In the first place, you can argue Microsoft created their market through its poor security practices. =]
But in any case, we'd have crappy progress if we had to maintain every niche market. What about Opera on Mac? Isn't Apple killing them by including Safari with the OS? Isn't that pretty evil of Apple? etc.
There is no additional consideration for agreeing to an EULA -- you have already purchased the software. Them giving you permission to use it is pretty similar to you paying a company with a check what you already owe them.
But oddly EULAs have been upheld by at least one court.
I'll have to agree: nothing really beats Debian's package management system. As for installation, at the moment you can use the "bf2.4" installer (please don't use "vanilla" or "compact," they're horrid command-line-based things with the 2.2.x kernel that don't support many newer pieces of hardware), but a new set of installers is being worked on (the last I heard it was planned to have 3 frontends -- text, ncurses, and gtk, so you can do a text install over a serial line, an ncurses install at a local console from floppies, or a flashy gtk install from a bootable install CD).
On another note: if you're running a desktop system (i.e. something that's not a production system) you really should consider using either testing or unstable. Despite the name, 'unstable' actually isn't all that unstable. When stuff breaks, it usually gets fixed pretty quickly, and usually nothing too major breaks (the worst breakage is usually uninstallable packages, not broken versions of actually installed packages). But if that's too risky, 'testing' is quite stable. A lot of people run 'stable' when they really should be using testing or unstable, and then complain that the software in there is all a year old (Mozilla 1.0.x and whatnot). But that's the point of 'stable' -- it's designed to be for a production release that doesn't ever need (or receive) upgrades except for critical security patches. It's really stable, probably moreso than you want your desktop system to be, especially if you read slashdot.
The other respondent answered your other questions sufficiently (ABC/HR is very well-established testing methodology, and your other claims are just flat-out counterfactual).
As for asking people to submit their opinions, that is exactly what scientific perceptual testing does (and other scientific fields as well). All sorts of studies are run this way: a call for volunteers to take some test. Sometimes they pay you $20 to participate in some psychology experiment for an hour, sometimes they pay you $100 to take an MRI-scan, and so on. This is no different.
AAC is much newer, so there are more unexpired patents that apply to it. More importantly, AAC is seen as relevant, while MP3 is yesterday's technology that nobody is really pushing anymore, so the AAC patents are strictly enforced, while the MP3 ones are not.
not likely to make a difference
on
AAC Put To The Test
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The quality loss in dithering 24->16 is much less than the quality loss in doing a lossy encode to 128kbps AAC, by at least an order of magnitude.
All my essays have been "as long as needed to explain your points thoroughly." They usually come with rough guidelines (e.g. "5-7 pages" or "2500-3000 words" or something), but these are just to give you an idea of how ambitious a topic you should pick, not strict rules on how much to write.
I meant in comparison to other ways of hooking up devices at close range (say, USB). There I don't see BlueTooth as having much of an advantage, and somewhat of a disadvantage due to cost.
I mostly just see it as gadgetry for the sake of gadgetry. And I don't like being forced to pay more for stuff I buy because it includes gadgets I don't need.
At least I can still buy corded mice and keyboards.
Do you have no expenses or something? Most people have to pay rent, and taxes, and buy food, and car insurance, and car maintenance, and house/apartment maintenance, and so on.
Since I know all you Lunix zealots are going to flame me, here's an addendum: yes, I know you can do plenty of things from a GUI in Debian. I use it myself. But you can't really do anything important (system-config type stuff) without resorting to a CLI, or at best an ncurses-based "gui" (that still requires use of a keyboard).
The vast majority of people only own one, or at most two, of these devices. Syncing is not an issue for most people -- they use their cell phone to make calls.
So basically, the devices don't need Bluetooth support. Adding it would make them more expensive and only benefit a small fraction of the users, so isn't justified (which is why it's not being done).
There were approximately 10m PDAs sold worldwide in 2002. Of those, around 4m were sold in the United States. That's somewhere around 1.5% of the population. Even assuming that many people already had PDAs, that's maybe 3% of the population. In short -- only rich businessmen (and technophiles who always buy the latest gadgets). And that's PDAs sold. PDAs used is probably much lower -- while I only two 2 people who use PDAs, I do know around 10 people who have PDAs (most got them as presents and haven't used them since the initial tinkering around). Hell, I myself have a PDA (Dell Axim X5) I got for free, but I haven't really used it, because I just don't see what it's good for.
