TripOS's role within AmigaOS was always a little strange and overblown by some people. (Most of) DOS, which dos.library interfaced with, and the CLI and its commands were essentially the whole of it. The kernel (exec) and pretty much everything to do with graphics and the GUI were a separate system. By the time of the release of AmigaOS 2.x, most of the code had been thrown out in favour of C equivalents.
This is actually a very real, very strong, case for RMS's controvertial opinions on the morality of proprietary software. Commodore/Escom's death didn't have to be the end of AmigaOS as a viable platform (it would, today, in my view be unrecognizable if it had continued to be supported, but that's another issue.) People relied upon the various owners of Amiga to provide the resources to ensure it remained usable: every single one of those owners from Gateway onwards have been failures. And all previous owners, Escom, Commodore, and Hi Torro, failed to plan for the possibility of commercial failure.
There was a movement to get AmigaOS open sourced in the late nineties. It was widely criticised by many, including those within the Amiga community, who decided that it was in some way wrong to allow Amiga technologies to become free enough that they might help bolster rival operating systems. The sheer mindlessness of that position is readily apparent after Gateway's decision to instead sell the technologies to private consortiums who had anything but freedom and openness in mind when they bought it.
Now, two years behind schedule, AmigaOS 4 is still in a state where it'll be finished "RSN". Public betas have shown no dramatic improvements over the original. It's tied to licensed PowerPC hardware because of Amiga Inc's nned for profits, a need that is opposite to the operating system's users need for future proofing and reasonable expectations of support.
AROS is no panacea, and it too has little advantage, beyond portability, over the original AmigaOS. But it at least keeps alive something. AmigaOS and AROS are beyond the point that they will ever be relevent as modern day operating systems - even on lightwieght systems, their lack of a credible security model limits their uses in a modern networked world.
The Amiga's prime purpose these days seems to be as a little noticed warning to others. If you invest your time and money into someone else's proprietary platform, even if it's the best platform there is (and, arguably, the Amigas were, for a very long time, the best platforms in existance for machines costing less than $5,000) you do stand a serious chance of being screwed over. The same lessons were apparent from the BeOS fiasco. The same lessons, learned in reverse, were apparent from the Atheos story (the developer quit, but because it was non-proprietary, others were able to pick up where he left off.)
As a "paranoid crackpot leftovers from the waning days of Amiga", I find it sad and such a waste that that's where we are.
Until I get more information than TFA has, I'll stick to generalities. But as a general rule, you don't have the right to walk up to him on the subway and start yelling "This man's an idiot! He should die. We should kill him. Let's beat him up!"
Why was Clinton so weak against terror? Why did he leave Bush a nation that was unprepared for an "inevitable" attack 8 months into his successor's term?
He didn't answer. He blew up at the interviewer instead.
Clinton wasn't weak on terror. Clinton's government actually prevented at least one 9/11 attack from happening on American soil, the attack on LAX on New Year's Eve, 1999.
Clinton didn't leave Bush a nation "unprepared" for an inevitable attack. Bush's first actions on taking over were to dismantle Clinton's anti-terror operation. That's well documented.
Be careful with your terminology there. Foley may be a major sexual harasser, and may have used his position and age to make unwanted sexual advances against under-age (and that's questionable) people, but his victims were, so far, all over 16. It seems improbable we're looking at advances against under 12s (or whatever cut-off is reasonable in terms of defining people as children as opposed to young adults.)
I agree his actions aren't comparable with Clinton's, but that's because Clinton, for all his faults, was involved in an entirely consensual relationship with a reciprocating woman who knew enough about her circumstances to make sane judgements. Foley, on the other hand, pushed unwanted advances on people who clearly didn't like it, and almost certainly weren't experienced enough to know what to do in the situation.
Pedophilia? Not in the slightest. A sexual harasser and all round asshole? You bet.
The burden of proof is on me to prove that I don't owe them the money.
Since when? You can't prove a negative! No credit card company expects you to prove your case for charge-backs, an illegitimate charge back is a matter between the two parties involved, not the credit card company.
What typo? We're talking about a situation where Fox, in a pre-recorded show, in full view of the producers of the show, put up a caption three times describing Foley as a Democrat.
There is no possible way in which Fox could have not known that this was inaccurate and in the show before they broadcast it, nor any way in which it is believable that they would have found it too difficult to fix had it been a genuine "mistake." They broadcast it anyway.
A typo is an accidental mistype you fail to spot before publication. Not a deliberate lie you deliberately allow to be published.
Wal*Mart isn't a supermarket though. (Well, larger Wal*Marts have a supermarket inside them, but if that makes them comparable to Tesco, then you might just as well compare them to HMV or Dixons.)
If you're in the UK, the nearest equivalent would probably be Woolworths. Except it's about 10x bigger. And has more stuff.
It's really quite simple. The system involves two opaque boxes (A and B), both with closable lids,.
