Your ISP gets on the whitelist, by demonstrating they have functional v6 network connectivity. Once that's done, the ISP is added to the whitelist, and thereafter, any DNS records resolved using the ISPs DNS servers will include AAAA records from participating content providers.
This all seems completely pointless to me. There is no harm in including the AAAA records in all replies - if you have no IPv6 connectivity then your software will simply fall back to the A record (which would also be supplied).
Sure, if your machine's routing table is screwed so it thinks it can reach the server's IPv6 address when it can't then things will break, but that's just tough shit - if your configuration is completely broken then you shouldn't complain when things break badly.
The main reason why you want IPv6 is so that you could communicate client to client (VoIP, P2P, gaming, etc.). IPv6 provides basically no real advantage if all you want to do is communicate with a big service (youtube, google, etc.), as NAT and proxies mostly work just fine for those cases.
...or license the patent to a company who develops and sells it. The value of the inventor's work is coming up with an idea which can be developed into a product that consumers can buy - if this never happens, the inventor shouldn't get paid. This significantly reduces the value of patents as legal weapons since the inventor himself does not benefit from the licensee suing people.
I'm not sure I fully understand your proposal - specifically, who is able to sue infringers?
The patent holder (inventor), or the licensee if the licence assigned that ability to them. But my point is that the inventor wouldn't get any money from licensing the patent to a company that is only interested in using it as litigation material. If the licensee wants to develop and sell a product based on the patent then that's fine and the inventor would be paid royalties, similarly the inventor could assign the ability to defend the patent to the licensee.
I don't see how this prevents companies from buying/hoarding myriad licensee rights simply for the sake of litigation
Why would the inventor license the patent to them if they are not interested in actually selling something based on it (and thus paying him)?
Anyway, I'm not necessarily saying that this is *the* solution that I would want to see enacted to fix the patent system, I'm just suggesting that it might improve it a bit from its current state. IMHO the whole patent system is utterly broken and the whole thing needs to be abolished. I'm not entirely convinced that we should have anything to take its place, but if we do I certainly think its scope should be far narrower than the current system.
If someone invents something, patents it, makes it, and then markets it, you get to decide its value by buying it our not. You vote with your money.
You get to determine the value of the physical product that results from the development of the patented idea. However, the value of the patent itself (which, whilst not physical, can still be bought and sold) is determined by several factors:
The sale value of current products that were developed from the patent.
The potential sale value of future products that will be developed from the patent.
The potential losses averted by the ability to use that patent for cross-licensing in defence of a (possibly unrelated) patent lawsuit.
The potential profit created by suing someone who infringes the patent (the profit could be what you win in the lawsuit, or extra money you get in the long term by keeping your competitors from gaining a foothold in the market).
Yes, some of these factors are pretty degenerate, but that's the sad reality of the current patent system.
This would remove the possibility for a dedicated inventor, who doesn't want to (or isn't capable to) deal with the complexities/difficulties with bringing his invention to market, or licensing the technology, but who would like to sell the patent to someone else to fund his own further inventing.
Make it that the inventor cannot sell the patent, but is allowed to licence it so long as he is paid by royalties. i.e. if the inventor chooses to exclusively licence it to a company that is not interested in developing it, he doesn't get any money. (Obviously suing someone else for patent infringement wouldn't invoke royalties to be paid).
So all an inventor has to do to get paid, is either develop and sell the invention himself, or licence the patent to a company who develops and sells it. The value of the inventor's work is coming up with an idea which can be developed into a product that consumers can buy - if this never happens, the inventor shouldn't get paid. This significantly reduces the value of patents as legal weapons since the inventor himself does not benefit from the licensee suing people.
Microsoft bought into the misconception that it needs patents to defend their business, despite the crap the patent system is.
I don't think its a misconception at all. The patent system is so broken that everyone is infringing everyone else's patents. If you don't have patents then you have nothing to defend yourself with when someone points out that you're infringing theirs (and lets be blunt here - in the US, pretty much any nontrivial software will be violating some patents).
So no, I don't think Microsoft should get any blame for filing patents - everyone does it (even the Free software companies) because it's the best defence against patent suits. That's just the sad situation at the moment. The thing Microsoft can be blamed for is making the situation worse by joining the ranks of those using patents as an offensive weapon (either by suing, or just loudly shouting about how they might sue).
Unfortunately, the patent system tends to work quite well for big companies (with a few exceptions) - they all have enough patents that for the most part they don't end up in serious patent battles, they just cross licence with each other. Small businesses are the ones who lose out - they don't have (nor can they afford to file for) lots of patents, so when one of the big businesses sues them, they are screwed.
The patent system was originally intended to promote innovation. These days it does the exact opposite by making it an extremely risky proposition for a small company to try and muscle in on a market segment that is dominated by big corporations, and makes it quite trivial for those big corporations to muscle established small businesses out of a segment they are interested in moving into.
While impractible, so would hiring a coder to custom modify any other OS be to most individuals.
Maybe hiring someone to modify a Free OS is impractical for an individual, but it certainly isn't for a business. Businesses contract developers to modify existing Free software projects all the time. Even for a small business, paying a developer to spend a few hours implementing/fixing a feature in an existing Free software project is perfectly reasonable and frequently happens, meanwhile you'd have to be a pretty damned big business to alter the course of an MS product (either by being a big enough customer that they care about you, or by having enough money to buy a controlling share of MS).
My couch in the living room with my 42" TV, or my home entertainment theatre in the basement with a 7'8" diagonal screen and many recliners is a lot more comfortable for watching Hulu or playing games. I'm slowly transferring my entire DVD collection onto my 1TB external drive which is connected to the same computer, so my wife can watch anime on the TV or surf youtube in the living room with friends - kinda difficult to do that in a small office with a 21" monitor and only 2 chairs. Honestly, the computer in the office only has a monitor for doing business related activities like spreadsheets and web development.
And you think you're going to be able to watch HDTV and play games over an RDP session?
I have an Atom/Ion connected directly to my TV and that works well, but I can't think that having a low power ARM streaming raw graphics over the network is going to be sensible at all. It'll be fine for web surfing, but trying to do HDTV and games just isn't going to work.
Just a few years back, I wondered why the damn TV couldn't be made so it automatically picks up the live input and runs with it, instead I still have to select the input source everytime I play a game or DVD, inevitably flipping through 8 things, 5 of them with no actual inputs in them just because the TV can't even detect connections automagically.
Most European TVs have been able to do this since the early 80s. Devices connected by SCART can assert pin 16 to tell the TV to automatically switch to that input. So you'd stick a DVD in the DVD player and the TV will automatically switch to showing the DVD player's signal. Devices can also be daisy-chained together so you don't need many inputs on the TV.
And god forbid my parents change the channel on their actual TV instead of on the Set-Top Box one day, they'll be out of TV for however long until I come to visit.
