Slackware 7 was my first distro (Well I did have a Red Hat 6.1 a while before but never really used it). I set it up as an internet gateway. It's a great way to learn Linux since it requires you to do much of the setup.
Having said that, I would never recommend it for real world use without proper package management (there are some for Slackware, but there not core components of the system). Trying to keep it maintained is a chore. Gentoo is the same, it has portage for package management but it still tends to break and need manual intervention (this was particularly bad when x86_64 was fairly new) and of course it's a rolling release so you will be running things that are not far off bleeding edge packages fairly often. But this and the face that its a from source distro, makes Gentoo great for development. Arch seemed ok, but you still need to read a news feed to know what manual changes you have to apply when the system updates to a different component.
Chromes Adblock is basically at the same level as Firefox's now (Well the UI could use a little work). With the developer version of the official Adblock Plus extension there is full blocking (as opposed to just removing content from the site and they both support the same scribing list of blocked content.
I can't really comment on NoScript since I never used it but there is probably something out for that too,
It's not at all like that. The difference is that Firefox is browsing random websites, it's possible that any of the hundred of video decoders in your OS might have a security exploit. Theres no way to sandbox 3rd party decoders. If there is an exploit in an old out of date proprietary codec that no one updates anymore then it's screwed. Even if the codec is still maintained you are relying on the whims of that company. Shotwell is an offline photo viewer, your only going to be viewing photos you specifically want to look at.
Even if you just whitelist a few codecs (ie H264, Theora, Webm), there is still no way to update/secure those specific codecs. When was the last time you heard of a H.264 codec update for Windows.
It's also being done for idealogical reasons. The internet needs to remain open, accepting H.264 codecs (with Firefox being the only real holdout against it becoming the defacto internet standard by having %35 market share) basically means that every single internet capable device now has to pay a licence fee to over a hundred companies holding thousands of licenses. There are also potential problems in the future, what happens when those companies decide they wan't more money. They agreed to giving free licensing until 2016 or so, that 5 years short of the patent expire date. How much would we have been up for in those if it was a basic requirement of internet browsing. Those companies would have been wanting to make up for the missed money in that time. Firefox holding out gave Google time to get and open VP8. I also wouldn't be surprised if they where prepared to defend it by taking it all the way to the supreme court if possible and try and get software patents themselfs overturned (remember Google isn't actually a software company, its an advertising company).
No matter how loudly you complain, if you have still brought their stuff, they don't give a fuck.
Corporations are there to make profit, no to be well liked. It just so happens that in many cases being well liked affects purchaser decision or stock price, but not in all cases.
Firstly, this internet isn't going to be connected to the systems that drive your car. The worst that happens is you loose your music or someone screws with your GPS navigation.
Secondly, cars are already heavily computerized. There was the Toyota breaking problem which was fairly bad, but I haven't heard of any other issues. Cars are already very complex systems, they have 'bugs' of their own the breaking issue was a computer one but it could have just been normal mechanical failure, there is no data to say that a computer system running things is somehow worse. The idea is mainly caused by people dealing with BSODs on Windows and such. The stuff you use on your desktop is not the same stuff as is in cars. Cars will have very fixed functions for the software they use not general use like we see on normal computer. Computers see widespread use in planes, space shuttles without issues, occasionally there are problems but its no more of an issue than regular problems. Adding a computer if its done right it can help reduce the problems or their impact (such as a system that uses sensors to warn if something is running how or vibrating weirdly or one that makes an emergency call when a collision is detected and feeds live video to the emergency workers so they can asses the situation in advance).
I agree that this system seems to be a giant hand out, they are talking about money through the entire piece, nothing about how the end users can benefit. Will I be able to download music from my home system? Or will I be forced to purchase through the Toyota Music Store. What about apps, will we see a Apple type store or a Android free market?
There is a point at which bandwidth becomes pointless. If you have a low latency system that has enough bandwidth to display HD videos for example, you no longer need to download movies, you can just watch them. The same can be applied to your entire computer desktop. Of course resolutions will be increasing and so on but so will the technologies.
