Does anyone have suggestions for how to deal with Verizon or other phone companies who want to get rid of the copper? Any idea how to talk to them in such a way that they'll actually leave it alone and usable?
Note that just getting them to leave the copper from the pole to your house isn't necessarily enough. In other discussions of this, people have reported that the wires were left intact, but the copper wires were removed past the poles (probably after the last house on a block was converted to fibre). If you want to revert to copper for some reason, it won't do you much good if the copper stops at the pole and there's no connectivity to the POTS system.
So is there a way for a customer to force them to leave the POTS system intact and usable? Or can they legally just shut it down after the last house in a block has fibre?
At our house, we have a funny reverse situation: A few years ago, when we decided to get DSL over the phone line, they said they had to replace the wire to the house, and they did so. But the old wire is still there, dangling from the attachment point under the roof, and lying in a coil on the ground. I mentioned this to their CS people a couple of times, they said they'd do something about it, and nobody ever showed up. I checked, and my suspicion was correct: That useless wire is owned by Verizon, it's outside my house, and it's illegal for me to do anything with it. Not that it really matters, since it isn't electrified, but leaving old wires dangling and/or coiled on the ground somehow doesn't seem like a Best Practice...
They told me they had to pull the copper and I believed them.
It's likely true that "they" (i.e., the workers that were at your house) had to pull the copper, because their bosses ordered them to do so. However, there's no law saying that the phone company has to do this. The phone company is ordering their workers to do it to eliminate the competetive "market" that they are required to provide over the copper wires but not over fibre.
Hey, I'm a software guy, what do I know?
As a software guy, you should be very familiar with the concept of "weasel words". The software industry is heavily dependent on sales contracts that are carefully worded to say something different than what a non-attorney customer thinks the words say.
You do get to defray your student loans for a couple more years and keep going to those college keggers, but then again if you are a graduate engineering student...chances are you aren't going to those.
Heh. I was a Comp Sci grad student a couple decades ago, with a lot of credits in the early bio-informatics area, and I worked for a number of biological departments as their computer geek to pay my way. I recall quite a number of parties with assorted bowls of "punch" that were spiked with significant quantities of clinical ethanol. That stuff has no flavor, so you have no idea how much ethanol you've consumed. We all understood that there are good reasons for the use of highly-purified ethanol in all sorts of research, but it was routine to (innocently) comment on how much of the stuff the department keeps on hand. Or tries to. All for research, of course.
Somehow, I doubt that the "need" for clinical ethanol in academia has decreased since then, or will in the foreseeable future.
Well, our roof is held up by lots and lots of the cell walls from dead plants (trees).
We do have neighbors whose roof is held up by piled up stones, in the form of that artificial conglomerate stone called "concrete". But most of the neighborhood's houses are made up primarily of dead-tree cell walls.
Cellulose and lignin can make for fairly strong walls, as long as you don't pile them up too far. Of course, sequoias do manage to make a sturdy pile of cell walls that are taller than the buildings that most of us live in, but I wouldn't recommend trying to make a building that tall out of sequoia skeletons.
But how is that even a useful comparison? We're failing, in my opinion, to live up to our own ideals. Why is it even worth _mentioning_ that there are places that fail even more dramatically to live up to our ideals?
It's worth mentioning because the topic is "Replacing a Thinkpad", and some people consider more than just price when they buy things. In particular, some people here are obviously aware of the slave-like conditions in some parts of the world, especially several east-Asian countries, and would like to avoid supporting such economies even if it costs them a few more dollars.
If you consider price the only significant thing, you should just skip over these kinds of message threads. But objecting to them will fall on many deaf ears, as some of us do take more than price into account, incomprehensible as that may seem to others.
It may also be worth mentioning that slavery still exists in the US. Perhaps not to the level that it exists in China, Malasia, and other countries, but there are US court cases dealing with it every year. Some of the US sweatshops are producing goods for some well-known companies. If you consider this significant, you might look into it, too. Such problems aren't limited to just China and a few other poor countries.
(For that matter, there is also non-slave labor in China. Thought you might like to know.;-)
| And don't change the argument, within cities, DSL is available in even the poorest areas.
Hmmm... I live in a middle-class suburb of Boston, and a few years ago I checked with getting DSL from our neighborhood phone monopoly (Verizon). They told me that they couldn't do it, because our house was too far from their office.
However, there was this funny bit of "government regulation" that forced them to make their lines available to other comm companies (for a price, of course). I contacted speakeasy, and they said "Sure; we can do it." They did, and it worked fine. And their support was very good, even (or especially) to nerds like us who run a linux gateway at home with several machines of different types behind it. Some months after that I again checked with Verizon. They not only didn't know that we were getting DLS over their phone line; they told me again that it wasn't possible because we were too far away.
Now, a few years later, they're working on getting us to switch to FiOS. Part of this includes ripping out the copper wires. This would end our use of speakeasy's service, since the FCC doesn't require leasing out FiOS lines to other companies. We'd have a faster line (maybe), but we'd get "Windows only" support and they'd block ports like SMTP, HTTP, and SSH. And they'd mess with Skype packets, which my wife's employer uses for conferencing with people working at home.
I don't think that profitability is the only thing going on here. Speakeasy is profitable for our house, despite a markup because they have to lease the line from Verizon. So Verizon should have wanted to supply the service. But they refused, even after speakeasy showed that it was possible and profitable. But Verizon is pushing a new service that would give them a monopoly and allow them to rip out the old copper wires (where they have to allow competition). The evidence is consistent with the idea that their motive is primarily power. They want to be a monopoly, but they don't want to supply service in a competetive arena even when they can. And they don't want to let in others (corporate or government) who can supply the service that they refuse to supply.
