VOIP is better than a regular phone line because it is usually cheaper and offers you more choice.
VoIP is worse than a regular phone line because it dies when your power or internet connection goes out.
That is just shortsighted.
Traditional phone lines go down too. Probably about as often as Internet does.
Not in my experience. Granted, my experience is somewhat dated -- I haven't had a landline since early 2002 (cellular only now, which has its own issues). But we'd often lose power, which killed internet access, but the phone service was working just fine. I actually remember reverting to using dial-up from a laptop once because I was expecting an email during the power outage.
The main difference probably is that, where I grew up, utility lines were buried underground rather than hanging from poles. If a pole gets knocked down and you have power/phone/cable on the pole, it's pretty unlikely that any of the three would survive. With underground cabling it's harder to predict.
Of course, in general I equate internet outage with power outage. In the case of cable internet, the cable might still be ok, but you can't power your cable modem (unless you have a battery backup).
ONLY a traditional wired handset that does not need an A/C adapter plugged into the wall, will function purely off the voltage supplied by the telephone company.
Excellent point! It's probably getting harder and harder to find a traditional power-adapter-free telephone these days.
There are so many different ways to solve it from the cheap home solutions to the expensive enterprise corporate solutions
But the point is that with a traditional landline with traditional phone, you don't need any kind of other solution at all.
... that your point is entirely a non-issue and more often that not was used in hilarious and deliberately misleading marketing attempts by the telephone companies to try and stop VOIP from encroaching on their lucrative territory.
I don't know about that... I'm exposed to zero television marketing and haven't really heard much from the phone companies in years.
I also don't particularly trust VoIP companies. I know people who lost phone service for several days because their VoIP company went out of business and their transition plan didn't work out so well. Does that mean my friends chose their VoIP provider poorly? Perhaps, but I'd be shocked to hear of a similar scenario with a traditional phone company. Even take an established VoIP company like Vonage -- I wouldn't trust them to be around long-term now. They've had serious cash-flow issues in the past, and I doubt their problems are behind them.
I'm not trying to say VoIP service is all bad; it's great! But claiming it's just as reliable and has the same high availability levels as a traditional landline is just silly. Will it get there? Maybe. Probably. But it's not there yet.
Yeah, true. I guess I was just pointlessly whining about how I don't think this article is/. front page-worthy. Not that such whining is ever useful, but...
Agnosticism is merely logic at play. Anyone who isn't an agnostic is deluded. Claiming to know with certainty that there isn't a god is just as unscientific as claiming that there is a god (Richard Dawkins' beliefs notwithstanding).
I think even Richard would claim that the God hypothesis is simply completely unsupported. He tends to use a colorful language involving alfs and so on, but I think that is the essence.
Yes, I'd agree that the god hypothesis is completely unsupported, but how is the no-god hypothesis supported either? You can pull out things like Occam's Razor in defense of the no-god hypothesis, but you can't definitively *prove* that there is no god. Any possible proof you come up with can be met with the (annoying but reasonable in this context) rebuttal of "it's that way because God is omnipotent and wants it that way."
I haven't actually read The God Delusion, but I've picked up a copy and will hopefully get to it soon. I don't expect it to change my view on the ability to disprove god, but who knows...
Atheism is not a religion, it is the absence of religion.
Agnosticism is the absence of decisiveness.
Heh, atheism sure sounds like a religion sometimes, given how fervently some atheists push their belief that there is no god. Some seem almost as bad as evangelical Christians.
Agnosticism is merely logic at play. Anyone who isn't an agnostic is deluded. Claiming to know with certainty that there isn't a god is just as unscientific as claiming that there is a god (Richard Dawkins' beliefs notwithstanding).
Of course, the mass media has confused the definition of agnosticism to the point of uselessness, so it's unsurprising to have this misconception.
(Full disclosure: I'm an agnostic atheist.)
Er, I don't quite understand why 10,000 is such a big deal. Xfce is at 29,994, and that's just for version 4, which was started around... 2001 or 2002 or so? Version 3 adds another 1181 commits to that, and I'm sure v2 and v1 would add a bit more if their history was still around.
I'm not saying this to brag (hell, KDE has over 125k, and I'm sure GNOME is comparable to that); I doubt it'll be a big deal when Xfce hits 30k commits, even. I'm just wondering why PLplot (arguably something of an obscure project) gets a/. article for what seems to be not much of a milestone.
There is no law that forces your products to work with other people's products
No, but is there a law that says you're allowed to use legal means to prevent other products from interoperating with your software? (Sigh, probably...)
This comment to Schneier's blog post might shed some light on the biggest bug in the code. If a user of the device is in one of the only *eight* ranges that the device recognises, there's a 60% chance they're below the legal limit when it will register as above the limit.
