Another thought: the WTC attacks deserved a nuclear response. I personally don't really give a shit whether it was 20-odd random lunatics from some Arab country. I would have selected a suitable location in each participant nation for a demonstration and detonated, somewhere where we'd get casualties, but within measure of 9/11. Make clear that attacks from residents of said nation are considered acts of war, and that the next attack upon the US would result in a significant deployment of our strategic arsenal onto the offending country. The colloquial parking lot effect.
What exactly do you consider the difference between flying planes into buildings and killing a shit load of civilians and dropping bombs to kill a shit load of civilians? Both sound like acts of terrorism to me.
Problem solved.
Well that's one way to solve the problem - ensure that the US gets wiped off the face of the planet by legitimising *everyone* with a grudge against the US and adding a few more to the number of people the US pisses off.
Most everyone I know is willing to voluntarily sign up for department and grocery store "point cards" to save ~%5.....
Last I checked the grocery store wasn't in the habit of detaining people without charge for weeks, or extraditing them to the US (possibly for torture) based on no real evidence.
if the public didn't trust the government they wouldn't have been voted in, right?
A significant problem with the public making decisions (e.g. voting) is that they are often woefully uninformed and therefore make decisions based on a very superficial understanding. A good example of this is the anti-nuclear brigade: they oppose nuclear power because they have some idea that modern reactors are as dangerous as Chernobyl, and so vote against it rather than actually doing some research into the relative merits and flaws of the various technologies being considered. The same is true of ID cards, airport security checks, etc - the government says "these will stop you getting blown up" and suddenly the vast majority of the public think they are a good thing without researching the problems.
For this reason, it is good to have decisions made by well informed experts rather than having the uninformed masses making poorly educated judgments.
However, at the same time, allowing the government to have free reign over these decisions is a real problem because a lot of the time it is clear to those of us who take the time to understand the situation, that the government often makes decisions that push their own agenda rather than benefiting the public. This is a real problem.
Maybe the solution is to have a public referendum on important decisions, but to test each voter on their background knowledge of the situation. Then weight the voting results by these tests so that more informed members of the public have more influence than those who just read what the Daily Mail has to say about it. Of course the problem here is how to ensure the government makes the tests fair rather than skewing the results in their favor?
The showing of your id should never be compulsory and it should be a criminal offence to attempt to force someone to show their ID.
What would be the point in ID cards if you didn't require people to show them? (Not that I believe there is any real point in them anyway).
In any case, this has been tried before - the government basically said "we're going to make entry into the database optional - only people who get passports will be put into the database". I.e. the government's idea of "optional" is "not required unless you're doing something that many people need to do anyway."
Any inappropriate access to the data stored against a persons id should be heavily penalised
Yeah, coz that has worked so well in the past *cough*DVLA*cough*.
What data can be stored against a persons id should be clearly legislated
Here's an idea - how about "none". As a law-abiding citizen, there is absolutely no need for the government to store data about me over and above what they already do (and even some of that is going too far).
The idea behind a patent is to get ideas out in the open. It's a trade with the public - the inventor offers his schematics, and the public gives him a time-limited monopoly. If someone invents something - say a new stronger, lighter alloy - that nobody else knows how to make, then it's not in the public's interest to let the knowledge of how to make it die with him. So they say "we'll guarantee you nobody else will make your alloy, if you give us the process by which you make it". Now, if it's something that any metallurgist worth his salt could whip up in a month or two, then the public would be getting gyped on the deal.
The trick is that patents (no longer) do this well. Possibly because of newer trade secrets laws.
Businesses generally only patent stuff which could be (relatively easily) discovered by reverse engineering the product - all the stuff that would be practically impossible for people outside the organisation to discover is kept as a trade secret instead. The the patents are no longer trying to get ideas out into the open - instead they are protecting ideas that would be out in the open anyway. The ideas that need to be brought out into the open are being kept as trade secrets.
Whilst I support the ideals of the patent system, I do think it has some major flaws. The biggest of those is the fact that it does not (and probably can't ever) recognise how someone came up with a design. For example, if you produce a product and then I just rip off the design then I should be paying you a licence because you did all the hard R&D word and I just ripped it off. On the other hand, if you produce a product and then I produce a similar product completely independently with no knowledge of yours I have received no benefit from your R&D and so why the hell should I pay you a licence fee?
This becomes more of an issue when small internal components of a product are patented and so there is no reasonable expectation that anyone else would know about the technology you patented. E.g. if you produce a product and patent parts of an ASIC you are using deep within the internals, and then I produce a completely different product which happens to need similar ASIC functionality there is no reasonable way I would know that I could licence a design from you - I would do the R&D myself and then some time after it hits the market I might get sued by you for infringing a patent I never knew existed.
Personally, I can't think of a way to build a replacement for the patent system which would do what the patent system is *intended* to do. However, the current patent system certainly isn't working.
conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License.
Since they are enforcing their own patents on the use of said software they are in violation of the GPL
How do you figure that? By your own words, you have said that it is their own patent - that means they get to choose the licence terms of their patented technology. If they choose licence terms that are compatible with their GPL responsibilities then there is no contradiction and they are in the clear.
