Well to use THEIR APIs yes, but to write your own APIs that do the same thing, NO. (And that is what this issue is all about).
You only need the headers (so that you can make your APIs call-compatible).
And you can get the headers from a lot of places, such as the WINE project. Microsoft does not make it drop dead simple to find them with out trying to get you to sign a license (even if free), but they are available for people to replicate most/some windows functionality via other platforms.
Further, I only need the APIs and the Documentation from Microsoft to write in any programming language, by simply translating the headers to what ever computer language I want to use. I then sell/give my programs to others and they run them on any windows machine without paying another nickle to Microsoft. I licensed the documentation, (because it was convenient, although I could have gotten it all on the web), and they licensed the binary APIs when they purchased Windows, or Linux, or what ever.
The form and structure of API arguments is not copywrite-able.
Excellent. A security measure that leaves counterfeit bills intact, and renders real ones useless. And when I drown my sorrows over these feline cadavers at the corner bar, the barkeep will tell me my money is worthless. New meaning to the phrase dead cat bounce.
Remember, Clancy deliberately introduced errors into his spy and nuclear weapons tech so that the real intelligence agencies (i.e., KGB and GRU) and real terrorists couldn't use them as formulae. Or at least, so he claimed on talk show appearances.
Yup, that must be why he did it.
Because the KGB and the GRU have no access to people who know the basics of Orbital mechanics and therefore would have been duped into wasting their money trying to put a satellite in geostationary orbit over the north pole. Such cleverness. Such subtly. Clancy, you sly dog.
I find it very stable, and rather surprisingly lightweight considering all the bells and whistles it supports. The current version is one of the best versions of KDE of all time, IMHO.
Nobody I know uses the semantic desktop, its simply a developmental toy, and most people turn off the indexing functions, since they pretty well know what is on their machines and where it is. They've even been browbeaten into deep-sixing their "activities" for the vast majority of users that simply wanted multiple desktops without all the widgets. (Its still there, but mostly caged and toothless).
It does everything I ask of it, and gets out of the way when I don't need it. Their Kmail, which use to be one of the best email MUAs has fallen to unusable status of late, in the midst of another re-write, but Thunderbird and several other are there to pick up the slack.
Not to mention Opensuse is a very good distro with full KDE support. (They do Gnome and other flavors as well). I happen to think Opensuse does KDE better than anyone else, but that's just my opinion.
Having long ago gone the "educational" route, I'm perfectly happy to start with a well thought out distro these days, and have 4 of them on this machine, in (Virtual Machines), including some pretty old school ones running nothing graphical.
Also, when their orbits are designed to overfly interesting places in the (former) USSR or China, how likely are they to overfly interesting stuff stateside?
How likely? 100% chance. Do spend a little time reading up on orbital mechanics some day.
Don't be like Tom Clancy, who wrote in one of his novels that the CIA had a satellite in geostationary orbit over the north pole.
An awful long post for one minute after the story's timestamp.
See that little asterisk after his name and Slashdot ID? It means he saw the story way sooner than you did. He probably had his post finished by the time it showed up on your screen.
Which can be avoided by using wifi if available. Simply toggle off dropbox upload of images, then toggle back on when he gets to wifi. Since he was prepared to do this using his phone as a modem for his laptop it would seem this is not an issue for him.
I agree, this sounds like way more trouble than it is worth.
The least you could do (and the object is in fact to do the least possible) is to let a contract for cat5 or fiber to each unit all terminating in the basement or some such locked place.
Then allow the various ISPs to come in and do the rest of the work on a customer by customer basis. You don't want these guys running cable all over your building.
ISPs get a numbered patch panel in the basement, and one (or more) direct runs to each apartment. Space and power for their rack/router.
What goes on inside the apartment is the apartment owner's problem.
You want to protect your building's common areas from legions of independent installers. But you do not want to get into the ISP business.
It is strange that sites such as this become wildlife reserves. apart from occaionaly blowing things up or scattering vast amounts of toxic materials all over the place they are pretty much not interfered with by humans.
