Re:Services aren't the same thing...
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RIAA Sues a Child
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The moment you start relating "theft of service" with "infringement", you're trying to mix the two concepts, which actually have completely different legal and dictionary definitions. Theft is stealing something, i.e. time, resources, etc. that is lost when the item or service rendered is taken without recompense. Infringement is making a copy of a literary work without the permission of the individual(s) who possess the artificial right, granted by the government, which thereby end-runs around their rights to control the production and distribution of the work in question. In the case of theft of service, typically a resource such as power or time is taken- something that can't be replaced when it's consumed. In the case of infringement, nothing is actually lost save the potential of profit from the work- in fact, the loss of said profits may never even be noticed- ever. A theft of service will eventually be found because something is consumed by the act.
If you can't see the distinction, perhaps you shouldn't be discussing the subject as you're missing a key point- the government even sees the difference here and you do not. And there shouldn't be a change in things because the whole idea you're actually espousing hasn't been around for more than 20 or so years- and it didn't originate from IP producers, it originated from the RIAA and MPAA and their IP lawyers, who have a vested interest in people thinking that way.
Cost centers do not set pricing. Marketing and sales do that. If you're dictating a sales price of a product off of the costs of another, you're doing something wrong. Honestly. Please quit trying to frame this in terms of a GPL "failure"- because it's not.
They have a batch of closed-source product offerings like NeWT (Closed, for NT/XP only...), NeVO, etc. that are priced at rather HIGH pricings so that people just simply can't afford the damn stuff unless they're as big as someone like IBM, TI, etc., it's no small wonder that they're hurting financially.
Sentiments aside, they look to be a small player that priced themselves out of the overall market, hoping to score support contracts for an Open Source project that was to showcase their abilities and hoping to sell at least a handful of this other stuff at an unrealistic $9-10k per instance. The closest thing that competes in price is only $4k and there's other solutions that ARE cheaper.
The reality is that Nessus will probably be forked, Tenable will keep sliding into the hole not because of the GPL but because of their own pricing themselves out of the market, and life will probably just go on all the same.
Already a raftload of precedents in the Courts that show that this is the case. Reformatting the source code doesn't change the literary work in a sufficient way to count as a seperate work.
Considering that in EACH of those cases, the software IS distributed, they could have went after the offenders. Perhaps they can't afford lawyers to do so- I DID mention in numerous threads before that Copyright, etc. is only as good as the legal effort you can muster to defend your IP rights.
I don't buy this as a reason, mind- because the people in question are still infringing and making it free as in beer won't change the situation any more than it is now. You have to go after them for their infringements- licenses don't change this. If it were the case, MS (or any other BSA members, for that matter) wouldn't be so worried about piracy of their products...
Considering that I have 17+ years of experience in the field, ranging from end-user applications to massively distributed embedded systems, you might want to reconsider your thinking on my not knowing what it's all about. I've coded in every language ranging from QB Professional (and developed a very sophisticated practice management system for Dentist's offices with the same...) to C++ with all the major Microsoft development tools. I stand by my comment. It doesn't mean it doesn't get used, mind- but it still has no place in anything of the sort. Delphi and VB are better tools.
Unless you're going to make a solid case other than opinion I'm just not going to believe you and I do believe my CV speaks for itself as to my knowlege about things in this arena.
Services is something done by someone on your behalf for your benefit.
Typically, it's got the word "service" attached to the mix:
Cable service. Phone service. Mobile service. Internet service. Power service.
Theft of service is actually taking something, a service, the effort of producing something like electricity, etc., without paying for the said effort. When you use it, it's gone in most cases- such as time on a phone line, power, etc. Hence, the term of "theft" being applied to the taking thereof without paying for it.
When you're buying music, movies, etc. it's NOT framed as a service- never have had that done. It's not and can't be framed as such under the laws worldwide. Radio could be a service, but CD's/DVD's- nope. This means it's a published work- if I make a copy thereof, you, the producer is not deprived of anything but a prospective sale of the work and the media it resides upon. You've lost nothing save the potential proceeds of a sale in that context- you can make yet another legitimate copy of the work and sell it to someone else, or even the person who made the illicit copy for that matter. That is the reason why it's defined differently in the law books AND the Dictionary. To call it "Theft" is to use the wrong term and is something as wrong as the act in question.
