Because it breaks a lock that Apple had hoped to use to make it difficult to migrate from iPods.
If you buy music from the iTMS, then you end up with a large music library you can only play on Fairplay-supporting devices, such as the iPod and the occasional, non-competing and fully licensed, mobile phone from Motorola. What do you buy when you want to upgrade from your current iPod? Answer: an iPod, nothing else that's better will play your library.
If you buy music from Real, you can play it on most music players and the iPod. Thus, right now, people with iPods can build up a significant music collection from Real, and then when their player breaks or is too limited, they can switch to something from Sony, or Creative, or Rio, or El Cheapo, or even Dell.
Apple's trying to pull the same stunt as Microsoft successfully did with Windows, except that Apple is considering using legal measures against competitors, whereas Microsoft just made its API too complex and too much of a moving target to clone.
A weekend democrat... is that like a weekend driver?
The funny thing is that Nader has done the exact opposite of what he claimed to have wanted to do. There's little doubt that Kerry is far more of an establishment, middle of the road, uninspiring candidate than Gore was. Gore was an environmentalist, he had a certain amount of vision, and it seems unlikely to me he'd have ever have been in the running for President had he not been picked as VP by Clinton.
At the primaries, the nearest candidates to Gore were kicked out in favour of the candidate the media and the DNC establishment clearly wanted. Howard Dean, the nearest thing to the type of candidate Nader claimed to want, ultimately made a lot of noise but never got anywhere.
I know what Nader is claiming to want to do, but I see a gulf between the results of his actions and his rhetoric. He either can see that too, and is an idiot, or he's exactly the destructive egomaniac his critics accuse him of being.
I suspect this is a tablet, a very small one (possibly the size of an iPod), and will probably be called a "pod".
The device patented is too small (if the "iPod connector" shown in the diagrams is to scale, it's about 10" corner to corner) to be one of the forthcoming iMacs, the smallest of which is likely to have a 17" screen.
El Reg themselves discount the idea, in the linked to article, that the device is the iPod, it doesn't match.
It also would explain why Apple has bought a crap-load of 60G iPod ready disks and then turned around and said they have no intention of releasing a 60G iPod.
If this is a tablet computer equipped to do a network boot of OS X through 802.11g,
Probably not. OS X is fairly large, to put it mildly./System is usually over a gig in size. Even Darwin, OS X without the GUI, Finder, apps, etc, takes up a few hundred megs or so once installed.
And once running, it requires quite a substantial amount of disk space for things like swap. Doing swap over 802.11g would be... interesting...
The thing is, the Unix world had many many years to develop something better than Microsoft. What you got was Motif, a gazillion emacs modules, key-command window managers, and various scripting components.
And you got OpenStep, NEWS, and other environments that were technically excellent. Until the mid-nineties though, most of the development was closed. And, unfortunately, pretty much the moment the F/OSS communities started up, it was clear they wanted to clone Windows. I recall the first version of RedHat I installed was set up with FVWM95 as the default WM.
The Unix world has had its good GUIs, I even linked to a pioneer in the field, it's the F/OSS communities that have insisted on ignoring work relevent to Unix and instead tried to graft on to an OS fundamentally unlike Windows an environment that was as Windows-like as possible.
The major argument isn't against Miguel as what he's doing and the mindset commonly associated with Miguel.
What most of us want is something better than what Microsoft does, more than that, we want something exciting, radical, and different. The mindset that Miguel and others seem to share is that as long as "our" stuff is Free, it is better, and there's no point in creating a better technology, we might just as well copy Microsoft, fix a few bugs, extend here and there, and, voila, you have something better. The technology isn't better, but the implementation is, and that's enough, right?
It's more than that though, it's an unwinnable contest. As long as Microsoft's "competitors" are merely trying to catch up with Microsoft, implementing the same technologies, there's no way, in practice, those competitors can actually be better except on purely political grounds.
Now don't get me wrong, I consider myself an enthusiast of free software. But if you're going to write an operating system from the ground up, then you're wasting a lot of opportunities by relentlessly copying someone else, especially copying the technologies - from the user interfaces to the APIs - of a company whose reputation in the industry is of being first, not best. It's a waste of talent.
The issue becomes worse when you consider that these competitors are trying to build Microsoft's environment upon an operating system that has a fundementally different philosophy at its heart, meaning any competitor designed this way is going to be fundamentally flawed. Linux, arguably, should be abandoned in favour of ReactOS if this development path continues.
