I have personally designed hardware that has driver-loaded firmware, and I'd do it again. It is a wonderful solution to the issue of upgradability, not to mention bug-fix-ability.
Not only that, I have written OS/2 and FreeBSD drivers for it outside of work hours (but with permission).
There is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON why a FOSS driver cannot install the firmware. This is NOT the problem. There MAY be a problem with distribution rights, or with documenting how to load the firmware, but these are NOT what TFA described.
While one might like to have the spec for writing one's own GPL firmware, and I dont see prob;lems with that, I do see a problem with expecting $100,000 worth of firmware development for free, when the hardware can be replicat4ed for a $10, and the combination normally sells for $100. Ie there are products on the market where the majority of the value is in the firmware. and Yes, it does sometimes take more than three man-years of $100/day consultants to write firmware for a product with a predicted lifetime of 8-months. (Graphics card, anyone?)
Currently the FCC does not rule the world. Their regulations do not apply in Europe, and presumably OSS developers in Europe could get the data if that was the issue.
The traditional explanation is one or both of
Their hardware is as shoddy as hell and they dont want anyone to know
Their own drivers are bug infested and they dont want anyone to know
I have been using Realtek on FreeBSD and its dead cheap and completely problem free. I recommend Realtek to anyone!
Disclaimer: I am a radio engineer and have no connection with Realtek other than as a satisfied customer.
I live in London, and I agree that learning your way around London traffic is very demanding, especially all those "Blue Book runs", but I suspect its the effect of breathing in diesel fumes all day that make the taxi drivers' brains grow. (It might also be the need to learn to make insulting remarks about other drivers in 47 different languages.)
you can't legislate what goes on in the mind of the creator of such work (yet)
Rest assured, the Blair government will trya as had as they can to find a way to do exactly that. At this very moment, Gordon Brown is planning a tax on thinking, regardless of the fact that he has yet to find a way to implement it.
hope that we evolve to the point of being able to put together a receiver/broadcast radio out of spare parts
Unfortunately evolution is going the other way. When I was in school I built an analogue TV from parts (it was monochrome, and the screen was green, and it only recieved one station, but it worked!. Most kids today can't even take the back off a TV. How many could wind a mains transformer on the kitchen table, or make a voltage multiplier?
Analogue is only used by oldies anyway. Everyone under the age of 70 uses Youtube instead - partly because their attention span is less than that of a goldfish - a side effect of "easy to use" Apple UIs.
don't ask me why they're selling Cell-based blade servers; it doesn't make much sense to me
Its pretty clear that you are not involved in any projects requiring real-time voice recognition of hundreds of datastreams simultaneously then. This is the only realistic architecture for that kind of task. Its also pretty good for many kinds of massive database processing, such as might be required for real-world artificial intelligence, such as face recognition from poor cctv pictures, and problems such as computing the risk envelope of incoming meteor strikes where there are many particles on poorly determined trajectories. Once we have a decent tool chain (RTFA), we can expect to see games where you can talk to your colleagues on the battle field, and have them recognise your (non-American) accent, and reply in appropriate language, while acting on your orders.
In short, it will address problems where the Pentium is three orders of magnitude or more short of the processing power required.
I accept that the performance of Cell architecture with MS Word is not impressive. MS Word actually works fine on my P1, so no problem here.
There are two reliable methods by whch all spamming, phishing, etc could be stopped for good:
(1) Use of cruise missiles against the perpetrators
(2)the same what that on-line gambling was stopped - action against the credit card companies.
All this stuff is for monitary reward - read "credit card transactions". No Credit card involvement means no problem.
And dont come with that "its the foreigners doing it" Who ever is doing it, its Americans paying, with American credit cards and banks. None of the stuff being pushed thro spam is physically available to anyone else. All the phishing is to take credit card details, and all the credit cards are American.
As been said time and time again.... Follow the MONEY
In Europe where TV is still mainly low definition, the blurry 320x240
All of Europe is PAL at 768x576. (800x600, SVGA to you) It is interlaced though. There may be occasional overpriced stations running the rare HD demo, but I have not seen them yet. This may be your point, but its not what you said. In the USA, the stuff is supposed to be 704x480. (640x480, VGA)
A family cannot really huddle around the PC to watch stuff on YouTube
No, but silly people acting silly on youtube is "watching Video online" and occupies people's time, partly because of novelty. It does detract from time spent watching rubbish on TV. Youtube in magnificent widescreen 320x240 is not a substitute for watching "scrapyard challenge" or "Pimp my ride" even with my big new 21" monitor. Nevertheless, I do recommend http://youtube.com/watch?v=eSJXNrIQiQs as what is worth watching, but you can't see on TV.
