Let's pretend you're talking about inventive rather than innovative, because I suspect that's what you meant (most people do), and "He didn't actually invent it, but he was the person who first packaged it in a form that got it into people's hands" doesn't strike me as something anyone has said patents should be granted for. Patents are supposed to go to the first person to invent something and take it to the patent office, not the first person to make it popular.
I'm not really sure anything in CP/M qualifies as massively inventive. Kildall's CP/M became popular not because it was inventive, but because it was there. It was a simple program loader with a very small library accessable to loaded applications. Many of the fundamentals in CP/M went back to libraries that came with the Intel test rig he was programming.
Yes, many aspects of it were copied into QD-OS (better known today as MSDOS), but these were compatibility hacks rather than functionality. Things like "System call 5 writes a character to the console" (or something, I forget which call did that.) FAT was copied too, but FAT is, frankly, obvious. I'm not sure how many other operating systems prior to CP/M used the same concepts, my guess would be many, but the Unix system we know and love isn't that different - the major difference is that the filenames appear FAT's equivalent of iNodes, rather than in dedicated directory files.
Kildall would probably have disagreed with you anyway. The guy was a programmer through and through. Despite all the anecdotes, the major reason IBM didn't have CP/M86 for the PC was because Kildall wasn't that interested in it as a project. Had he been so, it would have been released a year or two prior, and Seattle Computing's QD-OS wouldn't have been written because the need for it would have been absent. If he'd been interested, when the IBM people knocked on his door, they'd have been treated as any other OEM, rather than a group needing an entirely new product.
Kildall was interested in the things he was working on, much more so than maximising the money he got and controlling the market. Short of doing so defensively, as you would today, I doubt he'd have patented anything, even if something as obvious and derivative as CP/M had been patentable.
Wow, I thought that certain institutions were exempt (well, subject to modified rules) like a lot of other things. So, every time my kids schools have movie day they are violating copyright law. Same for day cares that use movies to entertain the kids.
Possibly, on the other hand my experience (admittedly from the UK) is that schools tend to be full of people anal about such things, and the school has probably got a license to do so.
IANAL. With that said:
Here's the deal, as I understand it: it's actually amazingly easy to violate copyright law. Any form of copying or public performance is technically a violation though fair use provides you with defenses for many specific examples, and occasionally you get other get-outs too. It is a violation of copyright law to make an unauthorized copy of a file on your computer harddrive whose copyright doesn't belong to you, but in 99% of cases, that's fair use.
In the vast majority of cases, no lawsuit against you would "succeed" in any useful sense because the costs of prosecuting are high and the returns are very low if you actually are found in breach but nobody in their right mind thinks you've caused any damage. So in your minivan example, if you were found to be violating copyright (and I doubt you would be, because you certainly have no intent to provide something the public can see, and the public isn't going to do more than snatch quick glimpses of a very-far-away-difficult-to-see picture), the copyright holder might be able to squeeze $750 out of you, but would have had to have gone to a lot of trouble to actually get there in the first place.
Between fair use and the logistical difficulty of suing people for trivial violations, you're rarely likely to be punished for the numerous times you fall foul of copyright law.
Of course, the fact that you don't have the right to do all these things gives groups like the MPAA some leverage when they argue for more oppressive DRM-enforcement. If DRM happens to also stop a lot of things that are currently too trivial to prosecute over, those arguing for more oppressive laws can get away with claiming you never had the right to do them anyway.
Which is one reason why it would be nice to see a move from "fair use defenses" to actual end-user rights when it comes to the use of content they're directly paid for. Unfortunately, the cause of reforming copyright has been hijacked by the pro-freeloader mob at the moment, which means I don't expect any movement of the law in that direction for the foreseeable future. I think we're going to see more oppressive copyright and DRM laws, and there's not going to be a united voice opposing that to stop it.
Yeah, I just took a look at the Wikipedia page, and it looks like Canopy is an overlapping, proprietary, technology, exclusively fixed wireless, rather than WiMAX based. Which is fine, as long as it does the job I don't think many people are going to care much about the differences. If it was mobile wireless (in competition with 802.11e) then I think it'd matter a little more that it's proprietary.
It doesn't look that expensive either, although Motorola's site, while big on details about consumer equipment (it's $200 per consumer for that side, at least for the low-end version), doesn't go into details about the ISP's share of the costs.
A few months ago, I was bothered that it looked like broadband was going to be controlled by a duopoly of the cable and phone companies. With AT&T taking over BellSouth (the latter of whom are ok, but they have their stupid "No servers" rules and threw me out of their website once when I was trying to order DSL because I picked "Linux" (no really, I was redirected to a dead-end page saying it wasn't a supported system, and there was no way to go back and chose a different one; but AT&T really do seem like power-crazed nutcases from everything I've read. They and Verizon were what started this whole network neutrality scare), and the cable companies being both incompetent and powercrazed, this didn't seem a good thing.
