What's going to get shut down by Apple? VoIP on the iPhone and iPod touch? Didn't Apple already announce that they were going to allow VoIP apps in the iTMS so long as they only used VoIP on WiFi connections (not on the cell phone data network)?
This is why I really hope we get some actually *open* wireless Internet built as a result of the analog TV spectrum being reallocated. I was very disappointed that the government didn't adopt the openness rules recommended by Google in the auction.
Imagine how great it would be to not be beholden to cell carriers, but to be able to buy any kind of Internet device you want, and use it as a phone if you want. It would open up competition between hardware manufacturers and service providers. Competition is good.
WTF? I say "If they think they can do it profitably and clean up after themselves then why not allow it?" and you think I'm in favor of a wild west mentality?
Maybe. If you're really saying "allow absolutely anyone who *thinks* that they can do it profitably and clean up after themselves." Otherwise, you're dealing with governmental regulations that will limit who can enter the market, which goes back to my question as to whether you can truly have a "free market" when it comes to building infrastructure.
I think one of my other posts might be more up your alley. I wouldn't suggest that we abandon the idea of allowing market forces to come into play, but I'm also not in favor of a wild-west mentality toward building infrastructure.
I think what lots of people fail to understand is the "governmental intervention" isn't always at odds with the idea of a "free market". Sometimes the government need to act in order to open a market to make it free. I think the idea should be to make the infrastructure (actual cabling and associated hardware) public, but probably charge a fee for using it. However, even that work of building and maintaining the infrastructure could be contracted out to a private company. It could even be owned by a private company, but in that case it should be *heavily* regulated to avoid unfair practices.
Verizon shouldn't be able to own the network and provide voice service in the same market. They also shouldn't be able to give preferential access to their business partners. If they're allowed to do anything like that, it will lead to an inherent conflict of interest which will eventually be abused.
What if several people want to dig up the same major road at various times. You don't want any kind of regulation there? No attempts to protect existing infrastructure from damage, or force companies to publicly document where their lines are going? Just nothing... a wild-west mentality toward building infrastructure. That sounds like a good idea?
I live in NYC in an expensive neighborhood, and though I suppose I have broadband, the highest upload rate I can get is 512k. That's kind of stupid. And there's no sign that it's going to get any better anytime soon.
Now, you might argue that it's because of too little regulation or too much regulation, but obviously someone is doing something wrong.
I'm sorry to go into a little off-topic rant here, but the lesson isn't really that consumer spending is good or consumer spending is bad, but that not all economic activity is created equal. You can't just say, "Hey consumers, spend as much as you want-- it doesn't matter what you spend it on-- and that will get us out of this mess!"
People spending money is good for the economy, but it has to be coupled with things like production, real wealth creation, and long-term investment. You can't have everyone in the country counting on house-flipping for their income without creating a bubble that will eventually burst.
This isn't just an issue for consumers, but it applies to the government as well. You can't simply cut taxes, flood everyone with cash, and hope that everything corrects itself-- at least not with the sorts of problems we currently have. You can't just throw all the money into building bridges to nowhere, either. You're going to have to find worthwhile projects and services that should have existed and should have been funded already, but have been sitting around in neglect from lack of funding. Luckily, there are a lot of projects and services out there like that.
We already paid $200 billion [newnetworks.com] for a nation wide fiber optics network that never delivered. When is anyone going to ask what happened to all that money?
This is the sort of thing that I don't understand. I can understand people being in favor of completely free markets, and I can understand people being in favor of governmental regulation. I think either can work fairly well, and both have down-sides, but why are people in favor of giving Verizon a monopoly and then not regulating the results? Why would the federal government give $200 billion and then not ask for an accounting of where the money went?
I think that's really where the economy fell down. Free market people and government intervention people have been fighting it out, and instead of picking either direction, they've compromised on, "Let's intervene by giving big companies stuff, but not bother to regulate what they do with what we give them!"
I don't think the government should ever subsidize anything without specifying what the money is going toward, requiring an accounting of every cent spent, and any money not spend on the stated goal should be subject to... what's the word? I feel like there's a word for when you pay someone and then later take it back because the money wasn't used how it was supposed to be used.
