> I remember it running really well in machines with as little as 32 megs of memory. What did they do wrong?
KDE and Gnome both embraced the "Active Desktop" metaphor... the same reason why Win95OSR2 (with IE4) ran tolerably well on a 166MHz Pentium with 32mb, but the same laptop would fall over die gasping if you installed Win98 on it (there was even a program, 98lite, that basically created a FrankenWindows installation that gave you 98's USB support (well, ok... USB mouse support...) with 95's faster Explorer).
> Even using all local resources available, US energy consumption is so great that those fossil fuels wouldn't last very long.
Well, you're right about it not being black and white. As gas (the petroleum kind, not the low-density molecular kind) becomes more expensive, it will increasingly be used as a motor fuel only (where it has few good alternatives), and other (cheaper) alternatives for power generation will displace it. Like the REAL "sustainable" energy source -- nuclear fission. Dollars per gigawatt, there's no cheaper way to make vast quantities of electricity.
Solar panels might be fashionably green and visibly "clean", but anyone who's seen what goes out the back doors (and up the smokestacks) of factories that actually MAKE them would never, EVER use the words "clean" or "green" to describe it.
For an interesting analogy, consider "Peak Wood". 200 years ago, even city dwellers (in America, at least... I think in Europe, it happened a century or so earlier) burned wood for heating. As the forests were cut down, wood became too expensive to burn, so people switched to something cheaper: coal. Meanwhile, old-growth forests were clearcut to get hardwood for building construction and furniture. Eventually, the supply started to dry up, costs increased, and the building industry, then the furniture industry, switched to softwoods. Now, if you want cheap furniture, you go to Ikea and buy plasticized softwood sawdust with a paper-thin sheet of real hardwood wood glued on top. Houses get built with OSB/waferboard and steel. And people still have fireplaces as ornaments, burning $5 quarter-logs bought shrink-wrapped once a year to burn on Christmas (while the air conditioner works extra hard to keep the room from getting too hot as a result).
> In this country, if you divided the land out exactly fairly between everybody, there's just enough to give everybody a medium sized garden.
It depends how you look at it. If you assume typical east-coast US big-city suburban densities (~5,000 square feet per 50x100sf lot with one single-family home on it, averaging 3-4 people per house including children), the world's entire population would metaphorically fit in an area the size of Texas:
Texas is ~269,000 square miles x 27,827,400 square feet per mile = 7,499,289,600,000 sq feet in Texas
Assume 4.5 billion people, 3 per residence = 1,500,000,000 residences
Divide the two, and you get ~5,000 square feet per residence.
Of course, the whole equation collapses when you factor in the need for things like roads, stores, and offices (not to mention farms), but it does kind of put the "4.5 billion" figure into perspective. Even crowded countries like China and India have lots of room to spread out once you eliminate the need for people to live within 20 miles of the coast, or within walking distance of public transportation. Anytime you want to give an environmentalist nightmares, politely remind them that 50 years from now, China will have a suburban populace exploding across the countryside that makes America's NIMBY'est exurb look like a New Urbanist wet dream by comparison.;-)
> Wouldn't the general linux-using masses go for the netbooks with linux anyway despite that 2G limit > (there MUST be an upgradeable model somewhere out there)? I mean, the portability and capabilities should amount > to something. Or does that limit its usefulness, and that word got around even among the non hardcore types? > I know there's plenty of distros that provided leaner versions.
AFAIK, Microsoft's licensing basically dictates it down to the number of address lines on the motherboard. I'm not aware of *any* netbooks that can take a 4gb SoDIMM... or even a 2gb SoDIMM, for that matter. They all have 1 (or no) socket, and it's limited to a gig, max (maybe 2gb, if it accounts for all of the system's ram). It really is stupid on all counts, because Microsoft is cutting its own upgrade market out of the loop. How many people are likely to spend $100+ on a copy of Windows 7 for their year-old netbook if it's limited to 2gb max? I'd say, fairly few. OTOH, how many people would be willing to spend $100-200 on an upgrade copy of Windows 7 if they could ALSO buy a $99 4gb SoDIMM and do it at the same time? I'd estimate the number to be QUITE a bit higher. If Microsoft really wanted to take its pound of flesh, they should have just released Windows "XP/N" at the Netbook licensing price and limited IT to 2gb, instead of shackling the hardware itself.
As far as Linux goes, I don't think it's any big secret that the latest builds of KDE and Gnome want as many gigs of RAM as Vista and Windows 7. Sure, there are lighter-weight window managers, but then you get back to the problem of a widening capabilities-gap between desktop and notebook computers. Looking back on my past 4 notebooks, the thing that ultimately condemned every one of them to the "maybe I'll use this as a home development server or firewall someday" pile was inadequate maxed-out ram. The CPU speed doesn't matter much if the hard drive starts thrashing the moment you move the mouse (assuming it ever manages to stop thrashing at all). You can find niche uses for old laptops as Linux-based appliances, but for running real apps, if Linux is your choice for daily computer use, you're going to be hurting for RAM just as badly as someone who runs Windows.
You're assuming that 99% of the people "preaching green" today won't say "fuck it, drill Alaska and mine coal" if gas costs more than $5/gallon for more than 3-6 months. If the only way to "go green" is to use rare earth elements, and China makes them too expensive, Europe might be fucked by its Greens and governments, but the US will just say 'screw green' and get on with life as usual.
The butterfly keyboards were cool, but you have to remember the reason why they were invented to begin with: back then, panels > 10" were incredibly expensive compared to the cost of an expensive folding keyboard mechanism, so IBM was able to turn a price constraint (small screens) into a feature (increased portability without sacrificing a good keyboard).
Now, the difference in cost between a 10" 1024x600 panel and a 12" 1280x750 panel is less than the difference in cost between a butterfly keyboard and a conventional laptop keyboard. High end laptops moved to 12.1" and 13.3" panels years ago, and there's no reason for them to go back. At the end of the day, few mainstream purchasers of ultraportable laptops would sacrifice the larger screen just to save another inch or two. Maybe, *maybe* a woman *might* go for it if it meant she could carry her laptop in her purse, but for a man or woman who carries it in a briefcase, backpack, or bare, there's little real motive to sacrifice those last 2" of display space just to make it a tiny bit smaller.
If anyone deserves to be hated, it's Microsoft for making the cheaper netbook-licensing cost of XP contingent upon the netbook having a hardware limit of 2gb max memory, which pretty much fucks anyone who wants to use Linux or upgrade to a better version of Windows someday. Now that the 64-bit barrier has pretty much been broken, I give it a year or two, max, before 8-16gb PCs become the norm at Best Buy, and people with 2gb netbooks find themselves in the same position as people with PalmOS PDA phones ~5 years ago (when the gap between the hardware & OS capabilities of PalmOS PDAs and PalmOS phones widened to the point that phones basically couldn't run any new software. I know... I had a Samsung SPHi300 and SPHi500, and only grudgingly jumped ship to the PPC6700 and WM5 because I was sick of being unable to run anything written during the 21st century).
The problem was partly cultural. As my high school American History teacher pointed out to our class (early 90s), "Psychologically, the clock stops in 1999". His point was that "the Year 2000(tm)" had been a holy, distant place steeped in strange rituals and images of a science-fiction inspired world for so long, nobody could rationally think of 2001, let alone 2000, as being a normal year less than 10 years away. I remember looking around during summer jobs in college, and realized it was true... people slapped post-2000 dates on things when making future plans, but nobody really *believed* in them, the way people did when making project plans for 1995 back in 1989. You could even look at projected dates, and notice that they either clustered around 2000 or 2001, or jumped ahead to 2010, 2020, and beyond. City governments could make grand road improvement plans for 2015, but as late as 1999, they could barely bring themselves to think about anything more ambitious than filling potholes in 2001.
> In fact, only CDMA phones have significant competition that could inspire a user to take > a phone to another carrier, and I wonder how incompatible Sprint's 3G network is with Verizon's.