One operator places the item to be teleported in box A and closes the lid. The operator of box B then opens the box and observes the contents. By doing so, the item appears in box B.
This works because of the way particle physics works. Any object may be in multiple places until it is actually observed. By hiding the item from one operator, the location of the item becomes unknown, and therefore the other operator is able to transport it to them merely by observing one of the locations it may have travelled to.
Really, this is elementary physics and it's surprising how rarely we take advantage of it. I actually go to work every morning by going to the bathroom, alone, closing the door, and then phoning a collegue at work, asking him to open the cubicle door at the bathroom there. By keeping my eyes closed at the precise moment he opens the door, I am able to ensure my own location is unobserved, and therefore that my precise whereabouts are unknown until my collegue opens the door and observes me. It's very useful and saves a lot of gas, but has the disadvantage that you have to rely upon there being someone whereever you want to travel to that you can contact who can observe the contents of a previously unobservable man-sized space. Also there's the danger that two people might do the same thing at once, in which case there's the danger of a time/space paradox being created.
I like Burger King (within reason, there are some pretty awful BKs around.) If it's not one of the franchises that microwaves the burgers, the Whoppers are usually pretty nice.
Cingular runs pretty evenly on both 1900MHz and 800 (or 850, depending on who's terminology you're using) MHz, depending on the area. Cingular is made up of a bunch of old B networks and AT&T's old A network (history: AT&T Wireless was an aquisition by AT&T, it used to be McCaw Cellular), and both these networks also bought a large amount of PCS spectrum.
But, yeah, T-Mobile is 100% 1900MHz. It's useful to have a dual band phone as you can then roam onto 850MHz GSM networks, but T-Mobile's roaming arrangements are a little wierd so...
GSM Is the REQUIREMENT in Europe by MANDATE. You can gloss it over with this or that, the "standards" were set up so one format met those standards, GSM. Suffice it to say you see it one way I see it another, and were not going to agree except to disagree. I heard the various arguments on this for a while and have not changed my opinion. GSM=MANDATED.
A COMMON STANDARD is the requirement by Europe, and then only on the 900MHz, and after it became defacto on 1800MHz, on 1800MHz too. GSM was the standard that was picked by the operators. GSM was not pushed by any governmental organization, it's a flat out lie to imply that it was.
Any state government in Europe can also make available other frequencies for mobile phone service running whatever services operators want. Indeed, that's how 1800MHz came about - because Britain opened up that frequency for operators to use. Both operators chose, off their free will, without even having to pick a common standard, GSM. Had they, and the dozens of operators that followed, picked something else, that'd have resulted in a different environment.
You can gloss over this as much as you like. You can say that because governments told operators they had to choose a common standard, that it's some kind of terrible crime against the holy goal of free marketism. What you can't say is that GSM specifically received government support.
Quite the reverse. The only standard I see being given mandated government support is IS-95, which the US government has done - often to the detriment of US interests. When IS-95 was pushed on the Chinese by the Clinton administration, the fall-out was immense, with the Chinese Government deliberately using it as a weapon against the US's attempts to deal with human rights violations. Qualcomm's lobbying, and the US government's incompetent caving in to such lobbying, has probably actually ensured many human rights abuses couldn't be prevented.
Yet, despite this well documented support of IS-95 by governments, for some reason it's the Europeans who get it in the neck. Because the European community had the audicity to want to replace the situation where the entire community had half a dozen or so incompatible analog standards with no roaming with a situation where someone could at least buy a phone that was guaranteed coverage anywhere in the area.
Oh the humanity!
BTW Vodafone experimented with a version of GSM that used the same air interface as IS-95 in the mid-nineties and ended up rejecting it, not because of politics or legal reasons, but because Qualcomm wasn't able to come up with a system that worked well for them. Nothing stopped them from running it, any more than anything stops European operators from implementing GPRS, EDGE, or UMTS.
2) CDMA in its various formats is the de facto standard, in the US. NO CDMA you've lost out on 90% of the US market. Verizon, Sprint, Alltel (which may as well be Verizon, why don't they just merge and get it over with), US Cellular and a slew of other local and regional carriers. The fact that CDMA is going to be the air interface for the "new and improved" GSM shows they fubar'd with their anti US mind set. Pick the better technology, and thats not GSM.
FWIW, CDMA is not a standard anywhere. It's an air interface technology. You might just as well argue that "Packet switching" or "Plastic buttons" is a standard.
IS-95, which is what you meant, is not the de-facto standard in the US. The biggest operator in the US is Cingular. Cingular operates a GSM network. GSM has many other operators, including T-Mobile, some of Alltel (in the old Western Wireless regions), and various regional operators. And before adding up customer figures, remember that only half of Sprint's customers use its IS-95 network.
It is a flat out lie to argue that 90% of US users use IS-95. I would be surprised if IS-95 is used by more than 45% of US cellphone subscribers.
Remember GSM was MANDATED not chosen by marketplace forces, MANADATED by governments.
