The whole idea of sending a customized anything to a central repair place screams out for a "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag. The box may be special to you, but it isn't to them. You can't expect major manufacturers to spend extra time/money on you just because you decided to paint your box a different color. The world doesn't work that way.
Even better: he could have gotten a case from a defective Xbox at eBay and replaced them before sending to the repair shop.
We got the Linux trademark back from the shit who tried to steal it because he knew Linus had been using it for trade first and continuously since.
Exactly: using it for trade. Just saying "omgwtfbbq eff used it first on a obscure usenet post" does not equal to "using it for trade", which is what the law requires.
At least, the first mention of "cyberlaw" I can find on Google Groups is this EFF newsletter from 1992-04-30
It doesn't matter. This is not a patent. Trademarks don't care about "prior art", but for registering and "continued usage" of the trademark. If the term can be proven to be generic, that can also disqualify a trademark registration. But if Donald Trump can trakemark "You're fired!" under a specific context, I'm pretty sure that "cyberlaw" can also be trademarked.
With $100 barrel oil and global warming, that's just what the world needs is to get a couple billion more people sitting in traffic jams burning up the dwindling supply of fossil fuels and polluting the air.
You're ignoring the fact that old motorbikes pollutes a lot. Some motorbikes do more damage than a whole car, even while spending less gas.
...when chip manufacturers gave away the full specifications. I even received by snail-mail thick books, 500 pages or so, with the specs from companies like Texas instruments and Motorola. Some manufacturers even sent free samples of the chips themselves.
That still happens. All chip manufacturers still give away full specs for chips that are traded at the open market.
The thing is: your mind is also fooling you. While simple stuff like small CPUs and other cheap integrated circuits always had documentation, bigass OEM-exclusive stuff NEVER had public documentation. Not even years ago.
A GPU is not the kind of chip that you can find at Radio Shack. And that kind of bigass integrator-only stuff ALWAYS worked like that.
Not because some people got responses from Steve Jobs himself (he would always defend Apple) but because what these lawyers allegedly did can be considered as blackmail. Lawyers always need to be very careful when discussing possible litigation or making deals, because if things sound like blackmail, they can get seriously fscked.
This kind of threat-making can completely invalidate the initial objectives of the suit, because the company might end up paying more than the defendant and lawers will be involved on a criminal case. A friend of mine once received a letter with this kind of threat ("look! this is how much your house is worth and you need to think about your children!") and the laywer ended up in prison, because his attempt to solve the issue with extortion instead of the law was considered as criminal.
If you're negotiating a legal case, you can't even TALK about how much a person's house is worth, if the house is not the subject of the suit. Laywers can't EVER sound like they're threatening to ruin your life because of [put random business-related issue here]. They can take steps to actually try ruining it, but they can't use that possibility as a means of negotiation. There are even specific laws regarding that situations, besides common extortion and blackmail laws.
Did I say that? I said the horse is dead. You can't beat it any more.
YOU are saying the horse is dead.
It's pretty simple. The people making the accusations never bothered to actually call up the New york Times and find out what the rate would be for a non-profit issue ad on standby.
The fact that MoveOn is paying more than what was initially offered is a proof that the charged rate was less than the usual (and legal, considering MoveOn is an advocacy group). MoveOn had to pay for stuff that wasn't properly billed in the first place and that's not a common business practice. When corporation A charges corporation B leess than usual for a product, because an employee from A messed up, people from B will never even know what happened. There is no such thing as "oops, I made you an offer and delivered the product but now I want more money!" because the last official offer is what actually gets charged.
And the Times is not a small newspaper, with amateurish, error-prone billing. Nothing gets past without proper payment and product classification checks. I bet you can't even insert an ad on a page without authorization from the advertising department.
But from your last message in this thread, to the other guy, you clearly look like a die-hard democrat. So I guess I'll leave you alone with your reality distortion field.
What do you mean? It is a closed subject? The thought police will arrest me for discussing it?
Moveon received the regular rate for running an ad, in what they call standby. The only thing that might be a bit out of the ordinary, is that the NYTimes called them back and said 'Well it looks like we have room on monday, so your ad should run.'
Sure, and ponies fly. Any reasonable manager would have just said "oh, we screwed up, our problem". MoveOn paying for other people's fault (after all, they closed a deal and without mentioning payment someone proposed to run the ad earlier) is clearly a proof that things weren't honest from the beginning.