(Of course, that analysis relies on a couple [reasonable] assumptions about the range of the device that may or may not be true.)
It appears that the NJ Supreme Court wasn't swayed too much by the source code evaluation. They're planning on reinstating the device with only minor modifications.
There are also quite a large number of routers (the majority) that *don't* run Linux. (And I do know something about this, working for a major home router OEM.) It's a commodity business these days, and cost cutting is the rule. If adding extra protocol support (esp for something like IPv6 with larger memory requirements) means adding more RAM or flash, it's not gonna happen unless you can make a business case for it. I'd be less surprised to see IPv6 in a consumer-level router appliance than SCTP... and I don't expect to see IPv6 standard for quite a while.
Er, no, it has nothing to do with the language. It has to do with the kernel not trusting the code that's running in userspace. And why should it? No matter what *language* you write in, it still gets compiled down to the same (or similar) machine code, or it gets run on an interpreter that boils it all down to machine code.
A new language doesn't solve this... fundamentally changing how user programs interact with the kernel might, but it may mean a completely new way of thinking both by the developer and OS.
And meanwhile, before you get a chance to find out what the court says in your particular scenario, you get to be arrested, tossed in a holding cell, possibly have to post bail (or sit in the cell for quite a while if you can't post bail... or even if you just luckily get arrested on a Friday night after the court is closed), and then suffer through a court appearance, with all the stress associated with that.
I'm not sure how to react to Hiibel. On the surface it sounds really awful. BUT, the key phrase of "reasonable suspicion about a crime" sounds, well, rather kind of reasonable to me.
Seems to me that police regularly stretch the definition of "reasonable suspicion" to pretty much anything that makes them happy.
Heck, I would photograph the inside of an ATM too - but I'd expect the police might get interested and I'd explain calmly what I was doing, but I'd be OK with being detained over it even if I knew it was wrong.
Sorry, but I wouldn't be OK with this. I'd be quite pissed off. Maybe it's pointless bitching, and maybe it suggests I don't want to live a happy life, but that's how it is.
How do you figure? Desktop level is dominated by what people download. Second comes video that people get off their camcorders and things they make themselves. The people who actually convert video between formats is a tiny subset of the people who watch video on their desktop. And now many people making amateur video are likely using H.264 because of YouTube. What mainstream GUI authoring tools currently exist that support Theora as a native or easy-to-choose format?
It's true, but for your average point-and-click user, they don't know how to convert formats. Most of them don't even know what a codec is. They just expect to push the "purchase" button on the pretty webpage, plug in their music player, press the "sync" button, and have everything work. The iPod is king; aside from those who still cling to DRM-encumbered formats and have to sell WMA (since Apple won't open up FairPlay), no one who wants a lot of customers would sell music in a format not supported by the iPod.
Yes, converting from FLAC to ALAC is about as painless as it'll get, but for most people, that's still too painful. Sadly enough...
Competition from whom? At the time, Theora wasn't even 1.0. I don't think anyone has seriously considered On2's newer codecs for mainstream HD work. That leaves... what? WMVHD? Maybe. But WMV has its own exciting licensing schemes (though IIRC Microsoft's per-unit royalties are pretty cheap).
AFAICT, anti-dumping regulations mainly only come into play when international trade is involved (or so says wikipedia). And even then, it doesn't appear to be illegal in the sense that corrective action can be taken; the best a "victim" of dumping can do is impose a tariff to raise the price of the dumped goods. Really, though, seems like just another form of economic protectionism.
Even if dumping is illegal domestically, how about selling a physical product at cost, or with a very small margin, as a "special introductory price" in order to gain market share? I don't see anything wrong with that, legal or otherwise.
The product key is irrelevant. A copyright holder has exclusive right to control distribution. That includes *re*distribution. If MS hasn't given explicit permission for their copyrighted software to be distributed in a particular way, then it's by default forbidden.
Having said that, I'd be surprised if MS were to go after torrent trackers hosting it. Seems like their goal here is to get as many people running Windows 7 as possible, so I'd imagine they'd look the other way in this case.
I'm not sure you can really apply the same reasoning here. Back when the GIF patents were an issue, people (and companies) were way less interested in throwing money into internet-related activities. Nowadays, licensing yet another codec seems like the norm.
Also the cost of reencoding a huge video library may be more than the cost of just paying the patent fees. And you also have the chicken/egg problem to deal with: who's going to sell/distribute Theora video when no (or very few) hardware players support it, and playing it on PCs requires the user to install additional software?
Slashdot Mirror
VOIP is better than a regular phone line because it is usually cheaper and offers you more choice.
VoIP is worse than a regular phone line because it dies when your power or internet connection goes out.
That is just shortsighted.
Traditional phone lines go down too. Probably about as often as Internet does.
