If they had courses covering the sorts of skills you find in modern software development shops (or at least in the GOOD software development shops), maybe this wouldn't be an issue.
Skills like code inspections, documentation of your changes, configuration management and so on.
Hopefully the OpenMoko phone will be Open enough (certainly it looks like the core programs involved including the daemon sending AT commands to the baseband side and receiving results back are going to be Open Source)
What I want to see is a phone which has a baseband processor that does all the stuff like talking to the cell towers. Such processor would present a fully documented and open interface (GPIO lines, AT commands, data ports, whatever) which the applications processor can talk to. Everything on the AP side would be 100% open source (GPL or whatever) from the phone dial app down to the daemon that actually sends AT commands to the baseband side.
So far the closest we have to that is the OpenEZX project for motorola EZX linux phones although a lot more work is needed in reverse engineering the proprietary AT commands sent by the proprietary tapisrv app before it can do everything the motorola software stack can do.
Where can I get a well supported full featured distro that doesn't remove 90% of the features from programs like XMMS, Mplayer and ffmpeg? (MP3 support, WMA support, DVD playback, RealAudio support etc etc)
The better solution is to do what software like AVG does and scan incoming email (and remove any viruses) when it comes in before the mail client even gets to SEE it, much less write it to the mailbox file.
Will it be cheaper per megabyte than current NOR flash? Will it mean that devices like mobile phones (or devices like the Lego Mindstorms which also stores programs/data on NOR flash) can have more memory space in them?
The question that should be asked about any new piece of anti-terrorism legislation or any anti-terrorism program is simple. If this program was in place before September 11, would it have stopped the catastrophe or made it less serious (e.g. the planes still being hijacked but the world trade centers not actually being hit or collapsing)?
If the answer to this question is NO then the question must be asked, is it worth giving up our civil liberties for a program or law that would not have stopped the terrorists in the first place. And the answer to that should be a resounding NO.
Unfortunately as long as we have politicians who are more willing to listen to a man named after a plant than after the people who voted for them in the first place, we will continue to see anti-terrorism programs and legislation that erode our civil liberties without even doing anything that would have actually had an effect on the September 11 hijackers in the first place.
I would say "thank god I don't live in America" but given that our prime minister will do anything Bush says and then some, we too are seeing all sorts of nasty laws that we don't need and that do nothing to benefit our country or stop terrorism. Thankfully there is an election coming up later this year or so and I can go and do my bit to vote the bastard Howard and his party out of office (I just hope more people follow suit)
There is a lot of network hardware out there which supports IPv6 and all that is needed is for it to be turned on and the device be given an IPv6 address (presumably the one that matches the IPv4 address it already has). Start with that and as more older gear is replaced, more and more of the global internet will have functioning IPv6 addresses.
The reason why OOXML uses WMF and relies on quirks of old versions of Word (and of WordPerfect etc) and all this other stuff is because OOXML has to be able to store every piece of data that the word *.doc file format stores. Because Word has used WMF ever since Microsoft invented WMF (which was long before SVG came along), Word will continue to use WMF.
The theaters I go to aren't like that. The staff do their jobs. People don't leave their mobile phones on. Kids are not a problem (although films specifically aimed at kids may be a different matter). And I have never had any problems with picture quality.
As for the idea of a home theater, even if I could afford such a setup (which I can't), I don't have the room in this small apartment to set one up. Plus, if I did have one, the neighbors would complain about the noise:)
I have no plans to stop going to the theater anytime soon.
As for the lousy experience that the parent poster had, complain about it. Better yet, threaten to go elsewhere if its not fixed. Recently one theater chain here in australia changed the rules so you couldn't bring in outside food (hot food, glass bottles, cans and alcohol were already banned for valid reasons, this ban was on lollies, chips, chocolate, plastic and paper drink containers etc). But there was a lot of complaints about the change in the rules so they reversed the change of policy and you can bring in outside food (other than hot food, glass bottles, cans and alcohol) again.
And this was a national theater chain with theaters all over the country.
Given the cost per megabyte for a hard disk is significantly cheaper than the cost per megabyte for a sattelite downlink, it makes perfect sense.
Also, theaters do not need to install sattelite dishes to receive movies (which may be hard or even impossible for some theaters to get permission to do).
And, sattelite links can go down or fail to work (especially if there is really severe weather such as thunderstorms).