A substantial section of the free software and open source communities lacks the talent and imagination to build something new, and unfortunately that section is leading development at the moment. Miguel is merely the figurehead for that movement. I don't blame people for feeling that way, I know a lot of people would like a Free clone of Microsoft's operating systems and environments, I just feel that this is a bandwagon the GNU/Linux distributions are unwise in hopping on to and pouring so much development time into.
The question really is do you want a Free Windows, or do you want a choice of platforms? Right now, GNU/Linux is Window's most powerful competitor, yet all the excitement, the innovation, the "We want to create something better" attitude, is coming from elsewhere.
I think the thing that disappoints me most is not that people look at a decent product from Microsoft and say "That's decent".
No, the thing that disappoints me most is that people look at a decent product from Microsoft and say "There's no way we can do anything better, let's clone it instead."
Which Mac doesn't have speakers in it? I've used a variety of Macs, three different models of PowerMac, and a Titanium PowerBook included, and all of them had speakers.
"redneck" is a very demeaning term. Just like "white trash".
I'm probably missing your point, but...
I've never heard of anyone describe themselves as "white trash", but I've heard a lot of people proudly describe themselves as "rednecks" and do what they can to fit the stereotype.
One bizarre experience for me, as someone who doesn't consider anything positive about rednecks (by reputation or by experience), was one of my neighbours coming over, saying he was born in Florida (I live in Florida) and that he's a redneck through-and-through and proud of it. He then, after saying this, told me he was having problems with his girlfriend because she "was lower class".
Now, funny thing is I know there are mods here itching to mod me down because of the logic in the last paragraph, but in some ways that proves the point - there are people who consider "redneck" a positive word, even when associated with all the things we generally associate with rednecks.
So what if Sun hates IBM? Apple hated IBM too, remember?
SPARC is coming to an end, it's not keeping up with the other technologies out there. The CPUs, while technically excellent for their time, are failing to scale and the resources simply aren't available in the same way as they are for ix86 and PowerPC. Sun, realistically, has three choices:
Stick with SPARC, and be left behind
Ditch proprietary hardware and jump straight into high-end commodity PCs - they're sure to make as much of a success of it as, say, Commodore
Switch to the ONLY other commercially viable and supported mass-market computer platform, and the only one other than SPARC that's pretty much open - PowerPC
If you were in Sun's shoes, what would you do? You wouldn't stick with SPARC. You certainly wouldn't want to try competing with Dell. Meanwhile PowerPCs are mass-market cheap, they're under active, competitive, development, thanks to IBM, Nintendo, and Apple, and reference platforms themselves aren't that far removed from those Sun produces right now - PCI (and successors), OpenFirmware, etc, etc.
Whether Sun hates IBM or not has nothing to do with anything. Right now Sun has to do the right thing for Sun. If that means out-of-court deals with Microsoft, or buying CPUs from a combination of manufacturers that includes IBM, then so be it.
I think the submitter put the cart before the horse.
I believe the reason Solaris is being ported to PowerPC is because Sun wants to jump ship from SPARC to PowerPC. It's so you can change processor, not OS.
Ok, which insurance company is using this to push "tidal wave insurance"? Seriously? Old Glory?
I think the major reason this is being published by a research institute allied with a branch of the insurance business is that generally you'd expect insurance companies to fund research into possible, expensive, disasters. They do, after all, need to figure out what might happen so they can react accordingly.
The fact that two eruptive intervals (2.1 million to 1.3 million and 1.3 million to 640,000 years ago) are of similar length does not mean that the next eruption will necessarily occur after another similar interval. The physical mechanisms may have changed with time. Furthermore, any inferences based on these two intervals would take into account too few data to be statistically meaningful. To say that an eruption that might happen in ten's or hundred's of thousand's of years is "overdue" would be a gross overstatement. On the other hand we cannot discount the possibility of such an event occurring some time in the future, given Yellowstone's volcanic history and the continued presence of magma beneath the Yellowstone caldera.
So it might go off, but to say it's any number of years "overdue" is pushing it. If it last went off 640,000 years ago, you could argue it's "639,999 years overdue", or you could just say it's not overdue at all because it's not exactly running on a timer.
The intention of whitehouse.com was, at a time when the Internet was new and people assumed that government sites would be under ".gov", to find a home for Whitehouse Magazine, a magazine that pre-existed the Internet as we know it and which certainly wasn't named in order to confuse people in to thinking it's something to do with the President.