Not in my experience. Granted, my experience is somewhat dated -- I haven't had a landline since early 2002 (cellular only now, which has its own issues). But we'd often lose power, which killed internet access, but the phone service was working just fine. I actually remember reverting to using dial-up from a laptop once because I was expecting an email during the power outage.
The main difference probably is that, where I grew up, utility lines were buried underground rather than hanging from poles. If a pole gets knocked down and you have power/phone/cable on the pole, it's pretty unlikely that any of the three would survive. With underground cabling it's harder to predict.
Of course, in general I equate internet outage with power outage. In the case of cable internet, the cable might still be ok, but you can't power your cable modem (unless you have a battery backup).
ONLY a traditional wired handset that does not need an A/C adapter plugged into the wall, will function purely off the voltage supplied by the telephone company.
Excellent point! It's probably getting harder and harder to find a traditional power-adapter-free telephone these days.
There are so many different ways to solve it from the cheap home solutions to the expensive enterprise corporate solutions
But the point is that with a traditional landline with traditional phone, you don't need any kind of other solution at all.
... that your point is entirely a non-issue and more often that not was used in hilarious and deliberately misleading marketing attempts by the telephone companies to try and stop VOIP from encroaching on their lucrative territory.
I don't know about that... I'm exposed to zero television marketing and haven't really heard much from the phone companies in years.
I also don't particularly trust VoIP companies. I know people who lost phone service for several days because their VoIP company went out of business and their transition plan didn't work out so well. Does that mean my friends chose their VoIP provider poorly? Perhaps, but I'd be shocked to hear of a similar scenario with a traditional phone company. Even take an established VoIP company like Vonage -- I wouldn't trust them to be around long-term now. They've had serious cash-flow issues in the past, and I doubt their problems are behind them.
I'm not trying to say VoIP service is all bad; it's great! But claiming it's just as reliable and has the same high availability levels as a traditional landline is just silly. Will it get there? Maybe. Probably. But it's not there yet.
Yeah, true. I guess I was just pointlessly whining about how I don't think this article is /. front page-worthy. Not that such whining is ever useful, but...
Agnosticism is merely logic at play. Anyone who isn't an agnostic is deluded. Claiming to know with certainty that there isn't a god is just as unscientific as claiming that there is a god (Richard Dawkins' beliefs notwithstanding).
I think even Richard would claim that the God hypothesis is simply completely unsupported. He tends to use a colorful language involving alfs and so on, but I think that is the essence.
Yes, I'd agree that the god hypothesis is completely unsupported, but how is the no-god hypothesis supported either? You can pull out things like Occam's Razor in defense of the no-god hypothesis, but you can't definitively *prove* that there is no god. Any possible proof you come up with can be met with the (annoying but reasonable in this context) rebuttal of "it's that way because God is omnipotent and wants it that way."
I haven't actually read The God Delusion, but I've picked up a copy and will hopefully get to it soon. I don't expect it to change my view on the ability to disprove god, but who knows...
Atheism is not a religion, it is the absence of religion.
Agnosticism is the absence of decisiveness.
Heh, atheism sure sounds like a religion sometimes, given how fervently some atheists push their belief that there is no god. Some seem almost as bad as evangelical Christians.
Agnosticism is merely logic at play. Anyone who isn't an agnostic is deluded. Claiming to know with certainty that there isn't a god is just as unscientific as claiming that there is a god (Richard Dawkins' beliefs notwithstanding).
Of course, the mass media has confused the definition of agnosticism to the point of uselessness, so it's unsurprising to have this misconception. (Full disclosure: I'm an agnostic atheist.)
Er, I don't quite understand why 10,000 is such a big deal. Xfce is at 29,994, and that's just for version 4, which was started around... 2001 or 2002 or so? Version 3 adds another 1181 commits to that, and I'm sure v2 and v1 would add a bit more if their history was still around.
/. article for what seems to be not much of a milestone.
I'm not saying this to brag (hell, KDE has over 125k, and I'm sure GNOME is comparable to that); I doubt it'll be a big deal when Xfce hits 30k commits, even. I'm just wondering why PLplot (arguably something of an obscure project) gets a
VOIP is better than a regular phone line because it is usually cheaper and offers you more choice.
VoIP is worse than a regular phone line because it dies when your power or internet connection goes out.
Apple ships it, therefore they'd be liable for it if it actually was a problem.
There is no law that forces your products to work with other people's products
No, but is there a law that says you're allowed to use legal means to prevent other products from interoperating with your software? (Sigh, probably...)
Seriously! I have a feeling Ghostbusters 3 is going to turn out like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of whatever crap they thought up.
Sigh.
This comment to Schneier's blog post might shed some light on the biggest bug in the code. If a user of the device is in one of the only *eight* ranges that the device recognises, there's a 60% chance they're below the legal limit when it will register as above the limit.
