So who in here would want to 'sacrifice' a little/big bit of his privacy, if you have the guarantee that everyone else gets tagged too ?
I'm appalled. I'm just speechless. Do people not realize that they're already criminals? Don't they speed in their car? Didn't they steal gum in the 5th grade? Didn't they ever get drunk and pee in the street? Did they pay every bill on time, all the time?
When you make it easy to lock up all the criminals then you make it easy to lock up everyone. Why are we so willing to nuke the bad guys even though we'll be hit by blast as well?
I totally agree with the the idea of your post, but the actual practice is a bit different.
First off, DVHS and HDTV PVRs exist in tiny numbers. I am not one of the guys who owns one. Neither are the vast majority of the people reading your post. It's a great idea, but a bit of a stretch to ask someone to purchase equipment that costs half a grand minimum before even going out to purchase their first HDTV. Once again, great idea, just not something very many people are going to be able to take advantage of.
Ok, number two: think of the specialty shop in your area that has a wide variety of HDTVs set up and ready to plug your box into. Having trouble? Me too. All of the specialty shops in my area have, at best, half a dozen sets. This is pretty far away from variety. I'm not trying to knock these guys. I bought my speakers from a specialty shop and got a good deal on some great speakers. I love those guys. But their monitor selection was pathetic, just like every other "home theater" shop I've actually walked into in my area. Are you _ever_ going to be able to see the actual display you're interested in, or just something fairly close?
Finally, what about Best Buy with your own content? Well, this is a problem too. A big problem. Let's say you showed up at BB with your own source material and you happened to find the one guy in all the BBs thoughout the land that was very knowledgeable, very friendly and didn't mind at all walking around with you answering your questions and helping you set up your PVR to every box you were interested in. Well, what about the sets? How are they calibrated? Have they ever been calibrated? Did they set that CRT down hard and screw up the guns? Have they been showing their plasma monitors at full brightness for 12 hours a day for half a year? Are those dead pixels typical of the manufacturer or unique to that one display? To put it succinctly, when you go into that menu and choose the defaults for the display you're interested in, how do you know that those defaults are typical of the box you're going to open up at home? How do you know if the set next to it is just as bad, or actually much closer to factory defaults?
I know, you can glean a lot by looking at the displays, but it's far from the only place to look. Even good sets will often look like crap at the big box store. I hate to say it, but this is one place where stats will often paint a better picture than the picture you see in front of your eyes at the store.
Yes. Go to a showroom and look at the displays. If you see some that have greater vertical resolution than the non-HD models, there you go. If you can't see a difference, then it doesn't make a difference.
This is not a solution.
At Best Buy and Circuit city I've seen lots of SD signals on HD displays. How on earth am I going to know if it's the set or the signal that's producing all those jaggies? Ask? At Best Buy? I might as well ask them to build a moon rocket while they're at it.
Knowing the stats won't neccessarily guarantee you a better picture, but it is a better place to start.
Intellegent design does not mean it was God who did it. Does not say who did it just that some intellegance did it. This is a viable theory. Don't attack it based on how religious organizations use the theory but on it's merits
I'll attack it on it's own merits. It is not logically sound to say that humans are so complex that they must have been created by someone intelligent.
Based on my experience with very complex systems, such as computer opperating systems, I've come to the conclusion that as intelligent beings design ever more complex systems it becomes increasingly more difficult to design systems that don't have large flaws (bugs) that will keep the systems from working.
Based on the complexity of our ecosystems where individual organisms rely so heavily on each other and the exact composition of minerals and radiation available, I find it increasingly less likely that an intelligent designer would be able to create such systems without help from evolution.
Evolution sorta assures "success"(survival) of organisms. Intelligent design does not (high likelihood of failure until much testing and re-design is complete). Therefor I find Itelligent desing flawed at the most basic level - it makes the opposite conclusion it's data points suggest.
...and yet The Simple Life is still running. Does that seem right to you?
Yes, it does. The Simple Life makes money. Hard to say whether that's because it's cheaper to make, has more viewers or both, but it makes money so they keep showing it.
So how many unique users does that translate to? Anyone with a reasonable estimate?
I know I've downloaded it about 15 times for about 4 unique users. Upgrades and redownloading for convienience instead of carrying around a disk are both big culprits.
I have no idea how I stack up with everyone else, but that's roughly a 4-1 download to usage ratio for me.