That's really an artefact of the trend in TVs to become dumb monitors instead of actually using the built in tuner. My TV isn't plugged into an antenna at all - it is simply used as a monitor for my MythTV frontend. I think there's a lot of scope for selling completely tunerless TVs these days, but the modern trend seems to be putting DVB-T tuners in them, which is a bit of a waste of money for anyone who doesn't have an antenna plugged directly into their TV (i.e. anyone with a PVR, DTH satellite, etc).
Anyway, I don't understand the market for this new gadget, it's basically just VNC in a box. I can see a market for a "set top computer" for people who don't want a proper desktop (maybe they just do the occasional email, a bit of web surfing, etc - all of which is fairly doable from a HDTV with a suitable set top box and a bluetooth keyboard. But this gadget requires you to have an actual dedicated computer to run the desktop - if you've got one of them, WTF would you want to surf the web from your TV instead of using the actual computer itself?
Today, we have computers which can remote to your television, so that you can have a 5 foot display at super resolution.
I'm not sure I consider 1920x1080 on a 5 foot display to be "super resolution"... It's lower res than what I've been using on my 24" monitor for years...
You seem to have missed the strong correlation between using credit cards on a regular basis and being one of those "certain individuals".
Not at all. Certain individuals are incapable of managing their finances, so it is dangerous for them to use a credit card (or any other method of easily acquiring credit). The majority of people _are_ capable of managing their finances, and for them there is nothing "irresponsible" about using a credit card.
Since this is Slashdot, a car analogy is probably in order: some people are incapable of driving safely, and therefore letting them drive a car is dangerous. However, the majority of people are (reasonably) safe drivers, so it is not "irresponsible" for them to drive a car. The difference here is that you have to prove your capabilities before you can get a licence to drive a car, whereas no such barrier to entry is required for a credit card.
There are *many* technologies/services/products that can be a problem for minority groups. Using these products does not automatically make one "irresponsible" unless one is a member of the minority group that cannot cope with it. You can draw a similar correlation showing that most people involved in car accidents are people who use cars, but that doesn't mean that using a car is irresponsible.
Oh, good grief. It's almost twice as long as a credit card and maybe three sixteenths of an inch thick. Woo. It fits in a standard shirt pocket. This is too much to carry? What are you, a smurf?
Standard chequebook size here is 200x75x4mm - yes, that's far too big. And no, it doesn't fit in my shirt pocket because I don't wear shirts. My wallet (containing numerous cards, cash and my driving licence) fits in my jeans pocket, a chequebook doesn't.
Interesting. Americans (well, the ones with brains) tend not to do business in the first place with vendors who haven't been around very long ("fly by night", we call them), so this generally isn't an issue.
Yeah because big companies *never* go bankrupt or try to screw you over. (That was sarcasm).
Personally I tend to try and do most of my business with small companies, since in my experience they offer much better value for money and a much better service. Either way, of all the vendors I've purchased from, the big ones have been the ones to go bankrupt - I think the bigger companies are more inclined to overstretch themselves, and then when something goes wrong they struggle to recover. Its also always been the larger businesses who have gone out of their way to screw me over - I guess the small businesses figure that they can't afford to lose customers by trying that one.
The protection also covers things like the costs incurred in getting you home after an airline/holiday company goes bankrupt (there has been a _lot_ of this going on over the past couple of years) or goes on strike, etc. so IMHO it is well worth having. Sure, you can buy insurance to do all this stuff, but it comes free if you use your credit card, so why not?
I don't know if you're old enough to remember, but spreadsheets *used* to be considered one of the three basic computer applications everyone should know how to use.
Yes, I'm plenty old enough to remember this, and I do know how to use a spreadsheet just fine. However, spreadsheets have always been a tool that can be used for everything, but does nothing _well_. Financial management software has supplanted spreadsheets because it happens to do financial management much better than a spreadsheet can.
Just because something used to be considered a basic tool that everyone should know doesn't mean that it shouldn't be replaced when something better comes along. No one programs computers with toggle switches any more, because it turns out that better methods were invented.
Interesting thing I'm hearing here that seems to be a big difference between bills in the US and the UK, your bills seem to come due sporadically throughout the month.
Myself and most people I know..pretty much only have bills due roughly at the first and 15th of the month. I only have to pay twice a month for things. I'm currently back on a W2 gig, so I get paid on the 7th and the 22nd of the month, so, when I get paid, I know I need to pay bills.
Some companies ask you what date you want to be billed each month, a lot don't. But even for the ones who do, you choose a date that lines up with your pay date, then change job and your pay date moves, then change some of your utilities and line them up with your new pay date, then change job, etc. Eventually the billing dates get all over the place - you could contact all the utilities and move the billing date when you change job, but.. effort.
And most of my bills also come in the mail, so I have that as a reminder
Many utilities offer a discount for using paper-free billing these days, so very few of my bills come in the post (I just electronically archive the PDF bills they generate). There are some other problems with this of course - places like banks like to take a couple of utility bills under 3 months old as ID (proof of address) and I had real problems when I moved house a few years ago since I simply didn't have enough paper bills. At some point they are going to have to change this method of proving your address, not least because it would be trivial to forge a utility bill anyway.
I _think_ the only paper bills I get these days are:
Credit card (monthly statement)
Water (a yearly statement of monthly payments that will become due over the coming year)
Council tax (a yearly statement of monthly payments that will become due over the coming year)
> it might make sense if the chequebook is the *only* way money leaves your account
How *else* would money leave a checking account? I suppose I could go to the bank and fill out a withdrawal form and get cash, but why bother, when I can just write a check?
> I'm not going to easily keep track of all the direct debits, > standing orders, ATM withdrawals, debit card transactions, etc.
Exactly. That's the point.
I'm sure as hell not going to write a cheque and walk to the post box every few days to pay a bill. Bills go out of my bank account automatically - saves a lot of hassle. It doesn't exactly make stuff hard to track because I can see all the transactions every time I log into my bank's website or use an ATM.
> I do use Gnucash to manage my finances
I just use a spreadsheet. It's easier.
Your finances must be *really* simplistic if a spreadsheet is easier than a financial management package. As soon as you have more than one account, a real financial management package makes things a lot easier.
> > buying everyday stuff like groceries on credit is not fiscally > > responsible and will quickly land you hip-deep in debt > > It will? I can't say I've noticed
Evidence: about twenty percent of the population of North America.
That is no evidence at all - that is simply evidence that 20% of the population of North America are incapable of managing their finances. This has nothing to do with using a credit card not being "fiscally responsible" and everything to do with *certain individuals* not being fiscally responsible.
It's not just a matter of discipline (though that is relevant too), but also of keeping track.
There's not a lot of excuse for not being able to keep track these days - you can check a current bank statement at any time over the web.
With a checkbook, you generally have a record of what you've spent.