It was neither. In Europe, it was chosen by the operators who were mandated to meet and settle on a common standard for the 900MHz band. For the 1800MHz band, it was initially chosen by operators who weren't mandated to settle on a common standard, but after 1800MHz GSM become widespread, was mandated in the remaining countries who hadn't implemented it yet. Regardless of which, it's a great standard. The "GSM was imposed by governments on unwilling, tortured, operators" is a common meme from Qualcomm's IS-95 shilling operation.
Have a GSM version all you want, but without a CDMA version, you've locked your self out of 90% of the US market from the start
By "CDMA" I assume you mean IS-95 (the most recent version of GSM, UMTS, uses a CDMA air interface.) In the US, the two standards are currently neck and neck. Cingular, the US's largest operator, uses GSM. T-Mobile and a number of regional operators also use GSM. GSM is available in the vast majority of locations in the US where cellular service of any type is available.
900/1800/1900 - Strike 2 - Frequency coverage is again way too outside US specific. Lack of the 800Mhz coverage used in many areas means your stuck with 1900 in the US and its poor building penetration and in some areas NO SERVICE as there are 800 only areas. Thats why all the US carriers require 800/1900 coverage. This would also make it more of a world phone by adding in 800 where used.
This is the one point you've made so far that has any remotely true validity. 800MHz support would help in the US. That's not to say it's 100% necessary, with a number of operators 1900MHz is the only frequency available. 1900MHz isn't awful, it's just there's more coverage when you combine the two, and in certain locations 1900MHz can be difficult to get. Cingular gets a poor (800MHz) signal in my home, T-Mobile's (1900MHz) is relatively good.
One hopes that the phone's support for 802.11 means that it also supports UMA, which will in the long term counter many of the disadvantages of higher frequencies.
If their primary market is outside the US, they are 100% on the spot, but if DLink is going to try to sell this in the US. They will be required to make these changes to get it to sell.
Not really.
First, you presume IS-95 users would want a PDA phone. That's not my experience, and I was a Sprint PCS customer for three years who before that was on GSM networks in the UK and used a PDA phone for a long time while there, so I've been on both sides of the fence.
The last thing I want to be is stuck with an oversized phone all the time. On IS-95, the only way to have two phones is to have two accounts, complete with seperate phone numbers. On GSM, for those occasions where a smaller phone would be more useful, it's just a matter of slipping the SIM out of one and into the other. The market for PDA phones is thus tiny, if not non-existant, on IS-95. On GSM, Blackberrys, Sidekicks, and others are relatively popular. Sidekicks, FWIW, are also, in practice, subject to the 1900MHz frequency limitation.
Limiting PDA phones to GSM isn't a bad idea, it's a good one. It's a waste of development time to try and develop such a thing for IS-95 users. When Verizon and Sprint PCS and Alltel stop treating their customers like crap and finally implement RUIM cards, we might see that change. But right now, none of the operators are using a version of IS-95 that is PDA friendly. That's a shame, but that's the way it is.
Second, as I mentioned above, there are plenty of existing PDA phones in the US that sell fairly well that are limited to the one band (1900MHz). I think it would be a good idea for them to improve that, but it's hardly a "this will make or break whether we can
While this makes sense on some level, obtaining the product from a brick and mortar store is hardly your only option. If it's difficult to get because it involves going to a store, perhaps the obvious solution is to order the product from Amazon.com, and let those who are actually willing to go to the store be rewarded for doing so?
Cell phones (GSM at least) Already have a GUID which is transmitted all the time while the phone is switched on.
It is easy for operators to track the position of a stolen cellphone down to about a meter if they wanted to.
Cellphones, including GSM phones, have a variety of Ids (the IMEI and the IMSI), but they're not transmitted "all the time"; they're periodically transmitted, such as when the phone is switched on, and when the phone moves from the range of towers connected to one Mobile Switching Center to another. The only time there's continuous transmission of the type necessary to trace a handset is when they're on a call.
Another point to remember is that this solution is of limited value. The reason cellphones are stolen isn't because thieves need them, but because they have a high resale value when exported to other countries. All this pretty much guarantees is that a crook will turn the phone off immediately after stealing it.
The purpose of clean rooming is actually just to prove that your product is not a derivative, not because looking at source code automatically taints anything you write afterwards.
If Microsoft took Apache, viewed the source, and then wrote, from scratch, a web server, would the Open Source community go nuts? No idea. The conspiracy theorists might, I guess. After all, some are still convinced that Windows is based upon VMS, because the guy who wrote the kernel once worked on VMS. The two operating systems are barely comparable, having only in common what modern operating systems generally do. Linux has far, far, more in common with the Unix kernel than the Windows kernel has in common with the VMS equivalent. But you're right, people will claim that copyright infringement has to have occurred because, like, the programs have the same function, and the guy saw both, so...
But here's the thing: If Microsoft took Apache, viewed the source, and then wrote, from scratch, a web browser, would the Open Source community go nuts? Definitely not. Yet both products are as likely as not to be "tainted" by the fact the authors looked at the source code for Apache.
