I hope it's on topic. I rely heavily on folks like you to tell me what software they find indespensible so I don't have to wade through as much crap to find the gems. I think that's what this article is all about.
Before this, my best source of open source on Windows was TheOpenCD. There's quite a bit of overlap with the Tom's Hardware article and I highly recommend it as a way to get many of these gems all in one place.
The article actually mentions other fanless solutions. It point out that the thing making this card unique is the swiveling heat sink/pipe that takes advantage of the airflow from your CPU cooler.
I think the twisting alone buys it a mention, but I think it could be made better. What we really want is for the thing to twist automatically with a loud WHIRRRR and then click into place with a satisfying Ker-Chunck. And it should do this only when it starts to heat up, like right after you start your game. Then a sexy voice should say, "cooling system operating at maximum capacity captain."
That's what we all want, right? You with me? Guys? (grumble. head down) "ok, back to the basement."
I'd like to add that when I bought software for my old Nokia 3650 which uses the Symbian Series 60 OS, I was very often asked to register over the air with my phones ID. This not only gave me platform lock-in, but individual phone lock-in as well. The only way to get most of that software onto a new Series 60 phone, or even a replacement if my phone broke, would be to re-buy the software.
Remember when everyone went ape-shit a few years back when Intel introduced processor IDS? You know how everyon is all against machine specific DRM? Guess what, due to the very nature of cell phone service, they have the equivilent to both IDs and very strong machine specific DRM built in... and the software manufacturers are already using it with glee.
Engineering and development costs per unit get smaller and smaller as more units are sold so they can't be predicted on a per unit basis until we know more about sales numbers. The article says Apple has sold 16 million iPods in the first nine months of this year and based on the rave reviews of the nano and the huge yearly growth of the iPod market, we might expect to see numbers like that for the nano alone next year. If that's the case, engineering costs per unit will likely dwindle to an insignificant figure. That is unless you expect that those costs have greatly exceeded, say, 16 million dollars.
Open Source is NOT always the only answer, some people have to make a living.
Money is no excuse for unethical behavior.
I hope selling software is not considered unethical. Or to put it better, I hope selling high-quality software at fair prices using fair business practices is not considered unethical.
Maybe you're just all about showing the source. Interesting position for someone posting as AC.
A good tech should not be afraid of discovering and learning any system he or she might put their hands on, because part of being a good tech is learning how to keep your mind open and troubleshoot a problem. It doesn't matter if the problem is Windows, Linux, or a coffee maker -- you use the tools that you have to do the best job you can.
This is probably true for new guys learning an in-place system or a few new systems added to the familiar core network, but far less true for a bunch of newbies (to the system in question) trying to design something good from scratch.
A good ADS guy will know how to design a good forest, he'll know how to acquire and install the necssary patches, he'll know how to set up a secure systems and he'll know the quality sources of help when he needs them. He'll know which built-in and third party utilities will save his bacon and he'll know what to check on if stuff stops working.
The only thing that will teach an MS guy how to do all this with Open Source is experience. The only way he'll get that is with a bunch of time working with the products in question.
In other words, it's dangerous as hell to trust your brand new network with a bunch of noobs. Even if they're very bright noobs who will catch on quickly, you take quite a risk while they're doing the catching on. Put a bunch of these guys under a couple of experienced people and they'll likely do ok with the new network, but if you don't have that experience on hand you're begging for trouble if you uproot a known system and throw a bunch of new stuff in to replace it.
Maybe. But as an owner of both a GyroMouse and an MS SideWinder Freestyle Pro game pad, I can tell you there are all kinds of ways this can go wrong.
Problem #1, The arms get tired. Quickly.
Even if this thing is smooth as butter and light as a feather, you'll need to move it in a range of motion much larger than a gamepad or joystick. If you enjoy video games, you'll have to do this for sessions lasting more than an hour. It gets old.
Problem #2, The body likes resistance so it can guage how it's doing at it's job.
Ever hear old timers go on and on about how much they liked their old IBM keyboards? They liked that satisfying click when you pressed the keys. Moving against air is just not the same. Though I liked using the SideWinder for Motocross Madness, it never stopped feeling weird not pushing against something.
I have no doubt Nintendo has designed a fine controller, but unless they can fix these seamingly unfixable issues, it's likely they'll find themselves with yet another niche product. It might be fun, but it won't be mainstream.
