Unfortunately, the Act passed (and I believe will be upheld by the Supreme Court) because "limited times" is too ambiguous. Yes, even the elected officials would admit to themselves that the framers of the Constitution would never have accepted today's duration as "limited", especially given how the value of today's knowledge degrades so much quicker than it used to. But they'll never voice this. They will say that the dictionary definition of "limited" can be any number less than "infinity", and they'd be right!
Because his point was not about issues of fair use and enforcement while a work is within the copyright protected duration (the purpose of the DMCA, for digial content only). The point of the article was about how no works are returning to the public domain, the unprotected status, as was intended by the Constitution.
I'm sure he's not crazy about the DMCA either, but the Bono Act and the DMCA are two entirely different issues within the copyright debate. To have brought the DMCA into his article would only have confused his points.
Nope. They should not have that option, regardless of the price tag. And such a law would actally require a Constitutional amendment (which states that copyright is granted for limited times). It would bastardize the whole intent of copyright. Remember:
- MYTH - the reason for copyright is to provide protection of the author's works against unauthorized copying (for the greater good of the author) - REALITY - the reason for copyright is to encourage the production of works (for the greater good of society)
By this, all works *MUST* eventually be returned to the public domain. It is most certainly unconstitutional for it to not be so.
The problem today is that the "limited times" mentioned in the Constitution can be any defined number, regardless of how high. By having ridiculously long durations, it effectively bastardizes the intent of the Constitution even worse than your suggestion does, in the short term. But the really long-term implications of granting a corporation the right to truly "own" a work (never release it, ever) are too dangerous to contemplate.
There really does need to be an arbitrary number given for copyright protections. "Limited times" begs for a defined number. It's just not limited *enough* right now.
(PS. what about different copyright durations for different *types* of works? For instance, surely the authors/publishers of software have recouped all they're going to get by, say, 10 years from the day it was released? What benefit is there to keeping ancient software protected by copyright?)
OK, everyone's response has been pretty uniform: he's talking about using Windows Messaging. If this is the case, fine, I've had that shut off since the beginning anyways. Everyone believes that these Romanian programmers have sold him a crappy solution.
But this guy seems pretty knowledgable in the ways of SPAM. Surely he knows that Windows Messaging is primative and cannot be a replacement for a good spam ad (no links, no graphics, just plain text). Surely he knows that it would be easily stopped by a firewall or anti-spam programs (unlike his statements).
That's what made me think he's planning on using an IE hole or a trojan. I wanted anyone's opinion on that possibility. It seems pretty unlikely that he'll be able to affect Mozilla running on Linux.
"This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.
"Isn't technology great?"
Firstly, can anyone envision what could possibly do this? Does your browser have to be trojoned to accomplish this feat? Could it be an IE-only kind of design bug?
Secondly, if he does manage this, he'd better do a better job of hiding his location, because he's about to piss off a *lot* of people with this stunt!
Because the major corporate customers know that proprietary products screw consumers in the long and possibly short run.
I happen to agree with your sentiment that major corporate customers *should* know that proprietary products screw them, but the evidence suggests that they don't know this, they don't care, or they perceive the effort to change too high.
Care to name a "major corporation" who have no information locked into any proprietary file formats? That means no MS Office, WordPerfect, Photoshop, Lotus Notes, PeopleSoft, AutoCAD, etc. etc. etc. I'd wager you can't name one big company that stores even half of its documents in formats that aren't held hostage by a software vendor.
Is this stupid? I think so, especially as the pattern is to get your organization so completely dependant on the vendors' software. Should the vendor decide that their profits aren't high enough, they can stop supporting your product (and therefore your documents), or charge extra to support you. Worse, if the company goes under you will have *no* way to update your system.
Proprietary formats are guaranteed to be an eventual dead-end. It's just that the end is so far beyond all corporations' short-sighted vision that it just doesn't matter to them.
Microsoft is probably only implementing XML as an available file format because it sounds good. Microsoft can tell everyone that they aren't being anti-competive now, "Look, we use an open file format!" Meanwhile, I guarantee that their plan goes like this:
Firstly, ".doc" will firmly remain the default file format for Word, ".xls" will remain default for Excel, etc. This will guarantee that >90% of the new documents produced on these apps will be in these proprietary formats, just out of sheer laziness of the users.
Secondly, there will be a deterrant to using their XML format. How much do you want to bet that documents saved in XML will be (a) ugly or feature reduced (the parser they provide will intentionally provide a limited set of formatting features), or (b) impossible to interpret without Microsoft's proprietary parser (in other words, no less proprietary a format than.doc).
So, no, Microsoft has *no* interest in helping along a panel to create an open format for documents, even if it is to their own specifications. Closed formats are all they want.
The *compositions* written by classical composers is free of copyright. You are welcome to take their works (the melodies, harmonies, every musical expression they made) and do with them what you like.
However, every *recording* made within the current timeframe of copyright today (death + 70 years) cannot be reused without consent of the holder of that work's copyright. You want an "unemcumbered" Beethoven's 9th Symphony that wasn't recorded in the '20s? Hire the conductor, orchestra, and choir, record it all, and its yours! Same goes for sheet music: if you can't find an old print copy, you can interpret the music yourself and write down every note on staff paper, and you won't owe anyone a thing.
Of course, that might be asking a bit much to avoid a few cents/dollars on licencing/royalty fees. But that's the deal, as it stands now.
The link states that the military might is far more powerful than the combined might of the citizenry, and as a result any uprising would by futile. The only chance would be if the military joined the side of the revolution, otherwise he saw a global police state will be set up soon that will last a thousand years.
First of all, the "global" aspect of the police state is ludicrous: no unifying state will be established in this world as long as there are nations that have somewhat equal military power (nuclear weapons) with unequal wealth. Off the top of my head, you've got China, Russia, India, etc. that easily fall into this catagory. There is no indication that the US has the military or economic strength to take over any of these nations (let alone all), nor does it look like the US could afford to bring these massive numbers of people up to our own level of wealth.
I also recall another state from about 70 years ago that proclaimed that its rule would last a thousand years. As it turned out, it ended after 12 years in 1945.
But back to the crux of the post. He dismisses the chance that the military would ever turn against the ruling regime. I doubt this. While there are many (most) military leaders who will tow the line of their commanding officer, I refuse to believe that there would not be a single man of conscience in a position of military power over an extended period of time. Eventually, a single division would break and start to fight back. I'm sure they would be quickly squashed, but the action would make them heroes in the eyes of many others in the military, the action would be repeated, and eventually a full-scale civil war (not just rebellion) would break out.
This is part of what I was referring to in my post above about the Level 9 taking years to take place. I probably should have said decades.
