"The thing that struck me as odd is that in the UK the 20MW station will supply about 7500 "homes" - always a strange piece of statistics. In Canada the 40MW solar station will supply about 10000. Is this purely down to different levels of power consumption on either side of the Atlantic (...)?"
The answer is yes. I can't believe this is worth +4 insightful. You are comparing two countries with vastly different energy needs.
"This makes no sense to me at all. First you say that I must grant this compulsory license. Then you turn around and say I may decline the license. I can't find a way to read this that isn't self-contradictory. Do I have to grant the license, or can I decline (to grant) it?"
Personally I got it on the first attempt. The difference is between "grant" and "accept". These are not the same thing.
Basically, the copyright holder must grant this compulsory license and any broadcaster can accept or decline this license. But, the copyright holder can also provide any other licenses that he/she wants and the broadcaster can chose to accept these licenses instead. Unless the broadcaster has accepted a license from the copyright holder, the broadcaster has no rights to broadcast that song.
"This is why there is only 1 car manufacturer. 1 brand of soda, shoes, toothe paste and so on."
Interesting that you say this, because most consumers simply will not evaluate all car manufacturers all brands of soda, all shoes, all toothpastes, etc. In most cases they simply chose what they are used to or whatever is on offer at Tesco.
When it comes to cars, most people do not search around to find the best car for them, they rely heavily on brand recognition which is why advertisement is so successful, and why Linux will not outsell Windows even if it was vastly superiour.
There is an enormous amount of research available on this, particularly because there is so much money in consumer decisions, and most seem to suggest that people make 'binary decisions' rather than comparisons.
That is; people look at one choice at a time, and if the choice is acceptable, they stop their search. Only if the choice is unacceptable do they move on to the next product. This is because massive amounts of choice is indeed painful.
I don't know what's "unstable". I've set up Beryl on 3 computers in the past few months, on Ubuntu 6.10 and 7.04... and all the installations are "stable".
"Works for me" is not the most common definition of "stable" in software development. I can give you an opposite account. Beryl and Compiz are both still flaky and has numerous show stoppers even on the hardware where it works best. That is also why it is not enabled by default in any big Linux distributions.
"Take a big guy who discovers he can get what he wants through force, now give the victim a firearm, big dude is less dangerous."
No. He is in no way less dangerous. This means that the thug will pull a gun and shoot you dead rather than pull a gun and threaten you, because he can't take the risk that you will kill him once he turns his back to you. This makes him a hell of a lot more dangerous. If guns are rare, armed robberies will much more rarely lead to murders. I dislike armed robberies, but I prefer them to actual killings.
The same goes for arming police. Contrary to popular belief, the UK police used to be armed a lot more than they are now. People and some politicians now call for them to be armed as if it was something 'new', but lots of policemen and policewomen would disagree. If the police don't have guns, sure they can lose a few armed criminals who will threaten them and then run away, but if the police have guns, the criminals are so much more likely to kill them.
This is not rocket science. It is just escalation of violence. You see it in any conflict.
"With that kind of outrageous difference in price, I'd go get it from Japan if I were in the market for that TV."
Not to rain on your parade, but this may not be entirely practical with a 103" Television. I can foresee a whole host of problems that the mega-rich which this is marketed towards, may rather want to pay $40000 to avoid. I assume the US price, like the UK price, also comes with a whole team of professional installers, cranes and the like.
From the review the television is 220 kilograms or 350 kg if you are using the heavy duty stand.
The current way the iTunes Music Store operates with territorial sales is clearly illegal in the European Union which is based on free flow of goods, services and money. This is one of the most fundamental reasons for the existence of the EU.
On the other hand Apple would not be able to run the music shop if they hadn't agreed to operate in this way due to refusal from the record companies.
I assume that Apple knew full well that the current way was illegal and started operating like this anyway. They were either prepared to pay some fines as part of the cost of doing business, or they believed that by the time the EU started fining them they would be in a much stronger position to force the record companies to agree to operate legitimately. The last reason is IMO quite morally acceptable, but still illegal.
The move to a 3D environment with GTA3 had such a massive impact on the game that many people easily forget GTA1 and GTA2 and consider GTA3 the first game of the series.
I'm almost inclined to agree. GTA1 and GTA2 are fun games but feel completely different than the games since GTA3. Very much like I don't consider Dune II to be a sequal to Dune 1.
Apple TV only supports EDTV and HDTV. Are there (m)any 4:3 TV's like that around?
