Yes, I do have a wife. We're planning on having children. If I'm going to die in five years, that might affect whether we do so. If I'm going to die in 15, I doubt it.
The last thing I particularly want is for either of us to die unexpectedly. That really will screw everything up. If I have 15 years to plan for it, I have 15 years to put away savings and otherwise help prepare for the event. If I wait 14 years, spend six months wondering what's going on (spending a large amount of money on diagnostics) and then find I only have six months to live, then the consequences are going to be devastating.
The fact I need to make commitments means I especially want to know. Frankly, while a $1,000 DNA test isn't something that should be expected of everyone, I think it's irresponsible to make long term commitments without caring whether you can legitimately make those commitments.
Never really understood why people consider knowing they're going to die 15 years from now of something specific more terrible than finding out you have six months to live after a year or two of medical prodding and poking.
As far as I'm concerned, I'd like to know. The sooner the better.
It's a bit of both. If someone owns a significant number of TV viewers, they have a strong influence on what TV channels those viewers have access to. That can have a major impact upon free communications and diversity of media.
As you say though, from a consumer standpoint it's also bad to have just one cable operator in one area, and that isn't impacted at all by whether or not Time Warner or Comcast serves 10% of TV viewers or 90%.
I suspect the list of commercial desktop applications that exists for GNU/Linux is small because of the number of high quality free software alternatives that exist for that platform, the difficulty of packaging third party software in such a way that it installs easily on an arbitrary GNU/Linux distribution, and the relatively small marketshare.
It certainly isn't because people can run the Windows versions of the same applications via Wine. Wine requires extraordinary patience and knowledge to set up and get most applications running that it runs. I suspect you've never tried it, though given the quality of the commentary on your website...
Reference counting is a form of garbage collection. The other popular family of garbage collection methods is called "Tracing".
Java uses tracing. Some languages, notably Delphi, uses reference counting. Reference counting has major issues related to objects that have circular references, but it at least has predictable performance, whereas tracing is extremely fast and deals with circular references, but has the "stop the world" issue where a program will grind to a halt whenever GC needs to be involved. There are various means by which the "stop the world" issue is minimized in recent GCs.
The issue with Objective C 1.0 isn't that the method it uses is reference counting, it's that it's not fully automatic. It's extremely easy to create memory leaks in pre-Leopard Objective C applications by forgetting to include an object in either the built-in garbage collector or in whatever you do manually to free unused memory.
Already, most software works or "mostly works" with Wine. I routinely run IE with Flash on my Fedora Core 6 laptop in Wine. How long before Wine becomes a "target platform" for software vendors who are otherwise locked into the Win32 API?
That's impressive, given the AppDB currently reports IE7 as being unusable, and IE6 as being installable only if you jump through several hoops and download at least one proprietary DLL that's neither bundled with IE6 nor freely distributable.
Don't get me wrong: I'm 100% certain you're telling the truth, and that you are running IE6, complete with msls31.dll that you've obtained from somewhere (perhaps an existing Windows installation?), but as a standalone product Wine is clearly far from "prime-time", and far from something that "works" or "mostly works" for the vast majority of ordinary users. It says something that as yet I haven't had a single application actually run. I tried Safari, it starts and locks up, needing to be manually killed. Apparently if I install certain fonts it might work but as yet I can't get those fonts to install, they claim to install but don't. I can't get Alpha Centauri to run for any length of time. Nobody else can either (well, someone got it to run longer than a few minutes, but cannot read anything on screen because there are no fonts.) I can't get IE6 to install because, in part, I can't find the above DLL; I looked into installing Outlook when I had problems (since resolved) with Evolution, but most versions are rated "Garbage" in the AppDB.
Going to the AppDB to find working applications finds that the apps that work the best tend to be some of the more popular games. The current top 25 has two (three, if you count Photoshop twice) non-games in it, iTunes and Photoshop, which gives you some idea of where Wine's strengths are.
Wine is not ready for prime-time. For anyone other than a person with very specific application requirements, who's prepared to spend a great deal of time configuring it and downloading hacks that fall outside of their GNU/Linux distribution's package collection, it's utterly and completely unusable. Wine is a great demonstration of how difficult it is to replicate the Windows operating system APIs. It's not "almost there", despite the immense effort put into it by some of the world's most talented programmers, it never has been.