Someone obviously told MoveOn to pay back before accusations could start flying all around the company and even the country. In fact, that suspicion is the whole reason this subject was posted at Slashdot in the first place. If things were a simple matter of a payment mistake between two companies, why reporting it? What's next, an executive from Apple paid more for its meal and got the money back? Who cares?
This kind of illegal financing of advocacy groups, using other people's money, is very common and lots of left-wing people are engaged in such practices. And those organizations often these breaches in the system to fulfill their financing needs. After all, "it's all for the greater good".
They could have learned from the Republicans and just denied it until forever.
Exactly. =]
If it WAS an honest mistake, there would be no reason to pay. Which, I admit, it probably wasn't.
I seriously doubt too. An honest mistake would be like an employee saying "oops, I made then a business offer that wasn't good for us" followed by a boss saying "too bad for us, but we won't even mention that to the client, as we have good manners".
I'm not trying to rag on Republicans. They're just evil and smooth, whereas the Dems are sort of evil and awkwardly self-loathing. And I don't mean all of them on either side.
I mean, I understand the NY Times going after the money to protect their journalistic credibility, but MoveOn should've thumbed their nose at them, based solely upon the fact that that's not how business works.
Except that if the whole issue wasn't a mistake at all, but a very common case of illegal financing (charging advocacy groups less is considered a form of financing), then it is not just about mischarging. I'm pretty sure that a MoveOn supporter/member inside the Times managed to get the ad for less than usual and later someone found out about it, mostly because the ad was controversial.
It's pretty hard to legitemately mischarge this kind of service. I consider it to be pretty obvious that someone managed to get stuff for less and when they got busted, they had to charge the remaining sum.
Uh, you still totally misunderstood me. I *make* some of my patch cables with directional indicators.
I am extremely sorry then. I as thinking that you actually said "those audiophile directional cables are great because the arrows help me organizing a complex installation".
I'm not saying the signals are directional. I'm saying there are situations where it is extremely useful, if not critical, to have visual indicators of roting direction.
Buying snake oil just to use a visual indication present at the product is STILL laughable. Just tag your cables, no need to buy $400 snake oil just because of small printed arrows.
Something many people don't understand is that the Nyquist criterion applies to the bandwidth of the recovered signal, not to its carrier frequency. So if you want to recover a 10-kHz wide signal at 800 MHz, you don't need to sample at 1600 MHz... you just need to sample at 20 kHz, using an ADC with lots of front-end bandwidth.
If your radio is entirely based on software, then you'll need to do the filtering and de-modulation using digital filters and that will handle the "entire" wave and will actually need much more than just the Nyquist criterion. The Nyquist criterion is related to *minimum reconstruction*, but it is not sufficient for real-world digital filter applications, where you need a more than that, to compensate for quantization, ADC linearity, varying ADC capture time, and DSP rounding and truncation errors.
So without an analog-based FM circuit in front of your DSP, you'll need 2GHz or more. For a radio, that's stupid.
So why, then, does everyone who sees the prototype I've been demo-ing walk away with stars in their eyes?
That has GOT to be the WORST argument I've even seen in my entire life.
Why? Mostly because it's an open-source geek's dream to see a machine that is fully connected with open source to be manufactured and promoted. It's also because most people are not in the electronics market, and even people who work in the area really DO like seeing a densely populated board.
But hey, if "everyone you see" has stars in their eyes, then I guess it's a freaking revolutionary device, certainly destined to save the planet.
I've been working in ICT for over 15 years, and I've spent years in some of the most remote areas in the world, trying to extend the reach of the Internet in a way that's useful to the people who live there. Let me tell you that in all that time, I have never encountered anything quite so well-designed for its task as the XO laptop.
You just disqualified yourself as someone able to perform a rational discussion about this. You devoted your life to "the most remote areas in the world" and you're happy because there's a new toy in the block, to help you with your ideologically-motivated occupation.
I've been evaluating a B2 prototype to determine its suitability to the task of being deployed in a Least Developed Country in the South Pacific region. I can say without hesitation that there is no competing technological device that even comes close.
Ok, it's useful for its task and it's a good competitor if you compare it to others in the same market. That still doesn't mean that its hardware is revolutionary.
It is still just an ordinary piece of hardware. The fact that it is related to poor kids doesn't change it.
