Companies used to sell these, and it's the way people used to do presentations from their computers. You get a mediocre contrast ratio, iffy colors, and the LCD tends to melt from the heat (meaning, the image fades) after some time. That's the whole reason people moved to dedicated projectors.
The BWM web site is completely messed up in Mozilla 1.0RC2. If they can't even create a web site that renders properly in a standards-compliant browser, how much can you trust their automotive software?
Microsoft sells you a piece of software for a "valuable consideration"--you purchase the software from them. That's what lemon laws usually apply to. While there is also a license and contract involved in free software, there is no purchase.
As long as such lemon laws only apply to purchases, we are fine. If there is a risk that they apply to other contracts or other kinds of software, then we need to lobby to have it changed. Extending lemon laws to free software would also create enormous problems for scientific software, and I suspect the National Academy is probably going to be careful to make the distinction.
I can't get very excited about a free server for a proprietary game running on a proprietary OS. Why not go all the way and design a free server and a free game?
Biologists generally assume that there is a pretty hard limit on life expectancy somewhere around 120 years, based on observed limits on the number of divisions cells can undergo. Maybe that will turn out to be false and stem cells can somehow escape those limits. But the population studies so far aren't able to invalidate that hypothesis.
This is a monument after all. It's a testimony to our wasteful use of energy. It documents for the next 10000 years how we cared less about the generations that followed us and more about unnecessary and lazy luxuries. It establishes our disregard for the land and our lack of spirituality. It is a testament to irrational, self-destructive behavior. People coming across it millenia from now will think it is a monument to honor devils and daemons. And they will be right.
What these guys are doing is researching new UI designs that more closely map to what you are trying to do.
The fact that the group also happens to create a lot of neat looking graphical designs and widgets is completely irrelevant to the argument.
Speech is very unlikely to provide the core of interface,
So? My point is not about whether speech or visual interfaces are better. Sometimes one will be better, sometimes another will be better. My point is that Shneiderman is single-mindedly optimizing a couple of parameters that are easy to measure. That's great for giving the appearance of scientific rigor, and it makes it easy to grind out papers. It does not necessarily lead to better user interfaces.
Shneiderman says something in the video that he wants to be remembered for his formal experimental approach. My point is that his approach is misguided because it measures aspects of human computer interaction that are irrelevant or even distracting in many tasks.
Shneiderman's statements exhibit the typical HCI blinders: it assumes that efficiency and speed is the primary goal of human computer interaction. But there is no reason to believe that it is for many tasks: doing something stupid twice as fast merely lets you do twice as many stupid things.
His comment that "[speech] is the bicycle of user interfaces" is quite apt: a bicycle is a more efficient and healthier mode of transportation than cars. Ironically, in societies based around bicycles, people spend less time commuting and need to spend less time at the gym on stationary bikes making up for the time they have been sitting in traffic.
How limited and wrong-headed this single-minded attempt at gaining speed and usability through graphical user interfaces is already apparent in something like Windows. Supposedly, they make things easier to use and faster, but people spend a lot of time uselessly clicking around and many people who are actually familiar with the alternatives feel that language-based ways of interaction are faster.
Going faster doesn't necessarily get you to your goal more quickly. Maybe Shneiderman missed the story of the tortoise and the hare; he should look it up some time.
AbiWord is impressive, and as a word processor, it is very usable. Unfortunately, its import facilities still don't really work well enough to be a MS Word replacement in a corporate Microsoft-based environment: features like forms and scripting just don't quite import right. You can't blame the Abi authors for that: Microsoft actively makes this hard, but it does, unfortunately, limit the utility of AbiWord.
You already get 200MHz ARM-based handhelds (soon 500MHz to 1GHz) and a folding keyboard. With that, you get both more convenient handheld operation and a much better keyboard. And if you like, such a setup also runs Linux.
Your best bet, in this respect, is to find a company that is willing to release the source code to the software that is running on your hardware.