Indeed, one might even suggest that at the time nobody expected the President to name his site "whitehouse.gov", it's not as if Congress and the Senate use "capitolbuilding.gov".
I know people do not like the notion that someone searching for Presidential information might easily and accidentally end up at a porn site, but that doesn't mean that situation has been created deliberately.
Of course, it may be that this device encourages better driving for the people who have it. These same people will, statistically, be less likely to have accidents as a result. This means less in insurance payouts, which saves money for the insurance company, who pass on the savings to their shareholders, their employees, and, to keep you as a customer because you're the kind of customer they like, to you.
So in this case, it very well may be a discount rather than a surcharge.
Incidentally, does this thing only measure how far and fast you've travelled? Or does it track location too?
I ask because, seriously, I don't give a crap about whether the insurance company knows how far and fast I've taken the car. That's not an invasion of my privacy as far as I'm concerned. However, if it starts to track where I've been, that's another issue altogether.
They could call the DVD layout and burning software "iDVD", and the music CD copying/burning software "iTunes", you know, because iDVD deals with DVDs, and iTunes would deal with tunes. Maybe there could be some utility built into the OS for copying and burning other types of disks, a "disk utility" if you will.
I suspect you're comparing apples to oranges. The guy said 8k a second, and then did a calculation that made it clear he was talking about 8 kilobytes. This is about normal for uncompressed voice traffic on an ordinary digital telephone network (indeed, in the US, the figure is about 7k a second, not 8.)
Your figures are so much higher than usual ISDN rates that I assume you actually mean bits per second, not bytes, which makes sense, a lot of the cheaper DSL connections would choke at outgoing rates of 90k-bytes-ps. I've always assumed Vonage compresses the streams rather than uses uncompressed streams, if I'm wrong and 90k-bytes-ps is a usual rate then I can only hope they're delivering your voice in full 5.1 14-bit stereo!
FWIW, GSM and CDMA both use codecs that deliver speech at about 1.4k-byte-/s, with cut down codecs that go as low as half of that. At the 1.4k-byte-ps rate, both are usually considered "land line quality" (though the mobile operators have a tendency to cut corners and use the lower rate codecs instead which is why it rarely feels that way.) I mention this because, as you can see, you can get very high quality calls into a much smaller stream than 8kbps.
If you're running Windows, you're already subject to a bunch of security holes. This patch fixes them, and given it appears to remove some major design flaws, I'd say it's worth upgrading even if it introduces a handful of to-date unknown bugs itself.
You can always install the patches for those when those bugs are found in the future.
Try going into your preferences and selecting the "low bandwidth" mode. This gets rid of 90% of the junk leaving you with the occasional ugly coloured bar and for the most part straight black text on white paper - exactly as God (that's Tim Berners Lee in this case) intended.
I've been using LB mode pretty much since I started reading/., it's so much nicer.
Aggressive is a subjective term, so I stick by "suggested". Unless, of course, you believe Jones meant that the lawyer actually was physically aggressive, using force, which is an entirely different issue.
She also told me that I could not sell it to anyone nor use it for any other purpose because she could prosecute as it's now linked forever to the book and it's subject matter. And she said that they were going to Trademark the term 'katie.com'.
This may be true but it's irrelevent to the context. The lawyer is pointing out that if Katie T, Penguin, et al, do trademark "katie.com", there may be legal implications down the road in terms of what Katie J will be able to use the domain for. Her existing non-commercial use of the domain, she's saying, will be valid, but anything else may pose legal problems.
And remember, this is not Katie T's lawyer, this is someone who happens to be a lawyer who was working on a project with Katie T. A lawyer who appears to be under the impression (at least, she's representing herself as under the impression) that she's doing Jones a favour.
Personally, I wouldn't touch this lawyer with a bargepole, as she obviously finds it easy to insert her foot in her mouth.
Actually we don't have any evidence that Tarbox sent lawyers after anyone. All we know is that a lawyer, working on a project with Tarbox, suggested to Jones that she sell the domain to Tarbox, and when Jones refused, said that continuing to hold on to the domain would only make things worse.
Which is presumably true. If you own a domain that's being targetted by netkooks and other Internet lowlife, you're not going to make anything better by holding on to it.
From what I have read, nothing Jones has said implied in any way that any legal threats were being made. But it's now being treated as fact on Slashdot that she has, I think the usual "If you hear something repeated enough times you begin to believe it's true" has been combined with a misunderstanding of what Jones wrote.
Additionally, please also understand that while I have worked with Parry Aftab, she is not my lawyer, and I never asked anyone to speak with Ms. Jones about her website.