It might be that the interface simply requires higher resolution than standard definition TVs. But if that is the case, the fonts are probably too small anyway.
The real reason is probably that the people that are likely to splash out $299 for this product are very unlikely to have an old 4:3 TV and Apple probably want this product associated with 'high end'.
Ridiculous License Agreement that is probably invalid in most countries in the world but still cause some legal problems due to some ridiculous laws in some countries (read: USA and the DMCA). If I purchase the phone, it is mine to do WTF I want to with.
Being from an open source company, it really sticks out like a sore thumb and makes this device a non-starter for anyone who cares about software/hardware freedom. Excactly the type of people that Trolltech is trying to sell the device to! The sheer stupidity....
Basically computer software has conditioned us to automatically press Ok in any dialog and there is nothing we can do about this. Automated actions by the user is inevitable and is present in every action in our life.
Nobody remembers if they locked the door or not and if you put "If you reach under your chair you will find $500" in a popup dialog, nobody is going to notice it.
From what I think I got from the presentation: * If you want warnings to be at all effective, avoid "false positives" at all costs. That is: Never show the user popups like: "you are sending information unencrypted over the network" (or whatever the IE dialog says) when you press a submit form on a web site, because people don't care and they will learn to ignore all such popups, even the important ones. The UAC is extremely guilty of this. * Some good insight into decision makers by users. Hint: people generate options one at a time and reject options that don't work. They never compare options but take the first one that works. This is called singular evaluation approach and is heavily taken advantage of in marketing. Software makers and web site creators should learn from this and modify their web sites accordingly.
"If you look around today on the web, the GIF format, even now that the patent has expired, is largely a minor file format and its use is largely fading still. "
Can you back up that statement? I don't think you can.
I checked a couple of semi-random big websites: BBC News has lots of Gifs. I stopped counting after 10 on the front page. The Times has lots of Gifs. I stopped counting after 10 on the front page. Yahoo has lots of Gifs. I stopped counting after 10 on the front page. Google has one picture on the page and it is a Gif. Slashdot.org has lots of Gifs. I stopped counting after 10 on the front page.
These were the five first pages I tested. The first four are examples of massively popular pages and all of them uses Gifs. The last one is an example of a anti-patent zealot page. It uses Gifs.
Gifs are still everywhere and Gif is not at all a minor format, so your example is actually showing the opposite of what you were trying to say.
It may be important for some things, true, but a significant reason for the performance of the Core 2 duo is that most of the benchmark applications are heavily optimised for SSE, and the core 2 duo executes 128-bit SSE instructions in one cycle, as opposed to two cycles with the Pentium IV and the AMD Athlon 64.
This is massively important as the core 2 duo can then operate on four 32 bit floating point numbers in one clock cycle instead of two.
In a facist state with abusive authorities like China, any tool the government has to locate and identify people should be considered a potential tool for oppression.
Gates has become rich on the back of Microsoft. Microsoft's illegal and immoral business practises are Well documented. As the majority shareholder he could have stopped those practises at any time. He is thus ultimately responsible for Microsoft's behaviour.
Bill Gates have become insanely rich from illegal and immoral business practises. Even if he gives away some of his money, he has still benefitted personally from these practises. He is quoted as saying he wants to give away almost all of his fortunes before he dies, but the money is useless for him when dead anyway.
If I was to steal $1 million, I would not suddenly be a moral person if I gave away half to charity, and I would not be in the clear just because I decided to give away all of the remainder to charity in my will.
But it also has to be reasonably priced. The iTunes price of $10, £8 or 10 per album isn't actually much cheaper than what you can get on the high street and you can buy a full CD for similar prices on Amazon.
That is not reasonably priced. People expect lower prices when they receive less and when it costs less to distribute.
I might very rarely buy an album at £8, but at £4 I would probably buy every album I like.
By all accounts this is an "opt-in" feature in MS Windows, which means that a very low number of parents will actually know about the feature and an even lower number will use it. Also, Windows must obviously have a way of setting which executables can be run, regular applications which presumably do not have any rating, won't be able to run. Thus parents can enable indie games on an individual basis in the few cases where this affects them.
I predict that the impact on indie games will be minimal.
"but you don't see anyone complaining that users have to pay a license fee to unlock the Quicktime Pro bundle of features that already exist on your Mac in a disabled state."
You don't, then let me be the first. I love OS X, but it is the only major OS that ships without a video player that can do full screen playback. While some of the Quicktime features can be considered "professional", full screen playback certainly is not such a feature.