The truth is that every time you look at source code, there's the possibility that someone will complain, at some point in the future, that you might have copied from them, regardless of what you work on. If we were to be 100% paranoid at this point, we couldn't get anything done or written at all. The reality is that we take a pragmatic view and "clean room" when we think someone might complain. Clean rooming is not about avoiding taint. All code written from scratch is equally tainted. Clean rooming is about avoiding copyright holders with a grudge from alleging specific instances of taint.
Can I interject here and point out that none of you are actually on-topic?
This discussion is not about device drivers, it's about the "blobs" that contain things like firmware and the distribution licenses that come with them.
For the most part, OpenBSD is doing pretty well creating device drivers. Indeed, it does better than Linux in many respects: OpenBSD's ipw3945 driver, for instance, is fully self contained and doesn't require the ugly hacks involving user-space daemons that the Linux version does. The author of the OpenBSD driver reverse engineered the Linux driver, and did so in a way that wouldn't taint anything (he hacked the driver to write information about what was being sent to what registers and when, recorded this information, and then wrote his driver. His driver is 99% based upon the actions of source code he's never seen.)
The issue isn't writing device drivers. Most of the devices Theo is complaining about already work under OpenBSD. However, the only way to obtain some critical components, such as the firmware, is to navigate to a website, agree to a license, and download them.
This especially a PITA if you're trying to get a network device to work. You can't access the network without the blob, and you can't obtain the blob unless your network is up. Not impossible to solve, but an added cause of frustration for anyone who's been in this situation.
Bear in mind what kind of "blobs" we're talking about. The blobs Theo is talking about aren't operating system drivers, it's not code that will be running under the computer's main CPU, these are firmware binaries for highly specific and specialized pieces of hardware.
There's very little value in having the source code for that. The number of people who would even understand how the code would work would be small. Given the amount of stuff Intel feels needs to be put into "computerspace" (kernel + userland) in recent drivers such as that for the ipw3945 wireless cards, one can get a pretty good idea of how low level the firmware is. To put it bluntly: if you're expecting it to be as high level as 8080 assembler, you're probably expecting too much. The hardware that interprets the blob may not even be Turing complete.
I'm not suggesting it wouldn't be good to have the source code, or even that Intel doesn't have a moral obligation - according to the morality of the Free Software philosophy - to provide it, but in real, practical, terms the source code is almost useless. What's more important is that the blob itself is available so that all operating systems, regardless of their licensing, can include the blob with their (fully Free Software) drivers.
Getting Intel to release the source to the blob would be an uphill struggle for very little reward even if successful. Getting Intel to release the blob itself is much easier, and in practice is "good enough" to ensure Free Software can fully and freely interoperate with Intel hardware.
The US government had no business leaning on the EU over Microsoft, and Tony Blair would be wise to keep his nose out of US law on gambling.
While I disagree with the law itself, the notion that someone, soley for the sake of making more money, should try to use a position of privilege to have a legitimate law overturned in foreign country is absolutely wrong and counter to basic democratic and civic principles.
Sorry to be old fashioned here, but too many countries think that it's legitimate to interfere in the private affairs of other countries for all the wrong reasons. This goes on too much already. It needs to stop.
It works the other way around too. I see people who hear the term "VoIP" and think this means "Skype" or, at a stretch, "Vonage". Oddest case is the confusion over a service called UMA, a technology that lets you use an 802.11 WAP with an Internet connection as a GSM tower. Because it's "VoIP", otherwise bright people will start asking why anyone would use this in favour of Vonage, or say they're looking forward to it because it means they can use Skype from their mobile phone handset.
Brandname and technology confusion is one big mess.
Re:I'll go for your lesser challenge of five...
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Ten Geek Business Myths
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· Score: 5, Informative
TOS and Kickstart already had IP-Stacks.
Well, in the sense they were available, yes, but the guy was talking about Microsoft going one step further and bundling it. I never owned an Atari ST, but I can tell you that none of the TCP/IP stacks for the Amiga were ever bundled with it in Commodore's lifetime.
AS225, Commodore's own stack, was never even released outside of a handful of developers. Amiga users had to rely upon AmiTCP or KA9Q (renamed "AmigaNOS") to get it to work. AmiTCP was free software (BSD license, IIRC) up until the 3.0 betas, but controvertially went shareware with version 4. KA9Q was... uh... yeah. You didn't want to use it.
To go on to other mainstream platforms of the time: So far as I'm aware, it wasn't until the late nineties that MacOS had a stack bundled with it. Stacks were available before 1990, largely due to the Mac's entrenchment in academia, but they weren't bundled with the system. OS/2 Warp 3 "came with" a TCP/IP "stack", but for consumer versions it was close to useless. It only supported SLIP, and wasn't modular, so you couldn't just add a device driver for your Ethernet card (or just PPP) and it'd work, you'd have to throw the entire stack out and buy the premium version from IBM.
