Some of the powerline broadband manufacturers were able to produce systems that didn't interfere with public safety and amateur radio.
This is necessary, since even a distant powerline broadband system can interfere with emergency communications - the signals skip off the ionosphere and around the whole world, and sometimes contacts by legitimate radio operators can be made at astonishingly low power - meaning that the power line carriers probably have the potential for worldwide interference.
Earlier this year, ARRL won a suit against FCC that will lead to more realistic parameters for interference. The previous ones applied a single-point interference specification made for consumer electronic devices to any point on a wire, and of course over the total length of the wire the interference power was much higher than the spec.
The problem is that power lines are not like telephone lines or coaxial cable. Telephone lines are carefully balanced so that they cancel out much of the interference they would otherwise generate. Coaxial cables have their own shield. Power lines are driven in unbalanced mode when RF is injected into them, and thus act just like long antenna wires, and they radiate a great deal of any RF sent down them. No amount of signal processing can fix that.
Why not use WiMax? It's higher bandwidth, requires less infrastructure overall to install (since you don't have to bypass transformers, etc.) and works for mobiles. Pretty much every business that has invested in BPL for home internet delivery has failed.
The broadband competition in those areas will end up being between WiMax and cellular.
It could be GPL. Is Diebold making the source to Ghostscript, as used in their product, available?
They would have to do that if it's GPL. This would not require them to release source to other software on the disk. There is a difference between aggregation and the creation of a derivative work. A program that just calls Ghostscript to run isn't a derivative work of Ghostscript.
No license is required to use a DVD you've bought.
It would be nice if that were true, but I'm pretty sure it's not true in U.S. law today. For example, I'm pretty sure that you are not allowed to publicly perform that DVD (project it to a public audience) without a special license that doesn't come from the DVD store.
Are you sure? My Sony Vaio from 2004 with a Celeron M says it pulls 14 watts while compiling with parallel threads and with the backlight full bright, and gets down to 11 watts at minimum. The battery is only 62 Watt-hours when new, and it lasts a lot longer than an hour.
If your laptop isn't charging with the smaller power supply, I suspect it is a bit too low voltage, not current.
There are a lot of underpowered units with inferior solar cells out there, for sale at very large markups. You probably want a folding unit, with reasonably durable cells. The ones I've seen aren't so great. There was a 6-watt folding unit at Fry's for about $100. That's 6 watts in full sun in optimal conditions, not nearly enough to operate and charge your laptop at the same time.
If you are running linux, the stuff in/proc/acpi/battery/*/* will probably give you the battery voltage in Volts and current draw in Amperes, and you multiply them together to get Watts. You need about twice that to operate and charge at the same time. Charging might be 60% efficient.
For single signon to be safe and secure, it seems to me imperative, that the password entry and access approval be done through the browser itself, in a more secure way, rather than through a standard web form, so easily manipulated.
If you want this, you need to go to W3C and start a standards activity. Browser authentication has remained the same, it seems, for a very long time. And if you actually implement it, you find it's lacking. For example, there is no way to log out! Browsers generally send authentication with each request to the site after you sign on.
Your description makes it sound like Google is using OpenID's software to do a sort of gated community. If they're taking advantage of the OpenID libraries, wouldn't it be more fair to the OpenID developers for Google to actually consume and provide OpenID?
It's "computer criminal". "Hacker" means something else.
Yes, legacy systems would tend to treat the OpenID login as your "handle". But they don't have to, and IMO it's bad practice to do so once you join OpenID.
Yet if this was Microsoft, we would be accusing them of "embracing and extending" a protocol to death.
And because Microsoft has a record of doing just that repeatedly, it would be reasonable to do so.
Please don't forget all of the bad practice around approval of Office Open XML, which made a sham of ISO, and their very recent maneuver to take over the OpenDocument standard group at ISO.
At the moment, I am less likely to trust Google regarding democracy and civil liberty issues than I am regarding Open Standards. Because they have a record on that.
But I agree that they screwed up the relationship and PR issues around this move. They should know better.
It's open development if the extension is as open as the original standard. It's not an accepted standard until the standards group accepts the extension.
Is it an Open Standard if you can't extend it openly? I am entirely against closed extensions to open standards, and unnecessarily incompatible extensions, the classical "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" stuff. But I am equally against standards being a ball and chain that prohibits further innovation. You should be able to produce an extension that you make open on the same terms as the original standard.
It looks to me as if Google is attempting to hit OpenID with a clue stick on a really obvious issue, saying "Normal folks use email addresses to log in, dummies!". And I am being told that what they are doing is really close to OpenID 2.0.
The string typed in is sufficiently different from what OpenID uses today that it would be easy to disambiguate. Putting this in an OpenID library, without increasing complication to the library user, sounds easy enough.
I think what Google is saying here is that if 99% of users are used to typing in their email address, and not used to typing in a URL as their ID, you should try to make your ID scheme work with an email address rather than invent something new. This actually sounds sensible. But I haven't looked very deeply and would be happy to hear from folks with more expertise.
