My understanding is that in the iPhone context, 'unlocking' refers to the enabling of third party SIM functionality, whereas 'jailbreaking' refers to enabling the ability to run third party applications. I could be entirely wrong, but I was under the impression that these were two separate issues.
Apple almost certainly have an agreement with AT&T (and O2, and T-Mobile) to prevent SIM unlocking. It's less likely that they have such an agreement to prevent jailbreaking, although it's still possible as jailbreaking would allow users to run VoIP and native IM clients, which are a direct threat to the business models of the mobile networks.
What is it about word processors that makes it inherently impossible to render documents properly on different machines? I mean, it seems to me that if the document format/specification is not capable of ensuring consistent rendering, then it is flawed and needs to be fixed. Otherwise, what's the point? You might as well use plain text.
Of course, I realise that most modern word processors probably don't live up to this;)
Where I worked during university, my boss had the radio on all the time on the shop floor. She didn't mind what station we picked, but around here there's not much choice. We weren't allowed to play our own CDs, because a previous employee had abused that privilege before and done nothing but play with the CD player all day. Thing was, the boss was rarely actually on the shop floor, and just kept an eye on us using CCTV.
My solution? An iPod and an iTrip. She could never claim it wasn't the radio!
I was being pedantic/flippant. I was also poking fun at the daft naming conventions of planets.
That said (if you're going to bring logic into it), I still maintain that what I said is a valid interpretation of what you said.
As for the whole Mac vs Linux market share contest, it's a pissing match. Counting purchases and downloads, I would count as two Mac users, two Windows users and who knows how many Ubuntu, Gentoo and Red Hat users. I don't think it's possible to lend any credibility to any market share statistic.
I'd contend, though, that if you take the general population into account, Macs have a greater mindshare than Linux. I wonder if anybody's ever conducted a poll on that subject...
I'm going to burn some karma here, but did you mean "better than"? I usually ignore grammatical mistakes, but you made this one four times in a row in capital letters.
Java EE is an utter mess, in my opinion. Too many acronyms and buzzwords and oh god the XML configuration files where everything has to be configured in three different places and then when you get something wrong it breaks and you can't figure out why... *deep breath*
That was my impression of it anyway. Some of it was incredibly useful, but all the unnecessary configuration just got in the way.
J2ME is nowhere near as complicated or difficult to get up and running. Eclipse, the EclipseME plugin and a compatible device are all you really need. The plugin does all the essential stuff for you, and having bluetooth on both the device and your PC makes deployment easy. For more serious stuff I use J2ME Polish (as in Mr Sheen), which handles handset compatibility and APIs quite well, as well as giving more control over the GUI.
That said, I got the distinct impression from TFA that, on the subject of J2ME, the author didn't have a clue what he was talking about:
As of today the they offer/highlight Sun Java Wireless Toolkit 2.5.1 for CLDC for download. But I have no idea about any device which offers support for it, I like the fact that I can use swing in Java ME applications but where am I supposed to test it. Unless they want a programmer to develop for a hypothetical platform which exists only as an emulator. They should offer/highlight Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) v2.0 which makes a lot more sense.
For a start, MIDP 2.0 is part of the CLDC Wireless Toolkit. And as for "where am I supposed to test it"... well, the toolkit comes with an emulator for precisely that purpose. Most modern mobile phones are also MIDP 2.0 / CLDC 1.1 compatible, so that shouldn't be a problem. There are also optional APIs that the mobile manufacturers can provide according to the capabilities of the phone (for example, the Nokia N95 contains a GPS unit, so the Location API is included).
I'm not saying that it's the best mobile development platform out there, as I've come close to tearing my hair out when faced with some of it's limitations. But if there's one thing I can't fault it on, it's the shallow learning curve. I suspect the author wasn't really trying.
No, it does not. Or, rather, it should not have. This is an age-old argument, really. The government's role should be limited to foreign policy (diplomacy and military) and upholding the law.
No. Government's role should be to benefit its citizens. And the most glaring omission from the above statement is that it is also the government/parliament's duty to write the law, which leads to a much larger set of responsibilities - for example, consumer protection.
the protected monopoly of AT&T led to infamous abuses
You don't need a government for a monopoly to form, see Microsoft. If a monopoly must exist (for example, in a market segment that will not support more than one player), then it is preferable that there is some government involvement because at least then the ordinary citizen can use their vote. A private monopoly is the worst of all worlds because the only people with any real influence are shareholders.
Civilian helicopters today are, pretty much, the same as 50 years ago -- because nobody needs them, since the costs of roads are extracted at gunpoint anyway...