In purely technical terms, pretty much any phone available from both Sprint and Verizon that doesn't go out of its way to prevent you from reflashing it with the other carrier's firmware works fine. In reality, it's a one-way trip from Sprint to Verizon (or maybe one of the few remaining regional CDMA carriers), because Sprint won't activate any phone whose ESN isn't in their official database. Hell, even when they OWNED Telus (Canada), you couldn't activate a Telus phone on Sprint or vice-versa, even though roaming between them was absolutely seamless, and the two networks used pretty much identical hardware & software.
In theory, Verizon won't stop you from using any unlocked CDMA phone... but as a practical matter, it's unlikely to reliably support anything besides voice. Even voicemail is iffy (read: the indicator probably won't work, and you'll have to dial a normal phone number to access it instead of pressing and holding the '1' key). Text messages ~140 characters might work, but longer ones will either be truncated or blackholed. 1xRTT data will probably work, but I wouldn't bet the farm on EV-DO. Unless you work for Verizon or have access to inside information not available to normal users, it's very unlikely you'll ever get an "alien" CDMA phone to work perfectly and seamlessly on Verizon.
Put another way, if Sprint and Verizon both properly supported R-UIM cards, and had a page on their respective websites listing the raw info you might need if you REALLY wanted to customize the firmware of an "alien" phone to make it work seamlessly, any unlocked phone that worked on one would work just fine on the other. The bare-metal hardware is identical. The only differences are in the customized firmware... and most of THOSE differences are the first thing people who build their own Windows Mobile & Android ROMs rip out.;-)
That said, Verizon won't likely be compatible with Sprint "forever". Officially, Verizon's future is LTE, and Sprint's future is WiMax. Unofficially, it's anybody's guess whether one or both will actually follow through with those plans, or change their minds along the way.
> From a Roman Catholic (and for that matter Lutheranism, Eastern, and Oriental Orthodoxy) perspective that is all baloney, though as the Perpetual Virginity of Mary would make a brother somewhat difficult.
OK, my mistake with the Sapphire. I have a CDMA Sprint Hero, and in *my* neck of the woods, the most bleeding-edge Eclair build on Xda-developers.com still lacks camera and accelerometer support. Admittedly, it's come a long way since Thanksgiving (when I checked ~3 weeks ago, Eclair for CDMA Hero really *was* pretty dysfunctional), but it's still not *quite* ready yet. That said, I'll probably be rooting and reflashing the day everything theoretically works.
My main point was that for a Google-spec'ed and Google-maintained phone to really *matter* in the US, they're going to have to offer some MAJOR sweetheart deal to Sprint, and basically get Sprint to sell phones built and maintained by Google (by eliminating "110%" of Sprint's risk by eating the inventory cost for Sprint). Sprint is actually fairly progressive about letting its customers have decent hardware... it's just utterly neurotic about losing money on unwanted phones it pays to build for customers (wounds that are almost entirely self-inflicted, and due to Sprint's insistence that only Sprint-ESN phones be used on Sprint unless they're roaming Canadians). Verizon is another matter entirely... but VZ usually ends up grudgingly following Sprint's lead 6-9 months down the road hardware-wise.
This could actually be the golden opportunity to bring R-UIM cards into Sprintland through "the back door". If Google makes its own CDMA phones, they'd almost certainly be R-UIM based, since the US is the only place on Earth where CDMA phones DON'T use R-UIM cards. Let's suppose the phones they made for Sprint to sell *had* R-UIM cards, but to make Sprint happy, they were pre-installed and covered by a thick sticker so you'd never know it was there unless you hung out at xda-deveopers.com. The moment you bought that first phone with R-UIM card known to Sprint's database, you could buy ANY physically-compatible CDMA phone you wanted from that point forward and use it on Sprint just by sticking the first phone's R-UIM card into it.
(for those who don't know, a R-UIM card is basically a GSM SIM card with extensions for CDMA).
> nobody is stuck on 1.5, after rooting the g1 that enabled every phone to be on 2.0 if they desire, merely some root exploration is required.
Unless, of course, you have a shiny new CDMA Hero, or its American GSM half-brother -- the MyTouch. Both are stuck at 1.5 until sometime next year when HTC finally releases 2.0 for it. Yeah, I *could* root my phone and do a guerrilla update to 2.0 now... except I'd lose bluetooth, GPS, the camera, and just about everything else besides maybe the ability to (sort of) make and receive voice calls...
In America, at least, the existence of a GSM Google Phone won't really matter anyway... AT&T's 3G network is oversold and saturated to the point of being useless, T-Mobile's 3G network barely exists, and Google's phone won't work on Sprint or Verizon. And even if Google HAD a CDMA version, Sprint won't let you activate a phone whose ESN isn't in their holy database, and Verizon's "any phone" policy REALLY means "any unlocked Sprint phone that's the twin of a Verizon phone and can be reflashed with a Verizon ROM" (unless you don't mind having a phone that's completely dysfunctional for anything besides voice calls... and *maybe* 1xRTT data if you're lucky).
> But, it is likely that they will make sure that it doesn't compete with their bread and butter.
A few posts up, someone made an interesting observation. If Oracle truly wants to kill off MySQL by weeding out everyone besides people using it for personal websites and free projects that aren't potential customers for a commercial database at any price, all they have to do is make it GPLv3, and quit selling commercial-use licenses (not cheap, but paying for one means you can use MySQL in a closed-source product without being subject to the GPL... 2, 3, or otherwise).
However, I think Oracle is wrong about the market consequences. I'd venture a guess that 99% of the people who currently use MySQL with commercial licenses would have gone with Microsoft SQL Serve or PostgreSQL, and not Oracle, if MySQL weren't an option. PostgreSQL, because it's free & BSD-licensed, MSSQL because the tools to prototype and develop with and for it are largely free (as in beer). As a practical matter, until the day your server is making you money or used in something resembling a production website, Microsoft isn't really interested in coming after you as long as the server it's running on is itself running a properly-licensed copy of Windows. MSSQL scales nicely from prototype to production, and doesn't start to require large amounts of actual cash until a fledgling business developing some new product that uses it is likely to be at a point where it actually has the funding available. Plus, like MySQL, a reasonably competent programmer can set up MSSQL Server and get it running well enough for development and demonstration without the need for an official DBA (joke: why does every company that uses Oracle have a DBA? Because they can't afford two. Ha. Ha. er, anyway...).
Put another way, if Oracle were to make MySQL GPL-only, it would only hurt MySQL, and would do very little, if anything, to actually help sales of Oracle's bread & butter. Sadly, though, given Oracle's general business practices, I think the fact that they'd TRY to do it is pretty much a given, and I fear for MySQL's future if Oracle ends up owning it.
The problem with a fork is that it would eventually kill MySQL.
If Oracle ends up owning MySQL and MySQL doesn't visibly fork, Oracle will be under pressure to keep MySQL semi-affordable and at least pretend they want it to be viable.
Remember... right now, there are two ways to license MySQL:
* You can distribute it with another application that is itself GPL'ed
* You can purchase a non-free license and distribute it with your non-GPL'ed application
The license to distribute MySQL as part of a turnkey non-GPL'ed solution isn't cheap... but it's still a lot cheaper than Oracle.
If a viable GPL'ed fork of MySQL were to emerge (possibly with Monty at the helm), it would take the heat off of Oracle, and allow them to slowly strangle it for non-GPL'ed use... raising the licensing fees to bring them more in line with those of Oracle, limiting its feature set (things like partitioning, for example) to keep it from competing too effectively against their more expensive database, limiting the number of cpus/cores it will use (or that are allowed to exist on the host server), etc.
Remember, under MySQL's license, if you write a non-GPL'ed app that depends upon MySQL, you can not automate its installation or configuration in any way without violating the licensing terms of MySQL's "Free" license. Nor can consultants paid to install your app do it. Only the end user, or its collective employees themselves, can do it.
