What this is good for is being able to say "I trust comments posted from LiveJournal, SixApart, Yahoo, MSN, Google, and Mac.com users to not be spam." (this isn't a list of places that support this yet, just a random list of large providers that could support it). Then anyone who has an account from those providers can log into your blog and post comments that are authenticated as being from them. Have problem with too much spam from some domain? Blacklist that domain, or remove it from your whitelist. Now, instead of every user who wants to post on your blog having to create a new account, they can just use their account from one of the sites that supports it.
... you have no definitive authority to say "this user is who he/she says they are."
You do have a definitive authority; their identity is a URL, and you ask the server if they really are who they say they are. You do this by going to the URL, looking for a META tag that specifies the identity server to use, and having a talk with that identity server. On LiveJournal, the only major site that actually implements this, your identity is simply the address of your journal, so if your username is foo, your identity would be livejournal.com/~foo (or livejournal.com/users/foo, or foo.livejournal.com if you have a paid account; there is no effort to give everyone a single unique identity). Read the article for the details.
Yes, that's why I specified good. There is good fanfiction out there; there's even some that people say is better than the original works it's based on. Now, sturgeons law applies, probably squared (or whatever would make it closer to 100%), to fanfiction, so good fanfiction writers are few and far between, but they do exist.
I read your review, and saw the "cheap knock off of COPS", and thought "well, yeah, but TROOPS was a cheap knock off of COPS, but it was great". Then I watched this, and realized that you were completely right. I didn't care about the characters at all, there was no plot to speak of, and there was way too much exposition and panning around beautiful but pointless CG.
Someone needs to get some good fanfiction writers to write the scripts for the next episode; I think that just having some better writing would make worlds of difference, although better acting would help too.
Meanwhile, Apple got the code to a rendering engine for free and gave back little to nothing. It's like TransGaming all over again.
"Little to nothing"? According to the article, KHTML used about half of the patches that Apple provided. Most of the other half of the patches were to KWQ, Apple's reimplementation of the parts of QT that KHTML used (which they needed to do in order to have correct Macintosh look and feel), which wouldn't have applied to KHTML anyhow. I fail to see how providing useful patches, although in a somewhat less useful form than developers might have wanted, is anything like using someone else's code, making proprietary changes, and then not releasing those changes under a free license. It's apples and oranges (no pun intended).
So what's the difference between having Asperger's syndrome and being a geek? I mean, it sounds like the description (not being able to pick up on social cues, somewhat of an outcast, smart but doesn't do well in school, focuses intensely on things) describe exactly the same thing as "geek" to me, except maybe for a set of interests that "geek" usually connotes (computers, science fiction, gaming, etc).
Anyone who might fear that the government might want evidence that they said something. Sure, a lot of such people are shady, but anyone who is fighting a repressive government would want the same sort of protection. For instance, imagine you are Islamic and staying in the US on a visa. You IM with someone, mentioning that you think Bush is an asshole and should be killed. Now, if you don't encrypt that, someone could eavesdrop and you could get arrested. If you use normal encryption/authentication mechanisms, then if someone compromises the other person's computer, or whatever, they can decrypt the message, prove that it was you who said it, and have even stronger evidence against you. With this scheme, however, you can feel free to say what you want, and still be guaranteed that even if the person you're talking to gives your messages to the police, they can't prove that it was you who said it, and no one can eavesdrop or decrypt the messages later when they find the private key.
Another reason you might want to use this is that you fear, at some point, that some government you deal with may be repressive, even if the current government is not. If you only start using encryption when you're talking about subversive stuff, then it's easy to track down the subversives, by just looking at who uses encryption. But if everyone uses it all the time, then there's no way to tell who is using it for shady purposes and who is just using it to chat.