I am aware of no terms of their patent that are incompatible with their GPL responsibilities. Note that this strictly talks about their responsibilities, not the responsibilities of a third party who wants to distribute the GPL code.
This is the fundamental difference between GPL2 and GPL3 - under GPL2 you can distribute code under the GPL which is patented. This means that you can happilly distribute the code in compliance with both the GPL and the patent (since it is your patent) but other people would not be able to do so since they don't have a patent licence (even though the GPL allows them to distribute the code). GPL3, on the other hand, specifically requires that you grant a patent licence to anyone who has the source code, so it removes this loophole.
they themselves have committed a copyright violation and opened themselves up to lawsuits from thousands of developers.
National domains were politically expedient, but a stupid idea.
I wouldn't say the idea was stupid, but the current implementation leaves a lot to be desired. For example, a small business that only the UK could happily have a.co.uk - this is no problem since it's only people in the UK who are interested in visiting the web site and it would give international visitors a clue that they probably shouldn't expect that business to trade internationally. Having a name collision with a small business in another country wouldn't really be an issue since the other business would be under their own country code. Businesses that trade internationally can have a.com as well as their own country code. I'd say this is a good thing since the domain name gives you an indication of the geographic region the business is interested in trading in.
However, there are some problems with this approach that immediately spring to mind: 1. The US would have to be convinced to make use of the.us TLD. 2. Some companies always seem to want to look bigger than they really are, so you'd still end up with them inappropriately registering a.com. (This seems strange to me since personally I would much prefer to do business with a small company since they usually treat their customers better). 3. You'd end up with people snapping up the.com name of any company that looks like it might get big enough to trade internationally, and then charging that company through the nose for it.
Of course, every so often some more TLDs are introduced. For the most part I don't think they do anything but bring in more money for the registrars since companies have a habit of just snapping up their domain name under as many TLDs as possible to avoid confusion with any other organisation/domain squatter.
How many of you young folk in the United States have ever had an email address with multiple dots in it?
I'm not in the US, but I have had a number: sucs.swan.ac.uk, theankh.demon.co.uk, f213.n2503.z2.fidonet.org... Although I stopped considering myself "young folk" a while ago:)
However, when you pay your buddy more to fix your car than a completely new car would cost at the dealership down the street, then you're either really irrationally in love with your car... or a moron.
This analogy is pretty bad because it ignores the convenience aspect.
If I want to send a short message to someone who I know has their phone with them then what are my options? Lets see:
1. Send an SMS message at a cost of 10p. They will probably receive the message within a few seconds. 2. Use my phone to send an email or an IM. Still not the cheapest way of doing things given the GPRS charges. They aren't going to get the email or IM until they get to their computer (unless they use an email push service to get mail notifications to their phone). Also, if I want a reply I have to either leave my IM client on my phone logged in over GPRS (expensive) or subscribe to an email push service (again, costs money). 3. Wait until I can get to a computer with an internet connection to send an email or IM. Hardly useful when you need to send a message to someone quickly. Also suffers from similar problems as (2).
So for the convenience I'm going to pay the 10p. Does that make me a moron? No - it makes me someone who finds the service useful enough to pay.
Fundamentally, the reason why ISPs can't get away with charging similar prices is because SMS is a single application with a very high bandwidth efficiency, whereas internet connections are used by many applications with vastly different bandwidth demands. If an ISP charges the same (per octet of bandwidth) as the telco charge for SMS, applications such as the web, video streaming, etc would be prohibitively expensive.
This is a real problem facing telcos at the moment - voice calls use a very small amount of bandwidth compared to many other applications (~13Kbps for GSM). Telcos make their money by charging for voice calls. However, with the convergence of the networks (e.g. VoIP), it becomes impossible to set prices for individual applications - voice must be charged in the same way as any other data. Maintaining the current pricing for voice calls would price other services out of the market, but adjusting prices to allow these services to exist would make the voice calls virtually free. A huge paradigm shift in the pricing strategy is needed.
In the long run, I think that all the telcos will just become data carriers providing internet access and voice calls will become essentially free. The number of application service providers will increase, much the same way as it has for other services on the internet - i.e. your ISP will run a voicemail server for you in the same way as they run an email server, but people like Google will also provide voicemail services (probably integrated into the Gmail interface). I imagine the pricing will be tied to the amount of bandwidth used, which will work out very beneficial for people who primarily make voice calls.
As you can imagine, as with any massive paradigm shift there is a lot of resistance from the industry because the future is so hard to predict.
the ability to send data from handset to handset was by using the network control protocols*, rather than within voice packets.
Correct - SMS messages are sent over the SS7 network, rather than the circuit switched network used to carry voice.
That said, I have no idea what network packet switched IP data is sent over (GPRS, etc.) - are the operators running the IP packets over yet another network infrastructure, or shoving them over the existing SS7 network (with possibly upgraded links). In the long run, the telcos are switching from SS7 to IMS (IP based - crazilly, usually IPv4. Talk about spending billions to upgrade to an already superseded protocol), but we aren't there yet.
high volumes of SMS data is a much greater burden than the packet data sent during a voice call.
well, not quite. SS7 links can be upgraded to provide more capacity, just as the circuit switched network can be (in fact, it isn't uncommon for SS7 traffic to be carried on the same physical TDM link as the voice circuits, so it wouldn't be hard to reallocate some of the voice timeslots to be SS7 links). In any case, networks have a very simple way of dealing with shock loads of SMS traffic (for example, new year's day) - they silently throw the messages away.