Pre-Sun, Monty's company owned the right to give MySQL away and sell licenses for it. A forked company would still have the right to develop and give away GPL'ed copies, but only Oracle would have the right to sell it under a more permissive (but violently expensive) license. Also, Oracle could license commercial versions with restrictions about what non-Oracle add-ins could be used with it to extends its capabilities beyond those allowed by Oracle itself.
Ideally, the EU should require that Oracle either spin off MySQL as an independent company they're prohibited from exercising control over, or sell it to someone like Redhat, who'll keep the free version evolving without trying to kill off its commercial licensing for ideological reasons. Hell, even IBM would be an improvement over Oracle for owning MySQL. IBM has a conflict of interest with DB2, but from what I've seen, IBM has always viewed DB2 as an excuse to upsell the customer to a mainframe. IBM might not PUSH MySQL to its consulting clients, but it's not opposed to cashing checks for a product that doesn't really NEED a lot of handholding anyway, and using it for both public relations and a recruiting tool to bring growing companies into the IBM customer base (think: Eclipse -> Websphere).
> I mean, to me a job (ANY job) is nothing more than a means to earn as much money as possible to allow me to enjoy life on the level I like. > It gives me money, which I then use to live in a nice place, buy cars and other toys, travel and chase women. Trust me, if I won the lottery > tomorrow, I'd never consider working again since I'd no longer need a job to earn money. I'd spend my life full time having fun (traveling, > partying, ridng my motorcycle around town, enjoying time with friends and family and chasing women).
Far better is to be one of the fortunate, happy few who are able to find the compromise position where the main line between work and play is defined by the location, time of day, and primary focus of the moment.
If I won the lottery tomorrow, I'd still program. I just wouldn't get up at 7am to do it, drive 20 miles in south Florida traffic, focus on enterprise Java, or take phone calls from people who want to waste my time arguing about things I'm not allowed to change. I'd have a nice 3-story loft whose third story was half programming/development lab, and half rooftop water garden for my cats to play in, with view of downtown Fort Lauderdale's skyscrapers between the potted trees. I'd spend most of my time working on embedded hardware-related projects (like my networked RGB Christmas lights -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5qR9_8KGPU ), building robots, and all the software projects I've wanted to work on for the past 20 years. If I had enough to afford it, I'd have a second home in downtown San Jose for summers and occasional winter weekends when I find myself going into Fry's withdrawal or need to socially reconnect with My People.
I can't even fathom willingly taking a job where I' m actively miserable for 8 hours a day, let alone 10 or more, regardless of how much money I had to spend during the remaining hour or two per day when I wasn't at work or asleep. I know people who'd spend 12-16 hours per day bathing in cowshit if they were paid enough. For the most part, they make tons of money for a few months, then get completely fried & burned out (if they're lucky, coinciding with an economic downturn), then spend a year or two with lots of time to enjoy the money they made... if they could stop stressing out about how they were going to afford their $3k+ mortgage payments 9-14 months down the road. If they're lucky, they'll get to enjoy a few years of happy retirement... Iff they don't die from sudden cardiac death or commit suicide before they're 60, instead. It's a good thing THEY have plenty of money to chase women, too... because they can't seem to hold the interest of one for more than 2 or 3 weeks unless they treat her like a de-facto employee & pay her enough to work the role of happy, faithful housewife who views them as anything more than a funding source. The ironic thing is that if you add up the money they've made over the past 10 years, subtract the amount I've made over the same time period, then additionally subtract out the premium they've had to spend just to cope with the demands of their jobs, I still come out ahead of them without even factoring quality of life into the equation.
> The market became so over-saturated with games that the public became disgusted with them.
Not quite. At the lowest point after the crash, members of the public were no less enthused about them than they were a year or two earlier. It was MERCHANTS who wouldn't touch videogames with a dirty twenty-foot pole, let alone sell them.
I've noticed that the perception that videogames "died" after "the crash" is strongest among people who were already adults when it happened. For those of us who were in middle school, the "crash" was an irrelevant abstraction. We got C64s, then Amigas, and were largely oblivious to the perception that videogames had somehow "gone away". Most of us had more games than we knew what to *do* with, and probably had more game discs laying on the floor around our beds than the total number of unique game cartridges for the Atari 2600, Intellivision, Atari 5200, Odyssey 3, *and* Colecovision that had ever existed since the dawn of the videogame era. If videogames went away in 1983, someone forgot to tell us;-)
I paid $199 more than 2 years ago for a Samsung CLP-510 with built-in duplexer. Its cartridge DRM would have really sucked if it weren't so trivially easy to defeat (I2C eeprom). I could theoretically refill cartridges, but it's barely worth bothering... new (non-remanufactured) thirdparty cartridges run about $65/ea and are officially good for ~5,000 pages. In this case, "officially" UNDERcounts it, because by design the printer will literally count the sheets you print from a cartridge and refuse to exceed its limit... unless you reset the counter, in which case you can run it until the cartridge is completely empty. The starter cartridges were officially good for 1,000 pages... I got about 1,400 pages out of the magenta cartridge (the first to go), and about 2,000 pages out of the yellow cartridge. Cyan was somewhere in between, and black went about the same time as yellow (black can print more pages, but I also printed lots of grayscale-only images, so black got independently depleted faster than the colored toner did). I bought my first set of replacement cartridges more than a year ago, and have a hunch that by the time I really, truly deplete my second cartridge (out of the four new ones), I'll be agonizing between a third set or a new printer (since by that point the drum will be getting a little ragged, too). On the other hand, I'll probably stick with it for at least a third round, even if I do need a new drum, just because I *was* able to defeat THIS printer's DRM, and might not be able to repeat the trick with the next printer.
Name a single mainstream religion, practiced anywhere in the world, whose core, sacred beliefs are aggressively guarded by the holy writ of copyright law and a small army of lawyers.
> Software is already protected by copyright, and should not be protected by patents.
Right now, it's kind of like "pick your poison". The problem isn't so much patents *per se*, as the way they've been granted (ie, the ongoing clusterfuck caused by the Clinton-era USPTO during the dotcom boom, whose attitude was "grant 'em all, let the courts sort it out"), the fact that they can't be proactively challenged (you can only wait to be sued for infringement, and if the patent's owner drops the case at the last moment, they can do the same thing to the next victim), and the fact that "one size/duration doesn't fit all scenarios" -- two decades is barely enough time for truly groundbreaking new drugs, but is gross overkill in most software scenarios.
Pointing towards copyright law isn't necessarily an improvement. At least patents eventually expire. Thanks to Disney, copyright is effectively *eternal*. Do we *really* want software techniques to be legally protected *forever*?
Pushing software harder and harder into the "copyright" camp is, IMHO, a dangerous strategy, because it ultimately leads those copyright owners to try and expand the scope of what that copyright protects. Patent trolls are bad, but copyright trolls have the potential to be much, much more destructive in the long run.
> If people didn't eat meat, so much more land would be available, that we could feed everyone > and still have a lot more land to return to the wild, thereby increasing biodiversity.
As a practical matter, real, honest-to-god oldschool "starving kids in ${poor country}" don't really exist anymore. At least, not for reasons that have anything whatsoever to do with arable land, drought, famine, or vermin. That's not to say that nobody is hungry, but most of THOSE hungry people will STILL go to bed hungry, even if every last acre of land and bushel of corn currently used to feed livestock ceases to be used for that purpose.
In America, at least, farmland no longer needed for factory farming is more likely to end up with strip malls and McMansions on it than wildlife or anything normally associated with "biodiversity".
In poor countries, animals will be grown as always. It might be cheaper to factory-produce ten million pounds of "cultured bacon" or "cultured beef" per week than to raise and slaughter the equivalent number of animals, but a poor family living in a hut somewhere isn't going to have the capital to go out and buy the necessary hardware. They're going to do what they always have... buy a few dozen newly-hatched chicks, a pig or two, and a cow. Less efficient, but equally less capital-intensive.