That only works if a cheque book is the *only* way you withdraw money from your account. I certainly don't have the discipline to note down every transaction (debit card payments, credit card payments, direct debits, standing orders, ATM transactions, BACS/FPS transfers) on a handwritten ledger at the time it happens. Especially since the bank does it all for me on their website anyway. I guess you can stay in the dark ages and refuse to pay by anything other than cheque, but you can kiss goodbye to phone/web shopping if you do that.
> If you lack the discipline to only spend within your > limits, you can always use a debit card instead,
Oh, yeah, I definitely want to be charged use fees in excess of a dollar for each and every transaction. How could I pass up a deal like that?
Sounds like the US banking system is utterly kerrayzee to me. I don't pay any fees for my transactions, whether they are done by BACS, FPS, debit card, credit card, cheque or cash.
And, like with a credit card, if you keep a ledger so that you know your balance, it's no longer more convenient than writing checks.
And like with a credit card, the bank does all this for you and makes a ledger available for you to see 24 hours a day.
> which will be declined at the time of the transaction if your bank account is empty.
Many debit cards in the US don't even do that. They automatically transform into credit cards if your balance goes below zero.
It can work in various ways in the UK - most of the time the debit card transaction happens online (i.e. the terminal connects to the bank while you are making the payment). In this case, the bank can decline the transaction (whether or not they do so, or just let you go overdrawn is down to your agreement with the bank). Some transactions are done offline and then submitted to the bank at the end of the day, and in this case the bank obviously can't decline. If you are someone who has a history of being incapable of managing your finances, the bank will issue you a card that does now allow offline transactions.
I know I keep saying this, but it's really a fairly major point.
It seems like a really irrelevant point to me, since as I keep mentioning, you can check your current balance and get a statement 24 hours a day. You don't even need a computer and an internet connection since the ATM will print you a mini statement at no cost.
I'd like to know what Europeans think is so bad about a checkbook. It's actually quite handy.
I think a chequebook is fine - I use mine for paying money to friends when I don't have their bank details. I don't use them in a shop though, and the reasons for this are many: 1. A chequebook is *really* bulky compared to a credit/debit card. My wallet is big enough as it is without carrying a bloody great chequebook with me. 2. If I pay by credit card then I get 30-60 days credit for
You have a lot more bills that regularly come due than I do, if you'd be paying something every other day. Or even remotely close to that.
Off the top of my head: National insurance, credit card, phone, TV licence, internet, satellite TV, regular donation to the RNLI, contact lenses, gas, electricity, mortgage, critical illness insurance, water, council tax.
That's 14, so pretty close to every couple of days, and I've probably forgotten some. Then there are the annual bills like income tax that I pay by a manual BACS transfer.
I wouldn't want to have anybody pulling from my deposit accounts simply because I have to be aware of the problem before I can have it corrected. As it is, if there are erroneous transactions, it is my credit card issuer's problem until it gets sorted out.
You have to be aware to get fraud fixed on your credit card too. If you blindly pay your credit card bill without ever looking at the statement then someone can make fraudulent transactions and they will never get fixed (that makes it your problem, not the credit card company's). Similarly, if you check your bank statements like you'd check your credit card statements then you can get any erroneous transactions fixed.
Maybe you missed what I said about the direct debit guarantee - the bank is legally obliged to reverse a direct debit *immediately* if you tell them to.
Most every checkbook I've ever seen or used also has a built in ledger, where you have balances against charges with you at all times. It is easy to see how much money you have left.
I've never bothered to use the ledger in my chequebook - it might make sense if the chequebook is the *only* way money leaves your account, but I'm not going to easily keep track of all the direct debits, standing orders, ATM withdrawals, debit card transactions, etc. on a little handwritten ledger. And that's before you even consider money going *in* to your account (I'm a sole trader, so I don't have a regular monthly salary going into my account on a fixed date - money appears in my account on a reasonably ad-hoc basis).
I do use Gnucash to manage my finances (its a good discipline that I picked up when I became self employed, because I have to keep track of that stuff for tax reasons), but that is a very "after the event" affair because I only bother to enter transactions into it when I get the statement that they are on. Keeping track of my balance on a day to day basis is usually done through web banking or by asking the ATM for my balance.
I personally do NOT like this as that I don't like giving hardly anyone or any company direct access to my bank
As I said, whilst they have direct access to your bank account, the agreement is also backed by the guarantee that your bank will refund the money immediately if you ask them to, no questions asked. This tends to work very well for the majority of the UK's population (although there are complaints that those without bank accounts are penalised since most utilities offer a discount for paying by DD as it reduces their costs).
However, many banks here are offering free bill pay from the banks website, where if the company is hooked to the 'system' (I forget the name) when I set up a bill to pay it is often transferred from the bank to the company electronically in about 1-2 days.
You can also do this in the UK if you don't want to pay by DD - you just tell your bank to transfer the funds into another bank account via BACS or FPS (BACS takes about 3 days and can be used to transfer money between *any* UK bank accounts, FPS is almost instantaneous but isn't yet supported by every bank). Both BACS and FPS are usually free.
If the bill to pay is a person or company not in their electronic system, the bank cuts them a physical check and mails it to them..free of charge.
That is unnecessary here since every bank accepts BACS transfers for current accounts. The only time I can think of where a cheque is required to transfer money between accounts is when you are paying into certain savings accounts (some ISAs, bonds, etc).
As for automatic payments!??! Eeek...not me. I like to see exactly what the bill is for everything, and pay the amounts out myself. Heck, what happens if you make a mistake in checking somehow...and your funds are lower than thought..and all those automatic bill payments come in and cause numerouse NSF (insufficient funds) penalties??
From my point of view, I think the chances of me forgetting to pay a bill (and getting penalised or cut off by the service provider) is much higher than the chance of going overdrawn due to an automatic payment, mainly because I'd be having to manually pay a bill every other day and something is bound to get missed.
Also, like many people I have an overdraft agreement with the bank which costs me nothing. Using an overdraft like a long term loan is, of course, crazy and I'd never do that; however, it does mean that if I accidentally go overdrawn then I am only charged a bit of interest (probably a few pennies for the few days it takes me to move money around to cover the shortfall) rather than a "unauthorised overdraft" penalty charge.
buying everyday stuff like groceries on credit is not fiscally responsible and will quickly land you hip-deep in debt
It will? I can't say I've noticed - I've always used my credit card to buy pretty much everything that's over £5 (almost every shop takes cards... and practically no shop takes cheques) and I've never landed in "heaps of debt". My credit card bill arrives at the end of the month and gets paid off by an automatic direct debit from my current account when the bill becomes due a month later.
Sure, if my bank account is empty when the direct debit goes out then my account will go overdrawn and I'll get charged, but that would happen if I was writing a guaranteed cheque too.