Are there any features that restaurants need that your traditional POS system may not include?
You bet. The system must be able to keep track of what order is associated with what table. This is done efficiently in the restaurant by being able to program the layout of the tables on the floor, and using touch screens to tap the right table when processing the order.
Also, there should be a way in the system for the server of the order to get reimbursed for tips left on credit card bills automatically.
I don't imagine Home Depot built these features into their systems.:-)
On the subtraction side, there obviously isn't much call for barcode readers to be integrated into a restaurant POS solution, which is pretty much a standard feature on modern retail machines.
Re:Instantiating the Activist Class
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HomeSec In the News
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Do you think that it's even possible to get to Level 7 anymore? To create a movement with more than a handful of participants, you need some serious communication. With the power that is in the hands of the federal government now, it's a trivial exercise to stop this kind of activity before it gets a chance to orgainize (with subtle threats and/or payoffs).
Your example of bringing Wall Street to a standstill by a walk-out of all IT workers sounds like Level 7 to me. How would you propose to organize such an event? You certainly couldn't do it quietly. You would be undermined in your efforts by the businesses you are trying to affect (their employees threatened with firing if they participate), and you yourself would likely be charged as a terrorist! All the rest would quietly fall back in line.
The civil rights battles of the '60s worked because the issue (black inequality) was one that all but the most bigotted person could see the truth in, and because there was such a large population of people who felt oppressed. It certainly didn't hurt that they were represented by a brave and charasmatic leader in Martin Luther King.
What's different today? Well, far fewer people (as a percentange of the population) are concerned enough with privacy and freedom to make enough noise to the apathetic majority. We don't have someone (yet) willing to stick his neck out on a grand scale (and likely die) for these issues. And (as I said above) the ability of the government to quietly diffuse dissention has improved by an order of magnitude since the '60s.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that there are no intermediate steps any longer. The percentage of the population that falls into the "pissed off" catagory will grow until we hit Level 9 spontaneously, and that will be exceptionally ugly. It will also take years (with no previous levels to gather organization, the revolt will be chaotic and largely ineffective for a long time) for the current regime to fall, and the "new regime" will take that much longer to establish itself. Don't expect a united country when you're done with this, either: after such a period of chaos, there's no way anybody could pull the whole of the country back together, at least not right away.
Maybe China will invade first, and the US will be spared self-destruction.
The big problem with Divx was that you needed a proprietary (and more expensive) player, along with privacy-invading dial-in features, in order to use it. The public said "nah-uh", and the format died deservedly.
This sounds like it should work in standard DVD players, and require no phone-home function. The "disposable rental" could work here.
The issue for the video rental business is that it needs to be priced *lower* than a standard DVD rental. Since most people would view the inconvenience of a time-restricted view as greater than the benefit of saving themselves the return trip to the rental store, there must be a cost-saving component for the consumer to accept this. This means that the cost of production and stocking of these one-time useage disks must be substantially less than the cost of re-stocking of returned rental DVDs.
Now that I think about it, maybe the perfect application of this would be the rental-by-mail business: only one-way shipping charges! This doesn't seem to be a market with very large room for growth, however.
... and that's not the point of their efforts. There has always been (and will always be) those who will (quite easily) circumvent copy measures and share illegal copies to others. They know they can't stop them, and that it's futile to try.
No, what they are doing (under the guise of the above argument) is making sure Joe Average user never gets to be able to exercise their fair rights through simple, legal means. Let's face it: right now when someone buys their kid a copy of the latest Disney movie on tape or DVD, there is no simple and cheap means for him/her to make a personal copy for backup. When the tape gets eaten by the VCR or the DVD gets stepped on, the only option is to go out and buy it again. This doesn't even touch on the holy grail of media distribution: pay-per-use media! Having DRM that can't be legally by-passed means that non-techies will have to swallow it, regardless that fair-use dictates you have the right to use it much more freely!
What the media distributors fear is that Joe Average will start to clue in to the fact that backups/spaceshifting/timeshifting are *legal* and start to have access to tools to make such activities happen *easily and cheaply*. They would lose FAR more money because of this than to Internet sharing (since most sharing doesn't actually affect sales: most would never have bought the product to begin with).
These guys know the facts, and where the revenue is *really* gained or lost. But they have to publicly spin it right. After all, it would look rather bad to say:
"We want to restrict the public's ability to make *legal* use of the music/movies they purchase".
It's much more palateable to say:
"We want to restrict the public's ability to make *illegal* use of the music/movies they purchase".
Our job is to educate Joe Average on why this is important. They need to know their rights, and the efforts being made to restrict their rights. There must be a mass of people to reject these "solutions" so they fail in the marketplace, and there must be even more to protest any more legal enforcement of these "solutions".
They should have the legal right (oh, wait, prior to the DMCA, they did have the legal right) to make copies of it, on whatever material they desire, for thier own peronal use
The DMCA, by the letter of its text, does *not* take away any of your legal fair-use rights. It was deliberately written this way.
You, or anyone else, are allowed to take copyrighted digital media and modify it, timeshift it, convert it to other formats, and make a bazillion copies of it for personal use. No different than any other media, including video tape, books, artworks, etc.
Media distribution companies are under no obligation to make copying their work an easy thing. They are implementing "technical measures" (some well-designed, others ludicrously easy to defeat) that attempt to prevent you from claiming your fair-use rights. You are free to use whatever means you wish (reverse engineering is still legal) to break these protections.
What you are *not* allowed to do is tell anyone how you accomplished this!
*This* is what is so evil about this law, and what 2600 tried to get across in its trial. It prevents freedom of expression of ideas. It lumps "circomvention devices" into the class of contraband like trafficking in drugs or weapons!
Ultimately, I believe that this part (if not more) of the DMCA will eventually be found unconstitutional. But the way the court system works, it will be many years before judicial chess game (a case that both sides can't afford to lose) finally works its way to the Supreme Court.
Wrong apps to be focusing on.
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Halloween VII
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· Score: 2
Yes, the applications are the real issue. Just not the ones you mentioned. Linux will not be able to eclipse Windows for the clueless, "not supported by an IT department" user for a long time, maybe never.
More important than the apps you mentioned (personal entertainment & productivity) are the *enterprise* applications (boring, but necessary stuff like payroll, inventory, project & resource management, specialized databases, and the like).
These are the kind of applications that are virtually impossible to develop robustly in an open source environment simply because no one is interested in writing this stuff for fun. GUIs are fun. Media players too. Even office suites (if only because the "target" is the evil Microsoft). But enterprise infrastructure applications? How many OSS geeks are just itching to build a replacement for the functionality of PeopleSoft? Or Primavera Project Planner?