The only problem with that is that even if you are only broadcasting public domain works or works where you have permission from the copyright holder to broadcast (either because you negotiated specific permission outside RIAA/ASCAP/BMI/IFPI/etc or because the work is licensed under a license that gives a more general permission to broadcast the work), you have to file mountains of paperwork (with RIAA, ASCAP, BMI and other rights holders) to prove that you didnt play one byte of any audio data without permission and even then they may still demand money if the rights holders aren't satisfied that you followed their ridiculous rules.
I wonder if things like potato chips would be allowed up there or if the crumbs would get into all the gaps and ruin the instruments? What about carbonated beverages (or would the low pressures that most spacecraft are kept under make that unworkable?)
Don't forget how the New Zealand government listened to the US government and shut down that guy who was making the D.I.Y. Unmanned Air Vehicle (which, IIRC, was not violating any NZ law).
I seem to recall that before AOL would allow Nullsoft to add OGG to WinAMP, AOL carried out a through patent search and declared OGG "safe" from patents and therefore safe to include in WinAMP.
I am guessing T-Mobile charges the same high per-kilobyte or per-megabyte GPRS/EDGE/etc data charges as Telstra here in australia do. Assuming that to be the case, wouldn't they WANT people to use the mobile internet as much as possible being that more use = more data downloaded = more money for T-Mobile.
Although given some of the crap I have seen from US Cell carriers, I am not surprised.
If you are unlucky enough to be stuck with a crippled phone, just find a firmware hack to unlock the missing features (if its a motorola phone, you should be able to find a SEEM/menu file/filesystem/whatever hack that will enable the missing functionality without the need to reflash the firmware at all)
There is about as much chance of Microsoft inventing (and more to the point, bringing to the marketplace) a truly unique idea as there is of Exxon Mobil covering the roof of their corporate HQ with solar panels or Lockheed Martin calling for world piece.
Were these machines with the "dell specific" video card drivers laptops? I do know that at various points ATI and NVIDIA have insisted that laptop vendors handle everything to do with the drivers for the GPUs in the laptops.
Just remember that both the USA and the USSR used (and may still use) ICBMs (such as the Titan and Atlas on the USA side) to launch both unmanned payloads and manned space capsules.
The US seems to want to stick its nose in anytime a foreign country, company or individual comes up with anything significant in aerospace technology. Its not just Galileo, they butted their nose in when that New Zealand guy came up with essentially a UAV (it was basically a jet engine with a guidance system attached IIRC)
No doubt the US will want its nose in if some third party comes up with a variant of the new "stealth" technology (that has been used for the F22 raptor and F35 JSF) independently from the US.
Kids are already vaccinated for Measles, Polio, Mumps, Rubella and other nasties. Why shouldn't we add this new vaccine to the same program and have girls vaccinated against these strains of cervical cancer. Just because it doesn't stop every form of the cancer doesn't mean we shouldn't use it. I am 100% behind giving people any vaccine that will prevent them from getting sick (no matter what, prevention is always better than cure)
With one of the seasons of The Amazing Race (I don't know which one), channel 7 (the network here in.AU with the local rights to the show) aired the first episode(s) a few days or so after the US airing. But they didn't keep it up for long. One argument they put forward as to why they couldn't do it is that they couldn't guarantee that they would have the show in time to prepare it for airing (hence the need to have more time between the US air date and the.AU air date)
Not knowing how a show gets from America to Australia or what preparation channel 7 has to do to it, I can't say if that excuse is valid or not.
Any phone CAN ring 911 and will find the right operator What the new Enhanced 911 that the FCC requires actually means is that when you dial 911, the phone knows where it is (through various mechanisms including GPS, cell-tower triangulation and cell-tower assisted GPS) and can tell the systems at the 911 call center where the cellphone you are calling from is located. The same thing happens when you ring 911 from your house (although in that case a reverse lookup is done on the phone number to find your address)
So yes you can use 911 from any cellphone. But the law mandates that all new telephone services must support some form of location service for 911 (which is why VoIP providers have had to add location information to their services) so it is almost certainly illegal (or failing that, a violation of FCC regs) for the carriers to activate a phone that doesn't support E911.
The solution is to get a GSM phone and a SIM card from the carrier of choice, the carrier cannot specify which phones your SIM card can and cannot be used in.
In this case its not about money or data charges or whatever else. The carriers don't want you using VoIP over their networks even if it cost twice as much per minute of talk (because of the data charges) than what a normal phone call cost. Its about control. If the carriers let you use data services (such as VoIP) over their networks, it becomes much easier to jump ship to some kind of 802.11* (e.g. WiMAX) based network when one becomes available, leaving the telcos with no real market.
