Even worse, IMHO, is the loss of the "insert" key on some modern Logitech keyboards, which have a double-sized "delete" key instead. As well as being used (with CTRL) as a shortcut for "copy" and (with SHIFT) for "paste", it's also used for "scroll up one line" in Links.
I bet the microcontroller still recognises the contact pair and sends the code, though. In fact, I'd be surprised if the FPC didn't have space for a key there.
It's only a problem if you haven't read and understood (or had a trustworthy, competent person read and understand on your behalf) the source code of the software you are running, and know for sure that it does only what you want and expect it to do.
Note that the vendors of software cannot necessarily be trusted to write software which does what you expect it to do, since they get paid whether or not the software behaves itself; but their willingness (or otherwise) to allow such independent third-party auditing speaks volumes about the quality of their software.
It's been done already. Light slows down whenever it passes through anything. It only manages to get up to 299 792 458 ms-1 in a perfect vacuum. Even air slows it a little bit.
Whenever a beam of light moves from one medium, eg. air, to another, eg. glass, its speed changes. If it enters on the skew, so the speed of one side of the beam changes before the other side, then the beam changes direction; just like a vehicle with a binding brake, it swings towards the side that slows down first. When it comes out of the glass back into air, it speeds up again and changes direction again, exactly the reverse way to what would have happened on the way in (since a beam of light always follows the same path, whichever end it's shining from); unless it's travelling at such an angle there's no way it could ever have got to be travelling in that direction by going through the surface and slowing down a bit sooner on one side than the other. In which case it simply bounces off like a pool ball hitting the cushion and tries to escape somewhere else. This is how fibre optics work.
It also means that when you blast a pulse of light into one end of a long fibre optic, some of it comes straight along the middle and out of the other end at the speed of light in whatever stuff the fibre is made out of; but some of it takes a longer journey, bouncing off the walls, and some of it bounces more times than others. So you get a longer pulse at the far end than you originally put in (and dimmer, since the same amount of energy is now being spread over more time). If you're sending many pulses at a high enough frequency, there comes a point when the first pulse hasn't finished arriving at the far end before the second pulse goes in, and the receiver won't be able to tell which is which. Also, if the fibre goes through a bend, sometimes some light that you thought was going to bounce off the walls actually strikes at such an angle as it can get out. With modern, highly flexible materials, this can actually happen without you bending the fibre enough to break it.
If you want maximum bandwidth out of your fibre, you have to take these phenomena into account. You can buy cheap acrylic fibre, with LEDs and phototransistors that screw-couple onto it; these can often be used for RS232 links with no additional components, using the transmitter to light the LED and the phototransistor to pull down the voltage at the receiver, but you'll be lucky to get more than 9600 baud through such a link. With just some simple signal conditioning, you can make it run much faster.
Why is everything Y/R-Y/B-Y nowadays? We have done fine with RGB for years, via the 21-pin SCART connector which has been fitted to every TV, video recorder, DVD player and sat-box since the mid-1980s. RGB is also exactly what a CRT or an LCD panel expects. Y/R-Y/B-Y needs to be passed through an op-amp matrix to recover the RGB signals, which introduces noise and distortion, and it needs three separate plugs instead of one! (although RGB uses more wires since there is also a timing signal and its associated ground return. But the timing signal is actually a composite video signal, which can be picked up on by TVs / recorders without RGB inputs.)
Seriously, what was ever so wrong with the way we've been doing it for years that they've had to change it?
The "standards" are only available if you sign a contract in the blood of a freshly-sacrificed virgin, under the light of the decrescent moon, while three wolves howl in the distance. In the terms of the contract (which must be written in the Ancient Runes, using a pen made from a raven's feather) you pledge that if you give away the secrets of implementing HDCP, including the secret that you even know any of the secrets of implementing HDCP, then your tongue may be cut out and buried on a beach by the first light of dawn.
