What it is called doesn't matter. DRM vs "Security Hardware" is the same thing, the software must be signed by a secure private key to run on the system, and that is what the GPLv3 disallows. If you sign software with a private key, you must distribute your private key. Well guess what, that totally destroys your "Security Hardware" because now any mindless joe can build some software that will run on your "secure" system, sign it with your freely available private key, and bypass the encryption and steal your data.
The GPLv3 will make OSS software completely non-viable in Government and business applications within 5 years. Government and Enterprise systems will all be mandated by policies and probably even laws (SEC regulations for publicly traded companies) to use TCPA/DRM'd computers as soon as it is a working "standard". When this happens GPLv3 software will not be allowed in any of these companies or the government.
It all comes down to idealist vs pragmatist. In an ideal world there would be no viruses, no hackers, and no need for encryption of any kind, and it would be great and everything would be open. In the real world, many systems need encryption, they need some form of DRM and not just to keep you from watching a movie. In the very near future I wouldn't be suprised if the government requires that their systems that they purchase implement some form of DRM for security purposes. Businesses will do it to, to lock THEIR DATA down and make sure corporate spys, naughty employees, whatever, don't compromise the system. The GPLv3 effectively locks OSS out of that entire market segment. It will eliminate choice for corps and governments that have policies that mandate secure systems. They will no longer be able to choose GPLv3 systems and software. It will hand the entire market to MS before there is even a battle. Basically the GPLv3 is RMS waving a white flag and saying "We won't compete with you in the secure DRM'd future, you can have that market". Believe me there is a market for this sort of thing, when TCPA actually gets here, and there is end to end encryption and rights management, Businesses will flock to it, to protect their data and networks from anyone who should be looking/touching/editing/whatever. And the GPLv3 says "Oh sorry we won't run on a TCPA computer".
One slight flaw in your argument is the following: 99.5% of computer owners will never upgrade their pc's in a year, not even in 10 years. As a consultant I have been on-site in hundreds of businesses, I see computers every day that are still running windows 95 or NT 4. Windows 98 is still around alot of places, I actually haven't seen a "brand new" computer in a small business in the last year.
If this new super DRM system ever did get released remember you'd have to have cooperation not only between MS and Intel, but nvidia, asus, via, ati, seagate, western digital, dell, hp, lenovo, ibm, amd, broadcom, everyone. If any one of the hardware companies for whatever reason isn't on board, then there is still plenty of choice, and I can easily see AMD standing up to Intel and saying "Ok you have fun with that, our systems are going to stay open". And you'd see AMD take another 20% market share from Intel, in a week.
Further, if GPLv3 says what Linus says it does, and I believe him, then it doesn't matter, if they release a complete DRM pc there will be no way to run linux on it anyway cause no one would be able to sign linux to run in a DRM system. Basically Linus is saying "Linux will continue to run on any platform we can possibly port it to". While RMS is saying "We won't port to DRM systems, so you better not release them or you'll loose that.5% of the market that we represent". In my opinion RMS's threat is pretty empty. If DRM systems are coming, we ought to be able to run linux on them. If GPLv3 says you basically can't run GPLv3 software on a DRM platform, that is stupid. If it simply says you can't use DRM to lock up GPLv3 software (or changes you've made to that software) behind the DMCA then its a good thing... I've read the draft at least 30 times, and I don't know which it is.
"it just works" then you go on to qualify your it just works statement by saying you have to put the power supply in a "good" place... This is a piece of consumer electronics. Do you consider a DVD player to be broken if you have to lay the cables in just the right way? What about a TV? Heck even a computer, switch, or router? I can't believe you're defending the xbox 360. Having to pay attention to where cables/exhaust fans are located on a piece of consumer electronics is unacceptable.
1) MS Releases IE for Mac as Open Source... 2) Project goes no where, produces no new code, no bug fixes, because the code is open, hackers find holes and hack IE Mac... 3) MS Starts FUD campaign about how open source is less secure, doesn't produce bug fixes fast, and doesn't add new features!
All the posts here are saying this would be a terrible idea but no one has mentioned why.
Yeah it would suck because MS would inevitably discontinue opera on all platforms besides windows, rename it, integrate it into the OS and make it uninstallable, and, then, MS would really have the best browser offering, and we'd all have nothing left to complain about.
But, that is why it would be such a good move. Fixing IE is gonna take alot of developer time and money, probably about as much as they'd pay to purchase Opera. Yeah, to fit into MS's strategy they'd have to completely hobble Opera and basically destroy all the good things about it.. But, they'd get a secure, fast, bloat free, feature rich browser that was coherently developed.
I think you're all opposed to the idea because it would be about the worst thing that could happen to OSS/Mozilla/Firefox. It would be a complete slap in the face, and it would destroy Firefox's momentum overnight. I'm against the idea too, cause I like opera, and it would be sad to see it destroyed by MS, but I don't think its a bad idea for MS. I think it would be about the most intelligent/strategic thing they could do right now.
