The iPhone was pretty popular, but what really got me was that he connected it to his laptop, and opened the 3G access.
Am I misreading or are you saying your geek friend was getting a 3Mbps connection via a 3G iPhone?
That would certainly have amazed me too, given the iPhone doesn't have 3G capability. I guess he could have used the iPod to get a 3Mbps WiFi connection then passed that to the laptop via Bluetooth.
I think the iPod's success is more to do with the user interface than the form factor.
It doesn't look that different to other mp3 players, but the incredibly simple and intuitive interface made it accessible to millions of folk who would not have put up with the UIs of other portable media devices.
So, has anyone downloaded their software? Are they serving up content without an agreement with the music publishers? Or was the press announcement a big scam and there is no 'free' music?
So the hideous price of GSM SMS is here to stay until we switch to 3G.
Are MMS messages also sent in the same fashion? I thought they used a normal data connection, which would suggest they should be much cheaper. Being cheaper would force more widespread adoption and surely save the networks vast sums of money. Unless, of course, standard SMS is just too profitable to give up.
I have a 3G phone. All my colleagues have 3G phones too. Text messages still follow the same old route and cost exactly the same as they did before.
I think you misread the Wikipedia article. The UK only permits the use of a mobile phone via a hands free car kit. It does not prohibit the use of phones altogether.
It is illegal to touch the phone at all while driving.
I'm not aware of any country banning the use of hands free car kits, simply because it would be near impossible to enforce. Every second motorist traveling alone, but singing along to the radio/ipod etc would be at risk of being stopped.
Like I said, it didn't work out so well for Rhapsody.
Sorry, I still don't get it.
The original article is about another crowd that want to give you songs to keep that are wrapped in DRM. Rhapsody can also give you songs to keep wrapped in DRM that work on your iPod.
Real have never claimed that Rhapsody To Go tracks can be played on anything other than a windows PC or a PlaysForSure device. I'm still not clear what exactly hasn't worked out for them?
What do you mean by it didn't work so well for Rhapsody?
The article you linked to says that after Real launched Harmony, Apple issued a software update which stopped the Harmony tracks from playing. Real then issued their own software update and the tracks have played without a problem ever since.
Now I'm sure Apple could issue another update in the future again breaking the tracks, but from the article you posted it reads like it worked out pretty well for Real, and for the iPod users that bought tracks for less than the cost over at the iTunes store.
What's the cost of 10k * 261 days * 12 hours of power?
Surely you could use wake on lan to wake the machines then do your rollout 10 minutes later? Or do a patch install when the machine is turned on and connects to the domain controller?
In windows I'm sure you can set the time between warning appearing and shutdown ocuring. Give 600 seconds warning and you could probably shutdown 90% of the machines overnight.
You keep saying this, but it's not been a reflection on reality.
Sorry, it's not a reflection on reality? What then do you think the point of the law is? You think they just do it to spite US Multinationals? You think they had the foresight three decades ago to think, what if some Americans invent an interweb of computers and start selling books to people in France?
Or are you saying that laws like this or the Net Book Agreement in the UK don't work? Where did I say that they do? All I said - and in only one post, so I'm not sure where your "you keep saying this" comes from - was that the point of the law is to encourage a smaller bookshops and encourage the stocking of a wider range of books.
Feel free to suggest that doesn't work, preferably with some evidence of your own from a country with such a price fixing law for books, but don't go putting words in other peoples' mouths. I certainly didn't say the law was effective in its aims, I just said what the aims of such laws were.
I can, however, say that since the demise of the Net Book Agreement in the UK, there are a much smaller number of bookstores, and their range is substantially more limited. Now we all know that correlation does not equal causation, so all I can provide is an account of my own experience. That I can't say with certainty why the demise occurred is why if you take the time to read my post and engage your brain before clicking reply, you will find I did not argue about the effectiveness of such laws at any time.
QED. The purpose of the law is to encourage more bookshops to stock a wider selection of books, knowing they are not going to be undercut by a large conglomerate. Where such agreements don't exist, there tend to be fewer bookshops, and those that do exist focus on the high volume new releases, making older, more obscure texts harder to purchase.
Of course there are disadvantages to be argued too, however the point of the law is to alleviate the very problem you see with bookshops.
Not sure I'd trust one of those just now. No one is really talking about MTBF and I've heard that eventually they turn into a Read Only device.
I thought everyone was talking about SSD drives MTBF? 2 Million hours seems pretty good to me. 200+ Years really ought to be Enough For Anybody[tm].