I'm not really sure what you're getting at here, but there are a whole load of reasons why cars are more common than helicopters. The one foremost in my mind, so soon after the death of Colin McRae, is that if something goes wrong with a car, it's already on the ground. If something goes wrong with a helicopter, it will plummet, and you will probably die.
Oh, and it's not true to say that nobody needs helicopters. They are very important to the oil industry, for transport to oil rigs. Aberdeen Airport, which services North Sea oil rigs, has the largest heliport in the world.
It is garbage collection -- some towns don't do it. That's where private companies compete leading to better service, and where citizens use small garbage-compactors to reduce their own costs.
What happens to the garbage after it has been collected? How much is recycled?
The subsidy, that dwellers of large cities pay occupants of small villages to have all these services, encourages "urban sprawl".
No, it prevents it by giving people an incentive to stay in their villages and not move to the cities, where their presence requires increased house-building, which is more economical on green-belt land because there is no decontamination to go through. Of course, the alternative is government promoting the use of brown-field sites as opposed to green belt sites through tax incentives/disincentives.
Erm, what uglyduckling said. I'm not against the provision of utilities by private entities (although I think it should always go through a nationalised wholesaler), but the government has a role in the setting up of the infrastructure which would otherwise be uneconomical, as a catalyst to further development.
I know that. Even not counting any expenditure on the backbone, the vast majority of broadband connections in the UK are ADSL, which uses the phone network installed by the nationalised Post Office Telecommunications.
The point I was trying to make was that, given the GPP's criteria - that a utility has to become 'everyday' before it should receive government funding - we would have no electricity in our houses.
Video calling is already being pushed by mobile phone operators (as opposed to landline operators) in the UK, primarily because mobiles tend to come with cameras built in, and they can take advantage of 3G services. With this in mind, there are a few problems with the concept of video calling that I can think of off the top of my head.
The first is that you have to hold the unit out in front of you, and point it vaguely in the direction of your face. This means that the speaker has to be much louder, and the microphone has to be much more sensitive. It's not appropriate in public places, because people will hear both sides of your call and not just one, and not appropriate in loud places, because the microphone will pick up much more background noise.
There's also the problem of echo - being able to hear your own voice through the speaker. It can be compensated for by echo cancellation software, but I personally never find this very effective, and can cause problems if both people try to speak at the same time.
Culturally we're quite used to audio-only phones, and we're used to being able to answer them without worrying about how we look. It's quite acceptable to participate in a telephone call naked... not so much in a video call.
But ultimately the biggest thing preventing me from making any calls on my video-capable phone is my mobile operator, T-Mobile. I'm on their Flext contract, and I don't get any free video-calling minutes. Also, I'm not in a 3G area. That's a pretty big disincentive...
I installed Ubuntu Feisty on a Shuttle SN41G2 the other day. It detected the onboard Nvidia graphics card and installed the nv drivers, which limited me to a resolution of 800x600. I installed the proper Nvidia drivers using the package management system, and as part of the installation procedure it told me to run a script from the command line. That script backed up my old xorg.conf, and generated a new one that didn't work. I had to restore from the backup, and then edit the original to call 'nvidia' instead of 'nv'.
I'm willing to accept that my hardware is possibly obscure, and I'm also willing to accept that Windows makes a worse job of auto-detecting my hardware - Ubuntu auto-detects the network card, whereas Windows requires drivers from a disc. But the bottom line is that if I didn't have experience of this happening before, I'd have no idea how to fix it, and I'd be telling my friends not to install Ubuntu.
Power generated by condition-dependent renewable sources can be used to pump water to the top of a hydroelectric system, which can be used when conditions are not favourable to your other sources. The problem, as mentioned, is economics. It's feasible to wait for prices of solar panels and wind turbines to go down (and for oil prices to go up), but the development of hydroelectric facilities has to be seen as a long-term investment.
The battery life on my HSDPA Samsung Z560 is pretty bad (made worse by the inaccurate battery meter). Not an issue for me, because I can charge it every night. But as a concession, it comes with two batteries in the box.
Of course, swappable batteries is an innovation lost on Apple's iPod designers.
No, it was written in a way that made it seem like a very alien concept. Whether or not it was a neutral position, a denouncement or just plain accident I'm not sure, but it certainly wasn't praise.
If you read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, there's a section that describes Goblin ownership law, and how it is different to conventional human ownership law. When a goblin creates something (usually metalwork, apparently), they retain ownership of that product and it is merely leased to the human who 'buys' it. Goblins tend to take offence to the human practice of selling on products that they believe to be rightfully theirs, and the practice of inheritance - when the human owner dies, goblins believe that the product should be returned to the creator and not passed on to another human.