This isn't really about winning contracts, this is an auction, just as it was for PCS and AWS. PCS was an unmitigated disaster precisely because the entire thing was "highest bidder wins". Swathes of spectrum were unused as they were owned by speculators, and no operators were ever able, in practice, to purchase spectrum in every market. The notion that the intent was to create usable mobile phone networks was simply not considered by the FCC, who were only interested in raising a huge amount of money, and used "free market" justifications for the ensuing chaos.
Yes, it is. Part of the switch over to digital involves moving TV channels using the higher numbered channels to lower numbered channels, so that this spectrum can be made available.
There's oodles of TV spectrum available in part because there's never been enough interest in terrestrial broadcasting, and also because every single TV station in the US has been allocated two channels, one for their existing analog service, and one for the digital replacement. Once the analog spectrum goes away, 50% of the TV spectrum currently in use will become available.
One interesting oddity is that digital channels have "soft" numbers from an end-user point of view rather than being tied to the frequency they're allocated. For example, CBS broadcasts on channel 12 in analog here but digitally on channel 13, but both are numbered "12" on the TV. So TV channels broadcasting on the frequencies being removed may continue to appear in the same place on your "dial" even though those actual frequencies aren't even available any more, let alone in use. (This is by design, the aim being to help make the switchover as smooth as possible.)
* Are they saying the actual 22mhz band or are they saying the first 22mhz of the 700 mhz band
Well, think about it. If it were the 22MHz band, then (a) we wouldn't be referring to this auction as being 700MHz spectrum, (b) we'd be looking at mobile phones with very long antennas and (c) the amount of bandwidth available would be somewhat unimpressive.
* Rules specify that it's split in four major areas, southeast, northeast, etc, what does this mean?
It means that the auction for spectrum in the southeast is separate for that in the north east, so if you want spectrum in both of those areas, you better bid in both auctions. Spectrum is usually split regionally in the US. Look at TV and radio franchises.
* What four original restrictions did google want on auction? Which two were granted?
Appropriately, you can use Google to find the answer to this. Essentially Google was trying to ensure the resultant networks would be open.
Why? Are you hoping to persuade him to cancel Bionic Woman or Journeyman before you die, so you can feel that at least you left the world a better place? Or is this retribution for whoever allowed Dane Cook to host two episodes of Saturday Night Live?
Generally not, no. My phone just needs to be turned on, and then I can either answer a call by hitting the green button, or initiate a call by dialing a number and hitting the green button. Receiving "email" (SMS) is a matter of hitting "Read" when the message arrives. Sending differs from phone to phone but is rarely a complex process. Switching service is a matter of swapping out a SIM card. About the only thing messed up at the moment is changing MMS configurations in the event of a service change, and you can generally ask your service provider to send an OTA update to do that for you automatically. For voice and text messaging it all "just works".
You can't really say the same for the Internet. You need an appliance capable of connecting and it to be turned on (as above), but you need a connection of some type (it doesn't just work anywhere where the provider has service), hardware to make that work, up and configured, you need operating system services configured for that connection (generally manually), you need client software packages for each and every Internet-based service (including redundant services that happen to use different protocols, eg webmail vs POP3/IMAP, or Skype vs SIP vs..., or AIM vs Yahoo! vs MSN, etc) you plan to use, and you need that manually configured too. Once you have it mostly up, it "mostly works" rather than "just works". Many websites will fail to load without a particular set of conditions being met.
You can argue if you want that this is inherent in any system that is more advanced than voice telephony, and that's true. But at the end of the day, if what someone wants is a simple means to communicate, then mobile phones provide that right out of the box. Internet solutions don't. The move towards 4G is in many ways hampered by the fact that the operators do not want to destroy that "just works" aspect of the system. They want the upper levels of the system standardized, and they want SIM cards (or something equivalent) so that end users don't have to run multiple applications and spend considerable amounts of time configuring their devices. End users will still want and expect a device that upon opening the box, charging the battery, inserting the SIM card, and turning the thing on, will allow them to immediately open and close channels of voice communications.
If a phone in 2017 requires you select between Skype, IMS, GNU VoiceWithNoPatents, or TimeWarner SuperVoiceCom(tm) as part of the process of making what today would be a phone call, then we're definitely going to be worse off than we are today.