The old-fashioned 21-pin SCART connector (which provided separate red, green and blue signals to drive the grids of the CRT, if your set be so wired, plus a composite video signal which can be used to extract timing information, left and right audio and voltage-based switching signals, and worked fine ever since the 1980s) just made it too easy for the pirates.
# useradd -m -gusers -p! -s/usr/games/nethack nethack
# passwd nethack
(enter a password for the user)
..... then login as user "nethack" with the password you gave. You go straight into a game of Nethack; and when you save or quit the game, you get logged straight out.
By the way, try pressing ! for a shell sometime in mid-game.....
Or from switching on the printer after the instruction to enter graphics mode has been sent..... resulting in the bitmaps which would make up the graphics being treated as ASCII codes, and printed in the printer's native font.
But no; I have seen a printer chuck out pages of junk, starting with "This program requires Microsoft Windows" or something, and it was due to an infected Windows machine trying to copy the virus to every SMB share it could see. Including the printer (which was on a SAMBA share). This was in the Windows '98 days, so the problem most probably doesn't occur nowadays. (We actually ditched all our Windows '98 machines in favour of what was then called Mandrake shortly afterward.)
I haven't got the answers you want, but I'm sure someone else has and I hope you find what you're looking for. Google Is Your Friend. Have a look here too: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ExcelVBA/ at least for the excel stuff. Outlook probably has its own VBA too, which you could use as an alternative to procmail, but I'm really not sure of that. Best of luck, anyway.
You're right that the problems are deeper-rooted; flashiness has a tendency to blind some people to what a Power User would consider absent functionality. (Give me a spelling checker for my text editor first, and I can live without proportional fonts *cough* Wordpad *cough*.) I once got a bollocking for spending 4 hours writing a program to automate something that would have taken me half an hour to do by hand. Do you think my boss apologised to me, the ninth time anyone had to do the same job?
Well..... it's kind of half-open. Anyone can use the specification document to create their own Flash content. However, using it to decode Flash content is against the conditions under which the specification document is distributed.
My gut feeling is that such conditions would be unenforcible in some jurisdictions (especially if someone buys up an uninhabited island and creates a sovereign nation with its own written constitution and no extradition treaty with the USA [as though that was ever an obstacle]). However, unless you had more money than Adobe (since the US legal system is nowadays about nothing else but money; court cases are won by whoever can afford the more expensive lawyers), you would have basically one go to get it right.
What else are people meant to do [beside cut and paste] to get information from one document type to another?
Use open, documented formats in the first place?:)
How would macros help in this situation?
Someone who has actually used the Office macro language might be able to explain this better; but within a macro (written in a VisualBasic dialect which has varied from one Office version to the next, so make sure you match any textbook you buy against the version you are currently running), you can access portions of your document as though they were variables and even create new documents.
I'm generally curious, as I'm forced to transfer lots of information from one to the other daily, and would appreciate any tips on how to do things better
My first tip would be use something other than MS Office:) My second tip would be to ask someone who knows MS Office. I personally don't use MS Office at all (can't, even -- I'd need a Windows workstation for that), and we don't even use OpenOffice.org much -- most of our work is done using custom in-house-written web applications. Anytime I've had to create a spreadsheet (which is whenever the beancounters want reports), I've just created it as a CSV file. And if what was wanted was something to print, like a "fill-in-the-gaps" letter, then I've created it as a PostScript file (ssssh..... don't tell anyone, but it's surprising how little PostScript you actually need to know just to be able to print something). But I've also had the advantage that the original source material usually was not a Word document, but a text file or SQL database. That's what comes of not being dependent on MS, I guess. Or say we have an e-mail from one of our suppliers, containing data that needs to be added to one of our databases. As long as the format is consistent from one batch of data to the next, a machine can process it without problems. We just have the supplier e-mail it to a certain address; Procmail picks it up, and pipes it to a script (I use perl, but that's considered a bit clunky and old-fashioned nowadays; you young-and-trendy types probably want to use something like ruby or python) which extracts the important stuff and generates the necessary INSERT statements.