One post mentioned "why spend money on something that you don't make money on" well they've been spending money every year for developers to build IE it doesn't seem to be a problem, another poster said "why spend money on something you already have" MS doesn't have an Opera-calibur browser, and making IE an opera-calibur browser is going to take alot of time and money.
I think MS is really pretty scared about the competition from google, from the web finally starting to matter in a real way. As MS loses market share in browsers, they lose hits to msn.com. honestly how many of you firefox users have your homepage set to msn.com? But IE comes with msn.com as the default homepage on every computer I've ever used. That loss of hits costs them money. They have no choice but to try to maintain 90%+ browser market share, if they were to drop to 50% market share, they'd really be hurting. I don't think anyone uses msn.com through an active choice... People choose to use Yahoo, Google, whatever, the only people who use msn.com are those who haven't changed their default home page. In short MS's only competitive advantage on the web is that they have a huge userbase that uses their browser... If they lose that, they lose everything else on the web, everyone will be at Google or Yahoo.
Ok, so I bought more than 200 cd's from 95-98, then I was out of the country for 2 years, and ever since I've been back (5 years now) there hasn't been a single new group that has made me even think twice about purchasing their album. I remember in the 90's every other week there was a new group at number 1, and they actually made decent music... Now it seems like the latest winner on american idol stays at the top of the charts for 20 weeks, and its just horrid pop music, totally written and designed by music execs...
It's the same problem the movie industry had this year... Horrid content, no real suprise blockbusters, nothing to get excited about. Seems to me the *CONTENT* industries need to produce some *CONTENT* if they want to stay in business.
I guess comcast has different policies in Boston. If it was only an extra $5 here I might consider it... Here as I explained it would be an extra $40-50 and would take my cable bill from $50 to $95-100...
My complaint is that its so expensive and then they don't give you what I feel they should for the price... If it was cheaper, or the provided more HD content, I would purchase it.
Brown makes some good points I suppose but they seem to me to be confined to being true about open office. I feel this has alot to do with the open office community process, and nothing to do with open office itself. I have contributed to quite a few open source projects, and I've tried to contribute to Open Office, but over there they make it hard to do. You have to jump through more hoops than even the mozilla foundation makes you jump through. Further, I've read through OOo's code, as well as the kernel, mozilla, firefox, kde (a bunch of projects there)... OOo's code is the most tangled pile of any open source project I've ever seen. I've never spent more than ~ a day on any other project to get a general feel and understanding of the code and how its laid out... I spent a week reading through OO, and I still don't even know the start from the middle... its a total mess.
In spite of all that, Brown still admits that OO is better for writing books than Word, and that Word 97 couldn't even print a 60k word manuscript... I'd imagine word 03 can do that, but I don't know. I use OO every day for everything, I haven't noticed a single "bug" in OO 2.0 that makes the software unusable. I use it for Invoicing, Code documentation, User documentation, creating pdf's of everything I write basically, project planning, opening word documents and excel spreadsheets, everything. I don't even have MS office installed on a single machine I use anymore (more than 20 machines). Does OO open slower than MS Office? Yeah a little... maybe 5 seconds... so what? Have I ever had it crash and lose a 50 page user manual? No not once! Has that happend with MS Office? Used to be a regular occurance!
The OO community process could use some work, its hard to contribute to the project, but, at the same time, for a free office suite, it works exceptionally well for me.
Sorry to reply again but you basically confirmed my numbers all on your own, and then tried to pretend you didn't... lets see no HD during the day, but from 8-11 there is an 80% chance... so you get 3 hours out of 24, that is 1/8th or 12.5%. Even if they showed 100% HD during those 3 hours you mentioned, 87.5% of the time they aren't broadcasting HD.
According to you they only show 80% HD during those 3 hours, so that knocks another chunk of time off and you're down to only 2.4 hours of HD content. Guess what that sounds alot like 10% of the time to me.
So you are paying an extra $20-50 (I don't know what comcast charges there, they charge $40 + $10/mo for the HD set top box here) for 10 channels that only broadcast what they say they broadcast 10% of the time. How can you say there isn't a shortage of HD content?
I agree there is a huge difference between SD and HD, and I agree with you that my HDTVs were and are great buys (even at the $2k+ price I paid for each one). Movies (even though they aren't high def) look absolutely stunning on my LCD projection tv. And the HD content I have seen from the various providers looks very nice and is great. I just don't think $20-$50/mo is worth 10 channels. I pay $50/mo right now for over 200 channels, why would I double that from 10 more?
