The carriers are very happy about this, but, as others have observed the fact that it's VOIP doesn't mean it's "anybody's VOIP" that it works with.
The UMA data network simply allows the carrier turn any WiFi access point into an additional cell tower on their network. The advantage for the consumer, discounted minutes at home. The advantage for the carrier fewer expensive cell towers to cover the same number of people.
In many demographics 40% of people's cellphone calls are made from home. It will be a tremendous savings in standard GSM spectrum to move 40% of the traffic to the 2.4Ghz band.
For the consumer, if your plan had 1000 minutes a month GSM, and an additional 1000 minutes a month over UMA then would you really need to hand $20 a month to a voip carrier? If you spend less than an hour a day talking on the phone, and you make 50% of your calls from home, the answer is no.
UMA phones will let you initiate and receive calls on either the GSM or Wifi networks. UMA phones are designed to hand the call seamlessly between networks. I've used one. They're pretty cool.
There are a large number of factors that go into the selection of handset models for both the U.S. post-paid and pre-paid markets: features, cost, size, manufacturer support, durability, radio quality, and audio quality among them.
Major carriers have an allotted sum that they can contribute to a person's first handset based on their one-year contract commitment. People in the handset selection teams for these companies choose the phones with the best feature set for that amount of money. There is no bonus for selecting a phone that is cheaper than this amount.
Less expensive phones sometimes get that way by choosing inferior components, and antenna designs. But not always. The only way to know whether a phone was cheaper due to clever engineering or cheap components is to completely reverse engineer the design with a every competent team of engineers, or deploy thousands of them and carefully watch the complaints.
The drive for Zoolanderesque micro phone sizes is over. There is such a thing as too small and consumers have figured this out.
Though there is certainly some deviation from the post-paid phone standards for the pre-paid phones each new model has a cost in customer care training time and handset replacement programs.
There is a push to make more data services available and some favoritism is shown to those handsets that can offer that content./. users may already know exactly what data services they need/want because they have fearlessly tried them, explored every menu of their phones, and come to a good conclusion as to what is worth paying for. Many people haven't. They only discover a new feature because they see some geeky person use it in a cool way that they'd never imagined, and say "I wish my phone could do that." To which the TruGeek replies. "That's a Nokia 6682. It can take even better pictures than this and send them right to your Inbox. Let me show you how." It may sound like paternalism to sell people phones with more features than they currently think they need, but it's not. It's just good marketing.
When you combine these factors you have a recipe for "I told you so's" The article's author didn't find the buttons too small on this phone (though many would), and where he was, the radio was adequate (though in tiny phones, penetrating the human hand is a definite problem). This phone will never let him "discover" the joys of sending cool pictures at the zoo to his grandkids e-mail boxes (which he may already do with with Coolpix 8800).
In summary. Geeksight is 20/20. We can mathematically determine that there is a slot for this in the American market, but marketing is stranger than chaos theory. And I would like to suggest that the article's author, go bid on the one for sale on ebay (right now AU $20) put his SIM in it. It doesn't get much cheaper than that, and then he could leave the article writing on handset marketing to people with a statistical sample > 1.
[disclaimer: I am a Treo650 fanboy who still has his T68 on the charger]
"...today offers a reason not to buy a smart phone."
Um, no. This is, in fact, the best reason to buy a smart phone yet. Non-smartphones typically save money by having little ram, little flash memory, and slow processors, this makes them cheap and great on batteries. Even with on-the-fly-proxy-html-rewriting surfing the modern broad-band oriented Internet can be a painful experience.
I have a SideKick II (which has Danger's very good html/image compressing proxies behind it), a Nokia 6682 (good Edge GSM phone), and a Treo 650. All of which can download a typical webpage before a SonyEricson T610 can run the most trivial of Java apps. Each of the phones has features I like, but when I need a data device I reach unhesitatingly for the Treo. 320x320 pixels and 300 Mhz beats both proxy-compression and Edge for overall web use for no other reason than more pixels and a more processor make the navigating the received page so much faster. It's also worth noting that now that T-Mobile has rolled out it's Edge network, multi-timeslot downloads are working with the Treo, so in well-covered areas it's twice as fast (~44kbits/s) as a typical GPRS download rate (~22kbits/s). In addition, the Treo has enough processor to play highframe rate videos (TCPMP), makes good use of 2gb SD cards, and has a good OpenSource SSH client (tuSSH).
In short, if you really want to surf from your phone, spend the extra bucks and get a smartphone, or 1000 minutes of use from now you'll wish you had.
Like the historical parallel, what we really have is a service industry of immigrant Chinese workers being driven by a market composed almost entirely of Westerners.
I couldn't disagree more. What we have is a game, where people can profit by annoying behavior.
BTW, if you're going to spend 10 pages of your article pointing out the wrongs of stereotyping gold-farmers as Chinese, then you really need to refrain from doing so yourself when trying to draw sympathy to their plight.
From your own survey you conclude...
The overall picture seems to be that many gold farms are based in China...
Then it would seem that for people to assume that they are Chinese could have nothing to do with the (to most long forgotten) racial stereotypes of the American Gold Rush, but instead to simple generalization. Most of the people using this label will be lazy, some unaware of the politically incorrect aspects, a few simply bad at math. Given the amount of this that goes on, there will be a number of people who have only ever encountered gold-farmers that happen to be from China. To ask the typical 14 year old to abstract himself as an invalid statistical sample of an overall picture is asking a bit much, don't you think?
The actual gold farmers are the losers in this market in several regards. These workers are harassed as they try to accumulate gold and then are fleeced by the middlemen.
Another cry for us to pity the gold farmers. Many of them will be poor and underpaid, we get it. If this is your first introduction to the level of "unfairness" in the world, then, um, good for you!
Why insist on tormenting foreign workers when Western players are equally culpable?
I'm a "Western player," but not culpable in any gold-farming endeavors. You could have said "some Western players," or "many Western players." But you didn't, because it was simpler this way. This doesn't make you a racist.
The racialized story is a very comfortable one for us to tell because it frames us as the victims...
No it's not. It's not remotely like comfortable. It's just more of the same old-world crap that clings to human consciousness, which, by design, carries forward some of the prejudices and fears of it's parents.
Just ditch it. The current generation of punk teenagers using this terminology are only doing so because it has legacy controversy attached to. To them it's like saying fsck in every other sentence. They don't don't understand the origins of racism any better than they know what Unlawful Carnal Knowledge would be, or why it might be considered "bad."
I play the games to have fun, not to win; not to make money. The fact that a combination of behavioral observations and a language tests is being used by players to determine the likelyhood that they are gold farmers is not an expression of any kind of underlying predjudice. The frustration that is expressed in these actions is due to people playing the games with conflicting goals. If everyone was there to make money no one would complain about what's fair or not. Every exploit used against them would be seen as an tool for exploiting others and thus valuable in itself. The game could then be called "Battles of Ferenginar" But I wouldn't buy it, as I wouldn't consider it fun.