What exactly are you transferring from where to where? It certainly sounds probable that you could automate the process, but I -- or, if your heart's set on sticking with Microsoft, whoever helps you out with the job in the end -- would need to know a few more details.
There's a business opportunity out there, migrating users to Open Source, and somebody is set to coin it in.
"I want to totally own you. I want to hold your data to ransom, and if you don't keep paying me, I will make it unreadable. I want to force you to upgrade your software and your equipment when I say so. I will send my hired goons around when I feel like it, just to make sure you're behaving yourself, and if I so much as suspect you're even thinking of doing anything I don't like, you'll pay" really isn't much of a sales pitch, and the only reason anyone falls for it is they don't know there is an alternative. Well, ignorance is curable.
Start by recruiting a bunch of school leavers, all of whom must hate Microsoft with a passion; just put "Send CV - NO MS WORD DOCS" on the advertisement. And mean it. You'll need one or two machines running Windows and Office; but these will be on a private network, air-gapped from the Internet, so no need for anti-virus/anti-spyware. Files will be transferred from the Linux machines on this network to the rest of your network by physically transferring hard disk drives. One of your staff must be absolutely fluent in some distribution; and it's best if you have at least one expert from each side of the deb/rpm wall.
Document conversion isn't the problem you imagine it's going to be. Most of any user's old documents only occasionally ever need to be looked at, maybe reprinted, but probably not edited. So first off, archive all those legacy documents as PostScript files. (Emulating a standard JetDirect print server is as good a way as any of doing this.) You can (and should) gzip or bzip2 the files to save space, since none of the standard Linux file viewers mind about compressed files. In the course of doing this, you will identify those documents which might conceivably need to be edited and can begin prioritising. You will also, in all probability, run into a situation where a newer version of Microsoft software has trouble with a file generated by an older version of Microsoft software. If this happens, milk the sucker.
Now work on replacing existing Office macros. This will come as a bit of a shock to the Windows power users, but: Many customers don't actually use macros for much, because they simply don't know how to. It's not uncommon to see people cutting and pasting between Word and Excel, or even dictating from a screen to another person at another terminal. And don't just go for straight work-alikes: look at the bigger picture. If data is coming in regularly by e-mail and normally gets handled by some contrived manual process, you want an end-to-end solution, beginning with a procmail recipe, that will do the whole thing automagically. "As good as" is not good enough. You have got to do better.
Some documents will need to be recreated from scratch by hand in order to render them editable. This should not be overlooked. Slightly less drastic than retyping everything is transferring as plain text, then recreating the formatting -- which doesn't take long if done properly. Don't forget you have the Postscript "reference renderings" to work against.
If you can get a foot in the door with a business that has recently been raided by FAST (and they don't suspect that the raid had anything to do with you), so much the better. Just convince them you can convert them to 100% FLOSS for half what they'd be expected to pay for licences for the proprietary stuff they're using.
Ah, well, it's likely that the upcoming Zune vs iPod vs PlaysForSure wars will wake people up to what DRM really means.
As an aside, a promotional catalogue that fell out of last week's Radio Timeslisted a combined record/CD player/radio with built-in MP3 encoder that can write to SD/MMC cards or USB mass storage devices. This is the sort of thing that is going to take digital music right into the mainstream.
Actually, in at least the EU and the UK, and probably the British Commonwealth, software patents are not legally enforcible.
Nor will they ever be. If the law is changed to allow software patents, then it will be recognised that they were never valid before; so any software patent previously but falsely granted in the EU or UK will be recognised as bogus. The holders will have to re-apply for them, but will be blocked by reason of Prior Art and/or obviety (since there will be code out there to do the same things as what they're trying to patent).
A gallon of water weighs ten pounds. There are eight pints in a gallon, and twenty fluid ounces in a pint; therefore, one hundred and sixty fluid ounces in a gallon. A fluid ounce of water weighs one ounce. Therefore, one gallon of water weighs ten pounds.