Words have meaning- and with everything you're trying to map your moral leanings to what you THINK the law is or should be, you're perverting the words themselves. It's as morally wrong as the people you're trying to label as "Theives".
Here's a clue for ya... The most fundamental improvements in everything were when everyone wasn't patent-happy. In fact, Patents as we have them are a recent thing- only about 250 years old. The current thinking on Patents is actually only about 20 or so old. It doesn't help things. In some cases, it actually HURTS things.
Patents do not guarantee protection on your IP - You've got to have the money in hand to successfully mount a legal offensive to defend the IP, be it Copyright or Patent.
Patents do not guarantee that you have every angle solidly held. It takes a good attorney (more cash...) and care to not make the initial filings on something overbroad. If it's overbroad, it'll get overturned if there's a request to review- almost every time.
Patents only work within the confines of countries that honor them. If they don't, they protect nothing. If you don't file them in various places, even the ones that honor them may not protect you because you've not filed in all the right places (more money yet again...).
Basically, a Patent is a mixed bag- it all depends on what you're talking about. In the case of the stuff I've got pending, it's relevent, but we're still going to have to have the money to defend the Patent. Some of the stuff that people like Bill and Co., and Bezos are filing are BOGUS and are part of the problem. They don't do anything but put Patent Attorneys on payroll.
This is a surface mount panel. No wire wrapping. Looking at it, the electronics aren't that complicated. Again, tell me WHY it's $2800? I can buy $1000 or so, but there's just not all that much time invested in it's assembly. I just don't see where it's coming from- and I DO know about all of that. It's my job to manage this sort of thing in the first place.
They need consistent access- XML, by MS' statement is the only way to accomplish that. Office 12 is the only one that uses XML as the native format. Also worth noting is that you're not going to be able to get Office 2003 very shortly- they always cut people off about 1 year after the new one comes out so that they can force upgrades.
It means that they lose the lock-in and monopoly position on that space.
I've always had the position that MS has absolutely NO place in government as it's proprietary and fits only on one systems platform. Electronic document access needs to be pretty much universal and consistent across decades of time. MS Office is unable to provide this- because it runs counter to MS' business plans. They have to keep people locked in and forced to upgrade periodically to keep their profits going. This means constantly changing and closed details formats- the exact opposite of what needs to be in place. It'd be different if the format was 100% open and they were the best tool for the job- but that's very definitely not the case.
New tools? There's about half a dozen or more tools that actually DO what they're attempting to accomplish- and they're available off the shelf now or in a couple of months.
Cost to upgrade to MS Office 12 - $50 million, including upgrades and training (needed anyhow, new UI...)
Cost to upgrade to OpenOffice - $5 million, including some small needed upgrades and the training.
I'll ask you, WHICH is more expensive? (Hint: It's not the MS option and they can use the savings to undo the rest of the mess that MS has made of things in their documents...)
I'll also ask you WHICH is the one that accomplishes the stated goals of Mass' requirements for largely universal accessability of electronic documents?
$2800 for the flat panel- how can they be hand making that part, it's got to be produced with some sort of production process that is mostly automated because of the sheer numbers of elements that have to be right the first time? I just don't buy that it's that expensive. I could believe $1500 or so, but not double that. I know all about engineering evals- I'm the CTO of a company that was solely in the consumer electronics space at one point. The price they're charging for supposedly an inexpensive and superior tech- supposedly cheaper than LCDs and FEDs. Not at those prices it's not.
"Such minor changes are a BIG improvement in usability, but that's only because the previous usability sucked. End users will require little to no retraining - the interface is designed for that."
Any changes in UI or operation will require much more retraining than you think. Most people don't know to really use a computer- they operate by rote. Any changes in how things are done end up throwing people for a loop and they take much, much longer to do the tasks they used to do. So, you're incurring the bulk of the expenses upgrading to MS Office 12 or OpenOffice/something comparable- no matter WHAT the situation. Now, in light of that little detail, which is MUCH more pricey? $50 million to buy the new version of software, upgrade all the hardware out there to use the format, retrain everyone- OR, go with OpenOffice, buy basic support contracts as needed, retrain everyone for $5 million.
What MS proposes actually WASTES taxpayer money to benefit them at the expense of Mass. citizens.