BTW, Nintendo is billing this thing as something that traditionally non-gaming family members will enjoy, even mom. Mom feels dorky enough when she picks up a regular controller; she will think twice, three times, or maybe forever before deciding to swing this thing around like a baseball bat in front of her laughing teen boys. This will be a product for 'secure' people only.
Grab a tiny radio that's as big as the tip of your thumb at the dollar store and you're all set. Then you can leave the relatively bulky iPod in your locker.
I went on vacation recently and started packing my electronic gizmos for the trip.
-PSP -cell phone -bluetooth headset -digital camera
Now these seemed like a reasonable group of electronics for entertainment and utility on the trip, but then I started adding in all the power bricks and I realized the whole shebange weighed more than my laptop. I even packed a power strip after I started contemplating pluggin these things in all around the hotel room.
Now, lets add an iPod Nano to that. Small and light, but you still have to plug it in, either to the wall or a USB port.
Now on top of that, how about an FM radio?
Ok, ok, I hear what you're saying, I don't go on vacation all the time and surely I could go without the FM radio for a week, right? But I gotta plug all this crap in at home too. Or I gotta buy batteries. Or I gotta plug in the battery charger.
I know this is a long-winded way of saying it, but getting rid of the need for one more device can be a real boon. Though I'm not in the market for either an iPod or a portable FM radio at the moment, I can certainly sympathize with those who'd want those functions combined.
TW
P.S. Anyone know of a good way to haul a bunch of 'portable' electronic stuff around? One at a time they're light and functional, but when you start adding everything up (I can't use the same headset with my phone and my music player?!?!?!?) it gets kind of old. Most backpacks have compartments that are too big and even if I wanted to look like Batman, it can actually be a hassle to have everything strapped to your waist. A bandelero mabye? Anyone got a name of a link for a good solution?
Q: What do you call a definition that only three people use?
A: Incorrect!
I'll remember that the next time my daughter turns in an assignment she completed with Open Office and output to Power Point format. Ya see, she was pissed at me at first because she didn't realize OO.o is set by default to it's own format. She turned in her assignments and the teacher couldn't read them. But when I set her OO.o to default to *.ppt she was able to turn the assignments in without a hitch.
Now that.ppt format may not be an 'open' standard, but it does allow her OO.o to talk to MS Office. On the other hand, the 'open' standard of the OO.o native format did not allow her to talk to Office. You can call my definition incorrect, but my incorrect definition is allowing me interoperability. What is your definition doing for you?
Q. What's the difference between a proprietary format that everyone uses and an 'open' standard that very few people use?
A. The open standard is useless.
Q. What do you call a proprietary format that is well understood and widely used by the computer-using community and which is unencumbered by fees or intellectual property claims?
A. I call it an 'open' standard.
Argue all you want, but the 'propriety' format which is unencumbered, well understood, and in wide adoption is going to be more 'open' than an unused 'open' standard. It will be more 'open' because I can write a program that I know will be able to communicate with the rest of the world. _That_ is the goal of open standards and _that_ is very often achieved with 'proprietary' standards that gain wide adoption.
Open standards are easy, even if everyone wants to do it their own way. All you have to do is mandate that communication file formats not be locked down, and you have to accept the fact that the 800 lb gorilla gets to win.
Open Office was perfectly free to make their own document format, but everyone know the standard is the Word 2000 format. Since the word 2000 format isn't encumbered by copyright or patent, every other companie that does word processing has found a way to output to.doc. It is effectively an open standard.
Compare and contrast with AOL instant messenger. They didn't lock it with IP, but they locked that shit down tight through other methods. No one was able to use it so now my company has to deal with IM hell. They didn't have to publish their standard, or go through 18 different levels of beurocracy to get it approved, all they had to do was let other people talk to their servers and clients and their method would have been a defacto standard.
Standards are easy, as long as everyone is free to impliment the proprietary formats of everyone else. Markets get to set them and enforce them, but everyone gets to bennefit from them.
I just want to know where I can still get the origional. I've never cared about GTA before, but now that there's content that's forbiden, I must find a way to get it.
Let me know when you find something. I'll be surfing for hot nude teens while waiting.
a) but what color are their stoplights? b) don't get me started about totaly blind people.
I already know the answer to a) because I've seen Bejing Bicycle and the lights are just the same as in the west.
b) suggests that handicapped people will always have a disadavantage. The solution for this is to still give the handicapped what they need, but also give every bit of help you can to the able bodied who can make use of it. In this case, using colors in addition to words doesn't disadvantage colorblind people, but also gives a bit of help to those in a position to make use of it.