Phones are reliable, easy to use, and they "just work". The nearest thing to complication they have is the length of telephone numbers, something that hasn't turned out to be that problematic in practice, and for which address books have been created to deal with the only major issues they have.
The utopia you describe is actually where the industry is heading, see 3GPP LTE, but it's not exactly a major issue that's crippling society that the industry isn't there yet. Even when UMTS is upgraded to the technologies I just described, I suspect the device that's primarily aimed at creating point-to-point voice communications using a network that's evolved from the PSTN will remain the most popular gadget most people carry everywhere.
No. As the GP pointed out, there are two licenses, the LGPL and the GPL. GLIBC is licensed under the LGPL, therefore you don't have to release the source to your own C program, just any modifications you might have made to GLIBC. As for the library of libarc, erm, I'm not sure what's going on here but I can't see any evidence it's licensed under either the GPL or LGPL. From http://libarc.sourceforge.net/:
License Copyright © 2004 Basis Technology Corp. All Rights Reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
* Neither the name of Basis Technology Corporation nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
Looks like a permissive free software license (*BSD, MIT) to me, not copyleft at all.
For what it's worth, Verizon Wireless is publicly committed to switching to the 4G version of GSM, known as "UMTS Release 8" or "LTE", within the next few years. So yes, they will be switching to (a version of) GSM, albeit not the 2G version.
UMTS Rel. 8 is a very open system even compared to previous versions of GSM. It's all-IP and sufficiently layered that you - the end user - could use the lower layers as a pure Internet-access medium with your own VoIP protocols, or at an opposite extreme use a phone that can roam on WiMAX networks with the upper layers of Rel. 8 implemented over WiMAX's Internet access network. So despite the cynicism, Verizon Wireless's announcement of more openness today is in keeping with the direction they're likely to head in anyway.
If Sprint and Alltel can be persuaded to switch to Rel. 8 too, then we might finally see a universally supported standard in the US that's actually worth using as well.
The industry hasn't gone towards "bigger" laptops so much as a wider variety of different sizes, and it's acknowledged that not everybody who wants a laptop necessarily plans to travel with it. Laptops are only getting bigger in the sense that they're also getting smaller. Nobody is dropping their 12" line to concentrate solely on 17" machines. Apple is pretty much the only company bucking that trend, with its move from 12" to 13" on the MacBook and the dropping of the 12" "Powerbook" (MacBook Pro), and they've yet to indicate what their actual intentions are in that area.
Laptops used to be the preserve of the archetypal salesman, and seen as a device unnecessary for anyone who wasn't planning to travel on a plane at the beginning and end of each week. But a battery powerable computer that can be used somewhere other than a desk is desirable to a much wider audience than salespeople. And that audience comprises of everyone from those who want something to travel with to those who want to watch DVDs and play games while sitting in bed.
So don't panic. Smaller laptops (as in the trend towards smaller laptops) will continue to be made while there's a market for them. The fact there's a market for larger laptops is simply, finally, being felt. And about time too.
I'm trying to work out if the parent is supposed to be ironic or something. The Model T was immensely successful, something your $50 Thinkpad that's sitting in the closet is not going to be if it's in the middle of Africa. The XO is low powered, has mesh networking built-in, and is spec'd to do all the jobs it's supposed to do out of the box.
Sending used laptops to the third world is likely to turn it into a major environmental disaster, as useless laptop after useless laptop needs disposal and has nowhere to go.
I suspect the long-term strategy of the US military in iraq and afghanistan is to wait until the insurgents have expended all their biggest and most reliable salvaged munitions: they won't be able to build very many IEDs a couple of years down the road, at this rate.
Ah yes, the Zapp Brannigan doctrine:
"The killbots? It was simply a matter of outsmarting them. Killbots have a preset kill limit, knowing this, I sent wave after wave after wave of men at them. Eventually they reached their limit and shut down."
The Xbox is doing fairly well, with the games division over-all making a profit in the last quarter and marketshare approximately equal to that of the Wii (and far, far, ahead of the PS3); and the second post to Slashdot on this subject explodes the article's contention that the Zune is failing. So, I guess your comment is quite appropriate;)
112 is the GSM emergency number. The GSM standard mandates that it should work no matter where you take your GSM phone.