Yes, you can get free players that are better than the Quicktime player, but this just makes the decision to count full screen playback as a professional feature that you have to pay for, more baffling.
Just ship the standard Quicktime player with full screen capability already! It is long overdue.
Several of the codecs in mention are heavily patended and FFMPEG's legality in many countries is not clear. The codecs from Fluendo, however, have a clear legal status as Fluendo has signed agreements with the patent holders.
That is the major difference between the offerings from Fluendo and FFMPEG.
I really don't think the porn is going to matter much. Back in VHS vs. betamax it may have mattered, but now physical media has already been made obsolete for porn by internet distribution. This would have happened for regular movies as well if the studios hadn't been so stubborn/scared.
Yes, people may still by porn on physical media, but it is not going to have such an impact.
What really matters is the name and the price. WTF is "Blue Ray"? HD has become the standard acronym for High Definition and DVD is a household term. HD DVD is a natural progression that people will understand. The HD DVD players are a lot cheaper than the Blue Ray players as well, at least on UK amazon.
In the end I'm not really that bothered. It is hard to get excited about High Definition.
So? If I were to keep all the retail boxes for all the stuff I've bought over the years I'd have no room to live. Also, manuals are easily lost. This just does not indicate anything.
But the fact is that there is a large number of copyright holders for the Linux kernel, not just Linus himself. Not all of these copyright holders accept binary kernel modules, and thus they should be considered illegal to distribute with the kernel.
However, refusing users to shimmy in a binary module themselves is wrong. The GPL clearly states that it only covers distribution, not usage, so users are perfectly entitled to do whatever they want to the kernel as long as they do not distribute it. Adding a check to refuse loading of binary modules would only lead to a fork of the kernel, which is unproductive and unhelpful.
If a binary kernel module contains absolutely no code from the Linux kernel in the form of headers or anything like that, the FSF would have a hard time claiming it is derivative work, thus it should be perfectly legal to distribute. The GPL may say otherwise, but this may be an over extension of the powers of a copyright holder.
Slashdot Mirror
"The thing that struck me as odd is that in the UK the 20MW station will supply about 7500 "homes" - always a strange piece of statistics. In Canada the 40MW solar station will supply about 10000. Is this purely down to different levels of power consumption on either side of the Atlantic (...)?"
The answer is yes. I can't believe this is worth +4 insightful. You are comparing two countries with vastly different energy needs.
"This makes no sense to me at all. First you say that I must grant this compulsory license. Then you turn around and say I may decline the license. I can't find a way to read this that isn't self-contradictory. Do I have to grant the license, or can I decline (to grant) it?"
Personally I got it on the first attempt. The difference is between "grant" and "accept". These are not the same thing.
Basically, the copyright holder must grant this compulsory license and any broadcaster can accept or decline this license. But, the copyright holder can also provide any other licenses that he/she wants and the broadcaster can chose to accept these licenses instead. Unless the broadcaster has accepted a license from the copyright holder, the broadcaster has no rights to broadcast that song.
"This is why there is only 1 car manufacturer. 1 brand of soda, shoes, toothe paste and so on."
Interesting that you say this, because most consumers simply will not evaluate all car manufacturers all brands of soda, all shoes, all toothpastes, etc. In most cases they simply chose what they are used to or whatever is on offer at Tesco.
When it comes to cars, most people do not search around to find the best car for them, they rely heavily on brand recognition which is why advertisement is so successful, and why Linux will not outsell Windows even if it was vastly superiour.
There is an enormous amount of research available on this, particularly because there is so much money in consumer decisions, and most seem to suggest that people make 'binary decisions' rather than comparisons.
That is; people look at one choice at a time, and if the choice is acceptable, they stop their search. Only if the choice is unacceptable do they move on to the next product. This is because massive amounts of choice is indeed painful.
Historically, Google has been pretty good about privacy issues, despite the NUMEROUS areas of concern like (...)
I would just like to ask two things:
1. Can you define 'pretty good'?
2. How do you know that they have been 'pretty good'?
I don't know what's "unstable". I've set up Beryl on 3 computers in the past few months, on Ubuntu 6.10 and 7.04... and all the installations are "stable".
"Works for me" is not the most common definition of "stable" in software development. I can give you an opposite account. Beryl and Compiz are both still flaky and has numerous show stoppers even on the hardware where it works best. That is also why it is not enabled by default in any big Linux distributions.
"Take a big guy who discovers he can get what he wants through force, now give the victim a firearm, big dude is less dangerous."
