You'll get banned from Slashdot for doing things like that, you know. This site is for prejudice and uninformed drivel only; Uncovering the real scam is bad form.
It amused me particularly because I asked someone only today why JVC sell over 200 different current models of camcorders in the UK, and was told that it was because of the scam shops do which says 'if you can find one of these cheaper anywhere else we'll refund the difference...' - apparently each major reseller gets one model which only they sell, even though it's practically identical to all the other models which are exclusive to each of the other major retailers. This scam of Microsoft's seems to me to be a sort of variant of the same gag.
I've never been to Europe so I don't know how Vodafone treats their customers (Vodafone is part owner of Verizon Wireless) so I don't know who's influencing these decisions.
I've been a Vodafone customer in the UK for eleven years now. I use a phone they didn't sell me, and have applications on it that I wroteaswellasvariousothers
Even on the phones Vodafone do sell you, features are not normally disabled; the last phone I got from them (Sony Ericsson P910i) has a ringtone downloaded direct to it from the net for free, and various applications I installed from places around the net. I don't think you could survive with a 'lock the users in' policy in Europe - there's too much competition.
you can bet the google OS will have similar requirements and the iphone definately will (if they ever release the SDK to non-approved developers, which is looking doubtful).
I downloaded their sdk yesterday from Nokia's site. Free as in beer, but it's easy to get. There are quite a few apps for symbian already and the sdk looks pretty well documented.
Already? Bloody should be, the system is fifteen years old...
Seriously, I used Symbian phones for five years, but never developed anything for them because the SDK was so poor. I've developed apps for Windows Mobile, and I don't even like Microsoft. My next phone will probably run OpenMoko, if I don't try to get Android running on my current phone.
Symbian - OK, it is (or was originally) a British product. But it really isn't very good.
After reading through all of the comments. You don't want to do this unless your really bored. It looks like he was having an affair with a VP that reports to him.
Oh, come on. That's a company tradition. Bill Gates didn't just shag someone who reported to him, he married her.
OK, OK, I know we're only supposed to speculate here without actually knowing anything. But if you want to know about it, it's here. It does use a Linux kernel (how then can it be 'Apache Licence'?). Above the kernel it is running a custom virtual machine, which doesn't seem to be a JVM. 'Android', as well as being the name of the project, is the name of a company bought by Google last year which specialised in PDA operating systems; The SDK will be ready for download on 12th November.
Before they were Android, the people behind the product were Danger, and produced a phone/PDA called HipTop, which was largely Java based.
That's something I'm concern about. I want something that's small enough to throw into a bag without worrying about it too much. But I also don't need another gadget/paperweight to add to my collection.
I used a Toshiba Libretto (with Debian, naturally) for years, and loved it. You very quickly get used to a small pitch keyboard, and within a couple of weeks will be touch-typing on it without difficulty. Keyboard feel, of course, is another issue, and I'd need to actually type on an EEE before I will know whether I want one. But it seems like an ideal package, and companies who are prepared to bring Linux products to the masses deserve to be supported.
OpenMoko and the 1973 will fail just as the Greenphone did. There is no leadership behind the project, no vision, just a bunch of well-intentioned geeks who want to make something cool. With no cohesive plan, though, the Neo1973 will never succeed.
If OpenMoko doesn't succeed, it will be largely because of posts like the above. Enough negative sentiment will doom any project, however cool.
OpenMoko isn't a product, it's a platform. Sure, the Neo1973 isn't the all-time ultimate mobile phone - it's a development platform. That's why in addition to the pre-built phone you get a development board you can house in your own enclosure with your own battery, screen, and other hardware bits. If you don't like Neo1973, build your own phone round the platform.
When I first started using Linux in 1993, doomsayers were saying it was obsolete and would never fly. Guess what? They were wrong.
I'm not saying OpenMoko is the world's ultimate phone project. Of course it isn't. But it's a good, big start, and it deserves support. If you don't support it, don't complain if, in ten years time, all you can get are closed, proprietary phones you can't even load your own software on.
You know, I'm getting old. I belong to a generation which, when someone gave us cool hardware, we grabbed and built cool software on top of it. Now, if it isn't all pretty and polished right out of the box, it gets condemned as rubbish. Guess what? Linus Torvalds was just a college kid when he wrote the first kernel. His professors didn't even rate him as very good. Certainly no-one thought he had leadership potential. And as for a cohesive plan, his cohesive plan was to build a scheduler which could schedule two tasks.