You mean when hell freezes over?
And why anyway? Echo cancellation is not that hard. A lot of open source 3D graphics software is much more sophisticated than echo cancellation. I think the reason why there are few open source implementations is because few people want it. As others have pointed out, open source telephony software contains this.
Part of the problem with some *nix developers I know is that they honestly don't have a clue what the various Windows platforms are capable of.
Part of the problem with Microsoft employees and Windows developers is that most of them honestly have no clue about non-Windows platforms, and never have had any either.
As someone who has been in the industry for nearly 30 years, I assure you, there is nothing, and has never been, anything novel or innovative on the Windows platform. Windows is a "me too" system, a collection of technologies copied and bought from others, and at that, it is mediocre at best. UNIX/Linux developers simply don't need to bother looking: they get the same old stuff on their own platforms.
Unless Microsoft is constrained by some kind of consent decree, this is just simple contract law. They can basically charge by whatever they want and sell to whoever they want. They might charge by square footage, number of pupils, or number of pencils if they like. They could charge a fixed percentage of your budget or just pick a number out of thin air.
A company now has to hire a legal team to check whether they can sell to a certain country
Funny you should mention that: they already have to do that under US export regulations.
and how much tax to charge.
I think hooking up a "Country" entry box to one of maybe 200 different tax rates is something even a simple e-commerce package can handle.
If an exporter really can't figure it out, they can do the same thing people have to do in the real world: employ the electronic equivalent of a local customs clearing house.
Now as you pointed out, the Customs service taxes goods coming into and out of a country. Let's say that you purchased a product online from a Brazilian site. They get taxed for it. Now the custom services adds additional tax on it. You are now double taxed on a product that should be taxed only once. How would you solve this logistical dilemma?
The same way it's been handled for the last 200 years. What's the problem? Usually (though not always), you don't pay sales tax on items destined for export, but the recipient pays import duty.
Physical goods are already taxed when they are imported. This works both ways: US exports to Europe are taxed in Europe (usually, the shipper handles the details), and US imports from Europe are taxed by the US customs service.
For downloadable purchases, Europeans have decided to tax them domestically. That's different from US policy, but so what? If American firms now want to sell downloadable stuff in Europe, they face the choice: either collect the European taxes or face increasing regulation by European governments. US firms generally prefer self-regulation. But the Europeans have the means to get their cut, if necessary, by taking the money out of on-line banking transactions.
The EU simply can't force US based companies to collect its taxes for it, neither for download nor for hard purchases.
Sure it can. For physical goods, it's really easy: the post office and delivery services are already doing it, and have been doing it for decades. Incidentally, US taxes are also due if you order something from Europe, so the situation is symmetrical.
For downloads, they can simply hold the buyers responsible for tax evasion and impose stiff penalties. You can bet that US companies would rather collect the tax themselves.
And how is that surprising? You have always had to pay taxes on orders delivered to you from the US. Whether you placed those orders by Internet, mail, or telephone makes no difference. Americans have to pay taxes on stuff they import from the UK as well.
It might make sense for the US and Europe to form a free trade zone. But until that happens, taxes on imported items are a fact of life, no matter how you order.
PC104 modules are not exactly cheap, and 266MHz is not exactly fast. You'd get something faster, cheaper with a dual AMD and spend less time on it.
If people are going to spend time on this sort of thing, why not do something interesting with the architecture? Use some interesting processors, use FPGAs for interconnects, whatever.
Many people with very little experience moved into IT in 2000 and 2001 in order to make a quick buck. Nothing wrong with that, but it was a temporary need, an employment bubble tracking an investment bubble. There is no reason, however, for many of those people to be able to expect continued employment in IT. In normal times, IT employment makes high demands on skill, education, and experience, and hiring is correspondingly selective.
You know ahead of time what a manufacturer charges for their cartridges and how much the whole "system" is going to be per page. I don't see much of a problem.
