The worst part it's that is probably gonna work...
I doubt it. This has been one big benefit of our having a few minority Governments in a row -- they don't generally have the time to waste pursuing laws nobody is particularly interested in seeing happen. MPs won't win votes in the House for voting for such legislation, and the Conservatives would rather make their mark on climate change or health care, or SOMETHING they can point to during election time.
Copyright change is a non-issue right now in the minds of the populace. The system we have works for the average citizen just fine. No MP is going to win votes for introducing changes to copyright law at this point, especially as many people expect an election will be called within the next month (probably over the Kyoto Agreement and climate change). Playing with Copyright law is the sort of thing stable majority Governments who aren't worried about their legacy (or a non-confidence motion) deal with.
Ever stop to think that the majority of the American users don't know of the BBC or it's web site address and the BBC's site fell under the "not hit becuase no one was going there so therefor it was fast?"
Yes. I believe I made it clear previously in this thread that this was precisely why I relied on them for information, when other North American news sites were getting hammered with traffic.
We're five hours ahead of you, not behind you. It was early afternoon here when the first plane hit.
Thanks to everyone for the correction. I feel quite the idiot now, and rightfully so:).
The point, however, stands -- where it was very difficult to get information from the websites of North American-based news services in those crucial first few hours, the BBC's website came through.
Thanks for that -- it's an interesting (albeit brief) view of how the BBC serves up pages world-wide. The article is, however, from 2005 -- it doesn't necessarily follow that this was the same setup back in 2001.
I found this bit interesting (emphasis mine):
We have a number of web servers ("server farms") in London and New York. These two cities are both excellent hubs connecting many different networks on the internet, and they are far enough apart so that if there were a major disaster in either city we could continue serving web pages from the other location.
If this layout were in place in 2001, it would be interesting to hear if they indeed needed to use this configuration to redirect traffic.
I remember you couldn't get anywhere on news sites during the 9/11 attacks on the WTC; even Google was horrendously slow. Non news sites all started relaying the news so that people could get hold of information.
This sort of experience could have a lot to do with where you are in the world, and your ISP.
I was in at my place of work in Toronto on 9/11, and remember rather vividly how hard it was to get to CNN's website. The CBC's website was fairly slow as well (we have to recall, not only were there attacks on the WTC, the Pentagon, and the plane that crashed, but thousands of inbound US flights were redirected to Canada, and people world-wide were trying to track down loved-ones who had flights re-routed here). Being the smart sort of guy I am, I was one of the few in the office to be able to get reliable, up-to-date information, because I reasoned that the BBC's website probably wouldn't be heavily flooded with North American traffic, and that it would be the middle of the night on that side of the pond. Sure, enough, I was correct -- while it was difficult to get to many news websites inside North America, several very respectable European sites were no problem to bring up in those very early hours after the first jet hit the WTC. It wasn't traffic on the Internet that was a problem -- it was specific websites being very heavily congested. There was still a lot of bandwidth available to go around -- just not for specific popular North American news websites (many of which have hopefully learned a lesson from that day, and have done some upgrading of their services to better handle traffic during serious emergencies).
And where do you get the idea that the gun registry has been so expensive because of the resistance to it? There's no connection, except for the fact that if there weren't such resistance more people would register and the registry would be even more overwhelmed.
As it's the wee hours of the morning, and I'm hoping to go to bed, I'll have to find a specific reference for you later (assuming I remember to do so, of course), however at one point the gun registry started a programme where they sent registration representatives all across the country, to rural, remote, and Native Canadian community areas to personally register people due to very low compliance levels.
Hiring, training, and flying hundreds of people around the country to help people fill out forms doesn't come cheap. Now I won't disagree that the overall start-up cost wasn't outrageous, and that there wasn't any waste -- but the same can be said of pretty much anything run by humans. The Government of the day, however, bent over backwards to make sure they weren't making criminals out of gun-owning Canadians. Registration deadlines were pushed back, people were hired to fill in forms for people who should have just picked them up from their local post office or community centre and mailed them in, and all sorts of allowances were made to try to prevent creating criminals out of tens of thousands of citizens. And let's not forget the advertising budget -- the Government didn't sneak this legislation in and then send the cops to peoples doors -- to try to encourage registration complience, they had several major advertising campaigns, including to-the-door pamphlet mailings, 1-800 numbers for asking questions about the registry, etc.
People seem to think that such services come for free. They don't. The Government could have taken a hard-line stance, and as soon as the original registration deadline came and went start sending the police to peoples homes, but instead they extended deadlines, had further advertising and educational campaigns, and sent staff to peoples homes to fill in the forms for them. Such services weren't budgeted for, as the Government of the day failed to anticipate how much of a backlash they would see from instituting the registry.
(FWIW, I know a number of gun owners, my father included, who were 100% FOR the registry, and who registered early and on-time).
