Social contract, my ass. If sites want to force users to view their ads, they can run us through a registration process and make us sign a usage agreement. Otherwise, I haven't commited to anything. A contract that is not legally enforceable is no contract at all. It might be considered "rude" or "in bad taste" or even "parasitic", but it ain't a "contract".
The concepts sound similar. The difference is that WiMax/802.16 will be an open standard with equipment available from multiple vendors and not a proprietary Motorola product.
When providing broadband to a large area becomes little more expensive than throwing up a cell tower, we will probably see the cellular providers add broadband to their services and maybe even get honest-to-goodness price competition going. In any event, it will get us away from the wired monopolies.
The idea of patents was developed in a simpler time when the rate of progress was slower and new ideas only expanded upon, at most, a handful of existing patents that were still in effect.
Today, the rate of change is so fast and most products are so complex that any new idea builds upon dozens or hundreds of active patents. That is why you see chains of patent violation claims like Tivo suing Echostar at the same time that Forgent is suing Tivo. Almost no product is standalone any more. Patents have mutated from protecting a single idea into being part of a company's "nuclear arsenal". You sue us for violating patents a,b, and c and we'll sue you for violating x,y, and z. IBM may have a lot of patents and derive a good amount of income from them, but I think they are fairly restrained compared to many other companies. If IBM was really nasty about enforcing all their patents aggressively, they could make life miserable for a large percentage of all companies in existance.
Smaller companies that actually try to produce a product are at the biggest disadvantage under this system. Chances are they're violating one or more patents by larger companies or they come close enough that they could be forced to prove they're not. It's the little companies that have patented some idea and don't actually produce products based on it that are profiting. They can just sit back and sue anybody who comes close to violating their unused patent.
From an admittedly lay perspective, it appears to me that 1) the duration of patents needs to be shortened, 2) that the owner of a patent should be required to actively attempt to implement or profit from it from the beginning. This crap where companies nobody ever heard of decide 10 years later to shake down everybody using JPEG or GIF for royalties must stop!, 3) full disclosure of patents must be legally required if a company is going to participate in any standards setting group. Example for this is Rambus participating in developing the SDRAM standard and then, after it became a huge success, announcing they owned a patent that covered part of the standard., and 4) like everyone else is saying - patents for ideas that are either obvious or prior art should be harder to get and easier to invalidate.
My goal is to keep the teenage wannabe hackers in my neighborhood from downloading pr0n over my wifi connection, not to block the FBI, CIA, NSA, or any other government TLA.
What percentage of people skip the "sale" just because they don't want to mess with rebates. I know Best Buy has lost a lot of my business over the last few years because they never put anything on sale, they just pile on multiple rebates. I just say screw it and order from Newegg or some other online site with a decent, no hassle price.
Heck, they even vary the price based on what system it is for. I was looking for laptop memory from them recently. I noticed that the exact same part number was either $124 or $140 depending on which Dell laptop you were ordering it for.
from the DVD-Audio vs. SACD debacle? Not having a single clear upgrade path, not being able to play them on a PC (okay, there is finally limited PC support), not being able to play them in the car, and not being allowed to have a digital connection to a receiver and being forced to connect 6 cables made both formats non-starters. Let's hope these new formats are not similarly crippled.
Why I buy DVD season sets of TV shows. Better picture, no commercials, and no care when the broadcast show airs or how much off from hour or half-hour boundaries it runs.
Of course if everybody only bought the DVD sets, the broadcast episodes would have poor ratings and the show would get cancelled and never be released on DVD. I wonder if direct to DVD "television" shows could be economically feasible.
It amazes me that in this age of science, we're still debating ancient religious nonsense. There is overwhelming evidence that life started as single-celled organisms 3.5 billion years ago and has been evolving into more complex forms in order to adapt to environmental conditions and competitive pressures ever since. You could claim that a god triggered the big bang, but it looks like the universe has been running on the autopilot of physical laws ever since and not any intelligent design.
If there is a god and the bible is true, then god is a pretty sadistic being. The only qualifier for going to heaven vs. hell is belief in this being. But god makes no appearances and instead has left us with a universe that appears to run purely on laws of nature and where, as best we can tell, life appears to have evolved unassisted for billions of years. I guess fossils are god's little practical jokes. If god would show up in Oral Roberts' thousand foot form and smite some heathens on national TV, then we'd all line up at the church doors.
And what's with this Jesus story? A married woman was supposedly still a virgin and her son was actually god's kid instead? Yeah, right. Too bad there was no DNA testing back in those days. So god knocked up this married virgin in order to create a son, so that the nice people of earth could kill him and let him serve as a scapegoat for their sins so god wouldn't have to send all of them to hell. What kind of bizarre accounting is that? Then after he was killed, this Jesus came back from the dead. How do we know? Because his followers said so. He would have made a lot more converts if he'd walked back into the Roman barracks after arising.