The problem, as many other posters will have pointed out before I finished reading the (copiously lengthy) article, is that an economy is a non-trivial thing to design. The fact that this economy exists on the Internet, which allows the free, instantaneous exchange of cash around the globe, means that any economy that you design in the game is going to be layers on the economy of the real world. In the real world I can buy a nice, WWV synchronized, LCD alarm clock at Fry's ($6) cheaper than I can buy lunch next door, because the clock is made in China. From a design perspective this is a tough element to control.
You didn't mention the kinds of noise you're interested in keep out, or what kind of data your sensors return. I will therefore assume, "all" noise and many kinds of sensors.
The best approach to keeping something as electrically noisy as a PC from spoiling your results is to put it in another room and connect it only with radio or light. This also addresses the sound issue.
If the bandwidth on your sensors is low enough for RS-232 serial data, then you're in luck, dozens of manufacturers sell simple in-line isolators like this.
If the cable it's running through is still picking up too much noise then using fiber converters on both ends (like this) will let you bridge the gap with glass which is pleasantly resistant to electrical noise.
If you're currently capturing your data with a bunch of low sample rate A-D converters, and have a large wad of sensor lines going to the attachment-pod on the PCI card, now would be the time to get your university's micro controller enthusiasts to create a sensor polling device. On something like the Atmel 8515.
Such a sensor converter will run for days on batteries, and produces very predictable low amplitude noise that is easy to isolate. It comes with an 8 channel 10-bit A-D, and the best part is they are available in an easy to breadboard 40-pin dip for $4.58 through digikey (here search on ATMEGA32-16PJ-ND).
If the bandwidth of your sensors is too great for RS-232, the same tricks can be played with RS-485 transceivers which will do speeds into the megabits, and are available as cheap dip packages.
For speeds beyond the few megabits realm a "custom data gathering CF card" and a Wifi capable IPAQ running Familiar springs to mind as a good starting point. But here we're getting into the question of "What exactly is it you're doing on the Windows box?"
--Art
In short, I think you should share more plan.
on
Paying for Volunteers?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I hit the web-site, and as other posters pointed out there is no download link, and there is no license.
People who make Free/OpenSource software happen want some kind of guarantee that their contribution will go back to the community. The sincere promises that you're considering several licenses won't cut it with many folk. Once you have the license in place you can post your stuff. Till then you can't really post much because you can't specify the conditions underwhich it can be downloaded/used.
One of the best ways an author knows what he might contribute to a project is downloading things and taking a look at the state of them. Whatever you've got will help this process along. Judging by the âoeStatusâ page at your site:
We're going through, one scene, one act, at a time, to get the job done. This aren't going to change much from month to month, but I'll try to keep you posted.
How about posting 2 completed scenes. I know it seems out of order to put finishing touches on 2 scenes when you have 70 to go, but it will let you share your vision with the gaming world and perhaps attract coders that didn't play the previous SpaceQuests.
Regardless, give'em something, anything, and don't make them sign up as developers to get to it.
Share the plan. Software development is a fairly quantifiable task these days. One thing that very much benefits a project is a clear development plan. I would suggest a unit of four hours resolution or better. If you make up a plan that starts with a list of features, and your story board, you should be able to map out the units of work needed to get it done. Miscellaneous tasks can be lumped together into four hour blocks but all the other coding tasks that bring about your story in an engine with the desired list of features should be included. This is a kind of super TODO list that will bring you three important advantatges:
Parallelism: code and artistry that might not be necessary till the end scenes can be started by those with the talent early rather than waiting for the herd to get that scene.
Progress indication: when you have the project mapped out into work units you can see/display/prove you're making progress even on weeks where all the progress was infrastructural, and didn't make any difference to the "scenes completed" counter. With the âoejust the end goalâ definitions, it's hard to see and share (as your status page would indicate).
Basis for reward system: Completing blocks of work can both decide where the author's name appears in the credits, and place him/her properly in the reward system.
As for the payment. I would highly recommend that you avoid letting money change hands in this. There are copyright/contract/wage/tax/underage/descriminatio n issues that you just don't want in your life.
If the reward system were mine to structure first off I'd make sure that everyone knew that their code was freely contributed under the chosen license. The $100 a week you have available is more than enough to inspire some help. Over the next 3 months that's $1200. If your income is steady and you can put that aside, I would set up a reward system like this:
The top 4 contributors get:
--A Radeon 9500 128MB card. (totals 548)
The next 4 get:
--A CL Audigy Platinum card (totals 264)
The next 4 get:
--A Razor Boomslang (totals 168)
Big reward totals: $980
And everyone else who completes at least one âoeacceptedâ unit of work gets a free âoeI made Space Quest 7â t-shirt.
I've helped plan a number of mediums scale software projects and would be glad to lend a hand. Cheers.
As someone new to the internals of X (but not Unix) it took me the better part of a day to sifting through out-dated documentation and installing font software and scripts for previous versions of X and hacking out the bugs, just to get the CorelDraw fonts I paid for to be available in the GIMP. In hindsight I can see how I could have done it in about 20 minutes, but it was anything but friendly.
Havoc makes a good point: You also still have to show the server-side stuff working with good performance and real-life significant memory savings.
But one can't put something to that test unless one develops it.
It basically comes down to: If a corporation is going to invest money in an open source development they are going to have some influence on how it's spent (in this case in terms of man hours). This influence may not be considered optimal to the other people in the movement, but it is Sun's money to spend.
And since I'm running RH 8.0, and OpenOffice, GIMP and AbiWord all have completely different font selections, I can't really see how it's going to get more fragmented.
Thank you for your efforts Sun Microsystems, I'm anxious to see the reuslts.
Whether it was building my first mock-phaser with "real flashing LED" or building the "Ultra-Sonic motion Sensing Alarm System" that I used to hear when my sister was getting into my room, there can be little doubt that Alan Dean Foster did more to inspire my love of technology than all the teachers in my highschool. Even today when I'm ohming out the different connections in my microwave to modify it so my CueCat sets the cooking time based on the barcode, it isn't because I can't turn the knob and press the button. It's because it's one step closer to a Replicator.
In a more practical mode, there is a great deal in software that is done by ignoring, "what will get the job done today" and paying attention to "what will bring me closer to an ultimate solution." This way of thinking is essential to good design and I can't think of a better way to inspire it than to give the designer several examples of near ideal systems, and the consequences that come from them.
I can't entirely agree with most of the objections I'm reading. I have ridden my bike a long distance to work, and can see the use for this product. Most days it's nice to glide along quietly smoothly, and environmentally friendily (if friend has an adverb form). After a long exhausting day, going home 3 hours later than normal, in the rain, all I wanted to do was get home. There was no joy in the ride; It was work that I wasn't looking forward to. To be able to get the bike up to speed and spend 25 cents in gas cruising home would have been a significant advantage. One that would inspire me to pedal the bike to work more often as the risk of an arduous ride home would be reduced.
But... If they want to sell me one of these kits they will have to be a little more fact-centric, and a little less like a Microsoft press release.