The truth is, I don't know if colors would help that much and even if they would I'd think a cautionary yellow might be more appropriate thana "don't do that!" red. And I really don't have a problem with considering culturable variability in UI design. It's just that sometimes it's overblown. Japanese men wear business suits and Chinese women stop their cars at red lights. Clearly people can learn different ways of doing things if that is their need or desire.
If you have one named, then tell me how their stoplights work. If you can give me even a single example of a stoplight where red means go, they you get my absolute and total respect.
This is actually a pretty good explanation. There are quite a few GC owners among my daughter's friends, but they all seem to have a PS2 as well. They mostly use the GC for Super Smash Brothers with groups of friends and they use the PS2 for fighting games and games that they play by themselves.
I do think the group market is something Nintendo does especially well. The games are fun and low stress, but still competitive. I expect that while the other two consoles increasingly go online and in the direction of one console per player, Nintendo will continue to make games and consoles that emphasise groups getting together in the living or rec rooms. It may not make them #1 in the market, but it'll at least keep them relevant and respected.
Yes, water is the product of hydrogen combustion. Any guess what the main byproducts are of gasoline production? Yup, in addition to CO2, it's water.
No foggy roads. No green deserts. In fact, the amount of water produced appears to have little effect on the local weather.
Planting trees and talking to congressmen is good advice, but the least of our problems is worrying about the amount of water comming out of the tailpipes of Hydrogen cars.
At the risk of being off topic, I have to point out that the conventional wisdom about the Game Cube is flat-out wrong. Many people will tell you that it's a race with PS2 and Xbox way out front and the Game Cube running a distant third. These figures show very clearly that the XB and GC are neck and neck while the PS2 is squashing them both.
No wonder Nintendo refuses to concede defeat. They may be, technically, last, but with 18 million units sold they're not exactly crushed in the market place, especially considering the the XB is almost certianly far more expensive to make and market.
Sorry to get off the PSP, but as December 2004 sales figures, these are pretty useless in that department. Lets compare the numbers in six months. DS may still beat the hell out of the PSP, but at least it will be closer to a fair fight.
Can someone explain to me why mass adoption of GPL software is so important?
Driver support and application support are two very important issues that get better with wider adoption. These shouldn't require much explanation.
The things that are a little harder to explain are freedom, openness and quality.
Freedom is best explained by Stalman. I actually buy a lot of his arguments. If you've been using Linux since '94, then you're probably familiar with them too. Is this helped by wider adoption? I think so. The more people are free, the more they expect freedom. The more they expect freedom, the more they don't accept a lot of the bullshit we have to put up with in our lives. If more people expected freedom, do you think we'd have to put up with shitty DRM? If more people expected freedom, do you think Microsoft would be busy closing it's Office file formats?
Openess is about companies not locking things down for their own purposes. Is the web more open now that Microsoft 'owns' the browser market? Keeping standards open is made much easier when there's wide adoption of software that uses open standards.
My favorite topic though is quality. Not only is QC much more thourough when you have a wide user base, but the wider your user base is, the more chance the several people have already asked for that useful feature you want in your software. Linux distros have improved dramatically since I first installed Red Hat 5 in '98 or '99. Things would not be so nice without wide adoption.
And it will make widespread adoption of GPLed software impossible. Picture a world in wich Linux could not be used by the Fortune 500. What are they going to do, stop using patents or not adopt Linux? It's simple, GPLed software, just like any other non-licensed or non-licensable software, would be banned from the company.
If you don't have adoption by the big boys, then you don't have adoption, period. Even Microsoft has both a Mac and Linux department. If you remove their ability to load Linux then you remove their incentive even to attempt interoperability.
If this is adopted as stated (dobtful since it wasn't very specific) either the GPL version that includes these clauses will die, or GPLed software will die. Personally, I hope for the former.
You're right, it's quite readable, but the picture you sent also highlights how much work there is to do on this display. At that size you can see all the presumably dead pixels. They look almost like acne.
I'm pretty excited about this, but it looks like it'll be a little while before I'm holding onto one.
The Cinderella example reminds me of a question I've had about derivative works and copyright.