Slashdot Mirror
If you buy music from the iTMS, then you end up with a large music library you can only play on Fairplay-supporting devices, such as the iPod and the occasional, non-competing and fully licensed, mobile phone from Motorola. What do you buy when you want to upgrade from your current iPod? Answer: an iPod, nothing else that's better will play your library.
If you buy music from Real, you can play it on most music players and the iPod. Thus, right now, people with iPods can build up a significant music collection from Real, and then when their player breaks or is too limited, they can switch to something from Sony, or Creative, or Rio, or El Cheapo, or even Dell.
Apple's trying to pull the same stunt as Microsoft successfully did with Windows, except that Apple is considering using legal measures against competitors, whereas Microsoft just made its API too complex and too much of a moving target to clone.
The funny thing is that Nader has done the exact opposite of what he claimed to have wanted to do. There's little doubt that Kerry is far more of an establishment, middle of the road, uninspiring candidate than Gore was. Gore was an environmentalist, he had a certain amount of vision, and it seems unlikely to me he'd have ever have been in the running for President had he not been picked as VP by Clinton.
At the primaries, the nearest candidates to Gore were kicked out in favour of the candidate the media and the DNC establishment clearly wanted. Howard Dean, the nearest thing to the type of candidate Nader claimed to want, ultimately made a lot of noise but never got anywhere.
I know what Nader is claiming to want to do, but I see a gulf between the results of his actions and his rhetoric. He either can see that too, and is an idiot, or he's exactly the destructive egomaniac his critics accuse him of being.
In case the above link expires, try here.
The device patented is too small (if the "iPod connector" shown in the diagrams is to scale, it's about 10" corner to corner) to be one of the forthcoming iMacs, the smallest of which is likely to have a 17" screen. El Reg themselves discount the idea, in the linked to article, that the device is the iPod, it doesn't match.
It also would explain why Apple has bought a crap-load of 60G iPod ready disks and then turned around and said they have no intention of releasing a 60G iPod.
And once running, it requires quite a substantial amount of disk space for things like swap. Doing swap over 802.11g would be... interesting...
The Unix world has had its good GUIs, I even linked to a pioneer in the field, it's the F/OSS communities that have insisted on ignoring work relevent to Unix and instead tried to graft on to an OS fundamentally unlike Windows an environment that was as Windows-like as possible.
What most of us want is something better than what Microsoft does, more than that, we want something exciting, radical, and different. The mindset that Miguel and others seem to share is that as long as "our" stuff is Free, it is better, and there's no point in creating a better technology, we might just as well copy Microsoft, fix a few bugs, extend here and there, and, voila, you have something better. The technology isn't better, but the implementation is, and that's enough, right?
It's more than that though, it's an unwinnable contest. As long as Microsoft's "competitors" are merely trying to catch up with Microsoft, implementing the same technologies, there's no way, in practice, those competitors can actually be better except on purely political grounds.
Now don't get me wrong, I consider myself an enthusiast of free software. But if you're going to write an operating system from the ground up, then you're wasting a lot of opportunities by relentlessly copying someone else, especially copying the technologies - from the user interfaces to the APIs - of a company whose reputation in the industry is of being first, not best. It's a waste of talent.
The issue becomes worse when you consider that these competitors are trying to build Microsoft's environment upon an operating system that has a fundementally different philosophy at its heart, meaning any competitor designed this way is going to be fundamentally flawed. Linux, arguably, should be abandoned in favour of ReactOS if this development path continues.
A substantial section of the free software and open source communities lacks the talent and imagination to build something new, and unfortunately that section is leading development at the moment. Miguel is merely the figurehead for that movement. I don't blame people for feeling that way, I know a lot of people would like a Free clone of Microsoft's operating systems and environments, I just feel that this is a bandwagon the GNU/Linux distributions are unwise in hopping on to and pouring so much development time into.
The question really is do you want a Free Windows, or do you want a choice of platforms? Right now, GNU/Linux is Window's most powerful competitor, yet all the excitement, the innovation, the "We want to create something better" attitude, is coming from elsewhere.
No, the thing that disappoints me most is that people look at a decent product from Microsoft and say "There's no way we can do anything better, let's clone it instead."
Which Mac doesn't have speakers in it? I've used a variety of Macs, three different models of PowerMac, and a Titanium PowerBook included, and all of them had speakers.
