The BBC oringinally planned to make its old content available to the whole world for free. Why not? It's already paid for. But then the media tycoons who salivate over the superior product of the public broadcaster (the sort of content which they refuse to pay to create) put huge pressure on Tony Blair's government to restrict the impact of the public broadcasting model on commercial broadcasters. The BBC was far too successful. It made far too much money. Besides, these media tycoons couldn't own it. That was the worst part. So Rupert Murdoch and others made it clear they would trash-talk the Labour Party in their newspapers if the BBC wasn't limited in who it would deliver free, superior content to. It's part of a much larger story. But that's essentially it. The people of the world have been prevented from seeing these great old shows because the few media tycoons who control commercial broadcasting in English-speaking world don't like competition with superior product based on a public model.
At least we know which model works best....the public one.
The first "large" RAM drive I ever saw was a 1GB shoebox that cost $300,000 that sat at the heart of one of Telecom New Zealand's number look-up services. A decade later we have 160GB flash drives that cost a tiny fraction of that. Good. I want one.:-)
They still do put out complete garbage. There wasn't a single movie this year I felt I HAD to see...and a few I wish I hadn't. I did like "Across the Universe" - the Beatles tribute psychedelic thing....mainly because it was different. I have to admit I'm too old for most of the "formula" movies. Seen one, seen a hundred. They're for younger viewers who haven't seen quite so many of the same sort of movie. I hate admitting that.:-)
The iPhone looked REALLY cool. I was hoping to buy one. But then I find it's locked to one telco and won't be available in my country until.....oh who knows.
Meanwhile, there are other cool products appearing that aren't as restricted and are even cheaper. Some combination of an ASUS eeePC and a cheap, pre-pay GSM cell phone might be the best way to go. Cell calls when you need'em and wireless Net with Skype when you don't. Plus the webcam. Plus Firefox. Plus Open Office, Java.....etc....etc....all for less than an iPhone.
A better solution to the security issues in the long run would be to stop lying to invade other countries and to stop supporting anyone who resorts to force instead of talking through problems. There may be a few exceptions....but they would be very few. Even Israel / Palestine would become tractable if the US stopped feeding it with money to sustain the unsustainable. Every time peace threatens to break out some land may be swapped to win peace, the extremists in the Israeli government provoke trouble so they won't have to give back any more West Bank settlements. The track record on that could not be more clear. That state of affairs wins enemies for America who see the US propping up the oppressors. They aren't completely wrong in thinking that.
Microsoft and Intel would have been working together to make the PC a crap gaming platform....in order to force people to buy XBox. Anyone else see that coming years ago? I sure did. The PC could run *anyone's* games. For free. Bad and wrong in the eyes of the monopolists.
You're right, of course. The real threat is from all the sheep who comply, not the wolves to avoid and circumvent the rules. Who started a war in Iraq? A woman with hand cream boarding a plane? No..It was the President who lied about weapons that didn't exist, then destroyed the emails that would have demonstrated they all lied. He's still in office, atop his pile of corpses. The woman still doesn't have her hand cream. The security industry is only effective at wasting vast sums of money and slowing everything down. Makes one grumpy just to htink about the farce that has been going on for years.....and that John McCain supported and still supports...and people will vote for him, too. Numb nuts that they are. OK...mark me off topic if you want, but this is the REAL story here, not nudey x-rays.
I've tried voice interfaces before. IBM' OS/2 had great voice support. But the problem was that you make NOISE...and what you say isn't private....and people around you don't want to HEAR your interface-chatter.
Voice works OK for occasional hands-free operation of a cell phone, but even there, you don't necessarily want everyone know who you're calling and when.
Noise is an imposition on shared space. I don't want your noise and you probably don't want mine. Touch makes a lot more sense. I'd use it.
Why do you think he wanted to stop there? Next logical step would be to blow up Rupert Murdoch.....One of the primary corruptors of the FCC....and the politicians who control it.