> What do you mean? As far as I know, in all the instances where a toolbar is bundled with some other > software, the toolbar installation is clearly mentioned in the software EULA, so each time the toolbar > is installed, the user agreed that he wanted it. As a developer for a Web optimizer plugin, this Firefox > change will make it much harder for us to reach our users.
Q. What's the difference between a 'trojan' and 'malware'?
A. Malware has a EULA.
I can't even *begin* to emphasize how badly it pisses me off when some app tries to sneak BHOs and plugins into their installer... almost always in ways that someone in a hurry to install the app that's actually *desired* will overlook. I flat-out refuse to ever use Yahoo and Google's toolbars, *precisely* because they have so many people trying to ram them down my throat and trick me into installing them.
> So in a very real sense, the reason space costs the US 10x more than the Chinese is because we are paying Americans to do the work.
Yeah, but there's a big, huge problem with outsourcing the manufacturing of space gear to China, even if we do the engineering at home: China still hasn't matured to the point where it can reliably guarantee and enforce a specific level of quality. Anyone who's dealt with China's computer industry knows all about parts that aren't just substandard or low-quality... they're substandard, low-quality, and actively go out of their way to masquerade that fact. Post-WWII, Japanese companies made shit... but they were honest about it, and buyers knew exactly what they were getting. And when they got better, everyone knew it, too. The problem with Chinese industry is that they'll make you items that are absolutely flawless... then steadily cut corners in ways you never even thought possible, and do it in ways that aren't easily detectable. Think: melamine-"enriched" food products (melamine's chemical signature mimics gluten) and candy sweetened with antifreeze. Or flash that claims to be 256MB, is really 128MB, and goes a step further by actively data-compressing what it can, and silently overwriting the oldest data when it can't. Or motherboards with outright fake cache ram, and a BIOS that goes out of its way to lie about it. Google "quality fade" for megabytes of articles about it, almost all of which are specific to mainland Chinese industry.
Imagine, for a moment, the political fallout from a dozen American astronauts dying in a space accident caused by some equipment failure where the failing equipment itself actively went out of its way to hide the fact that it was failing... and somehow, NASA were able to forensically prove it after the fact. Americans take for granted that if some component's self-diagnostics say "Everything's OK", well... everything's OK. With current Chinese industrial practices, that kind of blind faith would be deadly.
China's making amazing progress, but it still has a *long* way to go before its industry earns the reputation for absolute quality that companies like Mitsubishi, Rockwell, and Siemens enjoy... the ability to look up the number laser-etched on a single bolt & trace it all the way back to a specific truckload of ore from the mine, with auditable information about everyone who's touched or had anything to do with it along the way.
Need more proof? There are STILL new electronic devices, being made in China *today*, with electrolytic capacitors manufactured with the same defective/formula-sabotaged electrolyte that caused all the "bad cap" problems ~10 years ago. How can this be? Simple -- the capacitors work fine for a year or two, they just tend to be more likely to fail prematurely. Inspect them at the factory, and they look just like capacitors made with the proper formula. By the time they fail, the company that made them is long gone. And of course, the defective electrolyte itself is dirt cheap compared to the real formula...
In the interest of objectivity, there's one important detail that hasn't really been brought up yet in this discussion: CCTV doesn't have a monopoly over Chinese television. In most Chinese TV markets, their total audience share (for all of their channels combined) is about 45%.
Make no mistake. CCTV is, in fact, the official TV network of the Chinese Communist Party, directly accountable to its ministry of propaganda, but it has to earn its market share the same way other commercial channels do -- by making popular TV shows. The difference is, where other channels might get creative with product placement (ie, someone on a sitcom ordering a pizza from Dominos, or drinking Pepsi Max), they do it with party ideology. Chinese viewers who hate the CCP don't watch CCTV, or watch shows and play drinking games (a soldier expressed his love for the country? Do a shot of vodka...) whenever they see something stupid and overt. Chinese viewers who are loyal & enthusiastic CCP members watch the shows, and act like elderly Americans watching "Little House on the Prairie". The other 85% or so of Chinese viewers just regard them as a bunch of channels they get from the satellite or cable company, and view them about the same way Americans see PBS, "family-oriented" channels (retch, vomit, gag), Fox, MSNBC, and Lifetime. The channels are there, to watch or ignore. The only real advantage they have over their commercial competitors is the fact that every basic cable TV package in China MUST include them, so if you're poor, they probably ARE your entire TV package. On the other hand, if you're *that* poor, you're not likely to own an iPhone... genuine, counterfeit, or otherwise.
From a strictly business standpoint, Apple would have been stupid to say 'no' to the app. For one thing, in China, most of the elite & wealthy *are* CCP members. They might privately think Mao was full of shit, but on the other hand, they're internalized the party's beliefs to some extent whether they believe it or not. They DO watch CCTV, and would have been pissed/outraged if Apple had said 'no'. The REAL thing to watch for is whether or not Apple approves similar apps for CCTV's competitors, or throws out some lame excuse like "there's already an app in the store that does it".
> First-off, nude images are not a crime, even if you're a 15-year-old taking pictures of yourself in the mirror and sending them to your boyfriend.
Sadly, in at least two or three jurisdictions of the US, that's not true. Google "sexting" to read plenty of stories about teens charged as sex criminals for possessing nude photos of themselves. There's at least one case where the prosecutor sought to have the teen adjudicated as an adult. Hey, if two teens can be simultaneously classified as victims and assailants for having sex after school, it's not a huge leap of logic to conclude that they're dangerous pervert pedophiles...
If you have cat5 in place (or the means to run it), A-Bus is probably the most cost-effective strategy for whole-house audio. It's not as sexy as something like ZonAudio, but the hardware components are dirt cheap.
Here's the basic network topology of A-Bus. You feed the left and right audio to a box that's basically a balun. It sends the audio to the A-Bus hub on two pairs of cat5... one pair for left, one pair for right. At the hub, it distributes the source to typically 2 or 4 destinations, and outputs ~24v (48v?) on the remaining pair or two (somehow, it relays remote control signals back... I'm not sure offhand whether it uses one pair for power, and one pair for the remote/control backchannel, or whether it multiplexes it on top of the power wires). In any case, from the hub, the cat5 runs to the keypad-amp. Usually you'd put this someplace convenient, like next to a light switch. The keypad contains a digital amp that draws power from the cat5. A simple keypad has little more than a volume control and power button. The next level up adds a remote control sensor. The highest-end ones can handle 4 sources, and I believe Russound's has a feature that enables you to shut down the entire system from any keypad.
The speakers themselves connect to the keypad-amp. Additionally, you can run additional speaker wires off the keypad to connect a powered subwoofer and/or a local audio source (like the cable box). Anytime an audio signal is present on the local input, it overrides whatever's being sent by the hub.
A-Bus is far from perfect. Because it only draws power from the cat5, and draws only half the max allowed by (US) law, you can only get ~5-11 watts RMS per keypad. IMHO, they should have an option to put a typical wall-wart coaxial socket on the local input box and use it to power a beefier amp. Or, if you have 16/4 installed alongside the cat5 in a home run, they could repurpose the 16/4 to carry power (actually, I think Russound did something more or less like that with their new non-ABus liene)
If you have an amp and speakers in the room already, and just need to distribute the raw preamp-level audio, just use cat5 and baluns.
For the record, I researched this pretty heavily ~2-3 years ago. From what I remember, the big problem the digital alternatives to A-Bus had was timing. In theory, there's no reason why you couldn't use PoE to drive speakers directly from their own local amp connected via cat5, but unless you give it its own dedicated wires and use noncompressed audio streamed via UDP, you end up with serious timing problems (ie, speakers in two adjacent rooms might be 50-100ms off from each other. It's kind of like the problem lots of people now have with digital TV and adjacent rooms... unless the two TVs are absolutely identical, they won't decode the same signal at exactly the same rate, and the two rooms can be up to a few seconds ahead of or behind each other.
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> I remember it running really well in machines with as little as 32 megs of memory. What did they do wrong?