What a useless comment. The original poster is already aware of DropBox, and discarded it from consideration
He discarded it for no valid reason. That is what the GP is pointing out.
It is by far the cheapest most reliable solution to this problem, and it even allows leaving the laptop at home and simply uploading camera pictures to your smartphone where they can automatically be loaded to dropbox.
If the OP is unwilling to consider dropbox, where the solution is handed to him on a silver platter, then why should we waste our time to spec out his system for him?
Don't come here and dismiss the obvious solution, (Dropbox) for which which many newer phones support automatic uploading of both phone pictures and photos transferred to the phone from an external camera. (And deletes are not mirrored). You can transfer picture so the phone via Samba server on your phone (at least with Android you can) or bluetooth or cable. From then on you forget it. It will take care of it. It will re-try till it succeeds without you having to do anything.
And when you get home, Dropbox will have all your pictures on your desktop machine waiting for you.
There is also Picasa if you transfer to your pictures either from computer or your Android phone. Flicker, Photobucket, and about 20 other such services are also available. Anything you lash up with your home computer is bound to be flaky, more trouble than its worth, and bound to fail the minute you drive away from the house.
If you insist on rolling your own, and If you carry a computer and transfer all photos to that, you can of course use any number of sync solutions that work in "contribution" mode (local deletes are not replicated on the server), I've used Unison in this mode, or SyncCenter (windows) SyncToy (windows), rsync, etc.
But all of these require leaving a computer on at home, hoping it won't reboot due to any number of reasons, and assuming you can get wifi access from anywhere.
There is little point in building your own these days.
"Is CSIRO returning any monies to the Aussie Taxpayer?" - Yes, half the monies collected in this case went straight back to the government. That is the mandate that CSIRO operates under.
So the answer is no then, and Aussie wifi users STILL had to pay for development, and pay again when they buy a router.
Giving money to the government doesn't get any back into taxpayers pockets.
Out of the millions of SSIDs in the US alone, TFA writer could only confer with 400 of them for a sample
400 is what you can find in an afternoon of war driving in suburbia, or an hour walking around apartment complexes with a wardriving app on your smartphone.
But realistically, with WIFI being such a short range medium getting a significantly larger sample with a non-google scale budget is pretty problematic. You can't detect them very far away, and the more crowded the wifi space the smaller the detection distance due to unfavorable signal to noise ratio.
To the rescue: http://wigle.net/ a collection of 57 million crowd-sourced, geocoded access points gleaned via various means, but most of them with a smart phone application like Wigle Wifi Wardriving available free for android. Simply turn that on, put on your headphones and go for a walk and when you get back you will have very accurate maps of dozens of routers. Log into Wigle.com, upload, and contribute to the map which can also be searched and zoomed. (Their server is prone to slashdotting).
They could have worked a deal with Wigle.net to mine their SSID names, sorted in order by the first 6 letters, and discarded the first 98% and come up with a far more interesting collection.
Except it was trivial. They simply moved techniques long know in the radar industry to low-power routers to prevent them being swamped by reflection of their own signals. So, by your own definition: Trolling.
maybe cos its a government research organisation, not a commercial company. maybe the difference is that many other government research orgs are quite happy to sink countless millions in taxpayer-funded grants into new tech that is merely ripped off by commercial companies, so that taxpayers get to pay for it twice-over.
Really? First: lets set the record straight, they didn't invent wifi. It was working long before they got involved. They merely improved it, by applying state of the art backscatter minimization techniques already well known in the radar and UHF radio industry so that it could penetrate walls, and work in confined spaces.
CSIRO patented an idea. An algorithm. A mathematical formula for signal timing. Its exactly the same thing as MP3 patents, or the patents (expired) on GIF images. Had an american company done this, even a publicly funded one, you would have been all over them as patent trolls. But because its Australian it gets a pass?!!?
Second, instead of setting up a company or licensing others to set up companies to produce products they publicized their work, waited till it was widely adopted, then started suing people. They initially released it for open use, not expecting much. Even when the world+dog decided they wanted laptops they did nothing to license it. Only when it became ubiquitous did they jump in with lawyers.