But I've noticed things are changing majorly on the wireless front. UMTS and EVDO may not be much right now, but UMTS is going over to a WiMAX-like air interface in the next three or four years (HSOPA, that is, OFDM, possibly with MIMO), and I suspect most CDMA2000 networks will be complemented with WiMAX or UMTS in the same period of time. While things have dragged in the US, this switch of technologies should be much faster because this iteration of UMTS doesn't need huge amounts of additional spectrum to work. (Which has been the problem with W-CDMA based UMTS.)
The upshot is that mobile Internet speeds will start to approach 100Mbps by 2010, with latencies in the 5-20ms range. At which point, even shared access is going to be a decent alternative to DSL or Cable, and we might start seeing something resembling good competition. Prices for UMTS and WiMAX equipment should also drop like stones as everyone and their brother can make use of the coming spectrum glut to implement these things.
Meanwhile, you have your Canopy-based (and fixed-wireless WiMAX) WISPs that are making serious headway.
Have you posted anywhere about your experiences with WiMax? It's an interesting technology, it's only just being rolled out, and it'd be interesting to see a full review from an actual, live, WiMax user rather than the "Theoretically it's great!" stuff that gets posted all the time.
As an ex-pat Brit, I've noticed a massive difference between the quality of mass produced meat in Europe and that of the US. The raw ingredients (beef and chicken especially) really are a lot better in the US. I believe there's a lot less of the "Feed the dead to the living" in the US compared to Europe.
There are exceptions. I can't find decent lamb here for love nor money. And while the meat is excellent, the quality of the more popular restaurants is often lacking.
It's a small, 4lb, chicken. I have no idea if it's free range or not, but I do know they're the only chickens of that size my local supermarket sells. On top of which, the whole "free range" thing isn't something I have a great deal of sympathy here, given we're talking about creatures with brains only slightly larger than a pea.
I seriously doubt they taste any better FWIW. I'm picky about my chicken, especially after living in Britain during the late eighties/early nineties, when for some reason farmers decided to feed their birds fishmeal; Publix's chicken tastes excellent.
Don't think I'm criticising you here, but it's kind of frightening that you're posting (and with some justification given other people's comments) the idea of cooking a good meal involving a quite ordinary mix of vegetables and meat (plus a carb like rice) as some kind of miracle new diet. On a Sunday I'll regularly do a roast chicken dinner. That's about $4 worth of vegatables (including potatoes), and for two people, about $4 for the chicken itself. Gravy, stuffing mix, and other assorted stuff is maybe $1 on top of that. That's a full meal of the size you'd go to a restaurant to get, for two people, for less than $5 a head, plus meat for sandwiches for a couple of days.
I used to live, about ten years ago, on well under $20 a week. You can really make your budget stretch by eating healthily and avoiding pre-packaged foods. Of late, my budget has more than doubled, largely because of work fatigue and buying the wrong stuff (which probably isn't helping with the fatigue, but it's hard to come home and cook like this...)
I thought the article's comments about GNOME in particular were wrong. The problem with GNOME was not that it had no direction and therefore suddenly became bloated and unmanagable with feature creep. Far from it. It had a relatively popular leader who had an idea about how it should work. It gained feature creep because the "vision" of that OSS leader was to emulate a UI that itself was bloated, poorly designed, and suffering feature creep, both on the outside and the inside.
Had it had no direction, I believe it would have been more like the mix of UIs we saw in the early to mid-nineties on X11, or even throughout the late eighties on the Amiga. Someone would have put together a file manager. Another would have put an object viewer. Yet another might have worked on a print system. Each component would probably have been terrific, but the whole would have looked relatively ugly and argubly been poor in usability.
I'm surprised how "easy" it's been to fix GNOME and make it the relatively good system it is today (relatively as in recent versions, as configured by Debian and RedHat, are easily the second best mainstream GUIs, after Mac OS X.) That took the right kind of vision, and that vision, interestingly, was the result of the community noticing the project had gone badly wrong, and forcing itself to pay attention.
If you expect me to believe number two, you must not only prove that the interstellar traveller ate the cookie, but you must also prove that you did NOT eat the cookie. And you must prove that you are not an interstellar traveller.
Now, hold on a moment. _Proving the first and the last of these should prove the second...
...unless you're trying to claim that it's possible to eat your cookie and have it eaten by an interstella travelled. That's an extraordinary claim to make, and I hope you have some extraordinary evidence to back it up!
If and when the time comes that we feel it's ok to need a professional to come in to advise us on how to turn off our computers, then there's something seriously wrong with the world.
Honestly, nothing they released in the 1980s was remotely Mac like. Until Windows 2.0, Microsoft Windows didn't even support overlapping windows. Icons existed but had an entirely different function (to represent minimized windows, rather than files as in Mac OS.) Microsoft did collaborate with HP at one point on a desktop called NewWave, the earliest version technically came out in the eighties, but that's in 1989, and it wasn't a Microsoft product, and was never part of Windows.
Funnily enough, Windows up until Mac OS 6 was actually more capable than Mac OS, even if the UI was (much) less friendly. Mac OS 6 had the Multifinder, and at that point the integration was good enough to allow Mac OS users to have more or less the same power as Windows users. So not only did Microsoft produce a different system, it excelled in areas different from those that Mac OS excelled in.