The fact that Negroponte and co. managed to do it cheaper than anyone else, using commodity parts, should be offered as the highest praise, not castigation.
The fact that Negroponte did anything at all doesn't excuse fanboys from old, plain lying. He can cure world hunger with this little device yet that won't change the fact that it's just ordinary hardware. If you want to praise something, praise the idea, the application, the logistics. But don't lie, it's a very important step.
What other device is a wireless node and acts like a wireless mesh router even when powered off?
So what? It's not like OLPC invented mesh networking, and it's not actually an interesting feature for most applications. But yes, most wireless ZIGBEE networks are mesh-based. So no, OLPC is not "revolutionary".
What other device has a 1200x900 screen that takes well under a watt?
What about the DVD players that the OLPC borrowed the LCD from? The OLPC's "high-resolution" LCD is just an average mobile DVD screen with the individual colors being used as separate pixels.
Sure, it's not a huge leap ahead of other, similar devices - but the XO is definitely pushing the boundries of mobile computer design.
No, it's not pushing anything at all. It's just an ordinary design, made by a very small team (compared to other companies in the market) and using ordinary components. Even some Geode ref board beat OLPC at being "revolutionary".
Just because OLPC is connected to Open Source, a lot of fanboys actually believe it's a shiny new revolutionary device. In fact, it's just an expensive LCD terminal.
The OLPC laptop has already revolutionized the design of the laptop. On the hardware side we have the extreme power efficiency, the high resolution screen, the cranking mechanism, and last but not least the ergonomic, rugged design.
Oh, geez, cut it. It's just an average motherbord with standard components. People build more advanced machines in the embedded market, every single day.
There is no revolution. It's just another piece of hardware.
if they don't change it, then don't approve it as standard
That's not how it works. ISO standards are not "designed by committee" (yes, it's pejorative) but they're submitted by companies and institutions. You don't need to listen to every single project, company or institution that disagrees with your decisions, you only need to follow a simple set of rules while developing the spec on your own.
The ISO process doesn't works like the W3C process.
You can have slip within the electric motor, so it can behave like an electromagnetic clutch.
No it won't. A clutch is useful for burnouts because it allows you to free the transmission from motor inertia and power in no time. While you can easily ajust motor power with a electrical motor, you can't get rid of the inertia.
If you're doing a burnout and the bike runs out of control, it's easy as pressing a lever to stop the bike. With an electric motor, you'll have to fight the rotor inertia.
However, even while Vista has about 8%, Vista + DX 10 is 2.3% of users. That's about half as many as are using DX 7. About 15% use DX 8, and the rest are DX9 types.
Having Vista is already enough. If your game needs DX 10, just bundle it with the installer and it will install fine on Vista.
Vista is the only important factor in this issue, as DX 10 is a Vista-only product. That means that if Vista lacks users, DX 10 becomes uninteresting to use and bundle. If Vista has plenty of them, then you can use and bundle DX 10.
At the same time I was growing more and more curious (maybe nostalgic) for clean, lean code and designs in software. This naturally brought me towards Linux more and more.
Yeah, right. You're talking about an OS that can't keep kernel binary compatibility because the code is the exact opposite of a "clean, lean design".
As things stand now, It's essentially over: Microsoft will eventually be supplanted everywhere by Linux. It is inevitable, the snowball is rolling down a hill and getting larger by the day, and for good reason.
Yeah. The people from 1997 are calling, and they want their naive predictions back.
it's that smarter people who see things as they really are choose Linux.
Seriously? I've never seen a truly smart person choosing Linux. Most "Linux as lifestyle"-choosing people are, in fact, very dumb, yet they're self-appointed "geniuses". Sure, some smart people might use Linux for some tasks, but choosing it, like "it's either Windows or Linux for me, my friend", never. Only ignorant zealots talk about being "Microsoft-free".
Choosing Linux has nothing to do with being smart. It's just a product. Truly smart people run away from all this neo-comunist ideology bullshit and end up choosing Linux when it's a good option and Windows when it's a good option.
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The thing is: your mind is also fooling you. While simple stuff like small CPUs and other cheap integrated circuits always had documentation, bigass OEM-exclusive stuff NEVER had public documentation. Not even years ago.
A GPU is not the kind of chip that you can find at Radio Shack. And that kind of bigass integrator-only stuff ALWAYS worked like that.