It happens to also be European wide emergency number for all lines, landline and mobile, (though many member states have their own number, and have implemented 112 as an alias - for example, in the UK 999 is considered the emergency number; but that's not relevant here. The context is mobile phones, and 112 is the GSM mobile emergency number. It works in Europe, it works in Korea, it works in Australia, it works in the US - on GSM networks.
I suspect they're talking about CDs that have been sonied, that is, distributed with software on them that automatically installs a rootkit onto the victim's computer if inserted into a Windows-based PC.
Now, if I were a retailer, I'd just not sell the CDs, or if under legal obligation to display them I'd price them as high as legally able, and place a sticker on each one warning the customer that the CD is defective, with my sales people trained to discourage anyone who actually gets as far as the counter from buying the CD. But I'm not, and I don't think the retailers have the will on an individual store manager level to do anything about this kind of thing, even if their representative trade associations are willing to whine in public about the issue.
If Apple had sold the phone directly, T-Mobile and AT&T users, to name but two GSM networks with unlimited data plans, would have both had accessed to unlimited data, photo (and anything else) emailing, etc, etc, without any negotiation on Apple's part. Ringtones are not free on the iPhone.
The reality is that Apple has fucked up from a customer viewpoint. They don't care because people are buying the phone anyway, but the reality is that the only thing "they got" out of carrier exclusivity was visual voicemail, and the ability to hide about $100 of the cost of a $500 (initially ~$700) phone ($100 seems to be about the average kick-back.)
That seems a pretty poor deal to me, especially considering the sacrifices they had to make. The thing can only be activated anew, you can't simply swap your SIM from your existing account into a new iPhone, which means it's only "easy" to switch to for people who aren't already on a GSM carrier. So much for "just works". People trying to roam internationally with it are being hit by outrageous roaming fees. Locations poorly served by the chosen carrier (and trust me, AT&T sucks around where I live; T-Mobile in this area is by far the best carrier, both in terms of operators running real mobile phone standards and amongst all the operators claiming to be mobile phone operators) are areas the iPhone cannot be reasonably sold in. And Apple themselves have signed up to a program of constant updates designed to break uncrippled iPhones in the most dramatic ways, which aside from the maintenance cost, is doing Apple's PR over-all no good whatsoever. If the iPod was the product that would make the Mac respectable, the iPhone seems to be the product that will lead people to steer clear of them for fear of a manufacturer that engages in sonying.
And for what? Is there any evidence at all that the iPhone wouldn't be selling so well if it had come out at $700, was selling today at $500, and didn't support visual voicemail? Especially given all the potential customers who for one reason or another prefer a non-AT&T GSM carrier and aren't buying the iPhone as a result?
Apple will not care because they're making a profit in the short term, and because of the usual gaggle of moronic "analysts" that are willing to write articles on how Apple is somehow sticking it to the carriers by giving the carriers exactly what they want and not forcing the carriers to pay huge amounts of money in subsidies. If they understood the consequences of what they're doing, they'd realize they could have made a great deal more money, and avoided sullying their reputation, by losing the control freak attitude, and not being terrified of the carriers as they obviously were. They never even needed carrier approval, and there's not a GSM carrier in the US that wouldn't have given their approval anyway; that's the saddest part.
Verizon Wireless is more like its Verizon parent, not Vodafone parent. Vodafone, for all of its faults, has always been (at least in the UK) a fairly open mobile operator. They were one of the last to resist locking their contract GSM phones back when Orange and one2one started the trend there.
I've always thought Vodafone shouldn't have any ties to Verizon Wireless, it never made any sense. They apparently only stay in because it makes a lot of money, but Verizon Wireless's management has always let Verizon call the shots, they've never made any use of their links to Vodafone (just offering R-UIMs would be a vast improvement and would make it easier to provide international roaming), and their entire strategy is counter to what Vodafone has generally stood for. The entire "partnership" started off on entirely the wrong foot, with Verizon (then Bell Atlantic) throwing a hissy fit because Vodafone bought an operator, AirTouch, that Verizon wanted to buy. At the time Verizon and AirTouch had a joint venture in PrimeCo, one of Verizon Wireless's predecessors. Verizon promptly dissolved PrimeCo as apparent retaliation for Vodafone's/AirTouch's slight of them.