Even Windows 95 borrows only slightly from Mac OS. It has a (half-hearted attempt at a) "spacial" file manager, and icons on the desktop represent files, not windows. And, erm, that's it. Yeah.
Well, Apple did kind of think about it, and spent a lot of time suing Microsoft in the mid-eighties and early nineties (which was rather odd because pre-'95, Windows looked nothing like Mac OS, and even Windows 95 has significant differences.)
Different people have different takes on it. Some say Microsoft resolved the suit when it paid Apple the millions of dollars it did in the infamous Steve Jobs "Microsoft is our friend, Microsoft has always been our friend" keynote in the late nineties. Others say that Apple lost the suit, after successfully bullying companies for long enough using the suit that it didn't really matter (Digital Research is a famous example, who rewrote GEM's "Finder" equivalent to be completely un-Mac like after Apple sued, but after they'd already sold the earlier version to Atari, who continued to bundle the Mac-like version of GEM with the ST for years.)
Just a message to say thanks. I read the review and thought "he's going to get flamed to a crisp for this", but I also have to say it's about time certain issues stopped being treated, by serious people, as things that there are two, contradictory, legitimate sides to.
Defending science seems to be a difficult thing these days when people are more concerned about economics or moral issues that come with difficult decisions. Your answer to Stormin' Mormon struck me as the obvious one, yet this is the first response that explains it clearly.
I don't pretend to be an expert in Climate Science. This is why I listen to what those scientists who work in the field have to say. They're the experts. They're the people who use the scientific method and try to come up with the best, most concrete, most unquestionable, answers about the issue. They are not perfect, but after a time, when almost all of them are pointing in one direction, I've got to believe that's the direction we're heading in.
You know, I'm having a hard time that the words "SMTP", "port", and "25" appear in the cited law at all. I haven't read it, and would be curious to know what it actually says. My guess is it would avoid using the term "electronic mail" at all, and if it does, it would probably define the term, using language along the lines of "messages conveyed electronically from one computer to another via a computer network" or relatively open (from the point of view of conveying the spirit of the law), rather than the kinds of specifics people here are talking about.
Do legislators actually know what SMTP is? Someone help us if they do. If they do, I'm sure they know enough to know that's a current standard, likely to be obsoleted in the medium term, and not applicable to systems based upon X.400, SMS, or even Exchange/MAPI.
The final Kyoto Treaty has never been put before the Senate. Until it is, it cannot be seen to have been rejected by the Senate. It's very nice it established some principles, but these are always a negotiating point: you have to deal with what you're given at the end of the process. And you have to deal with that on its merits, not on whether you were given everything you wanted.
If the Senate could reject something it hasn't seen, on some sort of permanent, will-not-listen-to-reason basis, then it would be tying its hands in a way that would frustrate pretty much any chance of it agreeing to anything in the future.
Quite honestly, the US Senate can say whatever it likes well in advance. At the end of the day, it has to deal with what it's given. The senate was never given the final treaty to ratify or reject. Had it done so, and done so because of minor quibbles over principles that ultimately do not affect the bigger picture, then that'd be one thing. I find it highly unlikely it would have rejected it, on a 95-0 vote, under the criteria "You didn't give us exactly what we said we wanted".
Re:Forgot another method of Disassembly
on
The Wii Disassembled
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· Score: 2, Interesting
A few years ago, shortly after the release of the PowerMac G5, someone posted a website about how they'd been given an unwanted PowerMac G5, and because it didn't run Windows, they posted a step-by-step article on how to remove the guts, and replace them with an Athlon motherboard (not even a particularly powerful CPU either) and all the relevent trimmings. Even the case wasn't unscarred by the process.
At the time, with the PowerMac G5 generally considered the machine absolutely everyone wanted, the results positively put some geeks in shock, and generated an unbelievable amount of outrage. The author ended up confessing he'd been given the PowerMac G5's case, not the entire machine.
I see these stunts as a not terribly impressive attempt to do much the same thing. The PS3 is a much desired (albeit by a small hard-core) and unavailable, expensive, computer. To get one and then break it into pieces is going to upset that group of wanters greatly.
A better option might be to put the Gamecube's guts into a PS3 case, posting step-by-step instructions and being generally dismissive of the PS3's own hardware. Bonus points for cutting holes in the elegant PS3's case so you can plug the controllers and memory cards in.
It would be a slashvertisement if there was some way of getting to the eBay auction from Slashdot. As it is, it appears just to be a statement of fact.
I wrote a while ago that I believe the reason the RIAA is going ahead with a lot of these lawsuits even when the victims are less able to defend themselves than the average stereotypical "Freeloader in his early twenties who knows exactly what he's doing and does it anyway" is because the RIAA wants to do the whole "Good cop, bad cop" thing, with "the industry" (as in assorted radio stations, artists, etc) coming to the victim's aid (which they've done on various occasions), while the RIAA itself paints itself as the bad cop - willing to go to any level to ensure you don't violate the copyrights of its members.
Result: Massive headlines. Everyone KNOWS that no irrelevent defense will get you off the hook from an RIAA lawsuit. Single mother? Sued. Grandmother who let people use her computer? She's sued. You're in a wheelchair and suck food through a straw? Too bad you get your music from Kazaa. People steer clear of Kazaa, etc, as a result. If the RIAA's willing to sue them, then college students and computer programmers should certainly count themselves in the firing line.