No. He is in no way less dangerous. This means that the thug will pull a gun and shoot you dead rather than pull a gun and threaten you, because he can't take the risk that you will kill him once he turns his back to you. This makes him a hell of a lot more dangerous. If guns are rare, armed robberies will much more rarely lead to murders. I dislike armed robberies, but I prefer them to actual killings.
The same goes for arming police. Contrary to popular belief, the UK police used to be armed a lot more than they are now. People and some politicians now call for them to be armed as if it was something 'new', but lots of policemen and policewomen would disagree. If the police don't have guns, sure they can lose a few armed criminals who will threaten them and then run away, but if the police have guns, the criminals are so much more likely to kill them.
This is not rocket science. It is just escalation of violence. You see it in any conflict.
"With that kind of outrageous difference in price, I'd go get it from Japan if I were in the market for that TV."
Not to rain on your parade, but this may not be entirely practical with a 103" Television. I can foresee a whole host of problems that the mega-rich which this is marketed towards, may rather want to pay $40000 to avoid. I assume the US price, like the UK price, also comes with a whole team of professional installers, cranes and the like.
From the review the television is 220 kilograms or 350 kg if you are using the heavy duty stand.
The current way the iTunes Music Store operates with territorial sales is clearly illegal in the European Union which is based on free flow of goods, services and money. This is one of the most fundamental reasons for the existence of the EU.
On the other hand Apple would not be able to run the music shop if they hadn't agreed to operate in this way due to refusal from the record companies.
I assume that Apple knew full well that the current way was illegal and started operating like this anyway. They were either prepared to pay some fines as part of the cost of doing business, or they believed that by the time the EU started fining them they would be in a much stronger position to force the record companies to agree to operate legitimately. The last reason is IMO quite morally acceptable, but still illegal.
The move to a 3D environment with GTA3 had such a massive impact on the game that many people easily forget GTA1 and GTA2 and consider GTA3 the first game of the series.
I'm almost inclined to agree. GTA1 and GTA2 are fun games but feel completely different than the games since GTA3. Very much like I don't consider Dune II to be a sequal to Dune 1.
Apple TV only supports EDTV and HDTV. Are there (m)any 4:3 TV's like that around?
It might be that the interface simply requires higher resolution than standard definition TVs. But if that is the case, the fonts are probably too small anyway.
The real reason is probably that the people that are likely to splash out $299 for this product are very unlikely to have an old 4:3 TV and Apple probably want this product associated with 'high end'.
Ridiculous License Agreement that is probably invalid in most countries in the world but still cause some legal problems due to some ridiculous laws in some countries (read: USA and the DMCA). If I purchase the phone, it is mine to do WTF I want to with.
Being from an open source company, it really sticks out like a sore thumb and makes this device a non-starter for anyone who cares about software/hardware freedom. Excactly the type of people that Trolltech is trying to sell the device to! The sheer stupidity....
I just recently found a very interesting and scary presentation about security and phishing.
Basically computer software has conditioned us to automatically press Ok in any dialog and there is nothing we can do about this. Automated actions by the user is inevitable and is present in every action in our life.
Nobody remembers if they locked the door or not and if you put "If you reach under your chair you will find $500" in a popup dialog, nobody is going to notice it.
From what I think I got from the presentation:
* If you want warnings to be at all effective, avoid "false positives" at all costs. That is: Never show the user popups like: "you are sending information unencrypted over the network" (or whatever the IE dialog says) when you press a submit form on a web site, because people don't care and they will learn to ignore all such popups, even the important ones. The UAC is extremely guilty of this.
* Some good insight into decision makers by users. Hint: people generate options one at a time and reject options that don't work. They never compare options but take the first one that works. This is called singular evaluation approach and is heavily taken advantage of in marketing. Software makers and web site creators should learn from this and modify their web sites accordingly.
"If you look around today on the web, the GIF format, even now that the patent has expired, is largely a minor file format and its use is largely fading still. "
Can you back up that statement? I don't think you can.
I checked a couple of semi-random big websites:
BBC News has lots of Gifs. I stopped counting after 10 on the front page.
The Times has lots of Gifs. I stopped counting after 10 on the front page.
Yahoo has lots of Gifs. I stopped counting after 10 on the front page.
Google has one picture on the page and it is a Gif.
Slashdot.org has lots of Gifs. I stopped counting after 10 on the front page.
These were the five first pages I tested. The first four are examples of massively popular pages and all of them uses Gifs. The last one is an example of a anti-patent zealot page. It uses Gifs.