This stuff will *never* come for free. The companies who write these applications today do so exclusively for Windows, and they will not port them to Linux unless they see a reason for doing so (ie. customers running Linux on their corporate desktops). Since the apps are not on Linux today, corporations cannot migrate their desktops. The chicken-or-the-egg scenario in practice. (It is for this reason that I support the WINE project (including CodeWeavers). It is an interim step to getting enough seats running a Linux desktop, to convince the app developers to support the platform natively.)
Support in an enterprise environment will make Linux a more "legitimate" OS, and other vendors will follow. I can easily see Adobe getting into porting their graphics apps to Linux if they see Linux on more corporate seats. A native version of Lotus Notes would work nicely as well.
When everyday users start seeing Linux as a usable environment at work, they may be more predisposed to try it at home, as well. But I still firmly believe that unless they have a friendly geek for a neighbour, this will be the "last frontier" for Linux. I won't complain if applications from established vendors start arriving for such home users, but I wouldn't count on it happening soon. Windows is just better suited for the non-techie home user.
Could Philips sue for Trademark infringment?
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BMG Stops Producing CDs
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Seriously. It seems to me that if they are going to be using the CD logo (even stating outright that the disk is compliant to Red Book standards) that Philips should be able to haul them to court over improper and misleading usage of Philip's trademark.
Don't know if Philips has enough interest in doing so, though. After all, removing the mark from these "discs that kind of look like CDs" would probably make zero difference to the buying public, but would in fact remove a (probably small) revenue stream for Philips (BMG would no longer need to licence the trademark for their packaging).
I'm fairly certain that ignoring a lawsuit is not a good idea. If you do not defend yourself against a suit (or settle beforehand), the civil court that it was filed in will likely find in the plaintiff's favour. Then PanIP would be able to use all kinds of methods to remove the money they sued for (and won) from you, including forcing the sale of the company if necessary (or going after the company's owner(s) if it is not incorporated).
The proper response is to offer to settle out of court or respond to the lawsuit. Since responding in this case means having to deal with a distant court, it would quickly (like, a day or two) be more expensive to respond than to just pay the ransom settlement. This is what they're counting on.
However, it looks like PanIP found someone they didn't count on, a business that's decided to call them on their scheme. Though they don't say on their site, I'm betting that in addition to refuting the merits of the lawsuit (something that will be expensive but reasonably easy to do), they will also (all companies sued but didn't pay) collectively countersue for the frivolous lawsuit, with heavy punitive damages for PanIP and its owners.
PanIP will very soon drop this lawsuit, claiming anything it can that the suit was an innocent mistake, and well, shucks, they're real sorry. They will hope that dropping the suit will nullify the countersuit that is coming (since they will claim that they corrected the situation). DeBrand and the others hopefully will persue the countersuit anyways to make an example of PanIP (and to get paid back in damages for legal bills already incurred).
They had better succeed, too, because there needs to be some kind of serious retribution for this detestible practice of patent extortion.
Yes, the ideal solution is to have free software running on a free OS.
how much you want to bet that the next eula down the pipe will say "you are not allowed to run this on any operating system other than one made by microsoft"
However, even though this statement may become true (hell, it may already be true), but it is irrelevant. It would (and should) be completely ignored. If MS were to try to enforce such a clause, it would be viewed as very anticompetive, even by Ashcroft's standards.
I would suggest that Microsoft's response to this (other than business-as-usual of doing whatever possible to break WINE) would be to modify its volume licensing agreements such that Windows + Office will cost essentially the same as Office alone. This way, customers would have no financial incentive to go the SuSE/Codeweavers route, and we already know that there is no practical antitrust objection to this practice (at this time).
What they would not be able to effectively fight is an organization that wants to convert the majority of users to an "all free" environment, but a small number have to run Windows apps to do their job. This, I imagine, is where SuSE realistically is aiming this distro.
All of these new devices have programmable firmware which the manufacturer can change at will any time the device "phones home" to get a program listing. Not only won't Joe be able to buy another "new VCR thingy", the VCR thingy he owns will no longer be able to do what it could at the time that he bought it!
All the more reason to get these things in homes ASAP, with full features enabled. Joe Average will scream murder even bloodier if his current machine becomes crippled, as opposed to simply holding on to his current machine when new ones have features removed.
The hardware manufacturers will never voluntarily do as you suggest: why would they want to insense their customers that way? (Think of it this way: why would Panasonic release the machine at all if they intended to retract features?) They would do this only after being forced to do so by lawsuit or legislation, either one of which would be (finally) highly publicized and be unlikely to succeed due to the outcry.
Again, this is another opportunity to get the Joe Averages of the world to give a crap about things like this. There has never been a story since Betamax which has gained anywhere near mainstream media coverage on copyright and fair use rights issues. Most people don't rip CDs, so they won't care if they're copy protected. Most people don't watch DVDs on Linux, so they don't care if its illegal to do so. Most people don't need to turn e-books into PDFs, so they don't care if a Russian "hacker" is jailed for providing the means. But if most people are threatened with having their favorite new (and somewhat pricey) toy obsoleted or even crippled arbitrarily, you're damned right they'll care!
..so that Joe Average user might start actually to see these in Best Buy ASAP. If combination PVR and DVD recorders begin to combine the benefits of VCRs (removable, permanent recordable storage), DVD players (high-quality video), and PVRs (instant random access, freeze, content searches, etc.), then I think that these could be huge. As demand kicks up, watch the price plummet.
If these things get market penetration quickly, then we will be able to more effectively deflect the **AA's various fair-use restriction attempts. It's one thing for/. geeks to be up in arms over this, its quite another when a bunch of people start getting used to their "new VCR thingy", and some new laws come down which says that they'll never be able to buy another ever again!
Market penetration is what is needed, though. The industry can afford to piss off the early adopters of analog HDTV sets (that may be obsoleted by embedded permission tags in transmissions) because there just aren't very many HDTV sets out there. And of those, a bunch don't use it to its fullest advantage (ie. won't miss 1080i broadcast quality 'cause they never saw it to start with). For these PVR/DVD-R's, we need people literally replacing their VCRs and DVD players and using the features as they were designed to be used!
Excellent post. You're absolutely right that there is a shitload of backbone capacity being unused, because the last mile capacity is shit.
I think the last mile problem is an issue not of telcos and cable companies being unable or incapable of providing the service profitably, but rather that they are uninterested in allowing people to download data quickly and as much as they want. Rather than creating "power accounts" (where the users would pay substantially more for a very high bandwidth, unlimited capacity pipe), they are actively imposing bandwidth caps. They would rather the Net go back to nice, static HTML pages that are simple and fast to route, than to administer an overhaul their systems to take advantage of these new applications of the Net. And if they can, they would just as soon kill off interest in these applications (unless, of course, they can get a piece of the content providers' action for their part in the service).