1) The township should have NEVER used something such as Access, which was never intended for that sort of use in the first place, to do it's custom database operations. If they needed a database, they should have purchased one along with whatever tools to make decent user interfaces (i.e. Delphi or even VB proper, for goodness sake...)- it's what was intended for that sort of thing. Every time I see someone that used Access for something, I cringe because it's not reliable, slow, and all- it is the wrong tool for anything other than making small databases of things like CD collections. That's all it ever really was intended for.
2) PDF being right out with this proposal? Do you even think about what you type? PDF is a generic format that is pretty much readable by anything that most people would be using. Word DOC format ISN'T, and as such, has no business in government procedures or documents- PERIOD. It's about being able to provide usable, consistent access to documents for decades in many cases. You can't do this with MS Office- PERIOD.
Sure, OO writes out to that format- but OpenDocument is an open specification that not only all the main FOSS office suites either already support it or are in the final stages of supporting it- and the other Office Suites of mention other than MS Office are in the same situation. MS is the only one that's not on the same page.
Furthermore, for most people's Office suite needs, they do not need MS Office's functionalities. It might be a cherished notion that you need MS Office- but for the large part, most people aren't making dynamic documents, those very documents have absolutely no business whatsoever in Government in the first place, and the very issues that make MS Office documents very problematic in the first place are due to those "advanced features".
As a CTO of a company, I'm here to tell you that you're wrong on that.
Unless that is going to be part of your main product, $3000, especially for a smaller company (i.e. Anyone OTHER than Sharp, Epson, IBM, etc...), is WAAAAY too much money to be spending on something that is still almost not out of the labs. Unless I can see guarantees of something on the order of $100-300 on an 800x600 monochrome panel that size, it's not going to even be given a moment's thought. Honestly. You can get LCD panels for about that. You can get color LCD panels for less than what they're asking for this.
I'll even bet that you could probably get a FED or OLED panel for less than this- as an engineering eval.
I don't care HOW good their tech is- $2700-2800 for the display is far, far too much to ask someone to pay.
Yes, they're entitled to recoup their R&D- just not off my back while I'm developing a product around their stuff.
The Gumstix they're bundling retails for no more than $250. What is that thing made out of? Diamond?
I'd have difficulty signing off on something like this as an Engineering eval set, even IF my company, Coollogic, were still 100% in this space. As much as I'm VERY interested in developing things around the tech, I can't see me spending $3000 as an early adopter for a touch-panel UI device tech. I mean, I might do it, but that price tag gives me pause. That's a damn workstation for an employee, folks- or two depending on the workstations I'm signing off on.
I'm having to agree with you on that one- that price tag had better come down hard and fast or they're just not going to get people to buy off on it. No matter HOW good that something is, if it's in that consumer electronics space, it'd better not be costing a fortune to obtain even the engineering samples of it- people just won't buy the stuff. And if people are penny pinching on the BOM as they typically are, those panels ought to be priced at about the $100-200 price point to get people to be using them over LCD's and OLED panels.
Lordy... I expected something like $1000 or so- that's typically what an engineering prototype costs you if you're not getting one gratis from the manufacturer. A gumstix isn't THAT expensive. That E-Ink panel can't be THAT expensive.
$3000 is pretty steep for what we're seeing here. I'd have difficulty signing off on something like this if Coollogic were still 100% in that space... That thing's just too damn expensive for words right now.
I keep asking why the Telcos haven't twigged onto this one or the cable companies for that matter- pure greed is the only answer I can come up with, that and inefficiency that makes it too costly for them to deploy it. Ah, well... More cash for the enterprising person(s) that field something other than what's being done with Broadband- doesn't matter what so long as there's a decent upstream and downstram pipe. I notice that Free is feeding video over the wire- people say that this wouldn't be realistic with ADSL services- well, with MPEG2/MPEG4 and IP multicast, you COULD provide that functionality comfortably and still allow usage for surfing, etc. elsewhere in the house. And pay per view movies become blindingly simple to accomplish.
56 Mbits would be, at that point, a major selling point for something P2P in a legitimate useage. At that point everyone's pipe is fat enough to provide reasonable download speeds for things like CD or DVD iso's- of course, the *AA's of the world would screw that up because they have to have their business models protected at all costs even if there's tons of legtimate uses of the technologies in question.
