my hope would be a Takeshi Kovacs trilogy. Everything from a detective story to martian ghosts.
Well, Altered Carbon was supposed to have been optioned as a film ages ago, but the page seems to have vanished from IMDB.
Probably the studio found out that the main protagonist kept hopping bodies (so you couldn't use a Big Star) and/or spotted the anti-Catholic storyline.
Can anyone else recommend some reasonably novel, recent Sci-Fi movies?
Try: The Man From Earth - but CGI and pyrotechnic fans should be warned that its basically about a bunch of people sitting around and talking. But in a good way.
Then there's "A Scanner Darkly" - totally unlike all the other "suggested by Philip K Dick" movies.
I don't understand these complaints about the response times for the screens on e-readers.
Its not a problem as long as you're happy with a dedicated device for "page-by-page" reading of traditional books.
My question is why did you buy an e-READER if you wanted to watch VIDEO?
Put that the other way round: why would you want to buy an e-reader if your media player lets you read books and watch video?
Currently, the answer to that is that e-ink (a) is nicer to read than a backlit display and (b) offers vastly better battery life.
You should have bought a laptop.
...and the most interesting thing about these new screens (if they deliver) is that they could be used in laptops, smartphones and "slates", enabling them to compete with e-readers for display quality and battery life.
If dedicated ebook readers are to survive, the answer is to make them cheaper and lighter so people are prepared to buy & carry them as well as media players - or to have several on the go at once (like the PADDs in Star Trek TNG). That's how dedicated audio players have survived in the face of more sophisticated PMPs. However, "convergence" might be the safer bet for manufacturers.
While people can and do read eBooks on LCD/OLED screens, your forget that one of the main benefits of e-ink that LCD/OLED does not have is very low power consumption.
The power consumption cannot make up for the fact that current e-ink displays are too slow for video or the sort of animation needed by an iPhone/Android-esque GUI. Its conceivable that Apple might go for a compromise "transflective" LCD like this though (its still an LCD, though not truly bistable like e-ink).
The DMCA (and its international equivalents) is also a bugger in this case since it prohibits circumventing a protection system. However, it seems a bit rich to criticise Apple for this when other publishers (including Psystar) rely on this to impose "product activation" which is fare more offensive than anything Apple do.
Equally unfortunately, this was pretty irrelevant in the Psystar case for the reasons stated by the GP post.
the moment they gave it to you on the pretense of a SALE.
You think? Go read the copyright notice inside any book, CD or DVD you have "bought" someday. If you have a Windows PC, go read the license that came with that: far more restrictive than anything Apple have dreamed up.
Go buy a new "restore disc" from Dell or Sony and see if you're entitled to install that on anything other than a specific Dell or Sony PC.
Then explain why Apple are so special that they alone should not be entitled to use copyright to restrict the use of their software, when almost every other commercial software house does something comparable.
...and ultimately, if you don't approve of Apple, don't use their products.
Well, I have an iPod Touch and a Droid.
I don't experience any of the problems you mentioned,
Well, maybe the Droid has a fast enough processor to cope. Hopefully, the Nexus has too. The Hero is ok lacks the responsiveness to make the illusion work as well as on the Apple.
and multitouch is turned off (by default) because Apple has a patent for it.
Well there seems to be some doubt over the broadness of that patent. My Hero (urgh!) has pinch-to-zoom in the browser, and other devices have implemented it...
As for OS upgrades, how's that Apple G5 desktop running Snow Leopard?
On the one hand, we're talking about a computer that was at least 3 years old before Apple dropped PPC support from new products, and who's obsolescence was widely reported in 2005. It will still run the last-but-one version of OS X (10.5) which is mature, stable and likely to be maintained for some time yet.
On the other hand, we're talking about a 6-month old phone (often tied to an 18 month contract) with a fairly new, rapidly evolving OS. So far, its 3 releases behind although, to be fair, the Hero definitely might be getting a bump to 2.1 sometime this year, if your carrier can be arsed to distribute it.
Maybe the other Android phones have fared better...
Not to say that Apple's tablet won't be the most wonderful thing ever, but IMO there's no comparison here to smart phones or even MP3 players.
Except Apple are in an ideal position to sell their tablet as a iPhone/iPod Touch on steroids rather than a crippled desktop computer. They also have a whole store full of applications and casual games designed specifically for touch/accelerometer operation.
