For what it's worth, the CDDL is, as I understand it, a "weak copyleft", not a "not copyleft." If you modify CDDL-licensed code, your code also has to be licensed under the CDDL. If you add new modules that link with CDDL code, then the additional code is free to be licensed as you see fit. The MPL is similar, as is the LGPL.
So those with issues with so-called "viral" licenses aren't likely to be happy with the CDDL, and the CDDL still has the same issues as the GPL, MPL, APSL, etc, when it comes to integrating code from several sources under different licenses, while creating loopholes that allow someone who is determined to circumvent the license to easily, legally, do so.
We really need free software people to have the guts to stand up and cut down the number of licenses, essentially, to two, where others are shunned. One would be a strong copyleft, with optional (to the licenser) add-ons such as the classpath thing (these weaken the copyleft, but if you make them optional those concerned about their code being used in non-free environments can simply remove them.) The other would be a X11 style thing. There's no value whatsoever in having a hundred incompatible licenses. These undermine free software - if I can't incorporate CDDL code into an MPL program, or APSL code into a GPL'd app, then surely my freedom is restricted? As it stands, there are three major copy-lefted operating system kernels. You can't put Linux code in XNU or SunOS. You can't put XNU code in Linux or SunOS. You can't put SunOS code in Linux or XNU. But they're all "Free Software". You're supposed to be able to do whatever you want with the code as long as you don't impose further conditions. That's not how it works.
They've effectively announced that already. As I understand it, if you want to be a part of the official Java effort, submitting patches to Sun, you have to sign a statement giving them joint ownership over the code you submit.
This seems reasonable to me though obviously strong free-software advocates should understand that this gives Sun the right to license your submissions for use in proprietary code. If you don't want to do this, which might be because of that, or because you're anti-GPL3 (which looks likely to be something Sun will switch to), you can always fork the code and release the changes that way, rather than using Sun's infrastructure and sending the changes via that.
Novell sold the community out and now Sun is adopting the GPL?
Actually I've never understood the hostility against Sun. Novell's actions appear to be surprising, but I think at the moment we don't actually have the whole story.
Sun on the other hand have made their version of Unix Free Software. They've placed most of StarOffice under the GPL, under the name OpenOffice.org. There's always been a large body of code that's licensed under relatively liberal Free Software licenses from them, including one of the first X11 desktops. And they've developed, and kept open and royalty free, major standards such as NFS, NIS, and others.
So why people diss Sun and, as an example, worship Apple, who really do seem to have only a token "Open Source" effort which, for the most part, seems to exist as a legal and PR thing, is something I've never understood. Yes, Sun took their time over Java, but they've never stamped on independent re-implementations, and their reasons for being careful were always very obvious and very understandable. Sun has always appeared to me to be the real deal, a company that does contribute more than it takes, and always has.
Sun didn't give money to SCO for nothing. They bought rights to SCO Unix, so that they could incorporate the drivers into Solaris. At the time, SCO Unix had relatively good Intel/PC support, and Solaris, quite honestly, wouldn't run on 75% of the PCs out there (I know this first hand. I have a Solaris 8 media set. I couldn't get it to install on a Thinkpad or a cheap VIA based box. Even Darwin ran better on both.)
Part of the problem was how they worded it. They pointed out at the time they'd bought the rights in such a way that Solaris users would never have to worry about being sued by SCO. This made it sound like they'd paid a blackmail charge, rather than actually buying the right to redistribute actual (as opposed to imagined) SCO code.
They're now talking openly about moving to the GPL away from the CDDL. I can't help but feel that's good news.
You think Perelman should have won "Policy Leader of the Year"? Why?
It's kind of like complaining that the plane taking major celebrities to the Superbowl should have contained Matt Damon but instead it had the pilot and a bunch of stewardesses. I think you're nit-picking...
