In the realities of the real world, which most Americans are unaware of, EVERYONE who uses a computer is rich and the rest are poor. Free software does not help those poor in any way. Besides in most poor countries all software is free software. No one here in Bangladesh pays for a MS license, they buy a pirated copy. But no money comes back for education or healthcare from the FOSS community. I don't see Steve Jobs who made a ton of money with BSD saying "Hey I gotta help Bangladeshis get some education with some of this big pile of dough I made". Nor does Red Hat or Canonical. So use any damn operating system that you like because you like the OS. Don't try to pretend one is more moral than the other. And give credit where credit is due. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation does a lot of useful and important work here. Work that no other donor agencies have taken on.
And has any of the money of linux users gone directly to helping the poor??? Have any one of you who use linux (including myself) woken up one morning and said I saved $400 by not using windows and office, I'm going to give it to charity. And those of you who did, did you follow up on where your money goes?
When Stallman decides to do something for the poor of the world, he should talk. I live in Bangladesh and can see directly the benefits the poor are receiving from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. I don't see any benefit that free software does to people who've never seen a computer.
Of course the wealthier like me benefit immensely from free software. I use firefox, gimp, open office. I run linux and freebsd on my servers. But what good does it do the poor. All my services are for people who can afford computers.
Stallman despite his best intentions does close to nothing for the extremely poor or even the moderately poor. The people who Stallman and his cohorts benefit are those like Steve Jobs, a greedy megalomaniac who takes free software and makes piles of cash with it and gives nothing back.
Get a few 4GB pen drives to back up your digital pics. They're less than $20 apiece these days in Asia, not sure what the price is in the West. Attach the unused ones to one keyring and attach it to your backback. Attach the used ones to a different keyring.
Put your favorite portable apps on one of them. Mine has portable firefox, gaim and thunderbird and ClamWin and Truecrypt. Also keep installers for any other app you might need so you can install and use them at cybercafes.
One either likes a piece of music or does not. Someone doesn't buy music they don't like just because it's cheap. Whether it's 99 cents or 25 cents people who like a piece of music will buy it. More people buying it means more money for the record company and artists. That's how the system's supposed to work. The marginal cost of an additional copy of music on itunes is a negligible bandwidth cost. The cost for selling 100 copies and 100000 copies are essentially the same. The profits on the latter is of course 99900 more. And that should be incentive enough to put out good music.
In a lot of poor countries Monsanto seeds are banned for exactly this reason. It is a threat to the food security of the country. US/Canada where there is easy access to credit the problem might not seem very acute, but in poor countries like Bangladesh or India, one bad crop and the farmer won't have the resources to buy seeds for the next season. It's a manmade famine in the making.
Most intellectual property laws are to the detriment of poor countries. Simply a new form of colonization.
I simply stopped using my cellphone for work use. All calls from my boss were redirected to voicemail and I refused to give anyone at work my cell number. After about two weeks the company agreed to give me a "Company Cell Phone" which I couldn't use for personal use. I refused to carry that beyond work hours since I'd have to carry 2 phones. They eventually relented.
If you're into roller coasters, check out Cedar Point in Sandusky Ohio. The park has the best roller coasters in the country and is consistently in the Guiness book for the tallest/fastest/most loops or some record or the other.
I fail to understand what the point of the OpenDarwin project is. While some apple opensource projects are cool, like the Darwin streaming server, what exactly is the purpose of the Darwin OS. People use Mac OSX for the interface. Without that, what does Darwin provide that can't be had from Linux, FreeBSD or OpenBSD?
The marginal cost for increased bandwidth use by a particular user is zero, up to the limitations of the ISP's upstream link. So yes the added charges are basically a disincentive for bandwidth hogs so that the ISP doesn't have to buy additional bandwidth.
Once the ISP reaches it's limit, however, the marginal cost for the next 1kbps or 1Mbps is about the same because bandwidth is sold in discrete amounts and these days, it's only sold to ISP's in increments of full T-1 circuits.
So the user who's using the additinal bandwidth and thus compelling the ISP to get an additional circuit is costing the ISP the 200-400 cost of that circuit though everyone will see the benefit. So unless there's a way to charge everyone because of one persons excess use, a bandwidth charge is an appropriate deterrent.
P.S. Yes, I did work at an ISP for 5 years where we charged for bandwidth.
Lossy compression has been around for ever in the form of radio which doesn't broadcast the full spectrum of sound of the original. And any digital media whether lossy or "lossless" doesn't capture the full spectrum of the original media. The act of sampling itself causes some data loss however high the sampling rate. So the researcher should have plenty of historical data, but unfortunately doesn't use any of them.
Very dramatic statement to make though. Catches people's attention.
Perhaps a better way to sabotage AOL and send them a message is have a "dial-in hour" where everyone sets their computers to dial in and try to get an acct. It has a few effects. They pay for the 800 phone call, and it clogs up their phone lines.