But it would certainly make for an interesting situation if the RIAA decided to modify its strategy a little, and in cases where unsympathetic characters are deliberately violating copyright, they brought on a group of "victims" that had some of the sympathy value in reverse. For instance, some penniless blind artist could sue for breach of copyrights.
Either way, this again feeds into my central belief that NYCL is either utterly stupid beyond words, or is a (rather deep) shill for the music industry. Does anyone read a single article he posts and think "Oh! Great! I don't have to worry about using P2P to download music without authorization!" Or do they get the impression that the RIAA is a giant, evil, group that will sue pretty much anyone who dares even download a single copy of a file that wasn't copyrighted in the first place.
He's great at spreading fear. He does so under the guise of spreading hope, usually in the form of telling everyone about legal arguments being made that a three year old child could tell was frivilous. If he's legit, the RIAA should deliberately lose a few lawsuits to him. Keeping him in business is worth it.
I'm still trying to work out the story here. The submission appears to be saying that the RIAA doesn't like being countersued. Which presumably means that most people who sue actually love being countersued, or at least don't mind. Or perhaps the submitter thinks that people generally aren't aware of the fact that those who sue don't like being countersued.
Either way, this actually seems, well, blindingly obvious to me.
Perhaps it's the submitter that's surprised (in which case why did the editor post it? I mean, if I submit "Would you believe it? I just found the way to compile a Java class is with "javac". Wow!", I'm pretty sure it wouldn't get posted.
If the submitter really is a lawyer, rather than a shill for the RIAA who's trying to make all those in favour of meaningful copyright reform look like freeloader-apologists, then this story is yet another good reason why I wouldn't ever hire the guy.
I've tagged this "FUD" (because it tries to sow uncertainty, fear, and doubt, by using negative language to make the usual look unusual), "troll" (because I'm more and more convinced that's what this guy is. How can you not read the submission and want to flame the hell out of it?), and "blindinglyobvious", because, well, it's that.
Having read the Wikipedia page, I'm none-the-wiser about how Nokia's Symbian stuff is like Gizmondo.
It looks like Gizmondo produced something that worked and was much liked by the people who bought the product, but the combination of having what apparently was a major crook on board, together with absurd business decisions (varying from massive promotional spending on launch parties to a complete absense of publicity for the product in the US) sank the product. Quality certainly doesn't appear to have been an issue.
What does this have to do with Series 60 being, allegedly, not all it could be?
There are plenty of "dumbphones", phones with little more than my Motorola Graphite supported in 1997. A quick look at the prepaid section in most supermarkets will show you what's avaiable, generally they're all in the $10-30 range.
Perhaps the objection isn't that there aren't "Voice and rudementary text messaging support" (yes, I know some complain they support text messaging. C'mon! The hardware overhead of supporting text messaging is nil, and it's usually ONE extra menu option on the phone, which you can avoid if you're utterly desperate), but that there aren't any expensive phones out there that use it, so someone can walk out of a phone shop and say "Wow, I negotiated a really great deal. This Nokia usually sells for $400 unsubsidized but they only made me pay $100 for it!"
The great thing about cellphones right now is there's an enormous amount of choice in terms of features, designs, and prices, not to mention just "the way it works". It's a little bizarre people keep insisting they just can't find a phone that suits them, still less the elusive "phone that's reliable and bug free and has a long battery life, that I just need to use to make voice calls." Maybe they're just not looking.
On the first point, I agree with you. Plus, that kind of argument doesn't fly anywhere else. Generally if more than one group commits an offense of some sort (civil or otherwise) against you, you don't have to pick just one of them to sue.
As far as the second goes: as cpt kangarooski points out, the $750 is what is legislated, not some arbitrary figure the music industry has pulled out of it's rear.
Moreover though, saying they should prove actual value lost is a nonsense and precisely that reason why a figure was legislated in the first place. You don't know how many people downloaded the song. You don't know how many of those people passed it on to others. You do know that the person put the music up for download onto a network where it was effectively available, without control, to millions of anonymous strangers.
As if to make matters worse, putting that music up for download also increased the value overall of an piracy-oriented peer-to-peer system, making it a more practical and attractive alternative to legal music. If someone can expect to be able to use such a system to find an arbitrary song that they would otherwise have to pay for, they're likely to do so.
And we haven't even begun to scratch the surface. Some have argued, for instance, that the 50-70c per song the content producers gets from the iTunes Music Store should be used as the "actual" value (as if putting up a single song to be downloaded 2,000 times works out at 70c of lost revenue.) The fact is though that this is a royalty paid for music that's already crippled using DRM and therefore of already limited utility. Would the industry have negotiated a rate that low if it were higher bitrate unencrypted MP3s that will never need to be complemented with versions on other medias?
The bottom line is that I don't actually think the $750 is quite as extortionate as people claim it is. As a fine for putting someone else's music up for download by potentially millions of anonymous strangers, it's not exactly out of line.