If it was tax payer funded, it already belongs to the people. People weren't paying for it TWICE until CSIRO decided to sue. So the very thing you condemn was brought about by the action you applaud.
Only when they started patent trolling did those licensing fees get passed on to the consumer to pay yet again for something they had funded and contributed to the community. Routers cost money to build.
Is CSIRO returning any monies to the Aussie Taxpayer? Is their government funding in any way reduced in light of their licensing revenue? Nope.
It's not profitable because streaming sucks. People want to pay for something they can download and "own". I don't want to pay $5 to watch something once, and have it hiccup if the network glitches for even a second.
Even if I only watch it once, I like knowing I have a copy of that movie on my hard drive.
I believe the number of people that want to "own" a movie constitute a small minority. Very small. Even smaller for the number that want to own tv shows.
The thing will be in re-runs on TV in 6 months, even movies will be on TV, and DVDs will be in the clearance bins within two years, well before I would want to re-watch anything produced by hollywood.
The streaming issues are easily worked around by most services. They let you save it on your device for veiwing later, even when offline, then the device deletes it after your viewing count or time period.
Slashdot Mirror
And to keep arguing this point after the judge's ruling is clear indication that you haven't been paying attention.
Well to use THEIR APIs yes, but to write your own APIs that do the same thing, NO. (And that is what this issue is all about).
You only need the headers (so that you can make your APIs call-compatible).
And you can get the headers from a lot of places, such as the WINE project.
Microsoft does not make it drop dead simple to find them with out trying to get you to sign a license (even if free), but they are available
for people to replicate most/some windows functionality via other platforms.
Further, I only need the APIs and the Documentation from Microsoft to write in any programming language, by simply translating
the headers to what ever computer language I want to use. I then sell/give my programs to others and they run them on
any windows machine without paying another nickle to Microsoft. I licensed the documentation, (because it was convenient, although
I could have gotten it all on the web), and they licensed the binary APIs when they purchased Windows, or Linux, or what ever.
The form and structure of API arguments is not copywrite-able.
Excellent. A security measure that leaves counterfeit bills intact, and renders real ones useless.
And when I drown my sorrows over these feline cadavers at the corner bar, the barkeep will tell me my
money is worthless. New meaning to the phrase dead cat bounce.
Remember, Clancy deliberately introduced errors into his spy and nuclear weapons tech so that the real intelligence agencies (i.e., KGB and GRU) and real terrorists couldn't use them as formulae. Or at least, so he claimed on talk show appearances.
Yup, that must be why he did it.
Because the KGB and the GRU have no access to people who know the basics of Orbital mechanics and therefore would have been duped into wasting their money trying to put a satellite in geostationary orbit over the north pole. Such cleverness. Such subtly. Clancy, you sly dog.
Just turn off or uninstall what you don't need.
I find it very stable, and rather surprisingly lightweight considering all the bells and whistles it supports. The current version is one of the best versions of KDE of all time, IMHO.
Nobody I know uses the semantic desktop, its simply a developmental toy, and most people turn off the indexing functions, since they pretty well know what is on their machines and where it is. They've even been browbeaten into deep-sixing their "activities" for the vast majority of users that simply wanted multiple desktops without all the widgets. (Its still there, but mostly caged and toothless).
It does everything I ask of it, and gets out of the way when I don't need it. Their Kmail, which use to be one of the best email MUAs has fallen to unusable status of late, in the midst of another re-write, but Thunderbird and several other are there to pick up the slack.
Not to mention Opensuse is a very good distro with full KDE support. (They do Gnome and other flavors as well).
I happen to think Opensuse does KDE better than anyone else, but that's just my opinion.
Having long ago gone the "educational" route, I'm perfectly happy to start with a well thought out distro these days, and have 4 of them on this machine, in (Virtual Machines), including some pretty old school ones running nothing graphical.
Also, when their orbits are designed to overfly interesting places in the (former) USSR or China, how likely are they to overfly interesting stuff stateside?
How likely? 100% chance.
Do spend a little time reading up on orbital mechanics some day.