Somebody with GSM background can elaborate with the correct jargon.
Not specifically GSM, but I did work on SS7 and SIGTRAN for a while (and yes, they really are horrible protocols).
What planet are you living on? Why do you think the education system is the way it is? It's training future employees.
The education system is there to provide various levels of general education with increasing specialisation as the student progresses (e.g. school -> college -> university). At the school level the education should be quite general and is about teaching people a broad range of skills and general so that they can go into *any* job and have a better understanding of the world in general. Whether that job be software developer, mathematician, plumber, chef, whatever.
School maths lessons don't teach kids how to use a specific brand of calculator - they teach the principles needed to use any. Cooking lessons don't teach using a specific brand of oven - they teach the general principles. Why should computing lessons be any different? You don't need to know how to use Microsoft Word, you need to know the general principles of how to use a word processor, which can be applied to *any* word processor (even the next version of MS Word, which you can be sure is going to be nothing like the current one).
If people want to have more specific training, they are welcome to it - they can opt to do an extra course in their own time. The limited class time available should be used for teaching general analytical skills allowing people to adapt to all the software rather than learning a specific brand of software by rote. However, if people need specific training in how to use MS software rather than just general training in how to use *any* software that does the same job, I have to question the usability of MS software.
Wouldn't want kids to have any training on the software they're going to be using in the real world now would we?
When I was at school we were trained on Acorns (as was pretty much everyone in the UK at the time). Certainly not what is used in industry. I'm not convinced this caused harm - if anything I think it helped develop the skills needed to use *any* system rather than just learning MS software by rote.
In any case, whether you teach kids MS Office or OpenOffice when they are at school, by the time they get out into the real world no office software will look much like what they learnt - teaching the principles involved in using the software is far more important than teaching the software itself since the principles are transferable to whatever software they end up using in the real world - whether that be the latest greatest Microsoft software or something completely different.
Free training is not monopoly subsidising. Its just a different business model, they charge for the software and give free training. Other companies give away the software and make their money on support and training. There is nothing wrong with giving away free stuff (like training) in order to grow your market share.
This isn't "free training" - Microsoft are trying to shape the existing educational system to push their agenda. IMHO *no* company should be able to influence the direction of general education by handing over wonga. If they want to donate money then that's fine, but they shouldn't get to influence what the school does.
If Microsoft (or anyone else) wants to offer free training they can damned well run courses outside of school hours rather than hijacking the existing schooling system. Companies are not the right people to be deciding what the kids get taught in mandatory lessons since they will usually choose what is best for themselves rather than what is best for the students.
Tweak your pagerank algorithm so it improves the position of pages that are xhtml-strict
Sadly Google doesn't deal with XHTML well. I can only assume this is to prevent turning up XHTML sites when IE users search for stuff since IE won't display XHTML at all.
Is IE8 going to have XHTML support? (I'm not holding my breath). I'm certainly hoping Microsoft don't try to support the horribly broken mess that is HTML 5 first.
Only works if you're running the GNU grep. If you're stuck on something like Solaris there is no -r. (Which is one of the reasons why using Solaris feels like you're back in the 1970s - its userland really hasn't changed much since...)
When the risk is riduced to a fraction of a percent (similar to what airline travel is today) there will be less reason to argue based on safety that humans shouldn't attempt space travel. 14 lives in 120 launches isn't good enough. If your local airline carried those odds you'd not use it.
Sure, if an airline carried those odds I wouldn't use it to go on holiday. But these aren't the general public going on their summer break - they are a relatively small group of astronauts who understand and accept the risks involved. Why is it ok to send a very large number of people into war zones (where there's a good chance they will be seriously injured or die) but sending a small group of people into space is too dangerous? I'm sure you could point to many situations that governments put people in which are far more risky than sending them up in the shuttle.
I was under the impression that we were talking about ISPs and their business models in general. You said that my ISP won't ever say how contended my DSLAM is - this is not the case in some parts of the world (and yet I would imagine that the contention is quite similar).
They just don't want to provide the service they have sold to us.
Whether they don't _want_ to provide the service or _can't_ provide it really isn't the point. They aren't going to provide an "unlimited" service (for whatever reason) and they are changing the terms of service and pricing structure to match what they are _actually_ going to provide. Isn't that a good thing?
I'm sorry, I really don't see what the problem is - you are complaining that they advertise "unlimited" connections which they can't provide (and you are quite right to complain about this misadvertising) but when they change their pricing structure to allow them to advertise a model they _can_ provide you're still not happy. As far as I can tell they are stopping misadvertising services and instead telling customers what they are actually going to be able to do - surely that's a good thing?
I have never agreed to the terms of a EULA in my life. Putting a check box or a button in your software does not a legal agreement make.