The iPod Touch makes a nifty little video player, web and email browser, but its a tad too small. An A5 one would be rather attractive...
1) Android quickly catching up with Apple in terms of usefulness and it's working across a large set of diverse devices.
Sorry, I have an iPod Touch and a HTC Hero - and while the latter isn't bad (and would seem amazing if you hadn't used an iProduct) it doesn't come anywhere near the iProduct for slickness and consistency. Principle mistake: if you're making a touch screen/accelerometer device, make it a touch screen/accelerometer device - don't randomly have some functions on the screen and others on physical back/menu/zoom buttons or trackballs. Make sure that all applications can be satisfactorily controlled by touch alone.
Oh, and a multitouch interface should be sufficiently responsive to give the illusion that you are actually dragging objects with your finger. In Android, you make a gesture and then something happens. Fail.
As for diversity - you think its a good thing? Android has only been out for a bit over a year and already there are at least 3 different versions of the UI and core apps (HTC original, HTC Hero, Motorola Droid, Nexus 1) - some phones have keyboards, others don't, buttons are in different places...) and some early adopters are stuck with old versions of the OS.
Diversity might be good on full-size PCs, but ultra-portable devices need applications tailored to their display/input capabilities.
ChromeOS will only make Apple's problem worse
ChromeOS is interesting - and will get more interesting when we see some actual hardware products rather than just a virtual appliance running a browser. However, persuading people to "move to the cloud" could be a hard sell, and mobile internet coverage isn't yet up to a device that only works with the internet. Plus - unless Google do something evil - the online Google apps should work nicely with your slate.
2) If the expected price of $1000 is to be believed, it'll be a real turn off for anyone looking for a low cost MID.
Well, the actual price is anybody's guess - if they're selling it with a mobile internet contract, that could be the deliberately inflated "sim free" price. Anyway, Apple are famous for successfully selling things at a premium.
3) Let's be clear, if it's not e-ink or similar, this is in no way competition for the Kindle/Nook/Sony eReader
Current e-ink technology is only good for dedicated eBook readers. Its slow refresh rate makes it unsuitable for "general" computing and incapable of smooth animation or video.
OTOH people can and do read eBooks on LCD/OLED screens (and its feasible that Apple might use a hybrid transmissive/reflective LCD which would be better). If Apple gets into this market, the key factor will be what any hypothetical "iBooks" store is like in terms of range, price and DRM-blight (the things currently putting thinking persons off eBooks).
Free digital copy of "Blade Runner" with every Nexus One (director's cut, of course). Google gets to demo the phones' video chops and gets the coolness cred, Warner Bros get a chunk of the royalties.
(Put that right for you)
If they wanted to reference the book, they could include some themed Apps: Voight-Kampf, empathy box ("all it does is show this bloke trying to climb out of a hole - but it makes me feel sad"), Mood Organ (Setting #259: the urge to Google "porn" and click on all the sponsored links) and a casual game where you have to catch falling goats.
They should be suing the Star Trek franchise as well for using the term Nexus in Generations.
They'd have to stand in line behind the estate of E.E. "Doc" Smith who, on that basis, should be owed something for "tractor beam" (and probably other space-opera jargon).
So if there's no MENTION in his work of Nexus 1 relating to REPLICANTS (not Androids... he doesn't use that term either, IIRC)
The title of the book is "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"...
Replicants came from the film version.
...but that's not the point. Giving authors and their estates that sort of control over every name or term used in a book would only stifle creativity and create a world with no usable cultural heritage.
Even Motorola had the wherewithal to kindly ask Lucas before using Droid as a name for their phone because 'droid' is a registered trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd.
The clue is in the part of your own post starting "because" - even then, its debatable as to whether that trademark would apply to anything other than plush R2D2 toys.
Google applied for a trademark on "NEXUS ONE" [uspto.gov].
Yup - "Nexus 1". Not "Nexus 6". Its a dictionary word and a number. I Googled for "Nexus" and get the Tyne and Wear public transportation system, a Christian music school, a dating agency, a production company and a sponsored link to Amazon leading to a whole bunch of rather pornographic looking novels. No Dick (at least of the Philip K variety).