First, the infrastructure -- that is, the wires that carry the data, need to be owned and operated by an entity separate from the users of that system
This is (more or less) what I keep saying. It seems the monopoly/duopoly aspect of the Internet is only necessary for the actual hardware/infrastructure. Therefore, I'd propose that those monopolies/duopolies be permitted, but any company that builds/owns/maintains the hardware infrastructure be forbidden from actually providing services on that infrastructure. So if Verizon builds the actual network, then they can't also be an ISP, voice provider, or video provider. They should have to offer access to other companies (e.g. Speakeasy) who can then provide any services they want within a set agreement, and any access deal that is offered to any one company should be available to all companies (Verizon can't give a better deal to Time Warner than they offer to Speakeasy).
So in this example, the company building infrastructure would be heavily regulated, but the ISPs need not be. Real competition could kick in.
I'm sure lots of people will have a problem with the idea, and it will probably never happen, but I think it's the best solution.
How is helping broadband going to stimulate the economy?
Well, it seems like a silly question to me, but I'll go ahead and give it a stab anyway. First, building a ton of infrastructure means jobs of some kind. Someone has to dig the trenches. Someone has to build and operate the communications hubs that those trenches are connecting.
Beyond that, remember the tech boom of the 90s? Remember how that was this period of unprecedented economic growth? Honestly, yes, it was a bit of a bubble, but there was a lot of genuine growth there too. Do you know where that came from? The Internet. Largely, at least. The Internet allows businesses to operate more efficiently as well as opening new avenues for business. There are services that exist today that couldn't have existed before the Internet, and there are services that don't exist yet because our existing Internet is too slow.
Very often, improved infrastructure spurs economic growth, or at the very least supports economic growth.
On the other side of things, I'm wondering if, in the overall scheme of things, the value of x86-ness is all that high. I've been hearing that it's somewhat inferior for years, and the main reason that sort of architecture is still in use is mainly for compatibility reasons. OSX and Linux seem to be agile enough to switch between architectures with relative ease, so is the only hold-up Windows?
Do they mark on the packaging anywhere that it's for Apple Macintosh computers only? If yes, it's a software upgrade for computers that already have OSX installed, and not a "full" version for Dells. I'm not a fly on the wall so I can't speak as to why they chose certain wording on their marketing materials for one version or another.
That doesn't seem to me to prove evolution. You could say that god creates things that match, that go together, and He must have made a moth to match that flower.
Not that it's not an insightful prediction, and not that I believe in creationism at all, but it doesn't seem to me like that prediction is based on anything other than understanding the reproduction of flowers and knowing that, given that structure of flower, there must be an insect able to pollenate it.
Example; if someone said a watermelon is blue on the inside, but turns red when you cut it open, how could you prove them wrong? How could they prove they're right?
How can the inside of the watermelon be any color when there's no light shining on it?
the purpose of the alterations is to make it run on the non-Apple hardware.
And the license doesn't permit the software to be installed on non-Apple hardware, therefore the alterations are specifically for the purpose of breaking the license.
No, the purpose was to make the software work. Any potential license violation is incidental to that.
No, the purpose of the alterations are specifically to violate the license. If they were installing on Apple hardware, the alterations would not be at all necessary.
In law the intent matters.
Ok, so would you say that the intent of the law you cited was to allow people to sell altered versions of copyrighted works, just so long as the sole purpose of the alteration is to permit easier violation of the license agreement?
You're doing an amazing job of holding cognitive dissonance, and a spectacularly lousy one of convincing me that this bill should ever be passed.
Who says I'm trying to convince you? You're obviously going to rant and rave no matter what I say. Or don't you understand that you and I are competing over an audience, and I'm trying to convince them? I mean, at this point, I'm not going to even read your whole long post because it's kind of long meaningless angry nonsense that Rush Limbaugh or someone put in your head, and most likely no one else is listening, so what's the point?
But I am slightly curious-- what is it that you think ACORN does that you think it needs to be outlawed? I bet your the sort that argues that government shouldn't provide any kind of social services because it should be handled by community organizations, and then rants and raves about how all community organizations are evil because anything failing to turn a profit is a waste of money. The sort that thinks that capitalism is a moral code rather than an economic system, right?
ps- All your putting certain little phrases in bold really doesn't help. You may as well be writing your whole post in caps or something.
Well the purpose was explicitly to violate the license. That has to be meaningful, or else I could just violate software copyrights and distribution licenses willy-nilly so long as I bundled it with hardware.