Investors have noticed, and every few years motions come up to get Vodafone out of Verizon Wireless, but Vodafone's management have so far resisted on the basis that the division generates much more in profits than they would expect to get if they tried to go it alone.
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Yes, I do have a wife. We're planning on having children. If I'm going to die in five years, that might affect whether we do so. If I'm going to die in 15, I doubt it.
The last thing I particularly want is for either of us to die unexpectedly. That really will screw everything up. If I have 15 years to plan for it, I have 15 years to put away savings and otherwise help prepare for the event. If I wait 14 years, spend six months wondering what's going on (spending a large amount of money on diagnostics) and then find I only have six months to live, then the consequences are going to be devastating.
The fact I need to make commitments means I especially want to know. Frankly, while a $1,000 DNA test isn't something that should be expected of everyone, I think it's irresponsible to make long term commitments without caring whether you can legitimately make those commitments.
Never really understood why people consider knowing they're going to die 15 years from now of something specific more terrible than finding out you have six months to live after a year or two of medical prodding and poking.
As far as I'm concerned, I'd like to know. The sooner the better.
It's a bit of both. If someone owns a significant number of TV viewers, they have a strong influence on what TV channels those viewers have access to. That can have a major impact upon free communications and diversity of media.
As you say though, from a consumer standpoint it's also bad to have just one cable operator in one area, and that isn't impacted at all by whether or not Time Warner or Comcast serves 10% of TV viewers or 90%.
I suspect the list of commercial desktop applications that exists for GNU/Linux is small because of the number of high quality free software alternatives that exist for that platform, the difficulty of packaging third party software in such a way that it installs easily on an arbitrary GNU/Linux distribution, and the relatively small marketshare.
It certainly isn't because people can run the Windows versions of the same applications via Wine. Wine requires extraordinary patience and knowledge to set up and get most applications running that it runs. I suspect you've never tried it, though given the quality of the commentary on your website...
Reference counting is a form of garbage collection. The other popular family of garbage collection methods is called "Tracing".
Java uses tracing. Some languages, notably Delphi, uses reference counting. Reference counting has major issues related to objects that have circular references, but it at least has predictable performance, whereas tracing is extremely fast and deals with circular references, but has the "stop the world" issue where a program will grind to a halt whenever GC needs to be involved. There are various means by which the "stop the world" issue is minimized in recent GCs.
The issue with Objective C 1.0 isn't that the method it uses is reference counting, it's that it's not fully automatic. It's extremely easy to create memory leaks in pre-Leopard Objective C applications by forgetting to include an object in either the built-in garbage collector or in whatever you do manually to free unused memory.
That's impressive, given the AppDB currently reports IE7 as being unusable, and IE6 as being installable only if you jump through several hoops and download at least one proprietary DLL that's neither bundled with IE6 nor freely distributable.
Don't get me wrong: I'm 100% certain you're telling the truth, and that you are running IE6, complete with msls31.dll that you've obtained from somewhere (perhaps an existing Windows installation?), but as a standalone product Wine is clearly far from "prime-time", and far from something that "works" or "mostly works" for the vast majority of ordinary users. It says something that as yet I haven't had a single application actually run. I tried Safari, it starts and locks up, needing to be manually killed. Apparently if I install certain fonts it might work but as yet I can't get those fonts to install, they claim to install but don't. I can't get Alpha Centauri to run for any length of time. Nobody else can either (well, someone got it to run longer than a few minutes, but cannot read anything on screen because there are no fonts.) I can't get IE6 to install because, in part, I can't find the above DLL; I looked into installing Outlook when I had problems (since resolved) with Evolution, but most versions are rated "Garbage" in the AppDB.
Going to the AppDB to find working applications finds that the apps that work the best tend to be some of the more popular games. The current top 25 has two (three, if you count Photoshop twice) non-games in it, iTunes and Photoshop, which gives you some idea of where Wine's strengths are.
Wine is not ready for prime-time. For anyone other than a person with very specific application requirements, who's prepared to spend a great deal of time configuring it and downloading hacks that fall outside of their GNU/Linux distribution's package collection, it's utterly and completely unusable. Wine is a great demonstration of how difficult it is to replicate the Windows operating system APIs. It's not "almost there", despite the immense effort put into it by some of the world's most talented programmers, it never has been.
