Linux exists today largely as a response to microsoft. Microsoft makes its living selling copyrighted and protected - "sealed" boxes of software. Many develop open source code as a reaction against this. If microsoft did not have its monopoly on windows, anyone could copy and redistribute it and there would be substantially less incentive to contribute to or to use linux.
Because windows is proprietary, an entirely new operating system continues to grow in popularity and function. A competitor exists in the market largely due to the protections afforded windows under copyright. This is exactly the intent of copyright as spelled out in section 8 of the US constitution.
That's exactly where they are headed - and once they have it DRM will become a moot issue. And that's ALSO what they want because as soon as it's guaranteed WE THE PEOPLE have no profitable means of *personal* publication and their future is assured via the new media welfare system, their control of all major channels of communications will be complete.
Except... uh, punk wasn't "about" taking drugs OR having lots of sex. Every punk I knew was fairly intelligent and well learned and none I knew were into sex or drugs. Sex and drugs were the currency of the old pop machine and punk was a rebellion against all that.
No one is demanding I have electricity in my house. In some jurisdictions this is not the case - but in those jurisdictions who is it demanding you keep power connected? Isa it the electric company? No, it is the zoning commission; it is the elected representatives.
I can run a gas generator on pigshit from now until forever and the only money the oil companies see is what I spend filling the crankcase every six months. I can also power one from frenchy fry oil or sunflower seeds or whatever I care to grow.
If you are determined to live in the city you cannot blame others for your choice. Living in the city means you will have to pay for resources that are otherwise plentiful in less populated areas. Likewise, living in a less populated area I cannot just hop over to the library or the museum whenever the mood strikes because there simply aren't any. I'm also on shitty dialup whereas even the small towns around here offer some sort of broadband.
BTW, contemporary solar cells in proper focused collectors can run well over 25% efficiency. But solar power doesn't just mean electricity - a properly designed home can use the sun for heating and cooling and hot water supply with zero electrical requirements for those tasks. It doesn't cost more to build a home like that, but you're not going to find many just sitting around waiting to be occupied.
We all make our own choices in life. Blaming others for choices we have made and later regret only leads to more misery.
Let's consider: directv offers - estimating here - maybe 50 channels that air commercials. this doesn't include the various affiliates of which you really can only 'subscribe" to one group at a time.
Average show is 23 minutes, hat's seven minutes of commercials or about 15 minutes of commercials an hour. Average commercial is 30 seconds, so that's thirty commercials per channel per hour. Let's do the engineering thing and go worst case is maybe twenty commercials per hour per channel.
Over 50 stations, that's 1000 commercials per hour.
Think about all the money being spent to deliver those 1000 commercials per hour...
In this article it mentions "children" but most of the references are to teenage boys. There is no specific mention of "boys appearing to be as young as seven" or any of that sort of language - it mentions teens and puberty many times.
The hysteria that is driving most of the english speaking nations to new depths of fear, hate and paranoia - fueled in large part by a planetary alignment between religious zealots and hardcore feminist zealots - has resulted in a ridiculous all-encompassing definition of "child pornography" that includes virtually anyone under the age of 18. Old Penthouse magazines featuring 16 year old french girls can now be prosecuted as "child pornography." Pictures of teenagers who would willingly be doing that stuff anyway - who willingly ARE engaging in sex acts and posing for pictures (some even photographing themselves) - can be prosecuted as child pornography.
Protecting children from exploitation is fine - but not when it costs otherwise innocent people their liberty. We would not tolerate locking up all alcoholics to prevent a few traffic accidents, and we should not be tolerating these laws against what are essentially thought crimes.
You cannot "protect" children from life - attempts to do so only leave them naive and prime candidates for exploitation as young adults. These ridiculous taboos against otherwise NORMAL HUMAN BEHAVIOR are creating a seriously fucked up and perverse culture... and we have the teen pregnancy and AIDS statistics to prove it.
You just said "why" when you asked the question. If the punishment is exactly the same for raping the kid next door and getting off on a real, live person or jacking off alone to pictures of some anonymous kid half a world away, where is the incentive for a person of such proclivities to abstain from just fucking the kid next door?
If the punishment for going 100MPH over the limit is exactly the same as the punishment for going 10MPH over the limit, why the fuck not just drive 140MPH until you get stopped?
