Morfik is screwed. Cross-compilers are as old as the industry itself. Heck, one of the examples you cited (Delphi) was implemented as a cross-compiler (pascal to c).
...if you wanted to "save power" in a watch, you would just build a simple accellerometer into the device to turn the watch on (for say 30 seconds) when you move it (a simple mercury or mass/spring switch would be the cheapest way).
It (liability insurance) will be VERY hard to find, since it isn't a "type-approved" vehicle, and insurers have no actuarial history to work from. Homeowner's policies won't cover it without an additional rider... and again, w/o a way to assess the risk, don't be surprised if they decline to cover it.
I think the more useful part of that would be that you only need to supply power to change the display.
Unless you're going to wind it up every day, you're still going to need the power suply to be on constantly to run the internal clock.
The way to save energy would be to have the battery run the internal clock, then once a second update the display - but we already have those types of watches - they have things called "hands" that move once a second. $6.99, batteries included:-)
... and there's at least one person I'd recommend for a concrete parachute in lieu of cement shoes:-)
Chocolate teapots... little old ladies will buy ANYTHING mail-order, if you say "... and this week, we'll throw in a subscription to Chocolate Teapot Lovers Magazine as a special bonus".
I have a friend who bought a chocolate Monopoly game. We've eaten most of the hotels and houses.
Neither are the shoes that light up when you step down - they've had them in Wallyworld for $14.99 for a couple of years
And half the stuff isn't even at the prototype stage, like the origami screen - its just a "wouldn't this be neet".
... and they admit the single-slice bread toaster doesn't work - not that anyone ever makes a single slice... I'd expect a 6-slice toaster at LEAST! I mean, if we have razors that come with 6 blades, why can't we have 6-slice toasters?
he fact that US providers regularly treat Canadians but not vice versa is an indictment of government sponsored health care.
The fact that Canadians had to put photo IDs on their medicare cards to prevent all the Americans who were coming up in organized bus trips to "borrow" Canadian medicare cards from relatives and get "free" Canadian health care doesn't tell you anything, does it? Like that people without health care are desparate?
The Ministry of Health will begin issuing new photo health cards to every eligible person in Ontario. The cards will contain several new security features.
Each card will bear a digitized photograph and signature and a holographic overlay to prevent counterfeiting. The birthdate, expiry date, name, address and sex will be printed on the face of each card. The card will have a magnetic strip and bar code. As we expand the use of swipe reader technology, hospitals and other providers will be able to verify the card every time it is used.
Everyone in Ontario will be reregistered, after which we will begin a five-year renewal cycle. A renewal cycle is essential to maintain security and confirm eligibility. Reregistering people and issuing almost 11 million new cards will take three years. To improve customer service, people will register at the Ministry of Health's 20 regional offices or the Ministry of Transportation's 360 licensing offices.
It will never be possible to determine the exact amount of fraud. Based on expert advice, we calculate that the photo card and additional security measures will prevent about $65 million in fraud and misuse annually.
We will be ready to issue the first card early in 1995, and the cost will be about $30 million a year for three years. Thereafter, the annual cost will be about $19 million a year.
The other provinces followed suit. $65 million a year may not seem like much, but that was over a decade ago, and for one province ony... it adds up. It got so bad that one audit showed the same hospital treating the (supposedly) same person for having the same operation, not once, not twice, but THREE times.
The doctors would look at the file, they KNEW it wasn't the same patient, but what could they do? Refuse? Not allowed. "Ms. M. here for her weekly abortion... Mr. J here for his weekly appendectomy..."
Another advantaqe of diverse biological polycultures is that infections tend to be confined to small areas, as they can't find a convenient host to infect. One problem with the internet is that all potential hosts are only a few router hops away... but the same reasoning still applies - to find new hosts, the virus will have to hit a LOT more possibl hosts, and this sort of activity could be noticed by hosts that are NOT part of that particular culture. Maybe we'll see a self-healing net in the future.
Tort law is on your side (as is the wording of the class settlement). You suffered damages as a direct consequence of Sony's shipping a r00t kit. Same as if GM produced a vehicle with defective brakes and you were hit by that car... its a reasonably foreseeable consequence of their actions.
As I point out elsewhere, the very top of the judgment includes people who didn't buy a CD but were nonetheless r00ted.
Most small claims courts have brochures and web sites outlining the process.