That control is gone when the data gets stored on computers owned by various businesses.
Well, not really. It's more like a hash. Unless the people that designed the security sytem didn't have a clue, they wouldn't store reversable fingerprint information at all.
I remember having this discussion with my old boss when he wanted to go biometric a few years ago. He even got ahold of a some fingerprint readers for testing. We found that the industry, and this manufacturer, were very clear on the matter. No one wanted to actually store your fingerprints.
So, feeling confident, he installs the software, plays with it for a little bit and invites me over to try to "hack" his account with my thumb. I put my thumb on the plate and sure enough the device tells me I'm unauthorized... while displaying a giant picture of my thumb accross most of the display.
My conclusion: I believe the companies really aren't storing reversible fingerprint information. I also believe they're doing a lousy job of making people feel confident about this fact.
I think there are enough other downsides that this technology should be condered DOA for most purposes, but this particular issue is probably just a PR problem.
I went to check out a nice large brand-new gym near my house. They handed me a form to fill out including a questionnaire and a space for my name phone number and address. I answered a few of their questions and just put my first name on the form.
They mentioned that they'd like me to fill in my phone number and address and I said, "no thank you, I'd like to check out the equipment first before signing up." They told me they couldn't show me the gym without that information. Still thinking we just had a misunderstanding I pointed out that I wasn't there to use the gym, I just wanted to see what they had to offer before signing up. They then proceeded to point out to me that they were prepared to give me a tour, but would not do so without my phone number and address.
I said, "goodbye" and walked out the door. Even my bank doesn't require biometrics and didn't ask for an address before they told me about their features. These fitness center folks are too big for their own britches. Pushups and situps are free and running shoes don't cost that much compared to a gym membership. I'd like to use the gym, but I don't have to and I certainly wont consider it untless they figure out how to be less intrusive.
Did anyone else instantly think of the "Empire" scene in Clerks when you heard that Kevin Smith wrote the review?
I pictured Silent Bob doing the Jedi mind trick to get the video tape in Mall Rats. There were others too, but that's the one that flashed through my mind.
I'm just glad that I heard somewhere (I think it was a cnet article in the last couple weeks) that they're going to improve the ability for laptops to be members of multiple domains. That's a big plus...
...only if it's easy to disable. The last thing I need is my users joining to another domain and getting a)the other domain's domain admins have Administrator rights over the laptop and b)all the logon scripts and group policy of the other domain are convieniently applied to their computer. Translation for all you Unix and NetWare admins out there:it's like hopping over to a client site and giving root on your laptop to their admins. Why would you want to do that?
I have actually had end users join their laptops to the domains at client sites for one reason or another and my head started spinning around and smoke came shooting out of my ears. If they make this any easier I'll start doing flips in mid-air, I'm sure.
Like I said, easy to turn off then no problem. Easier to turn on and I will cry.
I wouldn't read too much into the current visuals. It's very common for MS products to look very different between beta and gold. For example, XP had the desert dunes wallpaper as default in the beta but switched to the grassy hills wallpaper for the release. There are a lot of other good examples out there if you think back to previous MS betas.
Don't get me wrong, I have a healthy dislike for XP over the very clean Win2K and I don't welcome more of the same. Just pointing out that what you see now is unlikely to be what you see when the product actually ships.
I guess that is the better example. I've been getting quite the education today on how different projects manage copyright. I always assumed people didn't know what they were talking about when they said things like the previous couple of posters (Linux copyright is owned by hundreds or thousands of individuals) but it appears (happily?) that I was wrong.
Isn't the open code still have to remain open in the closed branch. I haven't read the GPL in a while but doesn't it have a clause about derivative works remaining open as well?
For the sake of this discussion I'm assuming whatever legal entity owns the Linux kernel in the copyright sense suddenly sells out to the highest bidder and everyone else has to work from the already distributed GPLed code.
No, I don't expect this would ever happen, but it is the question on the table.
However, most significant projects have multiple Authors, and all of the Authors would have to agree on this course of action in order to do it.
I'm very curious about this.
If I'm a developer for a comercial, proprietary software vendor then all the code I write become property of the company. That's pretty straight forward.
If I did volunteer coding on the library web site, I would assume (but don't know for a fact) that my work would become the property of the library unless other specific arrangements were made.