Now, if Google had jumped straight to "Nexus 6", launched an ad campaign featuring Rutger Hauer, and offered a free lead codpiece or a $100 mail-in rebate on a genuine goat, there might have been a case.
(Push your eyeballs out through your ears? There's an App for that!)
Where do you suppose it should stop? Should Red Hat need Paramount's permission for "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" - or Nokia for the "Nokia Communicator"? Is "Heroes" ripping off Neal Stevenson by having a character punnily named "Hiro"?
...and lots of big, influential businesses start losing money hand over fist* so Something Gets Done About It very rapidly.
If the central DRM provider goes under then lots of little, uninfluential people** have to buy The Matrix again and lots of big, influential businesses make money hand over fist. Lots of crocodile tears - but all they do is make the champagne taste salty.
*especially true in the case of the porn industry:-)
**who waived any guarantee of lifetime access to their purchases when they clicked through the EULA.
The summary is slightly misleading. Yes, it's DRM but it's an effort by the industry to make it so that content purchased in one way (eg. on your PS3) will work on a multitude of other devices which may or may not be owned by you.
If I want to take a movie to a friend's house (see first line of TFA) and play it, all I have to do is stick the.mp4 (or whatever) file on a USB stick and plug it in their player. The only thing that would stop me doing this is DRM.
...so its a new form of DRM which solves a problem that only exists because of DRM.
Now, I'm happy to either (a) pay a small fee to a streaming video-on-demand service to view a film once, (b) pay a reasonable subscription for access to a large media library or (c) pay a significantly larger price to download an unprotected copy in a standard format which I can watch time and again and "treat like a DVD".
This however, seems to combine the worst features of (a),(b) and (c).
I see no reason an entity couldn't take it and create a forked product to compete in that space
No, but there is a built in inequity: anybody developing a fork from the GPL code base is obliged to release their products under the GPL. Even if they're happy to contribute their own work to the community, that makes it harder to develop products that are interoperable with other proprietary systems and/or which might have patent issues.
Oracle, on the other hand, will own the copyrights and therefore are not bound at all by the GPL. They would be free to distribute MySQL-based products or MySQL clients with, for example, better integration with Oracle, Windows,.NET or IIS. They could even bolt on a proprietary DB engine...
Now, if you are a GPL purist this won't worry you, since you'd rather shave your own head with a cheesegrater than use proprietary code (and you're probably using PostgreSQL anyway), but if you're more pragmatic and interested in commercializing MySQL-based products then it means Oracle have a potential competetive edge.
Of course, in the past you could always approach Monty or, later, Sun and ask for a license to distribute MySQL or its libraries outside the GPL. Now you'll have to ask Oracle - and its their position as a dominant player in the database industry that is the real cause for concern. That's also the anti-competition justification that may give the EU the right to intervene.
However, why wouldn't they be complimentary?
Depends whether you see MySQL in its traditional role as a "lite" DBMS which perfectly nails the sweet spot as a backend for blogs and web shops, or as a potential Oracle/MSSQL-killer dealing reliably with complex transactions and squillions of tables. I'm sure its creators see it as the latter, but I've always felt that adding transactions and referential integrity was a bit like putting airbags on a pushbike...
I think that's the point: iSlates and competing tablets can be marketed as a better way of running iPhone/Android-style "Apps(tm)" rather than as a way of running desktop PC applicatons - which is what the netbook has become.
Had the original eeePC 700 been a better product (better battery life, better Linux distro, better tailoring of the UI and applications to work on a tiny screen) then maybe the original concept would have take off. As it was, it kickstarted the market for small, cheap (mainly) Windows laptops that could do everything a desktop PC could, and the original concept was effectivey abandoned.
The new "tablets" have the advantage that they will be building on established, non-PC platforms with established software bases (its not all fart apps) and developer communities, running OSs and applcations designed from the ground up for use on small, touchscreen devices and making full use of new tricks such as multitouch and accelerometers.
and his recent performance of Hamlet was sold out over its entire run a long time before it started, and was also televised by the BBC on Christmas day.
Was that the thing that went on for hours and seemed to consist of The Doctor* and Capt. Picard standing up and quoting a lot of lines and episode titles from Star Trek and Babylon 5?