So, if I understand you correctly, the business model here is to ensure the subscriber never answers the phone (which would use up airtime the advertiser is claiming to subsidize) by ensuring they so long trying to find out who's calling them by reading a confusing screen covered in advertising, that the call ends up diverted to voicemail.
No, just the usual band of Apple apologists. Just about the only positive thing you can say is that it probably has no useful validity in practice.
Apple really wants to have its cake and eat it. It wants to benefit from Open Source as a PR thing (its shown no signs of actually wanting contributions from the community), and as a way to get cheap source code (as in drawing in large tracts of BSD code to help build the first Darwin), but it really doesn't like this "Freedom" thing much.
You know, if Microsoft did this, I don't think anyone would care. Microsoft isn't actually promoting itself as a provider of open source. Apple is. They really should remove this and this images from their web pages. It would at least be a little more honest.
If by "suitable for Linux" you mean that you can now start hacking the JVM to your heart's content, you may be right. But I interpret "suitable" as referring to stability, performance, security, and reliability, not whether I can personally hack the code.
This is one of those cases where being specific about the language you're using might help. What he probably meant was "suitable for distributions of GNU/Linux". There are no (serious) licensing issues any more with Java and it can be easily integrated with pretty much all standard distributions. Java can also become a base for further development of projects that make a point about not being tied to proprietary technologies. For example, it can be integrated into GNOME and KDE such that critical components can rely upon Java being there in a way that would be legally dubious today.
Aside from that, if people start hacking Java itself, they'll end up with versions that won't pass the compatability tests and break the very commercial apps you mention.
If people "hack" Java in order to add new features that make it incompatible with other versions, then Sun would have every right to enforce the Java trademark against them so they can't offer as "Java" and such confusion is reduced. If one of these forks turns out to be successful, then that's great as it presumably would have reasons for being successful, like, say, being better.
If, on the other hand, people start hacking it to:
- Port to alternative platforms
- Integrate it into frameworks it doesn't "natively" integrate with right now (KDE, GNUstep, etc), IIRC the current GNU/Linux distribution uses GTK, though I'm prepared to be corrected on that
- Play with various features of the system to improve performance and memory usage (there are a million ways you can write a garbage collector)
- Do the latter, but optimized for specific instances (should the same GC model be used on your Sharp Zaurus, Playstation 3, and 100GHz Core8Octomegaseptupal with 8T of RAM*
...then I don't see the problem, and I do see this as a good thing.
Either scenario, even your "People will corrupt the holy Java" instance, seems like it can't work out negatively, and may work out positively. They're good things!
* Note to people reading this a decade from now. Believe it or not, people in 2006 thought dual-core 3GHz CPUs were "Where it's at". I don't know what Octomegaseptupal is either BTW. The point is that's supposed to be a really insanely high end system.
Triple-play providers tend to be large telecommunications conglomerates who want to use a smaller monopoly (or large market share in a particular market) to muscle into another territory that's telecommunications related in order to tie customers to their offerings. For example, a cable operator has a monopoly over cable TV provision (albeit one threatened by satellite.) To shore it up, you can use the same cables to provide the customers with Internet and telephone services. Suddenly, a desire to replace one of those services with a competitors becomes an expensive proposition, so customers end up essentially locked to that provisioner.
Now, the major types of companies that do this are:
1. Telephone companies. They've provided one low-latency data system for home use (ISDN), and in the US (where triple-play is taking off) didn't market it at all. xDSL is better suited for data, given it's packet switched, but has relatively poor latency. Do you think they care about latency?
2. Cable TV companies. Cable TV companies having been trying to foist "Digital Cable" on pretty much everyone for several years now. They've never done anything about the dreadful latency such systems have (where changing a channel takes seconds), despite it being the number one complaint of most users (to the point I know staggeringly high numbers who've gone back to analog). Do you think they care about latency?