Maybe ESPN HD has gotten better in the last little while... I spent a week at my parents house in August, and I think in that whole week I saw 1 game that was in HD, maybe sportscenter was in HD, I don't remember, but most of the highlights weren't (they weren't recorded in HD, so look like crap when upsampled and put in HD format). I don't care about sportscenter and the rest of the talk shows, I feel those things shouldn't be on the HD channel anyway, the HD channel should be 100% devoted to showing actual games recorded in HD.
Anyway, if > 50% of the channels broadcast in HD > 75% of the time, I'd be willing to pay extra money for it. Since they don't I think that the 10 channels they do have should be given away for free as a teaser, cause that's all it is. "Here's a preview of what TV will look like in 5-10 years".
I own 2 HDTV sets, and I don't have HD programming at all. I use them to watch movies (for the 16x9 more than the high def, as dvd's aren't high def). My parents have an HDTV and they have the HD package from DirecTV, my friend has the HD package from Comcast, and another friend has dish networks HD package... In short they all suck. I refuse to pay an extra $20-50/mo for 10 extra channels that say they are "HD" channels and only actually broadcast HD maybe 20% of the time.
The worst is ESPN HD, 90% of the stuff they show on that channel is standard def, and just to rub it in your face the fill up the rest of the 16x9 screen with banners proclaiming ESPN HD! It's such a rip off. On the DirecTV HD package only 2 channels broadcast in HD more than half the time, Discovery HD and HDNET, Unfortunately, I'd say 50% of Discovery HD's programming from what I've seen is pictures of birds and flowers, no actual content, just a glorified screen saver.
In short, I'm suprised 50% of HDTV owners are actually wasting their money for a few channels that once in a while broadcast HD shows. Bring the content to HD, and more people will subscribe... Of course the networks won't have that, cause they're afraid of piracy, so until all the TVs are locked down there won't be any content....
I still feel my TVs were worth the money just for watching movies, with a good DVD player, good surround sound, good cables everywhere, watching a movie in my basement is just as engaging as watching it at the theater.. and I don't have to worry about gum stuck to my shoes or the inevitable jerk in the row behind me that refuses to shut up (or that brought his 1 year old to a 10pm showing, and wonders why the kid won't stop screaming).
Ok, so AJAX is all the rave and its this great new mozilla/google/apple technology, and everything is great and wonderful.
Then someone has a complaint about it, and now its MICROSOFT's technology, and it sucks...
I'm not an MS supporter, I don't run MS software anywhere I don't have to, I just found it quite amusing that every article I've ever read here raving about AJAX (which is cool technology) has never explicitly given credit to MS for inventing it. Only this one which is bashing AJAX gives full credit to MS.
I personally don't use AJAX, because to me this thing has submarine patent written all over it. I would be willing to bet that in among MS's thousands of patents there is one for this neat little trick, and in a couple years (or months) MS will suddenly be demanding royalties from every web service that uses their invention..
Oh yeah one more thing... You know of course that all Federal courts are requiring all cases to be electronically filed as of Jan 1 2006 right? So all attorneys files will need to be scanned and accessible in electronic format by then (if they are federal cases). Most states also have electronic filing available, and will mandate usage within the next 3-5 years. The Federal Courts are all going paperless, why shouldn't the attorney's follow suit? Also, all courts that I've dealt with in the last year are already paperless, if you file a piece of paper it gets scanned and stored electronically, and they throw out the piece of paper. Judges for the most part read their cases in electronic format.
Well I guess we know different lawyers. I'm building this system not as a write now get customers later scheme, I am building it on a contract basis for a nationwide law firm with more than 300 lawyers. I also have another 10 firms contributing ideas and feedback on the system. This system is being developed by lawyers for lawyers... The pain of reading on the computer screen is outweighed by (at least to these attorneys) the pain of carting around 100 pound plus boxes of paper to trials, hearings, etc. Now they can take their 5 pound laptop, and they have all the files for all the cases they are working with (not just the 1-2 boxes of paper that constitute 1 case). Also it outweighs the more than $150,000/mo these firms are paying for storage space for these paper files. I'm replacing nearly 200,000 sq ft of document storage with a redundant 5TB SAN (triple redundant mirrors, still all fits easily in a 42U rack)...
Some attorneys might not like reading on a computer screen... but in my experience they like saving money and portability and convienience more.
I agree what is the obsession with printers? I mean yeah I guess he's a journalist but wait he's on ONLINE JOURNALIST, how often does he really need to print? I haven't printed a page of paper since I got out of college. Even then at least 75% of my work was handed in electronically. My company delivers invoices electronically, we pay invoices electronically, we have 1 printer for 100 people, and most of the time it just sits there idle.
The Open Source solution to printers is to get rid of them and make everything electronic. That's where everything is going, and his rant is calling for open source to stay compatible with 20 year old technology, not move forward to the 21st century. Right now I'm working on a document management system for law offices that will make it so they don't have to have a single piece of paper. If I can get rid of paper in a law office, I can get rid of it anywhere. This should be the goal, not making it easier to make more paper.