That system might not be here yet, but it will be eventually. I doubt it will be in orbit due to the latency (even low latency is too much), but radio travels as fast as fiber and lasers are wireless too and won't interfere. Actually an advanced system of lasers might work much better than fiber, you don't have to lay the cables and you can just keep adding beams and receptors, just need a simple deployable system, like wifi except with multiple lasers that automatically locate receptors in range (maybe with some 2ndary radio system for the general direction) and aim a beam towards them.
In addition to that, there are many low bandwidth/low latency applications. Imagine giving all the villages/people in Africa cheap solar $5 OLPC style computers with built in internet access without needing a hub, server or whatever. They might not be able to do anything more than basic web browsing but that would be a huge revolution. They dropped a computer into an Indian village, came back a few months later and all the children now spoke English.
The problem is that MPEG-LA claim that is impossible to implement a codec without infringing on any patents. So according VP8 will have some stuff in it that MPEG-LA have patents on. It might be that On2 have actually licensed some patents from them for use in their codecs.
Of course there is a good chance this claim is a load of FUD from MPEG-LA, there are after all patents like Dirac that have been designed based on old, 20+ old techniques.
HTML5 already runs at Flash level speeds for me on Chrome. Firefox isn't too shabby either. It's often faster and has less resource usage (my netbook barely plays Flash videos but has no problems with HTML5 ones).
As for the annoying usage of Flash vs the annoying usage of HTML5, HTML5 might be a bit harder to block since it integrates directly into the page. You can currently block all Flash with Flash block, of course there might be a HTML5 canvas block, but canvas might end up being used to just about everything.
But with that said, it should be eaiser to block things like ads (currently adblock can't block those annoying 30 second ad clips that play before those 45 second videos), however a grease monkey script should be fairly easy to throw together to skip them and normal adblock rules can be used to block domain specific ads. There is also the potential for a grease monkey/adblock hybrid model.
Grey goo would be much worse. A plague can be contained, vaccinated against, small holdout pockets, some people might have a resistance etc...
Grey goo on the other hand could destroy the planet in 48 hours depending on the speed of the replicators, there wouldn't really be any defense against it since you would have to make enough counter defense goo to stop the grey goo (thats even assuming someone could design and deploy some kind of anti-goo in the time it would take for the grey goo to so its thing, we might not even know there is any grey goo until it's too late.). If you had something effective it would have to be able to take down the grey goo faster than it is growing and it would have an exponential head start. Grey goo has the potential to be air born too killing off all the people before it gets to the main core of the planet.
I think the only real defense against grey goo would be if individual people had their own nanofabs that where capable of creating their own self contained habitats that where resistant to the grey goo (or even used it). You would basically loose the planet though. Of course out of the survivors, there will be some who might make their own grey goo variants that the habitats don't protect from and launch them out.
Actually giving them the computers might be enough to teach them English. There was the Hole in a Wall project where they dumped a computer on a Indian village and just left it there in a public place. When they came back the children had all learned English.
I would argue that SSD's have already replaced magnetic drives for situations where speed is the most important factor, although there arn't really too many situations like that (and many of those can use ramdisk).
For desktops, laptops, netbooks and workstations a few GB are enough and the increase speed is much more useful. I have a 60gb OCZ Vertex SSD on my desktop. Spae wise its fine and I'm dual booting. I do have a 2ndry drive but its only used for games.
Most people won't likely need 14TB in 2020. I have 4TB currently and am using around 3TB, but I'm not most people. Obviously data centres will need bulk storage too. And 14TB would probably last me until 2020.
Another issue is that it's going to get harder and harder to cram bits magnetically (the superparamagnetic effect), I believe they are already running into some problems although there are alternative solutions such as a flat square bed that moves rather than the magnetic disk with arm for example. Flash on the other hand can just stack the chips and will likly follow Moore's law which won't be likely to run into problems until after 2020.
We could see a large migration to cloud storage for home users (obviously the backend will still be magnetic). People will stream videos rather than save them for example.
If it takes you a year to tweak an OS, your doing it wrong.
Took me a few hours to get it up to what I was used to, and for the record I completely replace the Windows UI with bblean (A Fluxbox like shell for Windows). Install cygwin and setup scripts so I can do things like fire up rxvt and ssh into my server. Install things like Office 2007, gedit (for windows now:)), Development tools (geany, vim) and so on. I also went from a 32bit install to a 64bit one. Install iTunes (Since my music is on a DAAP server)
Basically I spent a few hours making it usable (more like Linux).