Don't be like Tom Clancy, who wrote in one of his novels that the CIA had a satellite in geostationary orbit over the north pole.
An awful long post for one minute after the story's timestamp.
See that little asterisk after his name and Slashdot ID? It means he saw the story way sooner than you did.
He probably had his post finished by the time it showed up on your screen.
Which can be avoided by using wifi if available.
Simply toggle off dropbox upload of images, then toggle back on when he gets to wifi.
Since he was prepared to do this using his phone as a modem for his laptop it would seem this is not an issue for him.
I agree, this sounds like way more trouble than it is worth.
The least you could do (and the object is in fact to do the least possible) is to let a contract for cat5 or fiber to each unit
all terminating in the basement or some such locked place.
Then allow the various ISPs to come in and do the rest of the work on a customer by customer basis.
You don't want these guys running cable all over your building.
ISPs get a numbered patch panel in the basement, and one (or more) direct runs to each apartment.
Space and power for their rack/router.
What goes on inside the apartment is the apartment owner's problem.
You want to protect your building's common areas from legions of independent installers.
But you do not want to get into the ISP business.
It is strange that sites such as this become wildlife reserves. apart from occaionaly blowing things up or scattering vast amounts of toxic materials all over the place they are pretty much not interfered with by humans.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/30/porton-down-staff-insect-monitors
Yes you do not really want to know what they did there. In America there are the Nevada test ranges that have similar status.
So you are equating some spilt rocket fuel with nuclear weapons testing then?
Overreach much?
Yup, spys always post for solutions on Slashdot.
Sorry, I forgot about that.
Presumably all that gear, big camera, laptop, cell phone, all fits in the heel of his shoe and nobody would suspect a thing.
What a useless comment. The original poster is already aware of DropBox, and discarded it from consideration
He discarded it for no valid reason. That is what the GP is pointing out.
It is by far the cheapest most reliable solution to this problem, and it even allows leaving the laptop at home and simply uploading camera pictures to your smartphone where they can automatically be loaded to dropbox.
If the OP is unwilling to consider dropbox, where the solution is handed to him on a silver platter, then why should we waste our time to spec out his system for him?
Dropbox probably isn't going to work.
Yes it will. Perfectly, actually, in my experience.
And it won't delete photos when you delete them from the camera upload directory.
Check it out here: https://www.dropbox.com/help/288
Further, it will chew on each image file till it gets a successful upload.
Don't come here and dismiss the obvious solution, (Dropbox) for which which many newer phones support automatic uploading of both phone pictures and photos transferred to the phone from an external camera. (And deletes are not mirrored). You can transfer picture so the phone via Samba server on your phone (at least with Android you can) or bluetooth or cable. From then on you forget it. It will take care of it. It will re-try till it succeeds without you having to do anything.
And when you get home, Dropbox will have all your pictures on your desktop machine waiting for you.
There is also Picasa if you transfer to your pictures either from computer or your Android phone. Flicker, Photobucket, and about 20 other such services are also available. Anything you lash up with your home computer is bound to be flaky, more trouble than its worth, and bound to fail the minute you drive away from the house.
If you insist on rolling your own, and If you carry a computer and transfer all photos to that, you can of course use any number of sync solutions that work in "contribution" mode (local deletes are not replicated on the server), I've used Unison in this mode, or SyncCenter (windows) SyncToy (windows), rsync, etc.
But all of these require leaving a computer on at home, hoping it won't reboot due to any number of reasons, and assuming you can get wifi access from anywhere.
There is little point in building your own these days.
"Is CSIRO returning any monies to the Aussie Taxpayer?" - Yes, half the monies collected in this case went straight back to the government. That is the mandate that CSIRO operates under.
So the answer is no then, and Aussie wifi users STILL had to pay for development, and pay again when they buy a router.
Giving money to the government doesn't get any back into taxpayers pockets.
NASA simply put men on the moon using technology invented during world war 2
everything seems simple in hindsight
Riiiiiight....
Why not attribute it to cave men, after all fire was involved.
Rocket launching is far more dangerous to humans than to wildlife.