This isn't really about winning contracts, this is an auction, just as it was for PCS and AWS. PCS was an unmitigated disaster precisely because the entire thing was "highest bidder wins". Swathes of spectrum were unused as they were owned by speculators, and no operators were ever able, in practice, to purchase spectrum in every market. The notion that the intent was to create usable mobile phone networks was simply not considered by the FCC, who were only interested in raising a huge amount of money, and used "free market" justifications for the ensuing chaos.
Yes, it is. Part of the switch over to digital involves moving TV channels using the higher numbered channels to lower numbered channels, so that this spectrum can be made available.
There's oodles of TV spectrum available in part because there's never been enough interest in terrestrial broadcasting, and also because every single TV station in the US has been allocated two channels, one for their existing analog service, and one for the digital replacement. Once the analog spectrum goes away, 50% of the TV spectrum currently in use will become available.
One interesting oddity is that digital channels have "soft" numbers from an end-user point of view rather than being tied to the frequency they're allocated. For example, CBS broadcasts on channel 12 in analog here but digitally on channel 13, but both are numbered "12" on the TV. So TV channels broadcasting on the frequencies being removed may continue to appear in the same place on your "dial" even though those actual frequencies aren't even available any more, let alone in use. (This is by design, the aim being to help make the switchover as smooth as possible.)
Well, think about it. If it were the 22MHz band, then (a) we wouldn't be referring to this auction as being 700MHz spectrum, (b) we'd be looking at mobile phones with very long antennas and (c) the amount of bandwidth available would be somewhat unimpressive.
It means that the auction for spectrum in the southeast is separate for that in the north east, so if you want spectrum in both of those areas, you better bid in both auctions. Spectrum is usually split regionally in the US. Look at TV and radio franchises.
Appropriately, you can use Google to find the answer to this. Essentially Google was trying to ensure the resultant networks would be open.
Why? Are you hoping to persuade him to cancel Bionic Woman or Journeyman before you die, so you can feel that at least you left the world a better place? Or is this retribution for whoever allowed Dane Cook to host two episodes of Saturday Night Live?
Generally not, no. My phone just needs to be turned on, and then I can either answer a call by hitting the green button, or initiate a call by dialing a number and hitting the green button. Receiving "email" (SMS) is a matter of hitting "Read" when the message arrives. Sending differs from phone to phone but is rarely a complex process. Switching service is a matter of swapping out a SIM card. About the only thing messed up at the moment is changing MMS configurations in the event of a service change, and you can generally ask your service provider to send an OTA update to do that for you automatically. For voice and text messaging it all "just works".
You can't really say the same for the Internet. You need an appliance capable of connecting and it to be turned on (as above), but you need a connection of some type (it doesn't just work anywhere where the provider has service), hardware to make that work, up and configured, you need operating system services configured for that connection (generally manually), you need client software packages for each and every Internet-based service (including redundant services that happen to use different protocols, eg webmail vs POP3/IMAP, or Skype vs SIP vs..., or AIM vs Yahoo! vs MSN, etc) you plan to use, and you need that manually configured too. Once you have it mostly up, it "mostly works" rather than "just works". Many websites will fail to load without a particular set of conditions being met.
You can argue if you want that this is inherent in any system that is more advanced than voice telephony, and that's true. But at the end of the day, if what someone wants is a simple means to communicate, then mobile phones provide that right out of the box. Internet solutions don't. The move towards 4G is in many ways hampered by the fact that the operators do not want to destroy that "just works" aspect of the system. They want the upper levels of the system standardized, and they want SIM cards (or something equivalent) so that end users don't have to run multiple applications and spend considerable amounts of time configuring their devices. End users will still want and expect a device that upon opening the box, charging the battery, inserting the SIM card, and turning the thing on, will allow them to immediately open and close channels of voice communications.
If a phone in 2017 requires you select between Skype, IMS, GNU VoiceWithNoPatents, or TimeWarner SuperVoiceCom(tm) as part of the process of making what today would be a phone call, then we're definitely going to be worse off than we are today.
Phones are reliable, easy to use, and they "just work". The nearest thing to complication they have is the length of telephone numbers, something that hasn't turned out to be that problematic in practice, and for which address books have been created to deal with the only major issues they have.