So really, other than Unix, no mainstream operating systems came bundled with a full TCP/IP stack until Windows 95 did. I hate to say it, and maybe it'd have happened anyway, but Microsoft did pioneer there.
Decimation means to kill off 10%, not 90% as some posts have said. From Wikipedia: The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth." So the article is correct, this is decimation.
Kind of, I mean, nobody's being killed...
I've always thought it was legitimate to use decimate when you're refering to removing a small, but not insignificant, fraction but doing so in a particularly harsh way. For example, "Our profits were decimated!" wouldn't work because a slight reduction in profits is never brutal, but "Since the RIAA initiated lawsuits against users, usage of pirate-oriented peer-to-peer networks has been decimated" strikes me as more valid (assuming usage is still high, but has dropped significantly)
Yeah, I loved the RAM: drive on my old Amiga. I had a third party one for my QL too, but the Amiga one was the best as it was variable size. Lightning quick.
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Alas TripOS isn't (and wasn't) open source, merely "source available/limited distribution".
TripOS's role within AmigaOS was always a little strange and overblown by some people. (Most of) DOS, which dos.library interfaced with, and the CLI and its commands were essentially the whole of it. The kernel (exec) and pretty much everything to do with graphics and the GUI were a separate system. By the time of the release of AmigaOS 2.x, most of the code had been thrown out in favour of C equivalents.
I have to agree with that.
This is actually a very real, very strong, case for RMS's controvertial opinions on the morality of proprietary software. Commodore/Escom's death didn't have to be the end of AmigaOS as a viable platform (it would, today, in my view be unrecognizable if it had continued to be supported, but that's another issue.) People relied upon the various owners of Amiga to provide the resources to ensure it remained usable: every single one of those owners from Gateway onwards have been failures. And all previous owners, Escom, Commodore, and Hi Torro, failed to plan for the possibility of commercial failure.
There was a movement to get AmigaOS open sourced in the late nineties. It was widely criticised by many, including those within the Amiga community, who decided that it was in some way wrong to allow Amiga technologies to become free enough that they might help bolster rival operating systems. The sheer mindlessness of that position is readily apparent after Gateway's decision to instead sell the technologies to private consortiums who had anything but freedom and openness in mind when they bought it.
Now, two years behind schedule, AmigaOS 4 is still in a state where it'll be finished "RSN". Public betas have shown no dramatic improvements over the original. It's tied to licensed PowerPC hardware because of Amiga Inc's nned for profits, a need that is opposite to the operating system's users need for future proofing and reasonable expectations of support.
AROS is no panacea, and it too has little advantage, beyond portability, over the original AmigaOS. But it at least keeps alive something. AmigaOS and AROS are beyond the point that they will ever be relevent as modern day operating systems - even on lightwieght systems, their lack of a credible security model limits their uses in a modern networked world.
The Amiga's prime purpose these days seems to be as a little noticed warning to others. If you invest your time and money into someone else's proprietary platform, even if it's the best platform there is (and, arguably, the Amigas were, for a very long time, the best platforms in existance for machines costing less than $5,000) you do stand a serious chance of being screwed over. The same lessons were apparent from the BeOS fiasco. The same lessons, learned in reverse, were apparent from the Atheos story (the developer quit, but because it was non-proprietary, others were able to pick up where he left off.)
As a "paranoid crackpot leftovers from the waning days of Amiga", I find it sad and such a waste that that's where we are.
Until I get more information than TFA has, I'll stick to generalities. But as a general rule, you don't have the right to walk up to him on the subway and start yelling "This man's an idiot! He should die. We should kill him. Let's beat him up!"
Clinton wasn't weak on terror. Clinton's government actually prevented at least one 9/11 attack from happening on American soil, the attack on LAX on New Year's Eve, 1999.
Clinton didn't leave Bush a nation "unprepared" for an inevitable attack. Bush's first actions on taking over were to dismantle Clinton's anti-terror operation. That's well documented.
Why are you lying?
Be careful with your terminology there. Foley may be a major sexual harasser, and may have used his position and age to make unwanted sexual advances against under-age (and that's questionable) people, but his victims were, so far, all over 16. It seems improbable we're looking at advances against under 12s (or whatever cut-off is reasonable in terms of defining people as children as opposed to young adults.)
I agree his actions aren't comparable with Clinton's, but that's because Clinton, for all his faults, was involved in an entirely consensual relationship with a reciprocating woman who knew enough about her circumstances to make sane judgements. Foley, on the other hand, pushed unwanted advances on people who clearly didn't like it, and almost certainly weren't experienced enough to know what to do in the situation.
Pedophilia? Not in the slightest. A sexual harasser and all round asshole? You bet.
Since when? You can't prove a negative! No credit card company expects you to prove your case for charge-backs, an illegitimate charge back is a matter between the two parties involved, not the credit card company.
Actually you're both wrong. Microsoft became king because it provided high quality products at competitive prices.