So you can't play Youtube vids on the iPhone? I can play them just fine on my Samsung a900 cell phone. The iPhone is already very expensive. Wy I want to apy more for less functionality than a phone costing half as much? My current cellphone is a Huawei badged as Vodafone and costing - full price - about US120. I can check my gmail on it. I can watch mobel TV (9 channels). It's a camera, still and video, it plays MP3s and will play an 3gp vid I copy to it from my laptop. Why would I pay 5-7 times as muc for a phone that does basically the same things? If I want Wifi, I'll get an ASUS eeePC.....for less than an iPhone. Using Skype, it can be a MUCH cheaper "cell phone" anyway. Apple shouldn't get too up themselves over their cool toys. Other devices are close enough and cheap enough....and more open to use on a variety of networks.
My 19yo daughter is planning to do some travelling this year to foreign lands and ws thinking she should buy a laptop. I showed her the Eee PC and asked if that was the sort of thing she had in mind.
Oh YEAH! Small, cheap, Wi-Fi, functioning webcam, USB ports, Skype preloaded, web browser, e-mail, Open Office......everything.
Key advantages were small and cheap. The strong Internet and video / phone features just made it perfect.
She's about as mainstream as they come.
SONY should be worried....and consider offering a premium version of a small, light laptop like the Eee.
Not sure how you could run Windows on it, though. That would tend to push the spec out....and increase costs. Plus XP is on the way out according to Microsoft....and Vista simply can't DO what Linux can do on these wee PCs.
Hardware vendors were told to sell Vista-only. XP would have cost me $100 extra ona new laptop a year ago.
I bought another GB of RAM for the laptop for a total of 1.5GB....and it runs pretty much the same as XP or Linux in 512MB.
My issue is the HUGE range of apps and hardware for which there is no Vista support......though the hardware support is increasing steadily as time passes. But it seems to me that roughly 75% of time when I want to install a Win32 app that is says "XP and 2k only" .
I have learned to heed that warning as meaning don't even tr it. I've alreadyhad to completely re-install Vista once for having ignored that and installed the software anyway (Motorola bluetooth USB dongle and software).
They want to make the Internet like US daytime TV....sanitized, controlled, no disturbing messages. Nothing to challene the status quo. Upsetting people with reality is bad for the economy. Bad for business. Keep them fat, happy and ignorant. That's all 90% of the sheeple aspire to be anyway. It's the other 10% who run the world while the sheeple are goofing off.
Filter the Internet. No one should responsible or even awake.
What you say makes sense.
I suppose a developer could give the software away and then sell services around it. That is one popular way of making a living in the open source world.
If Microsoft them wanted to commercialise the software, presumably thye would have to negotiate with the developer for the NON-Microsoft aspects of the functionality.....assuming they aren't GPL'd anyway.
One point I'm not clear on: Could you isolate and separate the GPL parts and the Microsoft parts so there was no confusion?
My daughter saw her first ASUS EEE 701 laptop today. It runs linux, has wireless, a webcam, Open Office, mail, web browser, audio and video players.....a flash memory socket, but no CD drive. The screen is 7" and the size of the whole wee beast was VERY much to her liking. She's thinking if she can get Skype on it, in combination with the wireless, she'll have her "phone" neds catered for too. With no hard drive, I'm thinking the battery might last very well. She wants one.....and that wasn't just becasue it was the cheapest by far. For her - it was the BEST.
Once again we see why commercial health care doesn't work. The profit motive provides HUGE incentive to deprive people of coverage.
A universal system, funded either by a universal flat levy or a tagged portion of tax, would make such exclusions both irrelevant and contrary to the PRIMARY goal of providing appropriate and sufficient health care to people who need it. The young and healthy of course subsidise the care of the very young and the old and the injured. That is what insurance IS: spreading risk across a broad enough group to make the final cost an average of the wellbeing of EVERY person.
The US health care model is deranged and dysfunctional...and the big profits that generates sees it stay that way...and the propaganda that money pays for has for decades tricked Americans into thinking there is no better way.
If they stopped warring with the world, the cost of meeting health care requirements would be easily funded by7 what is currently wasted on "defense" spending.
Obvious enough to pretty much everyone everywhere.......
Vista works fine on my Acer laptop with 1.5GB of RAM. It ran like a one-legged dog until I upgraded from 512MB to 1.5GB.
The problem I have with Vista is that a huge number of Windows programs don't work on it or aren't fully supported and parts of them don't work. Then there is the problem of devices with drivers for XP only....and I learned the HARD way that you don't just try to use those anyway. I had to do a full reload from installation DVD to get out of the hole I dug trying that one.