This is possibly the most moronic comment I've ever seen. If we don't know why/how the climate is changing how on earth are we supposed to fix it? if its not man made (IE 100% nature) then what are we supposed to do to fix it? Further wouldn't that violate the environmentalists creed that nature is perfect, and we shouldn't touch it?
You just proposed spending probably more than 5 trillion dollars to "fix" a problem we don't know the cause of or even if it can be fixed. Yeah lets bankrupt the entire world on a hunch!
Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't try to invent cleaner technologies. I would love to drive a hydrogen car, not because of any pollution issues, but because of the economic and politcal ones.
It sounds like a good law in many respects, however, it seems that it basically mandates that you can only use paper ballots. No company will be able to comply with the law it seems if they have to hand over OS Source + all developers who worked on it, then they ought to have to hand over hardware firmware too, plus all the code they write that actually is the voting system... In short, until a company starts from scratch, designs all the hardware in house, designs a new OS in house, and then puts a voting system on it, and open sources the whole thing, no one can provide electronic balloting systems to North Carolina.
I could write a good solid voting system on Linux, and provide the source for that, but I don't have the resources to track down every person who's ever contributed to every library that my system would use, Maybe Linus could send me over a list of every person who's ever contributed to the kernel, maybe KDE or Gnome knows those things for their desktop environments, but maybe they don't...
In short, the law is impossible to comply with. Why can't Diebold just hand over the source code for what they wrote? Requiring an application developer to have access to source code for all libraries system or otherwise that his system uses is not workable. Even if Diebold persued a shared source license with MS, I don't think that gives them the right to distributed the source code to a third party. In fact I'm sure it doesn't. And you can say "Diebold isn't distributing, they're just placing it in escrow" well, someone is going to audit that code, and it won't be someone from Diebold, so now you have a third party combing through code they aren't legally allowed to see.
I'm not trying to be a Diebold apologist, they should hand over their code, they should write a decent system, everything says they haven't, and they shouldn't be allowed to sell shoddy election eq. So the law is good cause it prevents that. However, I worry as I stated that even a well intentioned, complete, secure, open source solution would be disallowed under this law, as I see no reasonable way to comply.
That they can distribute binary versions of the derivative works, there's no way windows ce 5 is released under what would essentially be the BSD license.
Well we aren't talking about a bank, we're talking about a small software company, suggesting a 50k+ solution for even 1000 users is stupid, further, I personally know people who are running asterisk with 10k+ extensions, yeah you have to throw more hardware at it (10-20 servers), but not more than a CCM solution and you're throwing 2-3k pizza boxes at it instead of 10-15k HP servers...
I know a hosted CCM provider that has 50 CCM servers and 15 Unity servers for 5000 users, yeah they have room to grow, but they are at about 75% capacity right now on those servers. That's not to mention the 10 as5400's that they have... all together their infrastructure cost more than 4 million and they pay 200k+ each year in service contracts. But sure I guess if you're just spending someone else's money CCM is a good way to go.
Anyway, CME is still more expensive than asterisk solutions I've priced, and then you're stuck with very limited expandability.
Did you look at any asterisk resellers? I'm one:) we can beat any price cisco can give you, and we support our solutions 100% http://www.singlepointnetworks.com/
huh? part of the reason you haven't switched to voip? If you have your psap direct number, then you could use it from voip just as easily as from any phone You wouldn't have all these issues that voip does of routing your number to the wrong psap, routing it to some "administrative" office that isn't even a psap etc.
4 months with 4 people? Oh and you forgot to mention costs. That system just cost you at least 50k (unity alone is 15k, you need an as53xx or 54xx to terminate to pots those run 15-20k, call manager is around 10k each server... 500 phones at 350+ each).
Anyway, maybe I'm just a fanboy, but I've deployed about 20 asterisk servers, largest being about 400 users, 4 pri's, users spread across 4 locations... $25k total, all the integration, and usability of call manager... oh yeah that deploy 2 people 2 weeks.
the second person used to work for cisco in TAC on the voice team (supporting call manager, and call manager express), avoid those products like the plague. They are a pain to setup, once they're working you have to babysit them, oh yeah and unity requires that you use exchange server, so have fun with that. TAC won't even talk to you or support your unity install unless you have an MCSE to talk to them, and it helps if you have at least one person who is CCIE voice... Also, its just plain expensive and doesn't do anything extra that asterisk does.
They need access to that database. Unfortunately the ILECs (SBC, Qwest, Verizon, et al) charge alot of money to access that database. I helped setup a CLEC, the most costly thing we did was get or PSAP/MSAG database connection, it was half of the cost per line that we charged ($25/line was what we charge our customers, $12.50 of that went directly to Qwest to access the e911 database). Needless to say, Vonage cannot afford that.
