I have the opposite issue... I have a not exactly ancient soundblaster pci128 card, and 64bit windows fails to detect it at all, and there's no drivers available that i could find. Linux on the other hand, picks it up by default.
Err, were these really limitations of m68k? Or just limitations of PalmOS or Palm's implementation? A lot of systems ran on m68k processors back in the days.
I wouldn't use it *as* a phone, and i would still have a separate phone for making voice calls. What i *would* use it for, is everything else (email, browsing, text messages etc), and it would be nice to have the functionality built in (oh, and for the network provider to give me 2 sims) rather than having to dick around with bluetooth connections to my phone.
// if, and when, a better tool is available, I'll find out the pros and cons of switching and make my decision based on the facts at hand and the recommendations of those I trust.
Exactly, a file format should not be able to dictate what you switch to... Your devision of what to use might boil down to "we need to open files in format x, only y supports x so we must use y", regardless of so many other important factors like cost, performance, usability, stability, long term support etc.
Without proprietary formats, you would be free to choose what truly is the best tool for your needs based on the actual pros and cons.
No, it works with any phone that's capable of working as a bluetooth modem. I use it with a motorola (i believe its an L7). If you can do without 3G/GPRS and just use wifi, you don't require a phone at all.
On their phones maybe, but the N800 is a good example of an open piece of kit... I'd like them to release a fully fledged phone, but using the same platform as the N800 (the N800 requires a bluetooth capable phone to work with).
I too have an N800, and my only complaint is that it requires a bluetooth compatible phone for 3G/GPRS connectivity, if it had this built in it would be ideal for me (carrying 2 devices around is a little clunky).
And they would have to comply with your licencing terms (ie advertise your company all over it)... If they didn't, you can have them up in court for it. And the fact that you released the code long before they came out with a product, goes a long way towards proving it's your own code. If you keep your code closed, and someone else steals it you'll have a much harder time proving what happened. And they may try to claim that you stole the code from them instead.
It depends who your target market is... Corporate users are more likely to buy a commercially supported version, than download a free version. End users are more likely to download a free version (or pirate a non free one), but end users increase mindshare and are generally less profitable anyway. The more widespread your product, the greater the chances that corporate buyers will have heard of it.
There are many terms under which you can release source code. You can put it under a microsoft-style shared source licence, where people can look at it, fix bugs and make improvements but those improvements become your property. You can do as ID do, and release the code openly but which is unuseable without proprietary data files which you still sell. You can add advertising clauses, ala BSD, so that any competitors who copy it have to advertise your company all over the place, this will very much discourage them. You can make it free for non commercial use only. You can bundle the source along with the binaries, such that only legit buyers can get the source (and perhaps have an internal customers-only website where customers can discuss things and contribute patches etc). You can differentiate between company supported "official" versions, and unsupported modifications made by users, and you can roll those user changes back in.
Infact the latter would be very good, there are plenty of commercial apps which could benefit from such a system. Things like linux support are in a catch 22 situation, not enough users to make porting profitable, and the user base wont increase without certain kinds of apps. Third parties could provide ports, they can either be used unofficially (you buy the official version, then download the linux version from the customer portal) or released with later versions. Similarly, bugs can be fixed by end users etc. Companies already use their customers for beta testing, why not use them for development too?
Because when you release it, you get to dictate the licensing terms... Your competitors won't use the code if one of the requirements is that it displays your company name all over the place (like the older BSD licence), but many other people/organisations who might learn from it couldn't care less. You can always dual-licence too, some companies may want to use the software but not comply with the advertising clause, you can decide wether or not to licence it to them under different terms. You might get as much value back as they get from the software, they might be in a completely different industry that doesnt compete with you, they might operate a similar business but in a different country where you have no intention of doing business. Or you can release it under a "no commercial use" type licence.
Also, if people do rip your code off you can easily point to the code you released to prove it happened. If you keep the code internal, and a rogue employee stole it and gave it to a competitor, how would you know? How would you prove it? And how would you prove it was your code that was stolen and not the other way round?
Is their recipe really secret? The ingredients at least are openly disclosed on the back of every bottle. I would imagine they also have to disclose all details to the government, before the product can be approved for sale. I can't imagine it would be too hard to work out how coke is made, and replicate it.
I always preferred the taste of Pepsi to Coke... I do hate the various "diet" and "low sugar" variants of both tho, they are utterly disgusting and taste completely awfull, they also taste a lot sweeter, but not a nice sweet, it's a sickening artificial sweetness.
What you really need, is a modular server which supports both a standard protocol and one (or more) proprietary ones... That way people can wean themselves off the proprietary protocols gradually, while moving to a standard one.