Methinks that a simple-minded capitalistic theology can't explain this behavior at all. You need to bring in concepts such as power and control to make any sense of it. Capitalist motivation would supply a service whenever it's profitable, and it's clearly profitable at our house. Refusing to do this and using politics to block others from supplying the service implies that there's some motive very different from profitability.
No, if you have a restrictive locked-in license with the OEMs, then you don't have to have a 'quality product'... Well, if you can't go into a computer shop and buy anything but Windows on a PC, then of course it's GOING TO SELL!
Yeah; I probably should include these observations along with the more basic "marketing clout" argument. They are all part of the same basic process, of course. Microsoft started off as an IBM contractor, and the primary reason for their initial success was the fact that their product was included in a box with the letters "IBM" on the outside. The marketing was done by IBM, who had already managed to establish a situation where "IBM machine" and "computer" were synonyms to most of the business community and the media. This is still true, of course; most of the MS-Windows systems I've seen in the corporate world still have the IBM logo on the outside. Some places have Dell or HP desktops, but business folk still mostly hold the letters "IBM" in reverence.
A number of analyses have pointed out that the main win for Microsoft was the way that they managed to keep the ownership of PC-DOS. The theory is that IBM's management wasn't prepared for what could be done with this, partly because their huge success in adopting the VM OS (which came out of academia) as their fundamental OS. They won't make this sort of mistake again, of course; they now understand the damage that can be done by someone who controls a proprietary, "black box" OS. It's too late for them to rein in Microsoft, but IBM and MS do have a rather stable (if a bit uneasy) business relationship.
There is the conjecture that what will eventually bring MS down is their growing practice of restricting what can run on their OS to only "Microsoft approved" products. This is slowly choking the life out of independent software development. The result will be to make the MS-Windows platform more and more like the all-in-one "boom-box" sound systems. Good enough if you want to just buy a box that "does everything". But inevitably the components of such systems are mostly just good enough to sell and no better. There has always been a large market for component audio and video equipment, because a large part of the population prefers the better quality and will tolerate small inter-operability problems to get quality. Similarly, OSX, Solaris and linux systems actively encourage independent software development, leading to much higher quality in many of the available "components". As Microsoft chokes off independent development, this can only help the platforms that cooperate and encourage independent developers of quality software.
But maybe we shouldn't talk about this much. If MS's management comes to appreciate this issue, they might not continue on their power-grabbing pathway. Maybe. It's interesting to think about, anyway. And it might be safe to discuss it openly, since the management of market-leader companies tend to have a strong "NIH" attitude, and don't pay attention to such criticism.
Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level with some of the best software around.
Not true. Vista is quite capable of "competing" in the same way that all Microsoft software has always competed with higher-quality software from competitors: Microsoft's marketing budget is larger than the marketing budgets of all its competitors combined. This is what made MS-DOS the instant success it was over the much better (at the time) CP-M. It's what made MS Windows more successful than the better Apple and unix (X-Windows) offerings.
Microsoft has understood from the start the lesson that IBM (their initial funder) pioneered in the 1960s and 70s: If you have a big enough marketing budget, it doesn't matter whether you have a quality product. Computer customers mostly can't judge quality; they buy entirely on "reputation", i.e., marketing.
Consider the piece of crap that were Windows ME and Windows 2000. They did just fine, despite the long list of quality problems reported in the tech media (but never noticed by 90% of the buying public). There's no real reason to believe that Vista will do any worse. All it takes is the right marketing, and Microsoft has the budget to do it.
I am more of a consumer who believes in the power of capitalism. As long as the phone company in question outlines their company policies I can make my own decision on which company behaves the way I like.
Lucky you, that you have so many phone companies (or maybe ISPs) to choose from. Most people have one (or zero;-) such "choice". For most of us, if we don't like the phone company's policies, we can just move somewhere else where we like the local monopoly's policies. Then, of course, that company might change their policies after we've been there a month, but we can always just sell our house, pack up, and move again, right?
The idea that the gov't can force companies to behave politically in whatever wind controls the gov't at the time is scary to me.
Perhaps, but the idea that a private corporation that's answerable to nobody but their shareholders and/or private owners is even scarier. That's the system that we here in the US had a revolution to get rid of. At least with our current government here, there is a chance that voters can change policies. I'd agree that one person doesn't count for much in even the most democratic governments, but my opinion counts for exactly zero to the rulers of the typical giant corporation, whether their monopoly is de jure or de facto. And I have no right to look into the inner workings of any private corporation.
Now if there were only some way to overthrow the government's right to grant and enforce legal monopolies, so that corporations like Verizon would actually have to face competition.
Actually, we have the Verizon monopoly where I live, but the government regulators have seen fit to force them to allow a sort of semi-competitive market, and we get our Internet service over their wires from speakeasy.net, which has excellent customer support (even if you run linux;-). But we are facing a forced switchover to FiOS, which doesn't have such rules and includes legally terminating POTS service. So we might not have even that minimum sort of free market here for much longer. Then we'll be back to the usual situation where, for example, we won't have free speech on the Internet partly because we won't be permitted to run web, email or ssh servers. Instead, we'll store all our communications on their servers, so they can examine it and do with it as they like.
Wild-west rugged capitalism sounds fine, but in communications, reality is that the big corporations and the governments hold hands and cooperate to make sure that you and I aren't permitted to engage in a free market.
Extradition treaties don't allow the US government to apply US laws to Swedish nationals acting completely in accordance with Swedish law on Swedish soil
The current US administration uses the term "irrelevant" for such things. What they do is send someone in to kidnap you, and fly you off to some hidden part of the world where they work you over for a few years. Then, when they tire of you, they fly you to some other part of the world, kick you out of the plane, and leave you to find your own way home.
Y'all know what cases I'm talking about, right?
There's no reason to expect the Bush administration to honor Swedish law any more than they honored, say, German law.