Granted there will be the occasional thing I forgot to install, or a tweak I missed but they get done as I need them.
Besides Windows7 is almost exactly the same as Vista, just without being so horrible. Your not going to run into any major differences with it. The final release of Ubuntu is in a few days from now, that should be enough time for people to have gotten comfortable.
Well the exponential growth has been going on since the very first computer systems where made way back before Moore's law even existed, when they where still using vacuum tubes.
Arguably it goes back even further if you consider it to be systems for information processing rather than strictly computer systems. Things like writing, transcribing books, the printing press, mathematics and so on.
The growth will probably stop eventually but it's unlikely to occur before any kind of singularity happens, even if it does the world will be drastically different. The planned 2012 IBM supercomputer should have about enough processing power to emulate a human brain (its not doing that but they have the blue brain project underway), By 2025 a $1000 computer should have that power (consider what the super computers of that time will have). Unless you think Moore's law is going to kick us all in the nuts in the next 15 years we should be well on our way. Traditional Moore's law (as it applies to transistors on silicon) should continue till some time around 2030 (although some earlier limits are as low as 2020 and it might slow down things leading up to the point). This doesn't take into account the dozens of other non-traditional technologies under research that aren't Moore's law relates: memsistors, photonic computing, DNA/quantum computing (only useful for some specific computation but AI might apply), 3D-ICs, carbon nanotubes, graphite, spintronics.
After some kind of singularity (assuming we survive) we have no idea what the limits are, can we make new sub universes where the laws are better optimized for computing? or change the laws in some specific area? Can we use the theory of relativity to speed computation up (ie I leave a computer on the planet and travel at close to the speed of light in a circle until it finishes number crunching, or hopefully some similar system on a chip)? Can we find some ultimate universal loophole for infinite energy/computation? A cpu that works in an infinite number of parallel universes? Maybe we will hit the universal wall, but by that point it won't matter so much.
I had a LED light blow within 6 months. This was a cheapo one though and the powers not so clean here but it's somthing to watch for befoure forking over money to redo your whole house.
They can probably still sue in countries where the product it sold. Specifically in Texas with that corrupt IP friendly courthouse. They might not stop you making the product, but if you can't sell to America you have lost a majority of sales.
The alternative solution is to opensource everything, compile or download the patented bits at run time with some giant disclaimer that no one will bother to read and make a business model around that. Like Ubuntu for example.
We really need a libPatentInfringment where we can just dump everything and categorize it, then look for a way to buy the patents or work around them. Things like FAT that doesn't bother to write the old DOS style filenames to avoid the patent on storing stuff with both long and short file names, but if you want it to, just install that lib (although since its in the kernel an external library probably won't work, but you get the idea).
One worrying thing is the new exFat filesystem in use in newer version of Windows. You can be sure after the patent lawsuites suit's on normal Fat that there is patented stuff in exFat. Unfortunately a a new FS is going to be required soon as flash drives start to hit the larger sizes. With every desktop running Windows and most of the population not even knowing what a filesystem is, everyone will end up using it. It's also the standard for SDXC.
This will of course leave Linux users screwed and every one ever who wants to make a windows compatible device like an mp3 player will need too pay a MS tax.
It's unfortunate that we couldn't switch to some open system. I believe UDF is fairly open and is the BluRay standard so should work on many systems. Anyone know if UDF support writing under Windows Vista/7? Can it even be read off flash media?
About the only thing I can say about the filesystem is that it won't be long befoure USB drives go the way of floppy drives as everything moves online.
Looks like Windows 7/Vista do support writing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format#Native_OS_support so it might be the best FS to choose from in future for compatibility when you don't need to use older XP era systems as latest Linux and OSX both seem to have write support. The only thing is I can't find any information about patents or license fees so I don't know if its an open standard or not. Still won't help with every digital camera manufacturer, SDXC and mp3 player switching to the MS system.