The iPhone Screen seems a little too small for me, and for whatever reason I don't feel comfortable reading large amounts much from electronic devices. I've read that it's harder on the eyes to read from a back-lit screen, which seems to me like a plausible explanation of my difficulty. I'm not sure, but I definitely have some kind of issue reading large amounts of text from my laptop that doesn't show up when I'm reading a printed page.
I don't know that the Kindle would fix that, but that's part of the idea behind electronic ink, right? I think that if I could borrow someone's Kindle for a few weeks to try it out, I would. If it was actually comfortable to read that way, I would definitely consider paying $400 for it. I'm just not going to spend $400 without having some idea of what I'm getting into. I've never even seen one of these things in person, have no idea what the screen actually looks like, etc.
But then, to me it still goes back to this niggling problem that itches the back of my brain-- device consolidation. There was a time when I had an iPod, a cell phone, a PDA that I carried pretty much everywhere, plus a laptop that I carried lots of places. The iPhone let me bring it down to the iPhone and a laptop, and if I added a kindle to that, there would be something slightly silly in it. At least-- it seems a bit weird to me in my own head that a single device-- the iPhone-- can actually do most of what I really want to do when I'm "on the road", but the other two devices are just extra storage and additional screens. That's fine, but sometimes I just feel like I'm carrying an array of screens and redundant storage, and I can't help but wonder if it couldn't be done better.
Incidentally, this also brings up my beef about software updaters. I have no problem with them running once a week at startup, checking the net for an update and terminating. But these fuckers remain running in the background constantly like Google updater. Look, do I really care to know the second a new program is released, a new patch? Look, why can't you just tell me the next time I reboot? Or hell, just run the updater when I execute the specific program and piss off when finished.
I think Microsoft and Apple need to take a serious look at Linux package managers. It's funny, because a few years ago everyone was complaining about how installing Linux applications was too annoying, but with most things, you can open up the package manager, click on a few things, it will figure out all the packages you need, and then you hit "install" (or whatever). Even if it's some piece of software that isn't officially supported by the distro, a developer can run his own repository, and I can add the repository to my package manager, and so I can use a single package manager for everything. The result is much simpler to deal with IMO.
My point is developers shouldn't really be given room to make annoying updaters, because it's something the OS should do. Rather than having each app install its own updater, Apple and MS should open Software Update and Microsoft Update to be more like Linux package managers. Then the only issues are the security concerns of insuring the validity of repositories, making it clear to users what each repository is giving them, and making it easy for administrators to add/remove repositories.
I don't see what removing MySQL and LDAP have to do with "slimming an OS." These are things that very few people are ever going to use on their desktop and made no sense to install by default, anyway.
That sounds like "slimming down" to me. At least, I can understand what the poster is trying to get at. It seems like we went through a period of early operating system development over the past few decades where the stress was on throwing everything in, including the kitchen sink. It's at least interesting that Linux distros are putting in some amount of effort into pulling excess functionality out of the default installation while computers continue to become bigger, faster, stronger.
And I think it is pointing at something similar to what is going on with OSX, and it is a trend. We've hit some kind of a milestone, I think, where most of our computer functionality is "good enough" for most of what we actually use them for. Something about the development of computer systems right now reminds me of... whenever it was... 10 years ago?... when people were using their computers mostly for word-processing, and their computers were good enough for that, so there wasn't a huge drive to accomplish a particular thing. Then people discovered that they could rip CDs into MP3s and share them, and there grew this whole new focus on multimedia and the Internet.
Now we have those things handled, and it seems like the answer to "what's next?" is making both hardware and software smaller and less bloated. We're getting smart phones that are becoming something more like a real portable computer, and we're getting things like netbooks. I predict you're also going to start seeing better use of embedded systems, like maybe DVRs are just going to be built into TVs soon. Not sure on that one, but I think you're going to see things shrinking, devices being consolidated, and a renewed focus on making things more efficient and refined.
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I had assumed that they at least supported the iPhone headphones that have an inline mic. That wouldn't be ideal, but it would get the job done.
If this usage picks up, I would really hope that Apple would put enough bluetooth support to support headsets.
What's going to get shut down by Apple? VoIP on the iPhone and iPod touch? Didn't Apple already announce that they were going to allow VoIP apps in the iTMS so long as they only used VoIP on WiFi connections (not on the cell phone data network)?