Of course, this means that it can also be used by criminals, too. One of the biggest problems with any sort of freedom, or tool to protect you from a repressive government, is that anyone can use it, including criminals. It's hard to find the right balance point; if I'm allowed to have a gun, to fight against the government if things go bad, then so is the loan shark down the street. If I'm allowed to have the freedom to speak my mind about how awful the government is, then so is Fred Phelps. If I'm allowed to use steganography to hide messages about fighting for marijuana reform, then a terrorist is allowed to use it to hide messages for coordinating an attack. It's a tough balance, constantly in contention. And if I use crypto all of the time in order to not look suspicious if I need to fight against the government, then the guy using crypto to trade child porn will look less suspicious, as well. It's a tough issue to work out.
Usability and security are not opposites. In fact, secure software needs to be usable, or else people won't use it properly, and will completely defeat the point of it being secure. Case in point, firewall software. If you need to edit a half dozen configuration files to set up a firewall, no one will have a firewall set up. If you have firewalls on by default without letting anything through, and make it difficult for someone to enable specific ports, people will probably just opt for the simpler route of turning the entire firewall off rather than figuring out how to set up a particular port. Even Mac OS X, which handles this fairly well, doesn't do it quite well enough. Most applications don't check to see if a port is firewalled when they bind to that port, and many don't even tell you what port they bind to, so in order to set the software up, I have to run it, turn off my firewall, portscan myself, and then add the new port I see open to my firewall configuration. In the ideal world, the application would pop up a dialog box saying "port 4242 appears to be firewalled. Shall I turn off the firewall for this port?", or at the very least, tell me what port it is and direct me to the system preferences (also, the firewall configuration shouldn't be in the "Sharing" preference panel).
There are plenty of other examples where making software more usable can make it more secure. I've used PGP before, which most of the time, is a pain in the ass, since I have to run all kinds of separate programs to generate keys and encrypt my text which I then have to paste into my mail program (yeah, I know, some have it built in, but mine doesn't [and yes, I know, you can get a hack to get Mail.app to use GPG, but it uses undocumented API's that are subject to change with each release of the OS]), and then do a similar amount of work when receiving mail. Apple's Mail can use X.509 certificates for S/MIME, which is pretty easy to use, although getting a key is somewhat difficult and undocumented. When I was working for a company which used Lotus Notes, however, signing and encryption were incredibly easy; in fact, your emails were signed and encrypted without you even knowing it, if they were sent to other Notes users on the same network. Now, Notes had problems of it's own, but that's the way security should work; it should be completely transparent to the user, so the user can work securely without having to worry about it.
The real danger with usability is making some of the software usable, while making the security features hard to use. This is the problem with Windows. On Windows, it is really easy to run an executable, but fairly difficult to tell that you're running an executable. On Linux, you don't have this problem because it's hard to run an executable, but it would be equally secure if you could easily run an executable, as long as it was clear that you were running an untrusted executable. For one thing, both Windows and the Mac need to do away with this file extension hiding business. If you can easily name an application Foo.mp3.exe and hide the.exe part (or Foo.mp3.app on the Mac), then it will always be difficult for users to tell that it is an executable, not an mp3 file. In fact, when double clicking on an application for the first time, the operating system should probably display a warning dialog saying that the application may be untrusted. This wouldn't effect most apps that people use, since they would only see that once, and then the operating system would remember that that app had been run. But it would make sure that if someone is double clicking a file that they didn't expect to be an application they would be warned, and would have the option of canceling that operation.
Sorry, I'm going to have to disagree. First of all, if you're using "i" in the common idiom, you should never have to do a search for it. All of the uses of i in the current scope should fit into 20 lines or so. And I can't see any reason why you'd want to do a global search for something that's used as a local variable.
Names should be as long as they need to be, and no longer. Local iteration variables only need to be one character, because all of their uses fit on the current screen, and they're used pretty often. A variable (or, more likely, function name) that is used infrequently, but in places all over the code, should probably be long enough to fully describe what it means, since people will likely have forgotten what it means in between times they've seen it.