That would have depended on the changes they proposed... Any proposed changes would have been evaluated, and if the different vendors reached a consensus that the changes provided a valid benefit, then they would have been accepted. Many of the garbage that microsoft put into ooxml would probably have been rejected, because it provides no benefit to end users or any vendor except microsoft. Similarly, any requirements without full implementation details would have been rejected.
Your 45mb pipe, even shared between 2000 users is a lot more than people had a few years ago... Consider dialups, and the college where i studied had 2mb shared between around 2000 students. But you need to consider the usage patterns, most ISPs will put way more than 2000 users on a single 45mb pipe, because the average user uses very little bandwidth. Your school clearly has a higher proportion of heavy users, and so it's bandwidth is more saturated. Do remember that this is a SCHOOL... It's purpose is to educate the kids, not to facilitate them playing games. They really have no obligation to support any use of the internet other than legitimate educational purposes. They could quite easily filter everything except HTTP, and require that you make and justify a request, via a teacher, for anything else.
But this is a university network... Accessing SSH on university systems so that students can do their work is far more important than playing some games. The network is there for research purposes, so thats students can do the research they need to pass their educational courses. Any traffic that facilitates the educational courses of the university should be prioritised, and anything else should get whatever bandwidth remains. And those games should be grateful they can play online games at all, the university is not obligated to provide them a connection nor allow them to play games on it (they could easily filter gaming traffic completely).
Well no, they don't charge the receiver of the call... But, they do charge international telco's for the privilege of routing calls into the country. And, i'm sure they have someone to monitor each call (their international line capacity isnt that high and wages are low, so its easily feasible). Also the line quality is very poor, a modem connection would be very unstable and slow.
Well, we had to pay for the truck every time it came... It wasn't a free service. It also wasn't essential, we could have shoveled the sewerage onto the bottom of the garden, where the waste water drained.. There were plenty of apple trees down there, and it did them good, especially during dry spells (when theres a shortage of water its illegal to pump clean water onto your garden, but waste water is another matter).
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I have the opposite issue...
I have a not exactly ancient soundblaster pci128 card, and 64bit windows fails to detect it at all, and there's no drivers available that i could find.
Linux on the other hand, picks it up by default.
Err, were these really limitations of m68k? Or just limitations of PalmOS or Palm's implementation?
A lot of systems ran on m68k processors back in the days.
I wouldn't use it *as* a phone, and i would still have a separate phone for making voice calls.
What i *would* use it for, is everything else (email, browsing, text messages etc), and it would be nice to have the functionality built in (oh, and for the network provider to give me 2 sims) rather than having to dick around with bluetooth connections to my phone.
Novell's patched version of OpenOffice supports DOCX and runs on linux...
// if, and when, a better tool is available, I'll find out the pros and cons of switching and make my decision based on the facts at hand and the recommendations of those I trust.
Exactly, a file format should not be able to dictate what you switch to... Your devision of what to use might boil down to "we need to open files in format x, only y supports x so we must use y", regardless of so many other important factors like cost, performance, usability, stability, long term support etc.
Without proprietary formats, you would be free to choose what truly is the best tool for your needs based on the actual pros and cons.
You could always bypass "protected" worksheets in excel, most other spreadsheets would simply ignore the "protection" when opening the file.
No, it works with any phone that's capable of working as a bluetooth modem. I use it with a motorola (i believe its an L7).
If you can do without 3G/GPRS and just use wifi, you don't require a phone at all.
On their phones maybe, but the N800 is a good example of an open piece of kit...
I'd like them to release a fully fledged phone, but using the same platform as the N800 (the N800 requires a bluetooth capable phone to work with).
I too have an N800, and my only complaint is that it requires a bluetooth compatible phone for 3G/GPRS connectivity, if it had this built in it would be ideal for me (carrying 2 devices around is a little clunky).
They do only provide electric, and accomodation, to those studying.
When you cease to be a student, you have to move out.
And they would have to comply with your licencing terms (ie advertise your company all over it)...
If they didn't, you can have them up in court for it. And the fact that you released the code long before they came out with a product, goes a long way towards proving it's your own code.
If you keep your code closed, and someone else steals it you'll have a much harder time proving what happened. And they may try to claim that you stole the code from them instead.
It depends who your target market is...
Corporate users are more likely to buy a commercially supported version, than download a free version. End users are more likely to download a free version (or pirate a non free one), but end users increase mindshare and are generally less profitable anyway.
The more widespread your product, the greater the chances that corporate buyers will have heard of it.
There are many terms under which you can release source code.
You can put it under a microsoft-style shared source licence, where people can look at it, fix bugs and make improvements but those improvements become your property.
You can do as ID do, and release the code openly but which is unuseable without proprietary data files which you still sell.