There must be some good humanitarian use for the disks. Like glueing them into flooring or something.
Until there are cheap fiber cables, and equipment to make arbitrary length ones. It's just much easier to network with copper and 99.99% of users simply don't need the speed.
Besides these days most home users use their lan just to get to the router and on to the outside world. That's true of a good number of corp users too. Since a connection is only as fast as the slowest link a 10Gps line is pretty much useless to most people. Large coporations may have some use for it as their internal backbone, but 10Gb/s to the desktop is quite far away from being implemented en masse.
>1) easy instalation for not technically inclined >people - they exist so I have to support them, >otherwise I would not care...
ipkg files on the zaurus and ipaq's running linux are basically a click and go install.
>2) Wireless syncing!!!! Saving lots of time.
Zaurus syncs via IP so you can set it to do with any interface you want. I do mine with 802.11b wireless.
>3) Universal recharging unit for all PDA (kinda >utopic, but again, this is a wish list).
The Zaurus and the ipaq have interchangeable power supplies and it uses the standard Radio Shack 'B' type plug so any 5v adapter with that plug will do. An adapter at Radio Shack is about 15 bucks.
Is there any purpose to this device, that is not served by other cheap motorized scooters and the built in sense of balance in our inner ears that don't require fancy microprocessors?
If you can hear it, you can copy it. Perceptual encoding like MP3's isn't a perfect digital copy anyways, so capturing the audio stream and converting it MP3's is good enough for most people. Of course if you want a perfect digital copy on another CD, you may be SOL.
Download the program to decrypt pdf's and copy the pdf versions of any books you have to your hard drive and move the actual books somewhere else.
I've been living out of a suitcase the last month, being homeless and all that and have a huge library of books in pdf and html format on my computer. Not the best way to read them, but very space efficient.
Saif
This thing have been coming soon for over a year now. Sounds like vaporware.
Anyway, just because it support SDMI, does't meen one has to use it. You can always rip your cd's on your computer using a program that doesn't support sdmi and then copy the files over.
And if you buy a disk with music it still doesn't matter, if you can hear it you can rip it.
Saif
Slashdot Mirror
This is rather silly. You can tether your cell phone with bluetooth anyway. i.e. if you have an unlocked phone.
In the realities of the real world, which most Americans are unaware of, EVERYONE who uses a computer is rich and the rest are poor. Free software does not help those poor in any way. Besides in most poor countries all software is free software. No one here in Bangladesh pays for a MS license, they buy a pirated copy. But no money comes back for education or healthcare from the FOSS community. I don't see Steve Jobs who made a ton of money with BSD saying "Hey I gotta help Bangladeshis get some education with some of this big pile of dough I made". Nor does Red Hat or Canonical.
So use any damn operating system that you like because you like the OS. Don't try to pretend one is more moral than the other. And give credit where credit is due. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation does a lot of useful and important work here. Work that no other donor agencies have taken on.
And has any of the money of linux users gone directly to helping the poor??? Have any one of you who use linux (including myself) woken up one morning and said I saved $400 by not using windows and office, I'm going to give it to charity. And those of you who did, did you follow up on where your money goes?
When Stallman decides to do something for the poor of the world, he should talk. I live in Bangladesh and can see directly the benefits the poor are receiving from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. I don't see any benefit that free software does to people who've never seen a computer.
Of course the wealthier like me benefit immensely from free software. I use firefox, gimp, open office. I run linux and freebsd on my servers. But what good does it do the poor. All my services are for people who can afford computers.
Stallman despite his best intentions does close to nothing for the extremely poor or even the moderately poor. The people who Stallman and his cohorts benefit are those like Steve Jobs, a greedy megalomaniac who takes free software and makes piles of cash with it and gives nothing back.
Get a few 4GB pen drives to back up your digital pics. They're less than $20 apiece these days in Asia, not sure what the price is in the West. Attach the unused ones to one keyring and attach it to your backback. Attach the used ones to a different keyring.
Put your favorite portable apps on one of them. Mine has portable firefox, gaim and thunderbird and ClamWin and Truecrypt. Also keep installers for any other app you might need so you can install and use them at cybercafes.
Saif
One either likes a piece of music or does not. Someone doesn't buy music they don't like just because it's cheap. Whether it's 99 cents or 25 cents people who like a piece of music will buy it. More people buying it means more money for the record company and artists. That's how the system's supposed to work. The marginal cost of an additional copy of music on itunes is a negligible bandwidth cost. The cost for selling 100 copies and 100000 copies are essentially the same. The profits on the latter is of course 99900 more. And that should be incentive enough to put out good music.
And therein will end mine and many others experiments with itunes and swtich back to the good ole p2p networks.
In a lot of poor countries Monsanto seeds are banned for exactly this reason. It is a threat to the food security of the country. US/Canada where there is easy access to credit the problem might not seem very acute, but in poor countries like Bangladesh or India, one bad crop and the farmer won't have the resources to buy seeds for the next season. It's a manmade famine in the making.