Having to look at code which reads
someRidiculouslyLongFunctionName(SomeOtherLongFunc tion(fooBar, bazQuux), thingamadoodle);
can be really painful, and this then causes people to split code up over multiple lines, which leads to a reasonable amount of code no longer being able to be viewed in one screenful, which makes it much harder to read and edit code.
Long names are not good, when they are for a local variable which is used many times in a short piece of code, and it is clear what a short name represents. Long names are good when they are used for possibly confusing names, names that are used globally, and names that are used infrequently.
How is this any different from any other charitable cause? Public radio stations say, every year, "we need $xxx", and bug everyone that listens about it, until they have made the money they need. This is pretty much what Wikipedia is doing. They always have a link on the top of the page asking for money, they're just saying that it's especially urgent, and setting an explicit goal, because of the recent troubles they've been having with their database server and their backup server.
Advertising would not work either. One of the main principles of Wikipedia is that of neutrality. Having sponsors would compromise that neutrality. This is the reason Consumer Reports doesn't accept advertisement, and is instead based on subscriptions. Well, Wikipedia clearly can't rely on subscriptions; the whole point is that anyone can read and modify it freely. So, they have to ask for donations. And yes, they will continue to ask for donations, as long as they are in existence, unless they get bought out or go corporate, like H2G2
Bullshit. Can you point to one shred of evidence that this is true? Just one? If it is true, then why are Amazon, Borders, Barnes and Nobles, etc. so successful? While it's true that they are diversified to some degree into other media, their bread and butter is books.
Yeah, it's true, people watch DVDs and TVs a lot, and surf the internet a lot, and listen to CDs a lot. But this doesn't mean that people don't also read a lot. So, I'd be interested in seeing any evidence you actually have, rather than just unfounded, bitch-about-the-state-of-affairs-in-America tripe.
Here are some statistics from one source: Good News About America's Public Schools. While it's true that they are statistics from a possibly biased source, I'd like you to show me any statistics showing that anyone has given up reading completely in favor of TV or movies.
Something that the article, and write-up on Slashdot, never mentioned is the fact that this $99 battery replacement actually gets you a new iPod. They are not charging you $99 dollars for a new battery. They are charging you $99 for a new iPod, and then, if possible, they will replace the battery on the old iPod and sell it refurbished.
Also, the article and write-up fail to consider the reason that the batter on the iPod is not user replaceable. It was not designed this way to frustrate people, or to lock people in to buying a whole new iPod. No, it was designed this way so the iPod could be a tiny, light music player with 40 gigs of storage. Removable batteries take up more room. If you want to try to cram a hard drive, some ram, a CPU, an LCD, a backlight, a dock or firewire connector, and a audio jack into a case as small as the iPod and have a replaceable battery, then go ahead. I don't think it's possible with today's technology.
Apple engineers and management probably underestimated how much use the iPods would get, and so figured that they would last at least three years under normal use, and that by that time, newer iPods would be available for less money than it would cost to replace the battery in the old ones (Apple is now selling the old style 10 GB iPods for $169, which is not that much more than the replacement cost for the batteries). So, a little over two years after the original iPod came out, you can get one with twice the capacity for only a little more than the cost of replacing the battery in the original iPod. I know that personally, I've had an iPod for 6 months and maybe charged it 20 times. If it's correct that the batteries have a lifetime of about 500 charge cycles, I'll get 12 years of use out of my iPod. By that time, it will be an antique relic.
So, Apple made a mistake in assuming that people wouldn't need to replace the battery, and has now corrected it by offering a battery replacement program and a three-year warranty. What's the big brouhaha all about?
Sorry, I didn't see the later link about the Leon processor. That does indeed appear to be open source. Simply linking to SPARC, however, doesn't provide much information about the available open source implementations of SPARC.
Any version of the SPARC Instruction Set can be licensed from SPARC International, and then used to design processors implementing that open standard. Truly - in letter and in spirit, SPARC's open - for business!