Up here, its very simple. You send them a letter by registered mail, explaining the problem and giving them 10 business days to get back to you. If you haven't heard from them in 3 weeks (the courts like it if you cut the defendant some slack), then you go down to where you file, and fill in a form (bring a copy of your demand letter).
The important words to put at the top of your demand letter:
DEMAND LETTER
WITHOUT PREJUDICE
The whole "without prejudice" means that you're not limiting yourself to te claims you state in your demend letter - you aren't "prejudicing your rights" to take other action as well.
Print out all the stuff where its obvious that Sony is in the wrong, and then a summary of your time that was wasted fixing this (a reformat, reinstall, and then reinstall of all software, and restore data from backups) + filing fee, if any, for the small claims action, + postage for the demand letter.
Its even better in my jurisdiction - in the interest of simplifying things, lawyers are barred from representing either party in a small claims court, so they have to be represented by a non-lawyer.
You didn't have to buy a CD to be entitled to a part of the settlement. Anyone who bought, used, or was affected by, the rootkit (in other words, if you were even peripherally affected, you can make a claim):
ALL PEOPLE WHO BOUGHT, RECEIVED OR USED A SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT COMPACT DISC WITH CONTENT PROTECTION SOFTWARE
If you bought, received or used a Sony BMG Music Entertainment compact disc containing either XCP or MediaMax 3.0 or 5.0 content protection software, your rights may be affected by a class action settlement.
IOW, you or someone else only had to have inserted the CD in your computer for you to be eligible to file a claim under the class action.
EXCLUDE YOURSELF: Get no XCP exchange program, cash or free music download settlement benefits. This is the only option that allows you to ever be part of any other lawsuit against the Defendants about the legal claims being resolved in this case. See Question 13 below.
OBJECT: Write to the Court about why you don't like the settlement.
GO TO A HEARING: Ask to speak in Court about the fairness of the settlement.
DO NOTHING: Get no XCP exchange program, cash or free music download settlement benefits. Give up certain rights. You will retain the right to sue the Defendants for any consequential damage to your computer or network that may have resulted from interactions between XCP software or MediaMax software and other software or hardware installed on your computer or network.
NOTE: the "Do Nothing" option is also for anyone who didn't buy the CD, whose computer was damaged because someone else loaded the CD onto their machine, etc. (for example, a temp office worker decided to listen to the CD and infected a PC).
Write Sony, state your claim (number of pcs affected, time lost) and that you are not part of the class settlement and would like to know what they're offering you to avoid court action.
Heck, up here small claims handles stuff like this up to $7,000.00 If I were affected, I'd send them a demand/notice, wait 10 working days, then pay the filing fee. If enough people did this, they'd make a SERIOUS offer, one in line with the actual damages.
While your point is valid, I would add one caveat - that the bit about having to click on the ad to see the video is the way it will work right now. As the article notes, advertisers aren't too happy about that. This could just be the camel's nose in the tent...
No problem... but for the target market in this article, wireless devices are a complete non-show. They can't afford a new desktop, they're certainly not going to be able to buy a new laptop, wireless router, etc. Look at the countries where they tested this - Yugoslavia isn't exactly a hotbed for broadband, and the internet on dialup can be brutal!
Its funny... I've got an Athlon 2500 that's been sitting here for the last 2 years that I turn on maybe once a week - everything "just works" on this old duron 950 w. dual screens/suse. I've been meaning to switch over the new box for over a year, but I leave this box on a minimum of 18 hours a day (there was one point where I just didn't bother turning it off for months at a time), and the difference in power consumption is significant.
The first win2k I had to work with was on a 150mhz P1... there were a LOT of problems with win2k on 300mhz - 700mhz boxes. It was CRAP! As for the explorer thing - you could leave the machine boot up, and sit idle for 5 minutes, then click on explorer - bam! Not even a blue screen.
As for the "last time the power went out"... fsck on a journaling filesystem takes under a second during reboot... and linux can start up after a power failure, same as Windows - that's a function of your bios, not your operating system - if your bios doesn't support it, windows can't autostart after a power failure either.
Now, back on-topic: The whole point is that people in the market for a computer shouldn't automatically think "New Windows PC" when there are cheaper and better options for them, such as a mac mini, or a beige box with linux preloaded, or a used computer. Which would you rather have to support - a n00b with a Windows box or a Linux box? The linux box is way easier - no defragging, no having to tell them to exit properly, no virus problems, no having to reinstall everything because of "registry rot", and patching/updating all apps under linux is autmatic. Microsoft will never be able to say this.