VERY stable. I'm using one of these Mini-ITX boards to serve as my household server. I've plans to make a Linux based media box shortly with another one of them, using something like OpenEmbedded to produce the image set for it.
Unlike the AMD/Intel motherboards you refer to, VIA has pretty tight design control over these boards as they make them internally for the large part- many of the manufacturers, Soyo included, tend to play with the parameters and step into the marginal operation territory, causing problems like you described...
As for full-screen high-res DiVX in Linux, the reviews out there indicated that it was a definite possibility with the latest codecs, etc. It's pretty much an extreme low-power Celeron of the same clock-speed for the intents and purposes that we're discussing here- if you're talking a Nehemiah core unit (Epia M10000 or later...) then you've got a Celeron 1GHz machine with basically a Savage 4 integrated GPU.
Me, I'm eagerly awaiting the dual-core machines. That way you can actually have one CPU handling the rendering to display, one handling other tasks.
As for accelerated support, it's available right now if you're a Fedora Core user or are capable of rolling your own stuff.
...If the Libraries in question have a license to produce copies, does that mean that the same license is extendable to what Google is doing?
If so, then this case is waste of everyone's time as it's not brazen infringement- it's an issue of someone taking umbrage over something that they're (Google and the Libraries...) already entitled to do; it's just something that the authors in the class action suit didn't realize might happen as a result of the licensing. (Of course, that doesn't entitle them to filing a suit just because they didn't like those results...)
If not, then Google either needs to get the right licenses themselves- or not publish those works that aren't in the Public Domain and they don't have an appropriate license for- and it IS infringement.
If you consider the number of the other "high-profile" programs that aren't on both platfrorms and then realize that it's about the same level of effort for those that DID bother to make a version for Linux- you'd find that the bulk of them follow the path that Quake 3:Arena followed.
It's a null argument. Autopackage and Loki/LGP Install/Uninstall take care of most of the situations and if you're careful about your coding, you can end up with stuff that works on pretty much any modern Linux distribution- LSB or no. POSIX is a much better standard to follow and more useful for APPLICATION portability anyhow.
A test suite deficiency is a waiver. That was their answer up to this point. I'd say that the test suite was BROKEN in the bug list instead of what was given and FIX the test before continuing forward with any further testing.
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The moment you start relating "theft of service" with "infringement", you're trying to mix the two concepts, which actually have completely different legal and dictionary definitions. Theft is stealing something, i.e. time, resources, etc. that is lost when the item or service rendered is taken without recompense. Infringement is making a copy of a literary work without the permission of the individual(s) who possess the artificial right, granted by the government, which thereby end-runs around their rights to control the production and distribution of the work in question. In the case of theft of service, typically a resource such as power or time is taken- something that can't be replaced when it's consumed. In the case of infringement, nothing is actually lost save the potential of profit from the work- in fact, the loss of said profits may never even be noticed- ever. A theft of service will eventually be found because something is consumed by the act.
If you can't see the distinction, perhaps you shouldn't be discussing the subject as you're missing a key point- the government even sees the difference here and you do not. And there shouldn't be a change in things because the whole idea you're actually espousing hasn't been around for more than 20 or so years- and it didn't originate from IP producers, it originated from the RIAA and MPAA and their IP lawyers, who have a vested interest in people thinking that way.
Cost centers do not set pricing. Marketing and sales do that. If you're dictating a sales price of a product off of the costs of another, you're doing something wrong. Honestly. Please quit trying to frame this in terms of a GPL "failure"- because it's not.
They have a batch of closed-source product offerings like NeWT (Closed, for NT/XP only...), NeVO, etc. that are priced at rather HIGH pricings so that people just simply can't afford the damn stuff unless they're as big as someone like IBM, TI, etc., it's no small wonder that they're hurting financially.
Sentiments aside, they look to be a small player that priced themselves out of the overall market, hoping to score support contracts for an Open Source project that was to showcase their abilities and hoping to sell at least a handful of this other stuff at an unrealistic $9-10k per instance. The closest thing that competes in price is only $4k and there's other solutions that ARE cheaper.
The reality is that Nessus will probably be forked, Tenable will keep sliding into the hole not because of the GPL but because of their own pricing themselves out of the market, and life will probably just go on all the same.
Already a raftload of precedents in the Courts that show that this is the case. Reformatting the source code doesn't change the literary work in a sufficient way to count as a seperate work.
