Fine... I wireless HUB. Perhaps I should have consulted you in your infinite wisdom of hardware knowledge before posting something that had nothing to do with the type of technology being used.
Maybe you should read the actual meaning of the post rather than nitpick the details... It's really not all that hard, just takes a tiny moment of mental effort to actually ascertain the meaning of what's written.
In other words, try using the "other half" of your brain once in a while too.
Aesthetics may be lost on someone such as yourself who could never even conceive of its advantages. Like it or not aesthetics have ALWAYS played a part in any product produced. Helps make the world a more pleasant an, wait for it, *idea inspiring*... Stating that the "fashion movement" is something that should be shunned is as shallow as saying that aesthetics are all that matters.
I'm sure there could be a million inventive ways to hide our mundane technology into things that are more decorative.
How about hiding a switch inside a picture frame... or even better a wireless switch...
Computers like any other technology component ultimately should be invisible or at the very least appealing to home users.
I have a feeling that this bear, like many other "whim" ideas may be the beginning of something much better.... A step in the "refinement" of home computing.
Microsoft today re-released it's revised version of the second draft of it's DOJ AgreementXP 7.0.9b package.
Under this agreement the states agree to re ammend an future litigation to include future contestment to future settlements of future points of litigation involving but not precluding any agreement in the first place.
In the event of any preclusion of an agreement to be acceptable to both or any parties invlolved are hereby resolved to the point of future litigation pending a court order with at least a 365 day warning pending aprroval of a senate oversight committee.
If these agreements are not met then proceed to Go and do NOT collect $200/month.
The more compatible you want your site to be the more you'll have to pour into compatibility coding.
As a rule og thumb I generally design for Netscape as there are fewer problems that crop up when the same page is viewed in IE.
Keep your styles limited to ones that operate the same over different browsers.
You'll find that macs and PC's show font sizes with much variation. My solution was to create a perl script to gather browser info and spit out a style sheet for that partuclar browser so that the font sizes and colors will be the same on multiple platforms and browsers.
Keep it appealling, but don't over do it. The only way to gauge what works and what's overkill is with experience.
Above all go to various sites and see what is functional and what is not. A site may be pretty as hell but impossible to use from a practical standpoint. Likewise a site may be wonderful to use but boring to have to sit through. Let your site's purpose dictate which way this should lean.
A portfolio site might do well with more graphics while a site on programming would do better with mostly text.
The one thing the net is forcing us to do as a whole is making us define a global set of standards. No longer will a specific country's social ethics stand, but be replaced with a global ethic of what is offensive and what is not.
Obviously and not surprisingly, sexual material has become widely acceptable globally... and the taboo's of individual country's in regards to the "maturity" are being replaced with what nature has decided is "acceptable".
The same would be said for political and financial ethics. The ethics for money as a whole on the net are much more tightly restricted simply because people on a global scale are conservative about their financial resources.
Forget the U.S. as "the great melting pot", the net will do what no country ever could....DEFINE US!
You just know that "warning" is going to be in tiny little fine white print at the bottom of the CD mixed in with all the other text no one ever reads.
"The job of a business is to generate revenue. It exists for no other purpose. The only question is how it goes about doing that. Sometimes moral questions arise: is it morally right for drug companies to profit while people who can't afford their products suffer and die? That's a hard question.
The issue of licensing for the MPEG-4 standard seems kind of trivial by comparison, doesn't it?"
I don't consider flaws that I see in the system trivial. A wrong is a wrong, and I have no more chance of convicing you that what you've chosen to believe is any more absurd than what I have chosen to believe.
I may be wrong about things... I hope I am, but I'm not going to sit back and claim that one wrong should continue simply from the standpoint that it is not directly killing anyone.
If your so concerned about lives lost, then why are you even here as opposed to out in the world trying to save those very people in danger. Go join the service, give blood, join a fire department, train to be a nurse or doctor... Certainly more noble professions than trying to convince someone on a forum that his opinions are irrelevant simply because you don't agree with them.
"Are you kidding me? Malevolent? Are you sitting there at your computer with a serious face telling me that the MPEG-4 Forum's licensing scheme is evil?"