If you lack the discipline to only spend within your limits, you can always use a debit card instead, which will be declined at the time of the transaction if your bank account is empty.
So no, using a credit card is not "fiscally irresponsible" and won't land you "hip-deep in debt" unless you're a complete idiot.
You don't know who they are or what they're going to do with your account, or what their policies and rates and hours are going to be next month.
You're right, I don't know what they are going to do with my money, but I don't pretend to know what a small local bank is going to do with it either. My money is protected by laws that require the government to protect it in the event that the bank goes under, and if I don't like what my bank are going to do the next month (which would have to adhere to the contract I have with them anyway) it is trivial to switch to a different bank.
They also don't have the concept of "direct debit". something that astounds me.
Every service that I need to pay for, from my gas utility, electric utility, student loan, and credit card bill can be paid directly at the company's website as a direct debt. I enter my routing and checking account numbers, and the bill gets deducted from my bank account.
I think you misunderstand what "Direct Debit" means in the UK. Direct Debit is basically a system where you authorise a company to withdraw money from your account each month. This is very similar to a standing order (where you instruct your bank "transfer X amount to another bank account on this day each week/month/year") except that for Direct Debits the amount to withdraw is determined by the recipient of the payment.
This means that my phone bill is automatically paid in full each month, even though it is not a fixed amount. I don't have to do anything after the DD is initially set up - no logging into the telco's website to organise the transfer each month, etc.
On the face of it, DD sounds like a security nightmare since you're basically authorising a third party to withdraw however much they like from your account. But it is backed by the direct debit guarantee, which is a legal requirement for the bank to protect you from fraudulent transactions and immediately refund you if there is any dispute. So from the consumer's point of view, the security is reasonable.
Pretty much all regular bill payments can be done by direct debit or standing order, so the need to actually go and pay it manually (whether that is by handing over cash, a cheque or organising an electronic transfer each month) is pretty much non-existent.
First of all, they don't have a monopoly anymore, so why bother doing this now
The EU has certainly waited until far too late - this step should have been taken 10 years ago. However, I do support what they are doing simply because it will prevent history from repeating itself.
Sure they didn't support PNG format properly until way too late, but really what makes the web so much better now than it was when Netscape threw in the towel and decided to rewrite their browser from scratch? We had CSS back then.
Yes, we had more or less the same standards back then, the difference is that IE's support for them was criminally broken. Getting anything reasonably advanced to work the way you wanted it to on IE was *really* hard. Getting stuff to work on both IE and any other browser was even harder - this means that the web never really advanced much, and where it did it only ended up working on IE, which was a serious problem for those of us who didn't have Windows machines.
I think the real problem for the web over the last decade was the W3C. HTML kept improving while the browser manufacturers kept adding features and W3C adopted what they liked.
You *need* standards, otherwise you go back to a situation where the platforms have diverged and only the majority platform is supported. Back in the days where IE had the monopoly, all the other browsers were basically playing catch-up - not because they were technologically behind IE, but because it is really hard to support an ad-hoc "standard" that is barely documented and only implemented on one platform. I want the browser writers to spend their time implementing improvements to functionality, not tweaking existing functionality so that it matches the bugs in another browser.
The successor to HTML 4 was XHTML, which was technical fiddling around the edges rather than adding something for the end user. Eventually we are going to get HTML 5
HTML 5 is a terrible design. XHTML introduced some real improvements over HTML 4.01, but a small number of vendors (Microsoft, Nokia, etc.) decided to raise two fingers at the W3C and implement their own badly designed standard instead (HTML 5). A standard which completely throws away all those improvements and introduces a bunch of badly thought out elements which are going to require frequent redesigns of the language to support future technologies (XHTML was going down the genericised path whereby future technologies would frequently not require language changes, which is a far saner idea).
Sure, HTML 5 introduces some features that XHTML hadn't got around to implementing, but it would've been far more sensible and reasonably trivial to extend XHTML in a generic way in order to implement those features.
The thing that everyone has forgotten here is what is best for the general public - the ones who aren't interested in tinkering with their computer and who just want to get onto the web.
What's best for the general public, and what the general public are interested in are rarely related. The general public will usually take the path of least resistance, which frequently doesn't serve their long term interests. Causing short term inconvenience may indeed be good for the general public in the long term. We've already seen what happens when Microsoft gains an unopposed monopoly - IE6 caused the web to stagnate for *years* because they had destroyed the competition and so there was no longer anyone pushing MS into doing any further development work on it. We are only just starting to get out of that stagnation now, primarily because other browser vendors appeared and took advantage of MS's lack of improvements, but the alternative browsers had a really tough job getting any traction against the IE monopoly.
A healthy market with plenty of competition is frequently an inconvenience for the general public, but it is undeniably better than a monopoly in the long term.
The full PC would transmit from the PC to the phone for phone tasks.
Which means my phone is going to need to be in constant communication with the PC - this is going to suck the battery dry in no time. Far more sensible to have the applications running locally on the phone.
Putting the single point of processing in your phone for your desktop, TV, picture frames, etc..etc..etc... is simply the wrong path.
I couldn't agree more.
Transmitting data between a phone and other devices when there is zero reason to is very bad.
And yet that's exactly what you're going to have to do if you turn the phone into a thin client. If the phone is being a thin client, that means it is constantly going to have to contact a server over the network to do stuff that would otherwise be local to the phone - e.g. looking at your calendar, reading your archived SMS messages, etc. Far more sensible is to have the phone do phone stuff and the PC do PC stuff instead of trying to have a single machine do everything.
Whilst it would certainly be nice for a phone to be _capable_ of doing desktop-type stuff (I could plug my phone into a hotel's HDTV and do desktop stuff when I'm on holiday), I think the idea of this actually replacing regular desktop workstations is nuts. Similarly, I think the idea of a desktop workstation doing all the processing for a thin-client smartphone is also nuts. They function well as separate devices - WTF would we want to cripple them like that?
Your insistence that anyone would even suggest transmitting to a thin client for processing means that you are unwilling or unable to take a useful part in the discussion.
I didn't say that you should use a thin client for data processing. My point was that the idea of a thin client makes *no sense* when it comes to playing video, because the processing load has to be entirely local to the display device (i.e. the thin client itself).
That statement right there says that you are unwilling or unable to understand what is being described. You are either trolling, or the entire discussion would have to be repeated to bring you back up to speed.
Or maybe you have failed to explain well enough. I have read the discussion and what you are saying really doesn't make sense to me.
The definition of a thin client is a device which does very little except display the product of a remote server. This is something that simply doesn't make sense for video playback - the video is already compressed suitable for transport across the network. The only serious CPU time involved in playing it is decoding this compressed stream - if you move that decoding job from the phone to a remote server then you now have the impossible task of getting that decoded data onto your thin client's display without recompressing it.