Its bad enough they're trying to bullshit people into believing that you can't take your licensed OS off a dead box and install it on a new one...
They're probably doing this as a preemptive strike against the sum-$200 pcs that are going to be coming out. One of those, plus a Nintendo Wii, is less than the down payment on one of those "deals".
If you read the article, you'll notice that the BANK (not Microsoft) is financing the other 2/3 (they pay the computer vendor), with the idea that they're going to be collecting because people are going to want to use the box they've invested 1/3 in.
So The vendor gets his money, Microsoft gets their "tax"... and someone with zero credit won't qualify for the lease/loan.
The average person can instal Linux just fine - its a one-disk, 1-reboot operation... Windows is another beast entirely, what with driver disks, conflicts with anti-virus and anti-spam software, the need to have a separate install for each application, etc. Oh, and it costs a lot more, too.
It's just that there's no "order of magnitude complexity" on plain vanilla hardware. These people are NOT going to be buying 512 meg video / 2 gig ram / 2 terabyte raid 5 overclocked/overcooled gamer extreme rigs. They're getting your baseline box, and overpaying for it because it IS a loan at subprime rates.
It's like the joke about how you buy a $70,000 car - buy a $30,000 car through a finance company. They're buying it on time payments. Literally. 800 hours of metered use after paying 1/3 up front. They're much better off with either of the following:
a used box with no extra financing charges or hidden costs
a new plain-jane all-in-one box with linux pre-installed
a new mac mini
There's nothing complex about any of these - they can ALL be bought with everything already installed and running.
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Morfik is screwed. Cross-compilers are as old as the industry itself. Heck, one of the examples you cited (Delphi) was implemented as a cross-compiler (pascal to c).
Speaking of assumptions ...
4 points:
They're called "self-winding watches", and they've been around for decades :-)- Self-Winding--zz2702409zB4z5---html
http://www.nextag.com/Watches--a-Watch+Features-_
How they work:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/question285.htm
(includes link to video)
It (liability insurance) will be VERY hard to find, since it isn't a "type-approved" vehicle, and insurers have no actuarial history to work from. Homeowner's policies won't cover it without an additional rider ... and again, w/o a way to assess the risk, don't be surprised if they decline to cover it.
Unless you're going to wind it up every day, you're still going to need the power suply to be on constantly to run the internal clock.
The way to save energy would be to have the battery run the internal clock, then once a second update the display - but we already have those types of watches - they have things called "hands" that move once a second. $6.99, batteries included :-)
Chocolate teapots ... little old ladies will buy ANYTHING mail-order, if you say "... and this week, we'll throw in a subscription to Chocolate Teapot Lovers Magazine as a special bonus".
I have a friend who bought a chocolate Monopoly game. We've eaten most of the hotels and houses.
Neither are the shoes that light up when you step down - they've had them in Wallyworld for $14.99 for a couple of years
And half the stuff isn't even at the prototype stage, like the origami screen - its just a "wouldn't this be neet".
well, you won't be able to ride it arund here without a license - at 80cc, its over the 49cc limit for unlicensed vehicles and unlicensed drivers.
This is just a rehash of the guy who put a chainsaw motor on his skateboard ...
The fact that Canadians had to put photo IDs on their medicare cards to prevent all the Americans who were coming up in organized bus trips to "borrow" Canadian medicare cards from relatives and get "free" Canadian health care doesn't tell you anything, does it? Like that people without health care are desparate?
http://www.ontla.on.ca/hansard/house_debates/35_pa rl/session3/l123.htm
Ontario:
The other provinces followed suit. $65 million a year may not seem like much, but that was over a decade ago, and for one province ony ... it adds up. It got so bad that one audit showed the same hospital treating the (supposedly) same person for having the same operation, not once, not twice, but THREE times.
The doctors would look at the file, they KNEW it wasn't the same patient, but what could they do? Refuse? Not allowed. "Ms. M. here for her weekly abortion ... Mr. J here for his weekly appendectomy ..."
Another advantaqe of diverse biological polycultures is that infections tend to be confined to small areas, as they can't find a convenient host to infect. One problem with the internet is that all potential hosts are only a few router hops away ... but the same reasoning still applies - to find new hosts, the virus will have to hit a LOT more possibl hosts, and this sort of activity could be noticed by hosts that are NOT part of that particular culture. Maybe we'll see a self-healing net in the future.