(OK, I'm being silly - but if you want a good cultural drinking game, watch Hamlet and down a shot every time you recognise something from a SF show...)
(*As in Doctor Who, but if I called him "Doctor Who" I'd risk starting a pedantry cascade...)
As an enthusiastic OS X user, though, I'd conceed that the first few releases were not much use. However, that's mainly because of lack of native software support - it always looked a million dollars. Mind you, he does seem to have a revisionist history concerning the original reaction to XP...
The big achievement of OS X, however, was that in the space of a few years, Apple moved their entire user base over to a completely new, non-binary compatible, UNIX-based system. XP was always hamstrung by legacy issues.
No - if he was he'd understand about appropriate precision and wouldn't be arguing about a +/-1 year error on a datum point only known to the nearest 30 years or so...
Also, there may not have been a "0 AD" but, equally, there wasn't a 1AD, 2AD, etc. - at least not that people knew about at the time - since the numbering system wasn't devised until the sixth century.
So while you've worked out that a Roman coin with the date "52 BC" is probably a fake, I'm afraid your special souveneir "review of the noulghty-noulghties" edition of the i>Galillee Times dated "AD 11"is a bit iffy, too...
Actually, calendar changes notwithstandig, a quick glance at Wikipedia suggests that the one thing that can be stated with certanty is that he wasn't born in 1AD, so arguing over a +/- 1 year discrepancy is kinda futile.
(Not to mention the difficulty of being born on a fixed calendar date and dying on a date determined by the phase of the moon).
That's assuming that he isn't just a gestalt of various prophets and political figures...
Slashdot Mirror
my hope would be a Takeshi Kovacs trilogy. Everything from a detective story to martian ghosts.
Well, Altered Carbon was supposed to have been optioned as a film ages ago, but the page seems to have vanished from IMDB.
Probably the studio found out that the main protagonist kept hopping bodies (so you couldn't use a Big Star) and/or spotted the anti-Catholic storyline.
Can anyone else recommend some reasonably novel, recent Sci-Fi movies?
Try: The Man From Earth - but CGI and pyrotechnic fans should be warned that its basically about a bunch of people sitting around and talking. But in a good way.
Then there's "A Scanner Darkly" - totally unlike all the other "suggested by Philip K Dick" movies.
I don't understand these complaints about the response times for the screens on e-readers.
Its not a problem as long as you're happy with a dedicated device for "page-by-page" reading of traditional books.
My question is why did you buy an e-READER if you wanted to watch VIDEO?
Put that the other way round: why would you want to buy an e-reader if your media player lets you read books and watch video?
Currently, the answer to that is that e-ink (a) is nicer to read than a backlit display and (b) offers vastly better battery life.
You should have bought a laptop.
...and the most interesting thing about these new screens (if they deliver) is that they could be used in laptops, smartphones and "slates", enabling them to compete with e-readers for display quality and battery life.
If dedicated ebook readers are to survive, the answer is to make them cheaper and lighter so people are prepared to buy & carry them as well as media players - or to have several on the go at once (like the PADDs in Star Trek TNG). That's how dedicated audio players have survived in the face of more sophisticated PMPs. However, "convergence" might be the safer bet for manufacturers.
While people can and do read eBooks on LCD/OLED screens, your forget that one of the main benefits of e-ink that LCD/OLED does not have is very low power consumption.
The power consumption cannot make up for the fact that current e-ink displays are too slow for video or the sort of animation needed by an iPhone/Android-esque GUI. Its conceivable that Apple might go for a compromise "transflective" LCD like this though (its still an LCD, though not truly bistable like e-ink).
No no no NO! Just because they add a license doesn't mean normal local laws doesn't apply any longer.
Unfortunately No Court has ruled on the validity of EULAs generally; decisions are limited to particular provisions and terms.
The DMCA (and its international equivalents) is also a bugger in this case since it prohibits circumventing a protection system. However, it seems a bit rich to criticise Apple for this when other publishers (including Psystar) rely on this to impose "product activation" which is fare more offensive than anything Apple do.
Equally unfortunately, this was pretty irrelevant in the Psystar case for the reasons stated by the GP post.
the moment they gave it to you on the pretense of a SALE.
You think? Go read the copyright notice inside any book, CD or DVD you have "bought" someday. If you have a Windows PC, go read the license that came with that: far more restrictive than anything Apple have dreamed up.