(Of course, that analysis relies on a couple [reasonable] assumptions about the range of the device that may or may not be true.)
It appears that the NJ Supreme Court wasn't swayed too much by the source code evaluation. They're planning on reinstating the device with only minor modifications.
Yah, just like IPv6 has.
There are also quite a large number of routers (the majority) that *don't* run Linux. (And I do know something about this, working for a major home router OEM.) It's a commodity business these days, and cost cutting is the rule. If adding extra protocol support (esp for something like IPv6 with larger memory requirements) means adding more RAM or flash, it's not gonna happen unless you can make a business case for it. I'd be less surprised to see IPv6 in a consumer-level router appliance than SCTP... and I don't expect to see IPv6 standard for quite a while.
Er, no, it has nothing to do with the language. It has to do with the kernel not trusting the code that's running in userspace. And why should it? No matter what *language* you write in, it still gets compiled down to the same (or similar) machine code, or it gets run on an interpreter that boils it all down to machine code.
A new language doesn't solve this... fundamentally changing how user programs interact with the kernel might, but it may mean a completely new way of thinking both by the developer and OS.
And meanwhile, before you get a chance to find out what the court says in your particular scenario, you get to be arrested, tossed in a holding cell, possibly have to post bail (or sit in the cell for quite a while if you can't post bail... or even if you just luckily get arrested on a Friday night after the court is closed), and then suffer through a court appearance, with all the stress associated with that.
No thanks, I'll pass.
I'm not sure how to react to Hiibel. On the surface it sounds really awful. BUT, the key phrase of "reasonable suspicion about a crime" sounds, well, rather kind of reasonable to me.
Seems to me that police regularly stretch the definition of "reasonable suspicion" to pretty much anything that makes them happy.
Heck, I would photograph the inside of an ATM too - but I'd expect the police might get interested and I'd explain calmly what I was doing, but I'd be OK with being detained over it even if I knew it was wrong.
Sorry, but I wouldn't be OK with this. I'd be quite pissed off. Maybe it's pointless bitching, and maybe it suggests I don't want to live a happy life, but that's how it is.
Ooh, thanks for the beer!
How do you figure? Desktop level is dominated by what people download. Second comes video that people get off their camcorders and things they make themselves. The people who actually convert video between formats is a tiny subset of the people who watch video on their desktop. And now many people making amateur video are likely using H.264 because of YouTube. What mainstream GUI authoring tools currently exist that support Theora as a native or easy-to-choose format?
It's true, but for your average point-and-click user, they don't know how to convert formats. Most of them don't even know what a codec is. They just expect to push the "purchase" button on the pretty webpage, plug in their music player, press the "sync" button, and have everything work. The iPod is king; aside from those who still cling to DRM-encumbered formats and have to sell WMA (since Apple won't open up FairPlay), no one who wants a lot of customers would sell music in a format not supported by the iPod.
Yes, converting from FLAC to ALAC is about as painless as it'll get, but for most people, that's still too painful. Sadly enough...
Competition from whom? At the time, Theora wasn't even 1.0. I don't think anyone has seriously considered On2's newer codecs for mainstream HD work. That leaves... what? WMVHD? Maybe. But WMV has its own exciting licensing schemes (though IIRC Microsoft's per-unit royalties are pretty cheap).
AFAICT, anti-dumping regulations mainly only come into play when international trade is involved (or so says wikipedia). And even then, it doesn't appear to be illegal in the sense that corrective action can be taken; the best a "victim" of dumping can do is impose a tariff to raise the price of the dumped goods. Really, though, seems like just another form of economic protectionism.
Even if dumping is illegal domestically, how about selling a physical product at cost, or with a very small margin, as a "special introductory price" in order to gain market share? I don't see anything wrong with that, legal or otherwise.
The product key is irrelevant. A copyright holder has exclusive right to control distribution. That includes *re*distribution. If MS hasn't given explicit permission for their copyrighted software to be distributed in a particular way, then it's by default forbidden.
Having said that, I'd be surprised if MS were to go after torrent trackers hosting it. Seems like their goal here is to get as many people running Windows 7 as possible, so I'd imagine they'd look the other way in this case.
At least where I live, many buses have bike racks on the front (outside, below the windshield).
I'm not sure you can really apply the same reasoning here. Back when the GIF patents were an issue, people (and companies) were way less interested in throwing money into internet-related activities. Nowadays, licensing yet another codec seems like the norm.
Also the cost of reencoding a huge video library may be more than the cost of just paying the patent fees. And you also have the chicken/egg problem to deal with: who's going to sell/distribute Theora video when no (or very few) hardware players support it, and playing it on PCs requires the user to install additional software?
-1 Annoying Pedantry