Considering that in EACH of those cases, the software IS distributed, they could have went after the offenders. Perhaps they can't afford lawyers to do so- I DID mention in numerous threads before that Copyright, etc. is only as good as the legal effort you can muster to defend your IP rights.
I don't buy this as a reason, mind- because the people in question are still infringing and making it free as in beer won't change the situation any more than it is now. You have to go after them for their infringements- licenses don't change this. If it were the case, MS (or any other BSA members, for that matter) wouldn't be so worried about piracy of their products...
Considering that I have 17+ years of experience in the field, ranging from end-user applications to massively distributed embedded systems, you might want to reconsider your thinking on my not knowing what it's all about. I've coded in every language ranging from QB Professional (and developed a very sophisticated practice management system for Dentist's offices with the same...) to C++ with all the major Microsoft development tools. I stand by my comment. It doesn't mean it doesn't get used, mind- but it still has no place in anything of the sort. Delphi and VB are better tools.
Unless you're going to make a solid case other than opinion I'm just not going to believe you and I do believe my CV speaks for itself as to my knowlege about things in this arena.
Services is something done by someone on your behalf for your benefit.
Typically, it's got the word " service " attached to the mix:
Cable service.
Phone service.
Mobile service.
Internet service.
Power service.
Theft of service is actually taking something, a service, the effort of producing something like electricity, etc., without paying for the said effort. When you use it, it's gone in most cases- such as time on a phone line, power, etc. Hence, the term of "theft" being applied to the taking thereof without paying for it.
When you're buying music, movies, etc. it's NOT framed as a service- never have had that done. It's not and can't be framed as such under the laws worldwide. Radio could be a service, but CD's/DVD's- nope. This means it's a published work- if I make a copy thereof, you, the producer is not deprived of anything but a prospective sale of the work and the media it resides upon. You've lost nothing save the potential proceeds of a sale in that context- you can make yet another legitimate copy of the work and sell it to someone else, or even the person who made the illicit copy for that matter. That is the reason why it's defined differently in the law books AND the Dictionary. To call it "Theft" is to use the wrong term and is something as wrong as the act in question.
Words have meaning- and with everything you're trying to map your moral leanings to what you THINK the law is or should be, you're perverting the words themselves. It's as morally wrong as the people you're trying to label as "Theives".
Here's a clue for ya... The most fundamental improvements in everything were when everyone wasn't patent-happy. In fact, Patents as we have them are a recent thing- only about 250 years old. The current thinking on Patents is actually only about 20 or so old. It doesn't help things. In some cases, it actually HURTS things.
Patents do not guarantee protection on your IP - You've got to have the money in hand to successfully mount a legal offensive to defend the IP, be it Copyright or Patent.
Patents do not guarantee that you have every angle solidly held. It takes a good attorney (more cash...) and care to not make the initial filings on something overbroad. If it's overbroad, it'll get overturned if there's a request to review- almost every time.
Patents only work within the confines of countries that honor them. If they don't, they protect nothing. If you don't file them in various places, even the ones that honor them may not protect you because you've not filed in all the right places (more money yet again...).
Basically, a Patent is a mixed bag- it all depends on what you're talking about. In the case of the stuff I've got pending, it's relevent, but we're still going to have to have the money to defend the Patent. Some of the stuff that people like Bill and Co., and Bezos are filing are BOGUS and are part of the problem. They don't do anything but put Patent Attorneys on payroll.
This is a surface mount panel. No wire wrapping. Looking at it, the electronics aren't that complicated. Again, tell me WHY it's $2800? I can buy $1000 or so, but there's just not all that much time invested in it's assembly. I just don't see where it's coming from- and I DO know about all of that. It's my job to manage this sort of thing in the first place.
They need consistent access- XML, by MS' statement is the only way to accomplish that. Office 12 is the only one that uses XML as the native format. Also worth noting is that you're not going to be able to get Office 2003 very shortly- they always cut people off about 1 year after the new one comes out so that they can force upgrades.
...they just don't want to go there.
It means that they lose the lock-in and monopoly position on that space.
I've always had the position that MS has absolutely NO place in government as it's proprietary and fits only on one systems platform. Electronic document access needs to be pretty much universal and consistent across decades of time. MS Office is unable to provide this- because it runs counter to MS' business plans. They have to keep people locked in and forced to upgrade periodically to keep their profits going. This means constantly changing and closed details formats- the exact opposite of what needs to be in place. It'd be different if the format was 100% open and they were the best tool for the job- but that's very definitely not the case.