Hell, it doesn't even look like much of an open standard. You need to license the instruction set in order to be able to implement it. This is like saying UNIX is open source, since anyone can implement POSIX and license the UNIX trademark, and because a lot of people have licensed the source code. That's not open source; it may be an open standard (although I'd argue that in order to be an open standard, you can't restrict who implements it with licensing agreements). So really, SPARC is in no way open source, and I wouldn't even consider it an open standard.
OpenCores, on the other hand, is really open source. You get the full design of the entire chip; you could just produce the chip by sending the CAD files to a chip fab and having them produce it. All of the Verilog/VHDL/etc. are open and freely available for you to use and modify. Even if you license the SPARC ISA, you still have to design the chip yourself.
Hell, there are plenty of ISA's that you can license. The IA32 architecture is implemented by Intel, AMD, Transmeta, and others. PowerPC is implemented by IBM and Motorola. MIPS chips are produced by lots of people. Open ISA's are a dime a dozen. What's important about OpenCores is that the full chip design is completely open.
Well, but if you search for windows, it displays the correct hit count on both pages. For linux, it hides the hit count on the first page. Try it.
Um, no. The number of results for "windows" is listed as being 2000 or so. There are obviously more sites on Windows than that in their database. What's happening is that it first shows sponsored results, then shows results from its directory (similar to Yahoo! or dmoz). The problem is, their search engine is so broken you can never get to the real results for Windows. If you keep hitting "next", the number of results keeps changing, and eventually it just gets confused and thinks there are no more results. The only one you ever get from the real results is the first hit, which is microsoft.com. I think the issue is that they are more incompetent than they are evil.
Sorry, the analogy to cash shows just where you are wrong. If I copy a dollar bill, it doesn't cost anybody anything. Now I have a dollar bill, and everyone else still has theirs. So, by analogy with your logic, shouldn't dollar bills now be more highly valued since there are more in circulation? Well, no. The more there are in circulation, the less well valued they are. And there's a very good reason why forgery is against the law. Sure, it's a little different with books, where mindshare is important, but the point still remains, you are not benefiting the author when you copy their book to read on your own. It would benefit the author much more if you bought the book.
So, I maintain that copyright is an important fiction, just like cash is. And breaking that fiction is seen as a crime for important reasons. The issue is that there are huge problems with how it is currently implemented. Having copyrights that last almost a century after the death of their author is just ridiculous; it doesn't promote the creation and sharing of ideas, like copyright is intended to, it just makes people who don't deserve it to get wealthier. But copyright, and other forms of intellectual property, are important legal fictions, which are becoming more and more abused of late. But anything that is of any value has the ability to be abused, so you can't condemn intellectual property as a whole because of a few people who abuse it.
That's copyright you're thinking of. According to the article, they are suing for trademark infringement. Trademarks are perpetual; they last forever, as long as you don't allow them to be diluted. That's why companies like Warner Brothers sue their fans for having websites with Harry Potter in their domain name. They don't want there to be a chance of their trademark being diluted to the point where they no longer have control over it.
iBook cost over two years:
iBook: $1000
iLife: $50.Mac account: $200 ($100 x 2)
Total: $1250
You still haven't responded to the fact that you never included an equivalent service to.mac on the PC side, and there is no reason to include iLife in the price (all iLife gets you that isn't free is iDVD, and the iBook doesn't include a DVD burner). You also subtracted a $200 rebate from the price of the Toshiba, instead of using list price for both.
Toshiba (list price): $950
Mac (list price): $999
Not such a big difference. Sure, you can jack up the price of either with all kinds of extras, and you can get rebates at specific times/places, or with specific combinations of products, but they're really pretty comparable.
As far as reliability and repair go, I've found that the macs I've used have been fine, although anecdotal evidence either way is not really useful. A good survey that tells you statistically which is more likely to break, and which is more likely to break expensively, is going to be more useful.
In the old days:
- Apple hardware cost more but it was very dependable.
