If it's the principle, then don't buy it! Send a letter to Apple to complain about them punishing early adopters - you know, the people that had faith enough buying a first release product from them. I am utterly appalled that they expect me to shell out another $20 for applications that I can get for free if I just jailbreak.
I've been holding out jailbreaking because I figured any apps I wanted I'd be able to get when the SDK was released. Now I'm wondering - are they making it $20 because they know we're not going to have a choice because the SDK is going to suck? Or are they just trying to scam money from early adopters AGAIN before the SDK comes out and makes this package redundant?
Good post, agree. Probably already seen it but it should be noted that Jobs has said there'll be a dev kit for the iPhone soon. It's a little vague about what sort of functionality we can expect - I get the feeling from that there might be some concessions they've made, either so Apple can sell you stuff or so the carriers still have some feeling of control. But I'm hoping a nice functional SDK will really make the iPhone (and in my case iPod Touch) shine as a useful device.
The best option to improve security is to let people get training and a permit that allows them to carry a weapon anywhere. If you have a significant portion of the population armed at all times then the chance of terrorist getting much further than "I have a bom..." before someone drops them would reduce the chances of such act to virtually zero. I'm looking for the smiley face that indicates you're joking, but scarily - I can't find it.
I don't know why anyone would feel safer getting into a metal tube that is going to whiz through the sky at a significant fraction of the speed of sound, hanging thousands of meters in the sky, knowing that there are people with guns on board. Even a casual shootout puts the lives of every single person at risk, let alone a pitched battle between terrorists and would-be saviours.
The potential for tragedy, on both a small and large scale, is so great I am forced to believe that the lack of smiley is a simple typo.
It would probably make most people a lot more polite as well. People shouldn't be polite because they fear getting shot by some psycho with a gun. They should be polite because it's the socially responsible way to behave.
It happened with nullsoft Waste, a p2p thing that was released by the Nullsoft guys then later yoinked by parent company AOL when they found out about it.
I have vague recollections of parts of it being used in a commercial product (I think from some motherboard manufacturer?) which was similarly later pulled, though I'm not sure why.
It is interesting because it was software that was released under the GPL by a company, and then later revoked. I wonder if this has been tested in court at all?
Surely its not that hard to get real evidence though - just look in your peer list when downloading and see if there's any comcast users seeding to you! That'd be an interesting experiment on some of the bigger torrents. Of course without a frame of reference in terms of numbers it might not be useful data, but at least you'd be able to see if some/any comcast users were uploading.
If you say that too loudly, the giant plasma screen TV industry might go out of business.
I was thinking about buying a plasma/LCD for my bedroom the other day so I could watch some stuff before drifting off. However before I did that I tried my laptop, which of course works perfectly, although finding a comfortable position is a little tricky - it gets quite hot and its like 25-30 celcius at night in my bedroom anyway, so I don't need to get hotter.
However, screen-size wise - I lined up the monitor to where a TV would sit in my room and realised that if I had (say) a 42" plasma, my laptop monitor (12.1") would still give me a bigger apparent picture size, as its so much closer to my head.
mod parent up; this is the correct solution to this problem. I noticed this when I had to download a jillion images; the more I did the slower the process got. I clicked 'clean up' and bam, instant fix.
I've been waiting to hear more about the Hanlin eReader - first heard about it on Slashdot about a year ago. It's e-ink, supports common formats (though its unclear if you have to convert them to its own "Wolf" format first, at least in some of the models) and looks neat.
I thought there already were such laws. I'd rather see less people in the news getting sued by the MPAA/RIAA and more people in the news getting sued for recklessly endangering the health, safety and lives of others, simply by being complete assholes.
No offense, but maybe you should wait until you're almost killed by careless idiocy like the GP was before you say something like this. I was walking home one night and some idiot kids were drinking on the roof of the shopping center near where I live. They saw me walking underneath and threw a half-full beer can at me from 4 stories up. It missed me by a matter of feet.
People should be completely and utterly aware of their actions at all times if there's even a slight chance they might affect the safety and health of other people. I've read too many stories about people getting injured and killed by asshole kids throwing rocks at cars to think that there shouldn't be REALLY serious repercussions for crimes like this, REGARDLESS of whether they hurt someone or not.
What's the difference between intended almost-manslaughter and manslaughter?
I often do the same, not because I expect Google to be able to magically figure out what I want, but because I figure Google have already indexed a page where someone has asked the exact same question before. I frequently use quotes around it (to search for the whole string), when trying to find something really specific and simple (eg, "how much does the earth weigh"). It's really easy to tweak the question to try alternatives.
Thanks to the shortages and articles like this, the Wii is the hot item to get for Christmas. This year's Google Zeitgeist has an interesting page showing the surge of Wii searches as we approach the end of the year.