Real life copyright law, of course, resembles goblin law fairly closely. I wonder if this was a deliberate dig at copyright by the author.
When you create a proprietary product, you are saying "if you attempt to share this, I will use the power of copyright law to stop you." That reduces freedom.
No, it fails to increase freedom. Remember that the copyright of the proprietary code in a derivative product is assigned automatically, and so was never free. Although I do see the role of the LGPL in that it allows you to modify a free part of a proprietary program.
to me, it is the GPL that ensures that the *code* remains free
I never understood this philosophy. Taking some open source code and building a proprietary product out of it does not make the original open source code any less free. It's the whole theft / copyright infringement argument again. When you take it, it doesn't deprive the original creators of their product.
Or, I understand the philosophy, but I think that particular way of putting it is a bit of FUD slinging.
I was under the impression that Compiz was still considered relatively unstable, and that the Ubuntu developers were enabling it in the next edition as a catalyst for better driver support. Apple GUI effects are stable now.
If this were the USA and not the UK, one could make an equal protection argument that #3 is unconstitutional. Not that you'd necessarily win that argument, but at least you'd be right.
Well there's no such law on the statute books here as far as I know. Actually, one of the complaints voiced about the DNA database is that ethnic minorities are proportionally over-represented in the database. Which is a stupid argument, because it's a database of everyone who's been arrested*, so what you have to ask is why ethnic minorities are more likely to be arrested.
(* In Scotland, your details are deleted from the database if you're arrested but not convicted of anything. Which is something the BBC was less than forthcoming about on the BBC Breakfast show where I heard about this. I was less than impressed. The show is meant to be a 'national' news show.)
1 is superior to 2.
Only if your focus is privacy. If your focus is justice, 1 is inferior to 2. I've already said that I don't count privacy as a 'freedom'. I also believe that it's much less important. If the database helps keep innocent people free, then I'd say it's doing its job. That said, I think the system in Scotland is the sensible one. The system in England is a matter for the English.
I already avoid traveling to America; now, perhaps I will need to avoid the UK as well. Although not perfect, at the least the EU has its privacy directive.
Two points. First, the UK is an EU member state. If the government somehow managed to get away with this, then there's no reason why any other EU member state couldn't do the same. Assuming we don't do something stupid like vote to leave the EU, of course.
Second, please don't avoid the UK on your travels just yet, because this won't be happening. This is something a judge and the police would like, it's nowhere near being government policy.
All credit to the judge, he's proposing a system that would greatly enhance the ability of the justice system to do its job, which in turn helps keep innocent people free (in my book, privacy is not a freedom). It just sort of falls apart when he starts talking about swabbing tourists.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried to watch the video. It just looked like one enormous goatse.cx reference to me. Fittingly enough, it's operated from behind.
My understanding is that in the iPhone context, 'unlocking' refers to the enabling of third party SIM functionality, whereas 'jailbreaking' refers to enabling the ability to run third party applications. I could be entirely wrong, but I was under the impression that these were two separate issues.
Apple almost certainly have an agreement with AT&T (and O2, and T-Mobile) to prevent SIM unlocking. It's less likely that they have such an agreement to prevent jailbreaking, although it's still possible as jailbreaking would allow users to run VoIP and native IM clients, which are a direct threat to the business models of the mobile networks.
What is it about word processors that makes it inherently impossible to render documents properly on different machines? I mean, it seems to me that if the document format/specification is not capable of ensuring consistent rendering, then it is flawed and needs to be fixed. Otherwise, what's the point? You might as well use plain text.
Of course, I realise that most modern word processors probably don't live up to this ;)
Where I worked during university, my boss had the radio on all the time on the shop floor. She didn't mind what station we picked, but around here there's not much choice. We weren't allowed to play our own CDs, because a previous employee had abused that privilege before and done nothing but play with the CD player all day. Thing was, the boss was rarely actually on the shop floor, and just kept an eye on us using CCTV.
My solution? An iPod and an iTrip. She could never claim it wasn't the radio!
I was being pedantic/flippant. I was also poking fun at the daft naming conventions of planets.
That said (if you're going to bring logic into it), I still maintain that what I said is a valid interpretation of what you said.
As for the whole Mac vs Linux market share contest, it's a pissing match. Counting purchases and downloads, I would count as two Mac users, two Windows users and who knows how many Ubuntu, Gentoo and Red Hat users. I don't think it's possible to lend any credibility to any market share statistic.