It's clear in the first case and at least plausible in the second case that the entity that owns copyright of the code is not the individual coder, but the larger legal entity. But if I do free coding for an open source project how clear is it?
If I 'contribute' my code to a 'project' doesnt' the project becomes a legal entity itself and therefor own the copyright of the code? I would assume this is the case because the project itself licenses the work under the GPL. You don't see individual contributors attaching GPL license to every modification they check in to the source tree.
I realise this is probably all very fuzzy for most projects. Are there bylaws, incorporation or non-profit staus on most GPL projects? Most are probably like informal clubs with very little thought given to legal status, but that in and of itself, probably doesn't mean they have no legal status.
I'm definately not a lawyer and most of this is question more than statement. Feel very free to pick it appart. I'm just very curious how this would actually work in a court of law.
Who cares if it's forked into a closed area? There still is the old source to build on!
I think this breaks down somewhat when you consider the importance of the developers. In this particular case, the purchasing company not only got the code, but the lead guy who created and/or managed the code.
The FOSS community would not have a huge problem on it's hands if some company acquired and closed a branch of the Linux kernel, but there would be much wringing of hands if Linus went to the closed branch and stopped managing the free one.
Quite correct -- essentially what the Bush adminstration is telling these telecom companies is that they won't be allowed to send a representative to a conference UNTIL there is a Democratic president!
Well, that's one way of putting it. Another way would be, "essentiall what the Bush administtration is telling these telecom companies is that they won't be allowed to send a representative to a conference UNTIL they stop giving money to Democrats and start giving money to Republicans!"
See, they don't have to wait at all. Everything's right with the world. If you donate money to the right party then you are able to participate in designing the telecommunications infrastructure. Or, to put it even more precisely, people who don't give money to Republicans put any chance of participating in government at risk. Darn, I still haven't got it right. How about this: "Legaly bribe your elected officials and you get to play. Everyone else goes home." Yeah, that's about right.
The iPod doesn't just copy music files, it also manages all the associated metadata like the database of songs, ratings, playlists and everything else. The communication is two ways. Having all that information available to the device is one of the major things that makes the iPod's interface better than a lot of its competitors.
Correction, it's one of the things that makes iTunes good but it has little to do with the iPod itself. The fact that iTures likes to keep a nice database of the music files on the iPod really has little to do with the fact that I'd like to put MP3s on my iPod without the need to fire up iTunes. One does not preclude the other. It's a decision, not a technical requirement.
Yes, the iPod could rebuild its database manually every time you disconnect it or on command but when you're talking about potentially having to sort through 60 gigs of music that could be very time-consuming and detrimental to battery life.
I have several 60gig+ hard drives that I somehow manage to copy data off of and onto without needing to rebuild a database. The process is quite painless, intuitive, and fast. The hard drives that I happen to have on USB don't typically have battery life problems as they get their entire power needs from the USB cable itself. As I understand the situation, the iPod gets power from USB as well.
Come on, man, I wasn't "hating on Apple." Notice that I managed to knock a Microsoft product in the very next paragraph?
What I was hating on was the fact that I'm forced to use any extra software at all. My thumb drive works just fine on Mac, Windows and Linux without installing anything extra. My USB hard drive does too. Maybe you can explain to me why I should need iTunes, ActiveSync or any other add-on software when my only goal is to move files into flash memory (my cell phone) or a hard drive (my daughters iPod) via USB? There is no technical reason to require this. Period.
Any attempt to explain that I can use third-party software misses the point. The point: I shouldn't need any extra software at all.
And here I thought it was the rich people who voted for Bush. I guess whatever argument is convenient for the situation.
Rich people did. HDTV companies did. But they're a small minority compared to the poorer masses. It's possible that poor old ladies can be convinced to buy a new HDTV and not raise a stink, but if those sewing circles start talking they will get their way. Lets face it, no politician wants a voting public that won't be able to see their TV commercials.
Thing is, the CD's she had with her that she'd got with the camera, were full of crippled software - "lite" versions you have to purchase the full version, etc
This is the crap I hate. You buy some nice piece of hardware that seems like it _should_ work just spiffy on its own, but the truth is you have to use someone's proprietary software or go searching for a hack to make it work. It's maddening.