As for long guns and crime, it happens way more often than you might think. That police woman killed in Montreal two or three years ago was killed by a long gun. The gunman who went on the rampage at Dawson College in Montreal last September was using a long gun. The gunman who killed 14 women at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal used a long gun. The Taber, Alberta school shooting was committed with a long gun. These were all very, very high-profile crimes here in Canada, and each and every one of them was committed with a long gun. Long guns play a very significant role in crime. Methinks that all too many long gun owners here in Canada have a very short memory when it comes to the crimes committed here using them.
Our gun control has had no effect on gun crime and it cost 2 bil a year.
No, it cost $2 billion to set-up. And a very large part of this cost was to accommodate people who were trying to circumvent (or simply avoid) registering in the first place.
Gun registration has never been about crime reduction, and more than the fact that the Province makes me register my car reduces traffic accidents. The idea of gun registration is about investigating gun crime, and in this regard the gun registry has been a major boon for law enforcement officials (note that every time the Conservatives start making noise about scrapping it, the police unions step up and plead their case that the registry routinely aids in their ability to investigate gun crimes).
Maybe we should just make the registry a system that needs to pay for itself, and we can increase the registration fee by $500 per gun owner. Then there will be no operating cost to the average non-gun-owning taxpayer.
Sorry, but Microsoft has always sucked. It's just that at one time a) they were too small to have a significant impact, and later b) there were compatible alternatives (PC-DOS, DR-DOS, etc.) they had to compete against.
"As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software."
Of course, I think the Open Source Software movement, and products like Linux and Firefox in particular, have caused him to have to eat these words from the letter:
Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?
Microsoft has long had a sucky mentality. It's a cancer that breeds from the top on down. At one time the effect of this was more minimal (and admittedly I think it was way worse in the early 1990's than it is today), but the suckiness was always there.
For what it's worth, I'd like to note that none of Microsoft's Vista applications are Mac OS X compatible, and it's API has been stable for far longer than Vista's has been.
PalmOS - once a closed-source winner... soon to be an open-source loser as the Linux-based OS supposedly in development is not adopted. Palm could dominate the market again if they pulled their heads out of their asses (not very likely).
I couldn't agree more. This has, unfortunately, bit me right on the ass, in a very topical manner, being the Lead Developer and Project Administrator for the jSyncManager Project, a SourceForge hosted project that provides a 100% pure Java protocol stack, synchronization framework, and full development kit for PalmOS-based devices. The project started in 1997, and at the time Palm even sent me a Palm III to aid in development (and Borland sent me a full suite of Java development tools as well, although as I wasn't developing on Windows I donated it to a good cause). In September 2002, I made the code OSS under the GPL/LGPL, and put it all up on SourceForge.
For a time, we were a big success. As the code ran identically on all platforms, it actually became very popular with German banks and insurance companies. IBM Germany even offered me a pathetic amount of money ($5000 US!) to buy the whole project (I turned them down, but as I was working for IBM at the time we did let it out with a new UI through IBM's alphaWorks as "ManplatoSync for Java"). Many corporations used it for synchronizing and managing their handheld devices, and it even got a write-up in JavaPro, and several other magazines. I even started going on the speaking circuit to talk about the technology behind the jSyncManager (the biggest one being the Wrox Wireless Professional Developers Conference, a series of three conferences which was cancelled after the first due to low pre-registration sales).
The ride was pretty good for a while, but Palm's complete and total lack-lustre record in this decade has caused the project to slide. I did get hired out to consult on integrating it into a medical health record system for hospitals that the Province of British Columbia was developing, but with the death of the PalmOS as a platform, demand for the project stagnated, and I could no longer afford to commit time to it.
So is the jSyncManager a winner, or a loser? At one point, we were in the top 5% of all SourceForge.net projects. We're still ranked rather highly, but in the life of the project on SourceForge we've only had just over 20 000 downloads. Activity is now virtually nil. The project is fortunately quite stable, but as the platform it relied upon is now pretty much a dead duck, and as interest has waned in Java-based projects that aren't web-service related, interest in the project has died as well. I've received perhaps two e-mails in the last 4 months on it.
It also hasn't helped that JSR-080 hasn't made much of a dent, and that it's availability is pretty much limited to Linux only (JSR-080 is the standard for communicating with USB devices in Java). We rely on this API for communicating with the more modern USB-based PalmOS devices, but it's poor availability on Windows and Mac OS X makes the jSyncManager less attractive. And Palm's slowness in introducing decent WiFi into their devices is also a problem (the fastest way to sync a PalmOS device is via WiFi, using HotSync over TCP/IP, which the jSyncManager supports on all Java installations).