Seriously, they have no moving parts - which do you think will fail first? The manufacturers have been working on the limited write capacity for years such that they believe it's no longer an issue. Modern flash memory can already silently correct for any parts that can no longer be written.
Now all we need is for production to ramp up and the cost to come down.
Actually you can pick up 10 500GB SATA Seagate drives with 5 year warranties for $1300.
The price per GB will continue to fall, so magnetic storage will be more cost effective. Of course there are other advantages and disadvantages to both.
Sure it does - as long as you give every user 'power user' or 'administrator' rights. Of course in a corporate setting you'd have to be idiotic to do so.
So you're left having to use third party packaged MSI packages or other hacks to run the installer.
I understand this is slated for improvement in FF3 though, so with luck we'll see the user base increase further still when that happens.
Isn't your bank the only institution able to transfer money out of your account?
Generally yes. The banks also approve companies and non profits who can then take part in the Direct Debit scheme. They can then set up a mandate and start collecting money from your account say as bill payment or a membership subscription. These transactions are covered by the Direct Debit Guarantee.
Don't you have to show your ID? Don't you have to sign some documents???
No, these can be set up electronically online or over the phone. Because of the arduous requirements to joint the Direct Debit scheme, the banks see little fraud. It is pretty much impossible to withdraw funds from someone's account for your own benefit, you can only give them to an approved company or charity.
To be fair what happened was someone set up a Direct Debit in his name, where a company or organisation can deduct money directly from your bank account. These are _very_ common in the UK, much more so than direct bill payment in the US.
One of the reasons they are so common is that every transaction under them is covered by the Direct Debit Guarantee. Under this, he can get an immediate refund from his bank just by asking.
The process of being approved to collect direct debits is pretty arduous, as the banks bear a lot of the costs if something goes wrong. At the same time, the consumer has a level of protection light years beyond that offered in the US for similar transactions.
It's not that uncommon for friends exchanging money in the UK (say someone borrowed some cash for a night out) to simply hand over their bank details and get the money from their friend as an electronic transfer using online banking. In general it'd be pretty difficult for someone to take money from an individual's bank account, even knowing their details for their own benefit. I'm not even sure most online banking in the US lets you deposit money directly into another person's account?
QWERTY was patented by Christopher Sholes in 1874. August Dvorak managed to patent his keyboard layout in 1936.
I'm not saying the Nigerian one shows the same or any degree of innovation, having not read their patent submission, but it is or was at least possible to patent a keyboard layout in the US.
No it is not. Mass transit is designed to carry people, therefore passengers expect other people, of varying ages to be traveling with them.
I personally don't expect there to be a problem. I think most people would accept the social norms and not deliberately view offensive material on their laptop, like some others have posted said they already do. However, we have all seen computers that are riddled with adware. Friends parents with computers who can't start them up without a flurry of pop ups. For those situations I have little problem with filtering by the airline providing the connection. For geeks, there will always be a route around it.
If every moment isn't a teaching moment for your kid, then you're doing something wrong.
No, sorry. I think you are wrong
Every moment for children tends to be a learning moment, but parents can decide the time, pace and subject for teaching.
As they say, your right to swing your arm ends just before my nose. Equally, your right to watch stuff on a plane ends when it starts to offend or disturb those flying with you.
Ever been out of town and found you needed a cable - USB / Firewire / Cat5?
I may have rolls of the stuff, crimps, tools the lot, but if you're not at home, need a cable and it's 7pm you might just have to hold your nose and pay for it.
That's not to say it doesn't stink. It does. The system is rotten that lets these stores charge this sort of markup just so they can say their printer is 49c cheaper than the next store.
However it's not going to change any time soon, there's just too much money to be made. A small amount from geeks who just need something there and then, and a much larger amount from customers who don't know better and actually trust these guys to sell them what they need at a price that's fair.
Much cheaper solution is a Linksys SPA3102 - you can get that for <$80 and get 1FXS 1FXO + Wifi. As others have pointed out, the call quality tends not to be as good as you get from just plugging a phone line in or calls that are exclusively VoIP
Isn't OSX slower on the same hardware as compared to MacOS 9 and isn't there some compatibility issues between the two.
One thing I would say about Vista, is that if compatibility issues are what it takes for Windows programmers to at last write programs that can function with reduced privileges, this is a good thing.
I've been using it domestically since 2002. It has run all our home phones for three years now.
If you want to do something quickly, there are live CDs that will have you set up in very little time. If you like to tinker, get Asterisk: The Future of Telephony from O'Reily and a linksys spa terminal adapter so you can use an ordinary phone.