Depends on your defenition of evil now doesn't it.
Is MPEG-4's licensing scheme evil? Probably not.
Can it be a part of a larger corporate ideology that I would view as "evil".. possibly.
Try looking at things from a perspective that isn't your own once in a while...and quite frankly from the condescending tone of your posts, I would imagine that you don't possess the ability to see things from any other perspective than the one that puts your nose at the center.
"Blowing up buildings is malevolent. Killing people is malevolent. Charging a per-use-hour fee to your customers is business."
Agreed...however it is in my view that business in regards to revenue acquisition and preservation in it's ultimate nature is entirely self-serving and therefore, in my opinion, "evil".
A business and some point in it's life crosses a line where the focus of the company is no longer on the products it produces, but rather the aquistion of revenue.
It's the very subtle difference in taking pride in products, offering them to the public, who in turn pay you for said products. As opposed to looking at the public merely as a source of revenue where your main objective is to get the most for giving the least.
It's a subtle difference and not surprising that it would escape your comprehension.
I'm sorry you feel that this isn't all that important.
Everything that happens in this world that is malevolent in nature usually has very small beginnings. How often I've heard "If we had only known sooner we could have done something about it." I wasn't raising a black flag a declaring war, I was pointing out a similarity between our economic trends and serfdom. If you feel it's not important fine... others apparently do feel it's a subject worth discussing.
When you buy a car with a credit card you still own the car unless you can't pay your bills... in which case you get sued and the government decides wether you have to give up your property.
There is leasing a vehicle which is more of the "carlord" you speak of.
In todays society leasing or renting is usually a choice. My concern comes from the erosion of the choice we have as to wether or not we "own" something.
Because it would increase the user base of their network...
but they don't want just that...they *want* you to use their network...*but only* with their client. It's a simple matter of protecting their revenue stream....or in this case, potential revenue stream.
I'm not sure of the current status of the application, but AOL has been doing the same thing to the OS X application Fire (a multi network IM client). Ever since it's release it's been a game of AOL blocking and subsequent update "fixing" the block,
Seems to me that all this extra programming is wasted cycles that could be better used for additional features for applications.
This is one area where greed is holding back innovation in the IM market.
remind me of the withering days of the casette where there were advanced features of seeking tracks and auto reverse play...
VHS recorders are less than $100 and I'm in serious doubt that anyone is going to pay extra for something they can already get from the DVD players and VHS recorders they already own...
I personally like the way ICQ handles messages and think that this could be applied to email as well. You could have settings that would require people to request authoriztion to send email to you. Everything else gets filtered. This would make spam a two step process for those involved and hence eliminate a vast majority of unwanted mail.
Granted one might be flooded with a deluge of autoriztion requests, but I suppose that could be set to a timing mechanisms whereas if a request was ignored long enough it's just refused.
Please feel free to poke prod or in any way disassemble this "idea"..or more accurately alteration of a successful method of communication.
...or at least your immediate needs. Phillips seems a logical choice to back at this point as a hardware vendor that can profit from the lack of copy protection. They are a company like any other and $$$ are the only language. Phillips could provide actual muscle in the corporate arena that people jumping up and down protesting could never provide. Let companies that back your "ideals" do the legwork for you, BUT, always keeps one eye one the people your fighting and the other on the people fighting for you, because umltimately, they are out for themselves too and wouldn't hesitate to throw you to the wolves too if it made them a buck.
Slashdot Mirror
Fine... I wireless HUB. Perhaps I should have consulted you in your infinite wisdom of hardware knowledge before posting something that had nothing to do with the type of technology being used.
Maybe you should read the actual meaning of the post rather than nitpick the details... It's really not all that hard, just takes a tiny moment of mental effort to actually ascertain the meaning of what's written.
In other words, try using the "other half" of your brain once in a while too.
Aesthetics may be lost on someone such as yourself who could never even conceive of its advantages. Like it or not aesthetics have ALWAYS played a part in any product produced. Helps make the world a more pleasant an, wait for it, *idea inspiring*... Stating that the "fashion movement" is something that should be shunned is as shallow as saying that aesthetics are all that matters.
I'm sure there could be a million inventive ways to hide our mundane technology into things that are more decorative.