Stuff happens. It will surprise you. OpenMoko may, indeed, not be a great success. But if it's a bit of a success, other people will be able to come along and build on it - it isopen source. In fact, that's already happening - that's what this story is about. The GreenPhone is not 'dead', it has mutated. Instead of building their own hardware platform, the Trolls are developing the 'green suite' on the OpenMoko platform. So you can still have your greenphone - the only thing is, it will be black and silver, or white and orange.
In theory, yes, but the public doesn't seem to like the idea. See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwriter. And there may be too much prior art to make patent grabs effective.
I have one of those - and yes, I can write with it (it does still work, which isn't bad for a twenty-year-old hand held device). Some people used to be pretty fast with them. With modern technology it could be made pretty small and light (the 1980s version is a bit of a brick. But I don't think it's the answer to the problem. I prefer handwriting recognition, which these days is getting pretty good - and we're not that far from talk-to-text being usably effective on handheld devices.
Thus the entire country (bar a few temples, and places of historic interest) is rebuilt every generation or two.
Actually, even most of Japan's ancient heritage buildings are systematically torn down and reconstructed every twenty years or so. The reconstructions are faithful copies of what was there before, but the materials are usually mostly new. This process of tearing down and renewing is part of the Shinto religion.
I can't offhand think of any European state with no land boundary (the UK has a land boundary with the Republic of Ireland, of course)
The UK isn't a state, it's a union of states. That's like saying the US has a land border with Canada. Within the island of Great Britain there are two international borders; within the island of Ireland, one. Cyprus also has a land border of a sort, between the Greek and Turkish zones. Within the EU, probably only Malta has none. Within the European Economic Area, Iceland also has none.
The old line about polishing a turd comes to mind. Caldera was one of the poorest distributions around.
As one of Caldera's first paying customers, I disagree. It was not a lot different from RedHat at the time, but had a good (Motif based, as I remember it) commercial desktop (this was before KDE or Gnome, remember), Word Perfect (this was before Open Office, remember), and a number of other good, useful, stable commercial UN*X packages bundled as well. Applixware was available at reasonable price (I know, I bought that too) and gave an office application suite as good as contemporary MS Office. OK, it wasn't a geek distro, but it was a really good commercial users distro.
The whole system was solid and stable and easy to use and to administer, and was more than a match for contemporary Microsoft operating systems. OK, Linux has come a long way since then - but if Caldera-SCO had put as much energy and money into improving their distro as they have into lawsuits I think they would be solidly successful now.
The BBC does not own ALL of the rights for it's programming. A lot of it is produced FOR the BBC by outside parties.
It is, yes. Paid for by the BBC out of your money and mine. The BBC only have to make it a condition of commissioning work that the work can be made available on the Internet, problem solved.
Except, of course, that the BBC now needs to make money by selling the programmes it makes to foreign broadcasters, and later to make money by selling DVDs, etc. If all it's content is made available on the Internet for free, us licence payers are going to have to pay more. But I don't see any particular problem with the BBC releasing restricted-quality content on the Internet for free, because the foreign broadcasters are still going to want to pay for high quality content to broadcast.
Essentially HANDING microsoft a FREE selling point - "You can't watch the BBC on anything else", AND PAYING THEM OUT OF OUR LICENSEE FEE.
Indeed. Sticks in the gullet, doesn't it? The thing is anything American was so far up Tiny B Liar's arse that they could get away with anything. Yes, Mr Bush. Of course, Mr Rumsfeld. At once, Mr Gates. Hopefully Gordon may be a little more prudent.
You don't think it's important that everyday people can actually listen/watch the material? How strange.
If you want to troll, don't be so obvious about it. Don't write something that everyone can instantly see is an Aunt Sally. Make it at least seem as if you're making a reasonable point.
Using an open format wouldn't stop 'everyday people' from watching or listening to the material. It would make it easier for them. They could use either the BBC's own player, or a range of other players from other providers. They could watch the material not just on their Windows computer running the BBC's software, but also on their phone, their MP3 player, their television via a set-top box.
This isn't just a win for strange nerdy people who want to roll their own media player, or Un-American[1] traitors who choose not to run Windows. It's a win for 'everyday people'.
If an American kid built a drone, and painted it in the colours of the American flag, you wouldn't think there was anything wrong with that, would you?