(Heheh.)
There is no possible way in which Fox could have not known that this was inaccurate and in the show before they broadcast it, nor any way in which it is believable that they would have found it too difficult to fix had it been a genuine "mistake." They broadcast it anyway.
A typo is an accidental mistype you fail to spot before publication. Not a deliberate lie you deliberately allow to be published.
Wal*Mart isn't a supermarket though. (Well, larger Wal*Marts have a supermarket inside them, but if that makes them comparable to Tesco, then you might just as well compare them to HMV or Dixons.)
If you're in the UK, the nearest equivalent would probably be Woolworths. Except it's about 10x bigger. And has more stuff.
It's really quite simple. The system involves two opaque boxes (A and B), both with closable lids,.
One operator places the item to be teleported in box A and closes the lid. The operator of box B then opens the box and observes the contents. By doing so, the item appears in box B.
This works because of the way particle physics works. Any object may be in multiple places until it is actually observed. By hiding the item from one operator, the location of the item becomes unknown, and therefore the other operator is able to transport it to them merely by observing one of the locations it may have travelled to.
Really, this is elementary physics and it's surprising how rarely we take advantage of it. I actually go to work every morning by going to the bathroom, alone, closing the door, and then phoning a collegue at work, asking him to open the cubicle door at the bathroom there. By keeping my eyes closed at the precise moment he opens the door, I am able to ensure my own location is unobserved, and therefore that my precise whereabouts are unknown until my collegue opens the door and observes me. It's very useful and saves a lot of gas, but has the disadvantage that you have to rely upon there being someone whereever you want to travel to that you can contact who can observe the contents of a previously unobservable man-sized space. Also there's the danger that two people might do the same thing at once, in which case there's the danger of a time/space paradox being created.
I like Burger King (within reason, there are some pretty awful BKs around.) If it's not one of the franchises that microwaves the burgers, the Whoppers are usually pretty nice.
Cingular runs pretty evenly on both 1900MHz and 800 (or 850, depending on who's terminology you're using) MHz, depending on the area. Cingular is made up of a bunch of old B networks and AT&T's old A network (history: AT&T Wireless was an aquisition by AT&T, it used to be McCaw Cellular), and both these networks also bought a large amount of PCS spectrum.
But, yeah, T-Mobile is 100% 1900MHz. It's useful to have a dual band phone as you can then roam onto 850MHz GSM networks, but T-Mobile's roaming arrangements are a little wierd so...
A COMMON STANDARD is the requirement by Europe, and then only on the 900MHz, and after it became defacto on 1800MHz, on 1800MHz too. GSM was the standard that was picked by the operators. GSM was not pushed by any governmental organization, it's a flat out lie to imply that it was.
Any state government in Europe can also make available other frequencies for mobile phone service running whatever services operators want. Indeed, that's how 1800MHz came about - because Britain opened up that frequency for operators to use. Both operators chose, off their free will, without even having to pick a common standard, GSM. Had they, and the dozens of operators that followed, picked something else, that'd have resulted in a different environment.
You can gloss over this as much as you like. You can say that because governments told operators they had to choose a common standard, that it's some kind of terrible crime against the holy goal of free marketism. What you can't say is that GSM specifically received government support.
Quite the reverse. The only standard I see being given mandated government support is IS-95, which the US government has done - often to the detriment of US interests. When IS-95 was pushed on the Chinese by the Clinton administration, the fall-out was immense, with the Chinese Government deliberately using it as a weapon against the US's attempts to deal with human rights violations. Qualcomm's lobbying, and the US government's incompetent caving in to such lobbying, has probably actually ensured many human rights abuses couldn't be prevented.
Yet, despite this well documented support of IS-95 by governments, for some reason it's the Europeans who get it in the neck. Because the European community had the audicity to want to replace the situation where the entire community had half a dozen or so incompatible analog standards with no roaming with a situation where someone could at least buy a phone that was guaranteed coverage anywhere in the area.
Oh the humanity!
BTW Vodafone experimented with a version of GSM that used the same air interface as IS-95 in the mid-nineties and ended up rejecting it, not because of politics or legal reasons, but because Qualcomm wasn't able to come up with a system that worked well for them. Nothing stopped them from running it, any more than anything stops European operators from implementing GPRS, EDGE, or UMTS.
FWIW, CDMA is not a standard anywhere. It's an air interface technology. You might just as well argue that "Packet switching" or "Plastic buttons" is a standard.
IS-95, which is what you meant, is not the de-facto standard in the US. The biggest operator in the US is Cingular. Cingular operates a GSM network. GSM has many other operators, including T-Mobile, some of Alltel (in the old Western Wireless regions), and various regional operators. And before adding up customer figures, remember that only half of Sprint's customers use its IS-95 network.
It is a flat out lie to argue that 90% of US users use IS-95. I would be surprised if IS-95 is used by more than 45% of US cellphone subscribers.