You can add advertising clauses, ala BSD, so that any competitors who copy it have to advertise your company all over the place, this will very much discourage them.
You can make it free for non commercial use only.
You can bundle the source along with the binaries, such that only legit buyers can get the source (and perhaps have an internal customers-only website where customers can discuss things and contribute patches etc). You can differentiate between company supported "official" versions, and unsupported modifications made by users, and you can roll those user changes back in.
Infact the latter would be very good, there are plenty of commercial apps which could benefit from such a system. Things like linux support are in a catch 22 situation, not enough users to make porting profitable, and the user base wont increase without certain kinds of apps. Third parties could provide ports, they can either be used unofficially (you buy the official version, then download the linux version from the customer portal) or released with later versions. Similarly, bugs can be fixed by end users etc.
Companies already use their customers for beta testing, why not use them for development too?
Because when you release it, you get to dictate the licensing terms...
Your competitors won't use the code if one of the requirements is that it displays your company name all over the place (like the older BSD licence), but many other people/organisations who might learn from it couldn't care less.
You can always dual-licence too, some companies may want to use the software but not comply with the advertising clause, you can decide wether or not to licence it to them under different terms. You might get as much value back as they get from the software, they might be in a completely different industry that doesnt compete with you, they might operate a similar business but in a different country where you have no intention of doing business.
Or you can release it under a "no commercial use" type licence.
Also, if people do rip your code off you can easily point to the code you released to prove it happened. If you keep the code internal, and a rogue employee stole it and gave it to a competitor, how would you know? How would you prove it? And how would you prove it was your code that was stolen and not the other way round?
Is their recipe really secret? The ingredients at least are openly disclosed on the back of every bottle.
I would imagine they also have to disclose all details to the government, before the product can be approved for sale.
I can't imagine it would be too hard to work out how coke is made, and replicate it.
I always preferred the taste of Pepsi to Coke...
I do hate the various "diet" and "low sugar" variants of both tho, they are utterly disgusting and taste completely awfull, they also taste a lot sweeter, but not a nice sweet, it's a sickening artificial sweetness.
Ruby code is among the least performant, and often the only solution is to add servers or rewrite it in another language.
What you really need, is a modular server which supports both a standard protocol and one (or more) proprietary ones...
That way people can wean themselves off the proprietary protocols gradually, while moving to a standard one.
That would have depended on the changes they proposed...
Any proposed changes would have been evaluated, and if the different vendors reached a consensus that the changes provided a valid benefit, then they would have been accepted.
Many of the garbage that microsoft put into ooxml would probably have been rejected, because it provides no benefit to end users or any vendor except microsoft. Similarly, any requirements without full implementation details would have been rejected.
Well if it's a dorm room, get a high gain antenna and hang it out the window, or find where the AP is located and point a directional antenna at it...
Your 45mb pipe, even shared between 2000 users is a lot more than people had a few years ago... Consider dialups, and the college where i studied had 2mb shared between around 2000 students.
But you need to consider the usage patterns, most ISPs will put way more than 2000 users on a single 45mb pipe, because the average user uses very little bandwidth. Your school clearly has a higher proportion of heavy users, and so it's bandwidth is more saturated.
Do remember that this is a SCHOOL... It's purpose is to educate the kids, not to facilitate them playing games. They really have no obligation to support any use of the internet other than legitimate educational purposes.
They could quite easily filter everything except HTTP, and require that you make and justify a request, via a teacher, for anything else.
But this is a university network... Accessing SSH on university systems so that students can do their work is far more important than playing some games.
The network is there for research purposes, so thats students can do the research they need to pass their educational courses. Any traffic that facilitates the educational courses of the university should be prioritised, and anything else should get whatever bandwidth remains. And those games should be grateful they can play online games at all, the university is not obligated to provide them a connection nor allow them to play games on it (they could easily filter gaming traffic completely).
Well no, they don't charge the receiver of the call...
But, they do charge international telco's for the privilege of routing calls into the country. And, i'm sure they have someone to monitor each call (their international line capacity isnt that high and wages are low, so its easily feasible).
Also the line quality is very poor, a modem connection would be very unstable and slow.
Well, we had to pay for the truck every time it came... It wasn't a free service.
It also wasn't essential, we could have shoveled the sewerage onto the bottom of the garden, where the waste water drained.. There were plenty of apple trees down there, and it did them good, especially during dry spells (when theres a shortage of water its illegal to pump clean water onto your garden, but waste water is another matter).
Actually, many of those sites have already been hacked in the past...
http://www.attrition.org/mirror/attrition/2000/08/01/www.myanmar.com/
A bunch of the government sites got defaced before that too, but i can't find the mirror sites.