"With a quarter of a gallon of fuel, he says most bikes will have a driving range of about 20 miles." Interesting, but what kind of mileage does the bike in the picture actually get? If you have a working prototype tell the story, and if it gets mediocre mileage tell us why, and what will be done to fix it in the version we buy.
"The problem is that it takes about 377 lbs of lead-acid batteries to equal the energy stored in a pound of gasoline"
Um, no it doesn't. At least not on my home planet. It's a shame that selling this item to the public seems to require such an obvious lie. Whatever cool formulas the chemists whip out aside, the forklifts at my client's work place use 350 lb. lead acid battery packs and run on them for 8 hour shifts. There is no forklift on the planet than can perform like they do for eight ours on 16 oz. (yes, I know that gas isn't the exact same weight as water, but it's close enough)) of gas. No way. Ain't happnin'.
"If you had to start the engine and then get on the bike, you wouldn't be able to get your balance," Katsaros says. "This gives users an easy way to get started."
Um, not so much. I started riding a motorcycle back when I had a full head of hair, and I can tell you for a fact I can reliably "start the engine, and then get on the bike." And, more usefully, other bikers and I can start the engine and engage it without duck-walking the bike up to speed so we can "get our balance." The feature of disengaging when the bike is going less than two miles an hour is there to avoid all the low-end gear + clutch crap that is necessary to to get a motorcycle going from a stop and still yield decent efficiency at normal speeds. It's a compensation for the simplicity of the design and a good trade-off in the cost/weight/functionality game. It's not a "feature for the benefit of the inept rider" any more than Code Red was a "security assurance feature for WindowsNT admins."
I sure hope Mr. Katsaros understands that selling a geeky toy means marketing to geeks, who by their nature prefer facts to hyperbole.
Unless it's an embedded app there's just no excuse
on
Do You Write Backdoors?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
There shouldn't any hard-coded trust between the authors of decent software and the buyers/users of that software. The fact is that any useful information that the backdoor could provide to the coder should be available to the purchaser. If the purchaser wants to trust the coder he needs to run sshd and give the coder and account with access to the application he coded. Why anyone would "reinvent" a secure backdoor when it can be accomplished with Freely available tools to a much greater level of security is just beyond me.
The serverlocker my servers are in is retina-scan protected. The device that does the trick requires precise alignment to get a good scan, and every other time I have to do it twice. If there are three people in front of me I can just sit down on the edge of my briefcase because at least one of them is going to have a problem. Most of the delay after getting successive good scans is in the scanning device looking up the eye in the database 30-50 seconds, then it reject you you align your head again, scan, and wait another 30-50 seconds.....
It's my understanding that the original point of a corporation was to limit the business of individuals--to regulate transactions between entities, and restrict individual liabilities for the outcomes of these transactions.
The problem seems to be that individuals have begun taking advantage of the limited liability to enjoy limited responsibility...
That seems like a good description, and a great explanation as to what often happens. The historical underpinnings of a social structure are the not focus of my objection to your point about corporations not having rights. I too can point my finger and say this is not what I call fair. And it isn't.
Because of this, they tend to attract the greedy, and the power-hungry...
I must concur. If I were greedy and power-hungry, that's where I'd go to revel in it.
When the RIAA says its policies are better for the artists, we know it's lying. When it says its policies are better for the customers, we know that's not true. When legislation is passed in support of these policies, we know it's been bought.
All inarguably true.
Given that we want a system that allows hard-working, enterprising folk to create powerful industries (Apple Computer and the Bama Pie company spring to mind) that in turn create a robust economic setting, what would you change? Corporations allow people to cooperate on a larger scale than would otherwise be possible. This does not strike me as a bad thing, "Grama Bama" needed her extended family and eventually numerous employees to make her company a success, and I don't imagine Steve Jobs was still doing much of the soldering when the Apple II+ hit the market.
A company I worked for in Canada had significant Asian contact. In places where the governments put large restrictions on corporate behavior, corporations exist on on the sly. Whether it's Mafia or Triad, the game is the same; it's collusion defended by violence.
In the States, the behavior of corporations is highly exposed and highly regulated. It is always in the interest of greedy folks to push those limits, and always in ours to make them pay dearly for it. With the help of campaign finance reform, I think we can do ok over the long term, and that in the short term the RIAA and other like them will attempt to monopolize and control whatever markets they can, to whatever extent they think they can get away with.
In many cases, I'm sure my assessment of motive errs toward the optimistic. I have personally met kindhearted policemen, sincere clergy, and selfless poor-folk. These people have left me with the habit of assuming the best about entire organizations of otherwise averagely moral folk. If I am to criticize them for lumping me in with the pink-bottomed, 13-year old kids with hundred gig hard drives stuffed to the kilobyte with warez and music they haven't the skill or life experience to appreciate, then I cannot assume that the entire non-artistic segment of the music industry is staffed with greed mongering trolls.
Though that would make this all much simpler.
The rich have been cornering markets, price fixing, and having an undue influence on government for all of recorded history. Though they are no longer individuals, one could argue that a kingdom was more than just a king, and not entirely unlike a corporation. In any capitalist society they are going to take undue control on occasion. The citizenry will take it back, and promptly trade it for the promises from the next wanna-be king.
My point is that corporations are simply groups of people with money. There is no just law we can make to limit their business without limiting the business of the individuals that compose them. The price of capitalism is like unto that of a beautiful garden, even with the best planning and care you have to take the time to pull the weeds, or they'll surely take it over.
Another grand idea... wasted.
on
Copyright Rumblings
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The author makes a great case. He proposes trade-offs that would be in everyone's best interest. And that's why it will never fly.
The problem is the content industries feel they "deserve" the original copyright term, and that the digital age is simply infringing on their "rights." And, quite short-sightedly, that all they need to do is get "better" laws and the next generation of technology will put it right.
Hundreds of people proposed very reasonable, in fact still too expensive, methods to make music available online. The problem with these systems was that they were reasonable. The current system of paying $15 for CD with 3 good songs 2 mediocre, and the remainder, crap is extremely profitable. No self-centered individual would endanger such a system for one that would allow a user to pay $3 each for their two favorite songs and ignore the rest. It just won't happen.
These people will fight tooth and claw to retain total control of our culture until we wrest it from their grasping hands.
The next generation of crypto-verifying players, and per user-agreement encrypted, signed music downloads, will be a telling test. They will lower the prices enough that many people won't care. They will then usher in laws that make any tool that plays digital music a "tool of piracy." Large proprietary software corporations will step right into the meal line with their ticket in hand, and the FOSS community will be all that stands in their way. Should be exciting to watch.
...but the actual motive here seems pretty obvious. Half the people reading this post could layer whatever kind of supercomplex, 3 megs of IP tables firewalling that the State wants into a cheap Linux box that could be placed at all the gateway points to a particular section of country.
Filtering and control of TCP/IP doesn't require anything remotely like OS source. Right now, millions of people in Asia with their bootlegged (we hope) copies of Windows enjoy a great deal more freedom of information than they've ever had. They can share, they can organize, and keep company with people all over their continent in a fashion that should scare the socks off any but the most open of societies.