Other things in this category: My daughters' iPod. Yeah, I know y'all love iTunes and I know that it doesn't suck, but maybe you can cut me some slack in the fact that I happened to choose a different package for my MP3 library before getting her the iPod. Now I have this incompatible mess. I could just switch to iTunes throughout the house, but why should I have to make that choice just to put a stupid MP3 file on her player?
My cell phone has this nice memory card that I need synch software in order to access. Yeah, I can store and use a gig of data, including MP3s, software, books, etc, but I can't access it on any computer that doesn't have ActiveSync. Why?
I'm sick of it. Maybe these folks think they're helping me out by including their crappys software or maybe they're just doing it to lock me in. Either way, it makes me, the consumer, wary of buying their products. That can't be something they actually like.
Expect congress to push the date back or be swamped with rednecks bitching about their TV.
In my mind, this post deserves to be "insightful" (currently "funny") because it's the best indicator I've seen of what will actually happen. To put it sucintly: Rednecks vote.
The longer version: Redneck voters helped put Bush and the congress over the top in the last election. Another sorta-related voting group involved in getting Bush his job: Old ladies who go to church but don't have much money to be buying HDTVs.
This is neither a pro or anti republican post. Just trying to figure this out. If the party-in-power's constituancy is gonna be mad at them for pulling the plug on Analog, what do you think they'll do?
I know this was meant to be funny, but the humorous part is that Win2k3 works just fine on a 1GHZ processor for many, many tasks.
When we upgraded our most heavily used Win2k domain controller to Win2k3, we didn't give it any hardware upgrades. We basically run 400 users on our site and all FSMO roles, including the PDC emulator for an 800 user domain on a dual 933 with 768MB of RAM. During most of the day, the processor doesn't rise above 10%.
I know we're not serving files for 800 users or running a web site with huge transactions on this box, but that's just the point. If you match your hardware to your task, most people find they actually need far less than they think they do.
Although I agree with you that this is not exactly news, as a recent email administrator I'd have to say your numbers are quite a bit off. In our organization, it's pretty close to roughly split between "cleaners", "savers" and "hybrids". I don't get this from anecdotal evidence of what I saw when helping out end-users either, but rather from looking at the mailbox sizes for everyone in the org.
"Savers" are easy to spot. They delete almost nothing except spam. We have quite a few users who would need a couple of the two gig Gmail accounts to hold all of their data.
"Cleaners" are also easy to spot. When someone has been with the company for 5+ years and their Exchange mailbox size is less than 20MB, you know they're not using their email as a database. These folks feel real stress when their email stretchs beyond the end of the page. My boss is one of these and he has very little understanding for why anyone would need a lot of email storage.
The "hybrids" are more difficult to spot. Many are not true hybrids, but actually "savers" who archive email semi-regularly. True "hybrids" delete most stuff, but whatever they deam "important" gets put in a nice mailbox folder tree. Over time these can become quite large, but it's never as bad as with real "savers". My purely subjective and anecdotalo observation is that these folks make up the most "normal" email user group. If you have three friends and two of them are freeks, the normal one is probably a "hybrid" email user.
I'm personally a "saver" who archives semi-regularly. Thanks to me, we basically don't have strict email limits anymore and people can store almost as much as they'd like. We never harrass VPs with multi-gig storage. But I have a lot of respect for "cleaners" too. For some reason, they never really have the problem of missing data that us "savers" are so worried about. The "cleaners" are like those folks you know that have absolutely no clutter in their houses, no junk drawer and no closet full of old hard drives. The truth is that we're afraid of losing things we "may need someday" but they know the truth is that we'll never find it in the clutter anyway, so why live with the clutter to begin with.
-Free health clinics compete with paid medical service.
-Police departments compete with private security and private investigation.
-The US Postal Service competes with UPS and FedEx
-Community theatre competes with Broadway
Interesting facts about these services:
1.In several of these activities, such as schools and the police, the stated goals of the public organization is to offer services at least as good as their private conterparts, but for no cost whatsoever to the consumer of the service.
2.Despite this, private enterprise actually makes quite a lot of money with their services, primarily by offering superior products.
I don't see what these folks are arguing about... unless their argument is that they don't know how to compete with beaurocratic government drones.
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So who in here would want to 'sacrifice' a little/big bit of his privacy, if you have the guarantee that everyone else gets tagged too ?
