To keep my daughter pounding on the keyboard, I gave a keyboard of her own. Just a plain keyboard with cable dangling - not attached to anything. These things cost next to nothing and are pretty sturdy. That worked until she realized the relation between keyboard and monitor:0). Still it kept her busy until she was about 2 yrs old.
Now she is 3, and I just let her on my home desktop (Linux Mint with XFCE) with her own restricted user id. Somebody has to log her in, but once logged in she has ready access to launchers for TuxPaint, etc.
A better comparison would be vs XO. XO has a better sun-light performance, comes at $400, better battery performance in blank&white mode, and can give you a bit of good karma, as you are giving away one to needy child. It can also do much more than what Kindle can do.
Even though there were a few ebook readers based on e-ink, they didn't got very little press coverage compared to Kindle. What is more important here is, Amazon has a product that is getting a better news coverage, comes at a relatively affordable price point, and could become a mass market product.
This will certainly give raise to improving the technology and forge way for future products which are simpler and can be much cheaper as the technology matures.
Despite many arguments here to the contrary, iPod or iPhone cannot be compared to a e-paper product. Just two use cases: long flight journeys (can be more than 30 hrs if you include waiting time for connections), under a bright sun in a beach.
Unbundling by itself is not going to help matters much. Even if such a regulation gets through in any country/region, the hardware vendors will still support only one OS. It should be mandatory for hardware vendors to certify their products on two competing operating systems from different vendors.
Just the other day, I was looking for a DTD for 4ML related to music and lyric notations. But the website is not working. Most probably the guy got bored with it and forgot to pay the hosting company.
We definitely need some sustainable way to host the DTDs.
I don't know much about legal premises of the injunction. But most fans are hungry for any news about the books. However once the read the spoilers they will also immediately start cursing the person who spilled it. Ah... the irony.
I don't think Raincoat or Rowling has much concern about some individual fan reading the book couple of days early. But the injunction will help in preventing media getting hold of a copy and printing spoilers all over the place.
Here in India, VCRs can be seen only in museums nowadays. When VCDs came into scene about 10 years ago they pretty much drove out VCRs overnight. One possible reason could be the very low level of penetration of VCRs to begin with. Most people rented a VCR (or VCP - the player only version without a recorder) from their video library, rather than buying one. But when VCDs came into picture it was like an explosion. Combined with very cheap - mostly pirated - VCDs they won the field without any competition. Even today, DVDs are not that much popular here when compared to VCDs.
It is true that the picture quality sucks; but hey, for Rs.99 (~ 2 dollars) for a movie in three disks most people don't care much for the picture quality. That is Rs.99 for a licensed movie - pirated movies might run even cheaper.
Most significant achievement of this effort is not just releasing free software in a CD. Much of this software is already downloadable from elsewhere. But the government was able to buy a large number of quality Unicode fonts (more than 100) from the publishers and released them in public domain.
Quality and free fonts had long been a problem in the free software development in Tamil language. The OCR software released also would be useful in releasing etexts of the vast literature available in Tamil as part of Project Madurai (like Project Gutenbug). But I believe the OCR software is not released as open souce. It is just free as in beer.
- Phatak is not India. He's a professor in one college in India.
I completely agree. Besides, in India as is the case elsewhere GPL wound makes sense for most of the open source developers who do not what to see their work hijacked.
There may be a few specialized cases where GPL, BSD, MIT or IBM's public license do not meet the needs. These projects are going release under a different license like so many other projects and companies have done elsewhere.
It is true that Apex was one of the first companies to bring out a MP3-DVD player. But the price was $189, not 80 or 90. I bought one in Sep 2000 for $149, just after its first price drop.
One of the reasons why the Peruvian legislators's letter got so much attention is, it didn't come from GNU folks, but from a politician; a politician who actually gets it. That is what makes it so special, and important.
There are many other advantages to Hurd than Linux if you look at it from the developer's point of view. Linux is monolithic that means everything goes into the kernel. It is a development nightmare. If you look at Linux kernel development from the outside, you will realize the fatal flaw in it development - that it is too big to be a single project. It is could be handled better if it is released as several independant projects.
This is what Hurd will achieve - I hope. You need not wait for 2-3 years for a major release (uh, once it gains momentum I mean). Parts of the system can be released independant of others. Independant vendors/developers can release device drivers or applications without being afraid that it will be break with the next kernel release. No more "Linus is overloaded" problems.