If I wanted to regain some control of information flow in any of those countries, I would want the Windows source. I would release the State version of it for a cheap price, and I would declare anyone using the non-state approved version a subversive and a law breaker. Each time the state approved version hit a website, or made any contact with any piece of software it would ask for that software's State ID. It would report all such information at its next opportunity to State sponsored computers. In filtering this data it would become obvious where the IP addresses were in your country that were not running the State version of the OS. Filtering the logs to distinguish subversives versus 'normal' folks would be a snap.
The only kind of filter that you can't add to Windows after the fact is one you don't want the user to be able to remove or refuse to install.
Heh, to an unlicensed operator, who is probably violating all kinds of ERP FCC limits?
It's really two questions.
To an unlicensed operator?
Yes, of course they will help unlicensed people. They were all unlicensed until they became hams, and most of them know it. I've had help on piles of radio projects from those nice folk, and returned the favors when they wanted to interface 'puters to their "rigs."
...who is probably violating all kinds of ERP FCC limits?
Who said anything about violating ERP (Effective Radiated Power) limits for FCC rules. The fellow in the article specifically mentioned abiding by those rules.
As for QRM (abbr. for interference), how much QRM is generated from a 1 watt tight-beam microwave hop.
This issue is quite different from that of CB radio enthusiasts that transmit at 300 times (yes, times) the FCC limits for that band, stomp all over the adjacent ham band with horrible amounts of interference, and then ask the hams for help when they've blown the finals on their tube amps. Yes, that category of CBer is often treated poorly at ham gatherings. And appropriately so.
Amateur radio isn't called called Amateur because they're beginners. It's Amateur because it's "not for profit." These fellows invest inordinate amounts of time and money participating in a community of radio enthusiasts, and if you are trying to stay within the rules and and achieve long distance radio communication there will be no end to the help/advice/parts available from them.
Which is probably why they shot over water. No trees, shorter towers. It's great to see this stuff getting tested, especially by educators who tend to publish their results. Hams have been enjoying this sort of fun for a long time now, and the basic problems are still in front of you. You have to have line of site (plus some extra height for the Fresnel effect), and you still have to buy and point dishes and since 1 watt WAPs aren't sitting on the shelf, you still have to get a pair of expensive little amplifiers. These things can at least be purchased now, and if you want to set up such a link, attend your local Amateur Radio shindig and you'll find piles of retired microwave enthusiasts, eager for the chance to lend a hand....
The best reason for HURD: "Because they want it that way."
No one should have to justify what they want to build to you or anyone. Free software is not about the GPL. It's about freedoms. If these people want to build the most paradigmatically pure kernel ever conceived of, I think that's great.
If they want to turn an architecturally useful chunk of marble into a useless statue of some kid named David. That's great too.
When I enter a bunch of keywords into freshmeat and pick over the results, I occasionally ask myself, "What was this guy thinking?" Others with that same list ask that same question, but about different projects. It's the fact that we are free to combine conceptual purity, modifiability, stability, speed, and dozens of other engineering trade-offs in exactly the manner that we think is "right" that makes picking through Freshmeat like picking through a box of Dark Chocolates.
Oddly, the same rule applies. If you don't like a particular chocolate, don't eat it; don't whine about it; just pick a different one
I wish Mr. Stallman the fewest alpha particles and the best of luck in his noble pursuit.
Though I agree that those should be important considerations in this company's decision, the dangers involved are neither imagined nor trivial.
1) In a technology sector where "time to market" is a crucial feature, distributing source for your drivers gives your competition a considerable edge. Everyone reading this who codes will know exactly what I mean when I say that having a known-good chunk of software to modify is vastly easier than starting from #include <linux/kernel.h>. Drivers are, in fact, a bitch to get right. On a device of median complexity you probably save your competitors a month of dev. time by presenting them with all your clever ideas and a working model on which to base their clone. On a truly clever device you may save them several months.
2) More importantly for some applications, if there are over-broad patents that concern your device, supplying source code can easily make the difference between your opponents having grounds for suit and not having them. Your source code reveals your intent behind your arrays, and the purpose of your function calls. When a lawyer is trying to prove your product is infringing, this is significantly better ammunition than hundreds of lines of debugger output that has to be "interpreted" by their experts.
An earlier poster had what I'd consider the best suggestion. Embed the secret stuff in your app. If your device supports it, make the kernel driver little more than a tool for getting data quickly in and out of user space. This approach has several advantages, among the better is that I (or any user who mucks about with these things) can then upgrade the kernel and recompile your trivial kernel space driver (say past an unrelated, but nasty bug) without begging for your help. I can do this to fix bugs you haven't encountered and present you with fixes for bugs you can't easily recreate, but others may be suffering from.
If you're developing software with six layers of abstraction between you and the box, buy all means by a PowerBook (they're ever cute), and develop it there. I'm sitting here next to an HP workstation for which I had to write 5000 lines of C for a particularly stressed application. Writing it using my (more powerful) Linux box and porting it over would have been a huge mistake.
In using a close match for the target platform I discovered a bug in their libraries that I would not have otherwise caught, and was familiar enough with the debugging utilities of the box to use them remotely on the servers on which this app. lived. Since I had written the app. at exactly the same OS level as the target system, I new it wasn't a porting bug and that it wasn't a version bug. This saved me time far more valuble than the cost of my HP workstation. People who look down their noses at this laptop either code at very high levels or don't code at all.
...are interesting when well researched, but basically useless to anyone who would actually have to choose between these two development environments. If you work for a company that designs applications of this kind there will be a host of more important things to consider than raw transactions per machine. The simple fact of e-commerce is that if a user is actually going to buy something at your site, you can waste tremendous processing power making them happy. If you make 2 dollars profit on a transaction and had to use 20% of the CPU on a 2Ghz processor for 40 1 second bursts (like you will if they shop using RH interchange), it's still worth it. What this benchmark argues well is that the MiddleWare product is probably worth buying if you have processor constraint problems. No amount of increased performance would warrant changing a staff of experienced Java programmers into a staff of inexperienced.net programmmers. Extra processors are just too cheap....
...we will come. Free Software is basically a "help your fellow man" kind of project, so it won't be very hard to find volunteers. However, as others have hinted, the real chore will be finding a task that can be solved by software that will benefit people without computers.
I've helped out with a few foodbanks have always been shocked at how incredibly primitive their distribution systems are. They have to have nearly prohibitive amounts of notice to get the orders for the right amounts of items correctly taken care of up-line. Locally there are no computers involved in this at all. A hand totaled list is read over the phone to a person who plugs it into a spreadsheet. AAAAAAAck! This is a job that screams, "Automate me." The people involved drool at the opportunity to place their orders less than a month in advance and to get rid of the paperwork, but setting up the infrastructure is most of the problem and actually writing the order submission app is pretty easy. In this case and so many others that I can imagine the majority of the work will be done on the scene. But for the fraction that doesn't have to to be done there, start some sourceforge projects and ask for volunteers. You'll find'em.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's not O.K. to do something to the people of one's country, it's inappropriate to do it to foreigners.
Can this be more obvious?