Or, you could just remember, "A pint of pure water weighs a pound and a quarter" and multiply that by eight. A gallon of water weight eight-and-eight-quarters pounds; which, when you sort out the top-heavy fraction (eight quarters are two), is ten pounds.
You can almost always re-flash a "branded" phone with "generic" firmware. This allows you to, for example, use an O2 SIM card in an ex-Vodafone handset. (Back in the days when Ericsson phones were ugly and Nokia phones were pretty, contract phones never used to be locked to one telco's SIM cards, and would accept anything you shoved in them. PAYG phones were fussy; but, of course, you're usually paying less than the phone is worth to get it in the first place and making up the difference in talk time vouchers.)
Also, at least on Sony Ericsson phones, you can use recordings taken via the internal mic as ringtones..... for free, forever!
But you can already tell the value of a coin without looking at it, just by the diameter, thickness, number of sides and presence or absence of a milled edge. I don't know about Canadian coins, but both British and Continental coins are easily identified by feel.
That is really the whole problem. If patent licencing were on an "everyone or no-one" basis (and let's not forget, the original intention of the patent system was to encourage sharing of innovation, as counter-intuitive as that may sound), the system would be far less open to abuse; it would not then be possible for a cartel of existing players to lock competitors out of a particular marketplace.
For that to work, Big Company has to be actually working the invention (otherwise they can't be making money out of it). And if the Little Guy's patent evidently has merit, then they ought to be able to borrow the money to fight the case (and win back costs from the other side as part of the settlement) on the strength of future royalties. If the patent doesn't have merit, no-one will lend you the money -- and rightly so. (This is assuming you can admit Intellectual Property as collateral for a loan; I don't see why not, since in almost every other way it gets treated like physical property.)
Even so, that's a good thing. If many people are encrypting essentially innocuous data, that shows that encryption is not, in and of itself, necessarily evidence of dodginess.
I think this makes sense. It's a recognition that monies are sometimes paid under duress and under protest.
Look at it this way: Handing over your dinner money to the playground bully doesn't necessarily mean you think he has a right to it -- just that you'd rather miss a meal than take a severe beating and probably end up missing a meal as well when he steals the money off you.
In the same way, some people choose to pay royalties they know full well to be bogus just so as to be able to ship product and earn some money, rather than challenge the bogus patents in court straight away during which time they are likely to be barred from selling product. This ruling just recognises that paying royalties does not necessarily mean acceptance that the patent is valid.
Why would you want dial-up access? The thing's got wireless built in, so it will work with an (external) wireless broadband router (and every OLPC is a router in its own right). If you really, really want dial-up, "modify" any wireless router with Flashable firmware and a serial console port so you can plug that into a dial-up modem and make it into a wireless dial-up router.
Or -- you could just stick pins in your eyes. This is the 21st Century! Dial-up belongs in the dustbin of history.
If you give people clean water and vaccines, then they become dependent on you.
If you give people the technology to purify their own water and manufacture their own vaccines, then they are no longer dependent on you.
Now, it's an improbably large leap from giving kids to computers to expecting them to become white-coated boffins who are going to save the world, and I would certainly expect anyone who made such a statement to back it up with a long argument. But something good is bound to happen as a result of this. Give the right creative materials to enough kids, and some of them will come up with something amazing. Bear in mind also that while we might consider it primitive by the standards we've come to expect of a computer, a lot of these kids literally won't have seen anything like it before. It's a real hands-on learning tool. The main storage is a bit on the meagre side, but it ought to hold enough reading matter to last between opportunities to download some more. It's programmable in Python, which isn't exactly the hardest language in the world; and it's got a sensor input which allows for all sorts of experiments. I'm not suggesting that it's the first easily-programmed computer with the ability to attach weird and wonderful things to it; the BBC Model B had a nice fast structured BASIC and even more versatile user I/O, but you were lucky to have one beeb per classroom.