Do I think that it'd be fair for, say, a charge of copying a music CD for a friend to listen to? Absolutely not. But that's not what we're talking about here.
I think both arguments look like bad lawyering to me and I wouldn't be surprised if the defendant gets into more trouble as a result than if they'd just kept their mouths shut and taken a settlement. The legal fees will pile up, and someone will have to pay them.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's pretend you're talking about inventive rather than innovative, because I suspect that's what you meant (most people do), and "He didn't actually invent it, but he was the person who first packaged it in a form that got it into people's hands" doesn't strike me as something anyone has said patents should be granted for. Patents are supposed to go to the first person to invent something and take it to the patent office, not the first person to make it popular.
I'm not really sure anything in CP/M qualifies as massively inventive. Kildall's CP/M became popular not because it was inventive, but because it was there. It was a simple program loader with a very small library accessable to loaded applications. Many of the fundamentals in CP/M went back to libraries that came with the Intel test rig he was programming.
Yes, many aspects of it were copied into QD-OS (better known today as MSDOS), but these were compatibility hacks rather than functionality. Things like "System call 5 writes a character to the console" (or something, I forget which call did that.) FAT was copied too, but FAT is, frankly, obvious. I'm not sure how many other operating systems prior to CP/M used the same concepts, my guess would be many, but the Unix system we know and love isn't that different - the major difference is that the filenames appear FAT's equivalent of iNodes, rather than in dedicated directory files.
Kildall would probably have disagreed with you anyway. The guy was a programmer through and through. Despite all the anecdotes, the major reason IBM didn't have CP/M86 for the PC was because Kildall wasn't that interested in it as a project. Had he been so, it would have been released a year or two prior, and Seattle Computing's QD-OS wouldn't have been written because the need for it would have been absent. If he'd been interested, when the IBM people knocked on his door, they'd have been treated as any other OEM, rather than a group needing an entirely new product.
Kildall was interested in the things he was working on, much more so than maximising the money he got and controlling the market. Short of doing so defensively, as you would today, I doubt he'd have patented anything, even if something as obvious and derivative as CP/M had been patentable.
Possibly, on the other hand my experience (admittedly from the UK) is that schools tend to be full of people anal about such things, and the school has probably got a license to do so.
IANAL. With that said:
Here's the deal, as I understand it: it's actually amazingly easy to violate copyright law. Any form of copying or public performance is technically a violation though fair use provides you with defenses for many specific examples, and occasionally you get other get-outs too. It is a violation of copyright law to make an unauthorized copy of a file on your computer harddrive whose copyright doesn't belong to you, but in 99% of cases, that's fair use.
In the vast majority of cases, no lawsuit against you would "succeed" in any useful sense because the costs of prosecuting are high and the returns are very low if you actually are found in breach but nobody in their right mind thinks you've caused any damage. So in your minivan example, if you were found to be violating copyright (and I doubt you would be, because you certainly have no intent to provide something the public can see, and the public isn't going to do more than snatch quick glimpses of a very-far-away-difficult-to-see picture), the copyright holder might be able to squeeze $750 out of you, but would have had to have gone to a lot of trouble to actually get there in the first place.
Between fair use and the logistical difficulty of suing people for trivial violations, you're rarely likely to be punished for the numerous times you fall foul of copyright law.
Of course, the fact that you don't have the right to do all these things gives groups like the MPAA some leverage when they argue for more oppressive DRM-enforcement. If DRM happens to also stop a lot of things that are currently too trivial to prosecute over, those arguing for more oppressive laws can get away with claiming you never had the right to do them anyway.
Which is one reason why it would be nice to see a move from "fair use defenses" to actual end-user rights when it comes to the use of content they're directly paid for. Unfortunately, the cause of reforming copyright has been hijacked by the pro-freeloader mob at the moment, which means I don't expect any movement of the law in that direction for the foreseeable future. I think we're going to see more oppressive copyright and DRM laws, and there's not going to be a united voice opposing that to stop it.
Yeah, I just took a look at the Wikipedia page, and it looks like Canopy is an overlapping, proprietary, technology, exclusively fixed wireless, rather than WiMAX based. Which is fine, as long as it does the job I don't think many people are going to care much about the differences. If it was mobile wireless (in competition with 802.11e) then I think it'd matter a little more that it's proprietary.
It doesn't look that expensive either, although Motorola's site, while big on details about consumer equipment (it's $200 per consumer for that side, at least for the low-end version), doesn't go into details about the ISP's share of the costs.
A few months ago, I was bothered that it looked like broadband was going to be controlled by a duopoly of the cable and phone companies. With AT&T taking over BellSouth (the latter of whom are ok, but they have their stupid "No servers" rules and threw me out of their website once when I was trying to order DSL because I picked "Linux" (no really, I was redirected to a dead-end page saying it wasn't a supported system, and there was no way to go back and chose a different one; but AT&T really do seem like power-crazed nutcases from everything I've read. They and Verizon were what started this whole network neutrality scare), and the cable companies being both incompetent and powercrazed, this didn't seem a good thing.