Let's say I was the original author of the poem, "the rain in spain falls mainly on the plain" and then it went into the public domain. Let's say that afterword someone made the derivation, "the rain in spain is very plane," and he copyrighted his "new" work. The question is, if a third party then came up with a poem,"the rain in spain takes off like a plane," could the second party successfully sue him for copyright infringement?
Based on your example, the answer might be yes, they could succefully sue. Are you familiar with a real case where a real judge ruled that a derivation of the original Cinderella (no mice!:-) was illegal because of Disney's copyright? Are any of you others out there aware of cases where copyright holders of derivative works have prevailed over original derivations of public domain work?
If so, this goes contrary to everything I've previously thought of the public domain. The right to make derivative works was one of the most important parts.
Does it mean that Disney will have to actually come up with new stories instead of ripping off Grimm brothers et al?
You see, that's exactly the problem. They have you using words like "ripping off" to describe what they do with thos public domain stories. As long as the public feels like this then congress can do whatever it wants (translation:whatever is suggested to it by the media giants) with copyright law.
I realize you were just pointing out hipochricy. But the terms you used to do it, so pervasive in our society, are the exact terms and feelings Disney counts on so the public never questions their "right" to keep their works locked away forever.
how hard is it to give choice? Do most people need this history between reboots? Can they turn the logging off with ease? If software designers made privacy possible with one big red button, who's computing experience is it going to hurt?
It is dumb because software isn't to be designed with 'criminal investigator usability' as a design consideration.
But I wish more software was designed with leaving a small or non-existant trail as a design consideration.
When I speak on the phone, none of it get's recorded unless someone makes a special effort to do so. I would hope my computing experience could be the same.
And I really hate the idea that a bunch of you people are thinking I'm some kind of major criminal for wanting it that way. If you happen to be one of the ones that think I should be happy to have everything logged, then please set up a web cam in your bedroom and tape everything that happens. After all, there really isn't any chance of it falling into the wrong hands and law enforcement might need to check those tapes to make sure you're not snorting coke in there. Cops are good people and none of them will laugh about what you're doing witht that banana. I promise.
Slashdot Mirror
IS this an on topic first post?
I hope it's on topic. I rely heavily on folks like you to tell me what software they find indespensible so I don't have to wade through as much crap to find the gems. I think that's what this article is all about.
Before this, my best source of open source on Windows was TheOpenCD. There's quite a bit of overlap with the Tom's Hardware article and I highly recommend it as a way to get many of these gems all in one place.
TW
The article actually mentions other fanless solutions. It point out that the thing making this card unique is the swiveling heat sink/pipe that takes advantage of the airflow from your CPU cooler.
I think the twisting alone buys it a mention, but I think it could be made better. What we really want is for the thing to twist automatically with a loud WHIRRRR and then click into place with a satisfying Ker-Chunck. And it should do this only when it starts to heat up, like right after you start your game. Then a sexy voice should say, "cooling system operating at maximum capacity captain."
That's what we all want, right? You with me? Guys? (grumble. head down) "ok, back to the basement."
TW
Great points.
I'd like to add that when I bought software for my old Nokia 3650 which uses the Symbian Series 60 OS, I was very often asked to register over the air with my phones ID. This not only gave me platform lock-in, but individual phone lock-in as well. The only way to get most of that software onto a new Series 60 phone, or even a replacement if my phone broke, would be to re-buy the software.
Remember when everyone went ape-shit a few years back when Intel introduced processor IDS? You know how everyon is all against machine specific DRM? Guess what, due to the very nature of cell phone service, they have the equivilent to both IDs and very strong machine specific DRM built in... and the software manufacturers are already using it with glee.
TW
Engineering and development costs per unit get smaller and smaller as more units are sold so they can't be predicted on a per unit basis until we know more about sales numbers. The article says Apple has sold 16 million iPods in the first nine months of this year and based on the rave reviews of the nano and the huge yearly growth of the iPod market, we might expect to see numbers like that for the nano alone next year. If that's the case, engineering costs per unit will likely dwindle to an insignificant figure. That is unless you expect that those costs have greatly exceeded, say, 16 million dollars.
TW
Open Source is NOT always the only answer, some people have to make a living.
Money is no excuse for unethical behavior.
I hope selling software is not considered unethical. Or to put it better, I hope selling high-quality software at fair prices using fair business practices is not considered unethical.
Maybe you're just all about showing the source. Interesting position for someone posting as AC.