The scope of the project always meant that we would probably never reach the Top 10 on SourceForge -- it was a tool that filled a specific niche. Windows users running the Palm Desktop software weren't about to convert en-masse to the Java-based jSyncManager. Users of other platforms, and organizations with mixed platforms loved it as it is easy for them to administer, and it works the same everywhere (including on platforms where they may have no other options). But in the end it's been Palm's poor record of advancing their platform that has done the project in, and now I'm happy to just put it into maintenence mode, and deal with problems if anyone cares to report them.
Well remember we, as license payers, pay for the content to be made. Giving it away to the world for free would probably be in violation of their charter, and would certainly make me ask "Why am I paying this again"?
Ah, if only the truth were so simplistic.
I've seen such arguments trotted out from time to time, and believe me -- I feel for my friends out in the UK who have to pay for a television license. Here in Canada we have no such fee, which is the way things should be.
HOWEVER, don't for a minute assume that your TV license fee dollars are the only funds that go into producing quality BBC programming, and thus that said programming should never escape across boarders through the Internet.
You see, where you pay a license fee to the BBC to own a television in your part of the world, here in my part of the world the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is funded (in part) through tax dollars -- including my tax dollars. And yet CBC Programming (especially documentaries) is shown all around the world, including portions of which are available online.
Aside from that, let's look at one of the shows the BBC is proposing to make available online: Doctor Who. Click the link and scroll down to "Production Companies". Yes, that's right, the venerable BBC Sci-Fi series is produced in part by the CBC.
Thus, I at least have already paid for part of Doctor Who. How many other modern BBC shows are co-produced in conjunction with the national broadcasters in other (esp. Commonwealth) countries?
(Let's not also mention that the BBC already broadcasts world-wide via various cable outlets, like BBC Canada and BBC America, amongst others).
I don't argue with the complaint that the UK's TV licensing fee seems like a cash-grab to my eyes, but that's up to you and your countrymen to fix, and not something I can affect change for. However, the view that your licensing fees are the sole source of funding for popular BBC shows doesn't exactly reflect modern reality, and the desire to prevent such shows from being made available to the world for free online isn't going to put the cat back into the bag: it escaped long, long ago, and probably never should have been in there in the first place.
So, you can do something with a computer with NO OS on it?
Of course you can. You can boot that OS from a diskette, a CD, a DVD, a USB key, or from over the network.
Of course, back in the day many systems came with a suitable basic environment burnt into ROM (often being a BASIC interpreter). I see no reason why something similar couldn't be done today (you could probably put the Linux kernel and a bash shell on-board without a lot of trouble).
But 20 cents is expressed as $0.20 and it would be correct int saying if you had $0.20 in change being returned to you, the cashier gave you 20 cents change.
That's because "cent" literally means "one-hundred". As in "per cent" (1% of a unit == 1/100th of that unit), or "centimetre" (1/100th of a metre). Thus, "cent" is already a fractional unit -- it's very name connotes that it is a 1/100th fraction of a larger unit (in this case, a dollar).
20 one-hundredths of a dollar (or 20 "cents") is thus correctly $0.20. There is no error is usage here -- the unit itself denotes the fractional part when written as a whole number of "cents".
It's no different than the fact that when we talk about a 2 000 000 000 Hz processor, we usually call it a "2GHz processor". The zeros didn't just disappear -- "G" represents "Giga", which is the prefix representing the large value of 10 to the 9th power.
As such, the error in this case is purely with the fact that the Verizon reps the gentleman spoke to have no idea what they're talking about, and get confused by a decimal point. They probably don't know how to cancel out the units in a multiplication: 0.002 cents/KB * 35893KB causes the KB on both sides to cancel out, leaving us with 0.002 * 35893 cents (== 71.78 cents). There is nothing to be confused with here -- you can't just multiply two numbers and then make up what unit you want it to represent because it's some unit you're comfortable with. I can't say that I'm charging someone 0.002 cents per KB for 35893KB, and then charge them 71.78 rutabegas. Or 71.78 emus. Or 71.78 Libraries of Congress.
Really, there is no excuse for this. Verizon should hire a grade 8 math teacher, and give their customer service staff a "how to use decimals and cancel units" math training day. I'll even volunteer to do it (although I'm over qualified). I'll even offer them a huge deal -- I'll just charge them 0.002 Gigacents an hour for my services.
I know it's a troll point of view at/. but for every McCartney there's a thousand artists who are struggling and barely make it with the present system.
And you think that extending copyright by another 45 years is going to make these struggling artists struggle any less?
Just because you create content doesn't mean that you deserve a big pile of money set at your doorstep for life. In terms of music, some songs are hits, but a huge majority are forgettable, and won't make the artist much of anything after five years. Some songs become classics -- but really, if you haven't made money off of your song after 50 years, then you probably never will.