With this thing, there's bound to be some kid smart enough to figure out something amazingly useful to do with it and who isn't put off by the thought that this computer is a bit limited. They probably won't invent a cheap, pocket-sized device that supplies unlimited free energy, purifies raw sewage into drinkable water and turns deserts into fertile fields; at least, not straight away. But what I can see happening is clean, safe, modern factories being built to churn these things out in the numbers in which they will be needed, where they are needed, and revitalising economies by creating good jobs. And I can see small but significant improvements to things like crop yields and medical treatment in less built-up areas, thanks just to better communication and information-sharing abilities. How much food is lost because a crop starts to bolt, and nobody else finds out in enough time to get theirs safely gathered in? Or how often do people harvest needlessly early, for fear that that will happen? How many lives could be saved by early intervention, if people only knew a bit of basic first aid and could recognise the symptoms of easily-cured diseases? How much other damage is being done by superstitions clung to out of ignorance? I honestly don't know. But when you've got whole maths classes analysing local data, and readily-available newspapers and textbooks on all subjects, this sort of thing really can't not happen.
And these kids are never going to know anything other than the Open Source way of doing things. They won't have preconceived ideas about sharing vs. stealing. That ought to put the frighteners on the Closed Source software vendors.
Slashdot Mirror
How so?
Even worse, IMHO, is the loss of the "insert" key on some modern Logitech keyboards, which have a double-sized "delete" key instead. As well as being used (with CTRL) as a shortcut for "copy" and (with SHIFT) for "paste", it's also used for "scroll up one line" in Links.
I bet the microcontroller still recognises the contact pair and sends the code, though. In fact, I'd be surprised if the FPC didn't have space for a key there.
It's only a problem if you haven't read and understood (or had a trustworthy, competent person read and understand on your behalf) the source code of the software you are running, and know for sure that it does only what you want and expect it to do.
Note that the vendors of software cannot necessarily be trusted to write software which does what you expect it to do, since they get paid whether or not the software behaves itself; but their willingness (or otherwise) to allow such independent third-party auditing speaks volumes about the quality of their software.
It's been done already. Light slows down whenever it passes through anything. It only manages to get up to 299 792 458 ms-1 in a perfect vacuum. Even air slows it a little bit.
Whenever a beam of light moves from one medium, eg. air, to another, eg. glass, its speed changes. If it enters on the skew, so the speed of one side of the beam changes before the other side, then the beam changes direction; just like a vehicle with a binding brake, it swings towards the side that slows down first. When it comes out of the glass back into air, it speeds up again and changes direction again, exactly the reverse way to what would have happened on the way in (since a beam of light always follows the same path, whichever end it's shining from); unless it's travelling at such an angle there's no way it could ever have got to be travelling in that direction by going through the surface and slowing down a bit sooner on one side than the other. In which case it simply bounces off like a pool ball hitting the cushion and tries to escape somewhere else. This is how fibre optics work.
It also means that when you blast a pulse of light into one end of a long fibre optic, some of it comes straight along the middle and out of the other end at the speed of light in whatever stuff the fibre is made out of; but some of it takes a longer journey, bouncing off the walls, and some of it bounces more times than others. So you get a longer pulse at the far end than you originally put in (and dimmer, since the same amount of energy is now being spread over more time). If you're sending many pulses at a high enough frequency, there comes a point when the first pulse hasn't finished arriving at the far end before the second pulse goes in, and the receiver won't be able to tell which is which. Also, if the fibre goes through a bend, sometimes some light that you thought was going to bounce off the walls actually strikes at such an angle as it can get out. With modern, highly flexible materials, this can actually happen without you bending the fibre enough to break it.
If you want maximum bandwidth out of your fibre, you have to take these phenomena into account. You can buy cheap acrylic fibre, with LEDs and phototransistors that screw-couple onto it; these can often be used for RS232 links with no additional components, using the transmitter to light the LED and the phototransistor to pull down the voltage at the receiver, but you'll be lucky to get more than 9600 baud through such a link. With just some simple signal conditioning, you can make it run much faster.