The utopia you describe is actually where the industry is heading, see 3GPP LTE, but it's not exactly a major issue that's crippling society that the industry isn't there yet. Even when UMTS is upgraded to the technologies I just described, I suspect the device that's primarily aimed at creating point-to-point voice communications using a network that's evolved from the PSTN will remain the most popular gadget most people carry everywhere.
For the vast majority, if not all, of the Presidential candidates who stand anything approaching a chance of winning this election:
- For protecting their own privacy on the Internet
- Against protecting your privacy on the Internet
I hope that helps.
No. As the GP pointed out, there are two licenses, the LGPL and the GPL. GLIBC is licensed under the LGPL, therefore you don't have to release the source to your own C program, just any modifications you might have made to GLIBC. As for the library of libarc, erm, I'm not sure what's going on here but I can't see any evidence it's licensed under either the GPL or LGPL. From http://libarc.sourceforge.net/:
Looks like a permissive free software license (*BSD, MIT) to me, not copyleft at all.
For what it's worth, Verizon Wireless is publicly committed to switching to the 4G version of GSM, known as "UMTS Release 8" or "LTE", within the next few years. So yes, they will be switching to (a version of) GSM, albeit not the 2G version.
UMTS Rel. 8 is a very open system even compared to previous versions of GSM. It's all-IP and sufficiently layered that you - the end user - could use the lower layers as a pure Internet-access medium with your own VoIP protocols, or at an opposite extreme use a phone that can roam on WiMAX networks with the upper layers of Rel. 8 implemented over WiMAX's Internet access network. So despite the cynicism, Verizon Wireless's announcement of more openness today is in keeping with the direction they're likely to head in anyway.
If Sprint and Alltel can be persuaded to switch to Rel. 8 too, then we might finally see a universally supported standard in the US that's actually worth using as well.
The industry hasn't gone towards "bigger" laptops so much as a wider variety of different sizes, and it's acknowledged that not everybody who wants a laptop necessarily plans to travel with it. Laptops are only getting bigger in the sense that they're also getting smaller. Nobody is dropping their 12" line to concentrate solely on 17" machines. Apple is pretty much the only company bucking that trend, with its move from 12" to 13" on the MacBook and the dropping of the 12" "Powerbook" (MacBook Pro), and they've yet to indicate what their actual intentions are in that area.
Laptops used to be the preserve of the archetypal salesman, and seen as a device unnecessary for anyone who wasn't planning to travel on a plane at the beginning and end of each week. But a battery powerable computer that can be used somewhere other than a desk is desirable to a much wider audience than salespeople. And that audience comprises of everyone from those who want something to travel with to those who want to watch DVDs and play games while sitting in bed.
So don't panic. Smaller laptops (as in the trend towards smaller laptops) will continue to be made while there's a market for them. The fact there's a market for larger laptops is simply, finally, being felt. And about time too.
I'm trying to work out if the parent is supposed to be ironic or something. The Model T was immensely successful, something your $50 Thinkpad that's sitting in the closet is not going to be if it's in the middle of Africa. The XO is low powered, has mesh networking built-in, and is spec'd to do all the jobs it's supposed to do out of the box.
Sending used laptops to the third world is likely to turn it into a major environmental disaster, as useless laptop after useless laptop needs disposal and has nowhere to go.
Ah yes, the Zapp Brannigan doctrine:
"The killbots? It was simply a matter of outsmarting them. Killbots have a preset kill limit, knowing this, I sent wave after wave after wave of men at them. Eventually they reached their limit and shut down."
The Xbox is doing fairly well, with the games division over-all making a profit in the last quarter and marketshare approximately equal to that of the Wii (and far, far, ahead of the PS3); and the second post to Slashdot on this subject explodes the article's contention that the Zune is failing. So, I guess your comment is quite appropriate ;)
112 is the GSM emergency number. The GSM standard mandates that it should work no matter where you take your GSM phone.
It happens to also be European wide emergency number for all lines, landline and mobile, (though many member states have their own number, and have implemented 112 as an alias - for example, in the UK 999 is considered the emergency number; but that's not relevant here. The context is mobile phones, and 112 is the GSM mobile emergency number. It works in Europe, it works in Korea, it works in Australia, it works in the US - on GSM networks.
I suspect they're talking about CDs that have been sonied, that is, distributed with software on them that automatically installs a rootkit onto the victim's computer if inserted into a Windows-based PC.