It might sound lame, but this is really the major stumbling block I have with adopting Linux as my desktop OS.
I hate, with a passion, the default massive gumby sized icons and toolbars and everything that appear to be the norm in most Linux VMs. I don't run in 1600x1200 so I can waste half my desktop space with huge icons.
Personnally I'd rather see divx and mp3 be used as the next standards, but Xvid and Ogg would be cool. xvid would be terrible because of its questionable legal status! The official xvid site still doesn't have binary downloads, which (according to wikipedia and simple deduction) is because of patent concerns.
Sure you can. However you're using patented technology without holding a license, so there is a theoretical risk that you could get sued. Sorry, I thought it was obvious, but I meant "can you do it legally?"
So it seems the answer is "no", based on your comment - which means that arguments that we should be using MPEG4 w/ h.264 as the "open standard" because there's lots of open source software people can use is bogus (at least, for people living under US patent law jurisdiction).
I replied before I read this comment, otherwise I would have modded you up.
We are a small webdev company and I have been trying to make sense of the patent mess as far as video goes for ages, after I spent some time investigating what is required to LEGALLY make video work on the web.
Anyone can build a youtube equivalent using FFMPEG with some simple scripts and other tools chained together. Unfortunately in the process you'd almost certainly be violating various patents. Trying to find out which ones they are, or commercial tools to do the same job, is really not very easy.
I'm currently waiting for a response from MPEG-LA about what's involved in correctly licensing an open source software package (using, say, x264) for h.264 encoding.
There's far more FOSS support for MPEG-4 and H.264 than for Ogg/Theora and the rest of the outdated codecs Xiph has salvaged from the dumpster of proprietary efforts. Having wide support behind one good, open portfolio of standards will make it easier for FOSS to compete with and participate in the desktop computing world. This is a really interesting post, but I thought this last bit was the most interesting, because its something I'm struggling with.
I can't figure out at what point the patent issues surrounding open source implementations of (say) h.264 codecs will affect people trying to use them in a commercial environment. For example - if you're in the US (or a country that respects US patent law), can you download and commercially use an open source implementation of h.264 (eg, x264)?
Judging from the fact that binaries for all these tools tend to not be hosted in the US (many of them, such as ffmpeg, state that patent concerns mean they only make source distributions available, and getting binaries involves downloading them from some place that doesn't respect US patent law, or at least its not enforced), I'm guessing there are several issues here.
For the WC3 to push an obscure format that nobody uses as the baseline of web video of the future is absurd. I disagree with this; I think the biggest stumbling block we have in terms of web video is the patent-heavy situation we have (assuming my thoughts on potentially patent-infringing FOSS software is correct).
I put it to you that Slashdot are also professional trolls, by the same logic.
I'm sure this article only exists on Slashdot because editors know that the community will froth and rage about another ill-informed Dvorak piece. I love reading the comments because they're inevitably the same - "why do Slashdot keep posting Dvorak articles?S??!!?@#".
The answer is, because you keep reading them and replying them and contributing to their traffic. If you want to see them stop, resist the temptation to reply! Although I'd rather you didn't, because a) its fun to watch the wailing and gnashing of teeth from a purely psychological point of view and b) its fun to watch people tear Dvorak to pieces.
I was considering moving away from Firefox because of its instability and poor memory usage, but I am so dependent on the extensions that I can not leave. Ironically (in my experience at least), the instability and poor memory usage are directly related to the extensions you're running.
I recently removed a bunch of extensions that I rarely used and I was *blown away* by the difference in performance.
Ummm.... well, would that also include the sites where they would need to go to download alternative browsers? Well, I suspect with even some half-assed organising attempt for such a protest, someone would remember to ask Mozilla to leave up a Firefox download page that was accessible by users.
I'm sure Opera and other browser developers wouldn't be slouching around either - it'd be a prime opportunity for them to peddle their wares.
How about, instead of deliberately locking out IE users (and accidentally locking out some non-IE users due to faulty browser detection), we just made our web pages standards compliant, with all the glory we can muster, and let browsers with faulty implementations lock themselves out? I don't think that'll work - my experience is that when users with faulty browsers see a broken web page, they don't go blaming the browser - they come knocking on the developer's door.
We use to ONLY test in IE, because it was 95% of the market, and it was all we used. Then Firefox came out and changed the scene dramatically, and now all our developers use Firefox, and a big part of our audience does too - so now sometimes we don't test in IE. And when something is broken, IE users whine at us and we go looking and sure enough, there's some weird bug that we missed and now have to work around!