I've never heard of anyone describe themselves as "white trash", but I've heard a lot of people proudly describe themselves as "rednecks" and do what they can to fit the stereotype.
One bizarre experience for me, as someone who doesn't consider anything positive about rednecks (by reputation or by experience), was one of my neighbours coming over, saying he was born in Florida (I live in Florida) and that he's a redneck through-and-through and proud of it. He then, after saying this, told me he was having problems with his girlfriend because she "was lower class".
Now, funny thing is I know there are mods here itching to mod me down because of the logic in the last paragraph, but in some ways that proves the point - there are people who consider "redneck" a positive word, even when associated with all the things we generally associate with rednecks.
SPARC is coming to an end, it's not keeping up with the other technologies out there. The CPUs, while technically excellent for their time, are failing to scale and the resources simply aren't available in the same way as they are for ix86 and PowerPC. Sun, realistically, has three choices:
- Stick with SPARC, and be left behind
- Ditch proprietary hardware and jump straight into high-end commodity PCs - they're sure to make as much of a success of it as, say, Commodore
- Switch to the ONLY other commercially viable and supported mass-market computer platform, and the only one other than SPARC that's pretty much open - PowerPC
If you were in Sun's shoes, what would you do? You wouldn't stick with SPARC. You certainly wouldn't want to try competing with Dell. Meanwhile PowerPCs are mass-market cheap, they're under active, competitive, development, thanks to IBM, Nintendo, and Apple, and reference platforms themselves aren't that far removed from those Sun produces right now - PCI (and successors), OpenFirmware, etc, etc.Whether Sun hates IBM or not has nothing to do with anything. Right now Sun has to do the right thing for Sun. If that means out-of-court deals with Microsoft, or buying CPUs from a combination of manufacturers that includes IBM, then so be it.
I believe the reason Solaris is being ported to PowerPC is because Sun wants to jump ship from SPARC to PowerPC. It's so you can change processor, not OS.
I think the major reason this is being published by a research institute allied with a branch of the insurance business is that generally you'd expect insurance companies to fund research into possible, expensive, disasters. They do, after all, need to figure out what might happen so they can react accordingly.
Indeed, one might even suggest that at the time nobody expected the President to name his site "whitehouse.gov", it's not as if Congress and the Senate use "capitolbuilding.gov".
I know people do not like the notion that someone searching for Presidential information might easily and accidentally end up at a porn site, but that doesn't mean that situation has been created deliberately.
So in this case, it very well may be a discount rather than a surcharge.
Incidentally, does this thing only measure how far and fast you've travelled? Or does it track location too?
I ask because, seriously, I don't give a crap about whether the insurance company knows how far and fast I've taken the car. That's not an invasion of my privacy as far as I'm concerned. However, if it starts to track where I've been, that's another issue altogether.
Your figures are so much higher than usual ISDN rates that I assume you actually mean bits per second, not bytes, which makes sense, a lot of the cheaper DSL connections would choke at outgoing rates of 90k-bytes-ps. I've always assumed Vonage compresses the streams rather than uses uncompressed streams, if I'm wrong and 90k-bytes-ps is a usual rate then I can only hope they're delivering your voice in full 5.1 14-bit stereo!
FWIW, GSM and CDMA both use codecs that deliver speech at about 1.4k-byte-/s, with cut down codecs that go as low as half of that. At the 1.4k-byte-ps rate, both are usually considered "land line quality" (though the mobile operators have a tendency to cut corners and use the lower rate codecs instead which is why it rarely feels that way.) I mention this because, as you can see, you can get very high quality calls into a much smaller stream than 8kbps.
Punish him for the evil he does, not the good.
You can always install the patches for those when those bugs are found in the future.
I've been using LB mode pretty much since I started reading /., it's so much nicer.
And remember, this is not Katie T's lawyer, this is someone who happens to be a lawyer who was working on a project with Katie T. A lawyer who appears to be under the impression (at least, she's representing herself as under the impression) that she's doing Jones a favour.
Personally, I wouldn't touch this lawyer with a bargepole, as she obviously finds it easy to insert her foot in her mouth.
A lawyer can't represent a client, can't even have a client, without that client's consent.
Which is presumably true. If you own a domain that's being targetted by netkooks and other Internet lowlife, you're not going to make anything better by holding on to it.
From what I have read, nothing Jones has said implied in any way that any legal threats were being made. But it's now being treated as fact on Slashdot that she has, I think the usual "If you hear something repeated enough times you begin to believe it's true" has been combined with a misunderstanding of what Jones wrote.