As such, extending copyright by another 45 years isn't going to benefit the "struggling artist". They'll keep struggling, or give up and do something else with their life. Under the current system in the UK, a 15-year-old who creates something will get to hold the copyright on it until they are 65. This doesn't seem unreasonable to me, and if their song is a dud when they are 15, chances are pretty low that it will suddenly become a smash sensation when they're 65.
So for all of your "Please, think of the struggling artists!" mantra, no, tihs sort of change doesn't benefit anyone but the McCartney's of this world.
Sorry -- have to reply to this thread to obliterate an accidental moderation. Unfortunately, with this new moderation system I inadvertantly highlighted the moderation drop-down, and pressed down-arrow, thinking I was going to scroll the page. Next thing I know, "Interesting" is highlighted and accepted immediately as soon as I release the cursor key.
And I wouldn't moderate this as "Interesting". What a waste of a modpoint...
I agree that you lose quality when re-encoding a song bought from iTunes, and I won't even touch anything with DRM.
You don't necessarily lose quality by re-encoding a song from iTMS. Just re-encode it using Apple lossless. Sure, the file is going to get bigger in size, however the quality will be identical to what you downloaded.
As it stands, there are to my knowledge no phone manufacturers that actually have software for Macs
I have a native OS X application from Sony Ericsson for developing themes for many of their cell phones (my trusty T610 included). With Bluetooth for data transfer, and Apple'OS X's built-in iSync, SMS through the Address Book, Bluetooth File Transfer software, and GPRS dialler support, what more could one need or use?
The answer for your read-only kernel partition is easy. Use a simple, non-journaled filesystem. Ext2 is perfect for this. As the filesystem will never be written, you don't have to worry about partial overwrite issues.
Journaling on flash isn't exactly a good idea. The problem here is that the journal is going to be written to very frequently, and it will always be located in the same location, you could very easily hit that max-writes inside the journal, which is going to cause all sorts of havoc. So I'd be very weary of adopting a journaling filesystem on a flash device -- you'll introduce failure in the journal itself, which is going to cause all sorts of write access issues down the road.
Personally, I'd stick to a non-journaled filesystem which has good bi-directional pointer support for sector/cluster chaining. Ext2 is thus a good choice, as may be Reiser3 (with journaling disabled).
In addition, even if you're attempting to use QOS on their equipment, the Comcast network probably ignores it anyways.
I don't think the cable providers network will even ever see it -- the QoS used in the Vonage routers I've come in contact with only has to do with local router-level packet queue prioritization for transmission (that is, if the Vonage router gets 20 packets awaiting transmission, and a voice packet arrives, it gets to jump the queue and is sent to the broadband modem first (or at least with significantly higher priority).
I have no idea if any of their routers are also setting QoS bits in the TCP packet header, but even if they did, as you say -- any router along the chain can (and probably will) ignore it.
(FWIW, I've been a Vonage customer since January 2006, and have been extremely happy with the service, especially as a very light phone user -- the price is right, the quality has been fantastic, and it comes with all the toys, bells, and whistles).
Obviously, one could write a browser plug-in that faked a banner ad request
AdBlock (and derivatives) already has such functionality built-in. In the preferences, you can check a box that tells it to just hide the ads (in which case, they are still downloaded, just not rendered).
What difference does it make where its located? Whats stopping you from using "~" or the unix API to get a user's home directory? This is a total non-issue.
This is not a development issue. This is also not an issue for people who are using a command line. This is an issue for users who never go past the GUI, being able to find things within the file-system where they expect to find them, in a consistent location between different OS's.
No, it makes no technical difference. Yes, you and I know that/home and/Users are exactly the same thing. Yes, scripts can use ~ or $HOME, and programs can query the home directory.
But when you sit my mother in front of a machine with a GUI, she (as an OS X user) expects to find her documents in the "Users" folder inside her hard drive. She has no concept of how the filesystem is set up (hell, the "/" in a path is enough to confuse her...). If this were to become common across OS's, I could move her to Linux or (::shudder::) Windows Vista, and she would continue to have her expectations met (and would be one less thing she'd need to bother me about).
Why is this so hard for some people here to grasp? It wouldn't be a change for the likes of you and I who live on the command line, and can store entire filesystem hierarchies in wetware memory -- it's a change for the sake of consistency for the rest of the world, so that Jane Secretary who has only ever had a course on MS Word can be moved from one platform to another without asking IT five times a day "Where are my files!".
They both are one word.
They both serve the same function.
and
That one word is descriptive of that function, since the directory is the 'Home' directory for the 'User'.
You sir have obviously never worked telephone technical support.
You know they're the same thing. I know they are the same thing. Joe and Jane AverageUser have no freaking clue that these two things are the same, and as soon as they sit in front of a computer will turn off all critical thinking skills, and will say dumb things like "Well, it's called something different on my other computer".