I'd contend, though, that if you take the general population into account, Macs have a greater mindshare than Linux. I wonder if anybody's ever conducted a poll on that subject...
A home desktop isn't a desktop? Is that kinda like how a dwarf planet isn't a planet?
I'm going to burn some karma here, but did you mean "better than"? I usually ignore grammatical mistakes, but you made this one four times in a row in capital letters.
Java EE is an utter mess, in my opinion. Too many acronyms and buzzwords and oh god the XML configuration files where everything has to be configured in three different places and then when you get something wrong it breaks and you can't figure out why... *deep breath*
That was my impression of it anyway. Some of it was incredibly useful, but all the unnecessary configuration just got in the way.
J2ME is nowhere near as complicated or difficult to get up and running. Eclipse, the EclipseME plugin and a compatible device are all you really need. The plugin does all the essential stuff for you, and having bluetooth on both the device and your PC makes deployment easy. For more serious stuff I use J2ME Polish (as in Mr Sheen), which handles handset compatibility and APIs quite well, as well as giving more control over the GUI.
That said, I got the distinct impression from TFA that, on the subject of J2ME, the author didn't have a clue what he was talking about:
For a start, MIDP 2.0 is part of the CLDC Wireless Toolkit. And as for "where am I supposed to test it"... well, the toolkit comes with an emulator for precisely that purpose. Most modern mobile phones are also MIDP 2.0 / CLDC 1.1 compatible, so that shouldn't be a problem. There are also optional APIs that the mobile manufacturers can provide according to the capabilities of the phone (for example, the Nokia N95 contains a GPS unit, so the Location API is included).
I'm not saying that it's the best mobile development platform out there, as I've come close to tearing my hair out when faced with some of it's limitations. But if there's one thing I can't fault it on, it's the shallow learning curve. I suspect the author wasn't really trying.
No. Government's role should be to benefit its citizens. And the most glaring omission from the above statement is that it is also the government/parliament's duty to write the law, which leads to a much larger set of responsibilities - for example, consumer protection.
You don't need a government for a monopoly to form, see Microsoft. If a monopoly must exist (for example, in a market segment that will not support more than one player), then it is preferable that there is some government involvement because at least then the ordinary citizen can use their vote. A private monopoly is the worst of all worlds because the only people with any real influence are shareholders.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at here, but there are a whole load of reasons why cars are more common than helicopters. The one foremost in my mind, so soon after the death of Colin McRae, is that if something goes wrong with a car, it's already on the ground. If something goes wrong with a helicopter, it will plummet, and you will probably die.
Oh, and it's not true to say that nobody needs helicopters. They are very important to the oil industry, for transport to oil rigs. Aberdeen Airport, which services North Sea oil rigs, has the largest heliport in the world.
What happens to the garbage after it has been collected? How much is recycled?
No, it prevents it by giving people an incentive to stay in their villages and not move to the cities, where their presence requires increased house-building, which is more economical on green-belt land because there is no decontamination to go through. Of course, the alternative is government promoting the use of brown-field sites as opposed to green belt sites through tax incentives/disincentives.
Erm, what uglyduckling said. I'm not against the provision of utilities by private entities (although I think it should always go through a nationalised wholesaler), but the government has a role in the setting up of the infrastructure which would otherwise be uneconomical, as a catalyst to further development.
I know that. Even not counting any expenditure on the backbone, the vast majority of broadband connections in the UK are ADSL, which uses the phone network installed by the nationalised Post Office Telecommunications.
The point I was trying to make was that, given the GPP's criteria - that a utility has to become 'everyday' before it should receive government funding - we would have no electricity in our houses.
Was home electricity really a 'part of everyday life' before electricity generation and distribution received any substantial government investment?
Video calling is already being pushed by mobile phone operators (as opposed to landline operators) in the UK, primarily because mobiles tend to come with cameras built in, and they can take advantage of 3G services. With this in mind, there are a few problems with the concept of video calling that I can think of off the top of my head.
The first is that you have to hold the unit out in front of you, and point it vaguely in the direction of your face. This means that the speaker has to be much louder, and the microphone has to be much more sensitive. It's not appropriate in public places, because people will hear both sides of your call and not just one, and not appropriate in loud places, because the microphone will pick up much more background noise.
There's also the problem of echo - being able to hear your own voice through the speaker. It can be compensated for by echo cancellation software, but I personally never find this very effective, and can cause problems if both people try to speak at the same time.
Culturally we're quite used to audio-only phones, and we're used to being able to answer them without worrying about how we look. It's quite acceptable to participate in a telephone call naked... not so much in a video call.