Go buy a new "restore disc" from Dell or Sony and see if you're entitled to install that on anything other than a specific Dell or Sony PC.
Then explain why Apple are so special that they alone should not be entitled to use copyright to restrict the use of their software, when almost every other commercial software house does something comparable.
...and ultimately, if you don't approve of Apple, don't use their products.
Apple is pretty controlling, in my opinion,
So don't use Apple products then.
People seem to want to have their cake and eat it: they disapprove of Apple but seem to think they have some god-given right to use their products.
If you believe that "information should be free" go install Debian.
Well, I have an iPod Touch and a Droid. I don't experience any of the problems you mentioned,
Well, maybe the Droid has a fast enough processor to cope. Hopefully, the Nexus has too. The Hero is ok lacks the responsiveness to make the illusion work as well as on the Apple.
and multitouch is turned off (by default) because Apple has a patent for it.
Well there seems to be some doubt over the broadness of that patent. My Hero (urgh!) has pinch-to-zoom in the browser, and other devices have implemented it...
As for OS upgrades, how's that Apple G5 desktop running Snow Leopard?
On the one hand, we're talking about a computer that was at least 3 years old before Apple dropped PPC support from new products, and who's obsolescence was widely reported in 2005. It will still run the last-but-one version of OS X (10.5) which is mature, stable and likely to be maintained for some time yet.
On the other hand, we're talking about a 6-month old phone (often tied to an 18 month contract) with a fairly new, rapidly evolving OS. So far, its 3 releases behind although, to be fair, the Hero definitely might be getting a bump to 2.1 sometime this year, if your carrier can be arsed to distribute it.
Maybe the other Android phones have fared better...
Not to say that Apple's tablet won't be the most wonderful thing ever, but IMO there's no comparison here to smart phones or even MP3 players.
Except Apple are in an ideal position to sell their tablet as a iPhone/iPod Touch on steroids rather than a crippled desktop computer. They also have a whole store full of applications and casual games designed specifically for touch/accelerometer operation.
The iPod Touch makes a nifty little video player, web and email browser, but its a tad too small. An A5 one would be rather attractive...
1) Android quickly catching up with Apple in terms of usefulness and it's working across a large set of diverse devices.
Sorry, I have an iPod Touch and a HTC Hero - and while the latter isn't bad (and would seem amazing if you hadn't used an iProduct) it doesn't come anywhere near the iProduct for slickness and consistency. Principle mistake: if you're making a touch screen/accelerometer device, make it a touch screen/accelerometer device - don't randomly have some functions on the screen and others on physical back/menu/zoom buttons or trackballs. Make sure that all applications can be satisfactorily controlled by touch alone.
Oh, and a multitouch interface should be sufficiently responsive to give the illusion that you are actually dragging objects with your finger. In Android, you make a gesture and then something happens. Fail.
As for diversity - you think its a good thing? Android has only been out for a bit over a year and already there are at least 3 different versions of the UI and core apps (HTC original, HTC Hero, Motorola Droid, Nexus 1) - some phones have keyboards, others don't, buttons are in different places...) and some early adopters are stuck with old versions of the OS.
Diversity might be good on full-size PCs, but ultra-portable devices need applications tailored to their display/input capabilities.
ChromeOS will only make Apple's problem worse
ChromeOS is interesting - and will get more interesting when we see some actual hardware products rather than just a virtual appliance running a browser. However, persuading people to "move to the cloud" could be a hard sell, and mobile internet coverage isn't yet up to a device that only works with the internet. Plus - unless Google do something evil - the online Google apps should work nicely with your slate.
2) If the expected price of $1000 is to be believed, it'll be a real turn off for anyone looking for a low cost MID.
Well, the actual price is anybody's guess - if they're selling it with a mobile internet contract, that could be the deliberately inflated "sim free" price. Anyway, Apple are famous for successfully selling things at a premium.
3) Let's be clear, if it's not e-ink or similar, this is in no way competition for the Kindle/Nook/Sony eReader
Current e-ink technology is only good for dedicated eBook readers. Its slow refresh rate makes it unsuitable for "general" computing and incapable of smooth animation or video.