The carriers are very happy about this, but, as others have observed the fact that it's VOIP doesn't mean it's "anybody's VOIP" that it works with.
The UMA data network simply allows the carrier turn any WiFi access point into an additional cell tower on their network. The advantage for the consumer, discounted minutes at home. The advantage for the carrier fewer expensive cell towers to cover the same number of people.
In many demographics 40% of people's cellphone calls are made from home. It will be a tremendous savings in standard GSM spectrum to move 40% of the traffic to the 2.4Ghz band.
For the consumer, if your plan had 1000 minutes a month GSM, and an additional 1000 minutes a month over UMA then would you really need to hand $20 a month to a voip carrier? If you spend less than an hour a day talking on the phone, and you make 50% of your calls from home, the answer is no.
UMA phones will let you initiate and receive calls on either the GSM or Wifi networks. UMA phones are designed to hand the call seamlessly between networks. I've used one. They're pretty cool.
There are a large number of factors that go into the selection of handset models for both the U.S. post-paid and pre-paid markets: features, cost, size, manufacturer support, durability, radio quality, and audio quality among them.
/. users may already know exactly what data services they need/want because they have fearlessly tried them, explored every menu of their phones, and come to a good conclusion as to what is worth paying for. Many people haven't. They only discover a new feature because they see some geeky person use it in a cool way that they'd never imagined, and say "I wish my phone could do that." To which the TruGeek replies. "That's a Nokia 6682. It can take even better pictures than this and send them right to your Inbox. Let me show you how." It may sound like paternalism to sell people phones with more features than they currently think they need, but it's not. It's just good marketing.
Major carriers have an allotted sum that they can contribute to a person's first handset based on their one-year contract commitment. People in the handset selection teams for these companies choose the phones with the best feature set for that amount of money. There is no bonus for selecting a phone that is cheaper than this amount.
Less expensive phones sometimes get that way by choosing inferior components, and antenna designs. But not always. The only way to know whether a phone was cheaper due to clever engineering or cheap components is to completely reverse engineer the design with a every competent team of engineers, or deploy thousands of them and carefully watch the complaints.
The drive for Zoolanderesque micro phone sizes is over. There is such a thing as too small and consumers have figured this out.
Though there is certainly some deviation from the post-paid phone standards for the pre-paid phones each new model has a cost in customer care training time and handset replacement programs.
There is a push to make more data services available and some favoritism is shown to those handsets that can offer that content.
When you combine these factors you have a recipe for "I told you so's" The article's author didn't find the buttons too small on this phone (though many would), and where he was, the radio was adequate (though in tiny phones, penetrating the human hand is a definite problem). This phone will never let him "discover" the joys of sending cool pictures at the zoo to his grandkids e-mail boxes (which he may already do with with Coolpix 8800).
In summary. Geeksight is 20/20. We can mathematically determine that there is a slot for this in the American market, but marketing is stranger than chaos theory. And I would like to suggest that the article's author, go bid on the one for sale on ebay (right now AU $20) put his SIM in it. It doesn't get much cheaper than that, and then he could leave the article writing on handset marketing to people with a statistical sample > 1.
[disclaimer: I am a Treo650 fanboy who still has his T68 on the charger]
"...today offers a reason not to buy a smart phone."
Um, no. This is, in fact, the best reason to buy a smart phone yet. Non-smartphones typically save money by having little ram, little flash memory, and slow processors, this makes them cheap and great on batteries. Even with on-the-fly-proxy-html-rewriting surfing the modern broad-band oriented Internet can be a painful experience.
I have a SideKick II (which has Danger's very good html/image compressing proxies behind it), a Nokia 6682 (good Edge GSM phone), and a Treo 650. All of which can download a typical webpage before a SonyEricson T610 can run the most trivial of Java apps. Each of the phones has features I like, but when I need a data device I reach unhesitatingly for the Treo. 320x320 pixels and 300 Mhz beats both proxy-compression and Edge for overall web use for no other reason than more pixels and a more processor make the navigating the received page so much faster. It's also worth noting that now that T-Mobile has rolled out it's Edge network, multi-timeslot downloads are working with the Treo, so in well-covered areas it's twice as fast (~44kbits/s) as a typical GPRS download rate (~22kbits/s). In addition, the Treo has enough processor to play highframe rate videos (TCPMP), makes good use of 2gb SD cards, and has a good OpenSource SSH client (tuSSH).
In short, if you really want to surf from your phone, spend the extra bucks and get a smartphone, or 1000 minutes of use from now you'll wish you had.
of the old world views.
Like the historical parallel, what we really have is a service industry of immigrant Chinese workers being driven by a market composed almost entirely of Westerners.
I couldn't disagree more. What we have is a game, where people can profit by annoying behavior.
BTW, if you're going to spend 10 pages of your article pointing out the wrongs of stereotyping gold-farmers as Chinese, then you really need to refrain from doing so yourself when trying to draw sympathy to their plight.
From your own survey you conclude...
The overall picture seems to be that many gold farms are based in China...
Then it would seem that for people to assume that they are Chinese could have nothing to do with the (to most long forgotten) racial stereotypes of the American Gold Rush, but instead to simple generalization. Most of the people using this label will be lazy, some unaware of the politically incorrect aspects, a few simply bad at math. Given the amount of this that goes on, there will be a number of people who have only ever encountered gold-farmers that happen to be from China. To ask the typical 14 year old to abstract himself as an invalid statistical sample of an overall picture is asking a bit much, don't you think?
The actual gold farmers are the losers in this market in several regards. These workers are harassed as they try to accumulate gold and then are fleeced by the middlemen.
Another cry for us to pity the gold farmers. Many of them will be poor and underpaid, we get it. If this is your first introduction to the level of "unfairness" in the world, then, um, good for you!
Why insist on tormenting foreign workers when Western players are equally culpable?
I'm a "Western player," but not culpable in any gold-farming endeavors. You could have said "some Western players," or "many Western players." But you didn't, because it was simpler this way. This doesn't make you a racist.
The racialized story is a very comfortable one for us to tell because it frames us as the victims...
No it's not. It's not remotely like comfortable. It's just more of the same old-world crap that clings to human consciousness, which, by design, carries forward some of the prejudices and fears of it's parents.
Just ditch it. The current generation of punk teenagers using this terminology are only doing so because it has legacy controversy attached to. To them it's like saying fsck in every other sentence. They don't don't understand the origins of racism any better than they know what Unlawful Carnal Knowledge would be, or why it might be considered "bad."
I play the games to have fun, not to win; not to make money. The fact that a combination of behavioral observations and a language tests is being used by players to determine the likelyhood that they are gold farmers is not an expression of any kind of underlying predjudice. The frustration that is expressed in these actions is due to people playing the games with conflicting goals. If everyone was there to make money no one would complain about what's fair or not. Every exploit used against them would be seen as an tool for exploiting others and thus valuable in itself. The game could then be called "Battles of Ferenginar" But I wouldn't buy it, as I wouldn't consider it fun.
