Does anybody know what exactly the iTV is based on? Is it based on a special edition of OSX (akin to Windows MCE), a new real-time OS based on Darwin/xnu, Quartz, Cocoa and QuickTime (though lacking large chunks of OSX which are irrelevant), the iPod RTOS, or something else?
Actually, Eurostar takes 2 hours 45 minutes to Paris, or 2 hours 15 to Brussels. And when comparing to a flight, remember to add the time required to get to/from the airport (railway stations are more central) and to check in (2 hours for air vs. 30 minutes for Eurostar). Once the new London route is built, they expect to shave a good half an hour off this as well.
Or just strap passengers into seats, plumbed into waste-evacuation systems like the ones fighter pilots have, with immersive entertainment goggles to distract them from the fact that they're basically flying prison-class.
The thing is that Merchant-Ivory costume dramas weren't highbrow. They flattered the audience with their lush period settings and aristocratic finery, though beneath that were about as challenging and thought-provoking as a Stephen Spielberg blockbuster. In a sense, they were the perfect art form of Thatcher's Britain: dressed up in the seductive trappings of wealth, though populist at the core, and placing commercial calculation before any sort of artistic or intellectual decisions.
Now that Macs will boot Windows, software companies fire their OSX developers and tell customers to boot into Windows if they want to use their software. Windows becomes even more entrenched as a standard, with Mac sellers soon bundling a copy of XP/Vista with their Macs. Eventually Apple bow to market pressure and start distributing Macs with Windows; then it's only a matter of time before the now redundant OSX is taken out to pasture.
Eco wasn't the only one to touch on HBHG in a story. Some 15 years before Dan Brown, Robert Anton Wilson (he of the Illuminatus! trilogy and numerous vaguely new-agey books) wrote a book titled The Widow's Son. It was set in the 18th century, and somewhat slower-paced than the Da Vinci Code, but the main twist of it was derived from Baigent and Leigh's Merovingian-bloodline conspiracy theory.
Australian law actually criminalises possession of unrated videos or games. AFAIK, if the cops/postal authorities/customs authorities find a copy of Baise-Moi or GTA3 in your possession, you can, in theory, go to jail for it.
Alternatively, they could wait until Microsoft implement a more robust OS kernel and do a deal to move OSX from a Mach/BSD kernel to the Microsoft Vista one (or whatever it is).
Within the next five years, we may well hear about something like this, and MacOS becoming a layer on top of Windows.
I am not a lawyer, but it looks to me like this won't affect many products:
(a) media is not affected, as it can easily be shipped blank, and can be quite happily formatted by the appliance that uses it in whatever format it uses, (b) most digital cameras don't use the FAT long filename hack, sticking to 8+3 filenames, like \DCIM\100CANON\IMG_0001.JPG. This is not actually covered by the patent, so as long as the manufacturers don't put in long filenames (and digital cameras don't need them), they get off free.
The main types of devices affected would be things like MP3 players, which recognise long filenames (or should, at least). Microsoft could in theory sue to remove the vfat filesystem from the Linux kernel, but the amount of ill will generated by doing so would probably exceed any competitive benefit gained.
Consortium of Flash disk manufacturers: "Here is FlashFS, our better, more efficient filesystem designed for Flash disks. From now on, we'll make Flash disks preformatted with it. Mr. Gates, please feel free to add FlashFS support to Windows, at the generous licensing fee of 50c per copy of Windows." MSFT: "Screw you. The FAT filesystem's good enough so we'll keep that. Besides, we own it."
A few months later, the drives that come preformatted with FlashFS aren't selling all that well. Most users get confused by the CD-ROM with the FlashFS driver that comes with them and don't want to have to install that on every machine they carry files between. Some buy the drives and reformat them with FAT, while others find that too intimidating and go for the (50c more expensive) preformatted drives. The colossal gains in efficiency, speed, data integrity and longevity that FlashFS offers are lost on the vast majority of users, who don't see anything wrong with FAT. The consortium quietly discontinues FlashFS, and sheepishly returns to Mr. Gates.
Consortium: "OK, you we're right. We want to use FAT again, and will happily pay 50c per unit." MSFT: "Actually, we've revaluated our licensing, and it's now $2.50"
Maybe then they can make Opera's JavaScript/DHTML implementation more compatible. Currently, a number of things (including Google Maps and MochiKit) either run imperfectly on it or not at all.
The ghost of Joh Bjelke-Petersen appears to be possessing the government in Canberra. With increasingly tightening censorship laws, crackdowns on peaceful protest and now the new sedition laws, Australia as a whole is looking like Bjelke-Petersen's Queensland did.
It's already happening. The Australian government has just passed a broad sedition law, which criminalises any speech inciting discontentment with the Queen, the government, either house of parliament or Australia's allies, and effectively any political protest stronger than writing a politely-worded letter to the newspaper. The government has been delegitimising and criminalising all forms of protest and dissent for some years now, and were Australia to get a national firewall, it would be extremely unlikely that the government would resist using it to keep Australians from seeing inappropriate opinions.