- Mac OS upgrades used to be free for minor updates and major releases (every 2 to 3 years) were resonably priced.
- Lots of free stuff like hypercard and later iMovie and blah@mac.com accounts.
Now:
- Hardware is still ~40% more than similar PC stuff.
- Dependablity has dropped to "white box" levels.
- iMoive et all applications cost $100 per year (to stay up to date)
- blah@mac.com accounts cost $130 per year PER ACCOUNT PER YEAR.
- Software updates cost $130 per year.
$360 per year for the feeding of a Mac is IMO too much. I resently bought a Toshiba 1115-S103 laptop (1.5Ghz Cel, 20G HD, 256M RAM, WinXP Home and a 14" screen) for $750 (new after $200 rebate). A similar iBook would be $1540 ($1050 + $130 + $360) over two years as opposed to my Toshiba for $900 ($750 + $150 for possible OS update costs).
This is blatantly wrong. None of these prices are right, at least on the mac end, unless you are talking about something other than US$. iMovie et al. are free. The only one which is not freely available is iDVD, which is bundled with iLife for $50. Mac.com accounts are $100 per year, not $130, and you never included the price of a similar service with the Toshiba. Comparing Mac.com prices with other similar services (you have to add up a few, such as an imap mailbox, plus 100 MB WebDAV disk space, plus web space, plus a bunch of free software), you find that $100 a year is a fair price. Jaguar may have been $130, but as you said, before there were free incremental updates and reasonably priced major ones. This is still the case. $130 is a pretty damn reasonable price for Jaguar. And we haven't had long enough to see how often updates like this will come out.
You still get tons of free stuff with MacOS. iTunes, iMovie, iCal, Mail, iPhoto, iSync, Safari, X11, a complete BSD distribution, Project Builder and related development tools, etc. Last time I checked Microsoft charged an awful lot for Visual Studio, not to mention anything equivalent to the rest of that (I don't pretend to be an expert on the exact product offerings and pricing of Microsoft software).
So, if you want to compare prices between similar Macs/PC offerings, please at least quote the correct price and compare similar items.
I saw a demonstration essentially the same technology at Compaq's CRL about two and a half years ago (formerly DEC CRL, or Cambridge Research Lab, the guys who did research for AltaVista). It did exactly the same thing. It broke sound files down into phonemes, then searched based on the phoneme. It was mostly used for finding a clip on the web rather than a specific place in a long file, but it was the same idea. The nice thing was that it was OK for its application if it missed once or twice. If the audio file was relevant, the word or phrase was probably used multiple times in the clip. It was pretty good at finding NPR stories about certain events. In fact, you can try it out for yourself at an online demo.
AI. What many people see as the birthplace of AI is the 1956 Dartmouth Conference on AI. While there had been a few independent researchers working on related projects, the Dartmouth conference is where it turned into a field.
The reason why BASIC was developed was because Dartmouth required everyone to learn to program. I think Dartmouth may have been the first college to do that. Sadly, it's no longer required. The requirement now is that you have to take one technology related course.
And currently, you can look at where Dartmouth is currently moving in this field. The wireless is one thing. One of the big efforts is the Institute of Security Technology Studies, which is doing research into all kinds of information security, and the Public Key Infrastructure Lab, which is doing research into how to set up a secure public key infrastructure in an institutional environment like Dartmouth. Now, some people might say that this has all been solved, but one of the most difficult problems Dartmouth faces is the numerous untrusted public computers all around the campus. Key distribution in this environment is quite tricky, especially if you don't want to require all users to get extra hardware.
The same way you block any radio signal; build a Faraday cage. Radio signals can't propagate through a conductor. It doesn't have to be perfect, or everywhere, just some big metal plates in between the access points and classrooms. The wiring and metal supports in a building can also cut the signal strength a good deal.
They can also place the access points in the common areas and turn the power down. This, in combination with the building materials, might work to block the signal.