Now, if I were a retailer, I'd just not sell the CDs, or if under legal obligation to display them I'd price them as high as legally able, and place a sticker on each one warning the customer that the CD is defective, with my sales people trained to discourage anyone who actually gets as far as the counter from buying the CD. But I'm not, and I don't think the retailers have the will on an individual store manager level to do anything about this kind of thing, even if their representative trade associations are willing to whine in public about the issue.
If Apple had sold the phone directly, T-Mobile and AT&T users, to name but two GSM networks with unlimited data plans, would have both had accessed to unlimited data, photo (and anything else) emailing, etc, etc, without any negotiation on Apple's part. Ringtones are not free on the iPhone.
The reality is that Apple has fucked up from a customer viewpoint. They don't care because people are buying the phone anyway, but the reality is that the only thing "they got" out of carrier exclusivity was visual voicemail, and the ability to hide about $100 of the cost of a $500 (initially ~$700) phone ($100 seems to be about the average kick-back.)
That seems a pretty poor deal to me, especially considering the sacrifices they had to make. The thing can only be activated anew, you can't simply swap your SIM from your existing account into a new iPhone, which means it's only "easy" to switch to for people who aren't already on a GSM carrier. So much for "just works". People trying to roam internationally with it are being hit by outrageous roaming fees. Locations poorly served by the chosen carrier (and trust me, AT&T sucks around where I live; T-Mobile in this area is by far the best carrier, both in terms of operators running real mobile phone standards and amongst all the operators claiming to be mobile phone operators) are areas the iPhone cannot be reasonably sold in. And Apple themselves have signed up to a program of constant updates designed to break uncrippled iPhones in the most dramatic ways, which aside from the maintenance cost, is doing Apple's PR over-all no good whatsoever. If the iPod was the product that would make the Mac respectable, the iPhone seems to be the product that will lead people to steer clear of them for fear of a manufacturer that engages in sonying.
And for what? Is there any evidence at all that the iPhone wouldn't be selling so well if it had come out at $700, was selling today at $500, and didn't support visual voicemail? Especially given all the potential customers who for one reason or another prefer a non-AT&T GSM carrier and aren't buying the iPhone as a result?
Apple will not care because they're making a profit in the short term, and because of the usual gaggle of moronic "analysts" that are willing to write articles on how Apple is somehow sticking it to the carriers by giving the carriers exactly what they want and not forcing the carriers to pay huge amounts of money in subsidies. If they understood the consequences of what they're doing, they'd realize they could have made a great deal more money, and avoided sullying their reputation, by losing the control freak attitude, and not being terrified of the carriers as they obviously were. They never even needed carrier approval, and there's not a GSM carrier in the US that wouldn't have given their approval anyway; that's the saddest part.
Verizon Wireless is more like its Verizon parent, not Vodafone parent. Vodafone, for all of its faults, has always been (at least in the UK) a fairly open mobile operator. They were one of the last to resist locking their contract GSM phones back when Orange and one2one started the trend there.
I've always thought Vodafone shouldn't have any ties to Verizon Wireless, it never made any sense. They apparently only stay in because it makes a lot of money, but Verizon Wireless's management has always let Verizon call the shots, they've never made any use of their links to Vodafone (just offering R-UIMs would be a vast improvement and would make it easier to provide international roaming), and their entire strategy is counter to what Vodafone has generally stood for. The entire "partnership" started off on entirely the wrong foot, with Verizon (then Bell Atlantic) throwing a hissy fit because Vodafone bought an operator, AirTouch, that Verizon wanted to buy. At the time Verizon and AirTouch had a joint venture in PrimeCo, one of Verizon Wireless's predecessors. Verizon promptly dissolved PrimeCo as apparent retaliation for Vodafone's/AirTouch's slight of them.
Investors have noticed, and every few years motions come up to get Vodafone out of Verizon Wireless, but Vodafone's management have so far resisted on the basis that the division generates much more in profits than they would expect to get if they tried to go it alone.
Try doing the calculation manually, and don't round your answers; bet you can't beat Python's "precision"!
Just did that in Ubuntu 7.04's default GNOME calculator and got the answer "-0". Minus Zero. Cool!
Looks like a lot of software has issues with that equation.