If you are not talking about doing the CPU heavy tasks on a remote machine then you are not talking about a thin client at all; conversely, if you are talking about putting the CPU heavy tasks on a remote machine then it doesn't make sense for video playback.
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The real issue I think is, who wants an IP6-only Internet connection?
Who said anything about IPv6-only? You can run IPv6 and IPv4 concurrently just fine.
Your ISP gets on the whitelist, by demonstrating they have functional v6 network connectivity. Once that's done, the ISP is added to the whitelist, and thereafter, any DNS records resolved using the ISPs DNS servers will include AAAA records from participating content providers.
This all seems completely pointless to me. There is no harm in including the AAAA records in all replies - if you have no IPv6 connectivity then your software will simply fall back to the A record (which would also be supplied).
Sure, if your machine's routing table is screwed so it thinks it can reach the server's IPv6 address when it can't then things will break, but that's just tough shit - if your configuration is completely broken then you shouldn't complain when things break badly.
The main reason why you want IPv6 is so that you could communicate client to client (VoIP, P2P, gaming, etc.). IPv6 provides basically no real advantage if all you want to do is communicate with a big service (youtube, google, etc.), as NAT and proxies mostly work just fine for those cases.
Multicast...
...or license the patent to a company who develops and sells it. The value of the inventor's work is coming up with an idea which can be developed into a product that consumers can buy - if this never happens, the inventor shouldn't get paid. This significantly reduces the value of patents as legal weapons since the inventor himself does not benefit from the licensee suing people.
I'm not sure I fully understand your proposal - specifically, who is able to sue infringers?
The patent holder (inventor), or the licensee if the licence assigned that ability to them. But my point is that the inventor wouldn't get any money from licensing the patent to a company that is only interested in using it as litigation material. If the licensee wants to develop and sell a product based on the patent then that's fine and the inventor would be paid royalties, similarly the inventor could assign the ability to defend the patent to the licensee.
I don't see how this prevents companies from buying/hoarding myriad licensee rights simply for the sake of litigation
Why would the inventor license the patent to them if they are not interested in actually selling something based on it (and thus paying him)?
Anyway, I'm not necessarily saying that this is *the* solution that I would want to see enacted to fix the patent system, I'm just suggesting that it might improve it a bit from its current state. IMHO the whole patent system is utterly broken and the whole thing needs to be abolished. I'm not entirely convinced that we should have anything to take its place, but if we do I certainly think its scope should be far narrower than the current system.
Huh?
If someone invents something, patents it, makes it, and then markets it, you get to decide its value by buying it our not. You vote with your money.
You get to determine the value of the physical product that results from the development of the patented idea. However, the value of the patent itself (which, whilst not physical, can still be bought and sold) is determined by several factors:
Yes, some of these factors are pretty degenerate, but that's the sad reality of the current patent system.
This would remove the possibility for a dedicated inventor, who doesn't want to (or isn't capable to) deal with the complexities/difficulties with bringing his invention to market, or licensing the technology, but who would like to sell the patent to someone else to fund his own further inventing.
Make it that the inventor cannot sell the patent, but is allowed to licence it so long as he is paid by royalties. i.e. if the inventor chooses to exclusively licence it to a company that is not interested in developing it, he doesn't get any money. (Obviously suing someone else for patent infringement wouldn't invoke royalties to be paid).
So all an inventor has to do to get paid, is either develop and sell the invention himself, or licence the patent to a company who develops and sells it. The value of the inventor's work is coming up with an idea which can be developed into a product that consumers can buy - if this never happens, the inventor shouldn't get paid. This significantly reduces the value of patents as legal weapons since the inventor himself does not benefit from the licensee suing people.
Microsoft bought into the misconception that it needs patents to defend their business, despite the crap the patent system is.
I don't think its a misconception at all. The patent system is so broken that everyone is infringing everyone else's patents. If you don't have patents then you have nothing to defend yourself with when someone points out that you're infringing theirs (and lets be blunt here - in the US, pretty much any nontrivial software will be violating some patents).
So no, I don't think Microsoft should get any blame for filing patents - everyone does it (even the Free software companies) because it's the best defence against patent suits. That's just the sad situation at the moment. The thing Microsoft can be blamed for is making the situation worse by joining the ranks of those using patents as an offensive weapon (either by suing, or just loudly shouting about how they might sue).
Unfortunately, the patent system tends to work quite well for big companies (with a few exceptions) - they all have enough patents that for the most part they don't end up in serious patent battles, they just cross licence with each other. Small businesses are the ones who lose out - they don't have (nor can they afford to file for) lots of patents, so when one of the big businesses sues them, they are screwed.
The patent system was originally intended to promote innovation. These days it does the exact opposite by making it an extremely risky proposition for a small company to try and muscle in on a market segment that is dominated by big corporations, and makes it quite trivial for those big corporations to muscle established small businesses out of a segment they are interested in moving into.
While impractible, so would hiring a coder to custom modify any other OS be to most individuals.
Maybe hiring someone to modify a Free OS is impractical for an individual, but it certainly isn't for a business. Businesses contract developers to modify existing Free software projects all the time. Even for a small business, paying a developer to spend a few hours implementing/fixing a feature in an existing Free software project is perfectly reasonable and frequently happens, meanwhile you'd have to be a pretty damned big business to alter the course of an MS product (either by being a big enough customer that they care about you, or by having enough money to buy a controlling share of MS).
My couch in the living room with my 42" TV, or my home entertainment theatre in the basement with a 7'8" diagonal screen and many recliners is a lot more comfortable for watching Hulu or playing games. I'm slowly transferring my entire DVD collection onto my 1TB external drive which is connected to the same computer, so my wife can watch anime on the TV or surf youtube in the living room with friends - kinda difficult to do that in a small office with a 21" monitor and only 2 chairs. Honestly, the computer in the office only has a monitor for doing business related activities like spreadsheets and web development.
And you think you're going to be able to watch HDTV and play games over an RDP session?
I have an Atom/Ion connected directly to my TV and that works well, but I can't think that having a low power ARM streaming raw graphics over the network is going to be sensible at all. It'll be fine for web surfing, but trying to do HDTV and games just isn't going to work.
Just a few years back, I wondered why the damn TV couldn't be made so it automatically picks up the live input and runs with it, instead I still have to select the input source everytime I play a game or DVD, inevitably flipping through 8 things, 5 of them with no actual inputs in them just because the TV can't even detect connections automagically.
Most European TVs have been able to do this since the early 80s. Devices connected by SCART can assert pin 16 to tell the TV to automatically switch to that input. So you'd stick a DVD in the DVD player and the TV will automatically switch to showing the DVD player's signal. Devices can also be daisy-chained together so you don't need many inputs on the TV.
And god forbid my parents change the channel on their actual TV instead of on the Set-Top Box one day, they'll be out of TV for however long until I come to visit.