Yeesh. Figures this is michigan. I had the misfortune of being born in that shithole. haven't been back in twenty years and don't miss it a bit.
Don't want to pay your electric company? Invest in solar panels, a diesel or lp gas generator, thermocouples or whatever it takes.
I escape pretty much literally thousands of tv ads every day - I don't watch stations that air commercials.
You, by not erecting off grid energy sources for yourself and watching tv every day are contributing to that pollution that so bothers you. So turn off the bloody tv and save that energy. Use that time you used to waste being a couch potato lobbying your representatives.
You are addicted to a culture you despise and blaming the culture for reflecting the values you support. That's not culture's problem, and culture cannot fix itself.
Even when the facts are right in front of them some people still won't bother reading them.
Do you even know the difference between transport speed and transport latency? It doesn't appear so from your comments. You can have a point to point fiber connection that can sustain 100gbps but that means nothing in terms of responsiveness. If it takes 10mS to establish the upstream link (which it most likely does) and then 10mS to acknowledge a packet you could have infinite bandwidth but you're still dealing with at least a 20mS response time for every change of state. These devices are not duplex and you do not get "instant on" communications - every packet has to be broadcast and then the acknowledge broadcast and collisions (that further jack up latency several milliseconds at a time) are inevitable... even if you were blessed with a purely theoretical "noise free" environment.
How about a citation? Hard drives are a magnetic storage media. I have cassette tapes that are ten years old and know people who have reel to reel tapes that are five times that old - the music hasn't magically disappeared from those tapes and they've been sitting in paper boxes on bookshelves. Here we have media created in a cleanroom and stored in a sealed chamber and you're saying it "expires" in just a few years?
I call bullshit. Let's see some objective studies to back up this assertion.
never let the facts get in the way of being right.
on
Wireless USB hubs
·
· Score: 1
"They" seem to know all about it but have never even read Motorola's own literature. In their own docs for the evaluation kit Motorola points out one of the main uses:
The zero install wireless USB2 evaluation kit allows users to operate on a UWB communications channel and evaluate USB devices performance when the timing and delay environment is different from a short wire...
It was a system firstly based on the National semiconductor COP line of microcontrollers. It was an attempt to create a "programmable block" architecture that plant engineers weaned on dedicated and fixed programmable logic controllers and ladder logic would (hopefully) be able to relate. You had a CPU/memory block and I/O and interface blocks of various types that could be 'stacked" and then programmed via RS232 from a terminal. Because it was a cop8 it didn't have a lot of horsepower but the "host" pc could compile from ladder logic, forth, etc.
Windows update? If MS wants a peek inside your box they don't need to do it using one byte metafile exploits.
OTOH, this does give them (or anyone else) the perfect excuse to scan every folder on your computer while looking for malformed wmf files. Of course, anyone using anti-virus software already has installed such a "rootkit" anyway - and who would use windows these days without one?
In your scenario, what would happen then (and it's likely if this does take off) is the guerillas in places like somalia and afghanistan and iraq would become "early adopters" and funnel the laptops away from the children. They might even open "schools" to make it easier to obtain and warehouse them. These things are supposed to have built in wireless connectivity, durability, a stand alone power source (the hand of the one holding it) - doesn't that sound liek the perfect tool for any militia looking for a robust means of organizing field operations?
and don't you think the world's governments are, at some point, going to step up with this argument and squash the project under the guise of "fighting terrorism?"
The only way to remove the "intrinsic value" from these is to give them none and to flood the market with them.
So far as the "stealing a postal truck" euphemism - what happens when the kids grow up? If you give one of these to every twelve year old in the world, eventually those twelve year olds are going to become twenty year olds. How do you create a stigma equating ownership of one of these things by an adult to the act of stealing a postal truck when you have spent a decade giving a postal truck to every child in the world?
Dell has their own brand in the fire with Sony so it's not at all a surprise they may be bucking MS on this. Because Dell is already probably selling more systems than any other competitor and has more deals with third party makers they aren't going to miss that added "incentive" the IP royalties would mean more to them in the long term than the discount coupons from MS.
But more than that I think it stupid to keep going on about this "Microsoft tax." You can buy a pretty ripping machine from Dell or Gateway or emachines (I mean Gateway) at a very, very good price. These prices are possible because of the huge volume these makers sell, and that volume is possible because everyone knows, no matter how much it may or may not suck, when they get the machine home it will be "familiar" to them and they can go to the gazillion warez and spyware repositories and install whatever crap floats their boat.