This is why I really hope we get some actually *open* wireless Internet built as a result of the analog TV spectrum being reallocated. I was very disappointed that the government didn't adopt the openness rules recommended by Google in the auction.
Imagine how great it would be to not be beholden to cell carriers, but to be able to buy any kind of Internet device you want, and use it as a phone if you want. It would open up competition between hardware manufacturers and service providers. Competition is good.
WTF? I say "If they think they can do it profitably and clean up after themselves then why not allow it?" and you think I'm in favor of a wild west mentality?
Maybe. If you're really saying "allow absolutely anyone who *thinks* that they can do it profitably and clean up after themselves." Otherwise, you're dealing with governmental regulations that will limit who can enter the market, which goes back to my question as to whether you can truly have a "free market" when it comes to building infrastructure.
I think one of my other posts might be more up your alley. I wouldn't suggest that we abandon the idea of allowing market forces to come into play, but I'm also not in favor of a wild-west mentality toward building infrastructure.
I think what lots of people fail to understand is the "governmental intervention" isn't always at odds with the idea of a "free market". Sometimes the government need to act in order to open a market to make it free. I think the idea should be to make the infrastructure (actual cabling and associated hardware) public, but probably charge a fee for using it. However, even that work of building and maintaining the infrastructure could be contracted out to a private company. It could even be owned by a private company, but in that case it should be *heavily* regulated to avoid unfair practices.
Verizon shouldn't be able to own the network and provide voice service in the same market. They also shouldn't be able to give preferential access to their business partners. If they're allowed to do anything like that, it will lead to an inherent conflict of interest which will eventually be abused.
What if several people want to dig up the same major road at various times. You don't want any kind of regulation there? No attempts to protect existing infrastructure from damage, or force companies to publicly document where their lines are going? Just nothing... a wild-west mentality toward building infrastructure. That sounds like a good idea?
I live in NYC in an expensive neighborhood, and though I suppose I have broadband, the highest upload rate I can get is 512k. That's kind of stupid. And there's no sign that it's going to get any better anytime soon.
Now, you might argue that it's because of too little regulation or too much regulation, but obviously someone is doing something wrong.
Yeah, really.
I'm sorry to go into a little off-topic rant here, but the lesson isn't really that consumer spending is good or consumer spending is bad, but that not all economic activity is created equal. You can't just say, "Hey consumers, spend as much as you want-- it doesn't matter what you spend it on-- and that will get us out of this mess!"
People spending money is good for the economy, but it has to be coupled with things like production, real wealth creation, and long-term investment. You can't have everyone in the country counting on house-flipping for their income without creating a bubble that will eventually burst.
This isn't just an issue for consumers, but it applies to the government as well. You can't simply cut taxes, flood everyone with cash, and hope that everything corrects itself-- at least not with the sorts of problems we currently have. You can't just throw all the money into building bridges to nowhere, either. You're going to have to find worthwhile projects and services that should have existed and should have been funded already, but have been sitting around in neglect from lack of funding. Luckily, there are a lot of projects and services out there like that.
We already paid $200 billion [newnetworks.com] for a nation wide fiber optics network that never delivered. When is anyone going to ask what happened to all that money?
This is the sort of thing that I don't understand. I can understand people being in favor of completely free markets, and I can understand people being in favor of governmental regulation. I think either can work fairly well, and both have down-sides, but why are people in favor of giving Verizon a monopoly and then not regulating the results? Why would the federal government give $200 billion and then not ask for an accounting of where the money went?
I think that's really where the economy fell down. Free market people and government intervention people have been fighting it out, and instead of picking either direction, they've compromised on, "Let's intervene by giving big companies stuff, but not bother to regulate what they do with what we give them!"
I don't think the government should ever subsidize anything without specifying what the money is going toward, requiring an accounting of every cent spent, and any money not spend on the stated goal should be subject to... what's the word? I feel like there's a word for when you pay someone and then later take it back because the money wasn't used how it was supposed to be used.
Is there a word for that?