At this point the Russians did the very Russian thing of making a point in principle. Is the OS suited or not no longer matters in the slightest. They will simply no longer do educational business with Microsoft in principle and this is it.
Add to this the recent stories about Microsoft software that updates itself silently, even when you turn off the auto-update, and MS's explanation of why this is the right thing for them to do. A Russian administrator would have to be really stupid (or really on the take) to approve of anything from Microsoft. Granted, a lot of them may do so, but that's just evidence of how stupid (or on the take) they are. So part of the story might be that at the very top, Russian administrators no longer trust any software made in the USA.
But with the BSA story, it does sorta sound like MS is trying its best to get Russians to buy from someone else.
I explained how to copy the ".desktop" file from another program and edit it, and he started making icons for all the programs he didn't have icons for (many of which require command-line arguments, but oh well).
Hmmm... I'd never heard of.desktop files, so I used find(1) to hunt down all of them on a nearby linux machine. It found only one:
~/.kde/share/apps/RecentDocuments/.desktop That isn't a very big sample set, but of course I cat'd it:
This is total gibberish to me. Is it documented somewhere that's handy? Google didn't help, because of course it strips off the '.' and finds zillions of matches. I found one hit for "man -k.desktop", pointing to dh_desktop(1), but the content of this doc doesn't give many clues about creating or using such files. It only says that this command "registers".desktop files, whatever the hell that means. There's no mention of the format of the file, or of the [dbhelper options] on the command line.
So where would a curious kid learn about such things? First off, what good are they? (I.e., what can you do with them, besides "register" them?;=]
Sorry to be so ignorant; I've only been using linux for a decade or so, so I don't know everything about all of it.
But, most people in the general population think that Computer=Windows.
You're making a common mistake here. To illustrate what it is, I'll just mention that on numerous occasions, I've got a lot of "Windows" diehards very confused when I show them my linux box, and point out that the screen is covered with "windows". Then I mention that there's nothing from Microsoft on the machine at all - but it obviously "runs windows", because you can see them on the screen. If I'm not near a non-MS computer, it sometimes works to say that my computer has "windows", but they're not "Microsoft windows". (And if I have a chance, I'll mention that my windows run better than Microsoft's, and invite they to a demo if they'd like.)
Just using the "Windows" trademark alone is a bad idea, because you're in effect saying that other OSs can't do windows. Most people "know" that you have to have windows on your screen to use a computer, so obviously if you don't have windows, your computer isn't usable.
It's sorta like RMS's desire that everyone add "GNU" to "linux". You should always say "Microsoft" before "Windows" when you're talking about that particular brand of windows. Then maybe you'll stand a chance of getting somewhere.
The first problem is convincing people that windows are found on other machines than those that come from Microsoft. And you can't do that by telling people that they shouldn't run Windows, because they won't hear the capital letter in your voice.
Aside from the jaw area, how would the skeleton of the cassowary differ from a velociraptor?
Two main differences: A velociraptor has two arms with claws on the end, while a cassowary has short, vestigial wings. And a velociraptor has a long, slender tail, while a cassowary has a typical bird-like stump of a tail.
There are also lots of other small differences, of course. But velociraptors and cassowaries are distant relatives, and their skeletons are as notable for their similarities as their differences. Even though they're both two-legged runners, their skeletons are much more like each other than like ours.
OTOH, among my pictures that I like to impress people with are several with me standing with an arm around a very friendly emu. The critter was a pet of some friends. It really liked having its head and neck scratched, just like our cockatiels and conure do. They made an emu-egg omelet when I was visiting last year, which fed 6 people breakfast.
Emus do have some serious-looking claws on their feet, though. I don't think I'd want to get too close to one that wasn't tame.
Considering that our favorite pets are actually vicious predators, I'd imagine that if velociraptors had survived, we would have probably made them into pets, too.
... Archaeopteryx, generally accepted as the first bird, may be an ancestor of Velociraptor, which would then be a flightless bird.
Minor quibble: Some of the bird fossils recently found in China are dated to a few millions years before the earliest Archaeopterix fossils, and appear somewhat more modern in many respects. It's more likely that Archaeopterix was in a clade that branched off early, and died out. But this is all still a lot of speculation, as there are significant error bars on all the dates. Maybe we'll eventually get a lot more fossils (or narrower date ranges) that will clarify the relations between those critters.
In any case, the leading theories for a couple decades now have most of the theropod dinosaurs (and maybe others) with feathers. It seems fairly clear that feathers evolved first as insulation, and flight feathers were a much later adaptation that seems to have worked out pretty well. But feathers (like hair) don't fossilize well, so we may never really know when they first evolved.
Actually, if you count installed copies of OSs, the overwhelming majority of them are open source. This is because the leader world wide, by a very wide margin, is the TRON real-time OS, which is installed in the majority of electronic devices manufactured in Asia. This OS started as a project at Tokyo University, led by Dr Ken Sakamura, and it was open source from the start. Of course, there are all sorts of proprietary packages added to it by various manufacturers. But as with linux, the core and the primary system libraries remain open-source, free software, developed in parallel at a large number of universities and corporations.
I've read that Microsoft predicts that Windows will reach a billion installations some time next year. TRON is installed in more (mostly tiny) computers than that each year. You probably have a number of them in your home, or in your pocket if you have certain models of cell phone.
Desktop and laptop computers may be the most noticable computers, but they're a rather small part of the computer market. The biggest part of the market went open-source several decades back. And it was done with full knowledge and approval of the manufacturers, who wanted a standard, portable real-time OS with a population of programmers who know how to use it effectively.
BTW, there is a linux-on-TRON project. Google for "MontaVista" or "T-Linux".
You might also read the article about TRON that Linux Insider just published.