That's really an artefact of the trend in TVs to become dumb monitors instead of actually using the built in tuner. My TV isn't plugged into an antenna at all - it is simply used as a monitor for my MythTV frontend. I think there's a lot of scope for selling completely tunerless TVs these days, but the modern trend seems to be putting DVB-T tuners in them, which is a bit of a waste of money for anyone who doesn't have an antenna plugged directly into their TV (i.e. anyone with a PVR, DTH satellite, etc).
Anyway, I don't understand the market for this new gadget, it's basically just VNC in a box. I can see a market for a "set top computer" for people who don't want a proper desktop (maybe they just do the occasional email, a bit of web surfing, etc - all of which is fairly doable from a HDTV with a suitable set top box and a bluetooth keyboard. But this gadget requires you to have an actual dedicated computer to run the desktop - if you've got one of them, WTF would you want to surf the web from your TV instead of using the actual computer itself?
Today, we have computers which can remote to your television, so that you can have a 5 foot display at super resolution.
I'm not sure I consider 1920x1080 on a 5 foot display to be "super resolution"... It's lower res than what I've been using on my 24" monitor for years...
You seem to have missed the strong correlation between using credit cards on a regular basis and being one of those "certain individuals".
Not at all. Certain individuals are incapable of managing their finances, so it is dangerous for them to use a credit card (or any other method of easily acquiring credit). The majority of people _are_ capable of managing their finances, and for them there is nothing "irresponsible" about using a credit card.
Since this is Slashdot, a car analogy is probably in order: some people are incapable of driving safely, and therefore letting them drive a car is dangerous. However, the majority of people are (reasonably) safe drivers, so it is not "irresponsible" for them to drive a car. The difference here is that you have to prove your capabilities before you can get a licence to drive a car, whereas no such barrier to entry is required for a credit card.
There are *many* technologies/services/products that can be a problem for minority groups. Using these products does not automatically make one "irresponsible" unless one is a member of the minority group that cannot cope with it. You can draw a similar correlation showing that most people involved in car accidents are people who use cars, but that doesn't mean that using a car is irresponsible.
Oh, good grief. It's almost twice as long as a credit card and maybe three sixteenths of an inch thick. Woo. It fits in a standard shirt pocket. This is too much to carry? What are you, a smurf?
Standard chequebook size here is 200x75x4mm - yes, that's far too big. And no, it doesn't fit in my shirt pocket because I don't wear shirts. My wallet (containing numerous cards, cash and my driving licence) fits in my jeans pocket, a chequebook doesn't.
Interesting. Americans (well, the ones with brains) tend not to do business in the first place with vendors who haven't been around very long ("fly by night", we call them), so this generally isn't an issue.
Yeah because big companies *never* go bankrupt or try to screw you over. (That was sarcasm).
Personally I tend to try and do most of my business with small companies, since in my experience they offer much better value for money and a much better service. Either way, of all the vendors I've purchased from, the big ones have been the ones to go bankrupt - I think the bigger companies are more inclined to overstretch themselves, and then when something goes wrong they struggle to recover. Its also always been the larger businesses who have gone out of their way to screw me over - I guess the small businesses figure that they can't afford to lose customers by trying that one.
The protection also covers things like the costs incurred in getting you home after an airline/holiday company goes bankrupt (there has been a _lot_ of this going on over the past couple of years) or goes on strike, etc. so IMHO it is well worth having. Sure, you can buy insurance to do all this stuff, but it comes free if you use your credit card, so why not?
I don't know if you're old enough to remember, but spreadsheets *used* to be considered one of the three basic computer applications everyone should know how to use.
Yes, I'm plenty old enough to remember this, and I do know how to use a spreadsheet just fine. However, spreadsheets have always been a tool that can be used for everything, but does nothing _well_. Financial management software has supplanted spreadsheets because it happens to do financial management much better than a spreadsheet can.
Just because something used to be considered a basic tool that everyone should know doesn't mean that it shouldn't be replaced when something better comes along. No one programs computers with toggle switches any more, because it turns out that better methods were invented.
Interesting thing I'm hearing here that seems to be a big difference between bills in the US and the UK, your bills seem to come due sporadically throughout the month.
Myself and most people I know..pretty much only have bills due roughly at the first and 15th of the month. I only have to pay twice a month for things. I'm currently back on a W2 gig, so I get paid on the 7th and the 22nd of the month, so, when I get paid, I know I need to pay bills.
Some companies ask you what date you want to be billed each month, a lot don't. But even for the ones who do, you choose a date that lines up with your pay date, then change job and your pay date moves, then change some of your utilities and line them up with your new pay date, then change job, etc. Eventually the billing dates get all over the place - you could contact all the utilities and move the billing date when you change job, but.. effort.
And most of my bills also come in the mail, so I have that as a reminder
Many utilities offer a discount for using paper-free billing these days, so very few of my bills come in the post (I just electronically archive the PDF bills they generate). There are some other problems with this of course - places like banks like to take a couple of utility bills under 3 months old as ID (proof of address) and I had real problems when I moved house a few years ago since I simply didn't have enough paper bills. At some point they are going to have to change this method of proving your address, not least because it would be trivial to forge a utility bill anyway.
I _think_ the only paper bills I get these days are:
> it might make sense if the chequebook is the *only* way money leaves your account
How *else* would money leave a checking account? I suppose I could go to the bank and fill out a withdrawal form and get cash, but why bother, when I can just write a check?
> I'm not going to easily keep track of all the direct debits,
> standing orders, ATM withdrawals, debit card transactions, etc.
Exactly. That's the point.
I'm sure as hell not going to write a cheque and walk to the post box every few days to pay a bill. Bills go out of my bank account automatically - saves a lot of hassle. It doesn't exactly make stuff hard to track because I can see all the transactions every time I log into my bank's website or use an ATM.
> I do use Gnucash to manage my finances
I just use a spreadsheet. It's easier.
Your finances must be *really* simplistic if a spreadsheet is easier than a financial management package. As soon as you have more than one account, a real financial management package makes things a lot easier.
> > buying everyday stuff like groceries on credit is not fiscally
> > responsible and will quickly land you hip-deep in debt
>
> It will? I can't say I've noticed
Evidence: about twenty percent of the population of North America.
That is no evidence at all - that is simply evidence that 20% of the population of North America are incapable of managing their finances. This has nothing to do with using a credit card not being "fiscally responsible" and everything to do with *certain individuals* not being fiscally responsible.
It's not just a matter of discipline (though that is relevant too), but also of keeping track.
There's not a lot of excuse for not being able to keep track these days - you can check a current bank statement at any time over the web.
With a checkbook, you generally have a record of what you've spent.