Since the "last-mile" is currently property of Cable and Telco companies (and 3rd party usage of these lines are cumbersome at best), the solution in my mind is a fast, reliable, cost effective two-way over-the-air broadband solution. Then a broadband ISP could hook into some of that backbone glut, and bypass the last mile issue. If they can pull substantial business from the current broadband providers, they would have no choice but to improve their service.
But this probably falls into your "five to fifteen years" timeframe, so never mind.
Please explain to me just where considerations of "digital theft" come into a transaction where a company has set a price for a tangible good and I have paid that price and taken delivery of the good. The good (which, legally, is chattel property) is now MY property. The seller no longer OWNS any rights in the property, and therefore, has no right to prohibit me from doing ANYTHING I want to do to it.
I agree with you wholeheartedly! It is your property, and yes you should be able to do with it what you want.
Technically, nothing in the DMCA prevents you from modifying your hardware or building anything (hardware or software) that can be used to break copy protections. Go ahead, feel free.
Just don't tell anyone how you did it!
That's what's illegal in the DMCA. Giving others the ability to (or even facilitating others with the knowledge of how to) break these protections is equal to trafficking in a controlled substance. It can get you sued in civil court. It can get you landed in jail.
*That's* what makes the DMCA so evil: it makes simple speech a crime. If I'm not mistaken, the maximum penalty for distribution of "devices" that break copy protection is higher than the maximum penalty for distribution of child porn! Keep that in mind when you try to find out how to modify your X-Box.
No one's stopping you from getting a T1 into your home. That's about as close to the internet backbone as you can get.
Sure you can get a T1 in your home. But as you know a direct backbone connection to the Net is costly and labourious to maintain. That's why ISPs were born: to take care of the technical problems of Internet access, share the bandwidth, and charge accordingly.
I'll make an analogy here. You need a car. You do not like any of the car models available to you (they are all big and bulky, and you would like something quick and nimble). You would pay a fair price for a manufactured car that suits you, but they simply will not build such a car. Your choices are either build the car yourself (get a T1 installed into your house) or encourage/wait for another automaker to fulfill your needs (over-the-air broadband).
Let's continue the analogy. In the '50s there were three places to buy comfortable, mature cars: GM, Ford and Chrysler (similar to Cable & DSL providing the only affordable broadband today). Although they were in some ways competing against each other, the designs of cars stagnated because the automakers' belief was that there was no alternatives: if they all stayed making cars the way they always had, they would make money. They believed that they could *dictate* the automobile's direction, disregarding what consumers *wanted*. But what happened next was the Japanese and European automakers started making different, better cars, and the U.S. auto industry has had to go through a painful period to adjust.
If the broadband equivalent of Toyota comes around and starts kicking Cable and Telco ass in terms of quality product (a product that we will actually *want* and *pay for*), provided over a means that the "big two" have no control over, they will have no choice but to adapt as the U.S. automakers did.
The main issue is the ability of the end user to get access to the backbones of the Net.
When the ability to hook up is a monopoly (like cable, where no 3rd party company is permitted to provide access over the cable company's coax), there is no competition incentive. All these "problematic" uses for the Net get banned, and there's no where else to go.
The situation is not much better with DSL, since the 3rd party providers are at the mercy of the Bells, and are pretty limited to what they can provide because of it.
The air, however, isn't owned by anyone (regulated, yes, but not property). If technology can allow for fast, reliable, two-way Net access through airspace, this removes the telco & cable companies' ability to ignore these undesirable Net services. If they start to lose too many subscribers to over-the-air providers, they will have to back off on the restrictions.
Note that the tone of the article was not an issue of cost: it was an issue of what you are *allowed* to do on the Net *regardless* of cost. If the telcos and cable providers are allowed to continue, they simply will stop permitting P2P usage on their lines, with no option to turn it on (they would rather kill high-bandwidth usage than bother to administer its usage).
End result: if we have other high-speed options, Net access will cost more (as it likely should), but at least we will still have the freedom to do as we wish. But if we do not get other options (through restrictive regulations, likely at the request of the copyright industries), then the article is bang-on.
The problems with a kitchen computer are numerous:
- Space - No one wants to give up counter space for a computer, and besides it would be a pain to lean over (you don't sit down very much in the kitchen). - Cleanliness - a keyboard and mouse would be ruined in short order. - Noise - maybe a bit of a minor issue, but it's always better to have less noise.
I always thought the following would be cool:
Hardware
- Motherboard - a mini-ITX motherboard would be perfect (low energy, possible fanless operation, tiny, integrated everything). - Enclosure - a slim box that would mount sideways, screwed to the side inside of one of the upper cabinets. - Cooling - if heat is a issue, a plenum could run on the inside of the cabinet from holes on the bottom of the cabinet through the enclosure to the ceiling. A fan to draw air through (as well as the power supply, ethernet, etc.) would all be up out of sight - Screen - an LCD panel with touch-like screen, mounted portrait layout, right on the cabinet door (so that it is right at eye level, and out of reach of the small kids). - Pen - whether it is a true touch screen (like a PDA) or a wired light pen, I don't know, but this would be the primary input device. - Speakers & microphone - small, slim models also mounted into the cabinet door. - USB/Firewire connections - for quick upload & download to/from a PDA, camera, memory keychain, etc. - another PC - running as a server.
Note that I don't want a hard drive, keyboard, or mouse. The most work in this would be physically installing the screen & speakers in the door so it looks good and the wires flex properly with the door swing, and with designing the motherboard enclosure and plenum. Oh, and wiring everything through the ceiling.
Software
- X-terminal setup - this machine would be boot-on-LAN, and all storage would be over Ethernet - run as much as possible on the server end.
- Handwriting recognition - since the machine would never be used for entering in large amounts of data (I don't code while cooking), there is no need for a keyboard (most entry would be on the server, and this would mostly be a "retrieval" device) - but there should be a handwriting code for when you need to enter in text, maybe like Palm's graffiti.
- Applications - I want this machine to do the following functions - Organizer - standard PDA stuff (calendar, address, to-do, notes, calculator, etc.) - Recipe database - duh! (and actually useful, given the screen's location) - Message centre - retrieve both voice and email messages - "Thumbtack" board - leave notes for others in the house (vocal or written) - Browser - access to the Web and local files - Live Broadcast - you could access TV, radio, etc. with server-based tuners - Stored Entertainment - play back mp3, divx, etc.
No word processing, spreadsheets, photo editing, games, etc. here! Just stuff that makes sense in the kitchen (communication, passive information and entertainment).
