As the parent suggests, this is old news. These sorts of things have been around for a while, but they really were free before.
FreeWorldDialup used to sell a number of interesting hybrid phones including one that was a regular cell phone that, when in a free WiFi area, would route calls through your VOIP system instead of using the cellular network. I think you had to stay put through the duration of the call because there didn't seem to be any mechanism for switching between VOIP and cellular if you moved out of the WiFi coverage range.
One, interesting device they had was one that would allow you to route your VOIP calls through your cell phone. The idea was that some cell phone rate plans actually made it cheaper to use your cell minutes than your land line for long distance and various other types of calls, so you could just plug your cell phone into this base station and set you dial plan on your VOIP network to route calls to the device. So, you could pick up your SIP phone, dial a number which would route the call through your PBX to this device, which would use the cell phone to make the final connection.
I'm sure a little googling would reveal that these things are still out there even if FWD isn't selling them anymore.
The First to file and first to invent rules always seemed strange to me. If two people file a patent for a similar idea at about the same time, then shouldn't that be a demonstration that the idea was obvious... or at least not unique?
If I had my way, if anyone submitted a similar patent to one that was still being examined and not yet awarded (or made public), then both should be invalidated as the idea should be deemed obvious because two practitioners of the art clearly came up with the same idea independently. This would have prented both the light-bulf and phone patents to have been rejected, which, in historical retrospect seem to have been indepentently invented by several different people/groups at about the same time.
One of the gotcha's with defining obviouse is that some of the most revolutionary and brilliant ideas are very simple. In retrospect, they're obvious, but until someone thought of them for the first time...
Although not an invetion, one case that illustrates this in a way that most modern readers find hard to believe is that reading was originally only used for re-telling stories to others, so much so that one historical writer reported being quite startled to come upon someone reading silently to himself and was confused about what was going on for a few moments.
In an ideal world, they would be publicly archived so you could easily go review them. Although I was able to find several sites like CNN and C-PSAN that had links to the videos, they were always unavailable when actually clicked on. I'm sure that, with a little more hunting, I might be able to find something official that actually works, but most of what I found was audio only and none that were 'authorized' legal, complete, copies, which is the point of this whole article I suppose.
For a fee, tapes are available in BETA version, which is broadcast quality and requires a C-Span release, or in VHS format, which does not require authorization. To order by phone, cite the ID number listed below.
Back in 2004, I contacted the Commission for Presidential Debates and suggested that they make the debates available via BitTorrent, but they didn't understand the technology and were reluctant to download software that they trust to even figure out what I was trying to suggest to them. Of course, even if they did understand it, and actually buy into the idea of hosting the torrents from their site, they probably wouldn't have been able to follow through because of restrictions like the one that this article is about.
websites that use Flash media which claim that the latest version distributed by Novell as part of OpenSuSE 10 is not complaint. Yet as far as I'm aware the versions correlate, so it's just bad scripting on the part of bands and others who insist on using Flash in their websites, not a problem with the deployed tools or browsers.
I've never liked the idea of coding to a browser. Use the standard query tags to determine the browser capabilities
Thankfully, there are things that can be done about some of these sorts of problems, like changing the user agent (use about:config in Firfox) or using tools like Greasemonkey, Web Developer and Firebug to "fix" poorly designed web sites. Unfortunately, these tools are unknown to most users and some are difficult for the average user to use and even power users ofen find it more work than it's worth to fix bad sites.
Argh! The success of google has overshadowed the very word that was the inspiration for the name in the first place... googol. May I suggest... googolcapacitors?
My Acorn Atom actually came with schematics (2) and it was easy enough to disassemble the ROM. The manual even had a complete definition of the syntax in Backus-Naur format. Too bad modern computer makers don't seem to have that sort of respect for their users.
Microsoft is finally catching up to circa 1995 security. Too bad it has more to do with protecting software 'assets' than with some semblance of actual user security through digitally signed software.
"Lobbyists" are the guys who attempt to persuade politicians directly. This is about persuading voters. Shouldn't there be a difference?
Indeed, someone who persuades voters should be called a campaigner.
Actually, the traditional media has been doing this for centuries. Their work is generally refered to as Journalistic Opinion pieces. Now that the some courts are treating bloggers as journalists, those are the rules that aught to apply. So why do we need to change the rules for bloggers when the existing rules apply and work just fine?
a small company like Fairpoint is going to have to focus on the customers they've got. Which means either making them happy, or losing the business to local Co-Ops setup to provide the missing services.
It's interesting that you mention Co-ops. I've heard/read good things from people who have Co-op telecom providers.