Why is everything Y/R-Y/B-Y nowadays? We have done fine with RGB for years, via the 21-pin SCART connector which has been fitted to every TV, video recorder, DVD player and sat-box since the mid-1980s. RGB is also exactly what a CRT or an LCD panel expects. Y/R-Y/B-Y needs to be passed through an op-amp matrix to recover the RGB signals, which introduces noise and distortion, and it needs three separate plugs instead of one! (although RGB uses more wires since there is also a timing signal and its associated ground return. But the timing signal is actually a composite video signal, which can be picked up on by TVs / recorders without RGB inputs.)
Seriously, what was ever so wrong with the way we've been doing it for years that they've had to change it?
The "standards" are only available if you sign a contract in the blood of a freshly-sacrificed virgin, under the light of the decrescent moon, while three wolves howl in the distance. In the terms of the contract (which must be written in the Ancient Runes, using a pen made from a raven's feather) you pledge that if you give away the secrets of implementing HDCP, including the secret that you even know any of the secrets of implementing HDCP, then your tongue may be cut out and buried on a beach by the first light of dawn.
The old-fashioned 21-pin SCART connector (which provided separate red, green and blue signals to drive the grids of the CRT, if your set be so wired, plus a composite video signal which can be used to extract timing information, left and right audio and voltage-based switching signals, and worked fine ever since the 1980s) just made it too easy for the pirates.
BTW did you know you can do something like:
By the way, try pressing ! for a shell sometime in mid-game
Or from switching on the printer after the instruction to enter graphics mode has been sent ..... resulting in the bitmaps which would make up the graphics being treated as ASCII codes, and printed in the printer's native font.
But no; I have seen a printer chuck out pages of junk, starting with "This program requires Microsoft Windows" or something, and it was due to an infected Windows machine trying to copy the virus to every SMB share it could see. Including the printer (which was on a SAMBA share). This was in the Windows '98 days, so the problem most probably doesn't occur nowadays. (We actually ditched all our Windows '98 machines in favour of what was then called Mandrake shortly afterward.)
I haven't got the answers you want, but I'm sure someone else has and I hope you find what you're looking for. Google Is Your Friend. Have a look here too: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ExcelVBA/ at least for the excel stuff. Outlook probably has its own VBA too, which you could use as an alternative to procmail, but I'm really not sure of that. Best of luck, anyway.
You're right that the problems are deeper-rooted; flashiness has a tendency to blind some people to what a Power User would consider absent functionality. (Give me a spelling checker for my text editor first, and I can live without proportional fonts *cough* Wordpad *cough*.) I once got a bollocking for spending 4 hours writing a program to automate something that would have taken me half an hour to do by hand. Do you think my boss apologised to me, the ninth time anyone had to do the same job?
Well ..... it's kind of half-open. Anyone can use the specification document to create their own Flash content. However, using it to decode Flash content is against the conditions under which the specification document is distributed.
My gut feeling is that such conditions would be unenforcible in some jurisdictions (especially if someone buys up an uninhabited island and creates a sovereign nation with its own written constitution and no extradition treaty with the USA [as though that was ever an obstacle]). However, unless you had more money than Adobe (since the US legal system is nowadays about nothing else but money; court cases are won by whoever can afford the more expensive lawyers), you would have basically one go to get it right.
What exactly are you transferring from where to where? It certainly sounds probable that you could automate the process, but I -- or, if your heart's set on sticking with Microsoft, whoever helps you out with the job in the end -- would need to know a few more details.
There's a business opportunity out there, migrating users to Open Source, and somebody is set to coin it in.
"I want to totally own you. I want to hold your data to ransom, and if you don't keep paying me, I will make it unreadable. I want to force you to upgrade your software and your equipment when I say so. I will send my hired goons around when I feel like it, just to make sure you're behaving yourself, and if I so much as suspect you're even thinking of doing anything I don't like, you'll pay" really isn't much of a sales pitch, and the only reason anyone falls for it is they don't know there is an alternative. Well, ignorance is curable.