Australia has always had a tradition of repressive, authoritarian government and arbitrary authority. After all, it was a penal colony, and a military outpost of the British Empire, holding the line, and standards had to be enforced. Up until the 1960s or 1970s, a lot of things which would be OK in London or New York were strictly beyond the pale in the big cities of Australia. Australian puritanism (or "wowserism") doesn't have the evangelical, light-on-a-hill idealism of the American variety, but tends to be more of a what-will-the-neighbours-think conservatism.
Mind you, Australia also has an equally old opposite tradition of borderline contempt for authority and propriety; commonly called "larrikinism". This is a country where an armed robber is a national hero, an unofficial (and by far more popular) national anthem is about a sheep thief, and more recently, there were (unofficial) national moments of silence and memorials held for an Australian executed in Singapore for smuggling a huge quantity of heroin. The larrikin streak has made an impression on Australian culture in a number of areas, from an old an ongoing tradition of political mischief to highly-developed scenes for activities such as stencil graffiti and urban exploration.
The downside of the larrikin-wowser dynamic is that there is not much of a centre, and not much of a tradition of liberalism and civil society. Since the 1970s, Australia has become more liberal and cosmopolitan, though that was never enshrined into anything like a bill of rights. Consequently, as soon as a hard-right government got into power, all the de facto institutions of liberalism are being swept away like so many sandcastles on a beach, and the old authoritarianism is showing through.
If they submarined SSE and demanded the destruction of open-source implementations and/or severe licensing conditions, that would be devastating to anyone involved using this standard, and would all but obliterate the standard in question, not to mention any future proposals from Microsoft. The damage to Microsoft's influence on standards would greatly outweigh any damage inflicted on open-source software. It would be like nuking a few blocks of a city to get rid of a gang of bank robbers.
Given the fact that they've licensed their own contributions to this code under a GPL-like Creative Commons license, them prohibiting the use of any patents involved with such licenses would be bizarre to say the least.
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And probably turn them back on after their rates of street violence (already very high in the UK) skyrocket.
"Al-Awadhi specifically suggested a game in which the player "slaughters the Jews and liberates the Al-Aqsa Mosque." "
Perhaps they could team up with Borat and create "Throw The Jew Down The Well: The Game"?
Does anybody know what exactly the iTV is based on? Is it based on a special edition of OSX (akin to Windows MCE), a new real-time OS based on Darwin/xnu, Quartz, Cocoa and QuickTime (though lacking large chunks of OSX which are irrelevant), the iPod RTOS, or something else?
Actually, Eurostar takes 2 hours 45 minutes to Paris, or 2 hours 15 to Brussels. And when comparing to a flight, remember to add the time required to get to/from the airport (railway stations are more central) and to check in (2 hours for air vs. 30 minutes for Eurostar). Once the new London route is built, they expect to shave a good half an hour off this as well.
Or just strap passengers into seats, plumbed into waste-evacuation systems like the ones fighter pilots have, with immersive entertainment goggles to distract them from the fact that they're basically flying prison-class.
Doesn't Jack Bauer use a Dell?
She didn't seem at all put off that I was using a European phone (In fact she sounded rather envious) and didn't give me any hassle about it at all.
I'm guessing you don't live in a red state then.
You could always buy an foreign SIM card (from some GSM-using country) and use it via roaming, pretending to be a tourist/business traveller.
The thing is that Merchant-Ivory costume dramas weren't highbrow. They flattered the audience with their lush period settings and aristocratic finery, though beneath that were about as challenging and thought-provoking as a Stephen Spielberg blockbuster. In a sense, they were the perfect art form of Thatcher's Britain: dressed up in the seductive trappings of wealth, though populist at the core, and placing commercial calculation before any sort of artistic or intellectual decisions.
Wasn't it originally Perl Hypertext Processor or Perl Home Page, being based on/forked from an early version of Perl (hence the similar syntax)?
Also, real hackers don't use GUIs. Graphical displays are for lusers too dumb to use a command line.
What if your home directory is on a NFS server? Is there any way to get Beagle to put its metadata elsewhere?
Now that Macs will boot Windows, software companies fire their OSX developers and tell customers to boot into Windows if they want to use their software. Windows becomes even more entrenched as a standard, with Mac sellers soon bundling a copy of XP/Vista with their Macs. Eventually Apple bow to market pressure and start distributing Macs with Windows; then it's only a matter of time before the now redundant OSX is taken out to pasture.
Eco wasn't the only one to touch on HBHG in a story. Some 15 years before Dan Brown, Robert Anton Wilson (he of the Illuminatus! trilogy and numerous vaguely new-agey books) wrote a book titled The Widow's Son. It was set in the 18th century, and somewhat slower-paced than the Da Vinci Code, but the main twist of it was derived from Baigent and Leigh's Merovingian-bloodline conspiracy theory.
Australian law actually criminalises possession of unrated videos or games. AFAIK, if the cops/postal authorities/customs authorities find a copy of Baise-Moi or GTA3 in your possession, you can, in theory, go to jail for it.