It seems to me that we could eliminate many of the 'Big Telco' problems that people complain about by simply making the only part of the system that is a monopoly be the connection between the Central Office and the end user and then run this part of the system as a co-op. Everyone could then choose who their regional, long distance, internet and cable providers who would only have to duplicate services up to the central office. The only place were a monopoly makes sense is in the last (few) mile(s) where it wouldn't be practical to have competing services. Everywhere else in the system, allowing competition would work just fine... especially since they wouldn't necessarilly have a captive audience that they could force to do things their way.
Perhaps it's time for an "OpenPhone Project" that implements wacky OSS coolness and innovation on top of a reference smartphone design and that can ultimately make its way into the hands of interested manufacturers? I'd be interested in reading about that on the front page of Slashdot...
Well, there's the Qtopia Greenphone. From what I've read so far, it doesn't sound like it's quite ready for prime time, but sounds like it's on the right path.
Having lots of people producing power using a variety of means as you suggest and adding what they don't need or can't store to the grid is much better solution than the grand parent's massively centralized system. Every engineer knows that single points of failure are bad and multiple sources are generally good. A distributed system like the parent suggests gives us all more security from all sorts of failure mechanisms from bad weather to terrorism and puts the power, litterally, in the hands of the people rather than a bunch of fat cats with sweet govenment subsidies.
I bought a Raven X60 from Emperor Linux this summer. It's a very nice machine and is just perfect for cafés where my nine pound Dell is inconvenient. Amortized over the last six months, my café drinks are down to less than $100 each!
Although Emperor Linux claims that they have many of the key laptop specific features working out of the box, I've found that not to be the case. Sleep, hibernate and dial-up modem capabilities never worked for me from day one. Also, you have to pay the Redmond Tax, so I had them not uninstall Windows XP and make it a dual boot machine. It's a good thing too, because it turned out to be the only way I could get online at some motels.
I've also run into problems with WiFi because one of my favourite coffee shops, Bluff City Coffee, because they provide access through a Cisco access point with WPA and a security protocol I'd never heard of before. It works easily with Windows, but it was tough to get it to work with Ubuntu. Evenutally we got it figured out, but it still blocks apt-get packages, so I have to download them manually, which isn't exactly a common thing for me to do in a café anyways.
You sign up (yeah, I know, you have to trust them) and give out email addresses like
If you don't trust spamgourmet.com with even one email address, then you can always get the source and run it on your own server.
P.S. I'm a big fan of spamgourmet and have been using it for years. I recommend it to everyone who asks about spam or registration web pages that require valid email addresses. I've even done a little work toward creating a servlet/filter that generates timestamped and requester IP address encoded mailto links so that any harvested email addresses that are subsequently used for spamming can be linked back to the harvester when reporting abuse.
I thought the whole idea with Mesh phones was that they connect directly to each other or route via intermediary Mesh phones. The WiFi thing was only supposed to be a stop-gap for calls between cities or until enough people had mesh phones and we reached a critical density where the cellular carriers became unnecessary. I have no idea how the routing would work, but that's what I thought the idea was.
If this is, indeed, the way that it is supposed to work, then I doubt Mesh phones ever see the light of day primarily because the carriers will kill it. Since the carriers are the major buyers of cell phones, no cell phone company would do something like create a mesh phone that could compete with their major customer's primary business... Then again, some Korean start-up without any encumbent telco customer base might try to make a run at the business, but they'd need a lot of money to saturate some market before it would be attractive to consumers - a chicken and egg problem.
Not necessarily. You can still charge someone if you license your software under the GPL.
No. The parent had it right. It is freeware. You're thinking of gratis-ware.
It's strange that in a country that was founded on freedom and liberty that they'd be so willing to let marketing folks hijack such a fundamentally important word and make it synonomous with gratituity so they could sell more laundry detergent. Even Mork from Ork knew what 'Fly be free' meant;)
There definitely is a need for OFFICIAL EXTENSIONS,considering that most of firefox's crashes,high CPU usage that users report are caused by faulty/buggy extensions
Now, I'm a big fan of Greasemonkey and I doubt that any OFFICIAL EXTENSIONS mechanism would have prevented this particular security flaw, but the fact that something like this is possible does illustrate that some sort of code-quality/security/reliabiliy assurance mechanism is necessary.
I'm sick of hearing about how maximised windows are stupid and useless, and how I just don't understand.
Yes, OCD types like myself do tend to get hung up on the formality of the 'right' way to do things. Luckily, in my advanced years, I have lightened up a little. I highly recommend it to those who still suffer (from this common misinterpretation of what OCD means).