Start by recruiting a bunch of school leavers, all of whom must hate Microsoft with a passion; just put "Send CV - NO MS WORD DOCS" on the advertisement. And mean it. You'll need one or two machines running Windows and Office; but these will be on a private network, air-gapped from the Internet, so no need for anti-virus/anti-spyware. Files will be transferred from the Linux machines on this network to the rest of your network by physically transferring hard disk drives. One of your staff must be absolutely fluent in some distribution; and it's best if you have at least one expert from each side of the deb/rpm wall.
Document conversion isn't the problem you imagine it's going to be. Most of any user's old documents only occasionally ever need to be looked at, maybe reprinted, but probably not edited. So first off, archive all those legacy documents as PostScript files. (Emulating a standard JetDirect print server is as good a way as any of doing this.) You can (and should) gzip or bzip2 the files to save space, since none of the standard Linux file viewers mind about compressed files. In the course of doing this, you will identify those documents which might conceivably need to be edited and can begin prioritising. You will also, in all probability, run into a situation where a newer version of Microsoft software has trouble with a file generated by an older version of Microsoft software. If this happens, milk the sucker.
Now work on replacing existing Office macros. This will come as a bit of a shock to the Windows power users, but: Many customers don't actually use macros for much, because they simply don't know how to. It's not uncommon to see people cutting and pasting between Word and Excel, or even dictating from a screen to another person at another terminal. And don't just go for straight work-alikes: look at the bigger picture. If data is coming in regularly by e-mail and normally gets handled by some contrived manual process, you want an end-to-end solution, beginning with a procmail recipe, that will do the whole thing automagically. "As good as" is not good enough. You have got to do better.
Some documents will need to be recreated from scratch by hand in order to render them editable. This should not be overlooked. Slightly less drastic than retyping everything is transferring as plain text, then recreating the formatting -- which doesn't take long if done properly. Don't forget you have the Postscript "reference renderings" to work against.
If you can get a foot in the door with a business that has recently been raided by FAST (and they don't suspect that the raid had anything to do with you), so much the better. Just convince them you can convert them to 100% FLOSS for half what they'd be expected to pay for licences for the proprietary stuff they're using.
Ah, well, it's likely that the upcoming Zune vs iPod vs PlaysForSure wars will wake people up to what DRM really means.
As an aside, a promotional catalogue that fell out of last week's Radio Times listed a combined record/CD player/radio with built-in MP3 encoder that can write to SD/MMC cards or USB mass storage devices. This is the sort of thing that is going to take digital music right into the mainstream.
Actually, in at least the EU and the UK, and probably the British Commonwealth, software patents are not legally enforcible.
Nor will they ever be. If the law is changed to allow software patents, then it will be recognised that they were never valid before; so any software patent previously but falsely granted in the EU or UK will be recognised as bogus. The holders will have to re-apply for them, but will be blocked by reason of Prior Art and/or obviety (since there will be code out there to do the same things as what they're trying to patent).
A gallon of water weighs ten pounds. There are eight pints in a gallon, and twenty fluid ounces in a pint; therefore, one hundred and sixty fluid ounces in a gallon. A fluid ounce of water weighs one ounce. Therefore, one gallon of water weighs ten pounds.
Or, you could just remember, "A pint of pure water weighs a pound and a quarter" and multiply that by eight. A gallon of water weight eight-and-eight-quarters pounds; which, when you sort out the top-heavy fraction (eight quarters are two), is ten pounds.
You can almost always re-flash a "branded" phone with "generic" firmware. This allows you to, for example, use an O2 SIM card in an ex-Vodafone handset. (Back in the days when Ericsson phones were ugly and Nokia phones were pretty, contract phones never used to be locked to one telco's SIM cards, and would accept anything you shoved in them. PAYG phones were fussy; but, of course, you're usually paying less than the phone is worth to get it in the first place and making up the difference in talk time vouchers.)
..... for free, forever!
Also, at least on Sony Ericsson phones, you can use recordings taken via the internal mic as ringtones
But you can already tell the value of a coin without looking at it, just by the diameter, thickness, number of sides and presence or absence of a milled edge. I don't know about Canadian coins, but both British and Continental coins are easily identified by feel.