But probably it lacks a strong leadership, which may be why it is taking so long to get it off the ground.
The defense department have their own separate supercomputer, called Anurag. It was less powerful than Param from C-DAC, but it was built specifically for defense purposes.
Can we stop saying DRM and Copy Protection, please. These are euphemisms created by content owners to reduce the effect of such tools on lay users. Let us start calling at Access Restriction Mechanisms or something. That is what they are! Even secure, cheap or user friendly DRMs are basically used to restrict access to the Copyrighted material.
For a layman to understand what these are, we need to call them by their proper name and get rid of these industry jargons. Most people wouldn't bother to understand what DRM is and "Copy Protection" might even give them some kind of secure feeling:-(.
Indian government is researching on a RLV that was on news today. The project is still at a concept stage. But they have the obligatory engineeing model. This one also uses liquid hydrogen as propellant.
There is not much info in that news item but another website has a little more information.
What is unique in this is it collects oxygen while in suborbital cruise, converts it to liquid oxygen and uses it to reach orbit. This process has already been testing at the ground level.
They expect to use it for launching LEO satellites and defence surveillance purposes.
That's 6 wins in 8 plays or 3 wins in 4 plays. I'm not going to try to extend this to further cases.
Actually it is 6/8 times one of the players will get it right and 2 players will pass. There will be a total of 24 individual plays (8 plays and 3 players). Out of these only 6 will be successful, 6 wrong and 12 passes.
So changes for a correct guess is just 1/4th. Chances for failure is 1/4th too, and half the time there will not be any success or failure.
DNS allows only about 5 bits in its encoding. That is 26 letters in english, numerals and zero. The 16 bit unicode (UCS2) needs to be converted to these 5 bits to represent all languages of the world. There is already a schme published as Internet Draft (draft-duerst-dns-i18n-02) which describes this process, which is dated July 1998. There are other ways also to internationalize domain names (draft-skwan-utf8-dns-01, iDNS, to name a few. iDNS is functional for a few years now.
I do not know what this patent is about exactly. But considering this is dated July 1999 there is most probably lot of alternative possibilities to internationalize domain names if not any prior art.
"Tomorrow, India will launch its first GSLV satellite using the Russian launchers.
GSLV is not a satellite. It is a launch vehicle - Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle.
Its an amazing feat since they have built the satellite from scratch.
India had been building satellites for two decades now. This is not her first indegenious satellite. In fact, the one on GSLV-D1 is an experimental satellite with few useful payloads that are not very critical to indian communication infrastructure.
If the launch is successful, India will become the sixth nation (US, Russia, China, Japan and the European Space Agency being the others) to build and launch a GSLV class satellite.
GSLV satellites? I guess he means the geosynchronous satellites. ISRO's previous launch vehicle series, PSLV was used for launching satellites in a polar orbit. The latest Indian Remote-sensing Satellites (IRS series) had been launched using PSLV rockets.
The GSLV rockets currently use some Russian cryogenic engines. It is still a major stepping stone for indian space industry.
Just as the free software movements most significant being GPL, Microsoft's first and foremost innovation is the EULA. It all started with that
Open Letter to Hobbyists from Billy.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you
steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something
to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair?...
During the election fiasco there was some news about Riverside County, California which have implemented electronic voting machines successfully at a cost of about $14 million. (Wired Story)
If I understand correctly, the authority to set the voting policy in USA resides with the county officials. They decide what kind of voting machines should be used/not used and the money to implement such comes from the county. I don't think the story implies the Feds have commissioned MS/Dell/Unisys to build the voting machines. They are building these on their own and unless some county authorities decide to buy these they cannot be implemented.
The best way to go about the voting machines is for the Feds to publish the specifications of the ideal voting machines and an agency to certify whether a particular brand of machines satisfy the specifications. These specs should be open and without any patents. Any company small or big would be able to build machines according to the specs and market it. Counties can buy the machines from whichever company they prefer.
This may not guarantee fair play, but atleast there will be some competition, and the government can buy the machines in their own terms, not some big corporation's EULA.