It's not the "Not Invented Here", its more Apple trying to keep vendor lockin, and everyone getting videos from iTunes rather thn YouTube. MS trying to gain a monopoly over the internet with a priopratart wmv format and SilverLight. And everyone else trying to stop MS from gaining the monopoly while they have %75 browser penetration and %95 OS share. Haven't heard much from Adobe other then there attempts to keep flash in the game by opening up to phone vendors (which Apple ignored of course). Also the fact that Theora isn't a great codec compared to the commercial ones, just the open one Fortunately Google own YouTube.
No one seems to mention Dirac or SNOW although they are newer and might require more cpu usage (problematic for phones and such).
I use one of those magnets to hold up an entire case of screw drivers.
As an added bonus they magnetize the screwdrivers so the screws stay on the end rather than fall into the dark, sharp and spiky depth of the case (its not strong enough to be a danger to magnetic harddrives).
They are a massive pain to remove though, and when you do there is often still a metal bracket attached.
The quote only really makes sense when your talking about a world where the only force is money, but thats not the case here, people break DRM for their own ethical, moral reasons, to prevent locking, or probably more often just for fun or because its convenient. (There could be money in it too if your breaking a competitors DRM, Maybe Amazon broke Adobes DRM to drive more authors to Kindel). In the end people aren't trying to break DRM so they can sell bootlegged copies of the content.
Once the DRM is broken, it might as well not exist since if the DRM ever actually becomes a problem for someone, they can just grab the tool.
You only need 1 person on the planet to break it and spread the information of how its done then that DRM is dead for good and everything ever encrypted with it is now accessible.
And only 99c a song isn't really enough, the price might not matter but convince is a big issue. Its easier for me to grab an album of PirateBay, I don't have to enter any credit card information and it's more continent after since. I'm not locked into Apple.
Perhapses on the individual scale (say giving a copy to a friend), removing the DRM isn't worth the effort, but the alternative involves the friend downloading another copy of the content either legitimately or illegally, its just as easy either way. Or just not getting the content at all.
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Slackware 7 was my first distro (Well I did have a Red Hat 6.1 a while before but never really used it). I set it up as an internet gateway. It's a great way to learn Linux since it requires you to do much of the setup.
Having said that, I would never recommend it for real world use without proper package management (there are some for Slackware, but there not core components of the system). Trying to keep it maintained is a chore. Gentoo is the same, it has portage for package management but it still tends to break and need manual intervention (this was particularly bad when x86_64 was fairly new) and of course it's a rolling release so you will be running things that are not far off bleeding edge packages fairly often. But this and the face that its a from source distro, makes Gentoo great for development. Arch seemed ok, but you still need to read a news feed to know what manual changes you have to apply when the system updates to a different component.
Chromes Adblock is basically at the same level as Firefox's now (Well the UI could use a little work). With the developer version of the official Adblock Plus extension there is full blocking (as opposed to just removing content from the site and they both support the same scribing list of blocked content. I can't really comment on NoScript since I never used it but there is probably something out for that too,
When people give you massive amounts of money for failing, I would say you have a fairly good business model.
It's not at all like that. The difference is that Firefox is browsing random websites, it's possible that any of the hundred of video decoders in your OS might have a security exploit. Theres no way to sandbox 3rd party decoders. If there is an exploit in an old out of date proprietary codec that no one updates anymore then it's screwed. Even if the codec is still maintained you are relying on the whims of that company. Shotwell is an offline photo viewer, your only going to be viewing photos you specifically want to look at.
Even if you just whitelist a few codecs (ie H264, Theora, Webm), there is still no way to update/secure those specific codecs. When was the last time you heard of a H.264 codec update for Windows.
It's also being done for idealogical reasons. The internet needs to remain open, accepting H.264 codecs (with Firefox being the only real holdout against it becoming the defacto internet standard by having %35 market share) basically means that every single internet capable device now has to pay a licence fee to over a hundred companies holding thousands of licenses. There are also potential problems in the future, what happens when those companies decide they wan't more money. They agreed to giving free licensing until 2016 or so, that 5 years short of the patent expire date. How much would we have been up for in those if it was a basic requirement of internet browsing. Those companies would have been wanting to make up for the missed money in that time. Firefox holding out gave Google time to get and open VP8. I also wouldn't be surprised if they where prepared to defend it by taking it all the way to the supreme court if possible and try and get software patents themselfs overturned (remember Google isn't actually a software company, its an advertising company).