Secondly, the fa
It was neither. In Europe, it was chosen by the operators who were mandated to meet and settle on a common standard for the 900MHz band. For the 1800MHz band, it was initially chosen by operators who weren't mandated to settle on a common standard, but after 1800MHz GSM become widespread, was mandated in the remaining countries who hadn't implemented it yet. Regardless of which, it's a great standard. The "GSM was imposed by governments on unwilling, tortured, operators" is a common meme from Qualcomm's IS-95 shilling operation.
By "CDMA" I assume you mean IS-95 (the most recent version of GSM, UMTS, uses a CDMA air interface.) In the US, the two standards are currently neck and neck. Cingular, the US's largest operator, uses GSM. T-Mobile and a number of regional operators also use GSM. GSM is available in the vast majority of locations in the US where cellular service of any type is available.
This is the one point you've made so far that has any remotely true validity. 800MHz support would help in the US. That's not to say it's 100% necessary, with a number of operators 1900MHz is the only frequency available. 1900MHz isn't awful, it's just there's more coverage when you combine the two, and in certain locations 1900MHz can be difficult to get. Cingular gets a poor (800MHz) signal in my home, T-Mobile's (1900MHz) is relatively good.
One hopes that the phone's support for 802.11 means that it also supports UMA, which will in the long term counter many of the disadvantages of higher frequencies.
Not really.
First, you presume IS-95 users would want a PDA phone. That's not my experience, and I was a Sprint PCS customer for three years who before that was on GSM networks in the UK and used a PDA phone for a long time while there, so I've been on both sides of the fence.
The last thing I want to be is stuck with an oversized phone all the time. On IS-95, the only way to have two phones is to have two accounts, complete with seperate phone numbers. On GSM, for those occasions where a smaller phone would be more useful, it's just a matter of slipping the SIM out of one and into the other. The market for PDA phones is thus tiny, if not non-existant, on IS-95. On GSM, Blackberrys, Sidekicks, and others are relatively popular. Sidekicks, FWIW, are also, in practice, subject to the 1900MHz frequency limitation.
Limiting PDA phones to GSM isn't a bad idea, it's a good one. It's a waste of development time to try and develop such a thing for IS-95 users. When Verizon and Sprint PCS and Alltel stop treating their customers like crap and finally implement RUIM cards, we might see that change. But right now, none of the operators are using a version of IS-95 that is PDA friendly. That's a shame, but that's the way it is.
Second, as I mentioned above, there are plenty of existing PDA phones in the US that sell fairly well that are limited to the one band (1900MHz). I think it would be a good idea for them to improve that, but it's hardly a "this will make or break whether we can
While this makes sense on some level, obtaining the product from a brick and mortar store is hardly your only option. If it's difficult to get because it involves going to a store, perhaps the obvious solution is to order the product from Amazon.com, and let those who are actually willing to go to the store be rewarded for doing so?
Cellphones, including GSM phones, have a variety of Ids (the IMEI and the IMSI), but they're not transmitted "all the time"; they're periodically transmitted, such as when the phone is switched on, and when the phone moves from the range of towers connected to one Mobile Switching Center to another. The only time there's continuous transmission of the type necessary to trace a handset is when they're on a call.
Another point to remember is that this solution is of limited value. The reason cellphones are stolen isn't because thieves need them, but because they have a high resale value when exported to other countries. All this pretty much guarantees is that a crook will turn the phone off immediately after stealing it.
Er, yeah, that's what I just said.
The purpose of clean rooming is actually just to prove that your product is not a derivative, not because looking at source code automatically taints anything you write afterwards.
If Microsoft took Apache, viewed the source, and then wrote, from scratch, a web server, would the Open Source community go nuts? No idea. The conspiracy theorists might, I guess. After all, some are still convinced that Windows is based upon VMS, because the guy who wrote the kernel once worked on VMS. The two operating systems are barely comparable, having only in common what modern operating systems generally do. Linux has far, far, more in common with the Unix kernel than the Windows kernel has in common with the VMS equivalent. But you're right, people will claim that copyright infringement has to have occurred because, like, the programs have the same function, and the guy saw both, so...
But here's the thing: If Microsoft took Apache, viewed the source, and then wrote, from scratch, a web browser, would the Open Source community go nuts? Definitely not. Yet both products are as likely as not to be "tainted" by the fact the authors looked at the source code for Apache.
The truth is that every time you look at source code, there's the possibility that someone will complain, at some point in the future, that you might have copied from them, regardless of what you work on. If we were to be 100% paranoid at this point, we couldn't get anything done or written at all. The reality is that we take a pragmatic view and "clean room" when we think someone might complain. Clean rooming is not about avoiding taint. All code written from scratch is equally tainted. Clean rooming is about avoiding copyright holders with a grudge from alleging specific instances of taint.
Can I interject here and point out that none of you are actually on-topic?
This discussion is not about device drivers, it's about the "blobs" that contain things like firmware and the distribution licenses that come with them.