5: Has google taken me as a consultant yet? If yes then what they are doing is AOK! if no then their actions are horrible and should be stopped.
Dear AC,
This is an understandable assumption but doesn't reflect the facts. For example, Symbian has purchased consulting services from me. If you look here, you'll notice that I am not afraid to criticize them.
Had Google taken me on and allowed me to work on the PR for this, I would have had them communicate about it differently. It's no trouble for Google to get this stuff back into OpenID, but they obviously didn't take the trouble to assure people that would happen.
Whether or not this is Google overturning an open standard can be judged upon:
1. Do they make it possible for everyone else to implement exactly what they are doing, on both the producer and consumer end, without any patent restrictions, royalties, or discriminatory licensing?
2. How close is what they are doing to the latest version of the standard, not 1.0?
3. Do they try to get what they are doing into version 2.1 (or whatever) of the standard?
4. Do they really have a reason for doing this? Like making the login easier for normal nontechnical people rather than you and I?
About two years ago at the Free Software conference in Belfast, this guy from Oracle, a reasonably senior marketing guy, did a talk "Free Software from Oracle". But it soon became obvious that he just meant software they don't charge for. The audience, including people like Ciaran O'Reardon and me, tried to set him straight as best we could. It was pretty funny.
RMS was there. But he'd met this pretty girl on the conference staff who managed to mention that she was a massage therapist. And Richard got this girl to give him a massage. So, he wasn't in the room for this talk. He would have screamed, if he was there.
Well, Blakeley, just about every PR firm offers to help "manage the perception of your company in online communities" these days. What do you think that means? Astroturfing Slashdot, Youtube, etc. In my various manangement positions it's been offered to me. Indeed, some of the companies offer to create negative publicity for your competition that way - HP had a publicity firm for its Linux activities that told us it would do that when we wanted. I never asked them to do so and hope nobody else did either.
This stuff is just standard these days. You've got to expect it.
There is no affirmative fair use right in copyright law. Go look for it in the copyright title, it's not there. Fair use is a defense in copyright case law. And it has been substantially eroded, and continues to be. If we're talking about books, a number of software manuals place substantial restrictions on the use of the information in their licenses. For example, the Java manuals from Sun restrict use of the knowledge to create an incompatible implementation. There is some dispute regarding whether these things can be enforced, but not enough.
Even with your more complex definition for the purposes of the OSI, the MS-LPL only fails on one count of 10, which is regarding being technology-neutral.
As if that one count of 10 wasn't important.
At one point or another, my main coding platform was an Apple II, Commodore Vic-20, Commodore 64, PDP-11, VAX, Sun, SGI, PC Clone, and I've had a number of secondary coding platforms, including CHAP (something Pixar made), 6809, PIC, AVR, and so on. And all of the various operating systems for those things.
Any code that I have been given with platform restrictions, during that entire time, for various employers, is dead code today. No users, probably can't even be built if someone could find it, and I can't use it either.
In contrast, essentially all of the work I've done under an Open Source license is still living and has a vibrant user community.
You really need to think about this rights thing more.
Just to make sure you understand this: the GPL PROHIBITS restrictions on porting or portability. You can't have GPL software that is legally prohibited from being ported off Windows. You can have GPL software that only runs on Windows until someone does the work to port it.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the powerline broadband manufacturers were able to produce systems that didn't interfere with public safety and amateur radio.
This is necessary, since even a distant powerline broadband system can interfere with emergency communications - the signals skip off the ionosphere and around the whole world, and sometimes contacts by legitimate radio operators can be made at astonishingly low power - meaning that the power line carriers probably have the potential for worldwide interference.
Earlier this year, ARRL won a suit against FCC that will lead to more realistic parameters for interference. The previous ones applied a single-point interference specification made for consumer electronic devices to any point on a wire, and of course over the total length of the wire the interference power was much higher than the spec.
The problem is that power lines are not like telephone lines or coaxial cable. Telephone lines are carefully balanced so that they cancel out much of the interference they would otherwise generate. Coaxial cables have their own shield. Power lines are driven in unbalanced mode when RF is injected into them, and thus act just like long antenna wires, and they radiate a great deal of any RF sent down them. No amount of signal processing can fix that.
Why not use WiMax? It's higher bandwidth, requires less infrastructure overall to install (since you don't have to bypass transformers, etc.) and works for mobiles. Pretty much every business that has invested in BPL for home internet delivery has failed.
The broadband competition in those areas will end up being between WiMax and cellular.
Bruce
You just might be able to make a court believe that for a single-purpose embedded system. It would make history if you did.
They would have to do that if it's GPL. This would not require them to release source to other software on the disk. There is a difference between aggregation and the creation of a derivative work. A program that just calls Ghostscript to run isn't a derivative work of Ghostscript.
It would be nice if that were true, but I'm pretty sure it's not true in U.S. law today. For example, I'm pretty sure that you are not allowed to publicly perform that DVD (project it to a public audience) without a special license that doesn't come from the DVD store.
Uh, I'd like to have a word with you about your daughter "Bossy"...
If your laptop isn't charging with the smaller power supply, I suspect it is a bit too low voltage, not current.