If you clicked the "agree" button then you agreed. And yes, there have been a number of legal cases upholding the validity of EULAs (sadly). If you didn't like the terms you shouldn't have clicked the "agree" button.
I'm sure they are used - but if you want to look at raw numbers (and especially in a "consumer" environment) then the numbers from the proprietary closed non-XMPP networks dwarfs everything else.
I'm continually amazed by the number of businesses who discuss their top secret business deals over MSN... I mean, sure - Microsoft probably aren't analysing your IMs, but do you want to take the risk when you could just set up your own XMPP server and keep the conversations local?
I think the most frightening thought of all is what would the net be like if it was designed from the ground up by the likes of MS & AOL a decade ago.... If the likes of MS had been given the opportunity to control these services then the internet today would be a truly appalling place - think of the IM mess branched out to *every* protocol.
Sounds rather like the original MSN and AOL to me. The only reason they didn't take off was because the Internet (or probably more precisely, the World Wide Web) had more content and allowed people to publish their own (which is why it had more:).
The ONLY one that will strive to remain off it will be MS. But you can bet that once they do, it will be with an interesting extension (and very closed one).
I read an article from an MS person the other day stating that MS were in the process of designing a new proprietary protocol to replace the existing MSN one and were working on some method of allowing interoperability with Google. I was left thinking that using XMPP instead of a new proprietary thing would have been a good start if they wanted interoperability.:)
If MS do start interoperating with other IM services and they change their own protocol to some new proprietary thing at the same time, I could see them losing a lot of their users. Suddenly you'd be able to talk to all your MSN contacts from your XMPP account but your multiprotocol IM client would no longer be able to talk to MSN, so people would just move to XMPP en masse.
That said, MS have a bit of a problem with joining the XMPP network because they allow people to use their own domain - i.e. you can have an MSN address of you@yourdomain.com and it would still need to go via the MSN servers. The only way I can see them handling this would be to have XMPP addresses in the form you@yourdomain.com@msn.com or similar.
but "Linux", being a very globular thing, didn't have consistency in the interface. The flow of various applications could change, the differing toolkits made buttons between programs different.
Interesting - I found that Windows was very similar, with each application choosing to do things differently. (I'm aware that Apple has always had much stricter UI guidelines though).
Also, everything is in development all the time.
Well, it is true that there is a lot of development going on (but I consider this to be a Good Thing). Whether you have to deal with the "in development" stuff yourself is greatly affected by your choice of distro. For example, if you choose Fedora you will get lots of development stuff because it is intended to be a bleeding edge distro. On the other hand, if you use CentOS, Debian, etc. you'll have the stable releases of stuff because they are intended to be stable distros.
Also, in my experience, the Free Software world's definition of "in development" is often the Windows world's definition of "released".
Many programs have little annoying quirks and such that just bug me.
You just described my experience of Windows.:) Actually, I think you just described my experience of pretty much every platform, but at least the Free ones allow me to fix things that I find annoying enough.
As pluses for the Mac platform, it actually has some games available (namely, World of Warcraft), as well as Microsoft Office, which is still my preferred office suite.
I guess this is the big deal. I don't tend to play many games (although I was under the impression that World of Warcraft would run under WINE?) and it is rare that I need an office suite - for writing letters, etc I tend to use LaTeX since it is easier and faster than using a word processor. On the odd occasion I do need an office suite OOo suits me fine (sadly they have adopted some of the Microsoft Office annoyances, such as Auto Fuckup^WCorrect:).
In general, I just didn't like the "feel" of any Linux desktop I tried to use
I guess the major plus-point for me about Linux desktops is that they are far more configurable. For example, if you want sloppy-focus (which I do) you just turn it on and it works, whereas under Windows you _can_ turn it on with TweakUI but from what I've seen it tends to break a lot of stuff. I've not really got any experience with OS X but from what I understand it also isn't anywhere near as configurable as the Linux desktop environments.
I've settled on Gnome + Compiz-Fusion as my preferred environment (although the Gnome projects' constant efforts to make the UI more userfriendly - read: move *all* the config settings into the Windows Registry^W^Wgconf instead of providing a nice configurator is a bit frustrating). I guess I would be most happy on a combination of Enlightenment 0.17 and Compiz-Fusion but sadly they aren't compatible with each other.
I handle any server that we use Linux on and I'm VERY capable in the Linux environment - I just don't like using it as a desktop long-term.
I'm quite surprised that you find Windows nicer to use if you're used to using the Linux command line tools. When I'm stuck behind a Windows machine I think the single biggest annoyance is probably that I can't just open up a terminal window and hack up a bit of bash script to do some repetitive task.
Anyway, I'm just happy there are an increasing number of alternatives to Windows - people don't consider you quite as weird these days if you don't use Windows at all.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Another thought: the WTC attacks deserved a nuclear response. I personally don't really give a shit whether it was 20-odd random lunatics from some Arab country. I would have selected a suitable location in each participant nation for a demonstration and detonated, somewhere where we'd get casualties, but within measure of 9/11. Make clear that attacks from residents of said nation are considered acts of war, and that the next attack upon the US would result in a significant deployment of our strategic arsenal onto the offending country. The colloquial parking lot effect.