And what, exactly, makes you think that this will get Microsoft to do anything, rather than having a legion of users pissed off at you? Well, Microsoft can get away with IE being a pain in the ass for developers because 95% of end users are not inconvenienced by the problems. Only a small portion of people on the planet (ie, web developers) are frustrated by it, and there's clearly not enough incentive for Microsoft to fix problems because of this.
If, however, they were deluged with support complaints or bad press because a significant proportion of IE users were presented with an error message on their favourite websites, that might provide the impetus for them to change it.
I know that if any web site I went to deliberately locked me out for a day because I use IE, those pricks wouldn't ever see a bit of traffic from me again. You have strong convictions! And thus should be applauded for them. However, what would you do if Google did it (the incentive for them is obvious - they could put a link to Firefox and say "maybe you should try using THIS instead", and then sit back and laugh)? Or some other site that was indispensable to you?
A day organised where all web developers can band together and intentionally not make their sites work for IE, just for one day.
I can't think of anything that would be a more effective protest. A single day where every IE user couldn't access a significant number of sites might make Microsoft sit up and take notice.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's the principle, then don't buy it! Send a letter to Apple to complain about them punishing early adopters - you know, the people that had faith enough buying a first release product from them. I am utterly appalled that they expect me to shell out another $20 for applications that I can get for free if I just jailbreak.
I've been holding out jailbreaking because I figured any apps I wanted I'd be able to get when the SDK was released. Now I'm wondering - are they making it $20 because they know we're not going to have a choice because the SDK is going to suck? Or are they just trying to scam money from early adopters AGAIN before the SDK comes out and makes this package redundant?
He might mean nlite, which I think is the same thing as vlite but for XP.
Good post, agree. Probably already seen it but it should be noted that Jobs has said there'll be a dev kit for the iPhone soon. It's a little vague about what sort of functionality we can expect - I get the feeling from that there might be some concessions they've made, either so Apple can sell you stuff or so the carriers still have some feeling of control. But I'm hoping a nice functional SDK will really make the iPhone (and in my case iPod Touch) shine as a useful device.
I don't know why anyone would feel safer getting into a metal tube that is going to whiz through the sky at a significant fraction of the speed of sound, hanging thousands of meters in the sky, knowing that there are people with guns on board. Even a casual shootout puts the lives of every single person at risk, let alone a pitched battle between terrorists and would-be saviours.
The potential for tragedy, on both a small and large scale, is so great I am forced to believe that the lack of smiley is a simple typo. It would probably make most people a lot more polite as well. People shouldn't be polite because they fear getting shot by some psycho with a gun. They should be polite because it's the socially responsible way to behave.
It happened with nullsoft Waste, a p2p thing that was released by the Nullsoft guys then later yoinked by parent company AOL when they found out about it.
I have vague recollections of parts of it being used in a commercial product (I think from some motherboard manufacturer?) which was similarly later pulled, though I'm not sure why.
It is interesting because it was software that was released under the GPL by a company, and then later revoked. I wonder if this has been tested in court at all?
Surely its not that hard to get real evidence though - just look in your peer list when downloading and see if there's any comcast users seeding to you! That'd be an interesting experiment on some of the bigger torrents. Of course without a frame of reference in terms of numbers it might not be useful data, but at least you'd be able to see if some/any comcast users were uploading.
If you say that too loudly, the giant plasma screen TV industry might go out of business.
I was thinking about buying a plasma/LCD for my bedroom the other day so I could watch some stuff before drifting off. However before I did that I tried my laptop, which of course works perfectly, although finding a comfortable position is a little tricky - it gets quite hot and its like 25-30 celcius at night in my bedroom anyway, so I don't need to get hotter.
However, screen-size wise - I lined up the monitor to where a TV would sit in my room and realised that if I had (say) a 42" plasma, my laptop monitor (12.1") would still give me a bigger apparent picture size, as its so much closer to my head.
mod parent up; this is the correct solution to this problem. I noticed this when I had to download a jillion images; the more I did the slower the process got. I clicked 'clean up' and bam, instant fix.
I've been waiting to hear more about the Hanlin eReader - first heard about it on Slashdot about a year ago. It's e-ink, supports common formats (though its unclear if you have to convert them to its own "Wolf" format first, at least in some of the models) and looks neat.
I thought there already were such laws. I'd rather see less people in the news getting sued by the MPAA/RIAA and more people in the news getting sued for recklessly endangering the health, safety and lives of others, simply by being complete assholes.
No offense, but maybe you should wait until you're almost killed by careless idiocy like the GP was before you say something like this. I was walking home one night and some idiot kids were drinking on the roof of the shopping center near where I live. They saw me walking underneath and threw a half-full beer can at me from 4 stories up. It missed me by a matter of feet.