On the other hand, having a 23" HD format monitor now makes me question Fitt's Law, which breaks down when the menu is waaay over there.
Me no understand.
Fitt's Law:
The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
Surely this explicitly takes into account the menu bar being waaay over there? Or have I misunderstood?
You didn't misunderstand... I just wasn't specific enough. What I actually had in mind was the corrollary of the Fitt's Law, which is in the third and fifth paragraphs of the original link.
Fitts' law indicates that the most quickly accessed targets on any computer display are the four corners of the screen, because of their pinning action, and yet, for years, they seemed to be avoided at all costs by designers.
Use the pinning actions of the sides, bottom, top, and corners of your display: A single-row toolbar with tool icons that "bleed" into the edges of the display will be many times faster than a double row of icons with a carefully-applied one-pixel non-clickable edge between the tools and the side of the display.
Fitt's Law has been used for a long time to justify the Macintosh menu bar being on the top of the screen rather than the top of the window. It makes some sense because you can easily move the mouse to the menu bar without overshooting. This 'pinning' effect improves the users' chance of getting the menu without having to slow down and carefully control hand movement as the pointer approaches the final target. Instead the user can simply make a fast sloppy upwards motion and still get the menu bar every time. It's sort of like baseball where it's faster to get to a base that you can over-run safely than to one where you have to slow down and stop on the base to be safe.
My argument was that the corollary of Fitt's Law no longer applies when it takes several motions of the mouse to get all the way across the screen to the menu bar. In a sense, you can argue that Fitt's Law still applies as you suggested, but that the corollary doesn't because the top edge of the screen is not just physically far away on a large monitor, but far enough away in access time that the pinning effect doesn't buy enough to justify having the menu way up there.
Large monitors change the dynamic. The menu may not even be in the users' field of view when working on a window that is in the opposide corner of the screen. Even if you adjust your mouse to be able to easily move to the edge of the screen in one motion, you sacrifice the finer control that is required when working on a small window on such a large array of pixels... even with acceleration enhancements.
When I saw a user with all of their windows maximized, I used to think that they were probably a novice user (or perpetual novice). Most non-technical folks do it this way.
Recently, I re-evaluated that opinion when I saw a developer using Eclipse maximized. His 17" monitor was clearly not usable with an application that had so many plugin panes simply because he didn't have room for anything else on his monitor if he wanted to size the window so that he could have all of the required views on the screen at the same time. I think that the maximized windows anti-pattern has more to do with the limitations of display size rather than because people are too stupid to do it the 'proper' way. In fact, I'd say, that the decision to maximize in a limited display is a sign that they're not so dumb after all.
However, on a large monitor, it is my opinion that mazimizing windows is a true anti-pattern because the benefits of drag and drop and multiple application interactions go away when you can only see one at a time. Most of these developers don't even know that, frequently, the easiest way to change directory in a CLI is to type 'cd ' and then drag a directory from the file browser to the terminal window. There are lots of similar GUI patterns that make working on a computer much easier.
Unfortunately, these things are often thought of as 'tricks' because the OS's have downplayed their use since users didn't seem to be using them. Most computer use is menu and wizard driven and there are very few applications that use a true OOUI.
It's one of those bizarre situations where the design was ahead of it's time and the lack of use of the features fed back to the designers who dropped the advanced features just before the technology caught up to the point where these advanced features would have actually been useful. I guess it doesn't matter that much because most users have been so heavily trained to use copy-paste and other broken metaphors instead of drag-and-drop and gestures, so that even though it may now make sense to use drag-and-drop more, nobody will bother because they're used to the old way.
It sort of reminds me of how an inferior technology like the old Palm torpedoed the prematurely advanced and poorly marketed Newton. Now we have to live with a bad paradigm.
On the other hand, having a 23" HD format monitor now makes me question Fitt's Law, which breaks down when the menu is waaay over there.
Slashdot Mirror
As the parent suggests, this is old news. These sorts of things have been around for a while, but they really were free before.
FreeWorldDialup used to sell a number of interesting hybrid phones including one that was a regular cell phone that, when in a free WiFi area, would route calls through your VOIP system instead of using the cellular network. I think you had to stay put through the duration of the call because there didn't seem to be any mechanism for switching between VOIP and cellular if you moved out of the WiFi coverage range.
One, interesting device they had was one that would allow you to route your VOIP calls through your cell phone. The idea was that some cell phone rate plans actually made it cheaper to use your cell minutes than your land line for long distance and various other types of calls, so you could just plug your cell phone into this base station and set you dial plan on your VOIP network to route calls to the device. So, you could pick up your SIP phone, dial a number which would route the call through your PBX to this device, which would use the cell phone to make the final connection.