Maybe the human race really does have some gene that predisposes them to belief in the supernatural. I see how hoaxes and urban legends spread like wildfire even today, when we're supposedly better educated in logical thought and we have cameras and camcorders all over the place to capture everything that happens. Two thousand years ago, before the scientific method and logical reasoning were even a twinkle in anyone's eye (well, maybe Aristotle's), superstition reigned. Some may see the Bible as the word of god (How do we know? because god said so. How do we know he said so? Because it's in the Bible). I see it as a collection of some history, some exaggerations, some folklore, some legends, and some out and out lies by people promoting a cause. Tales of a local flood passed down a few generations becomes a great flood that covered the entire earth and wiped out all the unworthy. Have you ever played the game where you line several people up, whisper something to the first person, and have each person repeat it to the next person in a whisper? What come out the far end often bears no resemblence to what was originally said. While some of the tales in the Bible may have a nugget of truth in them, they have likely been distorted almost out of recognition and a supernatural element tacked on.
Anyway, to quote from D&D, I disbelieve!
Actually, my tastes aren't met by the clear channel homogenized FM stations. I like groups that you can rarely find CDs for in places like Best Buy and you rarely hear anything from them played on FM. For example, I can hear progressive groups like Cairo, Dream Theater, Spock's Beard, Transatlantic, The Flower Kings, etc. on XM 51 that I have never heard on FM. XM is like cable for radio. It supports smaller niche genres nationwide that could never be supported by FM in a single market.
Does this also record on standard DVD+/-R discs? If not, then it's not really a DVD recorder and it should be called a Blu-Ray recorder or an HD-DVD recorder or something else. Since the new discs will not play in any current DVD players, they're not really "DVDs" any more that a DVD is a CD.
It insulates against heat and provides a firm surface to set the laptop on, which lets air circulate in the little gap below the laptop resting on its feet.
I expect the release of Nikon's D70 will cause Canon to come out with a more full-featured entry level model anyway, so hacking the 300D will only appeal to people who already have one.
That's the great thing about technology - relentless upward pressure on features and downward pressure on price!
I can guarantee that's NOT going to be the retail price for this thing when released to the general public. The 80GB laptop drives can be found for as low as $190. Nobody's going to pay 4 times the price for a 25% increase in capacity. (Now if we were talking Intel chip speeds, that'd be different)
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Brother Maynard, bring out the holy hand grenade...
have been giving thumbs down to Microsoft for years.
Social contract, my ass. If sites want to force users to view their ads, they can run us through a registration process and make us sign a usage agreement. Otherwise, I haven't commited to anything. A contract that is not legally enforceable is no contract at all. It might be considered "rude" or "in bad taste" or even "parasitic", but it ain't a "contract".
The concepts sound similar. The difference is that WiMax/802.16 will be an open standard with equipment available from multiple vendors and not a proprietary Motorola product.
When providing broadband to a large area becomes little more expensive than throwing up a cell tower, we will probably see the cellular providers add broadband to their services and maybe even get honest-to-goodness price competition going. In any event, it will get us away from the wired monopolies.
The idea of patents was developed in a simpler time when the rate of progress was slower and new ideas only expanded upon, at most, a handful of existing patents that were still in effect.
Today, the rate of change is so fast and most products are so complex that any new idea builds upon dozens or hundreds of active patents. That is why you see chains of patent violation claims like Tivo suing Echostar at the same time that Forgent is suing Tivo. Almost no product is standalone any more. Patents have mutated from protecting a single idea into being part of a company's "nuclear arsenal". You sue us for violating patents a,b, and c and we'll sue you for violating x,y, and z. IBM may have a lot of patents and derive a good amount of income from them, but I think they are fairly restrained compared to many other companies. If IBM was really nasty about enforcing all their patents aggressively, they could make life miserable for a large percentage of all companies in existance.
Smaller companies that actually try to produce a product are at the biggest disadvantage under this system. Chances are they're violating one or more patents by larger companies or they come close enough that they could be forced to prove they're not. It's the little companies that have patented some idea and don't actually produce products based on it that are profiting. They can just sit back and sue anybody who comes close to violating their unused patent.
From an admittedly lay perspective, it appears to me that 1) the duration of patents needs to be shortened, 2) that the owner of a patent should be required to actively attempt to implement or profit from it from the beginning. This crap where companies nobody ever heard of decide 10 years later to shake down everybody using JPEG or GIF for royalties must stop!, 3) full disclosure of patents must be legally required if a company is going to participate in any standards setting group. Example for this is Rambus participating in developing the SDRAM standard and then, after it became a huge success, announcing they owned a patent that covered part of the standard., and 4) like everyone else is saying - patents for ideas that are either obvious or prior art should be harder to get and easier to invalidate.
My goal is to keep the teenage wannabe hackers in my neighborhood from downloading pr0n over my wifi connection, not to block the FBI, CIA, NSA, or any other government TLA.
For finding any real news of interest.