3. Mobile phone operators. They're considering a whole bunch of systems based upon 3G and DVB-x systems to add triple-play to their offerings. Mobile phone companies. You know, the people that came up with EDGE and 1xRTT. The first generation of so-called 3G services, marketed as mobile versions of DSL, have lousy latency in the 200-500ms area. Those ones. Do you think they give a flying fuck about latency?
The point I'm making is that network latency doesn't seem to be the first, second, third, or twenty-eighth priority amongst the major suspects in the various industries that want to dominate this area. Few people are going to switch their ISP purely over latency issues if it means adding $20-50 to their no longer integrated monthly telecommunications bill.
The current type of War in Iraq is a type of war NO ARMY has ever fought.
So far as I can figure it, it's actually extremely similar to Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Right down to the being bombed by the people we're supposed to be liberating (hard though it may be to remember, British troops were originally sent into Northern Ireland to protect Catholics from predominantly Protestant violence. Within a very short space of time, the situation had deteriorated.)
There are a lot of lessons in history that people have a tendancy to ignore. That said, I think nobody planning this debacle expected a Northern Ireland type situation because they were thinking more in terms of this being a standard war from the beginning, and weren't thinking that hard about the end of it. Set up a large body of troops in a country to keep the peace there, with a loosely supported government with its own agenda, and a large amount of antagonism against those troops, some legitimate (because some people will always abuse their power) and some historical, and you have a recipe for intractable chaos. It took Britain and the people of Northern Ireland twenty-five years to find an honourable way out. Let's hope that doesn't happen in Iraq too.
The national Democratic leadership supported him in the primary. It was the "grassroots" that booted him out.
And he wasn't booted out because of his stance on the war with Iraq, it was his support for the Bush administration and his outright lying about the motives of those who disagree with his stance on Iraq, to the point of questioning their patriotism.
The Democratic Party is a broad church and many high profile Democratic supporters of the Iraq war enjoy support from people who disagree with them on that one issue. What we can't stand is a smear artist. It's a tragedy the slimeball won his seat, and if he did actually resign from the Democratic party and joined the Republican, I'd consider that worth losing control over the Senate for. It's one thing to have an honest disagreement, it's another to slander your own supporters. We don't need him, we don't want him.
I don't think you understand the problem, I'm NOT referring to the old joke about someone hunting for an "Any" key.
If you've ever had to hand hold an older technological illiterate (I don't mean that in any insulting way, I just mean someone ignorant and a little intimidated by "computers", be they three box monitor/keyboard things or mobile phones), a very frequent set of circumstances is that they'll ignore pretty much everything provided back to them by the machine as feed back. That means they will stare at the screen saying "What do I do now?" when there's only one thing to do, as in "Press any key to continue", "Click NEXT to begin", etc.
I'm not talking about idiots, many of the people I've had to handhold are geniuses in their respective fields, but are too much of a certain mindset to be able to get their heads around something with a modern user interface.
A checkbox appearing by the wrong candidate name isn't something they'll normally take note of.
And with the number of old people in Florida, who'll not understand the significance of the check mark (how often have you had to hand-hold people through, for example, pressing a key in response to a clear, unambiguous, "Press any key to continue" prompt on the screen?), I bet Crist is going to benefit from this bug to the tune of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of votes.
And when it's pointed out, the usual jeers of "Well, if they're so stupid they can't even see..." BS will be repeated, because, you know, it's ok and entirely fair to subject people to a test where if they "fail", only the Republican will ever benefit.
Absurdly high voice charges are easily gotten around, you just buy a pre-paid SIM Card for the place you're going to visit, and redirect your calls to the new number before you swap over. I've always found it surprising roaming charges haven't dropped given the ease with which this can be done.
While there are always questions about electoral corruption, Kerry didn't carry the popular vote and the vote was nowhere near as close as it was with Bush vs Gore. As such, for the most part, the allegations of vote rigging in Ohio and elsewhere, aside from being largely overblown, are probably irrelevent in terms of determining why Kerry lost.