OTOH, I think companies who refill or remanufacture cartridges should be free to do so as well, using whatever technological means they can. In particular, I think the patent office should not grant either functional or design patents on print heads unless the print heads really innovate significantly technologically.
I don't think not paying dividends is an illegal action.
There is no question that it is against the law (read the article and the laws referenced). The only question is whether Microsoft's cash reserves actually are excessive.
Both of these examples are equivalent to the actions of MS.
If you think that Microsoft's actions are equivalent to that, then they are clearly unlawful. The only justification Microsoft has for keeping cash on hand without paying the higher tax rate is if it is needed for immediate business purposes.
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Companies used to sell these, and it's the way people used to do presentations from their computers. You get a mediocre contrast ratio, iffy colors, and the LCD tends to melt from the heat (meaning, the image fades) after some time. That's the whole reason people moved to dedicated projectors.
The BWM web site is completely messed up in Mozilla 1.0RC2. If they can't even create a web site that renders properly in a standards-compliant browser, how much can you trust their automotive software?
As long as such lemon laws only apply to purchases, we are fine. If there is a risk that they apply to other contracts or other kinds of software, then we need to lobby to have it changed. Extending lemon laws to free software would also create enormous problems for scientific software, and I suspect the National Academy is probably going to be careful to make the distinction.
I can't get very excited about a free server for a proprietary game running on a proprietary OS. Why not go all the way and design a free server and a free game?
The Dymaxion house seems very much like a Yurt constructed from more costly materials.
Biologists generally assume that there is a pretty hard limit on life expectancy somewhere around 120 years, based on observed limits on the number of divisions cells can undergo. Maybe that will turn out to be false and stem cells can somehow escape those limits. But the population studies so far aren't able to invalidate that hypothesis.
This is a monument after all. It's a testimony to our wasteful use of energy. It documents for the next 10000 years how we cared less about the generations that followed us and more about unnecessary and lazy luxuries. It establishes our disregard for the land and our lack of spirituality. It is a testament to irrational, self-destructive behavior. People coming across it millenia from now will think it is a monument to honor devils and daemons. And they will be right.
The fact that the group also happens to create a lot of neat looking graphical designs and widgets is completely irrelevant to the argument.
Speech is very unlikely to provide the core of interface,
So? My point is not about whether speech or visual interfaces are better. Sometimes one will be better, sometimes another will be better. My point is that Shneiderman is single-mindedly optimizing a couple of parameters that are easy to measure. That's great for giving the appearance of scientific rigor, and it makes it easy to grind out papers. It does not necessarily lead to better user interfaces.
Shneiderman says something in the video that he wants to be remembered for his formal experimental approach. My point is that his approach is misguided because it measures aspects of human computer interaction that are irrelevant or even distracting in many tasks.
His comment that "[speech] is the bicycle of user interfaces" is quite apt: a bicycle is a more efficient and healthier mode of transportation than cars. Ironically, in societies based around bicycles, people spend less time commuting and need to spend less time at the gym on stationary bikes making up for the time they have been sitting in traffic.
How limited and wrong-headed this single-minded attempt at gaining speed and usability through graphical user interfaces is already apparent in something like Windows. Supposedly, they make things easier to use and faster, but people spend a lot of time uselessly clicking around and many people who are actually familiar with the alternatives feel that language-based ways of interaction are faster.
Going faster doesn't necessarily get you to your goal more quickly. Maybe Shneiderman missed the story of the tortoise and the hare; he should look it up some time.
AbiWord is impressive, and as a word processor, it is very usable. Unfortunately, its import facilities still don't really work well enough to be a MS Word replacement in a corporate Microsoft-based environment: features like forms and scripting just don't quite import right. You can't blame the Abi authors for that: Microsoft actively makes this hard, but it does, unfortunately, limit the utility of AbiWord.