Slashdot Mirror
To keep my daughter pounding on the keyboard, I gave a keyboard of her own. Just a plain keyboard with cable dangling - not attached to anything. These things cost next to nothing and are pretty sturdy. That worked until she realized the relation between keyboard and monitor :0). Still it kept her busy until she was about 2 yrs old.
Now she is 3, and I just let her on my home desktop (Linux Mint with XFCE) with her own restricted user id. Somebody has to log her in, but once logged in she has ready access to launchers for TuxPaint, etc.
A better comparison would be vs XO. XO has a better sun-light performance, comes at $400, better battery performance in blank&white mode, and can give you a bit of good karma, as you are giving away one to needy child. It can also do much more than what Kindle can do.
Even though there were a few ebook readers based on e-ink, they didn't got very little press coverage compared to Kindle. What is more important here is, Amazon has a product that is getting a better news coverage, comes at a relatively affordable price point, and could become a mass market product.
This will certainly give raise to improving the technology and forge way for future products which are simpler and can be much cheaper as the technology matures.
Despite many arguments here to the contrary, iPod or iPhone cannot be compared to a e-paper product. Just two use cases: long flight journeys (can be more than 30 hrs if you include waiting time for connections), under a bright sun in a beach.
Also,
3. Workplace CCTV cameras
Unbundling by itself is not going to help matters much. Even if such a regulation gets through in any country/region, the hardware vendors will still support only one OS. It should be mandatory for hardware vendors to certify their products on two competing operating systems from different vendors.
You know what would be better than polyethylene - Mithril. I will definitely buy one if it is made of mithril, even if it is double the cost ;-).
~Sivaraj
Just the other day, I was looking for a DTD for 4ML related to music and lyric notations. But the website is not working. Most probably the guy got bored with it and forgot to pay the hosting company.
We definitely need some sustainable way to host the DTDs.
~Sivaraj
I don't know much about legal premises of the injunction. But most fans are hungry for any news about the books. However once the read the spoilers they will also immediately start cursing the person who spilled it. Ah... the irony.
I don't think Raincoat or Rowling has much concern about some individual fan reading the book couple of days early. But the injunction will help in preventing media getting hold of a copy and printing spoilers all over the place.
...and the results are already in.
Here in India, VCRs can be seen only in museums nowadays. When VCDs came into scene about 10 years ago they pretty much drove out VCRs overnight. One possible reason could be the very low level of penetration of VCRs to begin with. Most people rented a VCR (or VCP - the player only version without a recorder) from their video library, rather than buying one. But when VCDs came into picture it was like an explosion. Combined with very cheap - mostly pirated - VCDs they won the field without any competition. Even today, DVDs are not that much popular here when compared to VCDs.
It is true that the picture quality sucks; but hey, for Rs.99 (~ 2 dollars) for a movie in three disks most people don't care much for the picture quality. That is Rs.99 for a licensed movie - pirated movies might run even cheaper.
Most significant achievement of this effort is not just releasing free software in a CD. Much of this software is already downloadable from elsewhere. But the government was able to buy a large number of quality Unicode fonts (more than 100) from the publishers and released them in public domain.
Quality and free fonts had long been a problem in the free software development in Tamil language. The OCR software released also would be useful in releasing etexts of the vast literature available in Tamil as part of Project Madurai (like Project Gutenbug). But I believe the OCR software is not released as open souce. It is just free as in beer.
- Phatak is not India. He's a professor in one college in India.
I completely agree. Besides, in India as is the case elsewhere GPL wound makes sense for most of the open source developers who do not what to see their work hijacked.
There may be a few specialized cases where GPL, BSD, MIT or IBM's public license do not meet the needs. These projects are going release under a different license like so many other projects and companies have done elsewhere.
The US military is not going to outsource to ESA (they aren't Indian). So I dont see the point of Vega.
;-).
India (ISRO) has a launch vehicle in the same category as Vega called PSLV, in case US military is interested
Cost of PSLV is probably cheaper than VEGA as well.
It is true that Apex was one of the first companies to bring out a MP3-DVD player. But the price was $189, not 80 or 90. I bought one in Sep 2000 for $149, just after its first price drop.
One of the reasons why the Peruvian legislators's letter got so much attention is, it didn't come from GNU folks, but from a politician; a politician who actually gets it. That is what makes it so special, and important.