And what is all this talk of 'enemies'? Iran is not your enemy. Yes, the republican party try to whip up hysteria about supposed foreign enemies to distract voters from their failures at home - it's something that right wing governments the world over have done since the time of the Romans at least. Iran not only does not threaten America, Iran could not threaten America even if it wanted to.
Even the 'War on Terr'r' is a nonsense. Face it: car drivers in America kill fourteen times as many Americans every year as Al Quaeda have ever killed. Do you have a 'War on Cars'?
This guy has built some cool technology, and he's sharing it with you. He's not taking your technology, he's freely offering you his. Can you use it? Would it be 'unpatriotic' to use it?
You're asking the wrong questions, and I would argue you're asking the wrong questions because you haven't thought about your product from the point of view of the consumer. Imagine there are two products available which do something you really want to do. Both of them come from little teenie companies with no track record, which could go bust tomorrow.
One has clear, well written, well documented code released under a liberal open source licence. If the company goes bust, you know the user community (perhaps including you) will be able to support it.
One has proprietary code. You can't get the source and if you could it's obfuscated so you can't use it. If the company goes bust the product is a paperweight
Which one would you buy? Seriously?
Face it, if your product is any good, then any reasonable tech company could do a black box reverse engineer of it whether they had the code or not. Keeping your code proprietary scarcely bothers your competitors one bit, but it makes your product much less valuable to your customers. Do this, and watch the market walk away from you.
The Sun is always wrong about Doctor Who. It has been printing one manifestly untrue story about the series every week for months. Just because you read in a tabloid that a Lancaster Bomber has been found on the Moon doesn't mean you automatically believe it (note to self: excellent plot for Doctor Who episode).
Personally I would be a lot more worried if the Sun reported that Doctor Who was definitely on for ten more seasons.
We get a very mixed message. Searching Dell's UK site for 'Ubuntu' brings up this page, but if you go through all the options on the online store, Linux isn't there.
I'm prepared to bet that, in the averabe British household, there is more 'radiation' from BBC TV and radio transmitters than from WiFi. This is a totally bogus story and the BBC should be ashamed of itself.
It requires 1 lb of recycleable aluminum per mile.
A mile is not a unit of energy. One of the consequences of an environment in which energy is expensive is that we will at last see lighter, more energy efficient vehicles becoming mainstream. The same energy which will propel an SUV for a mile will propel a Citroen 2CV, for example, at similar speed and in similar comfort for nearer ten miles; and sixty years after the 2CV was designed we surely have the wit to create a still more energy-efficient car.
Having said that, the big question in this story is what is the energy cost of recycling the aluminium, and my guess is that it must be prohibitive.
Speaking as a jobbing developer, I normally retain copyright in what I do; this is, in any case, the default position by law in Europe unless the contract explicitly states otherwise. I usually then publish the software under the GNU General Public Licence. What the firm who commissioned the software get out of the deal is:
It's tailored to their needs
I will give them ongoing support (for money)
They've got the source code and the right to modify it if I go under a bus, or fall out with them
Obviously, if people really want to own the copyright to their application I'm prepared to negotiate, but in practice in most systems the bit that's the customers' application is usually a very thin skin on the top of a big stack of libraries and utility classes, most of which are not my copyright anyway, and those that are my copyright I'm not prepared to yield the copyright in. So what in practice they get with the copyright to an application is not very much - something which won't work without a stack of open source libraries.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll get banned from Slashdot for doing things like that, you know. This site is for prejudice and uninformed drivel only; Uncovering the real scam is bad form.
It amused me particularly because I asked someone only today why JVC sell over 200 different current models of camcorders in the UK, and was told that it was because of the scam shops do which says 'if you can find one of these cheaper anywhere else we'll refund the difference...' - apparently each major reseller gets one model which only they sell, even though it's practically identical to all the other models which are exclusive to each of the other major retailers. This scam of Microsoft's seems to me to be a sort of variant of the same gag.
Caveat emptor.
I've been a Vodafone customer in the UK for eleven years now. I use a phone they didn't sell me, and have applications on it that I wrote as well as various others
Even on the phones Vodafone do sell you, features are not normally disabled; the last phone I got from them (Sony Ericsson P910i) has a ringtone downloaded direct to it from the net for free, and various applications I installed from places around the net. I don't think you could survive with a 'lock the users in' policy in Europe - there's too much competition.
You think Monday's never going to come, then?