I'm appalled. I'm just speechless. Do people not realize that they're already criminals? Don't they speed in their car? Didn't they steal gum in the 5th grade? Didn't they ever get drunk and pee in the street? Did they pay every bill on time, all the time?
When you make it easy to lock up all the criminals then you make it easy to lock up everyone. Why are we so willing to nuke the bad guys even though we'll be hit by blast as well?
TW
I totally agree with the the idea of your post, but the actual practice is a bit different.
First off, DVHS and HDTV PVRs exist in tiny numbers. I am not one of the guys who owns one. Neither are the vast majority of the people reading your post. It's a great idea, but a bit of a stretch to ask someone to purchase equipment that costs half a grand minimum before even going out to purchase their first HDTV. Once again, great idea, just not something very many people are going to be able to take advantage of.
Ok, number two: think of the specialty shop in your area that has a wide variety of HDTVs set up and ready to plug your box into. Having trouble? Me too. All of the specialty shops in my area have, at best, half a dozen sets. This is pretty far away from variety. I'm not trying to knock these guys. I bought my speakers from a specialty shop and got a good deal on some great speakers. I love those guys. But their monitor selection was pathetic, just like every other "home theater" shop I've actually walked into in my area. Are you _ever_ going to be able to see the actual display you're interested in, or just something fairly close?
Finally, what about Best Buy with your own content? Well, this is a problem too. A big problem. Let's say you showed up at BB with your own source material and you happened to find the one guy in all the BBs thoughout the land that was very knowledgeable, very friendly and didn't mind at all walking around with you answering your questions and helping you set up your PVR to every box you were interested in. Well, what about the sets? How are they calibrated? Have they ever been calibrated? Did they set that CRT down hard and screw up the guns? Have they been showing their plasma monitors at full brightness for 12 hours a day for half a year? Are those dead pixels typical of the manufacturer or unique to that one display? To put it succinctly, when you go into that menu and choose the defaults for the display you're interested in, how do you know that those defaults are typical of the box you're going to open up at home? How do you know if the set next to it is just as bad, or actually much closer to factory defaults?
I know, you can glean a lot by looking at the displays, but it's far from the only place to look. Even good sets will often look like crap at the big box store. I hate to say it, but this is one place where stats will often paint a better picture than the picture you see in front of your eyes at the store.
TW
Yes. Go to a showroom and look at the displays. If you see some that have greater vertical resolution than the non-HD models, there you go. If you can't see a difference, then it doesn't make a difference.
This is not a solution.
At Best Buy and Circuit city I've seen lots of SD signals on HD displays. How on earth am I going to know if it's the set or the signal that's producing all those jaggies? Ask? At Best Buy? I might as well ask them to build a moon rocket while they're at it.
Knowing the stats won't neccessarily guarantee you a better picture, but it is a better place to start.
TW
Intellegent design does not mean it was God who did it. Does not say who did it just that some intellegance did it. This is a viable theory. Don't attack it based on how religious organizations use the theory but on it's merits
I'll attack it on it's own merits. It is not logically sound to say that humans are so complex that they must have been created by someone intelligent.
Based on my experience with very complex systems, such as computer opperating systems, I've come to the conclusion that as intelligent beings design ever more complex systems it becomes increasingly more difficult to design systems that don't have large flaws (bugs) that will keep the systems from working.
Based on the complexity of our ecosystems where individual organisms rely so heavily on each other and the exact composition of minerals and radiation available, I find it increasingly less likely that an intelligent designer would be able to create such systems without help from evolution.
Evolution sorta assures "success"(survival) of organisms. Intelligent design does not (high likelihood of failure until much testing and re-design is complete). Therefor I find Itelligent desing flawed at the most basic level - it makes the opposite conclusion it's data points suggest.
TW
...and yet The Simple Life is still running. Does that seem right to you?
Yes, it does. The Simple Life makes money. Hard to say whether that's because it's cheaper to make, has more viewers or both, but it makes money so they keep showing it.
Simple, eh?
TW
So how many unique users does that translate to? Anyone with a reasonable estimate?
I know I've downloaded it about 15 times for about 4 unique users. Upgrades and redownloading for convienience instead of carrying around a disk are both big culprits.
I have no idea how I stack up with everyone else, but that's roughly a 4-1 download to usage ratio for me.
TW
That control is gone when the data gets stored on computers owned by various businesses.