The purpose of negative campaigning is to discourage supporters of the opposing candidate from voting. Paint the person you have to vote for as so completely unlikable that it'd turn your stomach to walk into the voting booth to do your duty.
EVDO is one form of CDMA2000, it's not something you add as such.
More importantly though, the issue with W-CDMA isn't that it's different technology, it's that it requires 5MHz of spectrum in each direction, and existing PCS operators frequently only have 5MHz of spectrum to begin with in many areas of the country. This is a temporary disadvantage, as for the most part the intention has been to use new spectrum promised by various governments. The designers of UMTS largely relied upon those promises, and built an "ideal" network based upon these coming to fruition, wheras the CDMA2000 lobby built something somewhat less than ideal that can be more easily fit into existing networks (CDMA2000 uses 1.25MHz slices of spectrum.)
The FCC has auctioned off spectrum around the 1700MHz and 2100MHz areas. T-Mobile has won enough spectrum that they can now blanket the entire country, should they choose to, in UMTS. And that, starting early next year, is exactly what they've announced they're going to do. (Most operators won a lot of 3G spectrum, it's just T-Mobile ended up with the most.)
Not sure what you're trying to say. Did you respond to the wrong comment or did I imply something that I'm not seeing? I don't think I mentioned Japan, except indirectly by mentioning FOMA, and the only reference I made to EVDO being rolled out was Revision A.
HSDPA isn't going to help your EVDO latency. HSDPA is an enhancement to W-CDMA, the air interface system used by UMTS. EVDO is a CDMA2000 standard, CDMA2000 being a competing standard with its own air interface standard.
FWIW, oart of the reason for HSDPA is to lower latency on W-CDMA networks (by optimizing the downlink.) With HSDPA, latency on a UMTS network is about 100ms for a round-trip ping. Add HSUPA (which improves the uplink), and the latency drops to around 10ms.
As far as lowering EVDO latency goes: I don't know what Verizon's plans are regarding EVDO Revision A, but Sprint is rolling out EVDO Rev A. right now, and that also lowers latency an appreciable amount, again to around the 100ms level.
Consider high-latency the price of being an early adopter. Unfortunately, most telecommunications companies don't give a rat's-arse about latency until they've already deployed the network and realise how crap it is. This is why GSM users are stuck with the god-awful EDGE standard, and why both UMTS and CDMA2000 have started out with dreadful latency. If I actually ran a mobile phone company, I'd grab Ericsson and Qualcomm's CEOs, and slap them silly until they learn that latency is the first thing they need to worry about with data standards, not the last, after-the-fact, thing.
The article seems information-free, largely hype with no substance, by someone who appears to have limited understanding of the issues. Even Vodafone is spelt incorrectly.
HSDPA is actually just an improved version of W-CDMA, the underlying air-interface standard used by the UMTS and FOMA 3G standards. It's an incremental improvement on W-CDMA, it brings more bandwidth but more importantly it brings lower (sub-100ms round-trip ping) latency. HSUPA is the "next step" from HSDPA (HSDPA concentrates on the downlink, HSUPA combines with HSDPA and improves the uplink) and brings better-than-DSL latency to UMTS.
There's nothing that revolutionary about the whole thing. It's still essentially "3G" (which is mostly a marketing phrase anyway) mobile phone technology. Bandwidth is still limited enough that you'll not see operators marketing it as a true alternative to DSL in the same way as, say, WiMax will be.
The article itself seems a little wierd. It's as if someone just found out about SMS text messaging and is enthused about it. HSDPA isn't new, it's been part of Cingular's UMTS roll-out for the two years or so they've been playing with UMTS. Nor is it significantly better or worse than EVDO revision A, which is being rolled out by Sprint at the moment (though there are advantages in the fact that HSDPA is generally implemented with UMTS at the upper levels, rather than the AMPS-derived upper-level protocols that IS-95/IS-2000 networks like Sprint's use.)