Most intellectual property laws are to the detriment of poor countries. Simply a new form of colonization.
This system of installation was already available on Mac OS 9x. Still works for some apps in OSX.
I simply stopped using my cellphone for work use. All calls from my boss were redirected to voicemail and I refused to give anyone at work my cell number. After about two weeks the company agreed to give me a "Company Cell Phone" which I couldn't use for personal use. I refused to carry that beyond work hours since I'd have to carry 2 phones. They eventually relented.
If you're into roller coasters, check out Cedar Point in Sandusky Ohio. The park has the best roller coasters in the country and is consistently in the Guiness book for the tallest/fastest/most loops or some record or the other.
I fail to understand what the point of the OpenDarwin project is. While some apple opensource projects are cool, like the Darwin streaming server, what exactly is the purpose of the Darwin OS. People use Mac OSX for the interface. Without that, what does Darwin provide that can't be had from Linux, FreeBSD or OpenBSD?
The marginal cost for increased bandwidth use by a particular user is zero, up to the limitations of the ISP's upstream link. So yes the added charges are basically a disincentive for bandwidth hogs so that the ISP doesn't have to buy additional bandwidth.
Once the ISP reaches it's limit, however, the marginal cost for the next 1kbps or 1Mbps is about the same because bandwidth is sold in discrete amounts and these days, it's only sold to ISP's in increments of full T-1 circuits.
So the user who's using the additinal bandwidth and thus compelling the ISP to get an additional circuit is costing the ISP the 200-400 cost of that circuit though everyone will see the benefit. So unless there's a way to charge everyone because of one persons excess use, a bandwidth charge is an appropriate deterrent.
P.S. Yes, I did work at an ISP for 5 years where we charged for bandwidth.
Lossy compression has been around for ever in the form of radio which doesn't broadcast the full spectrum of sound of the original. And any digital media whether lossy or "lossless" doesn't capture the full spectrum of the original media. The act of sampling itself causes some data loss however high the sampling rate. So the researcher should have plenty of historical data, but unfortunately doesn't use any of them.
Very dramatic statement to make though. Catches people's attention.
Perhaps a better way to sabotage AOL and send them a message is have a "dial-in hour" where everyone sets their computers to dial in and try to get an acct. It has a few effects. They pay for the 800 phone call, and it clogs up their phone lines.
There must be some good humanitarian use for the disks. Like glueing them into flooring or something.
I was just inspired. I'm quitting geekdom for the real world.
Just get a lucent Orinoco card. Stick it in an apple and it shows up as an Airport Card. The airport is simply the lucent cards without the antenna.
The lucent cards also come with a jack for an external antenna.
How is sticking a pcmcia card a hack, or even newsworthy?
Any easy to use app would be a good start. Otherwise codecs in hardware or software are more or less useless.
Until there are cheap fiber cables, and equipment to make arbitrary length ones. It's just much easier to network with copper and 99.99% of users simply don't need the speed.
Besides these days most home users use their lan just to get to the router and on to the outside world. That's true of a good number of corp users too. Since a connection is only as fast as the slowest link a 10Gps line is pretty much useless to most people. Large coporations may have some use for it as their internal backbone, but 10Gb/s to the desktop is quite far away from being implemented en masse.
>1) easy instalation for not technically inclined
>people - they exist so I have to support them,
>otherwise I would not care...
ipkg files on the zaurus and ipaq's running linux are basically a click and go install.
>2) Wireless syncing!!!! Saving lots of time.
Zaurus syncs via IP so you can set it to do with any interface you want. I do mine with 802.11b wireless.
>3) Universal recharging unit for all PDA (kinda
>utopic, but again, this is a wish list).
The Zaurus and the ipaq have interchangeable power supplies and it uses the standard Radio Shack 'B' type plug so any 5v adapter with that plug will do. An adapter at Radio Shack is about 15 bucks.
If it stops hotmail from framing and linking every thing that is linked from an e-mail, it'll make me very happy.
Saif
Is there any purpose to this device, that is not served by other cheap motorized scooters and the built in sense of balance in our inner ears that don't require fancy microprocessors?
If you can hear it, you can copy it. Perceptual encoding like MP3's isn't a perfect digital copy anyways, so capturing the audio stream and converting it MP3's is good enough for most people. Of course if you want a perfect digital copy on another CD, you may be SOL.
Download the program to decrypt pdf's and copy the pdf versions of any books you have to your hard drive and move the actual books somewhere else. I've been living out of a suitcase the last month, being homeless and all that and have a huge library of books in pdf and html format on my computer. Not the best way to read them, but very space efficient. Saif
This thing have been coming soon for over a year now. Sounds like vaporware. Anyway, just because it support SDMI, does't meen one has to use it. You can always rip your cd's on your computer using a program that doesn't support sdmi and then copy the files over. And if you buy a disk with music it still doesn't matter, if you can hear it you can rip it. Saif