As I point out elsewhere, the very top of the judgment includes people who didn't buy a CD but were nonetheless r00ted.
Up here, its very simple. You send them a letter by registered mail, explaining the problem and giving them 10 business days to get back to you. If you haven't heard from them in 3 weeks (the courts like it if you cut the defendant some slack), then you go down to where you file, and fill in a form (bring a copy of your demand letter).
The important words to put at the top of your demand letter:
Print out all the stuff where its obvious that Sony is in the wrong, and then a summary of your time that was wasted fixing this (a reformat, reinstall, and then reinstall of all software, and restore data from backups) + filing fee, if any, for the small claims action, + postage for the demand letter.
Its even better in my jurisdiction - in the interest of simplifying things, lawyers are barred from representing either party in a small claims court, so they have to be represented by a non-lawyer.
It's in the big text at the top of the settlement document: http://www.sonybmgcdtechsettlement.com/Faq.htm
IOW, you or someone else only had to have inserted the CD in your computer for you to be eligible to file a claim under the class action.
Nothing is preventing you from filing a claim against them. From the court settlement notice:
http://www.sonybmgcdtechsettlement.com/Notice.htm
NOTE: the "Do Nothing" option is also for anyone who didn't buy the CD, whose computer was damaged because someone else loaded the CD onto their machine, etc. (for example, a temp office worker decided to listen to the CD and infected a PC). Write Sony, state your claim (number of pcs affected, time lost) and that you are not part of the class settlement and would like to know what they're offering you to avoid court action.
Heck, up here small claims handles stuff like this up to $7,000.00 If I were affected, I'd send them a demand/notice, wait 10 working days, then pay the filing fee. If enough people did this, they'd make a SERIOUS offer, one in line with the actual damages.
While your point is valid, I would add one caveat - that the bit about having to click on the ad to see the video is the way it will work right now. As the article notes, advertisers aren't too happy about that. This could just be the camel's nose in the tent ...
No problem ... but for the target market in this article, wireless devices are a complete non-show. They can't afford a new desktop, they're certainly not going to be able to buy a new laptop, wireless router, etc. Look at the countries where they tested this - Yugoslavia isn't exactly a hotbed for broadband, and the internet on dialup can be brutal!
Its funny ... I've got an Athlon 2500 that's been sitting here for the last 2 years that I turn on maybe once a week - everything "just works" on this old duron 950 w. dual screens/suse. I've been meaning to switch over the new box for over a year, but I leave this box on a minimum of 18 hours a day (there was one point where I just didn't bother turning it off for months at a time), and the difference in power consumption is significant.
As for the "last time the power went out" ... fsck on a journaling filesystem takes under a second during reboot ... and linux can start up after a power failure, same as Windows - that's a function of your bios, not your operating system - if your bios doesn't support it, windows can't autostart after a power failure either.
Now, back on-topic: The whole point is that people in the market for a computer shouldn't automatically think "New Windows PC" when there are cheaper and better options for them, such as a mac mini, or a beige box with linux preloaded, or a used computer. Which would you rather have to support - a n00b with a Windows box or a Linux box? The linux box is way easier - no defragging, no having to tell them to exit properly, no virus problems, no having to reinstall everything because of "registry rot", and patching/updating all apps under linux is autmatic. Microsoft will never be able to say this.
Its bad enough they're trying to bullshit people into believing that you can't take your licensed OS off a dead box and install it on a new one ...
They're probably doing this as a preemptive strike against the sum-$200 pcs that are going to be coming out. One of those, plus a Nintendo Wii, is less than the down payment on one of those "deals".
So The vendor gets his money, Microsoft gets their "tax" ... and someone with zero credit won't qualify for the lease/loan.
The average person can instal Linux just fine - its a one-disk, 1-reboot operation ... Windows is another beast entirely, what with driver disks, conflicts with anti-virus and anti-spam software, the need to have a separate install for each application, etc. Oh, and it costs a lot more, too.
It's like the joke about how you buy a $70,000 car - buy a $30,000 car through a finance company. They're buying it on time payments. Literally. 800 hours of metered use after paying 1/3 up front. They're much better off with either of the following:
- a used box with no extra financing charges or hidden costs
- a new plain-jane all-in-one box with linux pre-installed
- a new mac mini
There's nothing complex about any of these - they can ALL be bought with everything already installed and running.