Alternatively, they could wait until Microsoft implement a more robust OS kernel and do a deal to move OSX from a Mach/BSD kernel to the Microsoft Vista one (or whatever it is).
Within the next five years, we may well hear about something like this, and MacOS becoming a layer on top of Windows.
I am not a lawyer, but it looks to me like this won't affect many products:
(a) media is not affected, as it can easily be shipped blank, and can be quite happily formatted by the appliance that uses it in whatever format it uses,
(b) most digital cameras don't use the FAT long filename hack, sticking to 8+3 filenames, like \DCIM\100CANON\IMG_0001.JPG. This is not actually covered by the patent, so as long as the manufacturers don't put in long filenames (and digital cameras don't need them), they get off free.
The main types of devices affected would be things like MP3 players, which recognise long filenames (or should, at least). Microsoft could in theory sue to remove the vfat filesystem from the Linux kernel, but the amount of ill will generated by doing so would probably exceed any competitive benefit gained.
Consortium of Flash disk manufacturers: "Here is FlashFS, our better, more efficient filesystem designed for Flash disks. From now on, we'll make Flash disks preformatted with it. Mr. Gates, please feel free to add FlashFS support to Windows, at the generous licensing fee of 50c per copy of Windows."
MSFT: "Screw you. The FAT filesystem's good enough so we'll keep that. Besides, we own it."
A few months later, the drives that come preformatted with FlashFS aren't selling all that well. Most users get confused by the CD-ROM with the FlashFS driver that comes with them and don't want to have to install that on every machine they carry files between. Some buy the drives and reformat them with FAT, while others find that too intimidating and go for the (50c more expensive) preformatted drives. The colossal gains in efficiency, speed, data integrity and longevity that FlashFS offers are lost on the vast majority of users, who don't see anything wrong with FAT. The consortium quietly discontinues FlashFS, and sheepishly returns to Mr. Gates.
Consortium: "OK, you we're right. We want to use FAT again, and will happily pay 50c per unit."
MSFT: "Actually, we've revaluated our licensing, and it's now $2.50"
You know the guy who stands at the door of Wal-Mart greeting shoppers? Well...
Maybe then they can make Opera's JavaScript/DHTML implementation more compatible. Currently, a number of things (including Google Maps and MochiKit) either run imperfectly on it or not at all.
The ghost of Joh Bjelke-Petersen appears to be possessing the government in Canberra. With increasingly tightening censorship laws, crackdowns on peaceful protest and now the new sedition laws, Australia as a whole is looking like Bjelke-Petersen's Queensland did.
It's already happening. The Australian government has just passed a broad sedition law, which criminalises any speech inciting discontentment with the Queen, the government, either house of parliament or Australia's allies, and effectively any political protest stronger than writing a politely-worded letter to the newspaper. The government has been delegitimising and criminalising all forms of protest and dissent for some years now, and were Australia to get a national firewall, it would be extremely unlikely that the government would resist using it to keep Australians from seeing inappropriate opinions.
Australia has always had a tradition of repressive, authoritarian government and arbitrary authority. After all, it was a penal colony, and a military outpost of the British Empire, holding the line, and standards had to be enforced. Up until the 1960s or 1970s, a lot of things which would be OK in London or New York were strictly beyond the pale in the big cities of Australia. Australian puritanism (or "wowserism") doesn't have the evangelical, light-on-a-hill idealism of the American variety, but tends to be more of a what-will-the-neighbours-think conservatism.
Mind you, Australia also has an equally old opposite tradition of borderline contempt for authority and propriety; commonly called "larrikinism". This is a country where an armed robber is a national hero, an unofficial (and by far more popular) national anthem is about a sheep thief, and more recently, there were (unofficial) national moments of silence and memorials held for an Australian executed in Singapore for smuggling a huge quantity of heroin. The larrikin streak has made an impression on Australian culture in a number of areas, from an old an ongoing tradition of political mischief to highly-developed scenes for activities such as stencil graffiti and urban exploration.
The downside of the larrikin-wowser dynamic is that there is not much of a centre, and not much of a tradition of liberalism and civil society. Since the 1970s, Australia has become more liberal and cosmopolitan, though that was never enshrined into anything like a bill of rights. Consequently, as soon as a hard-right government got into power, all the de facto institutions of liberalism are being swept away like so many sandcastles on a beach, and the old authoritarianism is showing through.
If they submarined SSE and demanded the destruction of open-source implementations and/or severe licensing conditions, that would be devastating to anyone involved using this standard, and would all but obliterate the standard in question, not to mention any future proposals from Microsoft. The damage to Microsoft's influence on standards would greatly outweigh any damage inflicted on open-source software. It would be like nuking a few blocks of a city to get rid of a gang of bank robbers.
Given the fact that they've licensed their own contributions to this code under a GPL-like Creative Commons license, them prohibiting the use of any patents involved with such licenses would be bizarre to say the least.