out every time we elect a government that sucks. Elections matter.)
I think you're both on the same page.
He didn't say the government paid for it, he just said "we" do. Generally speaking, when anyone goes bankrupt, they have a certain portion of their debts "forgiven". That money doesn't appear out of thin air, it just never goes back to the suppliers and banks that the money was owed to. That deficit has to be rectified, ultimately, by charging higher prices to future customers. And so, ultimately, we all pay more for the same services that original, bankrupt, service provider was providing.
No, you can't. That's the entire point. That's why all the teabaggers were so upset. You can't, any more, blow off getting insurance without penalty. If you don't get insurance, you'll pay a tax used to cover the costs of your "freeloading" (to use the term used earlier in the thread.)