It's sorta sad that the US government has cooperated with blocking widespread familiarity with this here in the US. It's keeping American software people from getting involved with what's probably the most significant development in the industry in recent decades. (I've read a few comments about similar blocking in Europe, but I don't know much about that.)
> >Every significant non free program has roots in some kind of free software.
>I thought it was the other way around - free software has its roots in creating free alternatives to non-free software.
Actually, of course, it's both ways. But free -> private happens a lot more than private -> free, for fairly simple and obvious reasons. The non-free, private software owners generally don't let us see their source, so building on their achievements is difficult (and lawsuit-prone). The free, open-source software developers make their stuff available, so anyone can build on it, making life easy for the private developers. And they tend not to sue, partly because it's difficult to prove that someone has used your code unless you can see their code.
I've always liked the comparison with the rest of the science/engineering enterprise. Historically, scientific and engineering methods have been developed independently over and over again, in every society. But most of this has been dead-end development, because new discoveries and techniques are kept secret in "guilds" and other similar organizations. The big explosion in science and technology in Europe a few centuries ago wasn't due to discovery of new research methods. It was the result of a population that developed an "open publication" ethic. This made it possible for researchers and engineers to build on each others' knowledge. Isaac Newton expressed it well with his famous remark that "If I have seen farther, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants". (Actually, what he really wrote was "Pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident.;-) And historians have pointed out that he even did this in that sentence, which is a variant on things said by others in previous centuries.
But we still have a problem with private, proprietary information. Many people support this, for various reasons. But it is almost always a dead end, because it prevents others from building on your development. And, as has happened over centuries in the rest of science and engineering, the future will belong to the software people who are willing to open their code for others to build on. Reverse engineering is possible, but it's expensive to "reinvent the wheel" all the time. It's usually easier to take something that someone else has developed, and extend it to do what you need. And, if such extension are made available, the result tends to be something that's much more useful for everyone.
But this isn't a concept that software people just invented. It's the entire basis of modern science and engineering. Without open publication, we'd still be back at the level of 15th- or 16th-century technology. And, as others have observed, private software tends to be low-quality parodies of something that the open-software crowd did years ago (but the commercial world never noticed). Either that, or the private developers just take the open software and use it without attribution, something that I've personally seen over and over in lots of corporate contracting jobs.
Lecture puts me to sleep. If it's an active dialog, my brain is fully engaged and there's no way my mind can wander. I got an A in that class.
Reminds me of a remark that I've seen in a few places: The classroom lecture is the best method yet discovered for teaching students who can't read.
Actually, I remember reading years ago a study of the efficacy of various teaching methods. The lecture method came out inferior to all the other methods tested. Not that it was ineffective; it mostly just used a lot more time to get any particular information across. So, of course, it's the method most used by our school system.
A video recording of a lecture illustrates the problem nicely: It's faster than the actual lecture, because the student can fast-forward through the parts that they already know. And it's more effective for the opposite reason: The student can back up and repeat something that they didn't catch the first time.
For a good reader, printed material speeds up both of these actions significantly, so for topics that don't actually require moving pictures, a printed text (or computer display) tends to be the fastest. The main disadvantage of computer texts is that they are mostly limited to less than one screenful at a time, and searching through a large text is often much slower than flipping through pages of a book. Eventually computer people might come up with a good solution to this defect. (This may have already been done, but if so, the method isn't widely known.)
What's up with the OSI protocols? NIH I guess. Lets all re-invent the wheel instead.
That's not the problem that I saw, 15 or 20 years back, when I was involved in a number of OSI implementation projects. We were in fact looking at several competing protocols, with the idea of implementing them all and developing test suites to determine their good and bad points.
But something interesting happened on all the OSI projects: We'd need the specs, of course, and you couldn't download them. You had to order the hard copy. This meant going through the usual corporate red tape for ordering stuff. You'd fill out a requirement doc, get it ok'd. You'd fill out a purchase req, figure out whose signatures you needed, and have the secretaries work on collecting the signatures. You'd mail off the order, and wait.
Meanwhile, since there was a lot of waiting to do, we'd work on the IP version. We'd download the RFCs, spend an hour or so reading and a few hourse discussing, and then we'd sit down at a terminal and start coding. We'd be at the testing stage within a day, and have usable results in a few days. By the time the OSI specs showed up on our desks, we'd have had the IP version up and running for weeks. While we were reading the OSI specs (always much larger than the IP specs), we'd have users getting experience with the IP version, and sending in bug reports and/or change/feature requests. By the time we finally got an OSI version to the alpha stage, the IP version would be ready to send to the first customers.
If the OSI gang had had the sense to make their docs available free on the Internet, they might not have lost so badly. But by trying to make the specs a profit center, and by using a different competing delivery network (the postal system), they put a major time blockade in the way of developers. So they lost out big time to IP.
I've never been all that convinced that IP was any better than OSI, especially now with the big migration to IPv6 peering over the horizon. But I never really got a good chance to test them and compare their capabilities. The OSI version of our code was always so far behind the IP version that the whole issue was moot. IP won every race, because OSI was so slow out of the starting box. And that was because we developers couldn't get out hands on the specs in a timely manner.
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Does anyone have suggestions for how to deal with Verizon or other phone companies who want to get rid of the copper? Any idea how to talk to them in such a way that they'll actually leave it alone and usable?
...
Note that just getting them to leave the copper from the pole to your house isn't necessarily enough. In other discussions of this, people have reported that the wires were left intact, but the copper wires were removed past the poles (probably after the last house on a block was converted to fibre). If you want to revert to copper for some reason, it won't do you much good if the copper stops at the pole and there's no connectivity to the POTS system.
So is there a way for a customer to force them to leave the POTS system intact and usable? Or can they legally just shut it down after the last house in a block has fibre?