Already? Bloody should be, the system is fifteen years old...
Seriously, I used Symbian phones for five years, but never developed anything for them because the SDK was so poor. I've developed apps for Windows Mobile, and I don't even like Microsoft. My next phone will probably run OpenMoko, if I don't try to get Android running on my current phone.
Symbian - OK, it is (or was originally) a British product. But it really isn't very good.
Oh, come on. That's a company tradition. Bill Gates didn't just shag someone who reported to him, he married her.
OK, OK, I know we're only supposed to speculate here without actually knowing anything. But if you want to know about it, it's here. It does use a Linux kernel (how then can it be 'Apache Licence'?). Above the kernel it is running a custom virtual machine, which doesn't seem to be a JVM. 'Android', as well as being the name of the project, is the name of a company bought by Google last year which specialised in PDA operating systems; The SDK will be ready for download on 12th November.
Before they were Android, the people behind the product were Danger, and produced a phone/PDA called HipTop, which was largely Java based.
I used a Toshiba Libretto (with Debian, naturally) for years, and loved it. You very quickly get used to a small pitch keyboard, and within a couple of weeks will be touch-typing on it without difficulty. Keyboard feel, of course, is another issue, and I'd need to actually type on an EEE before I will know whether I want one. But it seems like an ideal package, and companies who are prepared to bring Linux products to the masses deserve to be supported.
I'm not saying OpenMoko is the world's ultimate phone project. Of course it isn't. But it's a good, big start, and it deserves support. If you don't support it, don't complain if, in ten years time, all you can get are closed, proprietary phones you can't even load your own software on.
You know, I'm getting old. I belong to a generation which, when someone gave us cool hardware, we grabbed and built cool software on top of it. Now, if it isn't all pretty and polished right out of the box, it gets condemned as rubbish. Guess what? Linus Torvalds was just a college kid when he wrote the first kernel. His professors didn't even rate him as very good. Certainly no-one thought he had leadership potential. And as for a cohesive plan, his cohesive plan was to build a scheduler which could schedule two tasks.
Stuff happens. It will surprise you. OpenMoko may, indeed, not be a great success. But if it's a bit of a success, other people will be able to come along and build on it - it is open source. In fact, that's already happening - that's what this story is about. The GreenPhone is not 'dead', it has mutated. Instead of building their own hardware platform, the Trolls are developing the 'green suite' on the OpenMoko platform. So you can still have your greenphone - the only thing is, it will be black and silver, or white and orange.
I have one of those - and yes, I can write with it (it does still work, which isn't bad for a twenty-year-old hand held device). Some people used to be pretty fast with them. With modern technology it could be made pretty small and light (the 1980s version is a bit of a brick. But I don't think it's the answer to the problem. I prefer handwriting recognition, which these days is getting pretty good - and we're not that far from talk-to-text being usably effective on handheld devices.
Actually, even most of Japan's ancient heritage buildings are systematically torn down and reconstructed every twenty years or so. The reconstructions are faithful copies of what was there before, but the materials are usually mostly new. This process of tearing down and renewing is part of the Shinto religion.
Come back, little boy, when you've actually read the Treaty of Union.
The UK isn't a state, it's a union of states. That's like saying the US has a land border with Canada. Within the island of Great Britain there are two international borders; within the island of Ireland, one. Cyprus also has a land border of a sort, between the Greek and Turkish zones. Within the EU, probably only Malta has none. Within the European Economic Area, Iceland also has none.
As one of Caldera's first paying customers, I disagree. It was not a lot different from RedHat at the time, but had a good (Motif based, as I remember it) commercial desktop (this was before KDE or Gnome, remember), Word Perfect (this was before Open Office, remember), and a number of other good, useful, stable commercial UN*X packages bundled as well. Applixware was available at reasonable price (I know, I bought that too) and gave an office application suite as good as contemporary MS Office. OK, it wasn't a geek distro, but it was a really good commercial users distro.
The whole system was solid and stable and easy to use and to administer, and was more than a match for contemporary Microsoft operating systems. OK, Linux has come a long way since then - but if Caldera-SCO had put as much energy and money into improving their distro as they have into lawsuits I think they would be solidly successful now.
It is, yes. Paid for by the BBC out of your money and mine. The BBC only have to make it a condition of commissioning work that the work can be made available on the Internet, problem solved.