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For what it's worth, the CDDL is, as I understand it, a "weak copyleft", not a "not copyleft." If you modify CDDL-licensed code, your code also has to be licensed under the CDDL. If you add new modules that link with CDDL code, then the additional code is free to be licensed as you see fit. The MPL is similar, as is the LGPL.
So those with issues with so-called "viral" licenses aren't likely to be happy with the CDDL, and the CDDL still has the same issues as the GPL, MPL, APSL, etc, when it comes to integrating code from several sources under different licenses, while creating loopholes that allow someone who is determined to circumvent the license to easily, legally, do so.
We really need free software people to have the guts to stand up and cut down the number of licenses, essentially, to two, where others are shunned. One would be a strong copyleft, with optional (to the licenser) add-ons such as the classpath thing (these weaken the copyleft, but if you make them optional those concerned about their code being used in non-free environments can simply remove them.) The other would be a X11 style thing. There's no value whatsoever in having a hundred incompatible licenses. These undermine free software - if I can't incorporate CDDL code into an MPL program, or APSL code into a GPL'd app, then surely my freedom is restricted? As it stands, there are three major copy-lefted operating system kernels. You can't put Linux code in XNU or SunOS. You can't put XNU code in Linux or SunOS. You can't put SunOS code in Linux or XNU. But they're all "Free Software". You're supposed to be able to do whatever you want with the code as long as you don't impose further conditions. That's not how it works.
They've effectively announced that already. As I understand it, if you want to be a part of the official Java effort, submitting patches to Sun, you have to sign a statement giving them joint ownership over the code you submit.
This seems reasonable to me though obviously strong free-software advocates should understand that this gives Sun the right to license your submissions for use in proprietary code. If you don't want to do this, which might be because of that, or because you're anti-GPL3 (which looks likely to be something Sun will switch to), you can always fork the code and release the changes that way, rather than using Sun's infrastructure and sending the changes via that.
Actually I've never understood the hostility against Sun. Novell's actions appear to be surprising, but I think at the moment we don't actually have the whole story.
Sun on the other hand have made their version of Unix Free Software. They've placed most of StarOffice under the GPL, under the name OpenOffice.org. There's always been a large body of code that's licensed under relatively liberal Free Software licenses from them, including one of the first X11 desktops. And they've developed, and kept open and royalty free, major standards such as NFS, NIS, and others.
So why people diss Sun and, as an example, worship Apple, who really do seem to have only a token "Open Source" effort which, for the most part, seems to exist as a legal and PR thing, is something I've never understood. Yes, Sun took their time over Java, but they've never stamped on independent re-implementations, and their reasons for being careful were always very obvious and very understandable. Sun has always appeared to me to be the real deal, a company that does contribute more than it takes, and always has.
Sun didn't give money to SCO for nothing. They bought rights to SCO Unix, so that they could incorporate the drivers into Solaris. At the time, SCO Unix had relatively good Intel/PC support, and Solaris, quite honestly, wouldn't run on 75% of the PCs out there (I know this first hand. I have a Solaris 8 media set. I couldn't get it to install on a Thinkpad or a cheap VIA based box. Even Darwin ran better on both.)
Part of the problem was how they worded it. They pointed out at the time they'd bought the rights in such a way that Solaris users would never have to worry about being sued by SCO. This made it sound like they'd paid a blackmail charge, rather than actually buying the right to redistribute actual (as opposed to imagined) SCO code.
They're now talking openly about moving to the GPL away from the CDDL. I can't help but feel that's good news.
You think Perelman should have won "Policy Leader of the Year"? Why?
It's kind of like complaining that the plane taking major celebrities to the Superbowl should have contained Matt Damon but instead it had the pilot and a bunch of stewardesses. I think you're nit-picking...
Which brings us nicely to the next problem with the PS3...
Sorry, this is supposed to be a reply to the sibling, not you. I'm kind of brain dead this morning.