OTOH people can and do read eBooks on LCD/OLED screens (and its feasible that Apple might use a hybrid transmissive/reflective LCD which would be better). If Apple gets into this market, the key factor will be what any hypothetical "iBooks" store is like in terms of range, price and DRM-blight (the things currently putting thinking persons off eBooks).
Free digital copy of "Blade Runner" with every Nexus One (director's cut, of course). Google gets to demo the phones' video chops and gets the coolness cred, Warner Bros get a chunk of the royalties.
(Put that right for you)
If they wanted to reference the book, they could include some themed Apps: Voight-Kampf, empathy box ("all it does is show this bloke trying to climb out of a hole - but it makes me feel sad"), Mood Organ (Setting #259: the urge to Google "porn" and click on all the sponsored links) and a casual game where you have to catch falling goats.
They should be suing the Star Trek franchise as well for using the term Nexus in Generations.
They'd have to stand in line behind the estate of E.E. "Doc" Smith who, on that basis, should be owed something for "tractor beam" (and probably other space-opera jargon).
So if there's no MENTION in his work of Nexus 1 relating to REPLICANTS (not Androids... he doesn't use that term either, IIRC)
The title of the book is "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"...
Replicants came from the film version.
...but that's not the point. Giving authors and their estates that sort of control over every name or term used in a book would only stifle creativity and create a world with no usable cultural heritage.
Yes, the headline should read - Google rips off Dick.
What? and face lawsuits from the Bobbit estate?
Even Motorola had the wherewithal to kindly ask Lucas before using Droid as a name for their phone because 'droid' is a registered trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd.
The clue is in the part of your own post starting "because" - even then, its debatable as to whether that trademark would apply to anything other than plush R2D2 toys.
Google applied for a trademark on "NEXUS ONE" [uspto.gov].
Yup - "Nexus 1". Not "Nexus 6". Its a dictionary word and a number. I Googled for "Nexus" and get the Tyne and Wear public transportation system, a Christian music school, a dating agency, a production company and a sponsored link to Amazon leading to a whole bunch of rather pornographic looking novels. No Dick (at least of the Philip K variety).
Now, if Google had jumped straight to "Nexus 6", launched an ad campaign featuring Rutger Hauer, and offered a free lead codpiece or a $100 mail-in rebate on a genuine goat, there might have been a case.
(Push your eyeballs out through your ears? There's an App for that!)
Where do you suppose it should stop? Should Red Hat need Paramount's permission for "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" - or Nokia for the "Nokia Communicator"? Is "Heroes" ripping off Neal Stevenson by having a character punnily named "Hiro"?
What if ICANN goes under? The internet goes down.
...and lots of big, influential businesses start losing money hand over fist* so Something Gets Done About It very rapidly.
If the central DRM provider goes under then lots of little, uninfluential people** have to buy The Matrix again and lots of big, influential businesses make money hand over fist. Lots of crocodile tears - but all they do is make the champagne taste salty.
*especially true in the case of the porn industry :-)
**who waived any guarantee of lifetime access to their purchases when they clicked through the EULA.
The summary is slightly misleading. Yes, it's DRM but it's an effort by the industry to make it so that content purchased in one way (eg. on your PS3) will work on a multitude of other devices which may or may not be owned by you.
If I want to take a movie to a friend's house (see first line of TFA) and play it, all I have to do is stick the .mp4 (or whatever) file on a USB stick and plug it in their player. The only thing that would stop me doing this is DRM.
...so its a new form of DRM which solves a problem that only exists because of DRM.
Now, I'm happy to either (a) pay a small fee to a streaming video-on-demand service to view a film once, (b) pay a reasonable subscription for access to a large media library or (c) pay a significantly larger price to download an unprotected copy in a standard format which I can watch time and again and "treat like a DVD".
This however, seems to combine the worst features of (a),(b) and (c).
I see no reason an entity couldn't take it and create a forked product to compete in that space
No, but there is a built in inequity: anybody developing a fork from the GPL code base is obliged to release their products under the GPL. Even if they're happy to contribute their own work to the community, that makes it harder to develop products that are interoperable with other proprietary systems and/or which might have patent issues.
Oracle, on the other hand, will own the copyrights and therefore are not bound at all by the GPL. They would be free to distribute MySQL-based products or MySQL clients with, for example, better integration with Oracle, Windows, .NET or IIS. They could even bolt on a proprietary DB engine...