I had the misfortune of working in tech support for a few months when I was doing my undergrad in the mid 90's. And yes, there are a LOT of people out there who lack the critical thinking skills to determine this sort of thing for themselves. Heck, I still deal with this sort of thing on a semi-regular basis, anytime a family member moves from one computer to another.
IMO, having some form of consistency from one platform to another is in everyones best interest, even if the change is silly and meaningless to you and I.
I hope you're being a bit facetious, as being able to do that yourself post-install is intuitively obvious to your typical Linux Geek. But I'd have thought it was intuitively obvious that I was referring to having such a facility as part of the base install, to make Joe AverageUser more comfortable y using the expectations they bring with them from their Windows (post-Vista) and/or Mac OS X experience.
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I doubt it. This has been one big benefit of our having a few minority Governments in a row -- they don't generally have the time to waste pursuing laws nobody is particularly interested in seeing happen. MPs won't win votes in the House for voting for such legislation, and the Conservatives would rather make their mark on climate change or health care, or SOMETHING they can point to during election time.
Copyright change is a non-issue right now in the minds of the populace. The system we have works for the average citizen just fine. No MP is going to win votes for introducing changes to copyright law at this point, especially as many people expect an election will be called within the next month (probably over the Kyoto Agreement and climate change). Playing with Copyright law is the sort of thing stable majority Governments who aren't worried about their legacy (or a non-confidence motion) deal with.
Yaz.
Yes. I believe I made it clear previously in this thread that this was precisely why I relied on them for information, when other North American news sites were getting hammered with traffic.
Yaz.
Thanks to everyone for the correction. I feel quite the idiot now, and rightfully so :).
The point, however, stands -- where it was very difficult to get information from the websites of North American-based news services in those crucial first few hours, the BBC's website came through.
Yaz.
Thanks for that -- it's an interesting (albeit brief) view of how the BBC serves up pages world-wide. The article is, however, from 2005 -- it doesn't necessarily follow that this was the same setup back in 2001.
I found this bit interesting (emphasis mine):
If this layout were in place in 2001, it would be interesting to hear if they indeed needed to use this configuration to redirect traffic.
Yaz.
This sort of experience could have a lot to do with where you are in the world, and your ISP.
I was in at my place of work in Toronto on 9/11, and remember rather vividly how hard it was to get to CNN's website. The CBC's website was fairly slow as well (we have to recall, not only were there attacks on the WTC, the Pentagon, and the plane that crashed, but thousands of inbound US flights were redirected to Canada, and people world-wide were trying to track down loved-ones who had flights re-routed here). Being the smart sort of guy I am, I was one of the few in the office to be able to get reliable, up-to-date information, because I reasoned that the BBC's website probably wouldn't be heavily flooded with North American traffic, and that it would be the middle of the night on that side of the pond. Sure, enough, I was correct -- while it was difficult to get to many news websites inside North America, several very respectable European sites were no problem to bring up in those very early hours after the first jet hit the WTC. It wasn't traffic on the Internet that was a problem -- it was specific websites being very heavily congested. There was still a lot of bandwidth available to go around -- just not for specific popular North American news websites (many of which have hopefully learned a lesson from that day, and have done some upgrading of their services to better handle traffic during serious emergencies).
Yaz.
As it's the wee hours of the morning, and I'm hoping to go to bed, I'll have to find a specific reference for you later (assuming I remember to do so, of course), however at one point the gun registry started a programme where they sent registration representatives all across the country, to rural, remote, and Native Canadian community areas to personally register people due to very low compliance levels.
Hiring, training, and flying hundreds of people around the country to help people fill out forms doesn't come cheap. Now I won't disagree that the overall start-up cost wasn't outrageous, and that there wasn't any waste -- but the same can be said of pretty much anything run by humans. The Government of the day, however, bent over backwards to make sure they weren't making criminals out of gun-owning Canadians. Registration deadlines were pushed back, people were hired to fill in forms for people who should have just picked them up from their local post office or community centre and mailed them in, and all sorts of allowances were made to try to prevent creating criminals out of tens of thousands of citizens. And let's not forget the advertising budget -- the Government didn't sneak this legislation in and then send the cops to peoples doors -- to try to encourage registration complience, they had several major advertising campaigns, including to-the-door pamphlet mailings, 1-800 numbers for asking questions about the registry, etc.
People seem to think that such services come for free. They don't. The Government could have taken a hard-line stance, and as soon as the original registration deadline came and went start sending the police to peoples homes, but instead they extended deadlines, had further advertising and educational campaigns, and sent staff to peoples homes to fill in the forms for them. Such services weren't budgeted for, as the Government of the day failed to anticipate how much of a backlash they would see from instituting the registry.
(FWIW, I know a number of gun owners, my father included, who were 100% FOR the registry, and who registered early and on-time).