Not because some people got responses from Steve Jobs himself (he would always defend Apple) but because what these lawyers allegedly did can be considered as blackmail. Lawyers always need to be very careful when discussing possible litigation or making deals, because if things sound like blackmail, they can get seriously fscked.
This kind of threat-making can completely invalidate the initial objectives of the suit, because the company might end up paying more than the defendant and lawers will be involved on a criminal case. A friend of mine once received a letter with this kind of threat ("look! this is how much your house is worth and you need to think about your children!") and the laywer ended up in prison, because his attempt to solve the issue with extortion instead of the law was considered as criminal.
If you're negotiating a legal case, you can't even TALK about how much a person's house is worth, if the house is not the subject of the suit. Laywers can't EVER sound like they're threatening to ruin your life because of [put random business-related issue here]. They can take steps to actually try ruining it, but they can't use that possibility as a means of negotiation. There are even specific laws regarding that situations, besides common extortion and blackmail laws.
And the Times is not a small newspaper, with amateurish, error-prone billing. Nothing gets past without proper payment and product classification checks. I bet you can't even insert an ad on a page without authorization from the advertising department.
But from your last message in this thread, to the other guy, you clearly look like a die-hard democrat. So I guess I'll leave you alone with your reality distortion field.
Someone obviously told MoveOn to pay back before accusations could start flying all around the company and even the country. In fact, that suspicion is the whole reason this subject was posted at Slashdot in the first place. If things were a simple matter of a payment mistake between two companies, why reporting it? What's next, an executive from Apple paid more for its meal and got the money back? Who cares?
This kind of illegal financing of advocacy groups, using other people's money, is very common and lots of left-wing people are engaged in such practices. And those organizations often these breaches in the system to fulfill their financing needs. After all, "it's all for the greater good".
It's pretty hard to legitemately mischarge this kind of service. I consider it to be pretty obvious that someone managed to get stuff for less and when they got busted, they had to charge the remaining sum.
So without an analog-based FM circuit in front of your DSP, you'll need 2GHz or more. For a radio, that's stupid.
Why? Mostly because it's an open-source geek's dream to see a machine that is fully connected with open source to be manufactured and promoted. It's also because most people are not in the electronics market, and even people who work in the area really DO like seeing a densely populated board.
But hey, if "everyone you see" has stars in their eyes, then I guess it's a freaking revolutionary device, certainly destined to save the planet. You just disqualified yourself as someone able to perform a rational discussion about this. You devoted your life to "the most remote areas in the world" and you're happy because there's a new toy in the block, to help you with your ideologically-motivated occupation.
Ok, it's useful for its task and it's a good competitor if you compare it to others in the same market. That still doesn't mean that its hardware is revolutionary.
It is still just an ordinary piece of hardware. The fact that it is related to poor kids doesn't change it. The fact that Negroponte did anything at all doesn't excuse fanboys from old, plain lying. He can cure world hunger with this little device yet that won't change the fact that it's just ordinary hardware. If you want to praise something, praise the idea, the application, the logistics. But don't lie, it's a very important step.
So what? It's not like OLPC invented mesh networking, and it's not actually an interesting feature for most applications. But yes, most wireless ZIGBEE networks are mesh-based. So no, OLPC is not "revolutionary". What about the DVD players that the OLPC borrowed the LCD from? The OLPC's "high-resolution" LCD is just an average mobile DVD screen with the individual colors being used as separate pixels. No, it's not pushing anything at all. It's just an ordinary design, made by a very small team (compared to other companies in the market) and using ordinary components. Even some Geode ref board beat OLPC at being "revolutionary".
Just because OLPC is connected to Open Source, a lot of fanboys actually believe it's a shiny new revolutionary device. In fact, it's just an expensive LCD terminal.
There is no revolution. It's just another piece of hardware.
The ISO process doesn't works like the W3C process.
If you're doing a burnout and the bike runs out of control, it's easy as pressing a lever to stop the bike. With an electric motor, you'll have to fight the rotor inertia.
Vista is the only important factor in this issue, as DX 10 is a Vista-only product. That means that if Vista lacks users, DX 10 becomes uninteresting to use and bundle. If Vista has plenty of them, then you can use and bundle DX 10.
Yeah. The people from 1997 are calling, and they want their naive predictions back.
Choosing Linux has nothing to do with being smart. It's just a product. Truly smart people run away from all this neo-comunist ideology bullshit and end up choosing Linux when it's a good option and Windows when it's a good option.