There are many other advantages to Hurd than Linux if you look at it from the developer's point of view. Linux is monolithic that means everything goes into the kernel. It is a development nightmare. If you look at Linux kernel development from the outside, you will realize the fatal flaw in it development - that it is too big to be a single project. It is could be handled better if it is released as several independant projects.
This is what Hurd will achieve - I hope. You need not wait for 2-3 years for a major release (uh, once it gains momentum I mean). Parts of the system can be released independant of others. Independant vendors/developers can release device drivers or applications without being afraid that it will be break with the next kernel release. No more "Linus is overloaded" problems.
But probably it lacks a strong leadership, which may be why it is taking so long to get it off the ground.
The defense department have their own separate supercomputer, called Anurag. It was less powerful than Param from C-DAC, but it was built specifically for defense purposes.
Can we stop saying DRM and Copy Protection, please. These are euphemisms created by content owners to reduce the effect of such tools on lay users. Let us start calling at Access Restriction Mechanisms or something. That is what they are! Even secure, cheap or user friendly DRMs are basically used to restrict access to the Copyrighted material.
:-(.
For a layman to understand what these are, we need to call them by their proper name and get rid of these industry jargons. Most people wouldn't bother to understand what DRM is and "Copy Protection" might even give them some kind of secure feeling
Indian government is researching on a RLV that was on news today. The project is still at a concept stage. But they have the obligatory engineeing model. This one also uses liquid hydrogen as propellant.
There is not much info in that news item but another website has a little more information.
What is unique in this is it collects oxygen while in suborbital cruise, converts it to liquid oxygen and uses it to reach orbit. This process has already been testing at the ground level.
They expect to use it for launching LEO satellites and defence surveillance purposes.
That's 6 wins in 8 plays or 3 wins in 4 plays. I'm not going to try to extend this to further cases.
Actually it is 6/8 times one of the players will get it right and 2 players will pass. There will be a total of 24 individual plays (8 plays and 3 players). Out of these only 6 will be successful, 6 wrong and 12 passes.
So changes for a correct guess is just 1/4th. Chances for failure is 1/4th too, and half the time there will not be any success or failure.
DNS allows only about 5 bits in its encoding. That is 26 letters in english, numerals and zero. The 16 bit unicode (UCS2) needs to be converted to these 5 bits to represent all languages of the world. There is already a schme published as Internet Draft (draft-duerst-dns-i18n-02) which describes this process, which is dated July 1998. There are other ways also to internationalize domain names (draft-skwan-utf8-dns-01, iDNS, to name a few. iDNS is functional for a few years now.
I do not know what this patent is about exactly. But considering this is dated July 1999 there is most probably lot of alternative possibilities to internationalize domain names if not any prior art.
Search google for those draft texts.
"Tomorrow, India will launch its first GSLV satellite using the Russian launchers.
GSLV is not a satellite. It is a launch vehicle - Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle.
Its an amazing feat since they have built the satellite from scratch.
India had been building satellites for two decades now. This is not her first indegenious satellite. In fact, the one on GSLV-D1 is an experimental satellite with few useful payloads that are not very critical to indian communication infrastructure.
If the launch is successful, India will become the sixth nation (US, Russia, China, Japan and the European Space Agency being the others) to build and launch a GSLV class satellite.
GSLV satellites? I guess he means the geosynchronous satellites. ISRO's previous launch vehicle series, PSLV was used for launching satellites in a polar orbit. The latest Indian Remote-sensing Satellites (IRS series) had been launched using PSLV rockets.
The GSLV rockets currently use some Russian cryogenic engines. It is still a major stepping stone for indian space industry.
All corporations are Evil...
If I understand correctly, the authority to set the voting policy in USA resides with the county officials. They decide what kind of voting machines should be used/not used and the money to implement such comes from the county. I don't think the story implies the Feds have commissioned MS/Dell/Unisys to build the voting machines. They are building these on their own and unless some county authorities decide to buy these they cannot be implemented.
The best way to go about the voting machines is for the Feds to publish the specifications of the ideal voting machines and an agency to certify whether a particular brand of machines satisfy the specifications. These specs should be open and without any patents. Any company small or big would be able to build machines according to the specs and market it. Counties can buy the machines from whichever company they prefer. This may not guarantee fair play, but atleast there will be some competition, and the government can buy the machines in their own terms, not some big corporation's EULA.