New tools? There's about half a dozen or more tools that actually DO what they're attempting to accomplish- and they're available off the shelf now or in a couple of months.
Cost to upgrade to MS Office 12 - $50 million, including upgrades and training (needed anyhow, new UI...)
Cost to upgrade to OpenOffice - $5 million, including some small needed upgrades and the training.
I'll ask you, WHICH is more expensive? (Hint: It's not the MS option and they can use the savings to undo the rest of the mess that MS has made of things in their documents...)
I'll also ask you WHICH is the one that accomplishes the stated goals of Mass' requirements for largely universal accessability of electronic documents?
$2800 for the flat panel- how can they be hand making that part, it's got to be produced with some sort of production process that is mostly automated because of the sheer numbers of elements that have to be right the first time? I just don't buy that it's that expensive. I could believe $1500 or so, but not double that. I know all about engineering evals- I'm the CTO of a company that was solely in the consumer electronics space at one point. The price they're charging for supposedly an inexpensive and superior tech- supposedly cheaper than LCDs and FEDs. Not at those prices it's not.
Any changes in UI or operation will require much more retraining than you think. Most people don't know to really use a computer- they operate by rote. Any changes in how things are done end up throwing people for a loop and they take much, much longer to do the tasks they used to do. So, you're incurring the bulk of the expenses upgrading to MS Office 12 or OpenOffice/something comparable- no matter WHAT the situation. Now, in light of that little detail, which is MUCH more pricey? $50 million to buy the new version of software, upgrade all the hardware out there to use the format, retrain everyone- OR, go with OpenOffice, buy basic support contracts as needed, retrain everyone for $5 million.
What MS proposes actually WASTES taxpayer money to benefit them at the expense of Mass. citizens.
1) The township should have NEVER used something such as Access, which was never intended for that sort of use in the first place, to do it's custom database operations. If they needed a database, they should have purchased one along with whatever tools to make decent user interfaces (i.e. Delphi or even VB proper, for goodness sake...)- it's what was intended for that sort of thing. Every time I see someone that used Access for something, I cringe because it's not reliable, slow, and all- it is the wrong tool for anything other than making small databases of things like CD collections. That's all it ever really was intended for.
2) PDF being right out with this proposal? Do you even think about what you type? PDF is a generic format that is pretty much readable by anything that most people would be using. Word DOC format ISN'T, and as such, has no business in government procedures or documents- PERIOD. It's about being able to provide usable, consistent access to documents for decades in many cases. You can't do this with MS Office- PERIOD.
That OpenDocument is NOT OpenOffice.
Sure, OO writes out to that format- but OpenDocument is an open specification that not only all the main FOSS office suites either already support it or are in the final stages of supporting it- and the other Office Suites of mention other than MS Office are in the same situation. MS is the only one that's not on the same page.
Furthermore, for most people's Office suite needs, they do not need MS Office's functionalities. It might be a cherished notion that you need MS Office- but for the large part, most people aren't making dynamic documents, those very documents have absolutely no business whatsoever in Government in the first place, and the very issues that make MS Office documents very problematic in the first place are due to those "advanced features".
As a CTO of a company, I'm here to tell you that you're wrong on that.
Unless that is going to be part of your main product, $3000, especially for a smaller company
(i.e. Anyone OTHER than Sharp, Epson, IBM, etc...), is WAAAAY too much money to be spending on something that
is still almost not out of the labs. Unless I can see guarantees of something on the order of $100-300 on an
800x600 monochrome panel that size, it's not going to even be given a moment's thought. Honestly.
You can get LCD panels for about that. You can get color LCD panels for less than what they're asking for this.
I'll even bet that you could probably get a FED or OLED panel for less than this- as an engineering eval.
I don't care HOW good their tech is- $2700-2800 for the display is far, far too much to ask someone to pay.
Yes, they're entitled to recoup their R&D- just not off my back while I'm developing a product around their stuff.
The Gumstix they're bundling retails for no more than $250. What is that thing made out of? Diamond?