Something like the spa-2002 is nice becuase you get two lines. It's easier to experiment if you have two numbers. Linksys make WIFI dongles for these too. They're nice because you can then add a phone line anywhere in the house. Once you'r ehooked you can think about spending money on SIP phones. The SNOM phones seem to be favourites, or you could get a Cisco number like you might have in the office. They give you the nice big LCD display to play with.
Once you have played for a little, you'll probably never look back. Remember you really do want 256kb+ upstream bandwidth and if your home network is doing anything else you'll really appreciate some QoS. You also want a stable network connection. You can use Codecs to work round bandwidth, latency 100ms tends not to be too bad, but jitter is a killer. if your pings are all over the place, you'll end up sounding like an extra from Dr Who.
Yeah, I hate when socialist-leaning people talk about the failure of "the free market"
But this is not a socialist breakdown of the free market, it's exactly what happens in free markets with no regulation - the move towards monopolies. That's always where the most profit can be extracted. Every commercial organisation wants to increase its market share and reduce that of its competitors. This is exactly why markets need regulation - regulation which demands competition and restricts firms for growing into monopolies.
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That would certainly have amazed me too, given the iPhone doesn't have 3G capability. I guess he could have used the iPod to get a 3Mbps WiFi connection then passed that to the laptop via Bluetooth.
I think the iPod's success is more to do with the user interface than the form factor.
It doesn't look that different to other mp3 players, but the incredibly simple and intuitive interface made it accessible to millions of folk who would not have put up with the UIs of other portable media devices.
So, has anyone downloaded their software? Are they serving up content without an agreement with the music publishers? Or was the press announcement a big scam and there is no 'free' music?
I have a 3G phone. All my colleagues have 3G phones too. Text messages still follow the same old route and cost exactly the same as they did before.
I think you misread the Wikipedia article. The UK only permits the use of a mobile phone via a hands free car kit. It does not prohibit the use of phones altogether.
It is illegal to touch the phone at all while driving.
I'm not aware of any country banning the use of hands free car kits, simply because it would be near impossible to enforce. Every second motorist traveling alone, but singing along to the radio/ipod etc would be at risk of being stopped.
The original article is about another crowd that want to give you songs to keep that are wrapped in DRM. Rhapsody can also give you songs to keep wrapped in DRM that work on your iPod.
Real have never claimed that Rhapsody To Go tracks can be played on anything other than a windows PC or a PlaysForSure device. I'm still not clear what exactly hasn't worked out for them?
What do you mean by it didn't work so well for Rhapsody?
The article you linked to says that after Real launched Harmony, Apple issued a software update which stopped the Harmony tracks from playing. Real then issued their own software update and the tracks have played without a problem ever since.
Now I'm sure Apple could issue another update in the future again breaking the tracks, but from the article you posted it reads like it worked out pretty well for Real, and for the iPod users that bought tracks for less than the cost over at the iTunes store.
What's the cost of 10k * 261 days * 12 hours of power?
Surely you could use wake on lan to wake the machines then do your rollout 10 minutes later? Or do a patch install when the machine is turned on and connects to the domain controller?
In windows I'm sure you can set the time between warning appearing and shutdown ocuring. Give 600 seconds warning and you could probably shutdown 90% of the machines overnight.
Or are you saying that laws like this or the Net Book Agreement in the UK don't work? Where did I say that they do? All I said - and in only one post, so I'm not sure where your "you keep saying this" comes from - was that the point of the law is to encourage a smaller bookshops and encourage the stocking of a wider range of books.
Feel free to suggest that doesn't work, preferably with some evidence of your own from a country with such a price fixing law for books, but don't go putting words in other peoples' mouths. I certainly didn't say the law was effective in its aims, I just said what the aims of such laws were.
I can, however, say that since the demise of the Net Book Agreement in the UK, there are a much smaller number of bookstores, and their range is substantially more limited. Now we all know that correlation does not equal causation, so all I can provide is an account of my own experience. That I can't say with certainty why the demise occurred is why if you take the time to read my post and engage your brain before clicking reply, you will find I did not argue about the effectiveness of such laws at any time.
QED. The purpose of the law is to encourage more bookshops to stock a wider selection of books, knowing they are not going to be undercut by a large conglomerate. Where such agreements don't exist, there tend to be fewer bookshops, and those that do exist focus on the high volume new releases, making older, more obscure texts harder to purchase.
Of course there are disadvantages to be argued too, however the point of the law is to alleviate the very problem you see with bookshops.
Seriously, they have no moving parts - which do you think will fail first? The manufacturers have been working on the limited write capacity for years such that they believe it's no longer an issue. Modern flash memory can already silently correct for any parts that can no longer be written.