Slashdot Mirror
What it is called doesn't matter. DRM vs "Security Hardware" is the same thing, the software must be signed by a secure private key to run on the system, and that is what the GPLv3 disallows. If you sign software with a private key, you must distribute your private key. Well guess what, that totally destroys your "Security Hardware" because now any mindless joe can build some software that will run on your "secure" system, sign it with your freely available private key, and bypass the encryption and steal your data.
The GPLv3 will make OSS software completely non-viable in Government and business applications within 5 years. Government and Enterprise systems will all be mandated by policies and probably even laws (SEC regulations for publicly traded companies) to use TCPA/DRM'd computers as soon as it is a working "standard". When this happens GPLv3 software will not be allowed in any of these companies or the government.
It all comes down to idealist vs pragmatist. In an ideal world there would be no viruses, no hackers, and no need for encryption of any kind, and it would be great and everything would be open. In the real world, many systems need encryption, they need some form of DRM and not just to keep you from watching a movie. In the very near future I wouldn't be suprised if the government requires that their systems that they purchase implement some form of DRM for security purposes. Businesses will do it to, to lock THEIR DATA down and make sure corporate spys, naughty employees, whatever, don't compromise the system. The GPLv3 effectively locks OSS out of that entire market segment. It will eliminate choice for corps and governments that have policies that mandate secure systems. They will no longer be able to choose GPLv3 systems and software. It will hand the entire market to MS before there is even a battle. Basically the GPLv3 is RMS waving a white flag and saying "We won't compete with you in the secure DRM'd future, you can have that market". Believe me there is a market for this sort of thing, when TCPA actually gets here, and there is end to end encryption and rights management, Businesses will flock to it, to protect their data and networks from anyone who should be looking/touching/editing/whatever. And the GPLv3 says "Oh sorry we won't run on a TCPA computer".
One slight flaw in your argument is the following:
.5% of the market that we represent". In my opinion RMS's threat is pretty empty. If DRM systems are coming, we ought to be able to run linux on them. If GPLv3 says you basically can't run GPLv3 software on a DRM platform, that is stupid. If it simply says you can't use DRM to lock up GPLv3 software (or changes you've made to that software) behind the DMCA then its a good thing... I've read the draft at least 30 times, and I don't know which it is.
99.5% of computer owners will never upgrade their pc's in a year, not even in 10 years. As a consultant I have been on-site in hundreds of businesses, I see computers every day that are still running windows 95 or NT 4. Windows 98 is still around alot of places, I actually haven't seen a "brand new" computer in a small business in the last year.
If this new super DRM system ever did get released remember you'd have to have cooperation not only between MS and Intel, but nvidia, asus, via, ati, seagate, western digital, dell, hp, lenovo, ibm, amd, broadcom, everyone. If any one of the hardware companies for whatever reason isn't on board, then there is still plenty of choice, and I can easily see AMD standing up to Intel and saying "Ok you have fun with that, our systems are going to stay open". And you'd see AMD take another 20% market share from Intel, in a week.
Further, if GPLv3 says what Linus says it does, and I believe him, then it doesn't matter, if they release a complete DRM pc there will be no way to run linux on it anyway cause no one would be able to sign linux to run in a DRM system. Basically Linus is saying "Linux will continue to run on any platform we can possibly port it to". While RMS is saying "We won't port to DRM systems, so you better not release them or you'll loose that
"it just works"
then you go on to qualify your it just works statement by saying you have to put the power supply in a "good" place...
This is a piece of consumer electronics. Do you consider a DVD player to be broken if you have to lay the cables in just the right way?
What about a TV? Heck even a computer, switch, or router? I can't believe you're defending the xbox 360. Having to pay attention to where cables/exhaust fans are located on a piece of consumer electronics is unacceptable.
1) MS Releases IE for Mac as Open Source...
2) Project goes no where, produces no new code, no bug fixes, because the code is open, hackers find holes and hack IE Mac...
3) MS Starts FUD campaign about how open source is less secure, doesn't produce bug fixes fast, and doesn't add new features!
All the posts here are saying this would be a terrible idea but no one has mentioned why.
Yeah it would suck because MS would inevitably discontinue opera on all platforms besides windows, rename it, integrate it into the OS and make it uninstallable, and, then, MS would really have the best browser offering, and we'd all have nothing left to complain about.
But, that is why it would be such a good move. Fixing IE is gonna take alot of developer time and money, probably about as much as they'd pay to purchase Opera. Yeah, to fit into MS's strategy they'd have to completely hobble Opera and basically destroy all the good things about it.. But, they'd get a secure, fast, bloat free, feature rich browser that was coherently developed.
I think you're all opposed to the idea because it would be about the worst thing that could happen to OSS/Mozilla/Firefox. It would be a complete slap in the face, and it would destroy Firefox's momentum overnight. I'm against the idea too, cause I like opera, and it would be sad to see it destroyed by MS, but I don't think its a bad idea for MS. I think it would be about the most intelligent/strategic thing they could do right now.