What percentage of people skip the "sale" just because they don't want to mess with rebates. I know Best Buy has lost a lot of my business over the last few years because they never put anything on sale, they just pile on multiple rebates. I just say screw it and order from Newegg or some other online site with a decent, no hassle price.
The Force has a strong influence on the weak minded
to the old Star Trek episode, Miri?
Heck, they even vary the price based on what system it is for. I was looking for laptop memory from them recently. I noticed that the exact same part number was either $124 or $140 depending on which Dell laptop you were ordering it for.
a higher engineer to lawyer ratio?
I better start shopping for a bigger hard drive.
from the DVD-Audio vs. SACD debacle? Not having a single clear upgrade path, not being able to play them on a PC (okay, there is finally limited PC support), not being able to play them in the car, and not being allowed to have a digital connection to a receiver and being forced to connect 6 cables made both formats non-starters. Let's hope these new formats are not similarly crippled.
is like that old commercial where the guy puts his unprotected arm in a tank full of mosquitos.
Why I buy DVD season sets of TV shows. Better picture, no commercials, and no care when the broadcast show airs or how much off from hour or half-hour boundaries it runs.
Of course if everybody only bought the DVD sets, the broadcast episodes would have poor ratings and the show would get cancelled and never be released on DVD. I wonder if direct to DVD "television" shows could be economically feasible.
It amazes me that in this age of science, we're still debating ancient religious nonsense. There is overwhelming evidence that life started as single-celled organisms 3.5 billion years ago and has been evolving into more complex forms in order to adapt to environmental conditions and competitive pressures ever since. You could claim that a god triggered the big bang, but it looks like the universe has been running on the autopilot of physical laws ever since and not any intelligent design.
If there is a god and the bible is true, then god is a pretty sadistic being. The only qualifier for going to heaven vs. hell is belief in this being. But god makes no appearances and instead has left us with a universe that appears to run purely on laws of nature and where, as best we can tell, life appears to have evolved unassisted for billions of years. I guess fossils are god's little practical jokes. If god would show up in Oral Roberts' thousand foot form and smite some heathens on national TV, then we'd all line up at the church doors.
And what's with this Jesus story? A married woman was supposedly still a virgin and her son was actually god's kid instead? Yeah, right. Too bad there was no DNA testing back in those days. So god knocked up this married virgin in order to create a son, so that the nice people of earth could kill him and let him serve as a scapegoat for their sins so god wouldn't have to send all of them to hell. What kind of bizarre accounting is that? Then after he was killed, this Jesus came back from the dead. How do we know? Because his followers said so. He would have made a lot more converts if he'd walked back into the Roman barracks after arising.
Maybe the human race really does have some gene that predisposes them to belief in the supernatural. I see how hoaxes and urban legends spread like wildfire even today, when we're supposedly better educated in logical thought and we have cameras and camcorders all over the place to capture everything that happens. Two thousand years ago, before the scientific method and logical reasoning were even a twinkle in anyone's eye (well, maybe Aristotle's), superstition reigned. Some may see the Bible as the word of god (How do we know? because god said so. How do we know he said so? Because it's in the Bible). I see it as a collection of some history, some exaggerations, some folklore, some legends, and some out and out lies by people promoting a cause. Tales of a local flood passed down a few generations becomes a great flood that covered the entire earth and wiped out all the unworthy. Have you ever played the game where you line several people up, whisper something to the first person, and have each person repeat it to the next person in a whisper? What come out the far end often bears no resemblence to what was originally said. While some of the tales in the Bible may have a nugget of truth in them, they have likely been distorted almost out of recognition and a supernatural element tacked on.
Anyway, to quote from D&D, I disbelieve!
Actually, my tastes aren't met by the clear channel homogenized FM stations. I like groups that you can rarely find CDs for in places like Best Buy and you rarely hear anything from them played on FM. For example, I can hear progressive groups like Cairo, Dream Theater, Spock's Beard, Transatlantic, The Flower Kings, etc. on XM 51 that I have never heard on FM. XM is like cable for radio. It supports smaller niche genres nationwide that could never be supported by FM in a single market.
Does this also record on standard DVD+/-R discs? If not, then it's not really a DVD recorder and it should be called a Blu-Ray recorder or an HD-DVD recorder or something else. Since the new discs will not play in any current DVD players, they're not really "DVDs" any more that a DVD is a CD.
where we'd be if they'd continued the X-15 and Dynasoar rocket plane projects instead of sinking a gazillion dollars into the space shuttle.
It insulates against heat and provides a firm surface to set the laptop on, which lets air circulate in the little gap below the laptop resting on its feet.
That's the great thing about technology - relentless upward pressure on features and downward pressure on price!
That's one way to get them to move to digital TV faster - crowd them out of the old analog channels.
I can guarantee that's NOT going to be the retail price for this thing when released to the general public. The 80GB laptop drives can be found for as low as $190. Nobody's going to pay 4 times the price for a 25% increase in capacity. (Now if we were talking Intel chip speeds, that'd be different)