Where am I basing my personal observations? A computer science department at a university, of all places. One prof. and one departmental secretary has a PDA, the rest don't. And that's much higher than in the non-CS departments, where absolutely nobody has one. It's the same many other places. My dad's company gave away free PDAs to their engineers, but only around maybe 10% of them actually use their PDAs.
Cell phones have a much greater market penetration.
I have't used it myself, but people here seem to be describing Bluetooth as being designed for a very short range, on the order of 1-3m (people have mentioned that the advertised "10m" range doesn't actually work). So you'd have to get up and take your laptop over to the printer anyway.
Which is basically my point -- if this requires you to go over to the device anyway, saving you the 1 second it takes to connect a wire is pretty useless. The only time I see wireless as useful is if it has a greater range, so I could say print from any room in my house. But Bluetooth can't do that (802.11b can).
I don't really have a problem with having those cables; they're all behind the desk anyway. Even if Bluetooth was free I wouldn't want it. I see absolutely no advantage at all to making my printer wireless.
As for wireless headphones, there are currently no wireless headphones on the market with good sound quality at a reasonable price (Sennheiser makes pretty much the only well-regarded ones, and you'll pay a $75-$150 premium over the price of comparable wired headphones).
What the hell is the point of a wireless printer? What's wrong with connecting it with a wire? It's going to have to have a power cord anyway.
Really I don't see the use of Bluetooth. When I want to sync devices, I connect them with a wire. The only time wireless is useful is when I'm not close enough to connect a wire (which is what 802.11* is for).
Slashdot Mirror
I was just about to switch to AIX too.
In the first place, you can argue Microsoft created their market through its poor security practices. =]
But in any case, we'd have crappy progress if we had to maintain every niche market. What about Opera on Mac? Isn't Apple killing them by including Safari with the OS? Isn't that pretty evil of Apple? etc.
There is no additional consideration for agreeing to an EULA -- you have already purchased the software. Them giving you permission to use it is pretty similar to you paying a company with a check what you already owe them.
But oddly EULAs have been upheld by at least one court.
EULAs aren't supposed to be reasonable.
I'll have to agree: nothing really beats Debian's package management system. As for installation, at the moment you can use the "bf2.4" installer (please don't use "vanilla" or "compact," they're horrid command-line-based things with the 2.2.x kernel that don't support many newer pieces of hardware), but a new set of installers is being worked on (the last I heard it was planned to have 3 frontends -- text, ncurses, and gtk, so you can do a text install over a serial line, an ncurses install at a local console from floppies, or a flashy gtk install from a bootable install CD).
On another note: if you're running a desktop system (i.e. something that's not a production system) you really should consider using either testing or unstable. Despite the name, 'unstable' actually isn't all that unstable. When stuff breaks, it usually gets fixed pretty quickly, and usually nothing too major breaks (the worst breakage is usually uninstallable packages, not broken versions of actually installed packages). But if that's too risky, 'testing' is quite stable. A lot of people run 'stable' when they really should be using testing or unstable, and then complain that the software in there is all a year old (Mozilla 1.0.x and whatnot). But that's the point of 'stable' -- it's designed to be for a production release that doesn't ever need (or receive) upgrades except for critical security patches. It's really stable, probably moreso than you want your desktop system to be, especially if you read slashdot.
The other respondent answered your other questions sufficiently (ABC/HR is very well-established testing methodology, and your other claims are just flat-out counterfactual).
As for asking people to submit their opinions, that is exactly what scientific perceptual testing does (and other scientific fields as well). All sorts of studies are run this way: a call for volunteers to take some test. Sometimes they pay you $20 to participate in some psychology experiment for an hour, sometimes they pay you $100 to take an MRI-scan, and so on. This is no different.
AAC is much newer, so there are more unexpired patents that apply to it. More importantly, AAC is seen as relevant, while MP3 is yesterday's technology that nobody is really pushing anymore, so the AAC patents are strictly enforced, while the MP3 ones are not.