One post mentioned "why spend money on something that you don't make money on" well they've been spending money every year for developers to build IE it doesn't seem to be a problem, another poster said "why spend money on something you already have" MS doesn't have an Opera-calibur browser, and making IE an opera-calibur browser is going to take alot of time and money.
I think MS is really pretty scared about the competition from google, from the web finally starting to matter in a real way. As MS loses market share in browsers, they lose hits to msn.com. honestly how many of you firefox users have your homepage set to msn.com? But IE comes with msn.com as the default homepage on every computer I've ever used. That loss of hits costs them money. They have no choice but to try to maintain 90%+ browser market share, if they were to drop to 50% market share, they'd really be hurting. I don't think anyone uses msn.com through an active choice... People choose to use Yahoo, Google, whatever, the only people who use msn.com are those who haven't changed their default home page. In short MS's only competitive advantage on the web is that they have a huge userbase that uses their browser... If they lose that, they lose everything else on the web, everyone will be at Google or Yahoo.
Ok, so I bought more than 200 cd's from 95-98, then I was out of the country for 2 years, and ever since I've been back (5 years now) there hasn't been a single new group that has made me even think twice about purchasing their album. I remember in the 90's every other week there was a new group at number 1, and they actually made decent music... Now it seems like the latest winner on american idol stays at the top of the charts for 20 weeks, and its just horrid pop music, totally written and designed by music execs...
It's the same problem the movie industry had this year... Horrid content, no real suprise blockbusters, nothing to get excited about. Seems to me the *CONTENT* industries need to produce some *CONTENT* if they want to stay in business.
I guess comcast has different policies in Boston.
If it was only an extra $5 here I might consider it... Here as I explained it would be an extra $40-50 and would take my cable bill from $50 to $95-100...
My complaint is that its so expensive and then they don't give you what I feel they should for the price... If it was cheaper, or the provided more HD content, I would purchase it.
Brown makes some good points I suppose but they seem to me to be confined to being true about open office. I feel this has alot to do with the open office community process, and nothing to do with open office itself. I have contributed to quite a few open source projects, and I've tried to contribute to Open Office, but over there they make it hard to do. You have to jump through more hoops than even the mozilla foundation makes you jump through. Further, I've read through OOo's code, as well as the kernel, mozilla, firefox, kde (a bunch of projects there)... OOo's code is the most tangled pile of any open source project I've ever seen. I've never spent more than ~ a day on any other project to get a general feel and understanding of the code and how its laid out... I spent a week reading through OO, and I still don't even know the start from the middle... its a total mess.
In spite of all that, Brown still admits that OO is better for writing books than Word, and that Word 97 couldn't even print a 60k word manuscript... I'd imagine word 03 can do that, but I don't know. I use OO every day for everything, I haven't noticed a single "bug" in OO 2.0 that makes the software unusable. I use it for Invoicing, Code documentation, User documentation, creating pdf's of everything I write basically, project planning, opening word documents and excel spreadsheets, everything. I don't even have MS office installed on a single machine I use anymore (more than 20 machines). Does OO open slower than MS Office? Yeah a little... maybe 5 seconds... so what? Have I ever had it crash and lose a 50 page user manual? No not once! Has that happend with MS Office? Used to be a regular occurance!
The OO community process could use some work, its hard to contribute to the project, but, at the same time, for a free office suite, it works exceptionally well for me.
Sorry to reply again but you basically confirmed my numbers all on your own, and then tried to pretend you didn't...
lets see no HD during the day, but from 8-11 there is an 80% chance...
so you get 3 hours out of 24, that is 1/8th or 12.5%. Even if they showed 100% HD during those 3 hours you mentioned, 87.5% of the time they aren't broadcasting HD.
According to you they only show 80% HD during those 3 hours, so that knocks another chunk of time off and you're down to only 2.4 hours of HD content. Guess what that sounds alot like 10% of the time to me.
So you are paying an extra $20-50 (I don't know what comcast charges there, they charge $40 + $10/mo for the HD set top box here) for 10 channels that only broadcast what they say they broadcast 10% of the time. How can you say there isn't a shortage of HD content?
I agree there is a huge difference between SD and HD, and I agree with you that my HDTVs were and are great buys (even at the $2k+ price I paid for each one). Movies (even though they aren't high def) look absolutely stunning on my LCD projection tv. And the HD content I have seen from the various providers looks very nice and is great. I just don't think $20-$50/mo is worth 10 channels. I pay $50/mo right now for over 200 channels, why would I double that from 10 more?
Maybe ESPN HD has gotten better in the last little while... I spent a week at my parents house in August, and I think in that whole week I saw 1 game that was in HD, maybe sportscenter was in HD, I don't remember, but most of the highlights weren't (they weren't recorded in HD, so look like crap when upsampled and put in HD format). I don't care about sportscenter and the rest of the talk shows, I feel those things shouldn't be on the HD channel anyway, the HD channel should be 100% devoted to showing actual games recorded in HD.