As for long guns and crime, it happens way more often than you might think. That police woman killed in Montreal two or three years ago was killed by a long gun. The gunman who went on the rampage at Dawson College in Montreal last September was using a long gun. The gunman who killed 14 women at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal used a long gun. The Taber, Alberta school shooting was committed with a long gun. These were all very, very high-profile crimes here in Canada, and each and every one of them was committed with a long gun. Long guns play a very significant role in crime. Methinks that all too many long gun owners here in Canada have a very short memory when it comes to the crimes committed here using them.
Yaz.
Yaz.
No, it cost $2 billion to set-up. And a very large part of this cost was to accommodate people who were trying to circumvent (or simply avoid) registering in the first place.
Gun registration has never been about crime reduction, and more than the fact that the Province makes me register my car reduces traffic accidents. The idea of gun registration is about investigating gun crime, and in this regard the gun registry has been a major boon for law enforcement officials (note that every time the Conservatives start making noise about scrapping it, the police unions step up and plead their case that the registry routinely aids in their ability to investigate gun crimes).
Maybe we should just make the registry a system that needs to pay for itself, and we can increase the registration fee by $500 per gun owner. Then there will be no operating cost to the average non-gun-owning taxpayer.
Yaz.
Sorry, but Microsoft has always sucked. It's just that at one time a) they were too small to have a significant impact, and later b) there were compatible alternatives (PC-DOS, DR-DOS, etc.) they had to compete against.
Evidence? Maybe you're too young to remember Bill Gates' 1976 open letter to computer hobbiests, where he stated, and I quote:
Of course, I think the Open Source Software movement, and products like Linux and Firefox in particular, have caused him to have to eat these words from the letter:
Microsoft has long had a sucky mentality. It's a cancer that breeds from the top on down. At one time the effect of this was more minimal (and admittedly I think it was way worse in the early 1990's than it is today), but the suckiness was always there.
Yaz.
For what it's worth, I'd like to note that none of Microsoft's Vista applications are Mac OS X compatible, and it's API has been stable for far longer than Vista's has been.
Yaz.
I couldn't agree more. This has, unfortunately, bit me right on the ass, in a very topical manner, being the Lead Developer and Project Administrator for the jSyncManager Project, a SourceForge hosted project that provides a 100% pure Java protocol stack, synchronization framework, and full development kit for PalmOS-based devices. The project started in 1997, and at the time Palm even sent me a Palm III to aid in development (and Borland sent me a full suite of Java development tools as well, although as I wasn't developing on Windows I donated it to a good cause). In September 2002, I made the code OSS under the GPL/LGPL, and put it all up on SourceForge.
For a time, we were a big success. As the code ran identically on all platforms, it actually became very popular with German banks and insurance companies. IBM Germany even offered me a pathetic amount of money ($5000 US!) to buy the whole project (I turned them down, but as I was working for IBM at the time we did let it out with a new UI through IBM's alphaWorks as "ManplatoSync for Java"). Many corporations used it for synchronizing and managing their handheld devices, and it even got a write-up in JavaPro, and several other magazines. I even started going on the speaking circuit to talk about the technology behind the jSyncManager (the biggest one being the Wrox Wireless Professional Developers Conference, a series of three conferences which was cancelled after the first due to low pre-registration sales).
The ride was pretty good for a while, but Palm's complete and total lack-lustre record in this decade has caused the project to slide. I did get hired out to consult on integrating it into a medical health record system for hospitals that the Province of British Columbia was developing, but with the death of the PalmOS as a platform, demand for the project stagnated, and I could no longer afford to commit time to it.
So is the jSyncManager a winner, or a loser? At one point, we were in the top 5% of all SourceForge.net projects. We're still ranked rather highly, but in the life of the project on SourceForge we've only had just over 20 000 downloads. Activity is now virtually nil. The project is fortunately quite stable, but as the platform it relied upon is now pretty much a dead duck, and as interest has waned in Java-based projects that aren't web-service related, interest in the project has died as well. I've received perhaps two e-mails in the last 4 months on it.
It also hasn't helped that JSR-080 hasn't made much of a dent, and that it's availability is pretty much limited to Linux only (JSR-080 is the standard for communicating with USB devices in Java). We rely on this API for communicating with the more modern USB-based PalmOS devices, but it's poor availability on Windows and Mac OS X makes the jSyncManager less attractive. And Palm's slowness in introducing decent WiFi into their devices is also a problem (the fastest way to sync a PalmOS device is via WiFi, using HotSync over TCP/IP, which the jSyncManager supports on all Java installations).