Gifs are still everywhere and Gif is not at all a minor format, so your example is actually showing the opposite of what you were trying to say.
And not only that, it still refers to the Vista capability as good.
Last time I checked, the operating system is just a necessary evil in order to run your applications.
It may be important for some things, true, but a significant reason for the performance of the Core 2 duo is that most of the benchmark applications are heavily optimised for SSE, and the core 2 duo executes 128-bit SSE instructions in one cycle, as opposed to two cycles with the Pentium IV and the AMD Athlon 64.
This is massively important as the core 2 duo can then operate on four 32 bit floating point numbers in one clock cycle instead of two.
In a facist state with abusive authorities like China, any tool the government has to locate and identify people should be considered a potential tool for oppression.
Gates has become rich on the back of Microsoft. Microsoft's illegal and immoral business practises are Well documented. As the majority shareholder he could have stopped those practises at any time. He is thus ultimately responsible for Microsoft's behaviour.
Bill Gates have become insanely rich from illegal and immoral business practises. Even if he gives away some of his money, he has still benefitted personally from these practises. He is quoted as saying he wants to give away almost all of his fortunes before he dies, but the money is useless for him when dead anyway.
If I was to steal $1 million, I would not suddenly be a moral person if I gave away half to charity, and I would not be in the clear just because I decided to give away all of the remainder to charity in my will.
But it also has to be reasonably priced. The iTunes price of $10, £8 or 10 per album isn't actually much cheaper than what you can get on the high street and you can buy a full CD for similar prices on Amazon.
That is not reasonably priced. People expect lower prices when they receive less and when it costs less to distribute.
I might very rarely buy an album at £8, but at £4 I would probably buy every album I like.
By all accounts this is an "opt-in" feature in MS Windows, which means that a very low number of parents will actually know about the feature and an even lower number will use it. Also, Windows must obviously have a way of setting which executables can be run, regular applications which presumably do not have any rating, won't be able to run. Thus parents can enable indie games on an individual basis in the few cases where this affects them.
I predict that the impact on indie games will be minimal.
"but you don't see anyone complaining that users have to pay a license fee to unlock the Quicktime Pro bundle of features that already exist on your Mac in a disabled state."
You don't, then let me be the first. I love OS X, but it is the only major OS that ships without a video player that can do full screen playback. While some of the Quicktime features can be considered "professional", full screen playback certainly is not such a feature.
Yes, you can get free players that are better than the Quicktime player, but this just makes the decision to count full screen playback as a professional feature that you have to pay for, more baffling.
Just ship the standard Quicktime player with full screen capability already! It is long overdue.
Several of the codecs in mention are heavily patended and FFMPEG's legality in many countries is not clear. The codecs from Fluendo, however, have a clear legal status as Fluendo has signed agreements with the patent holders.
That is the major difference between the offerings from Fluendo and FFMPEG.
I really don't think the porn is going to matter much. Back in VHS vs. betamax it may have mattered, but now physical media has already been made obsolete for porn by internet distribution. This would have happened for regular movies as well if the studios hadn't been so stubborn/scared.
Yes, people may still by porn on physical media, but it is not going to have such an impact.
What really matters is the name and the price. WTF is "Blue Ray"? HD has become the standard acronym for High Definition and DVD is a household term. HD DVD is a natural progression that people will understand. The HD DVD players are a lot cheaper than the Blue Ray players as well, at least on UK amazon.
In the end I'm not really that bothered. It is hard to get excited about High Definition.
"A: NO MANUAL AND ORIGINAL RETAIL BOX IS MISSING"
So? If I were to keep all the retail boxes for all the stuff I've bought over the years I'd have no room to live. Also, manuals are easily lost. This just does not indicate anything.
But the fact is that there is a large number of copyright holders for the Linux kernel, not just Linus himself. Not all of these copyright holders accept binary kernel modules, and thus they should be considered illegal to distribute with the kernel.
However, refusing users to shimmy in a binary module themselves is wrong. The GPL clearly states that it only covers distribution, not usage, so users are perfectly entitled to do whatever they want to the kernel as long as they do not distribute it. Adding a check to refuse loading of binary modules would only lead to a fork of the kernel, which is unproductive and unhelpful.
If a binary kernel module contains absolutely no code from the Linux kernel in the form of headers or anything like that, the FSF would have a hard time claiming it is derivative work, thus it should be perfectly legal to distribute. The GPL may say otherwise, but this may be an over extension of the powers of a copyright holder.