At our house, we have a funny reverse situation: A few years ago, when we decided to get DSL over the phone line, they said they had to replace the wire to the house, and they did so. But the old wire is still there, dangling from the attachment point under the roof, and lying in a coil on the ground. I mentioned this to their CS people a couple of times, they said they'd do something about it, and nobody ever showed up. I checked, and my suspicion was correct: That useless wire is owned by Verizon, it's outside my house, and it's illegal for me to do anything with it. Not that it really matters, since it isn't electrified, but leaving old wires dangling and/or coiled on the ground somehow doesn't seem like a Best Practice
They told me they had to pull the copper and I believed them.
It's likely true that "they" (i.e., the workers that were at your house) had to pull the copper, because their bosses ordered them to do so. However, there's no law saying that the phone company has to do this. The phone company is ordering their workers to do it to eliminate the competetive "market" that they are required to provide over the copper wires but not over fibre.
Hey, I'm a software guy, what do I know?
As a software guy, you should be very familiar with the concept of "weasel words". The software industry is heavily dependent on sales contracts that are carefully worded to say something different than what a non-attorney customer thinks the words say.
You do get to defray your student loans for a couple more years and keep going to those college keggers, but then again if you are a graduate engineering student...chances are you aren't going to those.
;-)
Heh. I was a Comp Sci grad student a couple decades ago, with a lot of credits in the early bio-informatics area, and I worked for a number of biological departments as their computer geek to pay my way. I recall quite a number of parties with assorted bowls of "punch" that were spiked with significant quantities of clinical ethanol. That stuff has no flavor, so you have no idea how much ethanol you've consumed. We all understood that there are good reasons for the use of highly-purified ethanol in all sorts of research, but it was routine to (innocently) comment on how much of the stuff the department keeps on hand. Or tries to. All for research, of course.
Somehow, I doubt that the "need" for clinical ethanol in academia has decreased since then, or will in the foreseeable future.
But I'd agree that we didn't have "keggers".
Well, our roof is held up by lots and lots of the cell walls from dead plants (trees).
We do have neighbors whose roof is held up by piled up stones, in the form of that artificial conglomerate stone called "concrete". But most of the neighborhood's houses are made up primarily of dead-tree cell walls.
Cellulose and lignin can make for fairly strong walls, as long as you don't pile them up too far. Of course, sequoias do manage to make a sturdy pile of cell walls that are taller than the buildings that most of us live in, but I wouldn't recommend trying to make a building that tall out of sequoia skeletons.
Better yet let's just start sending people shit and billing them for it! I mean, what about the people without computers or Internet?
There's far too much prior art for that to be patentable. After all, that's the way that every government ever known has worked.
But how is that even a useful comparison? We're failing, in my opinion, to live up to our own ideals. Why is it even worth _mentioning_ that there are places that fail even more dramatically to live up to our ideals?
;-)
It's worth mentioning because the topic is "Replacing a Thinkpad", and some people consider more than just price when they buy things. In particular, some people here are obviously aware of the slave-like conditions in some parts of the world, especially several east-Asian countries, and would like to avoid supporting such economies even if it costs them a few more dollars.
If you consider price the only significant thing, you should just skip over these kinds of message threads. But objecting to them will fall on many deaf ears, as some of us do take more than price into account, incomprehensible as that may seem to others.
It may also be worth mentioning that slavery still exists in the US. Perhaps not to the level that it exists in China, Malasia, and other countries, but there are US court cases dealing with it every year. Some of the US sweatshops are producing goods for some well-known companies. If you consider this significant, you might look into it, too. Such problems aren't limited to just China and a few other poor countries.
(For that matter, there is also non-slave labor in China. Thought you might like to know.
| And don't change the argument, within cities, DSL is available in even the poorest areas.
... I live in a middle-class suburb of Boston, and a few years ago I checked with getting DSL from our neighborhood phone monopoly (Verizon). They told me that they couldn't do it, because our house was too far from their office.
Hmmm
However, there was this funny bit of "government regulation" that forced them to make their lines available to other comm companies (for a price, of course). I contacted speakeasy, and they said "Sure; we can do it." They did, and it worked fine. And their support was very good, even (or especially) to nerds like us who run a linux gateway at home with several machines of different types behind it. Some months after that I again checked with Verizon. They not only didn't know that we were getting DLS over their phone line; they told me again that it wasn't possible because we were too far away.
Now, a few years later, they're working on getting us to switch to FiOS. Part of this includes ripping out the copper wires. This would end our use of speakeasy's service, since the FCC doesn't require leasing out FiOS lines to other companies. We'd have a faster line (maybe), but we'd get "Windows only" support and they'd block ports like SMTP, HTTP, and SSH. And they'd mess with Skype packets, which my wife's employer uses for conferencing with people working at home.
I don't think that profitability is the only thing going on here. Speakeasy is profitable for our house, despite a markup because they have to lease the line from Verizon. So Verizon should have wanted to supply the service. But they refused, even after speakeasy showed that it was possible and profitable. But Verizon is pushing a new service that would give them a monopoly and allow them to rip out the old copper wires (where they have to allow competition). The evidence is consistent with the idea that their motive is primarily power. They want to be a monopoly, but they don't want to supply service in a competetive arena even when they can. And they don't want to let in others (corporate or government) who can supply the service that they refuse to supply.
Methinks that a simple-minded capitalistic theology can't explain this behavior at all. You need to bring in concepts such as power and control to make any sense of it. Capitalist motivation would supply a service whenever it's profitable, and it's clearly profitable at our house. Refusing to do this and using politics to block others from supplying the service implies that there's some motive very different from profitability.
No, if you have a restrictive locked-in license with the OEMs, then you don't have to have a 'quality product' ...
Well, if you can't go into a computer shop and buy anything but Windows on a PC, then of course it's GOING TO SELL!