That only works if a cheque book is the *only* way you withdraw money from your account. I certainly don't have the discipline to note down every transaction (debit card payments, credit card payments, direct debits, standing orders, ATM transactions, BACS/FPS transfers) on a handwritten ledger at the time it happens. Especially since the bank does it all for me on their website anyway. I guess you can stay in the dark ages and refuse to pay by anything other than cheque, but you can kiss goodbye to phone/web shopping if you do that.
> If you lack the discipline to only spend within your
> limits, you can always use a debit card instead,
Oh, yeah, I definitely want to be charged use fees in excess of a dollar for each and every transaction. How could I pass up a deal like that?
Sounds like the US banking system is utterly kerrayzee to me. I don't pay any fees for my transactions, whether they are done by BACS, FPS, debit card, credit card, cheque or cash.
And, like with a credit card, if you keep a ledger so that you know your balance, it's no longer more convenient than writing checks.
And like with a credit card, the bank does all this for you and makes a ledger available for you to see 24 hours a day.
> which will be declined at the time of the transaction if your bank account is empty.
Many debit cards in the US don't even do that. They automatically transform into credit cards if your balance goes below zero.
It can work in various ways in the UK - most of the time the debit card transaction happens online (i.e. the terminal connects to the bank while you are making the payment). In this case, the bank can decline the transaction (whether or not they do so, or just let you go overdrawn is down to your agreement with the bank). Some transactions are done offline and then submitted to the bank at the end of the day, and in this case the bank obviously can't decline. If you are someone who has a history of being incapable of managing your finances, the bank will issue you a card that does now allow offline transactions.
I know I keep saying this, but it's really a fairly major point.
It seems like a really irrelevant point to me, since as I keep mentioning, you can check your current balance and get a statement 24 hours a day. You don't even need a computer and an internet connection since the ATM will print you a mini statement at no cost.
I'd like to know what Europeans think is so bad about a checkbook. It's actually quite handy.
I think a chequebook is fine - I use mine for paying money to friends when I don't have their bank details. I don't use them in a shop though, and the reasons for this are many:
1. A chequebook is *really* bulky compared to a credit/debit card. My wallet is big enough as it is without carrying a bloody great chequebook with me.
2. If I pay by credit card then I get 30-60 days credit for
You have a lot more bills that regularly come due than I do, if you'd be paying something every other day. Or even remotely close to that.
Off the top of my head: National insurance, credit card, phone, TV licence, internet, satellite TV, regular donation to the RNLI, contact lenses, gas, electricity, mortgage, critical illness insurance, water, council tax.
That's 14, so pretty close to every couple of days, and I've probably forgotten some. Then there are the annual bills like income tax that I pay by a manual BACS transfer.
I wouldn't want to have anybody pulling from my deposit accounts simply because I have to be aware of the problem before I can have it corrected. As it is, if there are erroneous transactions, it is my credit card issuer's problem until it gets sorted out.
You have to be aware to get fraud fixed on your credit card too. If you blindly pay your credit card bill without ever looking at the statement then someone can make fraudulent transactions and they will never get fixed (that makes it your problem, not the credit card company's). Similarly, if you check your bank statements like you'd check your credit card statements then you can get any erroneous transactions fixed.
Maybe you missed what I said about the direct debit guarantee - the bank is legally obliged to reverse a direct debit *immediately* if you tell them to.
Most every checkbook I've ever seen or used also has a built in ledger, where you have balances against charges with you at all times. It is easy to see how much money you have left.
I've never bothered to use the ledger in my chequebook - it might make sense if the chequebook is the *only* way money leaves your account, but I'm not going to easily keep track of all the direct debits, standing orders, ATM withdrawals, debit card transactions, etc. on a little handwritten ledger. And that's before you even consider money going *in* to your account (I'm a sole trader, so I don't have a regular monthly salary going into my account on a fixed date - money appears in my account on a reasonably ad-hoc basis).
I do use Gnucash to manage my finances (its a good discipline that I picked up when I became self employed, because I have to keep track of that stuff for tax reasons), but that is a very "after the event" affair because I only bother to enter transactions into it when I get the statement that they are on. Keeping track of my balance on a day to day basis is usually done through web banking or by asking the ATM for my balance.
I personally do NOT like this as that I don't like giving hardly anyone or any company direct access to my bank
As I said, whilst they have direct access to your bank account, the agreement is also backed by the guarantee that your bank will refund the money immediately if you ask them to, no questions asked. This tends to work very well for the majority of the UK's population (although there are complaints that those without bank accounts are penalised since most utilities offer a discount for paying by DD as it reduces their costs).
However, many banks here are offering free bill pay from the banks website, where if the company is hooked to the 'system' (I forget the name) when I set up a bill to pay it is often transferred from the bank to the company electronically in about 1-2 days.
You can also do this in the UK if you don't want to pay by DD - you just tell your bank to transfer the funds into another bank account via BACS or FPS (BACS takes about 3 days and can be used to transfer money between *any* UK bank accounts, FPS is almost instantaneous but isn't yet supported by every bank). Both BACS and FPS are usually free.
If the bill to pay is a person or company not in their electronic system, the bank cuts them a physical check and mails it to them..free of charge.
That is unnecessary here since every bank accepts BACS transfers for current accounts. The only time I can think of where a cheque is required to transfer money between accounts is when you are paying into certain savings accounts (some ISAs, bonds, etc).
As for automatic payments!??!
Eeek...not me. I like to see exactly what the bill is for everything, and pay the amounts out myself. Heck, what happens if you make a mistake in checking somehow...and your funds are lower than thought..and all those automatic bill payments come in and cause numerouse NSF (insufficient funds) penalties??
From my point of view, I think the chances of me forgetting to pay a bill (and getting penalised or cut off by the service provider) is much higher than the chance of going overdrawn due to an automatic payment, mainly because I'd be having to manually pay a bill every other day and something is bound to get missed.
Also, like many people I have an overdraft agreement with the bank which costs me nothing. Using an overdraft like a long term loan is, of course, crazy and I'd never do that; however, it does mean that if I accidentally go overdrawn then I am only charged a bit of interest (probably a few pennies for the few days it takes me to move money around to cover the shortfall) rather than a "unauthorised overdraft" penalty charge.
buying everyday stuff like groceries on credit is not fiscally responsible and will quickly land you hip-deep in debt
It will? I can't say I've noticed - I've always used my credit card to buy pretty much everything that's over £5 (almost every shop takes cards... and practically no shop takes cheques) and I've never landed in "heaps of debt". My credit card bill arrives at the end of the month and gets paid off by an automatic direct debit from my current account when the bill becomes due a month later.
Sure, if my bank account is empty when the direct debit goes out then my account will go overdrawn and I'll get charged, but that would happen if I was writing a guaranteed cheque too.
If you lack the discipline to only spend within your limits, you can always use a debit card instead, which will be declined at the time of the transaction if your bank account is empty.