Xandros Linux is in many respects better than Vista.....except for Internet video, video editing and wireless device support. Those are the three things keeping on Vista on my laptop. Otherwise I'd load Linux on there and not look back.
The Germans who built Ulysses for the ESA can be proud of their work. Over-design and system redundancy would be essential features of any craft that can't be accessed and repaired.
...and the crazy people seek out the guns because.......of gun culture. The same way stalkers are attracted to Hollywood stars.
People who live in countries without US "gun culture" notice that crazies don't shoot people en masse anywhere near as often...and those who do were usually walking watching American "gun culture" / generally violent movies. You know the ones: No one talks about problems - they shoot them.
Gun culture seeds the mind of the crazies with the dream of going out in a hail of bullets.
MMC Monster: "The promise is to not litigate if you use their patents/documents for non-commercial applications."
So Microsoft promise not to sue people who don't have any money anyway.
Woohoo!!!!!
But it does seem to allow people to write free (as in beer) software and give it away. "How can it be commercial software? I'm giving it away."
Yeah. I was silly enough to buy the Oxford English Dictionary CD (equivalent to 20+ hardcover books - EVERY word in the English language) a few years ago. It cost me $800. The software that accesses the data on the CD only works on Win9x and an upgrade is very expensive. There are definitely people out there who are good at what they do, but creating and supporting software around their core competency isn't what they are good at.
I can understand that. A carpenter makes a chair, it lasts for decades. But someone makes a piece of software and it lasts maybe 5 years then has to be re-made? For people who work on long time scales, that is too frequent for them.
You're more likely to run out of food first.....as land is converted to grow fodder for bio-fuels. Where i live they are already saying that bread being 20% more expensive than a year ago is due to a shortage of wheat.......due to people switching to corn for bio fuels.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, the Earth was tropical and lush virtually from pole to pole. Then the incremental effects of perpetual sequestration of greenhouse gases by eons of plant growth essentially cooled the planet and left it as it is today.
Maybe we should be freeing carbon? Maybe what we have been doing is actually turning the clock back to more lush and life-sustaining Earth? (With a reduced landmass......true...)
Slashdot Mirror
The BBC oringinally planned to make its old content available to the whole world for free. Why not? It's already paid for. But then the media tycoons who salivate over the superior product of the public broadcaster (the sort of content which they refuse to pay to create) put huge pressure on Tony Blair's government to restrict the impact of the public broadcasting model on commercial broadcasters. The BBC was far too successful. It made far too much money. Besides, these media tycoons couldn't own it. That was the worst part. So Rupert Murdoch and others made it clear they would trash-talk the Labour Party in their newspapers if the BBC wasn't limited in who it would deliver free, superior content to. It's part of a much larger story. But that's essentially it. The people of the world have been prevented from seeing these great old shows because the few media tycoons who control commercial broadcasting in English-speaking world don't like competition with superior product based on a public model. At least we know which model works best....the public one.
The first "large" RAM drive I ever saw was a 1GB shoebox that cost $300,000 that sat at the heart of one of Telecom New Zealand's number look-up services. A decade later we have 160GB flash drives that cost a tiny fraction of that. Good. I want one. :-)
They still do put out complete garbage. There wasn't a single movie this year I felt I HAD to see...and a few I wish I hadn't. I did like "Across the Universe" - the Beatles tribute psychedelic thing....mainly because it was different. I have to admit I'm too old for most of the "formula" movies. Seen one, seen a hundred. They're for younger viewers who haven't seen quite so many of the same sort of movie. I hate admitting that. :-)
The iPhone looked REALLY cool. I was hoping to buy one. But then I find it's locked to one telco and won't be available in my country until.....oh who knows. Meanwhile, there are other cool products appearing that aren't as restricted and are even cheaper. Some combination of an ASUS eeePC and a cheap, pre-pay GSM cell phone might be the best way to go. Cell calls when you need'em and wireless Net with Skype when you don't. Plus the webcam. Plus Firefox. Plus Open Office, Java.....etc....etc....all for less than an iPhone.