KDE and Gnome both embraced the "Active Desktop" metaphor... the same reason why Win95OSR2 (with IE4) ran tolerably well on a 166MHz Pentium with 32mb, but the same laptop would fall over die gasping if you installed Win98 on it (there was even a program, 98lite, that basically created a FrankenWindows installation that gave you 98's USB support (well, ok... USB mouse support...) with 95's faster Explorer).
> Even using all local resources available, US energy consumption is so great that those fossil fuels wouldn't last very long.
Well, you're right about it not being black and white. As gas (the petroleum kind, not the low-density molecular kind) becomes more expensive, it will increasingly be used as a motor fuel only (where it has few good alternatives), and other (cheaper) alternatives for power generation will displace it. Like the REAL "sustainable" energy source -- nuclear fission. Dollars per gigawatt, there's no cheaper way to make vast quantities of electricity.
Solar panels might be fashionably green and visibly "clean", but anyone who's seen what goes out the back doors (and up the smokestacks) of factories that actually MAKE them would never, EVER use the words "clean" or "green" to describe it.
For an interesting analogy, consider "Peak Wood". 200 years ago, even city dwellers (in America, at least... I think in Europe, it happened a century or so earlier) burned wood for heating. As the forests were cut down, wood became too expensive to burn, so people switched to something cheaper: coal. Meanwhile, old-growth forests were clearcut to get hardwood for building construction and furniture. Eventually, the supply started to dry up, costs increased, and the building industry, then the furniture industry, switched to softwoods. Now, if you want cheap furniture, you go to Ikea and buy plasticized softwood sawdust with a paper-thin sheet of real hardwood wood glued on top. Houses get built with OSB/waferboard and steel. And people still have fireplaces as ornaments, burning $5 quarter-logs bought shrink-wrapped once a year to burn on Christmas (while the air conditioner works extra hard to keep the room from getting too hot as a result).
> In this country, if you divided the land out exactly fairly between everybody, there's just enough to give everybody a medium sized garden.
It depends how you look at it. If you assume typical east-coast US big-city suburban densities (~5,000 square feet per 50x100sf lot with one single-family home on it, averaging 3-4 people per house including children), the world's entire population would metaphorically fit in an area the size of Texas:
Texas is ~269,000 square miles x 27,827,400 square feet per mile = 7,499,289,600,000 sq feet in Texas
Assume 4.5 billion people, 3 per residence = 1,500,000,000 residences
Divide the two, and you get ~5,000 square feet per residence.
Of course, the whole equation collapses when you factor in the need for things like roads, stores, and offices (not to mention farms), but it does kind of put the "4.5 billion" figure into perspective. Even crowded countries like China and India have lots of room to spread out once you eliminate the need for people to live within 20 miles of the coast, or within walking distance of public transportation. Anytime you want to give an environmentalist nightmares, politely remind them that 50 years from now, China will have a suburban populace exploding across the countryside that makes America's NIMBY'est exurb look like a New Urbanist wet dream by comparison. ;-)
> Wouldn't the general linux-using masses go for the netbooks with linux anyway despite that 2G limit
> (there MUST be an upgradeable model somewhere out there)? I mean, the portability and capabilities should amount
> to something. Or does that limit its usefulness, and that word got around even among the non hardcore types?
> I know there's plenty of distros that provided leaner versions.
AFAIK, Microsoft's licensing basically dictates it down to the number of address lines on the motherboard. I'm not aware of *any* netbooks that can take a 4gb SoDIMM... or even a 2gb SoDIMM, for that matter. They all have 1 (or no) socket, and it's limited to a gig, max (maybe 2gb, if it accounts for all of the system's ram). It really is stupid on all counts, because Microsoft is cutting its own upgrade market out of the loop. How many people are likely to spend $100+ on a copy of Windows 7 for their year-old netbook if it's limited to 2gb max? I'd say, fairly few. OTOH, how many people would be willing to spend $100-200 on an upgrade copy of Windows 7 if they could ALSO buy a $99 4gb SoDIMM and do it at the same time? I'd estimate the number to be QUITE a bit higher. If Microsoft really wanted to take its pound of flesh, they should have just released Windows "XP/N" at the Netbook licensing price and limited IT to 2gb, instead of shackling the hardware itself.
As far as Linux goes, I don't think it's any big secret that the latest builds of KDE and Gnome want as many gigs of RAM as Vista and Windows 7. Sure, there are lighter-weight window managers, but then you get back to the problem of a widening capabilities-gap between desktop and notebook computers. Looking back on my past 4 notebooks, the thing that ultimately condemned every one of them to the "maybe I'll use this as a home development server or firewall someday" pile was inadequate maxed-out ram. The CPU speed doesn't matter much if the hard drive starts thrashing the moment you move the mouse (assuming it ever manages to stop thrashing at all). You can find niche uses for old laptops as Linux-based appliances, but for running real apps, if Linux is your choice for daily computer use, you're going to be hurting for RAM just as badly as someone who runs Windows.
You're assuming that 99% of the people "preaching green" today won't say "fuck it, drill Alaska and mine coal" if gas costs more than $5/gallon for more than 3-6 months. If the only way to "go green" is to use rare earth elements, and China makes them too expensive, Europe might be fucked by its Greens and governments, but the US will just say 'screw green' and get on with life as usual.
The butterfly keyboards were cool, but you have to remember the reason why they were invented to begin with: back then, panels > 10" were incredibly expensive compared to the cost of an expensive folding keyboard mechanism, so IBM was able to turn a price constraint (small screens) into a feature (increased portability without sacrificing a good keyboard).
Now, the difference in cost between a 10" 1024x600 panel and a 12" 1280x750 panel is less than the difference in cost between a butterfly keyboard and a conventional laptop keyboard. High end laptops moved to 12.1" and 13.3" panels years ago, and there's no reason for them to go back. At the end of the day, few mainstream purchasers of ultraportable laptops would sacrifice the larger screen just to save another inch or two. Maybe, *maybe* a woman *might* go for it if it meant she could carry her laptop in her purse, but for a man or woman who carries it in a briefcase, backpack, or bare, there's little real motive to sacrifice those last 2" of display space just to make it a tiny bit smaller.
If anyone deserves to be hated, it's Microsoft for making the cheaper netbook-licensing cost of XP contingent upon the netbook having a hardware limit of 2gb max memory, which pretty much fucks anyone who wants to use Linux or upgrade to a better version of Windows someday. Now that the 64-bit barrier has pretty much been broken, I give it a year or two, max, before 8-16gb PCs become the norm at Best Buy, and people with 2gb netbooks find themselves in the same position as people with PalmOS PDA phones ~5 years ago (when the gap between the hardware & OS capabilities of PalmOS PDAs and PalmOS phones widened to the point that phones basically couldn't run any new software. I know... I had a Samsung SPHi300 and SPHi500, and only grudgingly jumped ship to the PPC6700 and WM5 because I was sick of being unable to run anything written during the 21st century).
> People saw it coming all right. Look it up.
The problem was partly cultural. As my high school American History teacher pointed out to our class (early 90s), "Psychologically, the clock stops in 1999". His point was that "the Year 2000(tm)" had been a holy, distant place steeped in strange rituals and images of a science-fiction inspired world for so long, nobody could rationally think of 2001, let alone 2000, as being a normal year less than 10 years away. I remember looking around during summer jobs in college, and realized it was true... people slapped post-2000 dates on things when making future plans, but nobody really *believed* in them, the way people did when making project plans for 1995 back in 1989. You could even look at projected dates, and notice that they either clustered around 2000 or 2001, or jumped ahead to 2010, 2020, and beyond. City governments could make grand road improvement plans for 2015, but as late as 1999, they could barely bring themselves to think about anything more ambitious than filling potholes in 2001.
> In fact, only CDMA phones have significant competition that could inspire a user to take
> a phone to another carrier, and I wonder how incompatible Sprint's 3G network is with Verizon's.