Well, not really. It's more like a hash. Unless the people that designed the security sytem didn't have a clue, they wouldn't store reversable fingerprint information at all.
I remember having this discussion with my old boss when he wanted to go biometric a few years ago. He even got ahold of a some fingerprint readers for testing. We found that the industry, and this manufacturer, were very clear on the matter. No one wanted to actually store your fingerprints.
So, feeling confident, he installs the software, plays with it for a little bit and invites me over to try to "hack" his account with my thumb. I put my thumb on the plate and sure enough the device tells me I'm unauthorized... while displaying a giant picture of my thumb accross most of the display.
My conclusion: I believe the companies really aren't storing reversible fingerprint information. I also believe they're doing a lousy job of making people feel confident about this fact.
I think there are enough other downsides that this technology should be condered DOA for most purposes, but this particular issue is probably just a PR problem.
TW
I wouldnt be a member of that gym for much longer
I went to check out a nice large brand-new gym near my house. They handed me a form to fill out including a questionnaire and a space for my name phone number and address. I answered a few of their questions and just put my first name on the form.
They mentioned that they'd like me to fill in my phone number and address and I said, "no thank you, I'd like to check out the equipment first before signing up." They told me they couldn't show me the gym without that information. Still thinking we just had a misunderstanding I pointed out that I wasn't there to use the gym, I just wanted to see what they had to offer before signing up. They then proceeded to point out to me that they were prepared to give me a tour, but would not do so without my phone number and address.
I said, "goodbye" and walked out the door. Even my bank doesn't require biometrics and didn't ask for an address before they told me about their features. These fitness center folks are too big for their own britches. Pushups and situps are free and running shoes don't cost that much compared to a gym membership. I'd like to use the gym, but I don't have to and I certainly wont consider it untless they figure out how to be less intrusive.
TW
Did anyone else instantly think of the "Empire" scene in Clerks when you heard that Kevin Smith wrote the review?
I pictured Silent Bob doing the Jedi mind trick to get the video tape in Mall Rats. There were others too, but that's the one that flashed through my mind.
TW
No round keypad. No side talking. Doesn't look like Fisher Price plastic. It's possible that Nokia is learning from their past mistakes.
A lot of people, including me, like the Symbian series 60 OS. IF they've finally paired it with decent hardware, this could be a winner.
TW
...only if it's easy to disable. The last thing I need is my users joining to another domain and getting a)the other domain's domain admins have Administrator rights over the laptop and b)all the logon scripts and group policy of the other domain are convieniently applied to their computer. Translation for all you Unix and NetWare admins out there:it's like hopping over to a client site and giving root on your laptop to their admins. Why would you want to do that?
I have actually had end users join their laptops to the domains at client sites for one reason or another and my head started spinning around and smoke came shooting out of my ears. If they make this any easier I'll start doing flips in mid-air, I'm sure.
Like I said, easy to turn off then no problem. Easier to turn on and I will cry.
I wouldn't read too much into the current visuals. It's very common for MS products to look very different between beta and gold. For example, XP had the desert dunes wallpaper as default in the beta but switched to the grassy hills wallpaper for the release. There are a lot of other good examples out there if you think back to previous MS betas.
Don't get me wrong, I have a healthy dislike for XP over the very clean Win2K and I don't welcome more of the same. Just pointing out that what you see now is unlikely to be what you see when the product actually ships.
TW
I guess that is the better example. I've been getting quite the education today on how different projects manage copyright. I always assumed people didn't know what they were talking about when they said things like the previous couple of posters (Linux copyright is owned by hundreds or thousands of individuals) but it appears (happily?) that I was wrong.
TW
Isn't the open code still have to remain open in the closed branch. I haven't read the GPL in a while but doesn't it have a clause about derivative works remaining open as well?
For the sake of this discussion I'm assuming whatever legal entity owns the Linux kernel in the copyright sense suddenly sells out to the highest bidder and everyone else has to work from the already distributed GPLed code.
No, I don't expect this would ever happen, but it is the question on the table.
TW
However, most significant projects have multiple Authors, and all of the Authors would have to agree on this course of action in order to do it.
I'm very curious about this.
If I'm a developer for a comercial, proprietary software vendor then all the code I write become property of the company. That's pretty straight forward.
If I did volunteer coding on the library web site, I would assume (but don't know for a fact) that my work would become the property of the library unless other specific arrangements were made.