Yeah; I probably should include these observations along with the more basic "marketing clout" argument. They are all part of the same basic process, of course. Microsoft started off as an IBM contractor, and the primary reason for their initial success was the fact that their product was included in a box with the letters "IBM" on the outside. The marketing was done by IBM, who had already managed to establish a situation where "IBM machine" and "computer" were synonyms to most of the business community and the media. This is still true, of course; most of the MS-Windows systems I've seen in the corporate world still have the IBM logo on the outside. Some places have Dell or HP desktops, but business folk still mostly hold the letters "IBM" in reverence.
A number of analyses have pointed out that the main win for Microsoft was the way that they managed to keep the ownership of PC-DOS. The theory is that IBM's management wasn't prepared for what could be done with this, partly because their huge success in adopting the VM OS (which came out of academia) as their fundamental OS. They won't make this sort of mistake again, of course; they now understand the damage that can be done by someone who controls a proprietary, "black box" OS. It's too late for them to rein in Microsoft, but IBM and MS do have a rather stable (if a bit uneasy) business relationship.
There is the conjecture that what will eventually bring MS down is their growing practice of restricting what can run on their OS to only "Microsoft approved" products. This is slowly choking the life out of independent software development. The result will be to make the MS-Windows platform more and more like the all-in-one "boom-box" sound systems. Good enough if you want to just buy a box that "does everything". But inevitably the components of such systems are mostly just good enough to sell and no better. There has always been a large market for component audio and video equipment, because a large part of the population prefers the better quality and will tolerate small inter-operability problems to get quality. Similarly, OSX, Solaris and linux systems actively encourage independent software development, leading to much higher quality in many of the available "components". As Microsoft chokes off independent development, this can only help the platforms that cooperate and encourage independent developers of quality software.
But maybe we shouldn't talk about this much. If MS's management comes to appreciate this issue, they might not continue on their power-grabbing pathway. Maybe. It's interesting to think about, anyway. And it might be safe to discuss it openly, since the management of market-leader companies tend to have a strong "NIH" attitude, and don't pay attention to such criticism.
Vista is simply not capable of competing at an OS level with some of the best software around.
...
Not true. Vista is quite capable of "competing" in the same way that all Microsoft software has always competed with higher-quality software from competitors: Microsoft's marketing budget is larger than the marketing budgets of all its competitors combined. This is what made MS-DOS the instant success it was over the much better (at the time) CP-M. It's what made MS Windows more successful than the better Apple and unix (X-Windows) offerings.
Microsoft has understood from the start the lesson that IBM (their initial funder) pioneered in the 1960s and 70s: If you have a big enough marketing budget, it doesn't matter whether you have a quality product. Computer customers mostly can't judge quality; they buy entirely on "reputation", i.e., marketing.
Consider the piece of crap that were Windows ME and Windows 2000. They did just fine, despite the long list of quality problems reported in the tech media (but never noticed by 90% of the buying public). There's no real reason to believe that Vista will do any worse. All it takes is the right marketing, and Microsoft has the budget to do it.
I'd love to be proved wrong, but
I am more of a consumer who believes in the power of capitalism. As long as the phone company in question outlines their company policies I can make my own decision on which company behaves the way I like.
;-) such "choice". For most of us, if we don't like the phone company's policies, we can just move somewhere else where we like the local monopoly's policies. Then, of course, that company might change their policies after we've been there a month, but we can always just sell our house, pack up, and move again, right?
;-). But we are facing a forced switchover to FiOS, which doesn't have such rules and includes legally terminating POTS service. So we might not have even that minimum sort of free market here for much longer. Then we'll be back to the usual situation where, for example, we won't have free speech on the Internet partly because we won't be permitted to run web, email or ssh servers. Instead, we'll store all our communications on their servers, so they can examine it and do with it as they like.
Lucky you, that you have so many phone companies (or maybe ISPs) to choose from. Most people have one (or zero
The idea that the gov't can force companies to behave politically in whatever wind controls the gov't at the time is scary to me.
Perhaps, but the idea that a private corporation that's answerable to nobody but their shareholders and/or private owners is even scarier. That's the system that we here in the US had a revolution to get rid of. At least with our current government here, there is a chance that voters can change policies. I'd agree that one person doesn't count for much in even the most democratic governments, but my opinion counts for exactly zero to the rulers of the typical giant corporation, whether their monopoly is de jure or de facto. And I have no right to look into the inner workings of any private corporation.
Now if there were only some way to overthrow the government's right to grant and enforce legal monopolies, so that corporations like Verizon would actually have to face competition.
Actually, we have the Verizon monopoly where I live, but the government regulators have seen fit to force them to allow a sort of semi-competitive market, and we get our Internet service over their wires from speakeasy.net, which has excellent customer support (even if you run linux
Wild-west rugged capitalism sounds fine, but in communications, reality is that the big corporations and the governments hold hands and cooperate to make sure that you and I aren't permitted to engage in a free market.
The concept of corruption is not part of our system.
Hey, you wouldn't happen to have any bridges for sale, would you?
Extradition treaties don't allow the US government to apply US laws to Swedish nationals acting completely in accordance with Swedish law on Swedish soil
The current US administration uses the term "irrelevant" for such things. What they do is send someone in to kidnap you, and fly you off to some hidden part of the world where they work you over for a few years. Then, when they tire of you, they fly you to some other part of the world, kick you out of the plane, and leave you to find your own way home.
Y'all know what cases I'm talking about, right?
There's no reason to expect the Bush administration to honor Swedish law any more than they honored, say, German law.
At this point the Russians did the very Russian thing of making a point in principle. Is the OS suited or not no longer matters in the slightest. They will simply no longer do educational business with Microsoft in principle and this is it.