And what does getting on the network give you? It allows you to surf the internet. Nothing more, nothing less. Keeping people from surfing the net is fairly low priority. It's not like there's a bandwidth shortage, and there aren't enough people in Hanover to cause one.
Anything really malicious (impersonating students, mucking with administrative databases, etc.) has been prevented by traditional security measures (encrypted passwords, Kerberos authentication, etc.).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that's why I specified good. There is good fanfiction out there; there's even some that people say is better than the original works it's based on. Now, sturgeons law applies, probably squared (or whatever would make it closer to 100%), to fanfiction, so good fanfiction writers are few and far between, but they do exist.
I read your review, and saw the "cheap knock off of COPS", and thought "well, yeah, but TROOPS was a cheap knock off of COPS, but it was great". Then I watched this, and realized that you were completely right. I didn't care about the characters at all, there was no plot to speak of, and there was way too much exposition and panning around beautiful but pointless CG. Someone needs to get some good fanfiction writers to write the scripts for the next episode; I think that just having some better writing would make worlds of difference, although better acting would help too.
So what's the difference between having Asperger's syndrome and being a geek? I mean, it sounds like the description (not being able to pick up on social cues, somewhat of an outcast, smart but doesn't do well in school, focuses intensely on things) describe exactly the same thing as "geek" to me, except maybe for a set of interests that "geek" usually connotes (computers, science fiction, gaming, etc).
Another reason you might want to use this is that you fear, at some point, that some government you deal with may be repressive, even if the current government is not. If you only start using encryption when you're talking about subversive stuff, then it's easy to track down the subversives, by just looking at who uses encryption. But if everyone uses it all the time, then there's no way to tell who is using it for shady purposes and who is just using it to chat.
Of course, this means that it can also be used by criminals, too. One of the biggest problems with any sort of freedom, or tool to protect you from a repressive government, is that anyone can use it, including criminals. It's hard to find the right balance point; if I'm allowed to have a gun, to fight against the government if things go bad, then so is the loan shark down the street. If I'm allowed to have the freedom to speak my mind about how awful the government is, then so is Fred Phelps. If I'm allowed to use steganography to hide messages about fighting for marijuana reform, then a terrorist is allowed to use it to hide messages for coordinating an attack. It's a tough balance, constantly in contention. And if I use crypto all of the time in order to not look suspicious if I need to fight against the government, then the guy using crypto to trade child porn will look less suspicious, as well. It's a tough issue to work out.
There are plenty of other examples where making software more usable can make it more secure. I've used PGP before, which most of the time, is a pain in the ass, since I have to run all kinds of separate programs to generate keys and encrypt my text which I then have to paste into my mail program (yeah, I know, some have it built in, but mine doesn't [and yes, I know, you can get a hack to get Mail.app to use GPG, but it uses undocumented API's that are subject to change with each release of the OS]), and then do a similar amount of work when receiving mail. Apple's Mail can use X.509 certificates for S/MIME, which is pretty easy to use, although getting a key is somewhat difficult and undocumented. When I was working for a company which used Lotus Notes, however, signing and encryption were incredibly easy; in fact, your emails were signed and encrypted without you even knowing it, if they were sent to other Notes users on the same network. Now, Notes had problems of it's own, but that's the way security should work; it should be completely transparent to the user, so the user can work securely without having to worry about it.
The real danger with usability is making some of the software usable, while making the security features hard to use. This is the problem with Windows. On Windows, it is really easy to run an executable, but fairly difficult to tell that you're running an executable. On Linux, you don't have this problem because it's hard to run an executable, but it would be equally secure if you could easily run an executable, as long as it was clear that you were running an untrusted executable. For one thing, both Windows and the Mac need to do away with this file extension hiding business. If you can easily name an application Foo.mp3.exe and hide the .exe part (or Foo.mp3.app on the Mac), then it will always be difficult for users to tell that it is an executable, not an mp3 file. In fact, when double clicking on an application for the first time, the operating system should probably display a warning dialog saying that the application may be untrusted. This wouldn't effect most apps that people use, since they would only see that once, and then the operating system would remember that that app had been run. But it would make sure that if someone is double clicking a file that they didn't expect to be an application they would be warned, and would have the option of canceling that operation.