Now, if you are a GPL purist this won't worry you, since you'd rather shave your own head with a cheesegrater than use proprietary code (and you're probably using PostgreSQL anyway), but if you're more pragmatic and interested in commercializing MySQL-based products then it means Oracle have a potential competetive edge.
Of course, in the past you could always approach Monty or, later, Sun and ask for a license to distribute MySQL or its libraries outside the GPL. Now you'll have to ask Oracle - and its their position as a dominant player in the database industry that is the real cause for concern. That's also the anti-competition justification that may give the EU the right to intervene.
However, why wouldn't they be complimentary?
Depends whether you see MySQL in its traditional role as a "lite" DBMS which perfectly nails the sweet spot as a backend for blogs and web shops, or as a potential Oracle/MSSQL-killer dealing reliably with complex transactions and squillions of tables. I'm sure its creators see it as the latter, but I've always felt that adding transactions and referential integrity was a bit like putting airbags on a pushbike...
Apple's rumored iSlate, an iPhone
I think that's the point: iSlates and competing tablets can be marketed as a better way of running iPhone/Android-style "Apps(tm)" rather than as a way of running desktop PC applicatons - which is what the netbook has become.
Had the original eeePC 700 been a better product (better battery life, better Linux distro, better tailoring of the UI and applications to work on a tiny screen) then maybe the original concept would have take off. As it was, it kickstarted the market for small, cheap (mainly) Windows laptops that could do everything a desktop PC could, and the original concept was effectivey abandoned.
The new "tablets" have the advantage that they will be building on established, non-PC platforms with established software bases (its not all fart apps) and developer communities, running OSs and applcations designed from the ground up for use on small, touchscreen devices and making full use of new tricks such as multitouch and accelerometers.
Because time_t is signed, that gives us the range of 1901 December 13 20:45:52 UTC to 2038 January 19 03:14:07 UTC.
Damn - if only those 6th Century monks had thought of that we wouldn't now be arguing over whether today is the start of a new decade!
Except Jean-Luc Picard is (a) ficticious and, worse still (b) French so he wouldn't be allowed to use the title anyway...
(Obviously, France has annexed Yorkshire by the time of Star Trek...)
and his recent performance of Hamlet was sold out over its entire run a long time before it started, and was also televised by the BBC on Christmas day.
Was that the thing that went on for hours and seemed to consist of The Doctor* and Capt. Picard standing up and quoting a lot of lines and episode titles from Star Trek and Babylon 5?
(OK, I'm being silly - but if you want a good cultural drinking game, watch Hamlet and down a shot every time you recognise something from a SF show...)
(*As in Doctor Who, but if I called him "Doctor Who" I'd risk starting a pedantry cascade...)
This guy/gal needs to have their head examined
As an enthusiastic OS X user, though, I'd conceed that the first few releases were not much use. However, that's mainly because of lack of native software support - it always looked a million dollars. Mind you, he does seem to have a revisionist history concerning the original reaction to XP...
The big achievement of OS X, however, was that in the space of a few years, Apple moved their entire user base over to a completely new, non-binary compatible, UNIX-based system. XP was always hamstrung by legacy issues.
You're a hardware engineer, aren't you. :)
No - if he was he'd understand about appropriate precision and wouldn't be arguing about a +/-1 year error on a datum point only known to the nearest 30 years or so...
Also, there may not have been a "0 AD" but, equally, there wasn't a 1AD, 2AD, etc. - at least not that people knew about at the time - since the numbering system wasn't devised until the sixth century.
So while you've worked out that a Roman coin with the date "52 BC" is probably a fake, I'm afraid your special souveneir "review of the noulghty-noulghties" edition of the i>Galillee Times dated "AD 11"is a bit iffy, too...
no, at 25 dec 10 he became 9 years old
Actually, calendar changes notwithstandig, a quick glance at Wikipedia suggests that the one thing that can be stated with certanty is that he wasn't born in 1AD, so arguing over a +/- 1 year discrepancy is kinda futile.
(Not to mention the difficulty of being born on a fixed calendar date and dying on a date determined by the phase of the moon).
That's assuming that he isn't just a gestalt of various prophets and political figures...