I'm sure a little googling would reveal that these things are still out there even if FWD isn't selling them anymore.
The First to file and first to invent rules always seemed strange to me. If two people file a patent for a similar idea at about the same time, then shouldn't that be a demonstration that the idea was obvious... or at least not unique?
If I had my way, if anyone submitted a similar patent to one that was still being examined and not yet awarded (or made public), then both should be invalidated as the idea should be deemed obvious because two practitioners of the art clearly came up with the same idea independently. This would have prented both the light-bulf and phone patents to have been rejected, which, in historical retrospect seem to have been indepentently invented by several different people/groups at about the same time.
One of the gotcha's with defining obviouse is that some of the most revolutionary and brilliant ideas are very simple. In retrospect, they're obvious, but until someone thought of them for the first time...
Although not an invetion, one case that illustrates this in a way that most modern readers find hard to believe is that reading was originally only used for re-telling stories to others, so much so that one historical writer reported being quite startled to come upon someone reading silently to himself and was confused about what was going on for a few moments.
There is a a debate videos page from the Commission for Presidential Debates, but all it does is offer links to the C-SPAN store and a list following:
Back in 2004, I contacted the Commission for Presidential Debates and suggested that they make the debates available via BitTorrent, but they didn't understand the technology and were reluctant to download software that they trust to even figure out what I was trying to suggest to them. Of course, even if they did understand it, and actually buy into the idea of hosting the torrents from their site, they probably wouldn't have been able to follow through because of restrictions like the one that this article is about.
Is it safe to assume that SLA stands for Service Level Agreement?
My Acorn Atom actually came with schematics (2) and it was easy enough to disassemble the ROM. The manual even had a complete definition of the syntax in Backus-Naur format. Too bad modern computer makers don't seem to have that sort of respect for their users.
Microsoft is finally catching up to circa 1995 security. Too bad it has more to do with protecting software 'assets' than with some semblance of actual user security through digitally signed software.
It seems to me that we could eliminate many of the 'Big Telco' problems that people complain about by simply making the only part of the system that is a monopoly be the connection between the Central Office and the end user and then run this part of the system as a co-op. Everyone could then choose who their regional, long distance, internet and cable providers who would only have to duplicate services up to the central office. The only place were a monopoly makes sense is in the last (few) mile(s) where it wouldn't be practical to have competing services. Everywhere else in the system, allowing competition would work just fine... especially since they wouldn't necessarilly have a captive audience that they could force to do things their way.
Having lots of people producing power using a variety of means as you suggest and adding what they don't need or can't store to the grid is much better solution than the grand parent's massively centralized system. Every engineer knows that single points of failure are bad and multiple sources are generally good. A distributed system like the parent suggests gives us all more security from all sorts of failure mechanisms from bad weather to terrorism and puts the power, litterally, in the hands of the people rather than a bunch of fat cats with sweet govenment subsidies.
If Apple's problem with PowerPC was Performance Per Watt, then why'd they switch to Intel instead of AMD?
I bought a Raven X60 from Emperor Linux this summer. It's a very nice machine and is just perfect for cafés where my nine pound Dell is inconvenient. Amortized over the last six months, my café drinks are down to less than $100 each!
Although Emperor Linux claims that they have many of the key laptop specific features working out of the box, I've found that not to be the case. Sleep, hibernate and dial-up modem capabilities never worked for me from day one. Also, you have to pay the Redmond Tax, so I had them not uninstall Windows XP and make it a dual boot machine. It's a good thing too, because it turned out to be the only way I could get online at some motels.
I've also run into problems with WiFi because one of my favourite coffee shops, Bluff City Coffee, because they provide access through a Cisco access point with WPA and a security protocol I'd never heard of before. It works easily with Windows, but it was tough to get it to work with Ubuntu. Evenutally we got it figured out, but it still blocks apt-get packages, so I have to download them manually, which isn't exactly a common thing for me to do in a café anyways.
P.S. I'm a big fan of spamgourmet and have been using it for years. I recommend it to everyone who asks about spam or registration web pages that require valid email addresses. I've even done a little work toward creating a servlet/filter that generates timestamped and requester IP address encoded mailto links so that any harvested email addresses that are subsequently used for spamming can be linked back to the harvester when reporting abuse.
What's all this about WiFi?
I thought the whole idea with Mesh phones was that they connect directly to each other or route via intermediary Mesh phones. The WiFi thing was only supposed to be a stop-gap for calls between cities or until enough people had mesh phones and we reached a critical density where the cellular carriers became unnecessary. I have no idea how the routing would work, but that's what I thought the idea was.