The wildlife at Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral seems not too spooked by anything short of an actual launch, and then only briefly.
http://mediaarchive.ksc.nasa.gov/search.cfm?cat=27
I specially like the shot of the Osprey nesting on the parking lot sign.
Plain text passwords were captured at login time in coöperation with Yahoo! under ethics and legal-approved rules.
I'm sorry, but that just hurts my brain. The internal contradiction is epic.
Sadly, it doesn't surprise me that Yahoo would be party to this.
Which one is *really* more secure?
The one written on the monitor obviously.
Out of the millions of SSIDs in the US alone, TFA writer could only confer with 400 of them for a sample
400 is what you can find in an afternoon of war driving in suburbia, or an hour walking around apartment complexes with a wardriving app on your smartphone.
But realistically, with WIFI being such a short range medium getting a significantly larger sample with a non-google scale budget is pretty problematic. You can't detect them very far away, and the more crowded the wifi space the smaller the detection distance due to unfavorable signal to noise ratio.
To the rescue: http://wigle.net/ a collection of 57 million crowd-sourced, geocoded access points gleaned via various means, but most of them with a smart phone application like Wigle Wifi Wardriving available free for android. Simply turn that on, put on your headphones and go for a walk and when you get back you will have very accurate maps of dozens of routers. Log into Wigle.com, upload, and contribute to the map which can also be searched and zoomed. (Their server is prone to slashdotting).
They could have worked a deal with Wigle.net to mine their SSID names, sorted in order by the first 6 letters, and discarded the first 98% and come up with a far more interesting collection.
Except it was trivial. They simply moved techniques long know in the radar industry to low-power routers to prevent them being swamped by reflection of their own signals. So, by your own definition: Trolling.
maybe cos its a government research organisation, not a commercial company. maybe the difference is that many other government research orgs are quite happy to sink countless millions in taxpayer-funded grants into new tech that is merely ripped off by commercial companies, so that taxpayers get to pay for it twice-over.
Really?
First: lets set the record straight, they didn't invent wifi. It was working long before they got involved. They merely improved it, by applying state of the art backscatter minimization techniques already well known in the radar and UHF radio industry so that it could penetrate walls, and work in confined spaces.
CSIRO patented an idea. An algorithm. A mathematical formula for signal timing. Its exactly the same thing as MP3 patents, or the patents (expired) on GIF images. Had an american company done this, even a publicly funded one, you would have been all over them as patent trolls. But because its Australian it gets a pass?!!?
Second, instead of setting up a company or licensing others to set up companies to produce products they publicized their work, waited till it was widely adopted, then started suing people. They initially released it for open use, not expecting much. Even when the world+dog decided they wanted laptops they did nothing to license it. Only when it became ubiquitous did they jump in with lawyers.
If it was tax payer funded, it already belongs to the people.
People weren't paying for it TWICE until CSIRO decided to sue. So the very thing you condemn was brought about by the action you applaud.
Only when they started patent trolling did those licensing fees get passed on to the consumer to pay yet again for something they had funded and contributed to the community. Routers cost money to build.
Is CSIRO returning any monies to the Aussie Taxpayer? Is their government funding in any way reduced in light of their licensing revenue? Nope.
It's not profitable because streaming sucks. People want to pay for something they can download and "own". I don't want to pay $5 to watch something once, and have it hiccup if the network glitches for even a second.
Even if I only watch it once, I like knowing I have a copy of that movie on my hard drive.
I believe the number of people that want to "own" a movie constitute a small minority. Very small.
Even smaller for the number that want to own tv shows.
The thing will be in re-runs on TV in 6 months, even movies will be on TV, and DVDs will be in the clearance bins within two years, well before I would want to re-watch anything produced by hollywood.
The streaming issues are easily worked around by most services. They let you save it on your device for veiwing later, even when offline, then the device deletes it after your viewing count or time period.
A MiFi data-only sim does not work for data access in a smartphone with AT&T. I tried and failed before giving in and getting a voice plan.
We are talking about data here. Not voice.
You failed because you wanted voice, but didn't look into a good voip service.