You may have a very good point. However, there's likely something else at work here: the widespread belief in Russia (and a lot of the world) about American software's role in that big explosion of a Siberian pipeline in the summer of 1982.
Add to this the recent stories about Microsoft software that updates itself silently, even when you turn off the auto-update, and MS's explanation of why this is the right thing for them to do. A Russian administrator would have to be really stupid (or really on the take) to approve of anything from Microsoft. Granted, a lot of them may do so, but that's just evidence of how stupid (or on the take) they are. So part of the story might be that at the very top, Russian administrators no longer trust any software made in the USA.
But with the BSA story, it does sorta sound like MS is trying its best to get Russians to buy from someone else.
I explained how to copy the ".desktop" file from another program and edit it, and he started making icons for all the programs he didn't have icons for (many of which require command-line arguments, but oh well).
... I'd never heard of .desktop files, so I used find(1) to hunt down all of them on a nearby linux machine. It found only one:
.desktop", pointing to dh_desktop(1), but the content of this doc doesn't give many clues about creating or using such files. It only says that this command "registers" .desktop files, whatever the hell that means. There's no mention of the format of the file, or of the [dbhelper options] on the command line.
;=]
Hmmm
~/.kde/share/apps/RecentDocuments/.desktop
That isn't a very big sample set, but of course I cat'd it:
[Desktop Entry]
Icon=folder
Name=
Type=Link
URL=file:///
X-KDE-LastOpenedWith=kfmclient_dir
This is total gibberish to me. Is it documented somewhere that's handy? Google didn't help, because of course it strips off the '.' and finds zillions of matches. I found one hit for "man -k
So where would a curious kid learn about such things? First off, what good are they? (I.e., what can you do with them, besides "register" them?
Sorry to be so ignorant; I've only been using linux for a decade or so, so I don't know everything about all of it.
But, most people in the general population think that Computer=Windows.
You're making a common mistake here. To illustrate what it is, I'll just mention that on numerous occasions, I've got a lot of "Windows" diehards very confused when I show them my linux box, and point out that the screen is covered with "windows". Then I mention that there's nothing from Microsoft on the machine at all - but it obviously "runs windows", because you can see them on the screen. If I'm not near a non-MS computer, it sometimes works to say that my computer has "windows", but they're not "Microsoft windows". (And if I have a chance, I'll mention that my windows run better than Microsoft's, and invite they to a demo if they'd like.)
Just using the "Windows" trademark alone is a bad idea, because you're in effect saying that other OSs can't do windows. Most people "know" that you have to have windows on your screen to use a computer, so obviously if you don't have windows, your computer isn't usable.
It's sorta like RMS's desire that everyone add "GNU" to "linux". You should always say "Microsoft" before "Windows" when you're talking about that particular brand of windows. Then maybe you'll stand a chance of getting somewhere.
The first problem is convincing people that windows are found on other machines than those that come from Microsoft. And you can't do that by telling people that they shouldn't run Windows, because they won't hear the capital letter in your voice.
So is this yet another example of using patents to retard the "progress of science and the useful arts"?
Aside from the jaw area, how would the skeleton of the cassowary differ from a velociraptor?
Two main differences: A velociraptor has two arms with claws on the end, while a cassowary has short, vestigial wings. And a velociraptor has a long, slender tail, while a cassowary has a typical bird-like stump of a tail.
There are also lots of other small differences, of course. But velociraptors and cassowaries are distant relatives, and their skeletons are as notable for their similarities as their differences. Even though they're both two-legged runners, their skeletons are much more like each other than like ours.
OTOH, among my pictures that I like to impress people with are several with me standing with an arm around a very friendly emu. The critter was a pet of some friends. It really liked having its head and neck scratched, just like our cockatiels and conure do. They made an emu-egg omelet when I was visiting last year, which fed 6 people breakfast.
Emus do have some serious-looking claws on their feet, though. I don't think I'd want to get too close to one that wasn't tame.
Considering that our favorite pets are actually vicious predators, I'd imagine that if velociraptors had survived, we would have probably made them into pets, too.
... Archaeopteryx, generally accepted as the first bird, may be an ancestor of Velociraptor, which would then be a flightless bird.
Minor quibble: Some of the bird fossils recently found in China are dated to a few millions years before the earliest Archaeopterix fossils, and appear somewhat more modern in many respects. It's more likely that Archaeopterix was in a clade that branched off early, and died out. But this is all still a lot of speculation, as there are significant error bars on all the dates. Maybe we'll eventually get a lot more fossils (or narrower date ranges) that will clarify the relations between those critters.
In any case, the leading theories for a couple decades now have most of the theropod dinosaurs (and maybe others) with feathers. It seems fairly clear that feathers evolved first as insulation, and flight feathers were a much later adaptation that seems to have worked out pretty well. But feathers (like hair) don't fossilize well, so we may never really know when they first evolved.
Interestingly, apparently the "cute" pronunciation is mostly an invention of their marketing people -- many of their own developers still say "Q T".
So their marketers call Qt "cute", while the developers call it "cutie"?
(Hey, someone had to say it!)
Actually, if you count installed copies of OSs, the overwhelming majority of them are open source. This is because the leader world wide, by a very wide margin, is the TRON real-time OS, which is installed in the majority of electronic devices manufactured in Asia. This OS started as a project at Tokyo University, led by Dr Ken Sakamura, and it was open source from the start. Of course, there are all sorts of proprietary packages added to it by various manufacturers. But as with linux, the core and the primary system libraries remain open-source, free software, developed in parallel at a large number of universities and corporations.
I've read that Microsoft predicts that Windows will reach a billion installations some time next year. TRON is installed in more (mostly tiny) computers than that each year. You probably have a number of them in your home, or in your pocket if you have certain models of cell phone.