But I've noticed things are changing majorly on the wireless front. UMTS and EVDO may not be much right now, but UMTS is going over to a WiMAX-like air interface in the next three or four years (HSOPA, that is, OFDM, possibly with MIMO), and I suspect most CDMA2000 networks will be complemented with WiMAX or UMTS in the same period of time. While things have dragged in the US, this switch of technologies should be much faster because this iteration of UMTS doesn't need huge amounts of additional spectrum to work. (Which has been the problem with W-CDMA based UMTS.)
The upshot is that mobile Internet speeds will start to approach 100Mbps by 2010, with latencies in the 5-20ms range. At which point, even shared access is going to be a decent alternative to DSL or Cable, and we might start seeing something resembling good competition. Prices for UMTS and WiMAX equipment should also drop like stones as everyone and their brother can make use of the coming spectrum glut to implement these things.
Meanwhile, you have your Canopy-based (and fixed-wireless WiMAX) WISPs that are making serious headway.
This might even work...
Have you posted anywhere about your experiences with WiMax? It's an interesting technology, it's only just being rolled out, and it'd be interesting to see a full review from an actual, live, WiMax user rather than the "Theoretically it's great!" stuff that gets posted all the time.
That might be the source of the problem.
As an ex-pat Brit, I've noticed a massive difference between the quality of mass produced meat in Europe and that of the US. The raw ingredients (beef and chicken especially) really are a lot better in the US. I believe there's a lot less of the "Feed the dead to the living" in the US compared to Europe.
There are exceptions. I can't find decent lamb here for love nor money. And while the meat is excellent, the quality of the more popular restaurants is often lacking.
I seriously doubt they taste any better FWIW. I'm picky about my chicken, especially after living in Britain during the late eighties/early nineties, when for some reason farmers decided to feed their birds fishmeal; Publix's chicken tastes excellent.
Don't think I'm criticising you here, but it's kind of frightening that you're posting (and with some justification given other people's comments) the idea of cooking a good meal involving a quite ordinary mix of vegetables and meat (plus a carb like rice) as some kind of miracle new diet. On a Sunday I'll regularly do a roast chicken dinner. That's about $4 worth of vegatables (including potatoes), and for two people, about $4 for the chicken itself. Gravy, stuffing mix, and other assorted stuff is maybe $1 on top of that. That's a full meal of the size you'd go to a restaurant to get, for two people, for less than $5 a head, plus meat for sandwiches for a couple of days.
I used to live, about ten years ago, on well under $20 a week. You can really make your budget stretch by eating healthily and avoiding pre-packaged foods. Of late, my budget has more than doubled, largely because of work fatigue and buying the wrong stuff (which probably isn't helping with the fatigue, but it's hard to come home and cook like this...)
I find it hard to believe that an 802.11 radio outputs more "dangerous" radiation than a typical 100W lightbulb.
That's exactly what I wanted to say.
I thought the article's comments about GNOME in particular were wrong. The problem with GNOME was not that it had no direction and therefore suddenly became bloated and unmanagable with feature creep. Far from it. It had a relatively popular leader who had an idea about how it should work. It gained feature creep because the "vision" of that OSS leader was to emulate a UI that itself was bloated, poorly designed, and suffering feature creep, both on the outside and the inside.
Had it had no direction, I believe it would have been more like the mix of UIs we saw in the early to mid-nineties on X11, or even throughout the late eighties on the Amiga. Someone would have put together a file manager. Another would have put an object viewer. Yet another might have worked on a print system. Each component would probably have been terrific, but the whole would have looked relatively ugly and argubly been poor in usability.
I'm surprised how "easy" it's been to fix GNOME and make it the relatively good system it is today (relatively as in recent versions, as configured by Debian and RedHat, are easily the second best mainstream GUIs, after Mac OS X.) That took the right kind of vision, and that vision, interestingly, was the result of the community noticing the project had gone badly wrong, and forcing itself to pay attention.
If and when the time comes that we feel it's ok to need a professional to come in to advise us on how to turn off our computers, then there's something seriously wrong with the world.
Honestly, nothing they released in the 1980s was remotely Mac like. Until Windows 2.0, Microsoft Windows didn't even support overlapping windows. Icons existed but had an entirely different function (to represent minimized windows, rather than files as in Mac OS.) Microsoft did collaborate with HP at one point on a desktop called NewWave, the earliest version technically came out in the eighties, but that's in 1989, and it wasn't a Microsoft product, and was never part of Windows.
Funnily enough, Windows up until Mac OS 6 was actually more capable than Mac OS, even if the UI was (much) less friendly. Mac OS 6 had the Multifinder, and at that point the integration was good enough to allow Mac OS users to have more or less the same power as Windows users. So not only did Microsoft produce a different system, it excelled in areas different from those that Mac OS excelled in.
Even Windows 95 borrows only slightly from Mac OS. It has a (half-hearted attempt at a) "spacial" file manager, and icons on the desktop represent files, not windows. And, erm, that's it. Yeah.
Well, Apple did kind of think about it, and spent a lot of time suing Microsoft in the mid-eighties and early nineties (which was rather odd because pre-'95, Windows looked nothing like Mac OS, and even Windows 95 has significant differences.)