Bot more improtantly it's that volume that beckons other OEMs. Third party makers like Adobe and Epson and Norton and others offer Dell and Gateway juicy licensing deals because they know the distribution of their "demos" and their cheapass printers with the ridiculously overpriced ink and paper supplies will benefit them in the long run. So while MS gets paid by Dell, Dell gets paid by Adobe and Epson and Norton. Whether it's money that directly offsets the cost of licensing windows or the cut rate hardware that allows them to make "special deals" that help them blow out thousands of machines at a whack, in the end it's Windows that is driving down the cost of the hardware.
Until there are third party OEMs like Norton and Adobe offering well recognized linux tools that will help sell even more machines, Dell would make LESS on each system by NOT including windows. Twice the support costs (now they have to field both linux and windows calls) but LESS PROFIT. They would have to charge MORE FOR LESS, which is exactly what you see now.
It makes zero sense for Dell to sell bundled linux systems and that isn't going to change until linux has evolved into a "killer brand" in its own right. And that's not going to happen because fo Dell, it's only going to happen because someone, somewhere, develops a desktop that offers something more than windows and does so in a way that is tangible to someone who doesn't spend their life working on this stuff.
You berate this "freakshow of a power supply" while ranting about your need for a whisper quiet computer.
Duuuuuuhhhh.
If a power supply can crank a kilowatt without breaking too much of a sweat, what do you think it's going to do when running at a fourth of that? The cooling fan can run cooler and all those mambo heatsinks will help carry the heat out of the back of the case - as opposed to teeny heatsinks in a "less wasteful" powersupply that barely even get the heat away from the fets doing the power conversion.
With Firefox or MSIE I cannot click on a link to download an mp3 and have it play while it's downloading. I can use MS Media (yuck) to download it and play it, but then I have to "save" it somewhere. And in linux I can click on the "part" file if I know to do that or I can use wget and play it as it downloads, but those are both geeky non-easy things for newbies to do.
Having a music shopping app where you can (for example) "audition" a track at a streamable (but ugly) 32kbps then click a "buy" button and have it (and the artwork) automatically download to the proper folder and be available in your playlist immediately would be much easier than just using Firefox or IE to browse generic web pages.
It used to be ozzies had the reputation for being self made, independant, and relatively free thinking individualists. I can sort of understand this stuff here in the US since we screwed up three hundred years ago by not putting those puritans back on the boat from which they came - but lately you people "down under" often make our own fascist government look like sodom in comparison.
Far be it from me to tell the people of another country how to run their own show... I'm just grateful for the contrast. Every time I see another "we must filter porn to protect the children from carnal knowledge" or "me must outlaw cameras at school sports events to protect kids from the evil paedophiles" stories it reminds me just how much more fucked up things really could be here in the US.
What they aren't doing with the money is spending it on new jobs...
I watched my old man slave 30 years as a union pipefitter. It was a constant struggle to maintain what he had achieved and the reagan administration saw to it those uppity poles with their "solidarity" communism didn't make it to these shores. Now you can work thirty years for a company only to be fired three months before your retirement divests... or better still the company that owns that pension will just sell out to a new company who will promptly refuse to back your thirty years of effort.
Money means nothing if you don't spend it. The "new money" may not be going into factories, but I personally couldn't give a shit less - what's the point? There's always new opportunities to make money and everything is cyclical.
In general, everything that you buy in a store is cheaper in the USA. Canada has insane sales taxes on top of high prices.... However, the money collected in taxes mostly gets back to the Canadian people in some form, whereas in the US taxes paid go mostly to giant corporations with fat government contracts.
Aha! But "giant corporations" doing what? Selling and providng services...
So, in Canada the money gets back to the people via the government, and in the US it gets back to the people via Wal-Mart... what's the difference?
Unless you are using mplayer or Real that third party player you installed is probably a wrapper around the windows media framework, Want to use Premiere? You're going to need WM. Want to use Zoom player? It's wrapped around DirectShow - no Windows Media player, no directshow. No directshow most third party players won't work nor will many games.