In purely technical terms, pretty much any phone available from both Sprint and Verizon that doesn't go out of its way to prevent you from reflashing it with the other carrier's firmware works fine. In reality, it's a one-way trip from Sprint to Verizon (or maybe one of the few remaining regional CDMA carriers), because Sprint won't activate any phone whose ESN isn't in their official database. Hell, even when they OWNED Telus (Canada), you couldn't activate a Telus phone on Sprint or vice-versa, even though roaming between them was absolutely seamless, and the two networks used pretty much identical hardware & software.
In theory, Verizon won't stop you from using any unlocked CDMA phone... but as a practical matter, it's unlikely to reliably support anything besides voice. Even voicemail is iffy (read: the indicator probably won't work, and you'll have to dial a normal phone number to access it instead of pressing and holding the '1' key). Text messages ~140 characters might work, but longer ones will either be truncated or blackholed. 1xRTT data will probably work, but I wouldn't bet the farm on EV-DO. Unless you work for Verizon or have access to inside information not available to normal users, it's very unlikely you'll ever get an "alien" CDMA phone to work perfectly and seamlessly on Verizon.
Put another way, if Sprint and Verizon both properly supported R-UIM cards, and had a page on their respective websites listing the raw info you might need if you REALLY wanted to customize the firmware of an "alien" phone to make it work seamlessly, any unlocked phone that worked on one would work just fine on the other. The bare-metal hardware is identical. The only differences are in the customized firmware... and most of THOSE differences are the first thing people who build their own Windows Mobile & Android ROMs rip out. ;-)
That said, Verizon won't likely be compatible with Sprint "forever". Officially, Verizon's future is LTE, and Sprint's future is WiMax. Unofficially, it's anybody's guess whether one or both will actually follow through with those plans, or change their minds along the way.
My tree isn't publicly-networked, but I'm pretty proud of it and love to show it off :-)
Each light has its own microcontroller & RGB led. The lights are autonomous, but can be orchestrated by the controller.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5qR9_8KGPU
> From a Roman Catholic (and for that matter Lutheranism, Eastern, and Oriental Orthodoxy) perspective that is all baloney, though as the Perpetual Virginity of Mary would make a brother somewhat difficult.
But... but... what about *WESLEY* ?!? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFwvs8eYt6E
OK, my mistake with the Sapphire. I have a CDMA Sprint Hero, and in *my* neck of the woods, the most bleeding-edge Eclair build on Xda-developers.com still lacks camera and accelerometer support. Admittedly, it's come a long way since Thanksgiving (when I checked ~3 weeks ago, Eclair for CDMA Hero really *was* pretty dysfunctional), but it's still not *quite* ready yet. That said, I'll probably be rooting and reflashing the day everything theoretically works.
My main point was that for a Google-spec'ed and Google-maintained phone to really *matter* in the US, they're going to have to offer some MAJOR sweetheart deal to Sprint, and basically get Sprint to sell phones built and maintained by Google (by eliminating "110%" of Sprint's risk by eating the inventory cost for Sprint). Sprint is actually fairly progressive about letting its customers have decent hardware... it's just utterly neurotic about losing money on unwanted phones it pays to build for customers (wounds that are almost entirely self-inflicted, and due to Sprint's insistence that only Sprint-ESN phones be used on Sprint unless they're roaming Canadians). Verizon is another matter entirely... but VZ usually ends up grudgingly following Sprint's lead 6-9 months down the road hardware-wise.
This could actually be the golden opportunity to bring R-UIM cards into Sprintland through "the back door". If Google makes its own CDMA phones, they'd almost certainly be R-UIM based, since the US is the only place on Earth where CDMA phones DON'T use R-UIM cards. Let's suppose the phones they made for Sprint to sell *had* R-UIM cards, but to make Sprint happy, they were pre-installed and covered by a thick sticker so you'd never know it was there unless you hung out at xda-deveopers.com. The moment you bought that first phone with R-UIM card known to Sprint's database, you could buy ANY physically-compatible CDMA phone you wanted from that point forward and use it on Sprint just by sticking the first phone's R-UIM card into it.
(for those who don't know, a R-UIM card is basically a GSM SIM card with extensions for CDMA).
> nobody is stuck on 1.5, after rooting the g1 that enabled every phone to be on 2.0 if they desire, merely some root exploration is required.
Unless, of course, you have a shiny new CDMA Hero, or its American GSM half-brother -- the MyTouch. Both are stuck at 1.5 until sometime next year when HTC finally releases 2.0 for it. Yeah, I *could* root my phone and do a guerrilla update to 2.0 now... except I'd lose bluetooth, GPS, the camera, and just about everything else besides maybe the ability to (sort of) make and receive voice calls...
In America, at least, the existence of a GSM Google Phone won't really matter anyway... AT&T's 3G network is oversold and saturated to the point of being useless, T-Mobile's 3G network barely exists, and Google's phone won't work on Sprint or Verizon. And even if Google HAD a CDMA version, Sprint won't let you activate a phone whose ESN isn't in their holy database, and Verizon's "any phone" policy REALLY means "any unlocked Sprint phone that's the twin of a Verizon phone and can be reflashed with a Verizon ROM" (unless you don't mind having a phone that's completely dysfunctional for anything besides voice calls... and *maybe* 1xRTT data if you're lucky).
> But, it is likely that they will make sure that it doesn't compete with their bread and butter.
A few posts up, someone made an interesting observation. If Oracle truly wants to kill off MySQL by weeding out everyone besides people using it for personal websites and free projects that aren't potential customers for a commercial database at any price, all they have to do is make it GPLv3, and quit selling commercial-use licenses (not cheap, but paying for one means you can use MySQL in a closed-source product without being subject to the GPL... 2, 3, or otherwise).
However, I think Oracle is wrong about the market consequences. I'd venture a guess that 99% of the people who currently use MySQL with commercial licenses would have gone with Microsoft SQL Serve or PostgreSQL, and not Oracle, if MySQL weren't an option. PostgreSQL, because it's free & BSD-licensed, MSSQL because the tools to prototype and develop with and for it are largely free (as in beer). As a practical matter, until the day your server is making you money or used in something resembling a production website, Microsoft isn't really interested in coming after you as long as the server it's running on is itself running a properly-licensed copy of Windows. MSSQL scales nicely from prototype to production, and doesn't start to require large amounts of actual cash until a fledgling business developing some new product that uses it is likely to be at a point where it actually has the funding available. Plus, like MySQL, a reasonably competent programmer can set up MSSQL Server and get it running well enough for development and demonstration without the need for an official DBA (joke: why does every company that uses Oracle have a DBA? Because they can't afford two. Ha. Ha. er, anyway...).
Put another way, if Oracle were to make MySQL GPL-only, it would only hurt MySQL, and would do very little, if anything, to actually help sales of Oracle's bread & butter. Sadly, though, given Oracle's general business practices, I think the fact that they'd TRY to do it is pretty much a given, and I fear for MySQL's future if Oracle ends up owning it.
The problem with a fork is that it would eventually kill MySQL.
If Oracle ends up owning MySQL and MySQL doesn't visibly fork, Oracle will be under pressure to keep MySQL semi-affordable and at least pretend they want it to be viable.
Remember... right now, there are two ways to license MySQL:
* You can distribute it with another application that is itself GPL'ed
* You can purchase a non-free license and distribute it with your non-GPL'ed application
The license to distribute MySQL as part of a turnkey non-GPL'ed solution isn't cheap... but it's still a lot cheaper than Oracle.
If a viable GPL'ed fork of MySQL were to emerge (possibly with Monty at the helm), it would take the heat off of Oracle, and allow them to slowly strangle it for non-GPL'ed use... raising the licensing fees to bring them more in line with those of Oracle, limiting its feature set (things like partitioning, for example) to keep it from competing too effectively against their more expensive database, limiting the number of cpus/cores it will use (or that are allowed to exist on the host server), etc.
Remember, under MySQL's license, if you write a non-GPL'ed app that depends upon MySQL, you can not automate its installation or configuration in any way without violating the licensing terms of MySQL's "Free" license. Nor can consultants paid to install your app do it. Only the end user, or its collective employees themselves, can do it.