Now all we need is for production to ramp up and the cost to come down.
So actually you were so good, they included you in the same scene 30 times! Do they increase your daily rate for the duplication?
Actually you can pick up 10 500GB SATA Seagate drives with 5 year warranties for $1300.
The price per GB will continue to fall, so magnetic storage will be more cost effective. Of course there are other advantages and disadvantages to both.
So you're left having to use third party packaged MSI packages or other hacks to run the installer.
I understand this is slated for improvement in FF3 though, so with luck we'll see the user base increase further still when that happens.
No, these can be set up electronically online or over the phone. Because of the arduous requirements to joint the Direct Debit scheme, the banks see little fraud. It is pretty much impossible to withdraw funds from someone's account for your own benefit, you can only give them to an approved company or charity.
To be fair what happened was someone set up a Direct Debit in his name, where a company or organisation can deduct money directly from your bank account. These are _very_ common in the UK, much more so than direct bill payment in the US.
One of the reasons they are so common is that every transaction under them is covered by the Direct Debit Guarantee. Under this, he can get an immediate refund from his bank just by asking.
The process of being approved to collect direct debits is pretty arduous, as the banks bear a lot of the costs if something goes wrong. At the same time, the consumer has a level of protection light years beyond that offered in the US for similar transactions.
It's not that uncommon for friends exchanging money in the UK (say someone borrowed some cash for a night out) to simply hand over their bank details and get the money from their friend as an electronic transfer using online banking. In general it'd be pretty difficult for someone to take money from an individual's bank account, even knowing their details for their own benefit. I'm not even sure most online banking in the US lets you deposit money directly into another person's account?
Normally you pay extra for a diesel engine, sometimes almost as much as the $2,500 that is the entire cost of this car.
QWERTY was patented by Christopher Sholes in 1874. August Dvorak managed to patent his keyboard layout in 1936.
I'm not saying the Nigerian one shows the same or any degree of innovation, having not read their patent submission, but it is or was at least possible to patent a keyboard layout in the US.
I personally don't expect there to be a problem. I think most people would accept the social norms and not deliberately view offensive material on their laptop, like some others have posted said they already do. However, we have all seen computers that are riddled with adware. Friends parents with computers who can't start them up without a flurry of pop ups. For those situations I have little problem with filtering by the airline providing the connection. For geeks, there will always be a route around it.
Every moment for children tends to be a learning moment, but parents can decide the time, pace and subject for teaching.
As they say, your right to swing your arm ends just before my nose. Equally, your right to watch stuff on a plane ends when it starts to offend or disturb those flying with you.
I may have rolls of the stuff, crimps, tools the lot, but if you're not at home, need a cable and it's 7pm you might just have to hold your nose and pay for it.
That's not to say it doesn't stink. It does. The system is rotten that lets these stores charge this sort of markup just so they can say their printer is 49c cheaper than the next store.
However it's not going to change any time soon, there's just too much money to be made. A small amount from geeks who just need something there and then, and a much larger amount from customers who don't know better and actually trust these guys to sell them what they need at a price that's fair.
Much cheaper solution is a Linksys SPA3102 - you can get that for <$80 and get 1FXS 1FXO + Wifi. As others have pointed out, the call quality tends not to be as good as you get from just plugging a phone line in or calls that are exclusively VoIP
Isn't OSX slower on the same hardware as compared to MacOS 9 and isn't there some compatibility issues between the two.
One thing I would say about Vista, is that if compatibility issues are what it takes for Windows programmers to at last write programs that can function with reduced privileges, this is a good thing.
I've been using it domestically since 2002. It has run all our home phones for three years now.
If you want to do something quickly, there are live CDs that will have you set up in very little time. If you like to tinker, get Asterisk: The Future of Telephony from O'Reily and a linksys spa terminal adapter so you can use an ordinary phone.
Something like the spa-2002 is nice becuase you get two lines. It's easier to experiment if you have two numbers. Linksys make WIFI dongles for these too. They're nice because you can then add a phone line anywhere in the house. Once you'r ehooked you can think about spending money on SIP phones. The SNOM phones seem to be favourites, or you could get a Cisco number like you might have in the office. They give you the nice big LCD display to play with.
Once you have played for a little, you'll probably never look back. Remember you really do want 256kb+ upstream bandwidth and if your home network is doing anything else you'll really appreciate some QoS. You also want a stable network connection. You can use Codecs to work round bandwidth, latency 100ms tends not to be too bad, but jitter is a killer. if your pings are all over the place, you'll end up sounding like an extra from Dr Who.