If you are running linux, the stuff in /proc/acpi/battery/*/* will probably give you the battery voltage in Volts and current draw in Amperes, and you multiply them together to get Watts. You need about twice that to operate and charge at the same time. Charging might be 60% efficient.
Ugh. Have you tested that across many browsers? It would be nicer to have a way defined in the standard.
If you want this, you need to go to W3C and start a standards activity. Browser authentication has remained the same, it seems, for a very long time. And if you actually implement it, you find it's lacking. For example, there is no way to log out! Browsers generally send authentication with each request to the site after you sign on.
Bruce
Your description makes it sound like Google is using OpenID's software to do a sort of gated community. If they're taking advantage of the OpenID libraries, wouldn't it be more fair to the OpenID developers for Google to actually consume and provide OpenID?
Thanks
Bruce
It's "computer criminal". "Hacker" means something else.
Yes, legacy systems would tend to treat the OpenID login as your "handle". But they don't have to, and IMO it's bad practice to do so once you join OpenID.
Bruce
And because Microsoft has a record of doing just that repeatedly, it would be reasonable to do so.
Please don't forget all of the bad practice around approval of Office Open XML, which made a sham of ISO, and their very recent maneuver to take over the OpenDocument standard group at ISO.
At the moment, I am less likely to trust Google regarding democracy and civil liberty issues than I am regarding Open Standards. Because they have a record on that.
But I agree that they screwed up the relationship and PR issues around this move. They should know better.
Bruce
Thank you.
So, is the main problem here that they aren't backward-compatible with OpenID 1.0 consumers?
That's reasonable. I'd sign on to a statement to that effect.
It's open development if the extension is as open as the original standard. It's not an accepted standard until the standards group accepts the extension.
Is it an Open Standard if you can't extend it openly? I am entirely against closed extensions to open standards, and unnecessarily incompatible extensions, the classical "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" stuff. But I am equally against standards being a ball and chain that prohibits further innovation. You should be able to produce an extension that you make open on the same terms as the original standard.
It looks to me as if Google is attempting to hit OpenID with a clue stick on a really obvious issue, saying "Normal folks use email addresses to log in, dummies!". And I am being told that what they are doing is really close to OpenID 2.0.
Bruce
The string typed in is sufficiently different from what OpenID uses today that it would be easy to disambiguate. Putting this in an OpenID library, without increasing complication to the library user, sounds easy enough.
I think what Google is saying here is that if 99% of users are used to typing in their email address, and not used to typing in a URL as their ID, you should try to make your ID scheme work with an email address rather than invent something new. This actually sounds sensible. But I haven't looked very deeply and would be happy to hear from folks with more expertise.
Bruce
Dear AC,
This is an understandable assumption but doesn't reflect the facts. For example, Symbian has purchased consulting services from me. If you look here, you'll notice that I am not afraid to criticize them.
Had Google taken me on and allowed me to work on the PR for this, I would have had them communicate about it differently. It's no trouble for Google to get this stuff back into OpenID, but they obviously didn't take the trouble to assure people that would happen.
Bruce
1. Do they make it possible for everyone else to implement exactly what they are doing, on both the producer and consumer end, without any patent restrictions, royalties, or discriminatory licensing?
2. How close is what they are doing to the latest version of the standard, not 1.0?
3. Do they try to get what they are doing into version 2.1 (or whatever) of the standard?
4. Do they really have a reason for doing this? Like making the login easier for normal nontechnical people rather than you and I?
Bruce
They should call them Precious Gollum Rulers.
RMS was there. But he'd met this pretty girl on the conference staff who managed to mention that she was a massage therapist. And Richard got this girl to give him a massage. So, he wasn't in the room for this talk. He would have screamed, if he was there.
This stuff is just standard these days. You've got to expect it.
Have you ever read Shakespeare? Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
There is no affirmative fair use right in copyright law. Go look for it in the copyright title, it's not there. Fair use is a defense in copyright case law. And it has been substantially eroded, and continues to be. If we're talking about books, a number of software manuals place substantial restrictions on the use of the information in their licenses. For example, the Java manuals from Sun restrict use of the knowledge to create an incompatible implementation. There is some dispute regarding whether these things can be enforced, but not enough.
As if that one count of 10 wasn't important.
At one point or another, my main coding platform was an Apple II, Commodore Vic-20, Commodore 64, PDP-11, VAX, Sun, SGI, PC Clone, and I've had a number of secondary coding platforms, including CHAP (something Pixar made), 6809, PIC, AVR, and so on. And all of the various operating systems for those things.
Any code that I have been given with platform restrictions, during that entire time, for various employers, is dead code today. No users, probably can't even be built if someone could find it, and I can't use it either.
In contrast, essentially all of the work I've done under an Open Source license is still living and has a vibrant user community.
You really need to think about this rights thing more.
Bruce
Just to make sure you understand this: the GPL PROHIBITS restrictions on porting or portability. You can't have GPL software that is legally prohibited from being ported off Windows. You can have GPL software that only runs on Windows until someone does the work to port it.