Pre-Sun, Monty's company owned the right to give MySQL away and sell licenses for it. A forked company would still have the right to develop and give away GPL'ed copies, but only Oracle would have the right to sell it under a more permissive (but violently expensive) license. Also, Oracle could license commercial versions with restrictions about what non-Oracle add-ins could be used with it to extends its capabilities beyond those allowed by Oracle itself.
Ideally, the EU should require that Oracle either spin off MySQL as an independent company they're prohibited from exercising control over, or sell it to someone like Redhat, who'll keep the free version evolving without trying to kill off its commercial licensing for ideological reasons. Hell, even IBM would be an improvement over Oracle for owning MySQL. IBM has a conflict of interest with DB2, but from what I've seen, IBM has always viewed DB2 as an excuse to upsell the customer to a mainframe. IBM might not PUSH MySQL to its consulting clients, but it's not opposed to cashing checks for a product that doesn't really NEED a lot of handholding anyway, and using it for both public relations and a recruiting tool to bring growing companies into the IBM customer base (think: Eclipse -> Websphere).
> I mean, to me a job (ANY job) is nothing more than a means to earn as much money as possible to allow me to enjoy life on the level I like.
> It gives me money, which I then use to live in a nice place, buy cars and other toys, travel and chase women. Trust me, if I won the lottery
> tomorrow, I'd never consider working again since I'd no longer need a job to earn money. I'd spend my life full time having fun (traveling,
> partying, ridng my motorcycle around town, enjoying time with friends and family and chasing women).
Far better is to be one of the fortunate, happy few who are able to find the compromise position where the main line between work and play is defined by the location, time of day, and primary focus of the moment.
If I won the lottery tomorrow, I'd still program. I just wouldn't get up at 7am to do it, drive 20 miles in south Florida traffic, focus on enterprise Java, or take phone calls from people who want to waste my time arguing about things I'm not allowed to change. I'd have a nice 3-story loft whose third story was half programming/development lab, and half rooftop water garden for my cats to play in, with view of downtown Fort Lauderdale's skyscrapers between the potted trees. I'd spend most of my time working on embedded hardware-related projects (like my networked RGB Christmas lights -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5qR9_8KGPU ), building robots, and all the software projects I've wanted to work on for the past 20 years. If I had enough to afford it, I'd have a second home in downtown San Jose for summers and occasional winter weekends when I find myself going into Fry's withdrawal or need to socially reconnect with My People.
I can't even fathom willingly taking a job where I' m actively miserable for 8 hours a day, let alone 10 or more, regardless of how much money I had to spend during the remaining hour or two per day when I wasn't at work or asleep. I know people who'd spend 12-16 hours per day bathing in cowshit if they were paid enough. For the most part, they make tons of money for a few months, then get completely fried & burned out (if they're lucky, coinciding with an economic downturn), then spend a year or two with lots of time to enjoy the money they made... if they could stop stressing out about how they were going to afford their $3k+ mortgage payments 9-14 months down the road. If they're lucky, they'll get to enjoy a few years of happy retirement... Iff they don't die from sudden cardiac death or commit suicide before they're 60, instead. It's a good thing THEY have plenty of money to chase women, too... because they can't seem to hold the interest of one for more than 2 or 3 weeks unless they treat her like a de-facto employee & pay her enough to work the role of happy, faithful housewife who views them as anything more than a funding source. The ironic thing is that if you add up the money they've made over the past 10 years, subtract the amount I've made over the same time period, then additionally subtract out the premium they've had to spend just to cope with the demands of their jobs, I still come out ahead of them without even factoring quality of life into the equation.
> The market became so over-saturated with games that the public became disgusted with them.
Not quite. At the lowest point after the crash, members of the public were no less enthused about them than they were a year or two earlier. It was MERCHANTS who wouldn't touch videogames with a dirty twenty-foot pole, let alone sell them.
I've noticed that the perception that videogames "died" after "the crash" is strongest among people who were already adults when it happened. For those of us who were in middle school, the "crash" was an irrelevant abstraction. We got C64s, then Amigas, and were largely oblivious to the perception that videogames had somehow "gone away". Most of us had more games than we knew what to *do* with, and probably had more game discs laying on the floor around our beds than the total number of unique game cartridges for the Atari 2600, Intellivision, Atari 5200, Odyssey 3, *and* Colecovision that had ever existed since the dawn of the videogame era. If videogames went away in 1983, someone forgot to tell us ;-)
I paid $199 more than 2 years ago for a Samsung CLP-510 with built-in duplexer. Its cartridge DRM would have really sucked if it weren't so trivially easy to defeat (I2C eeprom). I could theoretically refill cartridges, but it's barely worth bothering... new (non-remanufactured) thirdparty cartridges run about $65/ea and are officially good for ~5,000 pages. In this case, "officially" UNDERcounts it, because by design the printer will literally count the sheets you print from a cartridge and refuse to exceed its limit... unless you reset the counter, in which case you can run it until the cartridge is completely empty. The starter cartridges were officially good for 1,000 pages... I got about 1,400 pages out of the magenta cartridge (the first to go), and about 2,000 pages out of the yellow cartridge. Cyan was somewhere in between, and black went about the same time as yellow (black can print more pages, but I also printed lots of grayscale-only images, so black got independently depleted faster than the colored toner did). I bought my first set of replacement cartridges more than a year ago, and have a hunch that by the time I really, truly deplete my second cartridge (out of the four new ones), I'll be agonizing between a third set or a new printer (since by that point the drum will be getting a little ragged, too). On the other hand, I'll probably stick with it for at least a third round, even if I do need a new drum, just because I *was* able to defeat THIS printer's DRM, and might not be able to repeat the trick with the next printer.
> So how are they not a religion?
Name a single mainstream religion, practiced anywhere in the world, whose core, sacred beliefs are aggressively guarded by the holy writ of copyright law and a small army of lawyers.
> Software is already protected by copyright, and should not be protected by patents.
Right now, it's kind of like "pick your poison". The problem isn't so much patents *per se*, as the way they've been granted (ie, the ongoing clusterfuck caused by the Clinton-era USPTO during the dotcom boom, whose attitude was "grant 'em all, let the courts sort it out"), the fact that they can't be proactively challenged (you can only wait to be sued for infringement, and if the patent's owner drops the case at the last moment, they can do the same thing to the next victim), and the fact that "one size/duration doesn't fit all scenarios" -- two decades is barely enough time for truly groundbreaking new drugs, but is gross overkill in most software scenarios.
Pointing towards copyright law isn't necessarily an improvement. At least patents eventually expire. Thanks to Disney, copyright is effectively *eternal*. Do we *really* want software techniques to be legally protected *forever*?
Pushing software harder and harder into the "copyright" camp is, IMHO, a dangerous strategy, because it ultimately leads those copyright owners to try and expand the scope of what that copyright protects. Patent trolls are bad, but copyright trolls have the potential to be much, much more destructive in the long run.
> If people didn't eat meat, so much more land would be available, that we could feed everyone
> and still have a lot more land to return to the wild, thereby increasing biodiversity.
As a practical matter, real, honest-to-god oldschool "starving kids in ${poor country}" don't really exist anymore. At least, not for reasons that have anything whatsoever to do with arable land, drought, famine, or vermin. That's not to say that nobody is hungry, but most of THOSE hungry people will STILL go to bed hungry, even if every last acre of land and bushel of corn currently used to feed livestock ceases to be used for that purpose.
In America, at least, farmland no longer needed for factory farming is more likely to end up with strip malls and McMansions on it than wildlife or anything normally associated with "biodiversity".
In poor countries, animals will be grown as always. It might be cheaper to factory-produce ten million pounds of "cultured bacon" or "cultured beef" per week than to raise and slaughter the equivalent number of animals, but a poor family living in a hut somewhere isn't going to have the capital to go out and buy the necessary hardware. They're going to do what they always have... buy a few dozen newly-hatched chicks, a pig or two, and a cow. Less efficient, but equally less capital-intensive.