Even if all the pieces were in place for doing everything I want here, there would be a lot of work to build an interface that would pull it all together nicely. All apps would be set up for as little data entry as possible (tapping on buttons should be the main interaction).
Of course, all this is way beyond my abilities, time, and cash flow to actually do. But that's my dream kitchen machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, the Act passed (and I believe will be upheld by the Supreme Court) because "limited times" is too ambiguous. Yes, even the elected officials would admit to themselves that the framers of the Constitution would never have accepted today's duration as "limited", especially given how the value of today's knowledge degrades so much quicker than it used to. But they'll never voice this. They will say that the dictionary definition of "limited" can be any number less than "infinity", and they'd be right!
Because his point was not about issues of fair use and enforcement while a work is within the copyright protected duration (the purpose of the DMCA, for digial content only). The point of the article was about how no works are returning to the public domain, the unprotected status, as was intended by the Constitution.
I'm sure he's not crazy about the DMCA either, but the Bono Act and the DMCA are two entirely different issues within the copyright debate. To have brought the DMCA into his article would only have confused his points.
Nope. They should not have that option, regardless of the price tag. And such a law would actally require a Constitutional amendment (which states that copyright is granted for limited times). It would bastardize the whole intent of copyright. Remember:
- MYTH - the reason for copyright is to provide protection of the author's works against unauthorized copying (for the greater good of the author)
- REALITY - the reason for copyright is to encourage the production of works (for the greater good of society)
By this, all works *MUST* eventually be returned to the public domain. It is most certainly unconstitutional for it to not be so.
The problem today is that the "limited times" mentioned in the Constitution can be any defined number, regardless of how high. By having ridiculously long durations, it effectively bastardizes the intent of the Constitution even worse than your suggestion does, in the short term. But the really long-term implications of granting a corporation the right to truly "own" a work (never release it, ever) are too dangerous to contemplate.
There really does need to be an arbitrary number given for copyright protections. "Limited times" begs for a defined number. It's just not limited *enough* right now.
(PS. what about different copyright durations for different *types* of works? For instance, surely the authors/publishers of software have recouped all they're going to get by, say, 10 years from the day it was released? What benefit is there to keeping ancient software protected by copyright?)
OK, everyone's response has been pretty uniform: he's talking about using Windows Messaging. If this is the case, fine, I've had that shut off since the beginning anyways. Everyone believes that these Romanian programmers have sold him a crappy solution.
But this guy seems pretty knowledgable in the ways of SPAM. Surely he knows that Windows Messaging is primative and cannot be a replacement for a good spam ad (no links, no graphics, just plain text). Surely he knows that it would be easily stopped by a firewall or anti-spam programs (unlike his statements).
That's what made me think he's planning on using an IE hole or a trojan. I wanted anyone's opinion on that possibility. It seems pretty unlikely that he'll be able to affect Mozilla running on Linux.
"This is even better," he said. "You don't have to be on a Web site at all. You can just have your computer on, connected to the Internet, reading e-mail or just idling and, bam, this program detects your presence and up pops the message on your screen, past firewalls, past anti-spam programs, past anything.
"Isn't technology great?"
Firstly, can anyone envision what could possibly do this? Does your browser have to be trojoned to accomplish this feat? Could it be an IE-only kind of design bug?
Secondly, if he does manage this, he'd better do a better job of hiding his location, because he's about to piss off a *lot* of people with this stunt!
Because the major corporate customers know that proprietary products screw consumers in the long and possibly short run.
I happen to agree with your sentiment that major corporate customers *should* know that proprietary products screw them, but the evidence suggests that they don't know this, they don't care, or they perceive the effort to change too high.
Care to name a "major corporation" who have no information locked into any proprietary file formats? That means no MS Office, WordPerfect, Photoshop, Lotus Notes, PeopleSoft, AutoCAD, etc. etc. etc. I'd wager you can't name one big company that stores even half of its documents in formats that aren't held hostage by a software vendor.
Is this stupid? I think so, especially as the pattern is to get your organization so completely dependant on the vendors' software. Should the vendor decide that their profits aren't high enough, they can stop supporting your product (and therefore your documents), or charge extra to support you. Worse, if the company goes under you will have *no* way to update your system.
Proprietary formats are guaranteed to be an eventual dead-end. It's just that the end is so far beyond all corporations' short-sighted vision that it just doesn't matter to them.
So, no, Microsoft has *no* interest in helping along a panel to create an open format for documents, even if it is to their own specifications. Closed formats are all they want.
The *compositions* written by classical composers is free of copyright. You are welcome to take their works (the melodies, harmonies, every musical expression they made) and do with them what you like.
However, every *recording* made within the current timeframe of copyright today (death + 70 years) cannot be reused without consent of the holder of that work's copyright. You want an "unemcumbered" Beethoven's 9th Symphony that wasn't recorded in the '20s? Hire the conductor, orchestra, and choir, record it all, and its yours! Same goes for sheet music: if you can't find an old print copy, you can interpret the music yourself and write down every note on staff paper, and you won't owe anyone a thing.
Of course, that might be asking a bit much to avoid a few cents/dollars on licencing/royalty fees. But that's the deal, as it stands now.
The link states that the military might is far more powerful than the combined might of the citizenry, and as a result any uprising would by futile. The only chance would be if the military joined the side of the revolution, otherwise he saw a global police state will be set up soon that will last a thousand years.
First of all, the "global" aspect of the police state is ludicrous: no unifying state will be established in this world as long as there are nations that have somewhat equal military power (nuclear weapons) with unequal wealth. Off the top of my head, you've got China, Russia, India, etc. that easily fall into this catagory. There is no indication that the US has the military or economic strength to take over any of these nations (let alone all), nor does it look like the US could afford to bring these massive numbers of people up to our own level of wealth.
I also recall another state from about 70 years ago that proclaimed that its rule would last a thousand years. As it turned out, it ended after 12 years in 1945.
But back to the crux of the post. He dismisses the chance that the military would ever turn against the ruling regime. I doubt this. While there are many (most) military leaders who will tow the line of their commanding officer, I refuse to believe that there would not be a single man of conscience in a position of military power over an extended period of time. Eventually, a single division would break and start to fight back. I'm sure they would be quickly squashed, but the action would make them heroes in the eyes of many others in the military, the action would be repeated, and eventually a full-scale civil war (not just rebellion) would break out.
This is part of what I was referring to in my post above about the Level 9 taking years to take place. I probably should have said decades.
Are there any features that restaurants need that your traditional POS system may not include?
:-)
You bet. The system must be able to keep track of what order is associated with what table. This is done efficiently in the restaurant by being able to program the layout of the tables on the floor, and using touch screens to tap the right table when processing the order.