The quality loss in dithering 24->16 is much less than the quality loss in doing a lossy encode to 128kbps AAC, by at least an order of magnitude.
All my essays have been "as long as needed to explain your points thoroughly." They usually come with rough guidelines (e.g. "5-7 pages" or "2500-3000 words" or something), but these are just to give you an idea of how ambitious a topic you should pick, not strict rules on how much to write.
We read slashdot, so we did not get your joke. You'll have to explain.
I meant in comparison to other ways of hooking up devices at close range (say, USB). There I don't see BlueTooth as having much of an advantage, and somewhat of a disadvantage due to cost.
I mostly just see it as gadgetry for the sake of gadgetry. And I don't like being forced to pay more for stuff I buy because it includes gadgets I don't need.
At least I can still buy corded mice and keyboards.
Do you have no expenses or something? Most people have to pay rent, and taxes, and buy food, and car insurance, and car maintenance, and house/apartment maintenance, and so on.
And I'll pour hot grits on Natalie Portman if you don't pipe down.
It's named Mandrake, yet you went for the "racist" angle?
USB had a point: it was much faster than serial/parallel ports, and it could support more devices. You cannot plug in 12 devices to your serial port.
That's the beauty of mail-order transistors, you can just build your own tablet PC!
If you can afford to spend $5000 on computer-related stuff, you're rich.
I run Debian for that very reason. But I of course run it on a real computer. I just don't see how Debian is well-suited to a keyboardless setup.
Since I know all you Lunix zealots are going to flame me, here's an addendum: yes, I know you can do plenty of things from a GUI in Debian. I use it myself. But you can't really do anything important (system-config type stuff) without resorting to a CLI, or at best an ncurses-based "gui" (that still requires use of a keyboard).
Because the CLI is particularly well-suited to tablet PCs, you know.
The vast majority of people only own one, or at most two, of these devices. Syncing is not an issue for most people -- they use their cell phone to make calls.
So basically, the devices don't need Bluetooth support. Adding it would make them more expensive and only benefit a small fraction of the users, so isn't justified (which is why it's not being done).
There were approximately 10m PDAs sold worldwide in 2002. Of those, around 4m were sold in the United States. That's somewhere around 1.5% of the population. Even assuming that many people already had PDAs, that's maybe 3% of the population. In short -- only rich businessmen (and technophiles who always buy the latest gadgets). And that's PDAs sold. PDAs used is probably much lower -- while I only two 2 people who use PDAs, I do know around 10 people who have PDAs (most got them as presents and haven't used them since the initial tinkering around). Hell, I myself have a PDA (Dell Axim X5) I got for free, but I haven't really used it, because I just don't see what it's good for.
Where am I basing my personal observations? A computer science department at a university, of all places. One prof. and one departmental secretary has a PDA, the rest don't. And that's much higher than in the non-CS departments, where absolutely nobody has one. It's the same many other places. My dad's company gave away free PDAs to their engineers, but only around maybe 10% of them actually use their PDAs.
Cell phones have a much greater market penetration.
I have't used it myself, but people here seem to be describing Bluetooth as being designed for a very short range, on the order of 1-3m (people have mentioned that the advertised "10m" range doesn't actually work). So you'd have to get up and take your laptop over to the printer anyway.
Which is basically my point -- if this requires you to go over to the device anyway, saving you the 1 second it takes to connect a wire is pretty useless. The only time I see wireless as useful is if it has a greater range, so I could say print from any room in my house. But Bluetooth can't do that (802.11b can).
I don't really have a problem with having those cables; they're all behind the desk anyway. Even if Bluetooth was free I wouldn't want it. I see absolutely no advantage at all to making my printer wireless.
As for wireless headphones, there are currently no wireless headphones on the market with good sound quality at a reasonable price (Sennheiser makes pretty much the only well-regarded ones, and you'll pay a $75-$150 premium over the price of comparable wired headphones).
What the hell is the point of a wireless printer? What's wrong with connecting it with a wire? It's going to have to have a power cord anyway.
Really I don't see the use of Bluetooth. When I want to sync devices, I connect them with a wire. The only time wireless is useful is when I'm not close enough to connect a wire (which is what 802.11* is for).