Names should be as long as they need to be, and no longer. Local iteration variables only need to be one character, because all of their uses fit on the current screen, and they're used pretty often. A variable (or, more likely, function name) that is used infrequently, but in places all over the code, should probably be long enough to fully describe what it means, since people will likely have forgotten what it means in between times they've seen it.
Having to look at code which readsc tion(fooBar, bazQuux), thingamadoodle);
someRidiculouslyLongFunctionName(SomeOtherLongFun
can be really painful, and this then causes people to split code up over multiple lines, which leads to a reasonable amount of code no longer being able to be viewed in one screenful, which makes it much harder to read and edit code.
Long names are not good, when they are for a local variable which is used many times in a short piece of code, and it is clear what a short name represents. Long names are good when they are used for possibly confusing names, names that are used globally, and names that are used infrequently.
Advertising would not work either. One of the main principles of Wikipedia is that of neutrality. Having sponsors would compromise that neutrality. This is the reason Consumer Reports doesn't accept advertisement, and is instead based on subscriptions. Well, Wikipedia clearly can't rely on subscriptions; the whole point is that anyone can read and modify it freely. So, they have to ask for donations. And yes, they will continue to ask for donations, as long as they are in existence, unless they get bought out or go corporate, like H2G2
They seem to read LKML, at least.
Yeah, it's true, people watch DVDs and TVs a lot, and surf the internet a lot, and listen to CDs a lot. But this doesn't mean that people don't also read a lot. So, I'd be interested in seeing any evidence you actually have, rather than just unfounded, bitch-about-the-state-of-affairs-in-America tripe.
Here are some statistics from one source: Good News About America's Public Schools. While it's true that they are statistics from a possibly biased source, I'd like you to show me any statistics showing that anyone has given up reading completely in favor of TV or movies.
Also, the article and write-up fail to consider the reason that the batter on the iPod is not user replaceable. It was not designed this way to frustrate people, or to lock people in to buying a whole new iPod. No, it was designed this way so the iPod could be a tiny, light music player with 40 gigs of storage. Removable batteries take up more room. If you want to try to cram a hard drive, some ram, a CPU, an LCD, a backlight, a dock or firewire connector, and a audio jack into a case as small as the iPod and have a replaceable battery, then go ahead. I don't think it's possible with today's technology.
Apple engineers and management probably underestimated how much use the iPods would get, and so figured that they would last at least three years under normal use, and that by that time, newer iPods would be available for less money than it would cost to replace the battery in the old ones (Apple is now selling the old style 10 GB iPods for $169, which is not that much more than the replacement cost for the batteries). So, a little over two years after the original iPod came out, you can get one with twice the capacity for only a little more than the cost of replacing the battery in the original iPod. I know that personally, I've had an iPod for 6 months and maybe charged it 20 times. If it's correct that the batteries have a lifetime of about 500 charge cycles, I'll get 12 years of use out of my iPod. By that time, it will be an antique relic.
So, Apple made a mistake in assuming that people wouldn't need to replace the battery, and has now corrected it by offering a battery replacement program and a three-year warranty. What's the big brouhaha all about?
While it's true that looks do count for something, reputation can count for even more.
Sorry, I didn't see the later link about the Leon processor. That does indeed appear to be open source. Simply linking to SPARC, however, doesn't provide much information about the available open source implementations of SPARC.