Different people have different takes on it. Some say Microsoft resolved the suit when it paid Apple the millions of dollars it did in the infamous Steve Jobs "Microsoft is our friend, Microsoft has always been our friend" keynote in the late nineties. Others say that Apple lost the suit, after successfully bullying companies for long enough using the suit that it didn't really matter (Digital Research is a famous example, who rewrote GEM's "Finder" equivalent to be completely un-Mac like after Apple sued, but after they'd already sold the earlier version to Atari, who continued to bundle the Mac-like version of GEM with the ST for years.)
Jamie,
Just a message to say thanks. I read the review and thought "he's going to get flamed to a crisp for this", but I also have to say it's about time certain issues stopped being treated, by serious people, as things that there are two, contradictory, legitimate sides to.
Defending science seems to be a difficult thing these days when people are more concerned about economics or moral issues that come with difficult decisions. Your answer to Stormin' Mormon struck me as the obvious one, yet this is the first response that explains it clearly.
I don't pretend to be an expert in Climate Science. This is why I listen to what those scientists who work in the field have to say. They're the experts. They're the people who use the scientific method and try to come up with the best, most concrete, most unquestionable, answers about the issue. They are not perfect, but after a time, when almost all of them are pointing in one direction, I've got to believe that's the direction we're heading in.
You know, I'm having a hard time that the words "SMTP", "port", and "25" appear in the cited law at all. I haven't read it, and would be curious to know what it actually says. My guess is it would avoid using the term "electronic mail" at all, and if it does, it would probably define the term, using language along the lines of "messages conveyed electronically from one computer to another via a computer network" or relatively open (from the point of view of conveying the spirit of the law), rather than the kinds of specifics people here are talking about.
Do legislators actually know what SMTP is? Someone help us if they do. If they do, I'm sure they know enough to know that's a current standard, likely to be obsoleted in the medium term, and not applicable to systems based upon X.400, SMS, or even Exchange/MAPI.
Your quote contradicts your first statement.
The final Kyoto Treaty has never been put before the Senate. Until it is, it cannot be seen to have been rejected by the Senate. It's very nice it established some principles, but these are always a negotiating point: you have to deal with what you're given at the end of the process. And you have to deal with that on its merits, not on whether you were given everything you wanted.
If the Senate could reject something it hasn't seen, on some sort of permanent, will-not-listen-to-reason basis, then it would be tying its hands in a way that would frustrate pretty much any chance of it agreeing to anything in the future.
Quite honestly, the US Senate can say whatever it likes well in advance. At the end of the day, it has to deal with what it's given. The senate was never given the final treaty to ratify or reject. Had it done so, and done so because of minor quibbles over principles that ultimately do not affect the bigger picture, then that'd be one thing. I find it highly unlikely it would have rejected it, on a 95-0 vote, under the criteria "You didn't give us exactly what we said we wanted".
A few years ago, shortly after the release of the PowerMac G5, someone posted a website about how they'd been given an unwanted PowerMac G5, and because it didn't run Windows, they posted a step-by-step article on how to remove the guts, and replace them with an Athlon motherboard (not even a particularly powerful CPU either) and all the relevent trimmings. Even the case wasn't unscarred by the process.
At the time, with the PowerMac G5 generally considered the machine absolutely everyone wanted, the results positively put some geeks in shock, and generated an unbelievable amount of outrage. The author ended up confessing he'd been given the PowerMac G5's case, not the entire machine.
I see these stunts as a not terribly impressive attempt to do much the same thing. The PS3 is a much desired (albeit by a small hard-core) and unavailable, expensive, computer. To get one and then break it into pieces is going to upset that group of wanters greatly.
A better option might be to put the Gamecube's guts into a PS3 case, posting step-by-step instructions and being generally dismissive of the PS3's own hardware. Bonus points for cutting holes in the elegant PS3's case so you can plug the controllers and memory cards in.
Erm, maybe you get arrested or something?
Certainly I don't expect campus police to act violently under the circumstances or consider it a reasonable reaction.
It would be a slashvertisement if there was some way of getting to the eBay auction from Slashdot. As it is, it appears just to be a statement of fact.
I wrote a while ago that I believe the reason the RIAA is going ahead with a lot of these lawsuits even when the victims are less able to defend themselves than the average stereotypical "Freeloader in his early twenties who knows exactly what he's doing and does it anyway" is because the RIAA wants to do the whole "Good cop, bad cop" thing, with "the industry" (as in assorted radio stations, artists, etc) coming to the victim's aid (which they've done on various occasions), while the RIAA itself paints itself as the bad cop - willing to go to any level to ensure you don't violate the copyrights of its members.
Result: Massive headlines. Everyone KNOWS that no irrelevent defense will get you off the hook from an RIAA lawsuit. Single mother? Sued. Grandmother who let people use her computer? She's sued. You're in a wheelchair and suck food through a straw? Too bad you get your music from Kazaa. People steer clear of Kazaa, etc, as a result. If the RIAA's willing to sue them, then college students and computer programmers should certainly count themselves in the firing line.
But it would certainly make for an interesting situation if the RIAA decided to modify its strategy a little, and in cases where unsympathetic characters are deliberately violating copyright, they brought on a group of "victims" that had some of the sympathy value in reverse. For instance, some penniless blind artist could sue for breach of copyrights.