Anyway, if > 50% of the channels broadcast in HD > 75% of the time, I'd be willing to pay extra money for it. Since they don't I think that the 10 channels they do have should be given away for free as a teaser, cause that's all it is. "Here's a preview of what TV will look like in 5-10 years".
I own 2 HDTV sets, and I don't have HD programming at all. I use them to watch movies (for the 16x9 more than the high def, as dvd's aren't high def). My parents have an HDTV and they have the HD package from DirecTV, my friend has the HD package from Comcast, and another friend has dish networks HD package... In short they all suck. I refuse to pay an extra $20-50/mo for 10 extra channels that say they are "HD" channels and only actually broadcast HD maybe 20% of the time.
The worst is ESPN HD, 90% of the stuff they show on that channel is standard def, and just to rub it in your face the fill up the rest of the 16x9 screen with banners proclaiming ESPN HD! It's such a rip off. On the DirecTV HD package only 2 channels broadcast in HD more than half the time, Discovery HD and HDNET, Unfortunately, I'd say 50% of Discovery HD's programming from what I've seen is pictures of birds and flowers, no actual content, just a glorified screen saver.
In short, I'm suprised 50% of HDTV owners are actually wasting their money for a few channels that once in a while broadcast HD shows. Bring the content to HD, and more people will subscribe... Of course the networks won't have that, cause they're afraid of piracy, so until all the TVs are locked down there won't be any content....
I still feel my TVs were worth the money just for watching movies, with a good DVD player, good surround sound, good cables everywhere, watching a movie in my basement is just as engaging as watching it at the theater.. and I don't have to worry about gum stuck to my shoes or the inevitable jerk in the row behind me that refuses to shut up (or that brought his 1 year old to a 10pm showing, and wonders why the kid won't stop screaming).
Ok, so AJAX is all the rave and its this great new mozilla/google/apple technology, and everything is great and wonderful.
Then someone has a complaint about it, and now its MICROSOFT's technology, and it sucks...
I'm not an MS supporter, I don't run MS software anywhere I don't have to, I just found it quite amusing that every article I've ever read here raving about AJAX (which is cool technology) has never explicitly given credit to MS for inventing it. Only this one which is bashing AJAX gives full credit to MS.
I personally don't use AJAX, because to me this thing has submarine patent written all over it. I would be willing to bet that in among MS's thousands of patents there is one for this neat little trick, and in a couple years (or months) MS will suddenly be demanding royalties from every web service that uses their invention..
Oh yeah one more thing... You know of course that all Federal courts are requiring all cases to be electronically filed as of Jan 1 2006 right?
So all attorneys files will need to be scanned and accessible in electronic format by then (if they are federal cases). Most states also have electronic filing available, and will mandate usage within the next 3-5 years. The Federal Courts are all going paperless, why shouldn't the attorney's follow suit? Also, all courts that I've dealt with in the last year are already paperless, if you file a piece of paper it gets scanned and stored electronically, and they throw out the piece of paper. Judges for the most part read their cases in electronic format.
Well I guess we know different lawyers.
I'm building this system not as a write now get customers later scheme,
I am building it on a contract basis for a nationwide law firm with more than 300 lawyers.
I also have another 10 firms contributing ideas and feedback on the system.
This system is being developed by lawyers for lawyers... The pain of reading on the computer screen is outweighed by (at least to these attorneys) the pain of carting around 100 pound plus boxes of paper to trials, hearings, etc. Now they can take their 5 pound laptop, and they have all the files for all the cases they are working with (not just the 1-2 boxes of paper that constitute 1 case). Also it outweighs the more than $150,000/mo these firms are paying for storage space for these paper files. I'm replacing nearly 200,000 sq ft of document storage with a redundant 5TB SAN (triple redundant mirrors, still all fits easily in a 42U rack)...
Some attorneys might not like reading on a computer screen... but in my experience they like saving money and portability and convienience more.
I agree what is the obsession with printers?
I mean yeah I guess he's a journalist but wait he's on ONLINE JOURNALIST, how often does he really need to print?
I haven't printed a page of paper since I got out of college. Even then at least 75% of my work was handed in electronically.
My company delivers invoices electronically, we pay invoices electronically, we have 1 printer for 100 people, and most of the time it just sits there idle.
The Open Source solution to printers is to get rid of them and make everything electronic. That's where everything is going, and his rant is calling for open source to stay compatible with 20 year old technology, not move forward to the 21st century. Right now I'm working on a document management system for law offices that will make it so they don't have to have a single piece of paper. If I can get rid of paper in a law office, I can get rid of it anywhere. This should be the goal, not making it easier to make more paper.
This is possibly the most moronic comment I've ever seen.