Slashdot Mirror
If they had courses covering the sorts of skills you find in modern software development shops (or at least in the GOOD software development shops), maybe this wouldn't be an issue.
Skills like code inspections, documentation of your changes, configuration management and so on.
Hopefully the OpenMoko phone will be Open enough (certainly it looks like the core programs involved including the daemon sending AT commands to the baseband side and receiving results back are going to be Open Source)
What I want to see is a phone which has a baseband processor that does all the stuff like talking to the cell towers. Such processor would present a fully documented and open interface (GPIO lines, AT commands, data ports, whatever) which the applications processor can talk to. Everything on the AP side would be 100% open source (GPL or whatever) from the phone dial app down to the daemon that actually sends AT commands to the baseband side.
So far the closest we have to that is the OpenEZX project for motorola EZX linux phones although a lot more work is needed in reverse engineering the proprietary AT commands sent by the proprietary tapisrv app before it can do everything the motorola software stack can do.
We need better linux distros.
Where can I get a well supported full featured distro that doesn't remove 90% of the features from programs like XMMS, Mplayer and ffmpeg? (MP3 support, WMA support, DVD playback, RealAudio support etc etc)
The better solution is to do what software like AVG does and scan incoming email (and remove any viruses) when it comes in before the mail client even gets to SEE it, much less write it to the mailbox file.
Will it be cheaper per megabyte than current NOR flash?
Will it mean that devices like mobile phones (or devices like the Lego Mindstorms which also stores programs/data on NOR flash) can have more memory space in them?
The question that should be asked about any new piece of anti-terrorism legislation or any anti-terrorism program is simple. If this program was in place before September 11, would it have stopped the catastrophe or made it less serious (e.g. the planes still being hijacked but the world trade centers not actually being hit or collapsing)?
If the answer to this question is NO then the question must be asked, is it worth giving up our civil liberties for a program or law that would not have stopped the terrorists in the first place. And the answer to that should be a resounding NO.
Unfortunately as long as we have politicians who are more willing to listen to a man named after a plant than after the people who voted for them in the first place, we will continue to see anti-terrorism programs and legislation that erode our civil liberties without even doing anything that would have actually had an effect on the September 11 hijackers in the first place.
I would say "thank god I don't live in America" but given that our prime minister will do anything Bush says and then some, we too are seeing all sorts of nasty laws that we don't need and that do nothing to benefit our country or stop terrorism. Thankfully there is an election coming up later this year or so and I can go and do my bit to vote the bastard Howard and his party out of office (I just hope more people follow suit)
There is a lot of network hardware out there which supports IPv6 and all that is needed is for it to be turned on and the device be given an IPv6 address (presumably the one that matches the IPv4 address it already has). Start with that and as more older gear is replaced, more and more of the global internet will have functioning IPv6 addresses.
The reason why OOXML uses WMF and relies on quirks of old versions of Word (and of WordPerfect etc) and all this other stuff is because OOXML has to be able to store every piece of data that the word *.doc file format stores. Because Word has used WMF ever since Microsoft invented WMF (which was long before SVG came along), Word will continue to use WMF.
The theaters I go to aren't like that. The staff do their jobs. People don't leave their mobile phones on. Kids are not a problem (although films specifically aimed at kids may be a different matter). And I have never had any problems with picture quality.
:)
As for the idea of a home theater, even if I could afford such a setup (which I can't), I don't have the room in this small apartment to set one up. Plus, if I did have one, the neighbors would complain about the noise
I have no plans to stop going to the theater anytime soon.
As for the lousy experience that the parent poster had, complain about it. Better yet, threaten to go elsewhere if its not fixed. Recently one theater chain here in australia changed the rules so you couldn't bring in outside food (hot food, glass bottles, cans and alcohol were already banned for valid reasons, this ban was on lollies, chips, chocolate, plastic and paper drink containers etc). But there was a lot of complaints about the change in the rules so they reversed the change of policy and you can bring in outside food (other than hot food, glass bottles, cans and alcohol) again.
And this was a national theater chain with theaters all over the country.
Given the cost per megabyte for a hard disk is significantly cheaper than the cost per megabyte for a sattelite downlink, it makes perfect sense.
Also, theaters do not need to install sattelite dishes to receive movies (which may be hard or even impossible for some theaters to get permission to do).
And, sattelite links can go down or fail to work (especially if there is really severe weather such as thunderstorms).