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Linux exists today largely as a response to microsoft. Microsoft makes its living selling copyrighted and protected - "sealed" boxes of software. Many develop open source code as a reaction against this. If microsoft did not have its monopoly on windows, anyone could copy and redistribute it and there would be substantially less incentive to contribute to or to use linux.
Because windows is proprietary, an entirely new operating system continues to grow in popularity and function. A competitor exists in the market largely due to the protections afforded windows under copyright. This is exactly the intent of copyright as spelled out in section 8 of the US constitution.
That's exactly where they are headed - and once they have it DRM will become a moot issue. And that's ALSO what they want because as soon as it's guaranteed WE THE PEOPLE have no profitable means of *personal* publication and their future is assured via the new media welfare system, their control of all major channels of communications will be complete.
Except... uh, punk wasn't "about" taking drugs OR having lots of sex. Every punk I knew was fairly intelligent and well learned and none I knew were into sex or drugs. Sex and drugs were the currency of the old pop machine and punk was a rebellion against all that.
No one is demanding I have electricity in my house. In some jurisdictions this is not the case - but in those jurisdictions who is it demanding you keep power connected? Isa it the electric company? No, it is the zoning commission; it is the elected representatives.
I can run a gas generator on pigshit from now until forever and the only money the oil companies see is what I spend filling the crankcase every six months. I can also power one from frenchy fry oil or sunflower seeds or whatever I care to grow.
If you are determined to live in the city you cannot blame others for your choice. Living in the city means you will have to pay for resources that are otherwise plentiful in less populated areas. Likewise, living in a less populated area I cannot just hop over to the library or the museum whenever the mood strikes because there simply aren't any. I'm also on shitty dialup whereas even the small towns around here offer some sort of broadband.
BTW, contemporary solar cells in proper focused collectors can run well over 25% efficiency. But solar power doesn't just mean electricity - a properly designed home can use the sun for heating and cooling and hot water supply with zero electrical requirements for those tasks. It doesn't cost more to build a home like that, but you're not going to find many just sitting around waiting to be occupied.
We all make our own choices in life. Blaming others for choices we have made and later regret only leads to more misery.
Let's consider: directv offers - estimating here - maybe 50 channels that air commercials. this doesn't include the various affiliates of which you really can only 'subscribe" to one group at a time.
Average show is 23 minutes, hat's seven minutes of commercials or about 15 minutes of commercials an hour. Average commercial is 30 seconds, so that's thirty commercials per channel per hour. Let's do the engineering thing and go worst case is maybe twenty commercials per hour per channel.
Over 50 stations, that's 1000 commercials per hour.
Think about all the money being spent to deliver those 1000 commercials per hour...
In this article it mentions "children" but most of the references are to teenage boys. There is no specific mention of "boys appearing to be as young as seven" or any of that sort of language - it mentions teens and puberty many times.
The hysteria that is driving most of the english speaking nations to new depths of fear, hate and paranoia - fueled in large part by a planetary alignment between religious zealots and hardcore feminist zealots - has resulted in a ridiculous all-encompassing definition of "child pornography" that includes virtually anyone under the age of 18. Old Penthouse magazines featuring 16 year old french girls can now be prosecuted as "child pornography." Pictures of teenagers who would willingly be doing that stuff anyway - who willingly ARE engaging in sex acts and posing for pictures (some even photographing themselves) - can be prosecuted as child pornography.
Protecting children from exploitation is fine - but not when it costs otherwise innocent people their liberty. We would not tolerate locking up all alcoholics to prevent a few traffic accidents, and we should not be tolerating these laws against what are essentially thought crimes.
You cannot "protect" children from life - attempts to do so only leave them naive and prime candidates for exploitation as young adults. These ridiculous taboos against otherwise NORMAL HUMAN BEHAVIOR are creating a seriously fucked up and perverse culture... and we have the teen pregnancy and AIDS statistics to prove it.
You just said "why" when you asked the question. If the punishment is exactly the same for raping the kid next door and getting off on a real, live person or jacking off alone to pictures of some anonymous kid half a world away, where is the incentive for a person of such proclivities to abstain from just fucking the kid next door?
If the punishment for going 100MPH over the limit is exactly the same as the punishment for going 10MPH over the limit, why the fuck not just drive 140MPH until you get stopped?