How about hiding a switch inside a picture frame... or even better a wireless switch...
Computers like any other technology component ultimately should be invisible or at the very least appealing to home users.
I have a feeling that this bear, like many other "whim" ideas may be the beginning of something much better.... A step in the "refinement" of home computing.
Microsoft today re-released it's revised version of the second draft of it's DOJ AgreementXP 7.0.9b package.
Under this agreement the states agree to re ammend an future litigation to include future contestment to future settlements of future points of litigation involving but not precluding any agreement in the first place.
In the event of any preclusion of an agreement to be acceptable to both or any parties invlolved are hereby resolved to the point of future litigation pending a court order with at least a 365 day warning pending aprroval of a senate oversight committee.
If these agreements are not met then proceed to Go and do NOT collect $200/month.
The more compatible you want your site to be the more you'll have to pour into compatibility coding.
As a rule og thumb I generally design for Netscape as there are fewer problems that crop up when the same page is viewed in IE.
Keep your styles limited to ones that operate the same over different browsers.
You'll find that macs and PC's show font sizes with much variation. My solution was to create a perl script to gather browser info and spit out a style sheet for that partuclar browser so that the font sizes and colors will be the same on multiple platforms and browsers.
Keep it appealling, but don't over do it. The only way to gauge what works and what's overkill is with experience.
Above all go to various sites and see what is functional and what is not. A site may be pretty as hell but impossible to use from a practical standpoint. Likewise a site may be wonderful to use but boring to have to sit through. Let your site's purpose dictate which way this should lean.
A portfolio site might do well with more graphics while a site on programming would do better with mostly text.
Whatever you do, just keep it functional first.
The one thing the net is forcing us to do as a whole is making us define a global set of standards. No longer will a specific country's social ethics stand, but be replaced with a global ethic of what is offensive and what is not.
Obviously and not surprisingly, sexual material has become widely acceptable globally... and the taboo's of individual country's in regards to the "maturity" are being replaced with what nature has decided is "acceptable".
The same would be said for political and financial ethics. The ethics for money as a whole on the net are much more tightly restricted simply because people on a global scale are conservative about their financial resources.
Forget the U.S. as "the great melting pot", the net will do what no country ever could....DEFINE US!
You just know that "warning" is going to be in tiny little fine white print at the bottom of the CD mixed in with all the other text no one ever reads.
Send $1000 and he'll send you a robotic prayer cloth!!!
Ooops... wrong guy.
This guy truly deserves the patent. He seems like a person who would use it responsibly...
If more people were like this think of where the idustry would be today.
Everyone knows the first known version of forced feedback is the Vulcan mind meld!
"Give me your thoughts! GIVE ME YOUR THOUGHTS!!!"
They're going to (hopefully) get tons of interesting ideas and almost as much useful code for the price of $10,000. Sure beats hiring programmers.
That's assuming that any contest entries automatically become the property of Google.
Perhaps this is the evolution of a new buisness model... Either way, I don't really care as long as Google remains free, fast, and useful!
..perhaps we're trying to get back to the good ol' days when you could walk around inside your computer....
or maybe they're taking the term "big iron" a little too seriously..
"The job of a business is to generate revenue. It exists for no other purpose. The only question is how it goes about doing that. Sometimes moral questions arise: is it morally right for drug companies to profit while people who can't afford their products suffer and die? That's a hard question.
The issue of licensing for the MPEG-4 standard seems kind of trivial by comparison, doesn't it?"
I don't consider flaws that I see in the system trivial. A wrong is a wrong, and I have no more chance of convicing you that what you've chosen to believe is any more absurd than what I have chosen to believe.
I may be wrong about things... I hope I am, but I'm not going to sit back and claim that one wrong should continue simply from the standpoint that it is not directly killing anyone.
If your so concerned about lives lost, then why are you even here as opposed to out in the world trying to save those very people in danger. Go join the service, give blood, join a fire department, train to be a nurse or doctor... Certainly more noble professions than trying to convince someone on a forum that his opinions are irrelevant simply because you don't agree with them.