But ultimately the biggest thing preventing me from making any calls on my video-capable phone is my mobile operator, T-Mobile. I'm on their Flext contract, and I don't get any free video-calling minutes. Also, I'm not in a 3G area. That's a pretty big disincentive...
I installed Ubuntu Feisty on a Shuttle SN41G2 the other day. It detected the onboard Nvidia graphics card and installed the nv drivers, which limited me to a resolution of 800x600. I installed the proper Nvidia drivers using the package management system, and as part of the installation procedure it told me to run a script from the command line. That script backed up my old xorg.conf, and generated a new one that didn't work. I had to restore from the backup, and then edit the original to call 'nvidia' instead of 'nv'.
I'm willing to accept that my hardware is possibly obscure, and I'm also willing to accept that Windows makes a worse job of auto-detecting my hardware - Ubuntu auto-detects the network card, whereas Windows requires drivers from a disc. But the bottom line is that if I didn't have experience of this happening before, I'd have no idea how to fix it, and I'd be telling my friends not to install Ubuntu.
Power generated by condition-dependent renewable sources can be used to pump water to the top of a hydroelectric system, which can be used when conditions are not favourable to your other sources. The problem, as mentioned, is economics. It's feasible to wait for prices of solar panels and wind turbines to go down (and for oil prices to go up), but the development of hydroelectric facilities has to be seen as a long-term investment.
They made it work like the iTunes interface. I'm reserving judgement on whether they've F'd it or F'd it up until I actually use it.
The battery life on my HSDPA Samsung Z560 is pretty bad (made worse by the inaccurate battery meter). Not an issue for me, because I can charge it every night. But as a concession, it comes with two batteries in the box.
Of course, swappable batteries is an innovation lost on Apple's iPod designers.
No, it was written in a way that made it seem like a very alien concept. Whether or not it was a neutral position, a denouncement or just plain accident I'm not sure, but it certainly wasn't praise.
If you read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, there's a section that describes Goblin ownership law, and how it is different to conventional human ownership law. When a goblin creates something (usually metalwork, apparently), they retain ownership of that product and it is merely leased to the human who 'buys' it. Goblins tend to take offence to the human practice of selling on products that they believe to be rightfully theirs, and the practice of inheritance - when the human owner dies, goblins believe that the product should be returned to the creator and not passed on to another human.
Real life copyright law, of course, resembles goblin law fairly closely. I wonder if this was a deliberate dig at copyright by the author.
No, it fails to increase freedom. Remember that the copyright of the proprietary code in a derivative product is assigned automatically, and so was never free. Although I do see the role of the LGPL in that it allows you to modify a free part of a proprietary program.
I never understood this philosophy. Taking some open source code and building a proprietary product out of it does not make the original open source code any less free. It's the whole theft / copyright infringement argument again. When you take it, it doesn't deprive the original creators of their product.
Or, I understand the philosophy, but I think that particular way of putting it is a bit of FUD slinging.
I was under the impression that Compiz was still considered relatively unstable, and that the Ubuntu developers were enabling it in the next edition as a catalyst for better driver support. Apple GUI effects are stable now.
The problem with the definition of the kilogram is that it depends on a physical object in France.
The problem with the definition of the gallon is that it depends on which side of the Atlantic you are on.
Well there's no such law on the statute books here as far as I know. Actually, one of the complaints voiced about the DNA database is that ethnic minorities are proportionally over-represented in the database. Which is a stupid argument, because it's a database of everyone who's been arrested*, so what you have to ask is why ethnic minorities are more likely to be arrested.
(* In Scotland, your details are deleted from the database if you're arrested but not convicted of anything. Which is something the BBC was less than forthcoming about on the BBC Breakfast show where I heard about this. I was less than impressed. The show is meant to be a 'national' news show.)
Only if your focus is privacy. If your focus is justice, 1 is inferior to 2. I've already said that I don't count privacy as a 'freedom'. I also believe that it's much less important. If the database helps keep innocent people free, then I'd say it's doing its job. That said, I think the system in Scotland is the sensible one. The system in England is a matter for the English.
Two points. First, the UK is an EU member state. If the government somehow managed to get away with this, then there's no reason why any other EU member state couldn't do the same. Assuming we don't do something stupid like vote to leave the EU, of course.
Second, please don't avoid the UK on your travels just yet, because this won't be happening. This is something a judge and the police would like, it's nowhere near being government policy.
All credit to the judge, he's proposing a system that would greatly enhance the ability of the justice system to do its job, which in turn helps keep innocent people free (in my book, privacy is not a freedom). It just sort of falls apart when he starts talking about swabbing tourists.