Yeesh. Figures this is michigan. I had the misfortune of being born in that shithole. haven't been back in twenty years and don't miss it a bit.
Everything old is new again
Don't want to pay your electric company? Invest in solar panels, a diesel or lp gas generator, thermocouples or whatever it takes.
I escape pretty much literally thousands of tv ads every day - I don't watch stations that air commercials.
You, by not erecting off grid energy sources for yourself and watching tv every day are contributing to that pollution that so bothers you. So turn off the bloody tv and save that energy. Use that time you used to waste being a couch potato lobbying your representatives.
You are addicted to a culture you despise and blaming the culture for reflecting the values you support. That's not culture's problem, and culture cannot fix itself.
$8000.00 to cover the cost of the manufacturer's liability insurance.
Even when the facts are right in front of them some people still won't bother reading them.
Do you even know the difference between transport speed and transport latency? It doesn't appear so from your comments. You can have a point to point fiber connection that can sustain 100gbps but that means nothing in terms of responsiveness. If it takes 10mS to establish the upstream link (which it most likely does) and then 10mS to acknowledge a packet you could have infinite bandwidth but you're still dealing with at least a 20mS response time for every change of state. These devices are not duplex and you do not get "instant on" communications - every packet has to be broadcast and then the acknowledge broadcast and collisions (that further jack up latency several milliseconds at a time) are inevitable... even if you were blessed with a purely theoretical "noise free" environment.
How about a citation? Hard drives are a magnetic storage media. I have cassette tapes that are ten years old and know people who have reel to reel tapes that are five times that old - the music hasn't magically disappeared from those tapes and they've been sitting in paper boxes on bookshelves. Here we have media created in a cleanroom and stored in a sealed chamber and you're saying it "expires" in just a few years?
I call bullshit. Let's see some objective studies to back up this assertion.
"They" seem to know all about it but have never even read Motorola's own literature. In their own docs for the evaluation kit Motorola points out one of the main uses:
The zero install wireless USB2 evaluation kit allows users to operate on a UWB communications channel and evaluate USB devices performance when the timing and delay environment is different from a short wire...
It was a system firstly based on the National semiconductor COP line of microcontrollers. It was an attempt to create a "programmable block" architecture that plant engineers weaned on dedicated and fixed programmable logic controllers and ladder logic would (hopefully) be able to relate. You had a CPU/memory block and I/O and interface blocks of various types that could be 'stacked" and then programmed via RS232 from a terminal. Because it was a cop8 it didn't have a lot of horsepower but the "host" pc could compile from ladder logic, forth, etc.
Windows update? If MS wants a peek inside your box they don't need to do it using one byte metafile exploits.
OTOH, this does give them (or anyone else) the perfect excuse to scan every folder on your computer while looking for malformed wmf files. Of course, anyone using anti-virus software already has installed such a "rootkit" anyway - and who would use windows these days without one?
In your scenario, what would happen then (and it's likely if this does take off) is the guerillas in places like somalia and afghanistan and iraq would become "early adopters" and funnel the laptops away from the children. They might even open "schools" to make it easier to obtain and warehouse them. These things are supposed to have built in wireless connectivity, durability, a stand alone power source (the hand of the one holding it) - doesn't that sound liek the perfect tool for any militia looking for a robust means of organizing field operations?
and don't you think the world's governments are, at some point, going to step up with this argument and squash the project under the guise of "fighting terrorism?"
The only way to remove the "intrinsic value" from these is to give them none and to flood the market with them.
So far as the "stealing a postal truck" euphemism - what happens when the kids grow up? If you give one of these to every twelve year old in the world, eventually those twelve year olds are going to become twenty year olds. How do you create a stigma equating ownership of one of these things by an adult to the act of stealing a postal truck when you have spent a decade giving a postal truck to every child in the world?
Dell has their own brand in the fire with Sony so it's not at all a surprise they may be bucking MS on this. Because Dell is already probably selling more systems than any other competitor and has more deals with third party makers they aren't going to miss that added "incentive" the IP royalties would mean more to them in the long term than the discount coupons from MS.
But more than that I think it stupid to keep going on about this "Microsoft tax." You can buy a pretty ripping machine from Dell or Gateway or emachines (I mean Gateway) at a very, very good price. These prices are possible because of the huge volume these makers sell, and that volume is possible because everyone knows, no matter how much it may or may not suck, when they get the machine home it will be "familiar" to them and they can go to the gazillion warez and spyware repositories and install whatever crap floats their boat.