Last time I checked the Oxford English Dictionary, "declined" did not mean "stopped". Sure its still going on, but much less than it was, especially in England, and the "political" justification for it is not as credible as it was. It will probably continue for many generations to come on a small scale, unless something stupid makes it flare up again. Stone was obviously a nutter - did you see what he ahd on him?
Only God can achieve perfection. We have to tolerate some degree of badness in people. But Blair doesn't know it. Zero Tolerance ends up making everyone a criminal. That doesn't mean we should be complacent, or ignore evil deeds, but we need to think before we condemn people (and condemn some after due thought).
A long time ago, we had hanging for sheep stealing, and the saying was "you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb". Pretty soon, the seep escalated to the shepherd. The criminal justice system needs to be sensible, flexible, and realistic to avoid this problem.
The Blair government is about inventing new crimes to fine people as a revenue stream, not resolving real problems.
I have said all this before, so its fairly well rehearsed. Obviously, I am a child of the 1960's:-)
I live in London. There is clearly a group of people somewhere hell bent on stirring up paranoia to justify this stuff.
London is at no more risk of violence than at any other time in the last 60 years, according to any credible statistics. The number if people being killed by terrorists (Islamic or otherwise) is massively down on what it was (and sure as hell not because of cameras)*. The number of innocent people being killed by armed police is perhaps a bit higher, but still lower than any big city in the USA.
So what has changed apart from the availability of technology that can route backhanders to people with good connections?)
When my parents were school age, their houses were being bombed and they were regularly machine-gunned by Nazi dive bombers while cycling to school. So when I was young, everyone thought it was perfectly safe to go outside and play on building sites or with farm machinery or wild animals, swim in the river, and in fact: Run along and play, don't hurt anyone, don't break anything, and come back when its meal time. Serious crime was reported in the press, but without salacious details, and sexual crime was reported only using long medical terms that most people could not understand, or be bothered to read.
So we played with snakes, climbed over the rubble of bombed houses, dived into the river despite the abandonned prams and bicycles, made home-made fireworks, leapt of garage roofs and played ball in the road, and experimented with drugs and wierd music. Only a few of my friends were injured severely, and none died, except from cocaine! We knew damn well not to fall off roofs of two story buildings, cos landing carelessly of a gound flor roof hurt badly. We knew to be careful with home made explosives, because a friend nearly lost his hand, and we knew how to make and do things with any old stuff that came to hand.
Todays parents are too old to remember this, and have media that tells them about every murder or rape fifty times a day. Children not exposed to minor risk are unable to comprehend that playing chicken with 125MPH trains is a bad idea, that driving a real car is not like "Grand Theft Auto" (especially as automatics are rare here, and there is nothing like a clutch in a computer game) so they steal cars and kill children by accident.
* Terrorism in England mostly means the IRA - a bunch if Irish criminals funded by misguided Americans, and to some extent, misguided Irish. They killed loads of innocent people, and quite a few innocent animals too! This has declined because coverage of other terrorist groups on TV has shown them that Terrorist incidents are massive own-goals in terms of publicity. If the USA made it possible for all Palestinians and Iraquis to have a TV, then terrorism in the middle East would soon collapse. Why do you think the Taliban imposed a telly-ban? Yes I do have friends from the Middle East (on both sides).
I have a MAJOR problem with sim locks. I have a phone which I got on a contract, and I am still paying the provider, but why should I not be able to lend it to my son, who is on a different service? I am still using my service provider, still making his exhorbitant payments monthly. If I lease a car, they do not insist I only drive on AVIS roads. WTF? The regulators need to get their arses in gear on this one.
I am not griping about susidised PAYG. I am talking about monthly contract here.
"3" lied when they told me they would unlock the phone for UKL13. Now I have the phone, the charge is a lot higher.
All my family and friends are being advised not to buy Nokia phones anymore as their BB5 technology prevents grey unlockers. Athers must ahve the same idea, as Nokia's market share is falling fast.
If you think UK phones do not have their functionality crippled, just buy SOny Eericson P990 on Vodaphone. (or use Google and save UKL400)
Yeah, but it wasn't rain, it was snow, and those were bulls, not gorillas, but yes they were radio-active - due to the leak from Winscale nuclear reactor (now called Cellafield to protect the guilty). It was no big deal for us, though. Our parents (in the 1940's) were bombed and machine-gunned by German divebombers while going to school.