So, if I understand you correctly, the business model here is to ensure the subscriber never answers the phone (which would use up airtime the advertiser is claiming to subsidize) by ensuring they so long trying to find out who's calling them by reading a confusing screen covered in advertising, that the call ends up diverted to voicemail.
Wow. That sounds great. Where do I sign up?
No, just the usual band of Apple apologists. Just about the only positive thing you can say is that it probably has no useful validity in practice.
Apple really wants to have its cake and eat it. It wants to benefit from Open Source as a PR thing (its shown no signs of actually wanting contributions from the community), and as a way to get cheap source code (as in drawing in large tracts of BSD code to help build the first Darwin), but it really doesn't like this "Freedom" thing much.
You know, if Microsoft did this, I don't think anyone would care. Microsoft isn't actually promoting itself as a provider of open source. Apple is. They really should remove this and this images from their web pages. It would at least be a little more honest.
This is one of those cases where being specific about the language you're using might help. What he probably meant was "suitable for distributions of GNU/Linux". There are no (serious) licensing issues any more with Java and it can be easily integrated with pretty much all standard distributions. Java can also become a base for further development of projects that make a point about not being tied to proprietary technologies. For example, it can be integrated into GNOME and KDE such that critical components can rely upon Java being there in a way that would be legally dubious today.
If people "hack" Java in order to add new features that make it incompatible with other versions, then Sun would have every right to enforce the Java trademark against them so they can't offer as "Java" and such confusion is reduced. If one of these forks turns out to be successful, then that's great as it presumably would have reasons for being successful, like, say, being better.
If, on the other hand, people start hacking it to:
- Port to alternative platforms
- Integrate it into frameworks it doesn't "natively" integrate with right now (KDE, GNUstep, etc), IIRC the current GNU/Linux distribution uses GTK, though I'm prepared to be corrected on that
- Play with various features of the system to improve performance and memory usage (there are a million ways you can write a garbage collector)
- Do the latter, but optimized for specific instances (should the same GC model be used on your Sharp Zaurus, Playstation 3, and 100GHz Core8Octomegaseptupal with 8T of RAM*
Either scenario, even your "People will corrupt the holy Java" instance, seems like it can't work out negatively, and may work out positively. They're good things!
* Note to people reading this a decade from now. Believe it or not, people in 2006 thought dual-core 3GHz CPUs were "Where it's at". I don't know what Octomegaseptupal is either BTW. The point is that's supposed to be a really insanely high end system.
Triple-play providers tend to be large telecommunications conglomerates who want to use a smaller monopoly (or large market share in a particular market) to muscle into another territory that's telecommunications related in order to tie customers to their offerings. For example, a cable operator has a monopoly over cable TV provision (albeit one threatened by satellite.) To shore it up, you can use the same cables to provide the customers with Internet and telephone services. Suddenly, a desire to replace one of those services with a competitors becomes an expensive proposition, so customers end up essentially locked to that provisioner.
Now, the major types of companies that do this are:
1. Telephone companies. They've provided one low-latency data system for home use (ISDN), and in the US (where triple-play is taking off) didn't market it at all. xDSL is better suited for data, given it's packet switched, but has relatively poor latency. Do you think they care about latency?
2. Cable TV companies. Cable TV companies having been trying to foist "Digital Cable" on pretty much everyone for several years now. They've never done anything about the dreadful latency such systems have (where changing a channel takes seconds), despite it being the number one complaint of most users (to the point I know staggeringly high numbers who've gone back to analog). Do you think they care about latency?
3. Mobile phone operators. They're considering a whole bunch of systems based upon 3G and DVB-x systems to add triple-play to their offerings. Mobile phone companies. You know, the people that came up with EDGE and 1xRTT. The first generation of so-called 3G services, marketed as mobile versions of DSL, have lousy latency in the 200-500ms area. Those ones. Do you think they give a flying fuck about latency?