First, the infrastructure -- that is, the wires that carry the data, need to be owned and operated by an entity separate from the users of that system
This is (more or less) what I keep saying. It seems the monopoly/duopoly aspect of the Internet is only necessary for the actual hardware/infrastructure. Therefore, I'd propose that those monopolies/duopolies be permitted, but any company that builds/owns/maintains the hardware infrastructure be forbidden from actually providing services on that infrastructure. So if Verizon builds the actual network, then they can't also be an ISP, voice provider, or video provider. They should have to offer access to other companies (e.g. Speakeasy) who can then provide any services they want within a set agreement, and any access deal that is offered to any one company should be available to all companies (Verizon can't give a better deal to Time Warner than they offer to Speakeasy).
So in this example, the company building infrastructure would be heavily regulated, but the ISPs need not be. Real competition could kick in.
I'm sure lots of people will have a problem with the idea, and it will probably never happen, but I think it's the best solution.
How is helping broadband going to stimulate the economy?
Well, it seems like a silly question to me, but I'll go ahead and give it a stab anyway. First, building a ton of infrastructure means jobs of some kind. Someone has to dig the trenches. Someone has to build and operate the communications hubs that those trenches are connecting.
Beyond that, remember the tech boom of the 90s? Remember how that was this period of unprecedented economic growth? Honestly, yes, it was a bit of a bubble, but there was a lot of genuine growth there too. Do you know where that came from? The Internet. Largely, at least. The Internet allows businesses to operate more efficiently as well as opening new avenues for business. There are services that exist today that couldn't have existed before the Internet, and there are services that don't exist yet because our existing Internet is too slow.
Very often, improved infrastructure spurs economic growth, or at the very least supports economic growth.
Well what are you going to do? Allow every company that wants to dig up whatever infrastructure they want wherever they want?
Doesn't this seem to be a situation where you can't just have a "free market"?
On the other side of things, I'm wondering if, in the overall scheme of things, the value of x86-ness is all that high. I've been hearing that it's somewhat inferior for years, and the main reason that sort of architecture is still in use is mainly for compatibility reasons. OSX and Linux seem to be agile enough to switch between architectures with relative ease, so is the only hold-up Windows?
Do they mark on the packaging anywhere that it's for Apple Macintosh computers only? If yes, it's a software upgrade for computers that already have OSX installed, and not a "full" version for Dells. I'm not a fly on the wall so I can't speak as to why they chose certain wording on their marketing materials for one version or another.
3) "And isms (capitalism, Catholicism, racism) are not science."
Yeah, right, like electromagnetism, empiricism or autism.
So are you saying that people who believe in evolution are electromagnetic autistic empiricists?
That doesn't seem to me to prove evolution. You could say that god creates things that match, that go together, and He must have made a moth to match that flower.
Not that it's not an insightful prediction, and not that I believe in creationism at all, but it doesn't seem to me like that prediction is based on anything other than understanding the reproduction of flowers and knowing that, given that structure of flower, there must be an insect able to pollenate it.
Obama did mention atheists in his inauguration, though, and not in a bad way.
Example; if someone said a watermelon is blue on the inside, but turns red when you cut it open, how could you prove them wrong? How could they prove they're right?
How can the inside of the watermelon be any color when there's no light shining on it?
the purpose of the alterations is to make it run on the non-Apple hardware.
And the license doesn't permit the software to be installed on non-Apple hardware, therefore the alterations are specifically for the purpose of breaking the license.
No, the purpose was to make the software work. Any potential license violation is incidental to that.
No, the purpose of the alterations are specifically to violate the license. If they were installing on Apple hardware, the alterations would not be at all necessary.
In law the intent matters.
Ok, so would you say that the intent of the law you cited was to allow people to sell altered versions of copyrighted works, just so long as the sole purpose of the alteration is to permit easier violation of the license agreement?
You're doing an amazing job of holding cognitive dissonance, and a spectacularly lousy one of convincing me that this bill should ever be passed.
Who says I'm trying to convince you? You're obviously going to rant and rave no matter what I say. Or don't you understand that you and I are competing over an audience, and I'm trying to convince them? I mean, at this point, I'm not going to even read your whole long post because it's kind of long meaningless angry nonsense that Rush Limbaugh or someone put in your head, and most likely no one else is listening, so what's the point?