If we don't know why/how the climate is changing how on earth are we supposed to fix it?
if its not man made (IE 100% nature) then what are we supposed to do to fix it?
Further wouldn't that violate the environmentalists creed that nature is perfect, and we shouldn't touch it?
You just proposed spending probably more than 5 trillion dollars to "fix" a problem we don't know the cause of or even if it can be fixed. Yeah lets bankrupt the entire world on a hunch!
Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't try to invent cleaner technologies. I would love to drive a hydrogen car, not because of any pollution issues, but because of the economic and politcal ones.
It sounds like a good law in many respects, however, it seems that it basically mandates that you can only use paper ballots. No company will be able to comply with the law it seems if they have to hand over OS Source + all developers who worked on it, then they ought to have to hand over hardware firmware too, plus all the code they write that actually is the voting system... In short, until a company starts from scratch, designs all the hardware in house, designs a new OS in house, and then puts a voting system on it, and open sources the whole thing, no one can provide electronic balloting systems to North Carolina.
I could write a good solid voting system on Linux, and provide the source for that, but I don't have the resources to track down every person who's ever contributed to every library that my system would use, Maybe Linus could send me over a list of every person who's ever contributed to the kernel, maybe KDE or Gnome knows those things for their desktop environments, but maybe they don't...
In short, the law is impossible to comply with. Why can't Diebold just hand over the source code for what they wrote? Requiring an application developer to have access to source code for all libraries system or otherwise that his system uses is not workable. Even if Diebold persued a shared source license with MS, I don't think that gives them the right to distributed the source code to a third party. In fact I'm sure it doesn't. And you can say "Diebold isn't distributing, they're just placing it in escrow" well, someone is going to audit that code, and it won't be someone from Diebold, so now you have a third party combing through code they aren't legally allowed to see.
I'm not trying to be a Diebold apologist, they should hand over their code, they should write a decent system, everything says they haven't, and they shouldn't be allowed to sell shoddy election eq. So the law is good cause it prevents that. However, I worry as I stated that even a well intentioned, complete, secure, open source solution would be disallowed under this law, as I see no reasonable way to comply.
That they can distribute binary versions of the derivative works, there's no way windows ce 5 is released under what would essentially be the BSD license.
Well we aren't talking about a bank, we're talking about a small software company, suggesting a 50k+ solution for even 1000 users is stupid,
further, I personally know people who are running asterisk with 10k+ extensions, yeah you have to throw more hardware at it (10-20 servers), but not more than a CCM solution and you're throwing 2-3k pizza boxes at it instead of 10-15k HP servers...
I know a hosted CCM provider that has 50 CCM servers and 15 Unity servers for 5000 users, yeah they have room to grow, but they are at about 75% capacity right now on those servers. That's not to mention the 10 as5400's that they have... all together their infrastructure cost more than 4 million and they pay 200k+ each year in service contracts. But sure I guess if you're just spending someone else's money CCM is a good way to go.
Anyway, CME is still more expensive than asterisk solutions I've priced, and then you're stuck with very limited expandability.
Did you look at any asterisk resellers? :) we can beat any price cisco can give you, and we support our solutions 100%
I'm one
http://www.singlepointnetworks.com/
huh? part of the reason you haven't switched to voip?
If you have your psap direct number, then you could use it from voip just as easily as from any phone
You wouldn't have all these issues that voip does of routing your number to the wrong psap, routing it to some "administrative" office that isn't even a psap etc.
4 months with 4 people? Oh and you forgot to mention costs.
That system just cost you at least 50k (unity alone is 15k, you need an as53xx or 54xx to terminate to pots those run 15-20k, call manager is around 10k each server... 500 phones at 350+ each).
Anyway, maybe I'm just a fanboy, but I've deployed about 20 asterisk servers, largest being about 400 users, 4 pri's, users spread across 4 locations... $25k total, all the integration, and usability of call manager... oh yeah that deploy 2 people 2 weeks.
the second person used to work for cisco in TAC on the voice team (supporting call manager, and call manager express), avoid those products like the plague. They are a pain to setup, once they're working you have to babysit them, oh yeah and unity requires that you use exchange server, so have fun with that. TAC won't even talk to you or support your unity install unless you have an MCSE to talk to them, and it helps if you have at least one person who is CCIE voice... Also, its just plain expensive and doesn't do anything extra that asterisk does.
They need access to that database.
Unfortunately the ILECs (SBC, Qwest, Verizon, et al) charge alot of money to access that database. I helped setup a CLEC, the most costly thing we did was get or PSAP/MSAG database connection, it was half of the cost per line that we charged ($25/line was what we charge our customers, $12.50 of that went directly to Qwest to access the e911 database).
Needless to say, Vonage cannot afford that.
There's the rub..
The local ILECs generally control and zealously gaurd those phone numbers, they are not given out to anyone.