Pricing is important. The top Nokia (N97), the blackberry and iphone are all around $NZ 800 -- 1000 unlocked. The HTC magic (Android G2 is the same price as the iphone...
What we are facing is competition. Nokia (correctly, INHO, having used a N95) realises symbian does not "cut it" @ the high end. Maemo might -- the RIM OS needs work, PalmOS is no longer developed and Windows is worse.
I want to play with this: good camera, GPS, and if it is functional as a communications 3G/wifi device it can replace the camera, basic cellphone and Eee I use when travelling.
But it has to hit the right price point. And that is around the point where you don't have to think much about it: the iphone and magic are $319 -- 639 on a 2 month contract in NZ (depends on what contract you sign) and that makes buying them reasonable
You can easily disprove a negative, if one person paid for an item.
And there are some Loki games around the house somewhere...
So not "never". Not recently, as most games after CIV II don't appeal to this grumpy old geezer
Um, no.
Point of standards is to make it easy for people to write and communicate.
If everyone does it a certain way -- way Msoft Word -- which is NOT "easy for structured documents -- Open office is better -- on long docs -- emacs or lyx is way better... you have to use what is in fact a de facto standard.
Google is going for the de facto standard of flash.
If and when Ogg is better quality -- and h264 is getting there -- and with minimal bandwidth we will all switch and flash will have a nice sleep. In the end quality wins, which is why the LP continues...
I think the idea that the codec should be open should be in the standard, because as the formats shift getting things translated becomes a problem: consider hi8 video, VCRs, DVDs... and how mach film etc we have on those we cannot access because the tech is now obselete.
I think the problem is that we all want eyecandy and stability.
KDE 4.2 has eyecandy. Lots of it. So does Gnome if you use desklets.
But when I'm working, I want stable, convenient and fast... which means weither a polished Gnome with most things like compiz switched off, openbox or xfce4. (I could simplify kde3, but have not worked out how to do this in kde4).
I think we will end up with a smaller window manager and eye candy as a module...
This author has moved the debate from appropriate sharing of data within public services to digital rights management.
Talking from some experience with interacting with government departments and writing complex documents. In these cases, IP is a dead issue -- the document is public domain (voter's rolls) or copyright defers to the funder -- health department reports. If a firm has IP issues, they have to negotiate for retention use and copyright. No politician would accept full retention: the commissioning body needs to use the data.
What is an issue is preparing the documents, and retrieving them In one group, we had to specify the version of Word to get "it right" -- and then a linux and apple person remained handicapped, as the document(s) are multiauthored, technical and complex.
I have been using word processors since Wordperfect 5.1: I have had to translate files from depreciated formats -- at times with great difficulty. Sometimes text is not sufficient. Open standards, (ideally at IEEEA level) should allow people to archive with some confidence. DRM would break this.
I'm fully aware that the US constitution has that reference. To the other 90% of the world's population this used to be irrelevant. What the US is trying to do is get the broadened version of copyright (eighty years after the death of the creator/author) and patent into international law, to continue the monopoly rights of their corporations.
The principle of copyright is OK. People need a monopoly for a restricted period of time to recoup development expenses. The current extensions are poor law and poor public policy. [in my view, the existence of five dollar DVDs shows that big media have poor business models, but that is different from public policy]
Fast distros matter heaps. Most of us can't afford to change our boxes often. Modern distros are getting larger, and slower. Particularly if you want to run KDE or Gnome. (Yes, KDE and Gnome are getting faster. Yes I recompile the kernel: my favourite distro is libranet which makes that easy). I'm now finding that my pentium 3 laptop is getting sluggish. Slackware is noticeably faster than Libranet on that: both are faster than Red Hat: this means I can use gnome instead of fluxbox on that machine.
I want to keep that laptop going for at least another two years. (Now, if I can only apt-get R, Lyx, and ESS!)
Problem is that all that good stuff at Fry's is no good in NZ and Australia, where we are on 220V 60 Hz AC. And the power plugs are different. And the discounts in kiwiland are very close to US bulk prices.
(Bringing it all home on a plane is another "interesting" problem).
The way that SCO thinks they can get away with it is that they hope they won't be counter-sued.
It might be worthwhile to take them to court if they do release a version that contradicts the GPL (and no access to source code would do that.
As an aside, US copyright law is that. US. SCO would have to pull the same stunt in other parts of the world: for instance Harry Potter is published by Scolastic in US and Bloomsbury elsewhere.
I'm not an american. I live under that other English -speaking tradition: the parlimentary democracy. However, there is a tradition that what people do in their own home is their business. We have a both a privacy and an official information act that assume citizen's own and can access both their own information and official information: the onus is on the government to prove it has a need not to give the information to the requestor. We also have censorship, police using entrapment, and incredibly stupid, intrusive laws.
I live in New Zealand.
I think that in the end a culture that respects privacy is the best protector of privacy. If you move too far away from the traditions of your society you lose that... and if we are creating our own cyber-society we have to consider the traditions that we are using.
One of those traditions is free speech. {I'd suggest another is is free software: a third is free information).
We need to think about how this applies not only locally but globally. Indeed, in adhering to these traditions and values, we may be subverting the laws of the state in which we live: this can and will lead to some people suffering under those laws).
The resilience of the syber-culture, and the value that we place on these rights, will be shown by the strength with which we defend them. No right has been taken by the people without a struggle.
And in this case, the struggle will be against corporations as much as any government.