But I am slightly curious-- what is it that you think ACORN does that you think it needs to be outlawed? I bet your the sort that argues that government shouldn't provide any kind of social services because it should be handled by community organizations, and then rants and raves about how all community organizations are evil because anything failing to turn a profit is a waste of money. The sort that thinks that capitalism is a moral code rather than an economic system, right?
ps- All your putting certain little phrases in bold really doesn't help. You may as well be writing your whole post in caps or something.
Well the purpose was explicitly to violate the license. That has to be meaningful, or else I could just violate software copyrights and distribution licenses willy-nilly so long as I bundled it with hardware.
The iPhone Screen seems a little too small for me, and for whatever reason I don't feel comfortable reading large amounts much from electronic devices. I've read that it's harder on the eyes to read from a back-lit screen, which seems to me like a plausible explanation of my difficulty. I'm not sure, but I definitely have some kind of issue reading large amounts of text from my laptop that doesn't show up when I'm reading a printed page.
I don't know that the Kindle would fix that, but that's part of the idea behind electronic ink, right? I think that if I could borrow someone's Kindle for a few weeks to try it out, I would. If it was actually comfortable to read that way, I would definitely consider paying $400 for it. I'm just not going to spend $400 without having some idea of what I'm getting into. I've never even seen one of these things in person, have no idea what the screen actually looks like, etc.
But then, to me it still goes back to this niggling problem that itches the back of my brain-- device consolidation. There was a time when I had an iPod, a cell phone, a PDA that I carried pretty much everywhere, plus a laptop that I carried lots of places. The iPhone let me bring it down to the iPhone and a laptop, and if I added a kindle to that, there would be something slightly silly in it. At least-- it seems a bit weird to me in my own head that a single device-- the iPhone-- can actually do most of what I really want to do when I'm "on the road", but the other two devices are just extra storage and additional screens. That's fine, but sometimes I just feel like I'm carrying an array of screens and redundant storage, and I can't help but wonder if it couldn't be done better.
Incidentally, this also brings up my beef about software updaters. I have no problem with them running once a week at startup, checking the net for an update and terminating. But these fuckers remain running in the background constantly like Google updater. Look, do I really care to know the second a new program is released, a new patch? Look, why can't you just tell me the next time I reboot? Or hell, just run the updater when I execute the specific program and piss off when finished.
I think Microsoft and Apple need to take a serious look at Linux package managers. It's funny, because a few years ago everyone was complaining about how installing Linux applications was too annoying, but with most things, you can open up the package manager, click on a few things, it will figure out all the packages you need, and then you hit "install" (or whatever). Even if it's some piece of software that isn't officially supported by the distro, a developer can run his own repository, and I can add the repository to my package manager, and so I can use a single package manager for everything. The result is much simpler to deal with IMO.
My point is developers shouldn't really be given room to make annoying updaters, because it's something the OS should do. Rather than having each app install its own updater, Apple and MS should open Software Update and Microsoft Update to be more like Linux package managers. Then the only issues are the security concerns of insuring the validity of repositories, making it clear to users what each repository is giving them, and making it easy for administrators to add/remove repositories.
I don't see what removing MySQL and LDAP have to do with "slimming an OS." These are things that very few people are ever going to use on their desktop and made no sense to install by default, anyway.
That sounds like "slimming down" to me. At least, I can understand what the poster is trying to get at. It seems like we went through a period of early operating system development over the past few decades where the stress was on throwing everything in, including the kitchen sink. It's at least interesting that Linux distros are putting in some amount of effort into pulling excess functionality out of the default installation while computers continue to become bigger, faster, stronger.
And I think it is pointing at something similar to what is going on with OSX, and it is a trend. We've hit some kind of a milestone, I think, where most of our computer functionality is "good enough" for most of what we actually use them for. Something about the development of computer systems right now reminds me of... whenever it was... 10 years ago?... when people were using their computers mostly for word-processing, and their computers were good enough for that, so there wasn't a huge drive to accomplish a particular thing. Then people discovered that they could rip CDs into MP3s and share them, and there grew this whole new focus on multimedia and the Internet.
Now we have those things handled, and it seems like the answer to "what's next?" is making both hardware and software smaller and less bloated. We're getting smart phones that are becoming something more like a real portable computer, and we're getting things like netbooks. I predict you're also going to start seeing better use of embedded systems, like maybe DVRs are just going to be built into TVs soon. Not sure on that one, but I think you're going to see things shrinking, devices being consolidated, and a renewed focus on making things more efficient and refined.