No matter how loudly you complain, if you have still brought their stuff, they don't give a fuck.
Corporations are there to make profit, no to be well liked. It just so happens that in many cases being well liked affects purchaser decision or stock price, but not in all cases.
Firstly, this internet isn't going to be connected to the systems that drive your car. The worst that happens is you loose your music or someone screws with your GPS navigation.
Secondly, cars are already heavily computerized. There was the Toyota breaking problem which was fairly bad, but I haven't heard of any other issues. Cars are already very complex systems, they have 'bugs' of their own the breaking issue was a computer one but it could have just been normal mechanical failure, there is no data to say that a computer system running things is somehow worse. The idea is mainly caused by people dealing with BSODs on Windows and such. The stuff you use on your desktop is not the same stuff as is in cars. Cars will have very fixed functions for the software they use not general use like we see on normal computer. Computers see widespread use in planes, space shuttles without issues, occasionally there are problems but its no more of an issue than regular problems. Adding a computer if its done right it can help reduce the problems or their impact (such as a system that uses sensors to warn if something is running how or vibrating weirdly or one that makes an emergency call when a collision is detected and feeds live video to the emergency workers so they can asses the situation in advance).
I agree that this system seems to be a giant hand out, they are talking about money through the entire piece, nothing about how the end users can benefit. Will I be able to download music from my home system? Or will I be forced to purchase through the Toyota Music Store. What about apps, will we see a Apple type store or a Android free market?
There is a point at which bandwidth becomes pointless. If you have a low latency system that has enough bandwidth to display HD videos for example, you no longer need to download movies, you can just watch them. The same can be applied to your entire computer desktop. Of course resolutions will be increasing and so on but so will the technologies.
That system might not be here yet, but it will be eventually. I doubt it will be in orbit due to the latency (even low latency is too much), but radio travels as fast as fiber and lasers are wireless too and won't interfere. Actually an advanced system of lasers might work much better than fiber, you don't have to lay the cables and you can just keep adding beams and receptors, just need a simple deployable system, like wifi except with multiple lasers that automatically locate receptors in range (maybe with some 2ndary radio system for the general direction) and aim a beam towards them.
In addition to that, there are many low bandwidth/low latency applications. Imagine giving all the villages/people in Africa cheap solar $5 OLPC style computers with built in internet access without needing a hub, server or whatever. They might not be able to do anything more than basic web browsing but that would be a huge revolution. They dropped a computer into an Indian village, came back a few months later and all the children now spoke English.
The problem is that MPEG-LA claim that is impossible to implement a codec without infringing on any patents. So according VP8 will have some stuff in it that MPEG-LA have patents on. It might be that On2 have actually licensed some patents from them for use in their codecs. Of course there is a good chance this claim is a load of FUD from MPEG-LA, there are after all patents like Dirac that have been designed based on old, 20+ old techniques.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IncidentReports/2010-04-29-Late-respin-for-bug-570765 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODE5Ng
HTML5 already runs at Flash level speeds for me on Chrome. Firefox isn't too shabby either. It's often faster and has less resource usage (my netbook barely plays Flash videos but has no problems with HTML5 ones).
As for the annoying usage of Flash vs the annoying usage of HTML5, HTML5 might be a bit harder to block since it integrates directly into the page. You can currently block all Flash with Flash block, of course there might be a HTML5 canvas block, but canvas might end up being used to just about everything.
But with that said, it should be eaiser to block things like ads (currently adblock can't block those annoying 30 second ad clips that play before those 45 second videos), however a grease monkey script should be fairly easy to throw together to skip them and normal adblock rules can be used to block domain specific ads. There is also the potential for a grease monkey/adblock hybrid model.
Convincing large number of physicists it exists, while in reality doesn't.
Grey goo would be much worse. A plague can be contained, vaccinated against, small holdout pockets, some people might have a resistance etc...
Grey goo on the other hand could destroy the planet in 48 hours depending on the speed of the replicators, there wouldn't really be any defense against it since you would have to make enough counter defense goo to stop the grey goo (thats even assuming someone could design and deploy some kind of anti-goo in the time it would take for the grey goo to so its thing, we might not even know there is any grey goo until it's too late.). If you had something effective it would have to be able to take down the grey goo faster than it is growing and it would have an exponential head start. Grey goo has the potential to be air born too killing off all the people before it gets to the main core of the planet.