"Are you kidding me? Malevolent? Are you sitting there at your computer with a serious face telling me that the MPEG-4 Forum's licensing scheme is evil?"
.. possibly.
Depends on your defenition of evil now doesn't it.
Is MPEG-4's licensing scheme evil? Probably not.
Can it be a part of a larger corporate ideology that I would view as "evil"
Try looking at things from a perspective that isn't your own once in a while...and quite frankly from the condescending tone of your posts, I would imagine that you don't possess the ability to see things from any other perspective than the one that puts your nose at the center.
"Blowing up buildings is malevolent. Killing people is malevolent. Charging a per-use-hour fee to your customers is business."
Agreed...however it is in my view that business in regards to revenue acquisition and preservation in it's ultimate nature is entirely self-serving and therefore, in my opinion, "evil".
A business and some point in it's life crosses a line where the focus of the company is no longer on the products it produces, but rather the aquistion of revenue.
It's the very subtle difference in taking pride in products, offering them to the public, who in turn pay you for said products. As opposed to looking at the public merely as a source of revenue where your main objective is to get the most for giving the least.
It's a subtle difference and not surprising that it would escape your comprehension.
I'm sorry you feel that this isn't all that important.
Everything that happens in this world that is malevolent in nature usually has very small beginnings. How often I've heard "If we had only known sooner we could have done something about it." I wasn't raising a black flag a declaring war, I was pointing out a similarity between our economic trends and serfdom. If you feel it's not important fine... others apparently do feel it's a subject worth discussing.
When you buy a car with a credit card you still own the car unless you can't pay your bills... in which case you get sued and the government decides wether you have to give up your property.
There is leasing a vehicle which is more of the "carlord" you speak of.
In todays society leasing or renting is usually a choice. My concern comes from the erosion of the choice we have as to wether or not we "own" something.
Yeah... ever hear of the term "landlord"
...and from what origin is that term derived?
I'm wondering in the next 10 years how many things we'll no longer own, but be charged as we use them.
I think there was a word for this kind of situation...
Serfdom
Only this time we pay to a CEO instead of a "Lord"
...the "other" scientists have made a breakthrough where a "monkey" can be controlled by another "monkey" via a remote system.
Paranoia or just a joke... you decide.
How much does it cost to access the AOL network with an AOL client if you are not a memeber of AOL?
If the answer is nothing, how is it that people of third party clients are freeloaders and people using the AOL client are not?
Just curious.
Because it would increase the user base of their network...
but they don't want just that...they *want* you to use their network...*but only* with their client. It's a simple matter of protecting their revenue stream....or in this case, potential revenue stream.
I'm not sure of the current status of the application, but AOL has been doing the same thing to the OS X application Fire (a multi network IM client). Ever since it's release it's been a game of AOL blocking and subsequent update "fixing" the block,
Seems to me that all this extra programming is wasted cycles that could be better used for additional features for applications.
This is one area where greed is holding back innovation in the IM market.
remind me of the withering days of the casette where there were advanced features of seeking tracks and auto reverse play...
VHS recorders are less than $100 and I'm in serious doubt that anyone is going to pay extra for something they can already get from the DVD players and VHS recorders they already own...
I personally like the way ICQ handles messages and think that this could be applied to email as well. You could have settings that would require people to request authoriztion to send email to you. Everything else gets filtered. This would make spam a two step process for those involved and hence eliminate a vast majority of unwanted mail.
Granted one might be flooded with a deluge of autoriztion requests, but I suppose that could be set to a timing mechanisms whereas if a request was ignored long enough it's just refused.
Please feel free to poke prod or in any way disassemble this "idea"..or more accurately alteration of a successful method of communication.
What can I say? I'm a consumer's martyr... ;)
...or at least your immediate needs. Phillips seems a logical choice to back at this point as a hardware vendor that can profit from the lack of copy protection. They are a company like any other and $$$ are the only language. Phillips could provide actual muscle in the corporate arena that people jumping up and down protesting could never provide. Let companies that back your "ideals" do the legwork for you, BUT, always keeps one eye one the people your fighting and the other on the people fighting for you, because umltimately, they are out for themselves too and wouldn't hesitate to throw you to the wolves too if it made them a buck.