Also, there should be a way in the system for the server of the order to get reimbursed for tips left on credit card bills automatically.
I don't imagine Home Depot built these features into their systems.
On the subtraction side, there obviously isn't much call for barcode readers to be integrated into a restaurant POS solution, which is pretty much a standard feature on modern retail machines.
Do you think that it's even possible to get to Level 7 anymore? To create a movement with more than a handful of participants, you need some serious communication. With the power that is in the hands of the federal government now, it's a trivial exercise to stop this kind of activity before it gets a chance to orgainize (with subtle threats and/or payoffs).
Your example of bringing Wall Street to a standstill by a walk-out of all IT workers sounds like Level 7 to me. How would you propose to organize such an event? You certainly couldn't do it quietly. You would be undermined in your efforts by the businesses you are trying to affect (their employees threatened with firing if they participate), and you yourself would likely be charged as a terrorist! All the rest would quietly fall back in line.
The civil rights battles of the '60s worked because the issue (black inequality) was one that all but the most bigotted person could see the truth in, and because there was such a large population of people who felt oppressed. It certainly didn't hurt that they were represented by a brave and charasmatic leader in Martin Luther King.
What's different today? Well, far fewer people (as a percentange of the population) are concerned enough with privacy and freedom to make enough noise to the apathetic majority. We don't have someone (yet) willing to stick his neck out on a grand scale (and likely die) for these issues. And (as I said above) the ability of the government to quietly diffuse dissention has improved by an order of magnitude since the '60s.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that there are no intermediate steps any longer. The percentage of the population that falls into the "pissed off" catagory will grow until we hit Level 9 spontaneously, and that will be exceptionally ugly. It will also take years (with no previous levels to gather organization, the revolt will be chaotic and largely ineffective for a long time) for the current regime to fall, and the "new regime" will take that much longer to establish itself. Don't expect a united country when you're done with this, either: after such a period of chaos, there's no way anybody could pull the whole of the country back together, at least not right away.
Maybe China will invade first, and the US will be spared self-destruction.
The big problem with Divx was that you needed a proprietary (and more expensive) player, along with privacy-invading dial-in features, in order to use it. The public said "nah-uh", and the format died deservedly.
This sounds like it should work in standard DVD players, and require no phone-home function. The "disposable rental" could work here.
The issue for the video rental business is that it needs to be priced *lower* than a standard DVD rental. Since most people would view the inconvenience of a time-restricted view as greater than the benefit of saving themselves the return trip to the rental store, there must be a cost-saving component for the consumer to accept this. This means that the cost of production and stocking of these one-time useage disks must be substantially less than the cost of re-stocking of returned rental DVDs.
Now that I think about it, maybe the perfect application of this would be the rental-by-mail business: only one-way shipping charges! This doesn't seem to be a market with very large room for growth, however.
... and that's not the point of their efforts. There has always been (and will always be) those who will (quite easily) circumvent copy measures and share illegal copies to others. They know they can't stop them, and that it's futile to try.
No, what they are doing (under the guise of the above argument) is making sure Joe Average user never gets to be able to exercise their fair rights through simple, legal means. Let's face it: right now when someone buys their kid a copy of the latest Disney movie on tape or DVD, there is no simple and cheap means for him/her to make a personal copy for backup. When the tape gets eaten by the VCR or the DVD gets stepped on, the only option is to go out and buy it again. This doesn't even touch on the holy grail of media distribution: pay-per-use media! Having DRM that can't be legally by-passed means that non-techies will have to swallow it, regardless that fair-use dictates you have the right to use it much more freely!
What the media distributors fear is that Joe Average will start to clue in to the fact that backups/spaceshifting/timeshifting are *legal* and start to have access to tools to make such activities happen *easily and cheaply*. They would lose FAR more money because of this than to Internet sharing (since most sharing doesn't actually affect sales: most would never have bought the product to begin with).
These guys know the facts, and where the revenue is *really* gained or lost. But they have to publicly spin it right. After all, it would look rather bad to say:
"We want to restrict the public's ability to make *legal* use of the music/movies they purchase".
It's much more palateable to say:
"We want to restrict the public's ability to make *illegal* use of the music/movies they purchase".
Our job is to educate Joe Average on why this is important. They need to know their rights, and the efforts being made to restrict their rights. There must be a mass of people to reject these "solutions" so they fail in the marketplace, and there must be even more to protest any more legal enforcement of these "solutions".
They should have the legal right (oh, wait, prior to the DMCA, they did have the legal right) to make copies of it, on whatever material they desire, for thier own peronal use
The DMCA, by the letter of its text, does *not* take away any of your legal fair-use rights. It was deliberately written this way.
You, or anyone else, are allowed to take copyrighted digital media and modify it, timeshift it, convert it to other formats, and make a bazillion copies of it for personal use. No different than any other media, including video tape, books, artworks, etc.
Media distribution companies are under no obligation to make copying their work an easy thing. They are implementing "technical measures" (some well-designed, others ludicrously easy to defeat) that attempt to prevent you from claiming your fair-use rights. You are free to use whatever means you wish (reverse engineering is still legal) to break these protections.
What you are *not* allowed to do is tell anyone how you accomplished this!
*This* is what is so evil about this law, and what 2600 tried to get across in its trial. It prevents freedom of expression of ideas. It lumps "circomvention devices" into the class of contraband like trafficking in drugs or weapons!
Ultimately, I believe that this part (if not more) of the DMCA will eventually be found unconstitutional. But the way the court system works, it will be many years before judicial chess game (a case that both sides can't afford to lose) finally works its way to the Supreme Court.
Yes, the applications are the real issue. Just not the ones you mentioned. Linux will not be able to eclipse Windows for the clueless, "not supported by an IT department" user for a long time, maybe never.
More important than the apps you mentioned (personal entertainment & productivity) are the *enterprise* applications (boring, but necessary stuff like payroll, inventory, project & resource management, specialized databases, and the like).
These are the kind of applications that are virtually impossible to develop robustly in an open source environment simply because no one is interested in writing this stuff for fun. GUIs are fun. Media players too. Even office suites (if only because the "target" is the evil Microsoft). But enterprise infrastructure applications? How many OSS geeks are just itching to build a replacement for the functionality of PeopleSoft? Or Primavera Project Planner?
This stuff will *never* come for free. The companies who write these applications today do so exclusively for Windows, and they will not port them to Linux unless they see a reason for doing so (ie. customers running Linux on their corporate desktops). Since the apps are not on Linux today, corporations cannot migrate their desktops. The chicken-or-the-egg scenario in practice. (It is for this reason that I support the WINE project (including CodeWeavers). It is an interim step to getting enough seats running a Linux desktop, to convince the app developers to support the platform natively.)