A better solution to the security issues in the long run would be to stop lying to invade other countries and to stop supporting anyone who resorts to force instead of talking through problems. There may be a few exceptions....but they would be very few. Even Israel / Palestine would become tractable if the US stopped feeding it with money to sustain the unsustainable. Every time peace threatens to break out some land may be swapped to win peace, the extremists in the Israeli government provoke trouble so they won't have to give back any more West Bank settlements. The track record on that could not be more clear. That state of affairs wins enemies for America who see the US propping up the oppressors. They aren't completely wrong in thinking that.
Microsoft and Intel would have been working together to make the PC a crap gaming platform....in order to force people to buy XBox. Anyone else see that coming years ago? I sure did. The PC could run *anyone's* games. For free. Bad and wrong in the eyes of the monopolists.
You're right, of course. The real threat is from all the sheep who comply, not the wolves to avoid and circumvent the rules. Who started a war in Iraq? A woman with hand cream boarding a plane? No..It was the President who lied about weapons that didn't exist, then destroyed the emails that would have demonstrated they all lied. He's still in office, atop his pile of corpses. The woman still doesn't have her hand cream. The security industry is only effective at wasting vast sums of money and slowing everything down. Makes one grumpy just to htink about the farce that has been going on for years.....and that John McCain supported and still supports...and people will vote for him, too. Numb nuts that they are. OK...mark me off topic if you want, but this is the REAL story here, not nudey x-rays.
Problem revealed and confirmed: crooks are running the country.
I've tried voice interfaces before. IBM' OS/2 had great voice support. But the problem was that you make NOISE...and what you say isn't private....and people around you don't want to HEAR your interface-chatter. Voice works OK for occasional hands-free operation of a cell phone, but even there, you don't necessarily want everyone know who you're calling and when. Noise is an imposition on shared space. I don't want your noise and you probably don't want mine. Touch makes a lot more sense. I'd use it.
Why do you think he wanted to stop there? Next logical step would be to blow up Rupert Murdoch.....One of the primary corruptors of the FCC....and the politicians who control it.
So you can't play Youtube vids on the iPhone? I can play them just fine on my Samsung a900 cell phone. The iPhone is already very expensive. Wy I want to apy more for less functionality than a phone costing half as much? My current cellphone is a Huawei badged as Vodafone and costing - full price - about US120. I can check my gmail on it. I can watch mobel TV (9 channels). It's a camera, still and video, it plays MP3s and will play an 3gp vid I copy to it from my laptop. Why would I pay 5-7 times as muc for a phone that does basically the same things? If I want Wifi, I'll get an ASUS eeePC.....for less than an iPhone. Using Skype, it can be a MUCH cheaper "cell phone" anyway. Apple shouldn't get too up themselves over their cool toys. Other devices are close enough and cheap enough....and more open to use on a variety of networks.
My 19yo daughter is planning to do some travelling this year to foreign lands and ws thinking she should buy a laptop. I showed her the Eee PC and asked if that was the sort of thing she had in mind. Oh YEAH! Small, cheap, Wi-Fi, functioning webcam, USB ports, Skype preloaded, web browser, e-mail, Open Office......everything. Key advantages were small and cheap. The strong Internet and video / phone features just made it perfect. She's about as mainstream as they come. SONY should be worried....and consider offering a premium version of a small, light laptop like the Eee. Not sure how you could run Windows on it, though. That would tend to push the spec out....and increase costs. Plus XP is on the way out according to Microsoft....and Vista simply can't DO what Linux can do on these wee PCs.
Hardware vendors were told to sell Vista-only. XP would have cost me $100 extra ona new laptop a year ago. I bought another GB of RAM for the laptop for a total of 1.5GB....and it runs pretty much the same as XP or Linux in 512MB. My issue is the HUGE range of apps and hardware for which there is no Vista support......though the hardware support is increasing steadily as time passes. But it seems to me that roughly 75% of time when I want to install a Win32 app that is says "XP and 2k only" . I have learned to heed that warning as meaning don't even tr it. I've alreadyhad to completely re-install Vista once for having ignored that and installed the software anyway (Motorola bluetooth USB dongle and software).
They want to make the Internet like US daytime TV....sanitized, controlled, no disturbing messages. Nothing to challene the status quo. Upsetting people with reality is bad for the economy. Bad for business. Keep them fat, happy and ignorant. That's all 90% of the sheeple aspire to be anyway. It's the other 10% who run the world while the sheeple are goofing off. Filter the Internet. No one should responsible or even awake.