We had Spam and dried egg to eat, with "ministry fo food juice" too (much better than Snoek).
Slashdot Mirror
No Need - They are abolishing the postal service anyway (actually, closing 3,500 postoffices, as a first step)
Not only that, I have written OS/2 and FreeBSD drivers for it outside of work hours (but with permission).
There is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON why a FOSS driver cannot install the firmware. This is NOT the problem. There MAY be a problem with distribution rights, or with documenting how to load the firmware, but these are NOT what TFA described.
While one might like to have the spec for writing one's own GPL firmware, and I dont see prob;lems with that, I do see a problem with expecting $100,000 worth of firmware development for free, when the hardware can be replicat4ed for a $10, and the combination normally sells for $100. Ie there are products on the market where the majority of the value is in the firmware. and Yes, it does sometimes take more than three man-years of $100/day consultants to write firmware for a product with a predicted lifetime of 8-months. (Graphics card, anyone?)
On FreeBSD it won't - the port of WIN_32_CODECS it depends on for this is marked illegal because of multiple remote execution exploits.
If I was not wearing my tin-foil hat, I would say that the EU only want to support users who are remotely exploitable!
Because the EU does not support the concept of class actions for one.
What I want to know is "How is it legal to force the population to use the products of a convicted corporation who have yet to pay their fines?"
This sounds like "aiding and abetting" in normal life.
With a Hollywood movie too!
OK, its not fierce, but it has fiierce names: Leopard, Tiger, Panther, Penguin etc
Penguins are fierce arn't they? Or maybe its just those dammned Penguinis! [sounds of being slapped round the face with a wet fish]
Lest go for truth in advertising and call it "Windows Vapourware"
WTF?
This is extremely silly: 'Anyone' can build their own hardware.
I know: I was that anyone.
The traditional explanation is one or both of
Their hardware is as shoddy as hell and they dont want anyone to know
Their own drivers are bug infested and they dont want anyone to know
I have been using Realtek on FreeBSD and its dead cheap and completely problem free. I recommend Realtek to anyone!
Disclaimer: I am a radio engineer and have no connection with Realtek other than as a satisfied customer.
I hope they are prepared to inflict appalling torture on offenders. I for one am quite happy to overlook human rights record on this matter.
I live in London, and I agree that learning your way around London traffic is very demanding, especially all those "Blue Book runs", but I suspect its the effect of breathing in diesel fumes all day that make the taxi drivers' brains grow. (It might also be the need to learn to make insulting remarks about other drivers in 47 different languages.)
Rest assured, the Blair government will trya as had as they can to find a way to do exactly that. At this very moment, Gordon Brown is planning a tax on thinking, regardless of the fact that he has yet to find a way to implement it.
Unfortunately evolution is going the other way. When I was in school I built an analogue TV from parts (it was monochrome, and the screen was green, and it only recieved one station, but it worked!. Most kids today can't even take the back off a TV. How many could wind a mains transformer on the kitchen table, or make a voltage multiplier?
And dont start on walking to school...
Analogue is only used by oldies anyway. Everyone under the age of 70 uses Youtube instead - partly because their attention span is less than that of a goldfish - a side effect of "easy to use" Apple UIs.
Its pretty clear that you are not involved in any projects requiring real-time voice recognition of hundreds of datastreams simultaneously then. This is the only realistic architecture for that kind of task. Its also pretty good for many kinds of massive database processing, such as might be required for real-world artificial intelligence, such as face recognition from poor cctv pictures, and problems such as computing the risk envelope of incoming meteor strikes where there are many particles on poorly determined trajectories. Once we have a decent tool chain (RTFA), we can expect to see games where you can talk to your colleagues on the battle field, and have them recognise your (non-American) accent, and reply in appropriate language, while acting on your orders.
In short, it will address problems where the Pentium is three orders of magnitude or more short of the processing power required.
I accept that the performance of Cell architecture with MS Word is not impressive. MS Word actually works fine on my P1, so no problem here.
Wifeswapping - a trouble shared is a trouble halved
Zango are the filthiest scum outside of Al Quieda.
(1) Use of cruise missiles against the perpetrators
(2)the same what that on-line gambling was stopped - action against the credit card companies.
All this stuff is for monitary reward - read "credit card transactions". No Credit card involvement means no problem.