Either way, this again feeds into my central belief that NYCL is either utterly stupid beyond words, or is a (rather deep) shill for the music industry. Does anyone read a single article he posts and think "Oh! Great! I don't have to worry about using P2P to download music without authorization!" Or do they get the impression that the RIAA is a giant, evil, group that will sue pretty much anyone who dares even download a single copy of a file that wasn't copyrighted in the first place.
He's great at spreading fear. He does so under the guise of spreading hope, usually in the form of telling everyone about legal arguments being made that a three year old child could tell was frivilous. If he's legit, the RIAA should deliberately lose a few lawsuits to him. Keeping him in business is worth it.
I'm still trying to work out the story here. The submission appears to be saying that the RIAA doesn't like being countersued. Which presumably means that most people who sue actually love being countersued, or at least don't mind. Or perhaps the submitter thinks that people generally aren't aware of the fact that those who sue don't like being countersued.
Either way, this actually seems, well, blindingly obvious to me.
Perhaps it's the submitter that's surprised (in which case why did the editor post it? I mean, if I submit "Would you believe it? I just found the way to compile a Java class is with "javac". Wow!", I'm pretty sure it wouldn't get posted.
If the submitter really is a lawyer, rather than a shill for the RIAA who's trying to make all those in favour of meaningful copyright reform look like freeloader-apologists, then this story is yet another good reason why I wouldn't ever hire the guy.
I've tagged this "FUD" (because it tries to sow uncertainty, fear, and doubt, by using negative language to make the usual look unusual), "troll" (because I'm more and more convinced that's what this guy is. How can you not read the submission and want to flame the hell out of it?), and "blindinglyobvious", because, well, it's that.
Having read the Wikipedia page, I'm none-the-wiser about how Nokia's Symbian stuff is like Gizmondo.
It looks like Gizmondo produced something that worked and was much liked by the people who bought the product, but the combination of having what apparently was a major crook on board, together with absurd business decisions (varying from massive promotional spending on launch parties to a complete absense of publicity for the product in the US) sank the product. Quality certainly doesn't appear to have been an issue.
What does this have to do with Series 60 being, allegedly, not all it could be?
Yeah, I've never got that either.
There are plenty of "dumbphones", phones with little more than my Motorola Graphite supported in 1997. A quick look at the prepaid section in most supermarkets will show you what's avaiable, generally they're all in the $10-30 range.
Perhaps the objection isn't that there aren't "Voice and rudementary text messaging support" (yes, I know some complain they support text messaging. C'mon! The hardware overhead of supporting text messaging is nil, and it's usually ONE extra menu option on the phone, which you can avoid if you're utterly desperate), but that there aren't any expensive phones out there that use it, so someone can walk out of a phone shop and say "Wow, I negotiated a really great deal. This Nokia usually sells for $400 unsubsidized but they only made me pay $100 for it!"
The great thing about cellphones right now is there's an enormous amount of choice in terms of features, designs, and prices, not to mention just "the way it works". It's a little bizarre people keep insisting they just can't find a phone that suits them, still less the elusive "phone that's reliable and bug free and has a long battery life, that I just need to use to make voice calls." Maybe they're just not looking.
On the first point, I agree with you. Plus, that kind of argument doesn't fly anywhere else. Generally if more than one group commits an offense of some sort (civil or otherwise) against you, you don't have to pick just one of them to sue.
As far as the second goes: as cpt kangarooski points out, the $750 is what is legislated, not some arbitrary figure the music industry has pulled out of it's rear.
Moreover though, saying they should prove actual value lost is a nonsense and precisely that reason why a figure was legislated in the first place. You don't know how many people downloaded the song. You don't know how many of those people passed it on to others. You do know that the person put the music up for download onto a network where it was effectively available, without control, to millions of anonymous strangers.
As if to make matters worse, putting that music up for download also increased the value overall of an piracy-oriented peer-to-peer system, making it a more practical and attractive alternative to legal music. If someone can expect to be able to use such a system to find an arbitrary song that they would otherwise have to pay for, they're likely to do so.
And we haven't even begun to scratch the surface. Some have argued, for instance, that the 50-70c per song the content producers gets from the iTunes Music Store should be used as the "actual" value (as if putting up a single song to be downloaded 2,000 times works out at 70c of lost revenue.) The fact is though that this is a royalty paid for music that's already crippled using DRM and therefore of already limited utility. Would the industry have negotiated a rate that low if it were higher bitrate unencrypted MP3s that will never need to be complemented with versions on other medias?
The bottom line is that I don't actually think the $750 is quite as extortionate as people claim it is. As a fine for putting someone else's music up for download by potentially millions of anonymous strangers, it's not exactly out of line.
Do I think that it'd be fair for, say, a charge of copying a music CD for a friend to listen to? Absolutely not. But that's not what we're talking about here.
I think both arguments look like bad lawyering to me and I wouldn't be surprised if the defendant gets into more trouble as a result than if they'd just kept their mouths shut and taken a settlement. The legal fees will pile up, and someone will have to pay them.