TW
A good tech should not be afraid of discovering and learning any system he or she might put their hands on, because part of being a good tech is learning how to keep your mind open and troubleshoot a problem. It doesn't matter if the problem is Windows, Linux, or a coffee maker -- you use the tools that you have to do the best job you can.
This is probably true for new guys learning an in-place system or a few new systems added to the familiar core network, but far less true for a bunch of newbies (to the system in question) trying to design something good from scratch.
A good ADS guy will know how to design a good forest, he'll know how to acquire and install the necssary patches, he'll know how to set up a secure systems and he'll know the quality sources of help when he needs them. He'll know which built-in and third party utilities will save his bacon and he'll know what to check on if stuff stops working.
The only thing that will teach an MS guy how to do all this with Open Source is experience. The only way he'll get that is with a bunch of time working with the products in question.
In other words, it's dangerous as hell to trust your brand new network with a bunch of noobs. Even if they're very bright noobs who will catch on quickly, you take quite a risk while they're doing the catching on. Put a bunch of these guys under a couple of experienced people and they'll likely do ok with the new network, but if you don't have that experience on hand you're begging for trouble if you uproot a known system and throw a bunch of new stuff in to replace it.
TW
Maybe. But as an owner of both a GyroMouse and an MS SideWinder Freestyle Pro game pad, I can tell you there are all kinds of ways this can go wrong.
Problem #1, The arms get tired. Quickly.
Even if this thing is smooth as butter and light as a feather, you'll need to move it in a range of motion much larger than a gamepad or joystick. If you enjoy video games, you'll have to do this for sessions lasting more than an hour. It gets old.
Problem #2, The body likes resistance so it can guage how it's doing at it's job.
Ever hear old timers go on and on about how much they liked their old IBM keyboards? They liked that satisfying click when you pressed the keys. Moving against air is just not the same. Though I liked using the SideWinder for Motocross Madness, it never stopped feeling weird not pushing against something.
I have no doubt Nintendo has designed a fine controller, but unless they can fix these seamingly unfixable issues, it's likely they'll find themselves with yet another niche product. It might be fun, but it won't be mainstream.
BTW, Nintendo is billing this thing as something that traditionally non-gaming family members will enjoy, even mom. Mom feels dorky enough when she picks up a regular controller; she will think twice, three times, or maybe forever before deciding to swing this thing around like a baseball bat in front of her laughing teen boys. This will be a product for 'secure' people only.
TW
Grab a tiny radio that's as big as the tip of your thumb at the dollar store and you're all set. Then you can leave the relatively bulky iPod in your locker.
I went on vacation recently and started packing my electronic gizmos for the trip.
-PSP
-cell phone
-bluetooth headset
-digital camera
Now these seemed like a reasonable group of electronics for entertainment and utility on the trip, but then I started adding in all the power bricks and I realized the whole shebange weighed more than my laptop. I even packed a power strip after I started contemplating pluggin these things in all around the hotel room.
Now, lets add an iPod Nano to that. Small and light, but you still have to plug it in, either to the wall or a USB port.
Now on top of that, how about an FM radio?
Ok, ok, I hear what you're saying, I don't go on vacation all the time and surely I could go without the FM radio for a week, right? But I gotta plug all this crap in at home too. Or I gotta buy batteries. Or I gotta plug in the battery charger.
I know this is a long-winded way of saying it, but getting rid of the need for one more device can be a real boon. Though I'm not in the market for either an iPod or a portable FM radio at the moment, I can certainly sympathize with those who'd want those functions combined.
TW
P.S. Anyone know of a good way to haul a bunch of 'portable' electronic stuff around? One at a time they're light and functional, but when you start adding everything up (I can't use the same headset with my phone and my music player?!?!?!?) it gets kind of old. Most backpacks have compartments that are too big and even if I wanted to look like Batman, it can actually be a hassle to have everything strapped to your waist. A bandelero mabye? Anyone got a name of a link for a good solution?
Q: What do you call a definition that only three people use?
.ppt format may not be an 'open' standard, but it does allow her OO.o to talk to MS Office. On the other hand, the 'open' standard of the OO.o native format did not allow her to talk to Office. You can call my definition incorrect, but my incorrect definition is allowing me interoperability. What is your definition doing for you?
A: Incorrect!
I'll remember that the next time my daughter turns in an assignment she completed with Open Office and output to Power Point format. Ya see, she was pissed at me at first because she didn't realize OO.o is set by default to it's own format. She turned in her assignments and the teacher couldn't read them. But when I set her OO.o to default to *.ppt she was able to turn the assignments in without a hitch.