Support in an enterprise environment will make Linux a more "legitimate" OS, and other vendors will follow. I can easily see Adobe getting into porting their graphics apps to Linux if they see Linux on more corporate seats. A native version of Lotus Notes would work nicely as well.
When everyday users start seeing Linux as a usable environment at work, they may be more predisposed to try it at home, as well. But I still firmly believe that unless they have a friendly geek for a neighbour, this will be the "last frontier" for Linux. I won't complain if applications from established vendors start arriving for such home users, but I wouldn't count on it happening soon. Windows is just better suited for the non-techie home user.
Seriously. It seems to me that if they are going to be using the CD logo (even stating outright that the disk is compliant to Red Book standards) that Philips should be able to haul them to court over improper and misleading usage of Philip's trademark.
Don't know if Philips has enough interest in doing so, though. After all, removing the mark from these "discs that kind of look like CDs" would probably make zero difference to the buying public, but would in fact remove a (probably small) revenue stream for Philips (BMG would no longer need to licence the trademark for their packaging).
I'm fairly certain that ignoring a lawsuit is not a good idea. If you do not defend yourself against a suit (or settle beforehand), the civil court that it was filed in will likely find in the plaintiff's favour. Then PanIP would be able to use all kinds of methods to remove the money they sued for (and won) from you, including forcing the sale of the company if necessary (or going after the company's owner(s) if it is not incorporated).
The proper response is to offer to settle out of court or respond to the lawsuit. Since responding in this case means having to deal with a distant court, it would quickly (like, a day or two) be more expensive to respond than to just pay the ransom settlement. This is what they're counting on.
However, it looks like PanIP found someone they didn't count on, a business that's decided to call them on their scheme. Though they don't say on their site, I'm betting that in addition to refuting the merits of the lawsuit (something that will be expensive but reasonably easy to do), they will also (all companies sued but didn't pay) collectively countersue for the frivolous lawsuit, with heavy punitive damages for PanIP and its owners.
PanIP will very soon drop this lawsuit, claiming anything it can that the suit was an innocent mistake, and well, shucks, they're real sorry. They will hope that dropping the suit will nullify the countersuit that is coming (since they will claim that they corrected the situation). DeBrand and the others hopefully will persue the countersuit anyways to make an example of PanIP (and to get paid back in damages for legal bills already incurred).
They had better succeed, too, because there needs to be some kind of serious retribution for this detestible practice of patent extortion.
Yes, the ideal solution is to have free software running on a free OS.
how much you want to bet that the next eula down the pipe will say "you are not allowed to run this on any operating system other than one made by microsoft"
However, even though this statement may become true (hell, it may already be true), but it is irrelevant. It would (and should) be completely ignored. If MS were to try to enforce such a clause, it would be viewed as very anticompetive, even by Ashcroft's standards.
I would suggest that Microsoft's response to this (other than business-as-usual of doing whatever possible to break WINE) would be to modify its volume licensing agreements such that Windows + Office will cost essentially the same as Office alone. This way, customers would have no financial incentive to go the SuSE/Codeweavers route, and we already know that there is no practical antitrust objection to this practice (at this time).
What they would not be able to effectively fight is an organization that wants to convert the majority of users to an "all free" environment, but a small number have to run Windows apps to do their job. This, I imagine, is where SuSE realistically is aiming this distro.
All of these new devices have programmable firmware which the manufacturer can change at will any time the device "phones home" to get a program listing. Not only won't Joe be able to buy another "new VCR thingy", the VCR thingy he owns will no longer be able to do what it could at the time that he bought it!
All the more reason to get these things in homes ASAP, with full features enabled. Joe Average will scream murder even bloodier if his current machine becomes crippled, as opposed to simply holding on to his current machine when new ones have features removed.
The hardware manufacturers will never voluntarily do as you suggest: why would they want to insense their customers that way? (Think of it this way: why would Panasonic release the machine at all if they intended to retract features?) They would do this only after being forced to do so by lawsuit or legislation, either one of which would be (finally) highly publicized and be unlikely to succeed due to the outcry.
Again, this is another opportunity to get the Joe Averages of the world to give a crap about things like this. There has never been a story since Betamax which has gained anywhere near mainstream media coverage on copyright and fair use rights issues. Most people don't rip CDs, so they won't care if they're copy protected. Most people don't watch DVDs on Linux, so they don't care if its illegal to do so. Most people don't need to turn e-books into PDFs, so they don't care if a Russian "hacker" is jailed for providing the means. But if most people are threatened with having their favorite new (and somewhat pricey) toy obsoleted or even crippled arbitrarily, you're damned right they'll care!
..so that Joe Average user might start actually to see these in Best Buy ASAP. If combination PVR and DVD recorders begin to combine the benefits of VCRs (removable, permanent recordable storage), DVD players (high-quality video), and PVRs (instant random access, freeze, content searches, etc.), then I think that these could be huge. As demand kicks up, watch the price plummet.
/. geeks to be up in arms over this, its quite another when a bunch of people start getting used to their "new VCR thingy", and some new laws come down which says that they'll never be able to buy another ever again!
If these things get market penetration quickly, then we will be able to more effectively deflect the **AA's various fair-use restriction attempts. It's one thing for
Market penetration is what is needed, though. The industry can afford to piss off the early adopters of analog HDTV sets (that may be obsoleted by embedded permission tags in transmissions) because there just aren't very many HDTV sets out there. And of those, a bunch don't use it to its fullest advantage (ie. won't miss 1080i broadcast quality 'cause they never saw it to start with). For these PVR/DVD-R's, we need people literally replacing their VCRs and DVD players and using the features as they were designed to be used!
Excellent post. You're absolutely right that there is a shitload of backbone capacity being unused, because the last mile capacity is shit.
I think the last mile problem is an issue not of telcos and cable companies being unable or incapable of providing the service profitably, but rather that they are uninterested in allowing people to download data quickly and as much as they want. Rather than creating "power accounts" (where the users would pay substantially more for a very high bandwidth, unlimited capacity pipe), they are actively imposing bandwidth caps. They would rather the Net go back to nice, static HTML pages that are simple and fast to route, than to administer an overhaul their systems to take advantage of these new applications of the Net. And if they can, they would just as soon kill off interest in these applications (unless, of course, they can get a piece of the content providers' action for their part in the service).
Since the "last-mile" is currently property of Cable and Telco companies (and 3rd party usage of these lines are cumbersome at best), the solution in my mind is a fast, reliable, cost effective two-way over-the-air broadband solution. Then a broadband ISP could hook into some of that backbone glut, and bypass the last mile issue. If they can pull substantial business from the current broadband providers, they would have no choice but to improve their service.