You already get 200MHz ARM-based handhelds (soon 500MHz to 1GHz) and a folding keyboard. With that, you get both more convenient handheld operation and a much better keyboard. And if you like, such a setup also runs Linux.
You mean when hell freezes over?
And why anyway? Echo cancellation is not that hard. A lot of open source 3D graphics software is much more sophisticated than echo cancellation. I think the reason why there are few open source implementations is because few people want it. As others have pointed out, open source telephony software contains this.
Indeed. And this tradeoff is worse than the disease it was trying to cure.
Part of the problem with Microsoft employees and Windows developers is that most of them honestly have no clue about non-Windows platforms, and never have had any either.
As someone who has been in the industry for nearly 30 years, I assure you, there is nothing, and has never been, anything novel or innovative on the Windows platform. Windows is a "me too" system, a collection of technologies copied and bought from others, and at that, it is mediocre at best. UNIX/Linux developers simply don't need to bother looking: they get the same old stuff on their own platforms.
Unless Microsoft is constrained by some kind of consent decree, this is just simple contract law. They can basically charge by whatever they want and sell to whoever they want. They might charge by square footage, number of pupils, or number of pencils if they like. They could charge a fixed percentage of your budget or just pick a number out of thin air.
Funny you should mention that: they already have to do that under US export regulations.
and how much tax to charge.
I think hooking up a "Country" entry box to one of maybe 200 different tax rates is something even a simple e-commerce package can handle.
If an exporter really can't figure it out, they can do the same thing people have to do in the real world: employ the electronic equivalent of a local customs clearing house.
Now as you pointed out, the Customs service taxes goods coming into and out of a country. Let's say that you purchased a product online from a Brazilian site. They get taxed for it. Now the custom services adds additional tax on it. You are now double taxed on a product that should be taxed only once. How would you solve this logistical dilemma?
The same way it's been handled for the last 200 years. What's the problem? Usually (though not always), you don't pay sales tax on items destined for export, but the recipient pays import duty.
For downloadable purchases, Europeans have decided to tax them domestically. That's different from US policy, but so what? If American firms now want to sell downloadable stuff in Europe, they face the choice: either collect the European taxes or face increasing regulation by European governments. US firms generally prefer self-regulation. But the Europeans have the means to get their cut, if necessary, by taking the money out of on-line banking transactions.
Sure it can. For physical goods, it's really easy: the post office and delivery services are already doing it, and have been doing it for decades. Incidentally, US taxes are also due if you order something from Europe, so the situation is symmetrical.
For downloads, they can simply hold the buyers responsible for tax evasion and impose stiff penalties. You can bet that US companies would rather collect the tax themselves.
It might make sense for the US and Europe to form a free trade zone. But until that happens, taxes on imported items are a fact of life, no matter how you order.
If people are going to spend time on this sort of thing, why not do something interesting with the architecture? Use some interesting processors, use FPGAs for interconnects, whatever.
Many people with very little experience moved into IT in 2000 and 2001 in order to make a quick buck. Nothing wrong with that, but it was a temporary need, an employment bubble tracking an investment bubble. There is no reason, however, for many of those people to be able to expect continued employment in IT. In normal times, IT employment makes high demands on skill, education, and experience, and hiring is correspondingly selective.
OTOH, I think companies who refill or remanufacture cartridges should be free to do so as well, using whatever technological means they can. In particular, I think the patent office should not grant either functional or design patents on print heads unless the print heads really innovate significantly technologically.
There is no question that it is against the law (read the article and the laws referenced). The only question is whether Microsoft's cash reserves actually are excessive.
Both of these examples are equivalent to the actions of MS.
If you think that Microsoft's actions are equivalent to that, then they are clearly unlawful. The only justification Microsoft has for keeping cash on hand without paying the higher tax rate is if it is needed for immediate business purposes.
Microsoft's enormous cash reserves may constitute an illegal tax shelter. See here and here for more details.