From the SPARC website:
Hell, it doesn't even look like much of an open standard. You need to license the instruction set in order to be able to implement it. This is like saying UNIX is open source, since anyone can implement POSIX and license the UNIX trademark, and because a lot of people have licensed the source code. That's not open source; it may be an open standard (although I'd argue that in order to be an open standard, you can't restrict who implements it with licensing agreements). So really, SPARC is in no way open source, and I wouldn't even consider it an open standard.OpenCores, on the other hand, is really open source. You get the full design of the entire chip; you could just produce the chip by sending the CAD files to a chip fab and having them produce it. All of the Verilog/VHDL/etc. are open and freely available for you to use and modify. Even if you license the SPARC ISA, you still have to design the chip yourself.
Hell, there are plenty of ISA's that you can license. The IA32 architecture is implemented by Intel, AMD, Transmeta, and others. PowerPC is implemented by IBM and Motorola. MIPS chips are produced by lots of people. Open ISA's are a dime a dozen. What's important about OpenCores is that the full chip design is completely open.
Here is the last page of results I can get: MSN Search results
So, I maintain that copyright is an important fiction, just like cash is. And breaking that fiction is seen as a crime for important reasons. The issue is that there are huge problems with how it is currently implemented. Having copyrights that last almost a century after the death of their author is just ridiculous; it doesn't promote the creation and sharing of ideas, like copyright is intended to, it just makes people who don't deserve it to get wealthier. But copyright, and other forms of intellectual property, are important legal fictions, which are becoming more and more abused of late. But anything that is of any value has the ability to be abused, so you can't condemn intellectual property as a whole because of a few people who abuse it.
That's copyright you're thinking of. According to the article, they are suing for trademark infringement. Trademarks are perpetual; they last forever, as long as you don't allow them to be diluted. That's why companies like Warner Brothers sue their fans for having websites with Harry Potter in their domain name. They don't want there to be a chance of their trademark being diluted to the point where they no longer have control over it.
Just ask Google
As far as reliability and repair go, I've found that the macs I've used have been fine, although anecdotal evidence either way is not really useful. A good survey that tells you statistically which is more likely to break, and which is more likely to break expensively, is going to be more useful.
You still get tons of free stuff with MacOS. iTunes, iMovie, iCal, Mail, iPhoto, iSync, Safari, X11, a complete BSD distribution, Project Builder and related development tools, etc. Last time I checked Microsoft charged an awful lot for Visual Studio, not to mention anything equivalent to the rest of that (I don't pretend to be an expert on the exact product offerings and pricing of Microsoft software).
So, if you want to compare prices between similar Macs/PC offerings, please at least quote the correct price and compare similar items.
I saw a demonstration essentially the same technology at Compaq's CRL about two and a half years ago (formerly DEC CRL, or Cambridge Research Lab, the guys who did research for AltaVista). It did exactly the same thing. It broke sound files down into phonemes, then searched based on the phoneme. It was mostly used for finding a clip on the web rather than a specific place in a long file, but it was the same idea. The nice thing was that it was OK for its application if it missed once or twice. If the audio file was relevant, the word or phrase was probably used multiple times in the clip. It was pretty good at finding NPR stories about certain events. In fact, you can try it out for yourself at an online demo.
The reason why BASIC was developed was because Dartmouth required everyone to learn to program. I think Dartmouth may have been the first college to do that. Sadly, it's no longer required. The requirement now is that you have to take one technology related course.
And currently, you can look at where Dartmouth is currently moving in this field. The wireless is one thing. One of the big efforts is the Institute of Security Technology Studies, which is doing research into all kinds of information security, and the Public Key Infrastructure Lab, which is doing research into how to set up a secure public key infrastructure in an institutional environment like Dartmouth. Now, some people might say that this has all been solved, but one of the most difficult problems Dartmouth faces is the numerous untrusted public computers all around the campus. Key distribution in this environment is quite tricky, especially if you don't want to require all users to get extra hardware.
They can also place the access points in the common areas and turn the power down. This, in combination with the building materials, might work to block the signal.
Anything really malicious (impersonating students, mucking with administrative databases, etc.) has been prevented by traditional security measures (encrypted passwords, Kerberos authentication, etc.).