The problem, as many other posters will have pointed out before I finished reading the (copiously lengthy) article, is that an economy is a non-trivial thing to design. The fact that this economy exists on the Internet, which allows the free, instantaneous exchange of cash around the globe, means that any economy that you design in the game is going to be layers on the economy of the real world. In the real world I can buy a nice, WWV synchronized, LCD alarm clock at Fry's ($6) cheaper than I can buy lunch next door, because the clock is made in China. From a design perspective this is a tough element to control.
The problem with farmers
How much does it cost to rent a one room studio "summer home?"
And, what are the minimum residency requirements for voting in Sweden?
You didn't mention the kinds of noise you're interested in keep out, or what kind of data your sensors return. I will therefore assume, "all" noise and many kinds of sensors.
The best approach to keeping something as electrically noisy as a PC from spoiling your results is to put it in another room and connect it only with radio or light. This also addresses the sound issue.
If the bandwidth on your sensors is low enough for RS-232 serial data, then you're in luck, dozens of manufacturers sell simple in-line isolators like this.
If the cable it's running through is still picking up too much noise then using fiber converters on both ends (like this) will let you bridge the gap with glass which is pleasantly resistant to electrical noise.
If you're currently capturing your data with a bunch of low sample rate A-D converters, and have a large wad of sensor lines going to the attachment-pod on the PCI card, now would be the time to get your university's micro controller enthusiasts to create a sensor polling device. On something like the Atmel 8515.
Such a sensor converter will run for days on batteries, and produces very predictable low amplitude noise that is easy to isolate. It comes with an 8 channel 10-bit A-D, and the best part is they are available in an easy to breadboard 40-pin dip for $4.58 through digikey (here search on ATMEGA32-16PJ-ND).
If the bandwidth of your sensors is too great for RS-232, the same tricks can be played with RS-485 transceivers which will do speeds into the megabits, and are available as cheap dip packages.
For speeds beyond the few megabits realm a "custom data gathering CF card" and a Wifi capable IPAQ running Familiar springs to mind as a good starting point. But here we're getting into the question of "What exactly is it you're doing on the Windows box?"
--Art
I hit the web-site, and as other posters pointed out there is no download link, and there is no license.
o n issues that you just don't want in your life.
People who make Free/OpenSource software happen want some kind of guarantee that their contribution will go back to the community. The sincere promises that you're considering several licenses won't cut it with many folk. Once you have the license in place you can post your stuff. Till then you can't really post much because you can't specify the conditions underwhich it can be downloaded/used.
One of the best ways an author knows what he might contribute to a project is downloading things and taking a look at the state of them. Whatever you've got will help this process along. Judging by the âoeStatusâ page at your site:
We're going through, one scene, one act, at a time, to get the job done. This aren't going to change much from month to month, but I'll try to keep you posted.
How about posting 2 completed scenes. I know it seems out of order to put finishing touches on 2 scenes when you have 70 to go, but it will let you share your vision with the gaming world and perhaps attract coders that didn't play the previous SpaceQuests.
Regardless, give'em something, anything, and don't make them sign up as developers to get to it.
Share the plan. Software development is a fairly quantifiable task these days. One thing that very much benefits a project is a clear development plan. I would suggest a unit of four hours resolution or better. If you make up a plan that starts with a list of features, and your story board, you should be able to map out the units of work needed to get it done. Miscellaneous tasks can be lumped together into four hour blocks but all the other coding tasks that bring about your story in an engine with the desired list of features should be included. This is a kind of super TODO list that will bring you three important advantatges:
Parallelism: code and artistry that might not be necessary till the end scenes can be started by those with the talent early rather than waiting for the herd to get that scene.
Progress indication: when you have the project mapped out into work units you can see/display/prove you're making progress even on weeks where all the progress was infrastructural, and didn't make any difference to the "scenes completed" counter. With the âoejust the end goalâ definitions, it's hard to see and share (as your status page would indicate).
Basis for reward system: Completing blocks of work can both decide where the author's name appears in the credits, and place him/her properly in the reward system.
As for the payment. I would highly recommend that you avoid letting money change hands in this. There are copyright/contract/wage/tax/underage/descriminati
If the reward system were mine to structure first off I'd make sure that everyone knew that their code was freely contributed under the chosen license. The $100 a week you have available is more than enough to inspire some help. Over the next 3 months that's $1200. If your income is steady and you can put that aside, I would set up a reward system like this:
The top 4 contributors get:
--A Radeon 9500 128MB card. (totals 548)
The next 4 get:
--A CL Audigy Platinum card (totals 264)
The next 4 get:
--A Razor Boomslang (totals 168)
Big reward totals: $980
And everyone else who completes at least one âoeacceptedâ unit of work gets a free âoeI made Space Quest 7â t-shirt.
I've helped plan a number of mediums scale software projects and would be glad to lend a hand. Cheers.
...I would welcome some kind of change.
As someone new to the internals of X (but not Unix) it took me the better part of a day to sifting through out-dated documentation and installing font software and scripts for previous versions of X and hacking out the bugs, just to get the CorelDraw fonts I paid for to be available in the GIMP. In hindsight I can see how I could have done it in about 20 minutes, but it was anything but friendly.
Havoc makes a good point:
You also still have to show the server-side stuff working with good performance and real-life significant memory savings.
But one can't put something to that test unless one develops it.
It basically comes down to: If a corporation is going to invest money in an open source development they are going to have some influence on how it's spent (in this case in terms of man hours). This influence may not be considered optimal to the other people in the movement, but it is Sun's money to spend.
And since I'm running RH 8.0, and OpenOffice, GIMP and AbiWord all have completely different font selections, I can't really see how it's going to get more fragmented.
Thank you for your efforts Sun Microsystems, I'm anxious to see the reuslts.
Whether it was building my first mock-phaser with "real flashing LED" or building the "Ultra-Sonic motion Sensing Alarm System" that I used to hear when my sister was getting into my room, there can be little doubt that Alan Dean Foster did more to inspire my love of technology than all the teachers in my highschool. Even today when I'm ohming out the different connections in my microwave to modify it so my CueCat sets the cooking time based on the barcode, it isn't because I can't turn the knob and press the button. It's because it's one step closer to a Replicator.
In a more practical mode, there is a great deal in software that is done by ignoring, "what will get the job done today" and paying attention to "what will bring me closer to an ultimate solution." This way of thinking is essential to good design and I can't think of a better way to inspire it than to give the designer several examples of near ideal systems, and the consequences that come from them.
I can't entirely agree with most of the objections I'm reading. I have ridden my bike a long distance to work, and can see the use for this product. Most days it's nice to glide along quietly smoothly, and environmentally friendily (if friend has an adverb form). After a long exhausting day, going home 3 hours later than normal, in the rain, all I wanted to do was get home. There was no joy in the ride; It was work that I wasn't looking forward to. To be able to get the bike up to speed and spend 25 cents in gas cruising home would have been a significant advantage. One that would inspire me to pedal the bike to work more often as the risk of an arduous ride home would be reduced.
But... If they want to sell me one of these kits they will have to be a little more fact-centric, and a little less like a Microsoft press release.
"With a quarter of a gallon of fuel, he says most bikes will have a driving range of about 20 miles."