And dont come with that "its the foreigners doing it" Who ever is doing it, its Americans paying, with American credit cards and banks. None of the stuff being pushed thro spam is physically available to anyone else. All the phishing is to take credit card details, and all the credit cards are American.
As been said time and time again .... Follow the MONEY
All of Europe is PAL at 768x576. (800x600, SVGA to you) It is interlaced though. There may be occasional overpriced stations running the rare HD demo, but I have not seen them yet. This may be your point, but its not what you said. In the USA, the stuff is supposed to be 704x480. (640x480, VGA)
No, but silly people acting silly on youtube is "watching Video online" and occupies people's time, partly because of novelty. It does detract from time spent watching rubbish on TV. Youtube in magnificent widescreen 320x240 is not a substitute for watching "scrapyard challenge" or "Pimp my ride" even with my big new 21" monitor. Nevertheless, I do recommend http://youtube.com/watch?v=eSJXNrIQiQs as what is worth watching, but you can't see on TV.
Only God can achieve perfection. We have to tolerate some degree of badness in people. But Blair doesn't know it. Zero Tolerance ends up making everyone a criminal. That doesn't mean we should be complacent, or ignore evil deeds, but we need to think before we condemn people (and condemn some after due thought).
A long time ago, we had hanging for sheep stealing, and the saying was "you may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb". Pretty soon, the seep escalated to the shepherd. The criminal justice system needs to be sensible, flexible, and realistic to avoid this problem.
The Blair government is about inventing new crimes to fine people as a revenue stream, not resolving real problems.
I live in London. There is clearly a group of people somewhere hell bent on stirring up paranoia to justify this stuff. London is at no more risk of violence than at any other time in the last 60 years, according to any credible statistics. The number if people being killed by terrorists (Islamic or otherwise) is massively down on what it was (and sure as hell not because of cameras)*. The number of innocent people being killed by armed police is perhaps a bit higher, but still lower than any big city in the USA.
So what has changed apart from the availability of technology that can route backhanders to people with good connections?)
When my parents were school age, their houses were being bombed and they were regularly machine-gunned by Nazi dive bombers while cycling to school. So when I was young, everyone thought it was perfectly safe to go outside and play on building sites or with farm machinery or wild animals, swim in the river, and in fact: Run along and play, don't hurt anyone, don't break anything, and come back when its meal time. Serious crime was reported in the press, but without salacious details, and sexual crime was reported only using long medical terms that most people could not understand, or be bothered to read.
So we played with snakes, climbed over the rubble of bombed houses, dived into the river despite the abandonned prams and bicycles, made home-made fireworks, leapt of garage roofs and played ball in the road, and experimented with drugs and wierd music. Only a few of my friends were injured severely, and none died, except from cocaine! We knew damn well not to fall off roofs of two story buildings, cos landing carelessly of a gound flor roof hurt badly. We knew to be careful with home made explosives, because a friend nearly lost his hand, and we knew how to make and do things with any old stuff that came to hand.
Todays parents are too old to remember this, and have media that tells them about every murder or rape fifty times a day. Children not exposed to minor risk are unable to comprehend that playing chicken with 125MPH trains is a bad idea, that driving a real car is not like "Grand Theft Auto" (especially as automatics are rare here, and there is nothing like a clutch in a computer game) so they steal cars and kill children by accident.
* Terrorism in England mostly means the IRA - a bunch if Irish criminals funded by misguided Americans, and to some extent, misguided Irish. They killed loads of innocent people, and quite a few innocent animals too! This has declined because coverage of other terrorist groups on TV has shown them that Terrorist incidents are massive own-goals in terms of publicity. If the USA made it possible for all Palestinians and Iraquis to have a TV, then terrorism in the middle East would soon collapse. Why do you think the Taliban imposed a telly-ban? Yes I do have friends from the Middle East (on both sides).
I am not griping about susidised PAYG. I am talking about monthly contract here.
"3" lied when they told me they would unlock the phone for UKL13. Now I have the phone, the charge is a lot higher.
All my family and friends are being advised not to buy Nokia phones anymore as their BB5 technology prevents grey unlockers. Athers must ahve the same idea, as Nokia's market share is falling fast.
If you think UK phones do not have their functionality crippled, just buy SOny Eericson P990 on Vodaphone. (or use Google and save UKL400)
We had Spam and dried egg to eat, with "ministry fo food juice" too (much better than Snoek).