The point I'm making is that network latency doesn't seem to be the first, second, third, or twenty-eighth priority amongst the major suspects in the various industries that want to dominate this area. Few people are going to switch their ISP purely over latency issues if it means adding $20-50 to their no longer integrated monthly telecommunications bill.
So far as I can figure it, it's actually extremely similar to Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Right down to the being bombed by the people we're supposed to be liberating (hard though it may be to remember, British troops were originally sent into Northern Ireland to protect Catholics from predominantly Protestant violence. Within a very short space of time, the situation had deteriorated.)
There are a lot of lessons in history that people have a tendancy to ignore. That said, I think nobody planning this debacle expected a Northern Ireland type situation because they were thinking more in terms of this being a standard war from the beginning, and weren't thinking that hard about the end of it. Set up a large body of troops in a country to keep the peace there, with a loosely supported government with its own agenda, and a large amount of antagonism against those troops, some legitimate (because some people will always abuse their power) and some historical, and you have a recipe for intractable chaos. It took Britain and the people of Northern Ireland twenty-five years to find an honourable way out. Let's hope that doesn't happen in Iraq too.
The national Democratic leadership supported him in the primary. It was the "grassroots" that booted him out.
And he wasn't booted out because of his stance on the war with Iraq, it was his support for the Bush administration and his outright lying about the motives of those who disagree with his stance on Iraq, to the point of questioning their patriotism.
The Democratic Party is a broad church and many high profile Democratic supporters of the Iraq war enjoy support from people who disagree with them on that one issue. What we can't stand is a smear artist. It's a tragedy the slimeball won his seat, and if he did actually resign from the Democratic party and joined the Republican, I'd consider that worth losing control over the Senate for. It's one thing to have an honest disagreement, it's another to slander your own supporters. We don't need him, we don't want him.
I don't think you understand the problem, I'm NOT referring to the old joke about someone hunting for an "Any" key.
If you've ever had to hand hold an older technological illiterate (I don't mean that in any insulting way, I just mean someone ignorant and a little intimidated by "computers", be they three box monitor/keyboard things or mobile phones), a very frequent set of circumstances is that they'll ignore pretty much everything provided back to them by the machine as feed back. That means they will stare at the screen saying "What do I do now?" when there's only one thing to do, as in "Press any key to continue", "Click NEXT to begin", etc.
I'm not talking about idiots, many of the people I've had to handhold are geniuses in their respective fields, but are too much of a certain mindset to be able to get their heads around something with a modern user interface.
A checkbox appearing by the wrong candidate name isn't something they'll normally take note of.
And with the number of old people in Florida, who'll not understand the significance of the check mark (how often have you had to hand-hold people through, for example, pressing a key in response to a clear, unambiguous, "Press any key to continue" prompt on the screen?), I bet Crist is going to benefit from this bug to the tune of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of votes.
And when it's pointed out, the usual jeers of "Well, if they're so stupid they can't even see..." BS will be repeated, because, you know, it's ok and entirely fair to subject people to a test where if they "fail", only the Republican will ever benefit.
Crist will win, quite possibly because of this.
Absurdly high voice charges are easily gotten around, you just buy a pre-paid SIM Card for the place you're going to visit, and redirect your calls to the new number before you swap over. I've always found it surprising roaming charges haven't dropped given the ease with which this can be done.
While there are always questions about electoral corruption, Kerry didn't carry the popular vote and the vote was nowhere near as close as it was with Bush vs Gore. As such, for the most part, the allegations of vote rigging in Ohio and elsewhere, aside from being largely overblown, are probably irrelevent in terms of determining why Kerry lost.
You meant of course indicated that poor planning would get you (the President) stuck in Iraq, right?
I mean, you wouldn't actually be lying about what Kerry said and meant now, would you?
Quite the opposite.
The purpose of negative campaigning is to discourage supporters of the opposing candidate from voting. Paint the person you have to vote for as so completely unlikable that it'd turn your stomach to walk into the voting booth to do your duty.
Horrible, isn't it?