What exactly do you consider the difference between flying planes into buildings and killing a shit load of civilians and dropping bombs to kill a shit load of civilians? Both sound like acts of terrorism to me.
Problem solved.
Well that's one way to solve the problem - ensure that the US gets wiped off the face of the planet by legitimising *everyone* with a grudge against the US and adding a few more to the number of people the US pisses off.
Most everyone I know is willing to voluntarily sign up for department and grocery store "point cards" to save ~%5.....
Last I checked the grocery store wasn't in the habit of detaining people without charge for weeks, or extraditing them to the US (possibly for torture) based on no real evidence.
if the public didn't trust the government they wouldn't have been voted in, right?
A significant problem with the public making decisions (e.g. voting) is that they are often woefully uninformed and therefore make decisions based on a very superficial understanding. A good example of this is the anti-nuclear brigade: they oppose nuclear power because they have some idea that modern reactors are as dangerous as Chernobyl, and so vote against it rather than actually doing some research into the relative merits and flaws of the various technologies being considered. The same is true of ID cards, airport security checks, etc - the government says "these will stop you getting blown up" and suddenly the vast majority of the public think they are a good thing without researching the problems.
For this reason, it is good to have decisions made by well informed experts rather than having the uninformed masses making poorly educated judgments.
However, at the same time, allowing the government to have free reign over these decisions is a real problem because a lot of the time it is clear to those of us who take the time to understand the situation, that the government often makes decisions that push their own agenda rather than benefiting the public. This is a real problem.
Maybe the solution is to have a public referendum on important decisions, but to test each voter on their background knowledge of the situation. Then weight the voting results by these tests so that more informed members of the public have more influence than those who just read what the Daily Mail has to say about it. Of course the problem here is how to ensure the government makes the tests fair rather than skewing the results in their favor?
and crash losing all data the first time someone tries to run a query.
By "lose" you presumably mean misplace the CDs full of unencrypted data they put in the post?
for example, by making you produce your ID card when you get a job, so everyone is forced to either "volunteer" for a card, or else be unemployed.
Will you be allowed to sign on if you are unable to get a job because you don't have an ID card?
The showing of your id should never be compulsory and it should be a criminal offence to attempt to force someone to show their ID.
What would be the point in ID cards if you didn't require people to show them? (Not that I believe there is any real point in them anyway).
In any case, this has been tried before - the government basically said "we're going to make entry into the database optional - only people who get passports will be put into the database". I.e. the government's idea of "optional" is "not required unless you're doing something that many people need to do anyway."
Any inappropriate access to the data stored against a persons id should be heavily penalised
Yeah, coz that has worked so well in the past *cough*DVLA*cough*.
What data can be stored against a persons id should be clearly legislated
Here's an idea - how about "none". As a law-abiding citizen, there is absolutely no need for the government to store data about me over and above what they already do (and even some of that is going too far).
Sounds like they'll be out of a job if they don't accomplish this, so naturally they will want to do anything they can to push the ID cards on people.
Civil servants don't get "out of a job" - they are simply assigned to some other department to increase the beaurocracy there.
The idea behind a patent is to get ideas out in the open. It's a trade with the public - the inventor offers his schematics, and the public gives him a time-limited monopoly. If someone invents something - say a new stronger, lighter alloy - that nobody else knows how to make, then it's not in the public's interest to let the knowledge of how to make it die with him. So they say "we'll guarantee you nobody else will make your alloy, if you give us the process by which you make it". Now, if it's something that any metallurgist worth his salt could whip up in a month or two, then the public would be getting gyped on the deal.
The trick is that patents (no longer) do this well. Possibly because of newer trade secrets laws.
Businesses generally only patent stuff which could be (relatively easily) discovered by reverse engineering the product - all the stuff that would be practically impossible for people outside the organisation to discover is kept as a trade secret instead. The the patents are no longer trying to get ideas out into the open - instead they are protecting ideas that would be out in the open anyway. The ideas that need to be brought out into the open are being kept as trade secrets.
Whilst I support the ideals of the patent system, I do think it has some major flaws. The biggest of those is the fact that it does not (and probably can't ever) recognise how someone came up with a design. For example, if you produce a product and then I just rip off the design then I should be paying you a licence because you did all the hard R&D word and I just ripped it off. On the other hand, if you produce a product and then I produce a similar product completely independently with no knowledge of yours I have received no benefit from your R&D and so why the hell should I pay you a licence fee?
This becomes more of an issue when small internal components of a product are patented and so there is no reasonable expectation that anyone else would know about the technology you patented. E.g. if you produce a product and patent parts of an ASIC you are using deep within the internals, and then I produce a completely different product which happens to need similar ASIC functionality there is no reasonable way I would know that I could licence a design from you - I would do the R&D myself and then some time after it hits the market I might get sued by you for infringing a patent I never knew existed.
Personally, I can't think of a way to build a replacement for the patent system which would do what the patent system is *intended* to do. However, the current patent system certainly isn't working.
conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License.
Since they are enforcing their own patents on the use of said software they are in violation of the GPL
How do you figure that? By your own words, you have said that it is their own patent - that means they get to choose the licence terms of their patented technology. If they choose licence terms that are compatible with their GPL responsibilities then there is no contradiction and they are in the clear.