If this is, indeed, the way that it is supposed to work, then I doubt Mesh phones ever see the light of day primarily because the carriers will kill it. Since the carriers are the major buyers of cell phones, no cell phone company would do something like create a mesh phone that could compete with their major customer's primary business... Then again, some Korean start-up without any encumbent telco customer base might try to make a run at the business, but they'd need a lot of money to saturate some market before it would be attractive to consumers - a chicken and egg problem.
Didn't we just have an article about some guy making a Farnsworth Fusor in his garage last week? How's this kid any different?
It's strange that in a country that was founded on freedom and liberty that they'd be so willing to let marketing folks hijack such a fundamentally important word and make it synonomous with gratituity so they could sell more laundry detergent. Even Mork from Ork knew what 'Fly be free' meant
Now, I'm a big fan of Greasemonkey and I doubt that any OFFICIAL EXTENSIONS mechanism would have prevented this particular security flaw, but the fact that something like this is possible does illustrate that some sort of code-quality/security/reliabiliy assurance mechanism is necessary.
Yes, OCD types like myself do tend to get hung up on the formality of the 'right' way to do things. Luckily, in my advanced years, I have lightened up a little. I highly recommend it to those who still suffer (from this common misinterpretation of what OCD means).
You didn't misunderstand... I just wasn't specific enough. What I actually had in mind was the corrollary of the Fitt's Law, which is in the third and fifth paragraphs of the original link.
Fitt's Law has been used for a long time to justify the Macintosh menu bar being on the top of the screen rather than the top of the window. It makes some sense because you can easily move the mouse to the menu bar without overshooting. This 'pinning' effect improves the users' chance of getting the menu without having to slow down and carefully control hand movement as the pointer approaches the final target. Instead the user can simply make a fast sloppy upwards motion and still get the menu bar every time. It's sort of like baseball where it's faster to get to a base that you can over-run safely than to one where you have to slow down and stop on the base to be safe.
My argument was that the corollary of Fitt's Law no longer applies when it takes several motions of the mouse to get all the way across the screen to the menu bar. In a sense, you can argue that Fitt's Law still applies as you suggested, but that the corollary doesn't because the top edge of the screen is not just physically far away on a large monitor, but far enough away in access time that the pinning effect doesn't buy enough to justify having the menu way up there.
Large monitors change the dynamic. The menu may not even be in the users' field of view when working on a window that is in the opposide corner of the screen. Even if you adjust your mouse to be able to easily move to the edge of the screen in one motion, you sacrifice the finer control that is required when working on a small window on such a large array of pixels... even with acceleration enhancements.
When I saw a user with all of their windows maximized, I used to think that they were probably a novice user (or perpetual novice). Most non-technical folks do it this way.
Recently, I re-evaluated that opinion when I saw a developer using Eclipse maximized. His 17" monitor was clearly not usable with an application that had so many plugin panes simply because he didn't have room for anything else on his monitor if he wanted to size the window so that he could have all of the required views on the screen at the same time. I think that the maximized windows anti-pattern has more to do with the limitations of display size rather than because people are too stupid to do it the 'proper' way. In fact, I'd say, that the decision to maximize in a limited display is a sign that they're not so dumb after all.
However, on a large monitor, it is my opinion that mazimizing windows is a true anti-pattern because the benefits of drag and drop and multiple application interactions go away when you can only see one at a time. Most of these developers don't even know that, frequently, the easiest way to change directory in a CLI is to type 'cd ' and then drag a directory from the file browser to the terminal window. There are lots of similar GUI patterns that make working on a computer much easier.
Unfortunately, these things are often thought of as 'tricks' because the OS's have downplayed their use since users didn't seem to be using them. Most computer use is menu and wizard driven and there are very few applications that use a true OOUI.
It's one of those bizarre situations where the design was ahead of it's time and the lack of use of the features fed back to the designers who dropped the advanced features just before the technology caught up to the point where these advanced features would have actually been useful. I guess it doesn't matter that much because most users have been so heavily trained to use copy-paste and other broken metaphors instead of drag-and-drop and gestures, so that even though it may now make sense to use drag-and-drop more, nobody will bother because they're used to the old way.
It sort of reminds me of how an inferior technology like the old Palm torpedoed the prematurely advanced and poorly marketed Newton. Now we have to live with a bad paradigm.
On the other hand, having a 23" HD format monitor now makes me question Fitt's Law, which breaks down when the menu is waaay over there.
Mmmm... Pie Pants.
No... wait. I meant Pie Pants.