The scope of the project always meant that we would probably never reach the Top 10 on SourceForge -- it was a tool that filled a specific niche. Windows users running the Palm Desktop software weren't about to convert en-masse to the Java-based jSyncManager. Users of other platforms, and organizations with mixed platforms loved it as it is easy for them to administer, and it works the same everywhere (including on platforms where they may have no other options). But in the end it's been Palm's poor record of advancing their platform that has done the project in, and now I'm happy to just put it into maintenence mode, and deal with problems if anyone cares to report them.
Yaz.
Ah, if only the truth were so simplistic.
I've seen such arguments trotted out from time to time, and believe me -- I feel for my friends out in the UK who have to pay for a television license. Here in Canada we have no such fee, which is the way things should be.
HOWEVER, don't for a minute assume that your TV license fee dollars are the only funds that go into producing quality BBC programming, and thus that said programming should never escape across boarders through the Internet.
You see, where you pay a license fee to the BBC to own a television in your part of the world, here in my part of the world the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is funded (in part) through tax dollars -- including my tax dollars. And yet CBC Programming (especially documentaries) is shown all around the world, including portions of which are available online.
Aside from that, let's look at one of the shows the BBC is proposing to make available online: Doctor Who. Click the link and scroll down to "Production Companies". Yes, that's right, the venerable BBC Sci-Fi series is produced in part by the CBC.
Thus, I at least have already paid for part of Doctor Who. How many other modern BBC shows are co-produced in conjunction with the national broadcasters in other (esp. Commonwealth) countries?
(Let's not also mention that the BBC already broadcasts world-wide via various cable outlets, like BBC Canada and BBC America, amongst others).
I don't argue with the complaint that the UK's TV licensing fee seems like a cash-grab to my eyes, but that's up to you and your countrymen to fix, and not something I can affect change for. However, the view that your licensing fees are the sole source of funding for popular BBC shows doesn't exactly reflect modern reality, and the desire to prevent such shows from being made available to the world for free online isn't going to put the cat back into the bag: it escaped long, long ago, and probably never should have been in there in the first place.
Yaz.
I resolved many, many years ago to stop making resolutions.
It's the only one I've ever kept.
Yaz.
Of course you can. You can boot that OS from a diskette, a CD, a DVD, a USB key, or from over the network.
Of course, back in the day many systems came with a suitable basic environment burnt into ROM (often being a BASIC interpreter). I see no reason why something similar couldn't be done today (you could probably put the Linux kernel and a bash shell on-board without a lot of trouble).
Yaz.
That's because "cent" literally means "one-hundred". As in "per cent" (1% of a unit == 1/100th of that unit), or "centimetre" (1/100th of a metre). Thus, "cent" is already a fractional unit -- it's very name connotes that it is a 1/100th fraction of a larger unit (in this case, a dollar).
20 one-hundredths of a dollar (or 20 "cents") is thus correctly $0.20. There is no error is usage here -- the unit itself denotes the fractional part when written as a whole number of "cents".
It's no different than the fact that when we talk about a 2 000 000 000 Hz processor, we usually call it a "2GHz processor". The zeros didn't just disappear -- "G" represents "Giga", which is the prefix representing the large value of 10 to the 9th power.
As such, the error in this case is purely with the fact that the Verizon reps the gentleman spoke to have no idea what they're talking about, and get confused by a decimal point. They probably don't know how to cancel out the units in a multiplication: 0.002 cents/KB * 35893KB causes the KB on both sides to cancel out, leaving us with 0.002 * 35893 cents (== 71.78 cents). There is nothing to be confused with here -- you can't just multiply two numbers and then make up what unit you want it to represent because it's some unit you're comfortable with. I can't say that I'm charging someone 0.002 cents per KB for 35893KB, and then charge them 71.78 rutabegas. Or 71.78 emus. Or 71.78 Libraries of Congress.
Really, there is no excuse for this. Verizon should hire a grade 8 math teacher, and give their customer service staff a "how to use decimals and cancel units" math training day. I'll even volunteer to do it (although I'm over qualified). I'll even offer them a huge deal -- I'll just charge them 0.002 Gigacents an hour for my services.
Yaz.
And you think that extending copyright by another 45 years is going to make these struggling artists struggle any less?
Just because you create content doesn't mean that you deserve a big pile of money set at your doorstep for life. In terms of music, some songs are hits, but a huge majority are forgettable, and won't make the artist much of anything after five years. Some songs become classics -- but really, if you haven't made money off of your song after 50 years, then you probably never will.
As such, extending copyright by another 45 years isn't going to benefit the "struggling artist". They'll keep struggling, or give up and do something else with their life. Under the current system in the UK, a 15-year-old who creates something will get to hold the copyright on it until they are 65. This doesn't seem unreasonable to me, and if their song is a dud when they are 15, chances are pretty low that it will suddenly become a smash sensation when they're 65.
So for all of your "Please, think of the struggling artists!" mantra, no, tihs sort of change doesn't benefit anyone but the McCartney's of this world.