I am aware of no terms of their patent that are incompatible with their GPL responsibilities. Note that this strictly talks about their responsibilities, not the responsibilities of a third party who wants to distribute the GPL code.
This is the fundamental difference between GPL2 and GPL3 - under GPL2 you can distribute code under the GPL which is patented. This means that you can happilly distribute the code in compliance with both the GPL and the patent (since it is your patent) but other people would not be able to do so since they don't have a patent licence (even though the GPL allows them to distribute the code). GPL3, on the other hand, specifically requires that you grant a patent licence to anyone who has the source code, so it removes this loophole.
they themselves have committed a copyright violation and opened themselves up to lawsuits from thousands of developers.
And yet these lawsuits haven't happened...
National domains were politically expedient, but a stupid idea.
.co.uk - this is no problem since it's only people in the UK who are interested in visiting the web site and it would give international visitors a clue that they probably shouldn't expect that business to trade internationally. Having a name collision with a small business in another country wouldn't really be an issue since the other business would be under their own country code. Businesses that trade internationally can have a .com as well as their own country code. I'd say this is a good thing since the domain name gives you an indication of the geographic region the business is interested in trading in.
.us TLD. .com. (This seems strange to me since personally I would much prefer to do business with a small company since they usually treat their customers better). .com name of any company that looks like it might get big enough to trade internationally, and then charging that company through the nose for it.
:)
I wouldn't say the idea was stupid, but the current implementation leaves a lot to be desired. For example, a small business that only the UK could happily have a
However, there are some problems with this approach that immediately spring to mind:
1. The US would have to be convinced to make use of the
2. Some companies always seem to want to look bigger than they really are, so you'd still end up with them inappropriately registering a
3. You'd end up with people snapping up the
Of course, every so often some more TLDs are introduced. For the most part I don't think they do anything but bring in more money for the registrars since companies have a habit of just snapping up their domain name under as many TLDs as possible to avoid confusion with any other organisation/domain squatter.
How many of you young folk in the United States have ever had an email address with multiple dots in it?
I'm not in the US, but I have had a number: sucs.swan.ac.uk, theankh.demon.co.uk, f213.n2503.z2.fidonet.org... Although I stopped considering myself "young folk" a while ago
However, when you pay your buddy more to fix your car than a completely new car would cost at the dealership down the street, then you're either really irrationally in love with your car ... or a moron.
This analogy is pretty bad because it ignores the convenience aspect.
If I want to send a short message to someone who I know has their phone with them then what are my options? Lets see:
1. Send an SMS message at a cost of 10p. They will probably receive the message within a few seconds.
2. Use my phone to send an email or an IM. Still not the cheapest way of doing things given the GPRS charges. They aren't going to get the email or IM until they get to their computer (unless they use an email push service to get mail notifications to their phone). Also, if I want a reply I have to either leave my IM client on my phone logged in over GPRS (expensive) or subscribe to an email push service (again, costs money).
3. Wait until I can get to a computer with an internet connection to send an email or IM. Hardly useful when you need to send a message to someone quickly. Also suffers from similar problems as (2).
So for the convenience I'm going to pay the 10p. Does that make me a moron? No - it makes me someone who finds the service useful enough to pay.
Fundamentally, the reason why ISPs can't get away with charging similar prices is because SMS is a single application with a very high bandwidth efficiency, whereas internet connections are used by many applications with vastly different bandwidth demands. If an ISP charges the same (per octet of bandwidth) as the telco charge for SMS, applications such as the web, video streaming, etc would be prohibitively expensive.
This is a real problem facing telcos at the moment - voice calls use a very small amount of bandwidth compared to many other applications (~13Kbps for GSM). Telcos make their money by charging for voice calls. However, with the convergence of the networks (e.g. VoIP), it becomes impossible to set prices for individual applications - voice must be charged in the same way as any other data. Maintaining the current pricing for voice calls would price other services out of the market, but adjusting prices to allow these services to exist would make the voice calls virtually free. A huge paradigm shift in the pricing strategy is needed.
In the long run, I think that all the telcos will just become data carriers providing internet access and voice calls will become essentially free. The number of application service providers will increase, much the same way as it has for other services on the internet - i.e. your ISP will run a voicemail server for you in the same way as they run an email server, but people like Google will also provide voicemail services (probably integrated into the Gmail interface). I imagine the pricing will be tied to the amount of bandwidth used, which will work out very beneficial for people who primarily make voice calls.
As you can imagine, as with any massive paradigm shift there is a lot of resistance from the industry because the future is so hard to predict.
the ability to send data from handset to handset was by using the network control protocols*, rather than within voice packets.
Correct - SMS messages are sent over the SS7 network, rather than the circuit switched network used to carry voice.