Interesting, but what kind of mileage does the bike in the picture actually get? If you have a working prototype tell the story, and if it gets mediocre mileage tell us why, and what will be done to fix it in the version we buy.
"The problem is that it takes about 377 lbs of lead-acid batteries to equal the energy stored in a pound of gasoline"
Um, no it doesn't. At least not on my home planet. It's a shame that selling this item to the public seems to require such an obvious lie. Whatever cool formulas the chemists whip out aside, the forklifts at my client's work place use 350 lb. lead acid battery packs and run on them for 8 hour shifts. There is no forklift on the planet than can perform like they do for eight ours on 16 oz. (yes, I know that gas isn't the exact same weight as water, but it's close enough)) of gas. No way. Ain't happnin'.
"If you had to start the engine and then get on the bike, you wouldn't be able to get your balance," Katsaros says. "This gives users an easy way to get started."
Um, not so much. I started riding a motorcycle back when I had a full head of hair, and I can tell you for a fact I can reliably "start the engine, and then get on the bike." And, more usefully, other bikers and I can start the engine and engage it without duck-walking the bike up to speed so we can "get our balance." The feature of disengaging when the bike is going less than two miles an hour is there to avoid all the low-end gear + clutch crap that is necessary to to get a motorcycle going from a stop and still yield decent efficiency at normal speeds. It's a compensation for the simplicity of the design and a good trade-off in the cost/weight/functionality game. It's not a "feature for the benefit of the inept rider" any more than Code Red was a "security assurance feature for WindowsNT admins."
I sure hope Mr. Katsaros understands that selling a geeky toy means marketing to geeks, who by their nature prefer facts to hyperbole.
There shouldn't any hard-coded trust between the authors of decent software and the buyers/users of that software. The fact is that any useful information that the backdoor could provide to the coder should be available to the purchaser. If the purchaser wants to trust the coder he needs to run sshd and give the coder and account with access to the application he coded. Why anyone would "reinvent" a secure backdoor when it can be accomplished with Freely available tools to a much greater level of security is just beyond me.
The serverlocker my servers are in is retina-scan protected. The device that does the trick requires precise alignment to get a good scan, and every other time I have to do it twice. If there are three people in front of me I can just sit down on the edge of my briefcase because at least one of them is going to have a problem. Most of the delay after getting successive good scans is in the scanning device looking up the eye in the database 30-50 seconds, then it reject you you align your head again, scan, and wait another 30-50 seconds.....
Ugh.
It's my understanding that the original point of a corporation was to limit the business of individuals--to regulate transactions between entities, and restrict individual liabilities for the outcomes of these transactions.
The problem seems to be that individuals have begun taking advantage of the limited liability to enjoy limited responsibility...
That seems like a good description, and a great explanation as to what often happens. The historical underpinnings of a social structure are the not focus of my objection to your point about corporations not having rights. I too can point my finger and say this is not what I call fair. And it isn't.
Because of this, they tend to attract the greedy, and the power-hungry...
I must concur. If I were greedy and power-hungry, that's where I'd go to revel in it.
When the RIAA says its policies are better for the artists, we know it's lying. When it says its policies are better for the customers, we know that's not true. When legislation is passed in support of these policies, we know it's been bought.
All inarguably true.
Given that we want a system that allows hard-working, enterprising folk to create powerful industries (Apple Computer and the Bama Pie company spring to mind) that in turn create a robust economic setting, what would you change? Corporations allow people to cooperate on a larger scale than would otherwise be possible. This does not strike me as a bad thing, "Grama Bama" needed her extended family and eventually numerous employees to make her company a success, and I don't imagine Steve Jobs was still doing much of the soldering when the Apple II+ hit the market.
A company I worked for in Canada had significant Asian contact. In places where the governments put large restrictions on corporate behavior, corporations exist on on the sly. Whether it's Mafia or Triad, the game is the same; it's collusion defended by violence.
In the States, the behavior of corporations is highly exposed and highly regulated. It is always in the interest of greedy folks to push those limits, and always in ours to make them pay dearly for it. With the help of campaign finance reform, I think we can do ok over the long term, and that in the short term the RIAA and other like them will attempt to monopolize and control whatever markets they can, to whatever extent they think they can get away with.
What would you propose to fix this?
In many cases, I'm sure my assessment of motive errs toward the optimistic. I have personally met kindhearted policemen, sincere clergy, and selfless poor-folk. These people have left me with the habit of assuming the best about entire organizations of otherwise averagely moral folk. If I am to criticize them for lumping me in with the pink-bottomed, 13-year old kids with hundred gig hard drives stuffed to the kilobyte with warez and music they haven't the skill or life experience to appreciate, then I cannot assume that the entire non-artistic segment of the music industry is staffed with greed mongering trolls.
Though that would make this all much simpler.
The rich have been cornering markets, price fixing, and having an undue influence on government for all of recorded history. Though they are no longer individuals, one could argue that a kingdom was more than just a king, and not entirely unlike a corporation. In any capitalist society they are going to take undue control on occasion. The citizenry will take it back, and promptly trade it for the promises from the next wanna-be king.
My point is that corporations are simply groups of people with money. There is no just law we can make to limit their business without limiting the business of the individuals that compose them. The price of capitalism is like unto that of a beautiful garden, even with the best planning and care you have to take the time to pull the weeds, or they'll surely take it over.
The author makes a great case. He proposes trade-offs that would be in everyone's best interest. And that's why it will never fly.
The problem is the content industries feel they "deserve" the original copyright term, and that the digital age is simply infringing on their "rights." And, quite short-sightedly, that all they need to do is get "better" laws and the next generation of technology will put it right.
Hundreds of people proposed very reasonable, in fact still too expensive, methods to make music available online. The problem with these systems was that they were reasonable. The current system of paying $15 for CD with 3 good songs 2 mediocre, and the remainder, crap is extremely profitable. No self-centered individual would endanger such a system for one that would allow a user to pay $3 each for their two favorite songs and ignore the rest. It just won't happen.
These people will fight tooth and claw to retain total control of our culture until we wrest it from their grasping hands.
The next generation of crypto-verifying players, and per user-agreement encrypted, signed music downloads, will be a telling test. They will lower the prices enough that many people won't care. They will then usher in laws that make any tool that plays digital music a "tool of piracy." Large proprietary software corporations will step right into the meal line with their ticket in hand, and the FOSS community will be all that stands in their way. Should be exciting to watch.
...but the actual motive here seems pretty obvious. Half the people reading this post could layer whatever kind of supercomplex, 3 megs of IP tables firewalling that the State wants into a cheap Linux box that could be placed at all the gateway points to a particular section of country.
Filtering and control of TCP/IP doesn't require anything remotely like OS source. Right now, millions of people in Asia with their bootlegged (we hope) copies of Windows enjoy a great deal more freedom of information than they've ever had. They can share, they can organize, and keep company with people all over their continent in a fashion that should scare the socks off any but the most open of societies.