Now that
TW
Q. What's the difference between a proprietary format that everyone uses and an 'open' standard that very few people use?
A. The open standard is useless.
Q. What do you call a proprietary format that is well understood and widely used by the computer-using community and which is unencumbered by fees or intellectual property claims?
A. I call it an 'open' standard.
Argue all you want, but the 'propriety' format which is unencumbered, well understood, and in wide adoption is going to be more 'open' than an unused 'open' standard. It will be more 'open' because I can write a program that I know will be able to communicate with the rest of the world. _That_ is the goal of open standards and _that_ is very often achieved with 'proprietary' standards that gain wide adoption.
tw
Open standards are easy, even if everyone wants to do it their own way. All you have to do is mandate that communication file formats not be locked down, and you have to accept the fact that the 800 lb gorilla gets to win.
.doc. It is effectively an open standard.
Open Office was perfectly free to make their own document format, but everyone know the standard is the Word 2000 format. Since the word 2000 format isn't encumbered by copyright or patent, every other companie that does word processing has found a way to output to
Compare and contrast with AOL instant messenger. They didn't lock it with IP, but they locked that shit down tight through other methods. No one was able to use it so now my company has to deal with IM hell. They didn't have to publish their standard, or go through 18 different levels of beurocracy to get it approved, all they had to do was let other people talk to their servers and clients and their method would have been a defacto standard.
Standards are easy, as long as everyone is free to impliment the proprietary formats of everyone else. Markets get to set them and enforce them, but everyone gets to bennefit from them.
TW
I just want to know where I can still get the origional. I've never cared about GTA before, but now that there's content that's forbiden, I must find a way to get it.
Let me know when you find something. I'll be surfing for hot nude teens while waiting.
TW
a) but what color are their stoplights?
b) don't get me started about totaly blind people.
I already know the answer to a) because I've seen Bejing Bicycle and the lights are just the same as in the west.
b) suggests that handicapped people will always have a disadavantage. The solution for this is to still give the handicapped what they need, but also give every bit of help you can to the able bodied who can make use of it. In this case, using colors in addition to words doesn't disadvantage colorblind people, but also gives a bit of help to those in a position to make use of it.
The truth is, I don't know if colors would help that much and even if they would I'd think a cautionary yellow might be more appropriate thana "don't do that!" red. And I really don't have a problem with considering culturable variability in UI design. It's just that sometimes it's overblown. Japanese men wear business suits and Chinese women stop their cars at red lights. Clearly people can learn different ways of doing things if that is their need or desire.
TW
Name one.
If you have one named, then tell me how their stoplights work. If you can give me even a single example of a stoplight where red means go, they you get my absolute and total respect.
TW
This is actually a pretty good explanation. There are quite a few GC owners among my daughter's friends, but they all seem to have a PS2 as well. They mostly use the GC for Super Smash Brothers with groups of friends and they use the PS2 for fighting games and games that they play by themselves.
I do think the group market is something Nintendo does especially well. The games are fun and low stress, but still competitive. I expect that while the other two consoles increasingly go online and in the direction of one console per player, Nintendo will continue to make games and consoles that emphasise groups getting together in the living or rec rooms. It may not make them #1 in the market, but it'll at least keep them relevant and respected.
TW
That was _so_ fake. Everyone knows RAM does _not_ come in 516MB incriments, only 512MB.
I can't prove it, but I suspect those weren't even real satellites.
Yes, water is the product of hydrogen combustion. Any guess what the main byproducts are of gasoline production? Yup, in addition to CO2, it's water.
No foggy roads. No green deserts. In fact, the amount of water produced appears to have little effect on the local weather.
Planting trees and talking to congressmen is good advice, but the least of our problems is worrying about the amount of water comming out of the tailpipes of Hydrogen cars.
TW
I'm amazed at these figures.
At the risk of being off topic, I have to point out that the conventional wisdom about the Game Cube is flat-out wrong. Many people will tell you that it's a race with PS2 and Xbox way out front and the Game Cube running a distant third. These figures show very clearly that the XB and GC are neck and neck while the PS2 is squashing them both.
No wonder Nintendo refuses to concede defeat. They may be, technically, last, but with 18 million units sold they're not exactly crushed in the market place, especially considering the the XB is almost certianly far more expensive to make and market.