That said, I have no idea what network packet switched IP data is sent over (GPRS, etc.) - are the operators running the IP packets over yet another network infrastructure, or shoving them over the existing SS7 network (with possibly upgraded links). In the long run, the telcos are switching from SS7 to IMS (IP based - crazilly, usually IPv4. Talk about spending billions to upgrade to an already superseded protocol), but we aren't there yet.
high volumes of SMS data is a much greater burden than the packet data sent during a voice call.
well, not quite. SS7 links can be upgraded to provide more capacity, just as the circuit switched network can be (in fact, it isn't uncommon for SS7 traffic to be carried on the same physical TDM link as the voice circuits, so it wouldn't be hard to reallocate some of the voice timeslots to be SS7 links). In any case, networks have a very simple way of dealing with shock loads of SMS traffic (for example, new year's day) - they silently throw the messages away.
Somebody with GSM background can elaborate with the correct jargon.
Not specifically GSM, but I did work on SS7 and SIGTRAN for a while (and yes, they really are horrible protocols).
What planet are you living on? Why do you think the education system is the way it is? It's training future employees.
The education system is there to provide various levels of general education with increasing specialisation as the student progresses (e.g. school -> college -> university). At the school level the education should be quite general and is about teaching people a broad range of skills and general so that they can go into *any* job and have a better understanding of the world in general. Whether that job be software developer, mathematician, plumber, chef, whatever.
School maths lessons don't teach kids how to use a specific brand of calculator - they teach the principles needed to use any. Cooking lessons don't teach using a specific brand of oven - they teach the general principles. Why should computing lessons be any different? You don't need to know how to use Microsoft Word, you need to know the general principles of how to use a word processor, which can be applied to *any* word processor (even the next version of MS Word, which you can be sure is going to be nothing like the current one).
If people want to have more specific training, they are welcome to it - they can opt to do an extra course in their own time. The limited class time available should be used for teaching general analytical skills allowing people to adapt to all the software rather than learning a specific brand of software by rote. However, if people need specific training in how to use MS software rather than just general training in how to use *any* software that does the same job, I have to question the usability of MS software.
Wouldn't want kids to have any training on the software they're going to be using in the real world now would we?
When I was at school we were trained on Acorns (as was pretty much everyone in the UK at the time). Certainly not what is used in industry. I'm not convinced this caused harm - if anything I think it helped develop the skills needed to use *any* system rather than just learning MS software by rote.
In any case, whether you teach kids MS Office or OpenOffice when they are at school, by the time they get out into the real world no office software will look much like what they learnt - teaching the principles involved in using the software is far more important than teaching the software itself since the principles are transferable to whatever software they end up using in the real world - whether that be the latest greatest Microsoft software or something completely different.
Free training is not monopoly subsidising. Its just a different business model, they charge for the software and give free training. Other companies give away the software and make their money on support and training. There is nothing wrong with giving away free stuff (like training) in order to grow your market share.
This isn't "free training" - Microsoft are trying to shape the existing educational system to push their agenda. IMHO *no* company should be able to influence the direction of general education by handing over wonga. If they want to donate money then that's fine, but they shouldn't get to influence what the school does.
If Microsoft (or anyone else) wants to offer free training they can damned well run courses outside of school hours rather than hijacking the existing schooling system. Companies are not the right people to be deciding what the kids get taught in mandatory lessons since they will usually choose what is best for themselves rather than what is best for the students.
Tweak your pagerank algorithm so it improves the position of pages that are xhtml-strict
Sadly Google doesn't deal with XHTML well. I can only assume this is to prevent turning up XHTML sites when IE users search for stuff since IE won't display XHTML at all.
Is IE8 going to have XHTML support? (I'm not holding my breath). I'm certainly hoping Microsoft don't try to support the horribly broken mess that is HTML 5 first.
grep -r -i "${PATTERN}" ${SOMEPATH}
Only works if you're running the GNU grep. If you're stuck on something like Solaris there is no -r. (Which is one of the reasons why using Solaris feels like you're back in the 1970s - its userland really hasn't changed much since...)
When the risk is riduced to a fraction of a percent (similar to what airline travel is today) there will be less reason to argue based on safety that humans shouldn't attempt space travel. 14 lives in 120 launches isn't good enough. If your local airline carried those odds you'd not use it.
Sure, if an airline carried those odds I wouldn't use it to go on holiday. But these aren't the general public going on their summer break - they are a relatively small group of astronauts who understand and accept the risks involved. Why is it ok to send a very large number of people into war zones (where there's a good chance they will be seriously injured or die) but sending a small group of people into space is too dangerous? I'm sure you could point to many situations that governments put people in which are far more risky than sending them up in the shuttle.
We aren't talking about the UK, genious.
I was under the impression that we were talking about ISPs and their business models in general. You said that my ISP won't ever say how contended my DSLAM is - this is not the case in some parts of the world (and yet I would imagine that the contention is quite similar).
They just don't want to provide the service they have sold to us.
Whether they don't _want_ to provide the service or _can't_ provide it really isn't the point. They aren't going to provide an "unlimited" service (for whatever reason) and they are changing the terms of service and pricing structure to match what they are _actually_ going to provide. Isn't that a good thing?
I'm sorry, I really don't see what the problem is - you are complaining that they advertise "unlimited" connections which they can't provide (and you are quite right to complain about this misadvertising) but when they change their pricing structure to allow them to advertise a model they _can_ provide you're still not happy. As far as I can tell they are stopping misadvertising services and instead telling customers what they are actually going to be able to do - surely that's a good thing?