EVDO is one form of CDMA2000, it's not something you add as such.
More importantly though, the issue with W-CDMA isn't that it's different technology, it's that it requires 5MHz of spectrum in each direction, and existing PCS operators frequently only have 5MHz of spectrum to begin with in many areas of the country. This is a temporary disadvantage, as for the most part the intention has been to use new spectrum promised by various governments. The designers of UMTS largely relied upon those promises, and built an "ideal" network based upon these coming to fruition, wheras the CDMA2000 lobby built something somewhat less than ideal that can be more easily fit into existing networks (CDMA2000 uses 1.25MHz slices of spectrum.)
The FCC has auctioned off spectrum around the 1700MHz and 2100MHz areas. T-Mobile has won enough spectrum that they can now blanket the entire country, should they choose to, in UMTS. And that, starting early next year, is exactly what they've announced they're going to do. (Most operators won a lot of 3G spectrum, it's just T-Mobile ended up with the most.)
Not sure what you're trying to say. Did you respond to the wrong comment or did I imply something that I'm not seeing? I don't think I mentioned Japan, except indirectly by mentioning FOMA, and the only reference I made to EVDO being rolled out was Revision A.
HSDPA isn't going to help your EVDO latency. HSDPA is an enhancement to W-CDMA, the air interface system used by UMTS. EVDO is a CDMA2000 standard, CDMA2000 being a competing standard with its own air interface standard.
FWIW, oart of the reason for HSDPA is to lower latency on W-CDMA networks (by optimizing the downlink.) With HSDPA, latency on a UMTS network is about 100ms for a round-trip ping. Add HSUPA (which improves the uplink), and the latency drops to around 10ms.
As far as lowering EVDO latency goes: I don't know what Verizon's plans are regarding EVDO Revision A, but Sprint is rolling out EVDO Rev A. right now, and that also lowers latency an appreciable amount, again to around the 100ms level.
Consider high-latency the price of being an early adopter. Unfortunately, most telecommunications companies don't give a rat's-arse about latency until they've already deployed the network and realise how crap it is. This is why GSM users are stuck with the god-awful EDGE standard, and why both UMTS and CDMA2000 have started out with dreadful latency. If I actually ran a mobile phone company, I'd grab Ericsson and Qualcomm's CEOs, and slap them silly until they learn that latency is the first thing they need to worry about with data standards, not the last, after-the-fact, thing.
The article seems information-free, largely hype with no substance, by someone who appears to have limited understanding of the issues. Even Vodafone is spelt incorrectly.
HSDPA is actually just an improved version of W-CDMA, the underlying air-interface standard used by the UMTS and FOMA 3G standards. It's an incremental improvement on W-CDMA, it brings more bandwidth but more importantly it brings lower (sub-100ms round-trip ping) latency. HSUPA is the "next step" from HSDPA (HSDPA concentrates on the downlink, HSUPA combines with HSDPA and improves the uplink) and brings better-than-DSL latency to UMTS.
There's nothing that revolutionary about the whole thing. It's still essentially "3G" (which is mostly a marketing phrase anyway) mobile phone technology. Bandwidth is still limited enough that you'll not see operators marketing it as a true alternative to DSL in the same way as, say, WiMax will be.
The article itself seems a little wierd. It's as if someone just found out about SMS text messaging and is enthused about it. HSDPA isn't new, it's been part of Cingular's UMTS roll-out for the two years or so they've been playing with UMTS. Nor is it significantly better or worse than EVDO revision A, which is being rolled out by Sprint at the moment (though there are advantages in the fact that HSDPA is generally implemented with UMTS at the upper levels, rather than the AMPS-derived upper-level protocols that IS-95/IS-2000 networks like Sprint's use.)
And every time Hillary opens her big fat mouth to criticise video games, it gets reported on Slashdot too. What's your point?
He's this guy I think (history of that page goes back a few years, so obviously other people had heard of him, even if you hadn't.)