Bot more improtantly it's that volume that beckons other OEMs. Third party makers like Adobe and Epson and Norton and others offer Dell and Gateway juicy licensing deals because they know the distribution of their "demos" and their cheapass printers with the ridiculously overpriced ink and paper supplies will benefit them in the long run. So while MS gets paid by Dell, Dell gets paid by Adobe and Epson and Norton. Whether it's money that directly offsets the cost of licensing windows or the cut rate hardware that allows them to make "special deals" that help them blow out thousands of machines at a whack, in the end it's Windows that is driving down the cost of the hardware.
Until there are third party OEMs like Norton and Adobe offering well recognized linux tools that will help sell even more machines, Dell would make LESS on each system by NOT including windows. Twice the support costs (now they have to field both linux and windows calls) but LESS PROFIT. They would have to charge MORE FOR LESS, which is exactly what you see now.
It makes zero sense for Dell to sell bundled linux systems and that isn't going to change until linux has evolved into a "killer brand" in its own right. And that's not going to happen because fo Dell, it's only going to happen because someone, somewhere, develops a desktop that offers something more than windows and does so in a way that is tangible to someone who doesn't spend their life working on this stuff.
You berate this "freakshow of a power supply" while ranting about your need for a whisper quiet computer.
Duuuuuuhhhh.
If a power supply can crank a kilowatt without breaking too much of a sweat, what do you think it's going to do when running at a fourth of that? The cooling fan can run cooler and all those mambo heatsinks will help carry the heat out of the back of the case - as opposed to teeny heatsinks in a "less wasteful" powersupply that barely even get the heat away from the fets doing the power conversion.
With Firefox or MSIE I cannot click on a link to download an mp3 and have it play while it's downloading. I can use MS Media (yuck) to download it and play it, but then I have to "save" it somewhere. And in linux I can click on the "part" file if I know to do that or I can use wget and play it as it downloads, but those are both geeky non-easy things for newbies to do.
Having a music shopping app where you can (for example) "audition" a track at a streamable (but ugly) 32kbps then click a "buy" button and have it (and the artwork) automatically download to the proper folder and be available in your playlist immediately would be much easier than just using Firefox or IE to browse generic web pages.
It used to be ozzies had the reputation for being self made, independant, and relatively free thinking individualists. I can sort of understand this stuff here in the US since we screwed up three hundred years ago by not putting those puritans back on the boat from which they came - but lately you people "down under" often make our own fascist government look like sodom in comparison.
Far be it from me to tell the people of another country how to run their own show... I'm just grateful for the contrast. Every time I see another "we must filter porn to protect the children from carnal knowledge" or "me must outlaw cameras at school sports events to protect kids from the evil paedophiles" stories it reminds me just how much more fucked up things really could be here in the US.
Someone gets it...
What they aren't doing with the money is spending it on new jobs...
I watched my old man slave 30 years as a union pipefitter. It was a constant struggle to maintain what he had achieved and the reagan administration saw to it those uppity poles with their "solidarity" communism didn't make it to these shores. Now you can work thirty years for a company only to be fired three months before your retirement divests... or better still the company that owns that pension will just sell out to a new company who will promptly refuse to back your thirty years of effort.
Money means nothing if you don't spend it. The "new money" may not be going into factories, but I personally couldn't give a shit less - what's the point? There's always new opportunities to make money and everything is cyclical.
In general, everything that you buy in a store is cheaper in the USA. Canada has insane sales taxes on top of high prices.... However, the money collected in taxes mostly gets back to the Canadian people in some form, whereas in the US taxes paid go mostly to giant corporations with fat government contracts.
Aha! But "giant corporations" doing what? Selling and providng services...
So, in Canada the money gets back to the people via the government, and in the US it gets back to the people via Wal-Mart... what's the difference?
terl us about "sprit infinitives" next grammah resson...
No, it not piss off me.
Unless you are using mplayer or Real that third party player you installed is probably a wrapper around the windows media framework, Want to use Premiere? You're going to need WM. Want to use Zoom player? It's wrapped around DirectShow - no Windows Media player, no directshow. No directshow most third party players won't work nor will many games.