For the most part, OpenBSD is doing pretty well creating device drivers. Indeed, it does better than Linux in many respects: OpenBSD's ipw3945 driver, for instance, is fully self contained and doesn't require the ugly hacks involving user-space daemons that the Linux version does. The author of the OpenBSD driver reverse engineered the Linux driver, and did so in a way that wouldn't taint anything (he hacked the driver to write information about what was being sent to what registers and when, recorded this information, and then wrote his driver. His driver is 99% based upon the actions of source code he's never seen.)
The issue isn't writing device drivers. Most of the devices Theo is complaining about already work under OpenBSD. However, the only way to obtain some critical components, such as the firmware, is to navigate to a website, agree to a license, and download them.
This especially a PITA if you're trying to get a network device to work. You can't access the network without the blob, and you can't obtain the blob unless your network is up. Not impossible to solve, but an added cause of frustration for anyone who's been in this situation.
Bear in mind what kind of "blobs" we're talking about. The blobs Theo is talking about aren't operating system drivers, it's not code that will be running under the computer's main CPU, these are firmware binaries for highly specific and specialized pieces of hardware.
There's very little value in having the source code for that. The number of people who would even understand how the code would work would be small. Given the amount of stuff Intel feels needs to be put into "computerspace" (kernel + userland) in recent drivers such as that for the ipw3945 wireless cards, one can get a pretty good idea of how low level the firmware is. To put it bluntly: if you're expecting it to be as high level as 8080 assembler, you're probably expecting too much. The hardware that interprets the blob may not even be Turing complete.
I'm not suggesting it wouldn't be good to have the source code, or even that Intel doesn't have a moral obligation - according to the morality of the Free Software philosophy - to provide it, but in real, practical, terms the source code is almost useless. What's more important is that the blob itself is available so that all operating systems, regardless of their licensing, can include the blob with their (fully Free Software) drivers.
Getting Intel to release the source to the blob would be an uphill struggle for very little reward even if successful. Getting Intel to release the blob itself is much easier, and in practice is "good enough" to ensure Free Software can fully and freely interoperate with Intel hardware.
The US government had no business leaning on the EU over Microsoft, and Tony Blair would be wise to keep his nose out of US law on gambling.
While I disagree with the law itself, the notion that someone, soley for the sake of making more money, should try to use a position of privilege to have a legitimate law overturned in foreign country is absolutely wrong and counter to basic democratic and civic principles.
Sorry to be old fashioned here, but too many countries think that it's legitimate to interfere in the private affairs of other countries for all the wrong reasons. This goes on too much already. It needs to stop.
It works the other way around too. I see people who hear the term "VoIP" and think this means "Skype" or, at a stretch, "Vonage". Oddest case is the confusion over a service called UMA, a technology that lets you use an 802.11 WAP with an Internet connection as a GSM tower. Because it's "VoIP", otherwise bright people will start asking why anyone would use this in favour of Vonage, or say they're looking forward to it because it means they can use Skype from their mobile phone handset.
Brandname and technology confusion is one big mess.
Well, in the sense they were available, yes, but the guy was talking about Microsoft going one step further and bundling it. I never owned an Atari ST, but I can tell you that none of the TCP/IP stacks for the Amiga were ever bundled with it in Commodore's lifetime.
AS225, Commodore's own stack, was never even released outside of a handful of developers. Amiga users had to rely upon AmiTCP or KA9Q (renamed "AmigaNOS") to get it to work. AmiTCP was free software (BSD license, IIRC) up until the 3.0 betas, but controvertially went shareware with version 4. KA9Q was... uh... yeah. You didn't want to use it.
To go on to other mainstream platforms of the time: So far as I'm aware, it wasn't until the late nineties that MacOS had a stack bundled with it. Stacks were available before 1990, largely due to the Mac's entrenchment in academia, but they weren't bundled with the system. OS/2 Warp 3 "came with" a TCP/IP "stack", but for consumer versions it was close to useless. It only supported SLIP, and wasn't modular, so you couldn't just add a device driver for your Ethernet card (or just PPP) and it'd work, you'd have to throw the entire stack out and buy the premium version from IBM.
So really, other than Unix, no mainstream operating systems came bundled with a full TCP/IP stack until Windows 95 did. I hate to say it, and maybe it'd have happened anyway, but Microsoft did pioneer there.
Kind of, I mean, nobody's being killed...
I've always thought it was legitimate to use decimate when you're refering to removing a small, but not insignificant, fraction but doing so in a particularly harsh way. For example, "Our profits were decimated!" wouldn't work because a slight reduction in profits is never brutal, but "Since the RIAA initiated lawsuits against users, usage of pirate-oriented peer-to-peer networks has been decimated" strikes me as more valid (assuming usage is still high, but has dropped significantly)
Yeah, I loved the RAM: drive on my old Amiga. I had a third party one for my QL too, but the Amiga one was the best as it was variable size. Lightning quick.
What were we talking about again? Oh yeah, SATA.