If I wanted to regain some control of information flow in any of those countries, I would want the Windows source. I would release the State version of it for a cheap price, and I would declare anyone using the non-state approved version a subversive and a law breaker. Each time the state approved version hit a website, or made any contact with any piece of software it would ask for that software's State ID. It would report all such information at its next opportunity to State sponsored computers. In filtering this data it would become obvious where the IP addresses were in your country that were not running the State version of the OS. Filtering the logs to distinguish subversives versus 'normal' folks would be a snap.
The only kind of filter that you can't add to Windows after the fact is one you don't want the user to be able to remove or refuse to install.
Welcome to the Panopticon.
Heh, to an unlicensed operator, who is probably violating all kinds of ERP FCC limits?
...who is probably violating all kinds of ERP FCC limits?
It's really two questions.
To an unlicensed operator?
Yes, of course they will help unlicensed people. They were all unlicensed until they became hams, and most of them know it. I've had help on piles of radio projects from those nice folk, and returned the favors when they wanted to interface 'puters to their "rigs."
Who said anything about violating ERP (Effective Radiated Power) limits for FCC rules. The fellow in the article specifically mentioned abiding by those rules.
As for QRM (abbr. for interference), how much QRM is generated from a 1 watt tight-beam microwave hop.
This issue is quite different from that of CB radio enthusiasts that transmit at 300 times (yes, times) the FCC limits for that band, stomp all over the adjacent ham band with horrible amounts of interference, and then ask the hams for help when they've blown the finals on their tube amps. Yes, that category of CBer is often treated poorly at ham gatherings. And appropriately so.
Amateur radio isn't called called Amateur because they're beginners. It's Amateur because it's "not for profit." These fellows invest inordinate amounts of time and money participating in a community of radio enthusiasts, and if you are trying to stay within the rules and and achieve long distance radio communication there will be no end to the help/advice/parts available from them.
Which is probably why they shot over water. No trees, shorter towers. It's great to see this stuff getting tested, especially by educators who tend to publish their results. Hams have been enjoying this sort of fun for a long time now, and the basic problems are still in front of you. You have to have line of site (plus some extra height for the Fresnel effect), and you still have to buy and point dishes and since 1 watt WAPs aren't sitting on the shelf, you still have to get a pair of expensive little amplifiers. These things can at least be purchased now, and if you want to set up such a link, attend your local Amateur Radio shindig and you'll find piles of retired microwave enthusiasts, eager for the chance to lend a hand....
The best reason for HURD: "Because they want it that way."
No one should have to justify what they want to build to you or anyone. Free software is not about the GPL. It's about freedoms. If these people want to build the most paradigmatically pure kernel ever conceived of, I think that's great.
If they want to turn an architecturally useful chunk of marble into a useless statue of some kid named David. That's great too.
When I enter a bunch of keywords into freshmeat and pick over the results, I occasionally ask myself, "What was this guy thinking?" Others with that same list ask that same question, but about different projects. It's the fact that we are free to combine conceptual purity, modifiability, stability, speed, and dozens of other engineering trade-offs in exactly the manner that we think is "right" that makes picking through Freshmeat like picking through a box of Dark Chocolates.
Oddly, the same rule applies. If you don't like a particular chocolate, don't eat it; don't whine about it; just pick a different one
I wish Mr. Stallman the fewest alpha particles and the best of luck in his noble pursuit.
Though I agree that those should be important considerations in this company's decision, the dangers involved are neither imagined nor trivial.
1) In a technology sector where "time to market" is a crucial feature, distributing source for your drivers gives your competition a considerable edge. Everyone reading this who codes will know exactly what I mean when I say that having a known-good chunk of software to modify is vastly easier than starting from #include <linux/kernel.h>. Drivers are, in fact, a bitch to get right. On a device of median complexity you probably save your competitors a month of dev. time by presenting them with all your clever ideas and a working model on which to base their clone. On a truly clever device you may save them several months.
2) More importantly for some applications, if there are over-broad patents that concern your device, supplying source code can easily make the difference between your opponents having grounds for suit and not having them. Your source code reveals your intent behind your arrays, and the purpose of your function calls. When a lawyer is trying to prove your product is infringing, this is significantly better ammunition than hundreds of lines of debugger output that has to be "interpreted" by their experts.
An earlier poster had what I'd consider the best suggestion. Embed the secret stuff in your app. If your device supports it, make the kernel driver little more than a tool for getting data quickly in and out of user space. This approach has several advantages, among the better is that I (or any user who mucks about with these things) can then upgrade the kernel and recompile your trivial kernel space driver (say past an unrelated, but nasty bug) without begging for your help. I can do this to fix bugs you haven't encountered and present you with fixes for bugs you can't easily recreate, but others may be suffering from.
Best of luck.
Yeah, I went to correct the one and changed the other. Sadder still is that I can actually spell. Someday I'll learn to work the mouse.
If you're developing software with six layers of abstraction between you and the box, buy all means by a PowerBook (they're ever cute), and develop it there. I'm sitting here next to an HP workstation for which I had to write 5000 lines of C for a particularly stressed application. Writing it using my (more powerful) Linux box and porting it over would have been a huge mistake.
In using a close match for the target platform I discovered a bug in their libraries that I would not have otherwise caught, and was familiar enough with the debugging utilities of the box to use them remotely on the servers on which this app. lived. Since I had written the app. at exactly the same OS level as the target system, I new it wasn't a porting bug and that it wasn't a version bug. This saved me time far more valuble than the cost of my HP workstation. People who look down their noses at this laptop either code at very high levels or don't code at all.
...are interesting when well researched, but basically useless to anyone who would actually have to choose between these two development environments. If you work for a company that designs applications of this kind there will be a host of more important things to consider than raw transactions per machine. The simple fact of e-commerce is that if a user is actually going to buy something at your site, you can waste tremendous processing power making them happy. If you make 2 dollars profit on a transaction and had to use 20% of the CPU on a 2Ghz processor for 40 1 second bursts (like you will if they shop using RH interchange), it's still worth it. What this benchmark argues well is that the MiddleWare product is probably worth buying if you have processor constraint problems. No amount of increased performance would warrant changing a staff of experienced Java programmers into a staff of inexperienced .net programmmers. Extra processors are just too cheap....
...we will come. Free Software is basically a "help your fellow man" kind of project, so it won't be very hard to find volunteers. However, as others have hinted, the real chore will be finding a task that can be solved by software that will benefit people without computers.
I've helped out with a few foodbanks have always been shocked at how incredibly primitive their distribution systems are. They have to have nearly prohibitive amounts of notice to get the orders for the right amounts of items correctly taken care of up-line. Locally there are no computers involved in this at all. A hand totaled list is read over the phone to a person who plugs it into a spreadsheet. AAAAAAAck! This is a job that screams, "Automate me." The people involved drool at the opportunity to place their orders less than a month in advance and to get rid of the paperwork, but setting up the infrastructure is most of the problem and actually writing the order submission app is pretty easy. In this case and so many others that I can imagine the majority of the work will be done on the scene. But for the fraction that doesn't have to to be done there, start some sourceforge projects and ask for volunteers. You'll find'em.