It's clear in the first case and at least plausible in the second case that the entity that owns copyright of the code is not the individual coder, but the larger legal entity. But if I do free coding for an open source project how clear is it?
If I 'contribute' my code to a 'project' doesnt' the project becomes a legal entity itself and therefor own the copyright of the code? I would assume this is the case because the project itself licenses the work under the GPL. You don't see individual contributors attaching GPL license to every modification they check in to the source tree.
I realise this is probably all very fuzzy for most projects. Are there bylaws, incorporation or non-profit staus on most GPL projects? Most are probably like informal clubs with very little thought given to legal status, but that in and of itself, probably doesn't mean they have no legal status.
I'm definately not a lawyer and most of this is question more than statement. Feel very free to pick it appart. I'm just very curious how this would actually work in a court of law.
TW
Who cares if it's forked into a closed area? There still is the old source to build on!
I think this breaks down somewhat when you consider the importance of the developers. In this particular case, the purchasing company not only got the code, but the lead guy who created and/or managed the code.
The FOSS community would not have a huge problem on it's hands if some company acquired and closed a branch of the Linux kernel, but there would be much wringing of hands if Linus went to the closed branch and stopped managing the free one.
TW
Quite correct -- essentially what the Bush adminstration is telling these telecom companies is that they won't be allowed to send a representative to a conference UNTIL there is a Democratic president!
Well, that's one way of putting it. Another way would be, "essentiall what the Bush administtration is telling these telecom companies is that they won't be allowed to send a representative to a conference UNTIL they stop giving money to Democrats and start giving money to Republicans!"
See, they don't have to wait at all. Everything's right with the world. If you donate money to the right party then you are able to participate in designing the telecommunications infrastructure. Or, to put it even more precisely, people who don't give money to Republicans put any chance of participating in government at risk. Darn, I still haven't got it right. How about this: "Legaly bribe your elected officials and you get to play. Everyone else goes home." Yeah, that's about right.
TW
The iPod doesn't just copy music files, it also manages all the associated metadata like the database of songs, ratings, playlists and everything else. The communication is two ways. Having all that information available to the device is one of the major things that makes the iPod's interface better than a lot of its competitors.
Correction, it's one of the things that makes iTunes good but it has little to do with the iPod itself. The fact that iTures likes to keep a nice database of the music files on the iPod really has little to do with the fact that I'd like to put MP3s on my iPod without the need to fire up iTunes. One does not preclude the other. It's a decision, not a technical requirement.
Yes, the iPod could rebuild its database manually every time you disconnect it or on command but when you're talking about potentially having to sort through 60 gigs of music that could be very time-consuming and detrimental to battery life.
I have several 60gig+ hard drives that I somehow manage to copy data off of and onto without needing to rebuild a database. The process is quite painless, intuitive, and fast. The hard drives that I happen to have on USB don't typically have battery life problems as they get their entire power needs from the USB cable itself. As I understand the situation, the iPod gets power from USB as well.
TW
Come on, man, I wasn't "hating on Apple." Notice that I managed to knock a Microsoft product in the very next paragraph?
What I was hating on was the fact that I'm forced to use any extra software at all. My thumb drive works just fine on Mac, Windows and Linux without installing anything extra. My USB hard drive does too. Maybe you can explain to me why I should need iTunes, ActiveSync or any other add-on software when my only goal is to move files into flash memory (my cell phone) or a hard drive (my daughters iPod) via USB? There is no technical reason to require this. Period.
Any attempt to explain that I can use third-party software misses the point. The point: I shouldn't need any extra software at all.
TW
And here I thought it was the rich people who voted for Bush. I guess whatever argument is convenient for the situation.
Rich people did. HDTV companies did. But they're a small minority compared to the poorer masses. It's possible that poor old ladies can be convinced to buy a new HDTV and not raise a stink, but if those sewing circles start talking they will get their way. Lets face it, no politician wants a voting public that won't be able to see their TV commercials.
Thing is, the CD's she had with her that she'd got with the camera, were full of crippled software - "lite" versions you have to purchase the full version, etc
This is the crap I hate. You buy some nice piece of hardware that seems like it _should_ work just spiffy on its own, but the truth is you have to use someone's proprietary software or go searching for a hack to make it work. It's maddening.