I think the only real defense against grey goo would be if individual people had their own nanofabs that where capable of creating their own self contained habitats that where resistant to the grey goo (or even used it). You would basically loose the planet though. Of course out of the survivors, there will be some who might make their own grey goo variants that the habitats don't protect from and launch them out.
What about the 3D hologram generator they somehow have in Bones. WTF is up with that?
Actually giving them the computers might be enough to teach them English. There was the Hole in a Wall project where they dumped a computer on a Indian village and just left it there in a public place. When they came back the children had all learned English.
Really depends on what they mean by replacement.
I would argue that SSD's have already replaced magnetic drives for situations where speed is the most important factor, although there arn't really too many situations like that (and many of those can use ramdisk).
For desktops, laptops, netbooks and workstations a few GB are enough and the increase speed is much more useful. I have a 60gb OCZ Vertex SSD on my desktop. Spae wise its fine and I'm dual booting. I do have a 2ndry drive but its only used for games.
Most people won't likely need 14TB in 2020. I have 4TB currently and am using around 3TB, but I'm not most people. Obviously data centres will need bulk storage too. And 14TB would probably last me until 2020.
Another issue is that it's going to get harder and harder to cram bits magnetically (the superparamagnetic effect), I believe they are already running into some problems although there are alternative solutions such as a flat square bed that moves rather than the magnetic disk with arm for example. Flash on the other hand can just stack the chips and will likly follow Moore's law which won't be likely to run into problems until after 2020.
We could see a large migration to cloud storage for home users (obviously the backend will still be magnetic). People will stream videos rather than save them for example.
The price halving time for NAND Flash is 1.4 years, Kryder's Law says something similar: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/Kryder's.html
If it takes you a year to tweak an OS, your doing it wrong.
:)), Development tools (geany, vim) and so on. I also went from a 32bit install to a 64bit one. Install iTunes (Since my music is on a DAAP server)
Took me a few hours to get it up to what I was used to, and for the record I completely replace the Windows UI with bblean (A Fluxbox like shell for Windows). Install cygwin and setup scripts so I can do things like fire up rxvt and ssh into my server. Install things like Office 2007, gedit (for windows now
Basically I spent a few hours making it usable (more like Linux).
Granted there will be the occasional thing I forgot to install, or a tweak I missed but they get done as I need them.
Besides Windows7 is almost exactly the same as Vista, just without being so horrible. Your not going to run into any major differences with it. The final release of Ubuntu is in a few days from now, that should be enough time for people to have gotten comfortable.
Well the exponential growth has been going on since the very first computer systems where made way back before Moore's law even existed, when they where still using vacuum tubes.
Arguably it goes back even further if you consider it to be systems for information processing rather than strictly computer systems. Things like writing, transcribing books, the printing press, mathematics and so on.
The growth will probably stop eventually but it's unlikely to occur before any kind of singularity happens, even if it does the world will be drastically different. The planned 2012 IBM supercomputer should have about enough processing power to emulate a human brain (its not doing that but they have the blue brain project underway), By 2025 a $1000 computer should have that power (consider what the super computers of that time will have). Unless you think Moore's law is going to kick us all in the nuts in the next 15 years we should be well on our way. Traditional Moore's law (as it applies to transistors on silicon) should continue till some time around 2030 (although some earlier limits are as low as 2020 and it might slow down things leading up to the point). This doesn't take into account the dozens of other non-traditional technologies under research that aren't Moore's law relates: memsistors, photonic computing, DNA/quantum computing (only useful for some specific computation but AI might apply), 3D-ICs, carbon nanotubes, graphite, spintronics.
After some kind of singularity (assuming we survive) we have no idea what the limits are, can we make new sub universes where the laws are better optimized for computing? or change the laws in some specific area? Can we use the theory of relativity to speed computation up (ie I leave a computer on the planet and travel at close to the speed of light in a circle until it finishes number crunching, or hopefully some similar system on a chip)? Can we find some ultimate universal loophole for infinite energy/computation? A cpu that works in an infinite number of parallel universes? Maybe we will hit the universal wall, but by that point it won't matter so much.