What you say makes sense. I suppose a developer could give the software away and then sell services around it. That is one popular way of making a living in the open source world. If Microsoft them wanted to commercialise the software, presumably thye would have to negotiate with the developer for the NON-Microsoft aspects of the functionality.....assuming they aren't GPL'd anyway. One point I'm not clear on: Could you isolate and separate the GPL parts and the Microsoft parts so there was no confusion?
My daughter saw her first ASUS EEE 701 laptop today. It runs linux, has wireless, a webcam, Open Office, mail, web browser, audio and video players.....a flash memory socket, but no CD drive. The screen is 7" and the size of the whole wee beast was VERY much to her liking. She's thinking if she can get Skype on it, in combination with the wireless, she'll have her "phone" neds catered for too. With no hard drive, I'm thinking the battery might last very well. She wants one.....and that wasn't just becasue it was the cheapest by far. For her - it was the BEST.
Once again we see why commercial health care doesn't work. The profit motive provides HUGE incentive to deprive people of coverage. A universal system, funded either by a universal flat levy or a tagged portion of tax, would make such exclusions both irrelevant and contrary to the PRIMARY goal of providing appropriate and sufficient health care to people who need it. The young and healthy of course subsidise the care of the very young and the old and the injured. That is what insurance IS: spreading risk across a broad enough group to make the final cost an average of the wellbeing of EVERY person. The US health care model is deranged and dysfunctional...and the big profits that generates sees it stay that way...and the propaganda that money pays for has for decades tricked Americans into thinking there is no better way. If they stopped warring with the world, the cost of meeting health care requirements would be easily funded by7 what is currently wasted on "defense" spending. Obvious enough to pretty much everyone everywhere.......
Vista works fine on my Acer laptop with 1.5GB of RAM. It ran like a one-legged dog until I upgraded from 512MB to 1.5GB. The problem I have with Vista is that a huge number of Windows programs don't work on it or aren't fully supported and parts of them don't work. Then there is the problem of devices with drivers for XP only....and I learned the HARD way that you don't just try to use those anyway. I had to do a full reload from installation DVD to get out of the hole I dug trying that one. Xandros Linux is in many respects better than Vista.....except for Internet video, video editing and wireless device support. Those are the three things keeping on Vista on my laptop. Otherwise I'd load Linux on there and not look back.
The Germans who built Ulysses for the ESA can be proud of their work. Over-design and system redundancy would be essential features of any craft that can't be accessed and repaired.
...and the crazy people seek out the guns because.......of gun culture. The same way stalkers are attracted to Hollywood stars. People who live in countries without US "gun culture" notice that crazies don't shoot people en masse anywhere near as often...and those who do were usually walking watching American "gun culture" / generally violent movies. You know the ones: No one talks about problems - they shoot them. Gun culture seeds the mind of the crazies with the dream of going out in a hail of bullets.
MMC Monster: "The promise is to not litigate if you use their patents/documents for non-commercial applications." So Microsoft promise not to sue people who don't have any money anyway. Woohoo!!!!! But it does seem to allow people to write free (as in beer) software and give it away. "How can it be commercial software? I'm giving it away."
Yeah. I was silly enough to buy the Oxford English Dictionary CD (equivalent to 20+ hardcover books - EVERY word in the English language) a few years ago. It cost me $800. The software that accesses the data on the CD only works on Win9x and an upgrade is very expensive. There are definitely people out there who are good at what they do, but creating and supporting software around their core competency isn't what they are good at. I can understand that. A carpenter makes a chair, it lasts for decades. But someone makes a piece of software and it lasts maybe 5 years then has to be re-made? For people who work on long time scales, that is too frequent for them.
Most existing Windows software isn't supported on Vista anyway.....Trying buying any language tutorials ....XP or 2K only.
You're more likely to run out of food first.....as land is converted to grow fodder for bio-fuels. Where i live they are already saying that bread being 20% more expensive than a year ago is due to a shortage of wheat.......due to people switching to corn for bio fuels.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, the Earth was tropical and lush virtually from pole to pole. Then the incremental effects of perpetual sequestration of greenhouse gases by eons of plant growth essentially cooled the planet and left it as it is today.
Maybe we should be freeing carbon? Maybe what we have been doing is actually turning the clock back to more lush and life-sustaining Earth? (With a reduced landmass......true...)