But this probably falls into your "five to fifteen years" timeframe, so never mind.
Sorry for taking so long to reply :-)
Please explain to me just where considerations of "digital theft" come into a transaction where a company has set a price for a tangible good and I have paid that price and taken delivery of the good. The good (which, legally, is chattel property) is now MY property. The seller no longer OWNS any rights in the property, and therefore, has no right to prohibit me from doing ANYTHING I want to do to it.
I agree with you wholeheartedly! It is your property, and yes you should be able to do with it what you want.
Technically, nothing in the DMCA prevents you from modifying your hardware or building anything (hardware or software) that can be used to break copy protections. Go ahead, feel free.
Just don't tell anyone how you did it!
That's what's illegal in the DMCA. Giving others the ability to (or even facilitating others with the knowledge of how to) break these protections is equal to trafficking in a controlled substance. It can get you sued in civil court. It can get you landed in jail.
*That's* what makes the DMCA so evil: it makes simple speech a crime. If I'm not mistaken, the maximum penalty for distribution of "devices" that break copy protection is higher than the maximum penalty for distribution of child porn! Keep that in mind when you try to find out how to modify your X-Box.
No one's stopping you from getting a T1 into your home. That's about as close to the internet backbone as you can get.
Sure you can get a T1 in your home. But as you know a direct backbone connection to the Net is costly and labourious to maintain. That's why ISPs were born: to take care of the technical problems of Internet access, share the bandwidth, and charge accordingly.
I'll make an analogy here. You need a car. You do not like any of the car models available to you (they are all big and bulky, and you would like something quick and nimble). You would pay a fair price for a manufactured car that suits you, but they simply will not build such a car. Your choices are either build the car yourself (get a T1 installed into your house) or encourage/wait for another automaker to fulfill your needs (over-the-air broadband).
Let's continue the analogy. In the '50s there were three places to buy comfortable, mature cars: GM, Ford and Chrysler (similar to Cable & DSL providing the only affordable broadband today). Although they were in some ways competing against each other, the designs of cars stagnated because the automakers' belief was that there was no alternatives: if they all stayed making cars the way they always had, they would make money. They believed that they could *dictate* the automobile's direction, disregarding what consumers *wanted*. But what happened next was the Japanese and European automakers started making different, better cars, and the U.S. auto industry has had to go through a painful period to adjust.
If the broadband equivalent of Toyota comes around and starts kicking Cable and Telco ass in terms of quality product (a product that we will actually *want* and *pay for*), provided over a means that the "big two" have no control over, they will have no choice but to adapt as the U.S. automakers did.
The main issue is the ability of the end user to get access to the backbones of the Net.
When the ability to hook up is a monopoly (like cable, where no 3rd party company is permitted to provide access over the cable company's coax), there is no competition incentive. All these "problematic" uses for the Net get banned, and there's no where else to go.
The situation is not much better with DSL, since the 3rd party providers are at the mercy of the Bells, and are pretty limited to what they can provide because of it.
The air, however, isn't owned by anyone (regulated, yes, but not property). If technology can allow for fast, reliable, two-way Net access through airspace, this removes the telco & cable companies' ability to ignore these undesirable Net services. If they start to lose too many subscribers to over-the-air providers, they will have to back off on the restrictions.
Note that the tone of the article was not an issue of cost: it was an issue of what you are *allowed* to do on the Net *regardless* of cost. If the telcos and cable providers are allowed to continue, they simply will stop permitting P2P usage on their lines, with no option to turn it on (they would rather kill high-bandwidth usage than bother to administer its usage).
End result: if we have other high-speed options, Net access will cost more (as it likely should), but at least we will still have the freedom to do as we wish. But if we do not get other options (through restrictive regulations, likely at the request of the copyright industries), then the article is bang-on.
The problems with a kitchen computer are numerous:
- Space - No one wants to give up counter space for a computer, and besides it would be a pain to lean over (you don't sit down very much in the kitchen).
- Cleanliness - a keyboard and mouse would be ruined in short order.
- Noise - maybe a bit of a minor issue, but it's always better to have less noise.
I always thought the following would be cool:
Hardware
- Motherboard - a mini-ITX motherboard would be perfect (low energy, possible fanless operation, tiny, integrated everything).
- Enclosure - a slim box that would mount sideways, screwed to the side inside of one of the upper cabinets.
- Cooling - if heat is a issue, a plenum could run on the inside of the cabinet from holes on the bottom of the cabinet through the enclosure to the ceiling. A fan to draw air through (as well as the power supply, ethernet, etc.) would all be up out of sight
- Screen - an LCD panel with touch-like screen, mounted portrait layout, right on the cabinet door (so that it is right at eye level, and out of reach of the small kids).
- Pen - whether it is a true touch screen (like a PDA) or a wired light pen, I don't know, but this would be the primary input device.
- Speakers & microphone - small, slim models also mounted into the cabinet door.
- USB/Firewire connections - for quick upload & download to/from a PDA, camera, memory keychain, etc.
- another PC - running as a server.
Note that I don't want a hard drive, keyboard, or mouse. The most work in this would be physically installing the screen & speakers in the door so it looks good and the wires flex properly with the door swing, and with designing the motherboard enclosure and plenum. Oh, and wiring everything through the ceiling.
Software
- X-terminal setup - this machine would be boot-on-LAN, and all storage would be over Ethernet - run as much as possible on the server end.
- Handwriting recognition - since the machine would never be used for entering in large amounts of data (I don't code while cooking), there is no need for a keyboard (most entry would be on the server, and this would mostly be a "retrieval" device) - but there should be a handwriting code for when you need to enter in text, maybe like Palm's graffiti.
- Applications - I want this machine to do the following functions
- Organizer - standard PDA stuff (calendar, address, to-do, notes, calculator, etc.)
- Recipe database - duh! (and actually useful, given the screen's location)
- Message centre - retrieve both voice and email messages
- "Thumbtack" board - leave notes for others in the house (vocal or written)
- Browser - access to the Web and local files
- Live Broadcast - you could access TV, radio, etc. with server-based tuners
- Stored Entertainment - play back mp3, divx, etc.
No word processing, spreadsheets, photo editing, games, etc. here! Just stuff that makes sense in the kitchen (communication, passive information and entertainment).
Even if all the pieces were in place for doing everything I want here, there would be a lot of work to build an interface that would pull it all together nicely. All apps would be set up for as little data entry as possible (tapping on buttons should be the main interaction).
Of course, all this is way beyond my abilities, time, and cash flow to actually do. But that's my dream kitchen machine.