I had a LED light blow within 6 months. This was a cheapo one though and the powers not so clean here but it's somthing to watch for befoure forking over money to redo your whole house.
They can probably still sue in countries where the product it sold. Specifically in Texas with that corrupt IP friendly courthouse. They might not stop you making the product, but if you can't sell to America you have lost a majority of sales.
The alternative solution is to opensource everything, compile or download the patented bits at run time with some giant disclaimer that no one will bother to read and make a business model around that. Like Ubuntu for example.
We really need a libPatentInfringment where we can just dump everything and categorize it, then look for a way to buy the patents or work around them. Things like FAT that doesn't bother to write the old DOS style filenames to avoid the patent on storing stuff with both long and short file names, but if you want it to, just install that lib (although since its in the kernel an external library probably won't work, but you get the idea).
Most newer OSes seem to support UDF writing, so hopfully it will work in future: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format#Native_OS_support
One worrying thing is the new exFat filesystem in use in newer version of Windows. You can be sure after the patent lawsuites suit's on normal Fat that there is patented stuff in exFat. Unfortunately a a new FS is going to be required soon as flash drives start to hit the larger sizes. With every desktop running Windows and most of the population not even knowing what a filesystem is, everyone will end up using it. It's also the standard for SDXC.
This will of course leave Linux users screwed and every one ever who wants to make a windows compatible device like an mp3 player will need too pay a MS tax.
It's unfortunate that we couldn't switch to some open system. I believe UDF is fairly open and is the BluRay standard so should work on many systems. Anyone know if UDF support writing under Windows Vista/7? Can it even be read off flash media?
About the only thing I can say about the filesystem is that it won't be long befoure USB drives go the way of floppy drives as everything moves online.
Looks like Windows 7/Vista do support writing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format#Native_OS_support so it might be the best FS to choose from in future for compatibility when you don't need to use older XP era systems as latest Linux and OSX both seem to have write support. The only thing is I can't find any information about patents or license fees so I don't know if its an open standard or not. Still won't help with every digital camera manufacturer, SDXC and mp3 player switching to the MS system.
It's not the "Not Invented Here", its more Apple trying to keep vendor lockin, and everyone getting videos from iTunes rather thn YouTube. MS trying to gain a monopoly over the internet with a priopratart wmv format and SilverLight. And everyone else trying to stop MS from gaining the monopoly while they have %75 browser penetration and %95 OS share. Haven't heard much from Adobe other then there attempts to keep flash in the game by opening up to phone vendors (which Apple ignored of course). Also the fact that Theora isn't a great codec compared to the commercial ones, just the open one Fortunately Google own YouTube.
No one seems to mention Dirac or SNOW although they are newer and might require more cpu usage (problematic for phones and such).
I use one of those magnets to hold up an entire case of screw drivers.
As an added bonus they magnetize the screwdrivers so the screws stay on the end rather than fall into the dark, sharp and spiky depth of the case (its not strong enough to be a danger to magnetic harddrives).
They are a massive pain to remove though, and when you do there is often still a metal bracket attached.
Except its not like a safe at all...
The quote only really makes sense when your talking about a world where the only force is money, but thats not the case here, people break DRM for their own ethical, moral reasons, to prevent locking, or probably more often just for fun or because its convenient. (There could be money in it too if your breaking a competitors DRM, Maybe Amazon broke Adobes DRM to drive more authors to Kindel). In the end people aren't trying to break DRM so they can sell bootlegged copies of the content.
Once the DRM is broken, it might as well not exist since if the DRM ever actually becomes a problem for someone, they can just grab the tool.
You only need 1 person on the planet to break it and spread the information of how its done then that DRM is dead for good and everything ever encrypted with it is now accessible.
And only 99c a song isn't really enough, the price might not matter but convince is a big issue. Its easier for me to grab an album of PirateBay, I don't have to enter any credit card information and it's more continent after since. I'm not locked into Apple.
Perhapses on the individual scale (say giving a copy to a friend), removing the DRM isn't worth the effort, but the alternative involves the friend downloading another copy of the content either legitimately or illegally, its just as easy either way. Or just not getting the content at all.
Too bad shes only smiling to turn the volume up :(