Other things in this category: My daughters' iPod. Yeah, I know y'all love iTunes and I know that it doesn't suck, but maybe you can cut me some slack in the fact that I happened to choose a different package for my MP3 library before getting her the iPod. Now I have this incompatible mess. I could just switch to iTunes throughout the house, but why should I have to make that choice just to put a stupid MP3 file on her player?
My cell phone has this nice memory card that I need synch software in order to access. Yeah, I can store and use a gig of data, including MP3s, software, books, etc, but I can't access it on any computer that doesn't have ActiveSync. Why?
I'm sick of it. Maybe these folks think they're helping me out by including their crappys software or maybe they're just doing it to lock me in. Either way, it makes me, the consumer, wary of buying their products. That can't be something they actually like.
TW
Expect congress to push the date back or be swamped with rednecks bitching about their TV.
In my mind, this post deserves to be "insightful" (currently "funny") because it's the best indicator I've seen of what will actually happen. To put it sucintly: Rednecks vote.
The longer version: Redneck voters helped put Bush and the congress over the top in the last election. Another sorta-related voting group involved in getting Bush his job: Old ladies who go to church but don't have much money to be buying HDTVs.
This is neither a pro or anti republican post. Just trying to figure this out. If the party-in-power's constituancy is gonna be mad at them for pulling the plug on Analog, what do you think they'll do?
TW
I know this was meant to be funny, but the humorous part is that Win2k3 works just fine on a 1GHZ processor for many, many tasks.
When we upgraded our most heavily used Win2k domain controller to Win2k3, we didn't give it any hardware upgrades. We basically run 400 users on our site and all FSMO roles, including the PDC emulator for an 800 user domain on a dual 933 with 768MB of RAM. During most of the day, the processor doesn't rise above 10%.
I know we're not serving files for 800 users or running a web site with huge transactions on this box, but that's just the point. If you match your hardware to your task, most people find they actually need far less than they think they do.
TW
Although I agree with you that this is not exactly news, as a recent email administrator I'd have to say your numbers are quite a bit off. In our organization, it's pretty close to roughly split between "cleaners", "savers" and "hybrids". I don't get this from anecdotal evidence of what I saw when helping out end-users either, but rather from looking at the mailbox sizes for everyone in the org.
"Savers" are easy to spot. They delete almost nothing except spam. We have quite a few users who would need a couple of the two gig Gmail accounts to hold all of their data.
"Cleaners" are also easy to spot. When someone has been with the company for 5+ years and their Exchange mailbox size is less than 20MB, you know they're not using their email as a database. These folks feel real stress when their email stretchs beyond the end of the page. My boss is one of these and he has very little understanding for why anyone would need a lot of email storage.
The "hybrids" are more difficult to spot. Many are not true hybrids, but actually "savers" who archive email semi-regularly. True "hybrids" delete most stuff, but whatever they deam "important" gets put in a nice mailbox folder tree. Over time these can become quite large, but it's never as bad as with real "savers". My purely subjective and anecdotalo observation is that these folks make up the most "normal" email user group. If you have three friends and two of them are freeks, the normal one is probably a "hybrid" email user.
I'm personally a "saver" who archives semi-regularly. Thanks to me, we basically don't have strict email limits anymore and people can store almost as much as they'd like. We never harrass VPs with multi-gig storage. But I have a lot of respect for "cleaners" too. For some reason, they never really have the problem of missing data that us "savers" are so worried about. The "cleaners" are like those folks you know that have absolutely no clutter in their houses, no junk drawer and no closet full of old hard drives. The truth is that we're afraid of losing things we "may need someday" but they know the truth is that we'll never find it in the clutter anyway, so why live with the clutter to begin with.
TW
(Hey, the GOP loves private businesses, right?)
Hmmm. Lets see.
-Pulic schools compete with private schools.
-Free health clinics compete with paid medical service.
-Police departments compete with private security and private investigation.
-The US Postal Service competes with UPS and FedEx
-Community theatre competes with Broadway
Interesting facts about these services:
1.In several of these activities, such as schools and the police, the stated goals of the public organization is to offer services at least as good as their private conterparts, but for no cost whatsoever to the consumer of the service.
2.Despite this, private enterprise actually makes quite a lot of money with their services, primarily by offering superior products.
I don't see what these folks are arguing about... unless their argument is that they don't know how to compete with beaurocratic government drones.
TW