So no, using a credit card is not "fiscally irresponsible" and won't land you "hip-deep in debt" unless you're a complete idiot.
You don't know who they are or what they're going to do with your account, or what their policies and rates and hours are going to be next month.
You're right, I don't know what they are going to do with my money, but I don't pretend to know what a small local bank is going to do with it either. My money is protected by laws that require the government to protect it in the event that the bank goes under, and if I don't like what my bank are going to do the next month (which would have to adhere to the contract I have with them anyway) it is trivial to switch to a different bank.
They also don't have the concept of "direct debit". something that astounds me.
Every service that I need to pay for, from my gas utility, electric utility, student loan, and credit card bill can be paid directly at the company's website as a direct debt. I enter my routing and checking account numbers, and the bill gets deducted from my bank account.
I think you misunderstand what "Direct Debit" means in the UK. Direct Debit is basically a system where you authorise a company to withdraw money from your account each month. This is very similar to a standing order (where you instruct your bank "transfer X amount to another bank account on this day each week/month/year") except that for Direct Debits the amount to withdraw is determined by the recipient of the payment.
This means that my phone bill is automatically paid in full each month, even though it is not a fixed amount. I don't have to do anything after the DD is initially set up - no logging into the telco's website to organise the transfer each month, etc.
On the face of it, DD sounds like a security nightmare since you're basically authorising a third party to withdraw however much they like from your account. But it is backed by the direct debit guarantee, which is a legal requirement for the bank to protect you from fraudulent transactions and immediately refund you if there is any dispute. So from the consumer's point of view, the security is reasonable.
Pretty much all regular bill payments can be done by direct debit or standing order, so the need to actually go and pay it manually (whether that is by handing over cash, a cheque or organising an electronic transfer each month) is pretty much non-existent.
First of all, they don't have a monopoly anymore, so why bother doing this now
The EU has certainly waited until far too late - this step should have been taken 10 years ago. However, I do support what they are doing simply because it will prevent history from repeating itself.
Sure they didn't support PNG format properly until way too late, but really what makes the web so much better now than it was when Netscape threw in the towel and decided to rewrite their browser from scratch? We had CSS back then.
Yes, we had more or less the same standards back then, the difference is that IE's support for them was criminally broken. Getting anything reasonably advanced to work the way you wanted it to on IE was *really* hard. Getting stuff to work on both IE and any other browser was even harder - this means that the web never really advanced much, and where it did it only ended up working on IE, which was a serious problem for those of us who didn't have Windows machines.
I think the real problem for the web over the last decade was the W3C. HTML kept improving while the browser manufacturers kept adding features and W3C adopted what they liked.
You *need* standards, otherwise you go back to a situation where the platforms have diverged and only the majority platform is supported. Back in the days where IE had the monopoly, all the other browsers were basically playing catch-up - not because they were technologically behind IE, but because it is really hard to support an ad-hoc "standard" that is barely documented and only implemented on one platform. I want the browser writers to spend their time implementing improvements to functionality, not tweaking existing functionality so that it matches the bugs in another browser.
The successor to HTML 4 was XHTML, which was technical fiddling around the edges rather than adding something for the end user. Eventually we are going to get HTML 5
HTML 5 is a terrible design. XHTML introduced some real improvements over HTML 4.01, but a small number of vendors (Microsoft, Nokia, etc.) decided to raise two fingers at the W3C and implement their own badly designed standard instead (HTML 5). A standard which completely throws away all those improvements and introduces a bunch of badly thought out elements which are going to require frequent redesigns of the language to support future technologies (XHTML was going down the genericised path whereby future technologies would frequently not require language changes, which is a far saner idea).
Sure, HTML 5 introduces some features that XHTML hadn't got around to implementing, but it would've been far more sensible and reasonably trivial to extend XHTML in a generic way in order to implement those features.
The thing that everyone has forgotten here is what is best for the general public - the ones who aren't interested in tinkering with their computer and who just want to get onto the web.
What's best for the general public, and what the general public are interested in are rarely related. The general public will usually take the path of least resistance, which frequently doesn't serve their long term interests. Causing short term inconvenience may indeed be good for the general public in the long term. We've already seen what happens when Microsoft gains an unopposed monopoly - IE6 caused the web to stagnate for *years* because they had destroyed the competition and so there was no longer anyone pushing MS into doing any further development work on it. We are only just starting to get out of that stagnation now, primarily because other browser vendors appeared and took advantage of MS's lack of improvements, but the alternative browsers had a really tough job getting any traction against the IE monopoly.
A healthy market with plenty of competition is frequently an inconvenience for the general public, but it is undeniably better than a monopoly in the long term.
The full PC would transmit from the PC to the phone for phone tasks.
Which means my phone is going to need to be in constant communication with the PC - this is going to suck the battery dry in no time. Far more sensible to have the applications running locally on the phone.
Putting the single point of processing in your phone for your desktop, TV, picture frames, etc..etc..etc... is simply the wrong path.
I couldn't agree more.
Transmitting data between a phone and other devices when there is zero reason to is very bad.
And yet that's exactly what you're going to have to do if you turn the phone into a thin client. If the phone is being a thin client, that means it is constantly going to have to contact a server over the network to do stuff that would otherwise be local to the phone - e.g. looking at your calendar, reading your archived SMS messages, etc. Far more sensible is to have the phone do phone stuff and the PC do PC stuff instead of trying to have a single machine do everything.
Whilst it would certainly be nice for a phone to be _capable_ of doing desktop-type stuff (I could plug my phone into a hotel's HDTV and do desktop stuff when I'm on holiday), I think the idea of this actually replacing regular desktop workstations is nuts. Similarly, I think the idea of a desktop workstation doing all the processing for a thin-client smartphone is also nuts. They function well as separate devices - WTF would we want to cripple them like that?
Your insistence that anyone would even suggest transmitting to a thin client for processing means that you are unwilling or unable to take a useful part in the discussion.
I didn't say that you should use a thin client for data processing. My point was that the idea of a thin client makes *no sense* when it comes to playing video, because the processing load has to be entirely local to the display device (i.e. the thin client itself).
That statement right there says that you are unwilling or unable to understand what is being described. You are either trolling, or the entire discussion would have to be repeated to bring you back up to speed.
Or maybe you have failed to explain well enough. I have read the discussion and what you are saying really doesn't make sense to me.
The definition of a thin client is a device which does very little except display the product of a remote server. This is something that simply doesn't make sense for video playback - the video is already compressed suitable for transport across the network. The only serious CPU time involved in playing it is decoding this compressed stream - if you move that decoding job from the phone to a remote server then you now have the impossible task of getting that decoded data onto your thin client's display without recompressing it.
If you are not talking about doing the CPU heavy tasks on a remote machine then you are not talking about a thin client at all; conversely, if you are talking about putting the CPU heavy tasks on a remote machine then it doesn't make sense for video playback.