The only problem with that is that even if you are only broadcasting public domain works or works where you have permission from the copyright holder to broadcast (either because you negotiated specific permission outside RIAA/ASCAP/BMI/IFPI/etc or because the work is licensed under a license that gives a more general permission to broadcast the work), you have to file mountains of paperwork (with RIAA, ASCAP, BMI and other rights holders) to prove that you didnt play one byte of any audio data without permission and even then they may still demand money if the rights holders aren't satisfied that you followed their ridiculous rules.
I wonder if things like potato chips would be allowed up there or if the crumbs would get into all the gaps and ruin the instruments?
What about carbonated beverages (or would the low pressures that most spacecraft are kept under make that unworkable?)
I also had that same kit (or if not that one, one that was almost identical) when I was a kid. Great kit actually :)
Don't forget how the New Zealand government listened to the US government and shut down that guy who was making the D.I.Y. Unmanned Air Vehicle (which, IIRC, was not violating any NZ law).
I seem to recall that before AOL would allow Nullsoft to add OGG to WinAMP, AOL carried out a through patent search and declared OGG "safe" from patents and therefore safe to include in WinAMP.
I am guessing T-Mobile charges the same high per-kilobyte or per-megabyte GPRS/EDGE/etc data charges as Telstra here in australia do. Assuming that to be the case, wouldn't they WANT people to use the mobile internet as much as possible being that more use = more data downloaded = more money for T-Mobile.
Although given some of the crap I have seen from US Cell carriers, I am not surprised.
If you are unlucky enough to be stuck with a crippled phone, just find a firmware hack to unlock the missing features (if its a motorola phone, you should be able to find a SEEM/menu file/filesystem/whatever hack that will enable the missing functionality without the need to reflash the firmware at all)
There is about as much chance of Microsoft inventing (and more to the point, bringing to the marketplace) a truly unique idea as there is of Exxon Mobil covering the roof of their corporate HQ with solar panels or Lockheed Martin calling for world piece.
Were these machines with the "dell specific" video card drivers laptops? I do know that at various points ATI and NVIDIA have insisted that laptop vendors handle everything to do with the drivers for the GPUs in the laptops.
Just remember that both the USA and the USSR used (and may still use) ICBMs (such as the Titan and Atlas on the USA side) to launch both unmanned payloads and manned space capsules.
The US seems to want to stick its nose in anytime a foreign country, company or individual comes up with anything significant in aerospace technology. Its not just Galileo, they butted their nose in when that New Zealand guy came up with essentially a UAV (it was basically a jet engine with a guidance system attached IIRC)
No doubt the US will want its nose in if some third party comes up with a variant of the new "stealth" technology (that has been used for the F22 raptor and F35 JSF) independently from the US.
Kids are already vaccinated for Measles, Polio, Mumps, Rubella and other nasties. Why shouldn't we add this new vaccine to the same program and have girls vaccinated against these strains of cervical cancer. Just because it doesn't stop every form of the cancer doesn't mean we shouldn't use it. I am 100% behind giving people any vaccine that will prevent them from getting sick (no matter what, prevention is always better than cure)
With one of the seasons of The Amazing Race (I don't know which one), channel 7 (the network here in .AU with the local rights to the show) aired the first episode(s) a few days or so after the US airing. But they didn't keep it up for long. One argument they put forward as to why they couldn't do it is that they couldn't guarantee that they would have the show in time to prepare it for airing (hence the need to have more time between the US air date and the .AU air date)
Not knowing how a show gets from America to Australia or what preparation channel 7 has to do to it, I can't say if that excuse is valid or not.
Any phone CAN ring 911 and will find the right operator
What the new Enhanced 911 that the FCC requires actually means is that when you dial 911, the phone knows where it is (through various mechanisms including GPS, cell-tower triangulation and cell-tower assisted GPS) and can tell the systems at the 911 call center where the cellphone you are calling from is located.
The same thing happens when you ring 911 from your house (although in that case a reverse lookup is done on the phone number to find your address)
So yes you can use 911 from any cellphone.
But the law mandates that all new telephone services must support some form of location service for 911 (which is why VoIP providers have had to add location information to their services) so it is almost certainly illegal (or failing that, a violation of FCC regs) for the carriers to activate a phone that doesn't support E911.
The solution is to get a GSM phone and a SIM card from the carrier of choice, the carrier cannot specify which phones your SIM card can and cannot be used in.
In this case its not about money or data charges or whatever else.
The carriers don't want you using VoIP over their networks even if it cost twice as much per minute of talk (because of the data charges) than what a normal phone call cost. Its about control. If the carriers let you use data services (such as VoIP) over their networks, it becomes much easier to jump ship to some kind of 802.11* (e.g. WiMAX) based network when one becomes available, leaving the telcos with no real market.