> What do you mean? As far as I know, in all the instances where a toolbar is bundled with some other
> software, the toolbar installation is clearly mentioned in the software EULA, so each time the toolbar
> is installed, the user agreed that he wanted it. As a developer for a Web optimizer plugin, this Firefox
> change will make it much harder for us to reach our users.
Q. What's the difference between a 'trojan' and 'malware'?
A. Malware has a EULA.
I can't even *begin* to emphasize how badly it pisses me off when some app tries to sneak BHOs and plugins into their installer... almost always in ways that someone in a hurry to install the app that's actually *desired* will overlook. I flat-out refuse to ever use Yahoo and Google's toolbars, *precisely* because they have so many people trying to ram them down my throat and trick me into installing them.
> So in a very real sense, the reason space costs the US 10x more than the Chinese is because we are paying Americans to do the work.
Yeah, but there's a big, huge problem with outsourcing the manufacturing of space gear to China, even if we do the engineering at home: China still hasn't matured to the point where it can reliably guarantee and enforce a specific level of quality. Anyone who's dealt with China's computer industry knows all about parts that aren't just substandard or low-quality... they're substandard, low-quality, and actively go out of their way to masquerade that fact. Post-WWII, Japanese companies made shit... but they were honest about it, and buyers knew exactly what they were getting. And when they got better, everyone knew it, too. The problem with Chinese industry is that they'll make you items that are absolutely flawless... then steadily cut corners in ways you never even thought possible, and do it in ways that aren't easily detectable. Think: melamine-"enriched" food products (melamine's chemical signature mimics gluten) and candy sweetened with antifreeze. Or flash that claims to be 256MB, is really 128MB, and goes a step further by actively data-compressing what it can, and silently overwriting the oldest data when it can't. Or motherboards with outright fake cache ram, and a BIOS that goes out of its way to lie about it. Google "quality fade" for megabytes of articles about it, almost all of which are specific to mainland Chinese industry.
Imagine, for a moment, the political fallout from a dozen American astronauts dying in a space accident caused by some equipment failure where the failing equipment itself actively went out of its way to hide the fact that it was failing... and somehow, NASA were able to forensically prove it after the fact. Americans take for granted that if some component's self-diagnostics say "Everything's OK", well... everything's OK. With current Chinese industrial practices, that kind of blind faith would be deadly.
China's making amazing progress, but it still has a *long* way to go before its industry earns the reputation for absolute quality that companies like Mitsubishi, Rockwell, and Siemens enjoy... the ability to look up the number laser-etched on a single bolt & trace it all the way back to a specific truckload of ore from the mine, with auditable information about everyone who's touched or had anything to do with it along the way.
Need more proof? There are STILL new electronic devices, being made in China *today*, with electrolytic capacitors manufactured with the same defective/formula-sabotaged electrolyte that caused all the "bad cap" problems ~10 years ago. How can this be? Simple -- the capacitors work fine for a year or two, they just tend to be more likely to fail prematurely. Inspect them at the factory, and they look just like capacitors made with the proper formula. By the time they fail, the company that made them is long gone. And of course, the defective electrolyte itself is dirt cheap compared to the real formula...
In the interest of objectivity, there's one important detail that hasn't really been brought up yet in this discussion: CCTV doesn't have a monopoly over Chinese television. In most Chinese TV markets, their total audience share (for all of their channels combined) is about 45%.
Make no mistake. CCTV is, in fact, the official TV network of the Chinese Communist Party, directly accountable to its ministry of propaganda, but it has to earn its market share the same way other commercial channels do -- by making popular TV shows. The difference is, where other channels might get creative with product placement (ie, someone on a sitcom ordering a pizza from Dominos, or drinking Pepsi Max), they do it with party ideology. Chinese viewers who hate the CCP don't watch CCTV, or watch shows and play drinking games (a soldier expressed his love for the country? Do a shot of vodka...) whenever they see something stupid and overt. Chinese viewers who are loyal & enthusiastic CCP members watch the shows, and act like elderly Americans watching "Little House on the Prairie". The other 85% or so of Chinese viewers just regard them as a bunch of channels they get from the satellite or cable company, and view them about the same way Americans see PBS, "family-oriented" channels (retch, vomit, gag), Fox, MSNBC, and Lifetime. The channels are there, to watch or ignore. The only real advantage they have over their commercial competitors is the fact that every basic cable TV package in China MUST include them, so if you're poor, they probably ARE your entire TV package. On the other hand, if you're *that* poor, you're not likely to own an iPhone... genuine, counterfeit, or otherwise.
From a strictly business standpoint, Apple would have been stupid to say 'no' to the app. For one thing, in China, most of the elite & wealthy *are* CCP members. They might privately think Mao was full of shit, but on the other hand, they're internalized the party's beliefs to some extent whether they believe it or not. They DO watch CCTV, and would have been pissed/outraged if Apple had said 'no'. The REAL thing to watch for is whether or not Apple approves similar apps for CCTV's competitors, or throws out some lame excuse like "there's already an app in the store that does it".
> First-off, nude images are not a crime, even if you're a 15-year-old taking pictures of yourself in the mirror and sending them to your boyfriend.
Sadly, in at least two or three jurisdictions of the US, that's not true. Google "sexting" to read plenty of stories about teens charged as sex criminals for possessing nude photos of themselves. There's at least one case where the prosecutor sought to have the teen adjudicated as an adult. Hey, if two teens can be simultaneously classified as victims and assailants for having sex after school, it's not a huge leap of logic to conclude that they're dangerous pervert pedophiles...
If you have cat5 in place (or the means to run it), A-Bus is probably the most cost-effective strategy for whole-house audio. It's not as sexy as something like ZonAudio, but the hardware components are dirt cheap.
Here's the basic network topology of A-Bus. You feed the left and right audio to a box that's basically a balun. It sends the audio to the A-Bus hub on two pairs of cat5... one pair for left, one pair for right. At the hub, it distributes the source to typically 2 or 4 destinations, and outputs ~24v (48v?) on the remaining pair or two (somehow, it relays remote control signals back... I'm not sure offhand whether it uses one pair for power, and one pair for the remote/control backchannel, or whether it multiplexes it on top of the power wires). In any case, from the hub, the cat5 runs to the keypad-amp. Usually you'd put this someplace convenient, like next to a light switch. The keypad contains a digital amp that draws power from the cat5. A simple keypad has little more than a volume control and power button. The next level up adds a remote control sensor. The highest-end ones can handle 4 sources, and I believe Russound's has a feature that enables you to shut down the entire system from any keypad.
The speakers themselves connect to the keypad-amp. Additionally, you can run additional speaker wires off the keypad to connect a powered subwoofer and/or a local audio source (like the cable box). Anytime an audio signal is present on the local input, it overrides whatever's being sent by the hub.
A-Bus is far from perfect. Because it only draws power from the cat5, and draws only half the max allowed by (US) law, you can only get ~5-11 watts RMS per keypad. IMHO, they should have an option to put a typical wall-wart coaxial socket on the local input box and use it to power a beefier amp. Or, if you have 16/4 installed alongside the cat5 in a home run, they could repurpose the 16/4 to carry power (actually, I think Russound did something more or less like that with their new non-ABus liene)
If you have an amp and speakers in the room already, and just need to distribute the raw preamp-level audio, just use cat5 and baluns.
For the record, I researched this pretty heavily ~2-3 years ago. From what I remember, the big problem the digital alternatives to A-Bus had was timing. In theory, there's no reason why you couldn't use PoE to drive speakers directly from their own local amp connected via cat5, but unless you give it its own dedicated wires and use noncompressed audio streamed via UDP, you end up with serious timing problems (ie, speakers in two adjacent rooms might be 50-100ms off from each other. It's kind of like the problem lots of people now have with digital TV and adjacent rooms... unless the two TVs are absolutely identical, they won't decode the same signal at exactly the same rate, and the two rooms can be up to a few seconds ahead of or behind each other.