Desktop and laptop computers may be the most noticable computers, but they're a rather small part of the computer market. The biggest part of the market went open-source several decades back. And it was done with full knowledge and approval of the manufacturers, who wanted a standard, portable real-time OS with a population of programmers who know how to use it effectively.
BTW, there is a linux-on-TRON project. Google for "MontaVista" or "T-Linux".
You might also read the article about TRON that Linux Insider just published.
It's sorta sad that the US government has cooperated with blocking widespread familiarity with this here in the US. It's keeping American software people from getting involved with what's probably the most significant development in the industry in recent decades. (I've read a few comments about similar blocking in Europe, but I don't know much about that.)
> >Every significant non free program has roots in some kind of free software.
;-) And historians have pointed out that he even did this in that sentence, which is a variant on things said by others in previous centuries.
>I thought it was the other way around - free software has its roots in creating free alternatives to non-free software.
Actually, of course, it's both ways. But free -> private happens a lot more than private -> free, for fairly simple and obvious reasons. The non-free, private software owners generally don't let us see their source, so building on their achievements is difficult (and lawsuit-prone). The free, open-source software developers make their stuff available, so anyone can build on it, making life easy for the private developers. And they tend not to sue, partly because it's difficult to prove that someone has used your code unless you can see their code.
I've always liked the comparison with the rest of the science/engineering enterprise. Historically, scientific and engineering methods have been developed independently over and over again, in every society. But most of this has been dead-end development, because new discoveries and techniques are kept secret in "guilds" and other similar organizations. The big explosion in science and technology in Europe a few centuries ago wasn't due to discovery of new research methods. It was the result of a population that developed an "open publication" ethic. This made it possible for researchers and engineers to build on each others' knowledge. Isaac Newton expressed it well with his famous remark that "If I have seen farther, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants". (Actually, what he really wrote was "Pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident.
But we still have a problem with private, proprietary information. Many people support this, for various reasons. But it is almost always a dead end, because it prevents others from building on your development. And, as has happened over centuries in the rest of science and engineering, the future will belong to the software people who are willing to open their code for others to build on. Reverse engineering is possible, but it's expensive to "reinvent the wheel" all the time. It's usually easier to take something that someone else has developed, and extend it to do what you need. And, if such extension are made available, the result tends to be something that's much more useful for everyone.
But this isn't a concept that software people just invented. It's the entire basis of modern science and engineering. Without open publication, we'd still be back at the level of 15th- or 16th-century technology. And, as others have observed, private software tends to be low-quality parodies of something that the open-software crowd did years ago (but the commercial world never noticed). Either that, or the private developers just take the open software and use it without attribution, something that I've personally seen over and over in lots of corporate contracting jobs.
a record 497m euro (£343m; $690m) fine
How many hours of MS profits does this correspond to?
Without knowing this, it's hard to get a feel for how strong a slap on the wrist this is going to be. (If MS ever actually pays it, of course.)
Also, out of curiosity, how does this number compare to MS's political campaign contributions over the past 10 or so years?
Lecture puts me to sleep. If it's an active dialog, my brain is fully engaged and there's no way my mind can wander. I got an A in that class.
Reminds me of a remark that I've seen in a few places: The classroom lecture is the best method yet discovered for teaching students who can't read.
Actually, I remember reading years ago a study of the efficacy of various teaching methods. The lecture method came out inferior to all the other methods tested. Not that it was ineffective; it mostly just used a lot more time to get any particular information across. So, of course, it's the method most used by our school system.
A video recording of a lecture illustrates the problem nicely: It's faster than the actual lecture, because the student can fast-forward through the parts that they already know. And it's more effective for the opposite reason: The student can back up and repeat something that they didn't catch the first time.
For a good reader, printed material speeds up both of these actions significantly, so for topics that don't actually require moving pictures, a printed text (or computer display) tends to be the fastest. The main disadvantage of computer texts is that they are mostly limited to less than one screenful at a time, and searching through a large text is often much slower than flipping through pages of a book. Eventually computer people might come up with a good solution to this defect. (This may have already been done, but if so, the method isn't widely known.)
What's up with the OSI protocols? NIH I guess. Lets all re-invent the wheel instead.
That's not the problem that I saw, 15 or 20 years back, when I was involved in a number of OSI implementation projects. We were in fact looking at several competing protocols, with the idea of implementing them all and developing test suites to determine their good and bad points.
But something interesting happened on all the OSI projects: We'd need the specs, of course, and you couldn't download them. You had to order the hard copy. This meant going through the usual corporate red tape for ordering stuff. You'd fill out a requirement doc, get it ok'd. You'd fill out a purchase req, figure out whose signatures you needed, and have the secretaries work on collecting the signatures. You'd mail off the order, and wait.
Meanwhile, since there was a lot of waiting to do, we'd work on the IP version. We'd download the RFCs, spend an hour or so reading and a few hourse discussing, and then we'd sit down at a terminal and start coding. We'd be at the testing stage within a day, and have usable results in a few days. By the time the OSI specs showed up on our desks, we'd have had the IP version up and running for weeks. While we were reading the OSI specs (always much larger than the IP specs), we'd have users getting experience with the IP version, and sending in bug reports and/or change/feature requests. By the time we finally got an OSI version to the alpha stage, the IP version would be ready to send to the first customers.
If the OSI gang had had the sense to make their docs available free on the Internet, they might not have lost so badly. But by trying to make the specs a profit center, and by using a different competing delivery network (the postal system), they put a major time blockade in the way of developers. So they lost out big time to IP.
I've never been all that convinced that IP was any better than OSI, especially now with the big migration to IPv6 peering over the horizon. But I never really got a good chance to test them and compare their capabilities. The OSI version of our code was always so far behind the IP version that the whole issue was moot. IP won every race, because OSI was so slow out of the starting box. And that was because we developers couldn't get out hands on the specs in a timely manner.