I am sure top secret business deals aren't discussed via MSN
:)
Actually, they are - that was my point. A *lot* of businesses use MSN for messaging between colleagues. It's quite stupid.
I have never agreed to the terms of a EULA in my life. Putting a check box or a button in your software does not a legal agreement make.
If you clicked the "agree" button then you agreed. And yes, there have been a number of legal cases upholding the validity of EULAs (sadly). If you didn't like the terms you shouldn't have clicked the "agree" button.
I'm sure they are used - but if you want to look at raw numbers (and especially in a "consumer" environment) then the numbers from the proprietary closed non-XMPP networks dwarfs everything else.
I'm continually amazed by the number of businesses who discuss their top secret business deals over MSN... I mean, sure - Microsoft probably aren't analysing your IMs, but do you want to take the risk when you could just set up your own XMPP server and keep the conversations local?
I think the most frightening thought of all is what would the net be like if it was designed from the ground up by the likes of MS & AOL a decade ago. ...
:).
If the likes of MS had been given the opportunity to control these services then the internet today would be a truly appalling place - think of the IM mess branched out to *every* protocol.
Sounds rather like the original MSN and AOL to me. The only reason they didn't take off was because the Internet (or probably more precisely, the World Wide Web) had more content and allowed people to publish their own (which is why it had more
The ONLY one that will strive to remain off it will be MS. But you can bet that once they do, it will be with an interesting extension (and very closed one).
:)
I read an article from an MS person the other day stating that MS were in the process of designing a new proprietary protocol to replace the existing MSN one and were working on some method of allowing interoperability with Google. I was left thinking that using XMPP instead of a new proprietary thing would have been a good start if they wanted interoperability.
If MS do start interoperating with other IM services and they change their own protocol to some new proprietary thing at the same time, I could see them losing a lot of their users. Suddenly you'd be able to talk to all your MSN contacts from your XMPP account but your multiprotocol IM client would no longer be able to talk to MSN, so people would just move to XMPP en masse.
That said, MS have a bit of a problem with joining the XMPP network because they allow people to use their own domain - i.e. you can have an MSN address of you@yourdomain.com and it would still need to go via the MSN servers. The only way I can see them handling this would be to have XMPP addresses in the form you@yourdomain.com@msn.com or similar.
but "Linux", being a very globular thing, didn't have consistency in the interface. The flow of various applications could change, the differing toolkits made buttons between programs different.
:)
:).
:)
Interesting - I found that Windows was very similar, with each application choosing to do things differently. (I'm aware that Apple has always had much stricter UI guidelines though).
Also, everything is in development all the time.
Well, it is true that there is a lot of development going on (but I consider this to be a Good Thing). Whether you have to deal with the "in development" stuff yourself is greatly affected by your choice of distro. For example, if you choose Fedora you will get lots of development stuff because it is intended to be a bleeding edge distro. On the other hand, if you use CentOS, Debian, etc. you'll have the stable releases of stuff because they are intended to be stable distros.
Also, in my experience, the Free Software world's definition of "in development" is often the Windows world's definition of "released".
Many programs have little annoying quirks and such that just bug me.
You just described my experience of Windows.
Actually, I think you just described my experience of pretty much every platform, but at least the Free ones allow me to fix things that I find annoying enough.
As pluses for the Mac platform, it actually has some games available (namely, World of Warcraft), as well as Microsoft Office, which is still my preferred office suite.
I guess this is the big deal. I don't tend to play many games (although I was under the impression that World of Warcraft would run under WINE?) and it is rare that I need an office suite - for writing letters, etc I tend to use LaTeX since it is easier and faster than using a word processor. On the odd occasion I do need an office suite OOo suits me fine (sadly they have adopted some of the Microsoft Office annoyances, such as Auto Fuckup^WCorrect
In general, I just didn't like the "feel" of any Linux desktop I tried to use
I guess the major plus-point for me about Linux desktops is that they are far more configurable. For example, if you want sloppy-focus (which I do) you just turn it on and it works, whereas under Windows you _can_ turn it on with TweakUI but from what I've seen it tends to break a lot of stuff. I've not really got any experience with OS X but from what I understand it also isn't anywhere near as configurable as the Linux desktop environments.
I've settled on Gnome + Compiz-Fusion as my preferred environment (although the Gnome projects' constant efforts to make the UI more userfriendly - read: move *all* the config settings into the Windows Registry^W^Wgconf instead of providing a nice configurator is a bit frustrating). I guess I would be most happy on a combination of Enlightenment 0.17 and Compiz-Fusion but sadly they aren't compatible with each other.
I handle any server that we use Linux on and I'm VERY capable in the Linux environment - I just don't like using it as a desktop long-term.
I'm quite surprised that you find Windows nicer to use if you're used to using the Linux command line tools. When I'm stuck behind a Windows machine I think the single biggest annoyance is probably that I can't just open up a terminal window and hack up a bit of bash script to do some repetitive task.
Anyway, I'm just happy there are an increasing number of alternatives to Windows - people don't consider you quite as weird these days if you don't use Windows at all.