People should be completely and utterly aware of their actions at all times if there's even a slight chance they might affect the safety and health of other people. I've read too many stories about people getting injured and killed by asshole kids throwing rocks at cars to think that there shouldn't be REALLY serious repercussions for crimes like this, REGARDLESS of whether they hurt someone or not.
What's the difference between intended almost-manslaughter and manslaughter?
I often do the same, not because I expect Google to be able to magically figure out what I want, but because I figure Google have already indexed a page where someone has asked the exact same question before. I frequently use quotes around it (to search for the whole string), when trying to find something really specific and simple (eg, "how much does the earth weigh"). It's really easy to tweak the question to try alternatives.
Heh, that was my first (depressing) thought. This sounds like it would be the ultimate weapon in interstellar combat!
Thanks to the shortages and articles like this, the Wii is the hot item to get for Christmas. This year's Google Zeitgeist has an interesting page showing the surge of Wii searches as we approach the end of the year.
It might sound lame, but this is really the major stumbling block I have with adopting Linux as my desktop OS.
I hate, with a passion, the default massive gumby sized icons and toolbars and everything that appear to be the norm in most Linux VMs. I don't run in 1600x1200 so I can waste half my desktop space with huge icons.
So it seems the answer is "no", based on your comment - which means that arguments that we should be using MPEG4 w/ h.264 as the "open standard" because there's lots of open source software people can use is bogus (at least, for people living under US patent law jurisdiction).
I replied before I read this comment, otherwise I would have modded you up.
We are a small webdev company and I have been trying to make sense of the patent mess as far as video goes for ages, after I spent some time investigating what is required to LEGALLY make video work on the web.
Anyone can build a youtube equivalent using FFMPEG with some simple scripts and other tools chained together. Unfortunately in the process you'd almost certainly be violating various patents. Trying to find out which ones they are, or commercial tools to do the same job, is really not very easy.
I'm currently waiting for a response from MPEG-LA about what's involved in correctly licensing an open source software package (using, say, x264) for h.264 encoding.
I can't figure out at what point the patent issues surrounding open source implementations of (say) h.264 codecs will affect people trying to use them in a commercial environment. For example - if you're in the US (or a country that respects US patent law), can you download and commercially use an open source implementation of h.264 (eg, x264)?
Judging from the fact that binaries for all these tools tend to not be hosted in the US (many of them, such as ffmpeg, state that patent concerns mean they only make source distributions available, and getting binaries involves downloading them from some place that doesn't respect US patent law, or at least its not enforced), I'm guessing there are several issues here. For the WC3 to push an obscure format that nobody uses as the baseline of web video of the future is absurd. I disagree with this; I think the biggest stumbling block we have in terms of web video is the patent-heavy situation we have (assuming my thoughts on potentially patent-infringing FOSS software is correct).
I put it to you that Slashdot are also professional trolls, by the same logic.
I'm sure this article only exists on Slashdot because editors know that the community will froth and rage about another ill-informed Dvorak piece. I love reading the comments because they're inevitably the same - "why do Slashdot keep posting Dvorak articles?S??!!?@#".
The answer is, because you keep reading them and replying them and contributing to their traffic. If you want to see them stop, resist the temptation to reply! Although I'd rather you didn't, because a) its fun to watch the wailing and gnashing of teeth from a purely psychological point of view and b) its fun to watch people tear Dvorak to pieces.
I recently removed a bunch of extensions that I rarely used and I was *blown away* by the difference in performance.
I'm sure Opera and other browser developers wouldn't be slouching around either - it'd be a prime opportunity for them to peddle their wares.
We use to ONLY test in IE, because it was 95% of the market, and it was all we used. Then Firefox came out and changed the scene dramatically, and now all our developers use Firefox, and a big part of our audience does too - so now sometimes we don't test in IE. And when something is broken, IE users whine at us and we go looking and sure enough, there's some weird bug that we missed and now have to work around!
If, however, they were deluged with support complaints or bad press because a significant proportion of IE users were presented with an error message on their favourite websites, that might provide the impetus for them to change it. I know that if any web site I went to deliberately locked me out for a day because I use IE, those pricks wouldn't ever see a bit of traffic from me again. You have strong convictions! And thus should be applauded for them. However, what would you do if Google did it (the incentive for them is obvious - they could put a link to Firefox and say "maybe you should try using THIS instead", and then sit back and laugh)? Or some other site that was indispensable to you?
You know what I was thinking would be cool?
A day organised where all web developers can band together and intentionally not make their sites work for IE, just for one day.
I can't think of anything that would be a more effective protest. A single day where every IE user couldn't access a significant number of sites might make Microsoft sit up and take notice.