Except, of course, that the BBC now needs to make money by selling the programmes it makes to foreign broadcasters, and later to make money by selling DVDs, etc. If all it's content is made available on the Internet for free, us licence payers are going to have to pay more. But I don't see any particular problem with the BBC releasing restricted-quality content on the Internet for free, because the foreign broadcasters are still going to want to pay for high quality content to broadcast.
Indeed. Sticks in the gullet, doesn't it? The thing is anything American was so far up Tiny B Liar's arse that they could get away with anything. Yes, Mr Bush. Of course, Mr Rumsfeld. At once, Mr Gates. Hopefully Gordon may be a little more prudent.
If you want to troll, don't be so obvious about it. Don't write something that everyone can instantly see is an Aunt Sally. Make it at least seem as if you're making a reasonable point.
Using an open format wouldn't stop 'everyday people' from watching or listening to the material. It would make it easier for them. They could use either the BBC's own player, or a range of other players from other providers. They could watch the material not just on their Windows computer running the BBC's software, but also on their phone, their MP3 player, their television via a set-top box.
This isn't just a win for strange nerdy people who want to roll their own media player, or Un-American[1] traitors who choose not to run Windows. It's a win for 'everyday people'.
1: Yes, of course I'm un-American. I'm Scots.
I don't suppose you see the irony of this.
If an American kid built a drone, and painted it in the colours of the American flag, you wouldn't think there was anything wrong with that, would you?
And what is all this talk of 'enemies'? Iran is not your enemy. Yes, the republican party try to whip up hysteria about supposed foreign enemies to distract voters from their failures at home - it's something that right wing governments the world over have done since the time of the Romans at least. Iran not only does not threaten America, Iran could not threaten America even if it wanted to.
Even the 'War on Terr'r' is a nonsense. Face it: car drivers in America kill fourteen times as many Americans every year as Al Quaeda have ever killed. Do you have a 'War on Cars'?
This guy has built some cool technology, and he's sharing it with you. He's not taking your technology, he's freely offering you his. Can you use it? Would it be 'unpatriotic' to use it?
You're asking the wrong questions, and I would argue you're asking the wrong questions because you haven't thought about your product from the point of view of the consumer. Imagine there are two products available which do something you really want to do. Both of them come from little teenie companies with no track record, which could go bust tomorrow.
Which one would you buy? Seriously?
Face it, if your product is any good, then any reasonable tech company could do a black box reverse engineer of it whether they had the code or not. Keeping your code proprietary scarcely bothers your competitors one bit, but it makes your product much less valuable to your customers. Do this, and watch the market walk away from you.
The Sun is always wrong about Doctor Who. It has been printing one manifestly untrue story about the series every week for months. Just because you read in a tabloid that a Lancaster Bomber has been found on the Moon doesn't mean you automatically believe it (note to self: excellent plot for Doctor Who episode).
Personally I would be a lot more worried if the Sun reported that Doctor Who was definitely on for ten more seasons.
Peter Kropotkin pointed this out over 100 years ago
We get a very mixed message. Searching Dell's UK site for 'Ubuntu' brings up this page, but if you go through all the options on the online store, Linux isn't there.
I'm prepared to bet that, in the averabe British household, there is more 'radiation' from BBC TV and radio transmitters than from WiFi. This is a totally bogus story and the BBC should be ashamed of itself.
A mile is not a unit of energy. One of the consequences of an environment in which energy is expensive is that we will at last see lighter, more energy efficient vehicles becoming mainstream. The same energy which will propel an SUV for a mile will propel a Citroen 2CV, for example, at similar speed and in similar comfort for nearer ten miles; and sixty years after the 2CV was designed we surely have the wit to create a still more energy-efficient car.
Having said that, the big question in this story is what is the energy cost of recycling the aluminium, and my guess is that it must be prohibitive.
The short answer is Yes.
Speaking as a jobbing developer, I normally retain copyright in what I do; this is, in any case, the default position by law in Europe unless the contract explicitly states otherwise. I usually then publish the software under the GNU General Public Licence. What the firm who commissioned the software get out of the deal is:
Obviously, if people really want to own the copyright to their application I'm prepared to negotiate, but in practice in most systems the bit that's the customers' application is usually a very thin skin on the top of a big stack of libraries and utility classes, most of which are not my copyright anyway, and those that are my copyright I'm not prepared to yield the copyright in. So what in practice they get with the copyright to an application is not very much - something which won't work without a stack of open source libraries.