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Pricing is important. The top Nokia (N97), the blackberry and iphone are all around $NZ 800 -- 1000 unlocked. The HTC magic (Android G2 is the same price as the iphone... What we are facing is competition. Nokia (correctly, INHO, having used a N95) realises symbian does not "cut it" @ the high end. Maemo might -- the RIM OS needs work, PalmOS is no longer developed and Windows is worse. I want to play with this: good camera, GPS, and if it is functional as a communications 3G/wifi device it can replace the camera, basic cellphone and Eee I use when travelling. But it has to hit the right price point. And that is around the point where you don't have to think much about it: the iphone and magic are $319 -- 639 on a 2 month contract in NZ (depends on what contract you sign) and that makes buying them reasonable
"If violence isn't your last resort, then you didn't use enough violence." -- The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates
You can easily disprove a negative, if one person paid for an item. And there are some Loki games around the house somewhere... So not "never". Not recently, as most games after CIV II don't appeal to this grumpy old geezer
Um, no. Point of standards is to make it easy for people to write and communicate. If everyone does it a certain way -- way Msoft Word -- which is NOT "easy for structured documents -- Open office is better -- on long docs -- emacs or lyx is way better... you have to use what is in fact a de facto standard. Google is going for the de facto standard of flash. If and when Ogg is better quality -- and h264 is getting there -- and with minimal bandwidth we will all switch and flash will have a nice sleep. In the end quality wins, which is why the LP continues... I think the idea that the codec should be open should be in the standard, because as the formats shift getting things translated becomes a problem: consider hi8 video, VCRs, DVDs... and how mach film etc we have on those we cannot access because the tech is now obselete.
I think the problem is that we all want eyecandy and stability. KDE 4.2 has eyecandy. Lots of it. So does Gnome if you use desklets. But when I'm working, I want stable, convenient and fast... which means weither a polished Gnome with most things like compiz switched off, openbox or xfce4. (I could simplify kde3, but have not worked out how to do this in kde4). I think we will end up with a smaller window manager and eye candy as a module...
This author has moved the debate from appropriate sharing of data within public services to digital rights management. Talking from some experience with interacting with government departments and writing complex documents. In these cases, IP is a dead issue -- the document is public domain (voter's rolls) or copyright defers to the funder -- health department reports. If a firm has IP issues, they have to negotiate for retention use and copyright. No politician would accept full retention: the commissioning body needs to use the data. What is an issue is preparing the documents, and retrieving them In one group, we had to specify the version of Word to get "it right" -- and then a linux and apple person remained handicapped, as the document(s) are multiauthored, technical and complex. I have been using word processors since Wordperfect 5.1: I have had to translate files from depreciated formats -- at times with great difficulty. Sometimes text is not sufficient. Open standards, (ideally at IEEEA level) should allow people to archive with some confidence. DRM would break this.
I'm fully aware that the US constitution has that reference. To the other 90% of the world's population this used to be irrelevant. What the US is trying to do is get the broadened version of copyright (eighty years after the death of the creator/author) and patent into international law, to continue the monopoly rights of their corporations. The principle of copyright is OK. People need a monopoly for a restricted period of time to recoup development expenses. The current extensions are poor law and poor public policy. [in my view, the existence of five dollar DVDs shows that big media have poor business models, but that is different from public policy]
Fast distros matter heaps. Most of us can't afford to change our boxes often. Modern distros are getting larger, and slower. Particularly if you want to run KDE or Gnome. (Yes, KDE and Gnome are getting faster. Yes I recompile the kernel: my favourite distro is libranet which makes that easy). I'm now finding that my pentium 3 laptop is getting sluggish. Slackware is noticeably faster than Libranet on that: both are faster than Red Hat: this means I can use gnome instead of fluxbox on that machine. I want to keep that laptop going for at least another two years. (Now, if I can only apt-get R, Lyx, and ESS!)
Problem is that all that good stuff at Fry's is no good in NZ and Australia, where we are on 220V 60 Hz AC. And the power plugs are different. And the discounts in kiwiland are very close to US bulk prices. (Bringing it all home on a plane is another "interesting" problem).
The way that SCO thinks they can get away with it is that they hope they won't be counter-sued. It might be worthwhile to take them to court if they do release a version that contradicts the GPL (and no access to source code would do that. As an aside, US copyright law is that. US. SCO would have to pull the same stunt in other parts of the world: for instance Harry Potter is published by Scolastic in US and Bloomsbury elsewhere.
I'm not an american. I live under that other English -speaking tradition: the parlimentary democracy. However, there is a tradition that what people do in their own home is their business. We have a both a privacy and an official information act that assume citizen's own and can access both their own information and official information: the onus is on the government to prove it has a need not to give the information to the requestor. We also have censorship, police using entrapment, and incredibly stupid, intrusive laws. I live in New Zealand. I think that in the end a culture that respects privacy is the best protector of privacy. If you move too far away from the traditions of your society you lose that... and if we are creating our own cyber-society we have to consider the traditions that we are using. One of those traditions is free speech. {I'd suggest another is is free software: a third is free information). We need to think about how this applies not only locally but globally. Indeed, in adhering to these traditions and values, we may be subverting the laws of the state in which we live: this can and will lead to some people suffering under those laws). The resilience of the syber-culture, and the value that we place on these rights, will be shown by the strength with which we defend them. No right has been taken by the people without a struggle. And in this case, the struggle will be against corporations as much as any government.