Sorry to get off the PSP, but as December 2004 sales figures, these are pretty useless in that department. Lets compare the numbers in six months. DS may still beat the hell out of the PSP, but at least it will be closer to a fair fight.
TW
Can someone explain to me why mass adoption of GPL software is so important?
Driver support and application support are two very important issues that get better with wider adoption. These shouldn't require much explanation.
The things that are a little harder to explain are freedom, openness and quality.
Freedom is best explained by Stalman. I actually buy a lot of his arguments. If you've been using Linux since '94, then you're probably familiar with them too. Is this helped by wider adoption? I think so. The more people are free, the more they expect freedom. The more they expect freedom, the more they don't accept a lot of the bullshit we have to put up with in our lives. If more people expected freedom, do you think we'd have to put up with shitty DRM? If more people expected freedom, do you think Microsoft would be busy closing it's Office file formats?
Openess is about companies not locking things down for their own purposes. Is the web more open now that Microsoft 'owns' the browser market? Keeping standards open is made much easier when there's wide adoption of software that uses open standards.
My favorite topic though is quality. Not only is QC much more thourough when you have a wide user base, but the wider your user base is, the more chance the several people have already asked for that useful feature you want in your software. Linux distros have improved dramatically since I first installed Red Hat 5 in '98 or '99. Things would not be so nice without wide adoption.
TW
And it will make widespread adoption of GPLed software impossible. Picture a world in wich Linux could not be used by the Fortune 500. What are they going to do, stop using patents or not adopt Linux? It's simple, GPLed software, just like any other non-licensed or non-licensable software, would be banned from the company.
If you don't have adoption by the big boys, then you don't have adoption, period. Even Microsoft has both a Mac and Linux department. If you remove their ability to load Linux then you remove their incentive even to attempt interoperability.
If this is adopted as stated (dobtful since it wasn't very specific) either the GPL version that includes these clauses will die, or GPLed software will die. Personally, I hope for the former.
TW
You're right, it's quite readable, but the picture you sent also highlights how much work there is to do on this display. At that size you can see all the presumably dead pixels. They look almost like acne.
I'm pretty excited about this, but it looks like it'll be a little while before I'm holding onto one.
TW
The Cinderella example reminds me of a question I've had about derivative works and copyright.
:-) was illegal because of Disney's copyright? Are any of you others out there aware of cases where copyright holders of derivative works have prevailed over original derivations of public domain work?
Let's say I was the original author of the poem, "the rain in spain falls mainly on the plain" and then it went into the public domain. Let's say that afterword someone made the derivation, "the rain in spain is very plane," and he copyrighted his "new" work. The question is, if a third party then came up with a poem,"the rain in spain takes off like a plane," could the second party successfully sue him for copyright infringement?
Based on your example, the answer might be yes, they could succefully sue. Are you familiar with a real case where a real judge ruled that a derivation of the original Cinderella (no mice!
If so, this goes contrary to everything I've previously thought of the public domain. The right to make derivative works was one of the most important parts.
TW
Does it mean that Disney will have to actually come up with new stories instead of ripping off Grimm brothers et al?
You see, that's exactly the problem. They have you using words like "ripping off" to describe what they do with thos public domain stories. As long as the public feels like this then congress can do whatever it wants (translation:whatever is suggested to it by the media giants) with copyright law.
I realize you were just pointing out hipochricy. But the terms you used to do it, so pervasive in our society, are the exact terms and feelings Disney counts on so the public never questions their "right" to keep their works locked away forever.
TW
how hard is it to give choice? Do most people need this history between reboots? Can they turn the logging off with ease? If software designers made privacy possible with one big red button, who's computing experience is it going to hurt?
It is dumb because software isn't to be designed with 'criminal investigator usability' as a design consideration.
But I wish more software was designed with leaving a small or non-existant trail as a design consideration.
When I speak on the phone, none of it get's recorded unless someone makes a special effort to do so. I would hope my computing experience could be the same.
And I really hate the idea that a bunch of you people are thinking I'm some kind of major criminal for wanting it that way. If you happen to be one of the ones that think I should be happy to have everything logged, then please set up a web cam in your bedroom and tape everything that happens. After all, there really isn't any chance of it falling into the wrong hands and law enforcement might need to check those tapes to make sure you're not snorting coke in there. Cops are good people and none of them will laugh about what you're doing witht that banana. I promise.
TW