I'd have difficulty signing off on something like this as an Engineering eval set, even IF my company,
Coollogic, were still 100% in this space. As much as I'm VERY interested in developing things around
the tech, I can't see me spending $3000 as an early adopter for a touch-panel UI device tech. I mean,
I might do it, but that price tag gives me pause. That's a damn workstation for an employee,
folks- or two depending on the workstations I'm signing off on.
I'm having to agree with you on that one- that price tag had better come down hard and fast or they're
just not going to get people to buy off on it. No matter HOW good that something is, if it's in that
consumer electronics space, it'd better not be costing a fortune to obtain even the engineering samples
of it- people just won't buy the stuff. And if people are penny pinching on the BOM as they typically are,
those panels ought to be priced at about the $100-200 price point to get people to be using them
over LCD's and OLED panels.
Lordy... I expected something like $1000 or so- that's typically what an engineering prototype costs you if you're not getting one gratis from the manufacturer. A gumstix isn't THAT expensive. That E-Ink panel can't be THAT expensive.
$3000 is pretty steep for what we're seeing here. I'd have difficulty signing off on something like this
if Coollogic were still 100% in that space... That thing's just too damn expensive for words right now.
I keep asking why the Telcos haven't twigged onto this one or the cable companies for that matter- pure greed is the only answer I can come up with, that and inefficiency that makes it too costly for them to deploy it. Ah, well... More cash for the enterprising person(s) that field something other than what's being done with Broadband- doesn't matter what so long as there's a decent upstream and downstram pipe. I notice that Free is feeding video over the wire- people say that this wouldn't be realistic with ADSL services- well, with MPEG2/MPEG4 and IP multicast, you COULD provide that functionality comfortably and still allow usage for surfing, etc. elsewhere in the house. And pay per view movies become blindingly simple to accomplish.
56 Mbits would be, at that point, a major selling point for something P2P in a legitimate useage. At that point everyone's pipe is fat enough to provide reasonable download speeds for things like CD or DVD iso's- of course, the *AA's of the world would screw that up because they have to have their business models protected at all costs even if there's tons of legtimate uses of the technologies in question.
VERY stable. I'm using one of these Mini-ITX boards to serve as my household server. I've plans to make a Linux based media box shortly with another one of them, using something like OpenEmbedded to produce the image set for it.
Unlike the AMD/Intel motherboards you refer to, VIA has pretty tight design control over these boards as they make them internally for the large part- many of the manufacturers, Soyo included, tend to play with the parameters and step into the marginal operation territory, causing problems like you described...
As for full-screen high-res DiVX in Linux, the reviews out there indicated that it was a definite possibility with the latest codecs, etc. It's pretty much an extreme low-power Celeron of the same clock-speed for the intents and purposes that we're discussing here- if you're talking a Nehemiah core unit (Epia M10000 or later...) then you've got a Celeron 1GHz machine with basically a Savage 4 integrated GPU.
Me, I'm eagerly awaiting the dual-core machines. That way you can actually have one CPU handling the rendering to display, one handling other tasks.
As for accelerated support, it's available right now if you're a Fedora Core user or are capable of rolling your own stuff.
...If the Libraries in question have a license to produce copies, does that mean that the same license is extendable to what Google is doing?
If so, then this case is waste of everyone's time as it's not brazen infringement- it's an issue of someone taking umbrage over something that they're (Google and the Libraries...) already entitled to do; it's just something that the authors in the class action suit didn't realize might happen as a result of the licensing. (Of course, that doesn't entitle them to filing a suit just because they didn't like those results...)
If not, then Google either needs to get the right licenses themselves- or not publish those works that aren't in the Public Domain and they don't have an appropriate license for- and it IS infringement.
I'd ask you the same thing...
If you consider the number of the other "high-profile" programs that aren't on both platfrorms and then realize that it's about the same level of effort for those that DID bother to make a version for Linux- you'd find that the bulk of them follow the path that Quake 3:Arena followed.
It's a null argument. Autopackage and Loki/LGP Install/Uninstall take care of most of the situations and if you're careful about your coding, you can end up with stuff that works on pretty much any modern Linux distribution- LSB or no. POSIX is a much better standard to follow and more useful for APPLICATION portability anyhow.
A test suite deficiency is a waiver. That was their answer up to this point. I'd say that the test suite was BROKEN in the bug list instead of what was given and FIX the test before continuing forward with any further testing.