For that to work, Big Company has to be actually working the invention (otherwise they can't be making money out of it). And if the Little Guy's patent evidently has merit, then they ought to be able to borrow the money to fight the case (and win back costs from the other side as part of the settlement) on the strength of future royalties. If the patent doesn't have merit, no-one will lend you the money -- and rightly so. (This is assuming you can admit Intellectual Property as collateral for a loan; I don't see why not, since in almost every other way it gets treated like physical property.)
Even so, that's a good thing. If many people are encrypting essentially innocuous data, that shows that encryption is not, in and of itself, necessarily evidence of dodginess.
I think this makes sense. It's a recognition that monies are sometimes paid under duress and under protest.
Look at it this way: Handing over your dinner money to the playground bully doesn't necessarily mean you think he has a right to it -- just that you'd rather miss a meal than take a severe beating and probably end up missing a meal as well when he steals the money off you.
In the same way, some people choose to pay royalties they know full well to be bogus just so as to be able to ship product and earn some money, rather than challenge the bogus patents in court straight away during which time they are likely to be barred from selling product. This ruling just recognises that paying royalties does not necessarily mean acceptance that the patent is valid.
Why would you want dial-up access? The thing's got wireless built in, so it will work with an (external) wireless broadband router (and every OLPC is a router in its own right). If you really, really want dial-up, "modify" any wireless router with Flashable firmware and a serial console port so you can plug that into a dial-up modem and make it into a wireless dial-up router.
Or -- you could just stick pins in your eyes. This is the 21st Century! Dial-up belongs in the dustbin of history.
If you give people clean water and vaccines, then they become dependent on you.
If you give people the technology to purify their own water and manufacture their own vaccines, then they are no longer dependent on you.
Now, it's an improbably large leap from giving kids to computers to expecting them to become white-coated boffins who are going to save the world, and I would certainly expect anyone who made such a statement to back it up with a long argument. But something good is bound to happen as a result of this. Give the right creative materials to enough kids, and some of them will come up with something amazing. Bear in mind also that while we might consider it primitive by the standards we've come to expect of a computer, a lot of these kids literally won't have seen anything like it before. It's a real hands-on learning tool. The main storage is a bit on the meagre side, but it ought to hold enough reading matter to last between opportunities to download some more. It's programmable in Python, which isn't exactly the hardest language in the world; and it's got a sensor input which allows for all sorts of experiments. I'm not suggesting that it's the first easily-programmed computer with the ability to attach weird and wonderful things to it; the BBC Model B had a nice fast structured BASIC and even more versatile user I/O, but you were lucky to have one beeb per classroom.
With this thing, there's bound to be some kid smart enough to figure out something amazingly useful to do with it and who isn't put off by the thought that this computer is a bit limited. They probably won't invent a cheap, pocket-sized device that supplies unlimited free energy, purifies raw sewage into drinkable water and turns deserts into fertile fields; at least, not straight away. But what I can see happening is clean, safe, modern factories being built to churn these things out in the numbers in which they will be needed, where they are needed, and revitalising economies by creating good jobs. And I can see small but significant improvements to things like crop yields and medical treatment in less built-up areas, thanks just to better communication and information-sharing abilities. How much food is lost because a crop starts to bolt, and nobody else finds out in enough time to get theirs safely gathered in? Or how often do people harvest needlessly early, for fear that that will happen? How many lives could be saved by early intervention, if people only knew a bit of basic first aid and could recognise the symptoms of easily-cured diseases? How much other damage is being done by superstitions clung to out of ignorance? I honestly don't know. But when you've got whole maths classes analysing local data, and readily-available newspapers and textbooks on all subjects, this sort of thing really can't not happen.
And these kids are never going to know anything other than the Open Source way of doing things. They won't have preconceived ideas about sharing vs. stealing. That ought to put the frighteners on the Closed Source software vendors.