Yaz.
I'm currently hiring 3rd world citizens to kick spammers in the crotch.
To the spammers: it's nothing personal. You have to understand: it's just business.
Yaz.
Sorry -- have to reply to this thread to obliterate an accidental moderation. Unfortunately, with this new moderation system I inadvertantly highlighted the moderation drop-down, and pressed down-arrow, thinking I was going to scroll the page. Next thing I know, "Interesting" is highlighted and accepted immediately as soon as I release the cursor key.
And I wouldn't moderate this as "Interesting". What a waste of a modpoint...
Yaz.
You don't necessarily lose quality by re-encoding a song from iTMS. Just re-encode it using Apple lossless. Sure, the file is going to get bigger in size, however the quality will be identical to what you downloaded.
Yaz.
I have a native OS X application from Sony Ericsson for developing themes for many of their cell phones (my trusty T610 included). With Bluetooth for data transfer, and Apple'OS X's built-in iSync, SMS through the Address Book, Bluetooth File Transfer software, and GPRS dialler support, what more could one need or use?
Yaz.
The answer for your read-only kernel partition is easy. Use a simple, non-journaled filesystem. Ext2 is perfect for this. As the filesystem will never be written, you don't have to worry about partial overwrite issues.
Journaling on flash isn't exactly a good idea. The problem here is that the journal is going to be written to very frequently, and it will always be located in the same location, you could very easily hit that max-writes inside the journal, which is going to cause all sorts of havoc. So I'd be very weary of adopting a journaling filesystem on a flash device -- you'll introduce failure in the journal itself, which is going to cause all sorts of write access issues down the road.
Personally, I'd stick to a non-journaled filesystem which has good bi-directional pointer support for sector/cluster chaining. Ext2 is thus a good choice, as may be Reiser3 (with journaling disabled).
Yaz.
I don't think the cable providers network will even ever see it -- the QoS used in the Vonage routers I've come in contact with only has to do with local router-level packet queue prioritization for transmission (that is, if the Vonage router gets 20 packets awaiting transmission, and a voice packet arrives, it gets to jump the queue and is sent to the broadband modem first (or at least with significantly higher priority).
I have no idea if any of their routers are also setting QoS bits in the TCP packet header, but even if they did, as you say -- any router along the chain can (and probably will) ignore it.
(FWIW, I've been a Vonage customer since January 2006, and have been extremely happy with the service, especially as a very light phone user -- the price is right, the quality has been fantastic, and it comes with all the toys, bells, and whistles).
Yaz.
AdBlock (and derivatives) already has such functionality built-in. In the preferences, you can check a box that tells it to just hide the ads (in which case, they are still downloaded, just not rendered).
Yaz.
This is not a development issue. This is also not an issue for people who are using a command line. This is an issue for users who never go past the GUI, being able to find things within the file-system where they expect to find them, in a consistent location between different OS's.
No, it makes no technical difference. Yes, you and I know that /home and /Users are exactly the same thing. Yes, scripts can use ~ or $HOME, and programs can query the home directory.
But when you sit my mother in front of a machine with a GUI, she (as an OS X user) expects to find her documents in the "Users" folder inside her hard drive. She has no concept of how the filesystem is set up (hell, the "/" in a path is enough to confuse her...). If this were to become common across OS's, I could move her to Linux or (::shudder::) Windows Vista, and she would continue to have her expectations met (and would be one less thing she'd need to bother me about).
Why is this so hard for some people here to grasp? It wouldn't be a change for the likes of you and I who live on the command line, and can store entire filesystem hierarchies in wetware memory -- it's a change for the sake of consistency for the rest of the world, so that Jane Secretary who has only ever had a course on MS Word can be moved from one platform to another without asking IT five times a day "Where are my files!".
Yaz.
You sir have obviously never worked telephone technical support.
You know they're the same thing. I know they are the same thing. Joe and Jane AverageUser have no freaking clue that these two things are the same, and as soon as they sit in front of a computer will turn off all critical thinking skills, and will say dumb things like "Well, it's called something different on my other computer".
I had the misfortune of working in tech support for a few months when I was doing my undergrad in the mid 90's. And yes, there are a LOT of people out there who lack the critical thinking skills to determine this sort of thing for themselves. Heck, I still deal with this sort of thing on a semi-regular basis, anytime a family member moves from one computer to another.
IMO, having some form of consistency from one platform to another is in everyones best interest, even if the change is silly and meaningless to you and I.
Yaz.
I hope you're being a bit facetious, as being able to do that yourself post-install is intuitively obvious to your typical Linux Geek. But I'd have thought it was intuitively obvious that I was referring to having such a facility as part of the base install, to make Joe AverageUser more comfortable y using the expectations they bring with them from their Windows (post-Vista) and/or Mac OS X experience.
Yaz.