Again, you're trying to draw distinctions that don't mean anything, so I'm not going to bother trying. Find me a PC motherboard being sold today that doesn't have USB suport on it. I doubt there are any. Does that mean it must have USB to be a PC motherboard? Find me a Palm device that doesn't have a stylus. I don't remember there being any, but does that mean it wouldn't be a Palm device if they made it to be entirely operated by your fingers?
The real question here isn't whether anyone is choosing to release tablet PCs without styluses, but rather is a tablet PC without a stylus still a tablet PC? The answer is unequivocally "yes".
The most credit I can give you here is that this much is true. Tablets do imply a kind of "writing", and the fact that tablet PCs allow for text input is part of why they call them "tablets".
So we have a definition for wax tablets, clay tablets, medicine tablets, and Scots tablets. Now what's relevant here? How about we actually link to the Wikipedia article on tablet PCs. That's what we're talking about, right? Ok, so here's what the Wikipedia has to say:
A Tablet PC is a notebook- or slate-shaped mobile computer. Its touchscreen or digitizing tablet technology allows the user to operate the computer with a stylus or digital pen, or a fingertip, instead of a keyboard or mouse.
The emphasis is mine, but the article talks in a couple places about touch screens and virtual keyboards. I don't know why you feel compelled to manufacture false distinctions, but there's nothing in the computer industry that says that tablet PCs necessarily have styluses. What do you call the form factor of a portable PC that doesn't have a keyboard or mouse, but operation is achieved through a touchscreen? You can make up your own terms, but everyone in the computer industry calls that a tablet.
Who decided that you need a stylus to have it be a "tablet"? What kind of arbitrary distinction is that?
It seems to me that what distinguishes a tablet from other form factors is that it's only a screen, without any separate input device to speak of. Basically, if you make a laptop that doesn't fold over and make it so the screen is always exposed, it's a tablet PC.
And don't fall into the trap of thinking that gold is somehow magical in its ability to have value. Gold is only valuable because people say it is, just like the US dollar. The only difference is that the scarcity of gold is based on physics and the relative difficulty of building a supercollider, while the scarcity of US dollars is based on the desire of the US to have a functioning economy.
Right. In fact, the value of gold isn't entirely due to its scarcity, either. I may be exaggerating a bit when I say this, but the value of gold is determined by the fact that it's rare *and* shiny. If it were scarce and grimy, if it were just a rare rock, it probably wouldn't be worth jack. The value of gold has a lot to do with the fact that it was pretty and has traditionally been desirable as a material for jewelry, which means people would hoard it as a status symbol. That's all. It's not some magical inherent value that makes gold valuable, and it's not really scarcity. It's that it's shiny and your girlfriend thinks it's pretty.
I've always wondered whether there was any good reason these days to have the pre-defined elements the way we do. Is the current selection of elements really efficient and meaningful? Is there a good reason to prohibit people from making up their own elements?
Back in the day, of course, web pages were pretty simple, and I guess it made sense that you would come up with a couple generic tags and assign each of them formatting. The "P" tag was a paragraph, and "LI" was a list item. Since pages were mostly plain text, and mostly paragraphs and lists, it made sense.
But now? The type of data contained in a web page is so variable and people want to be more in control of layout and design. So sometimes, when I'm thinking about it, I start to feel like the whole thing is kind of weird. This is a weird debate for me, and I find myself having trouble articulating my thoughts.
The main things I use are "A", "P", "H*", "DIV", "SPAN", "BLOCKQUOTE", "UL", "OL", and "LI"... I guess some others sometimes ("CITE", "DL", "DT", "DD"). But does that selection of default elements really make sense? Were they derived systematically? Even these new elements, were they derived systematically, or were they just pulled from what would go into a weblog or something?
I don't know. The new elements seem good to me. There have been loads of times when I've had so many "DIV" tags with semantic classes that I've just wanted to make up my own elements specific to the data I'm working with. Yeah, I know it shouldn't be any harder to write "div class="article" vs. "article", but it would just make more sense in my own head and be easier to read.
At the same time, I've spent a fair amount of time coming up with CSS that will just reset all the elements to a standard display (P and BLOCKQUOTE display as normal DIVs, no bullets on UL, H1 the same size as normal text, etc). Call me crazy, but sometimes it's just easier for me to start from scratch.
Put these two ideas together, and sometimes I kind of feel like no web browser should have any default elements defined, and you should be able to make up any tag you want. The whole thing should be handled by convention, and there should be an agreed-upon default CSS file that you attach to get the display that would give you the layout browsers give you now without CSS. Hell, even include that CSS with the browser, but allow an easy switch in the HTML spec to disable the whole thing. Drop the "A" tag altogether and make anything a link if you include "href='http://example.com'".
Then again, it seems like that might lead to chaos. I don't know. Sometimes HTML makes a lot of sense to me, and sometimes it seems like the stupidest set of conventions I've ever seen.
iLife? It's had nothing added, they just repackaged every single feature?
You know, sometimes software companies release a new version of software, including many of the same features, but with some smaller new features and general refinement in the software. This is a pretty common practice, and it even is appreciated by the customers of the software developers. Legend has it that there was even some developer near Seattle that would release newer versions which were worse than prior versions of their software, and for some reason people would still buy these "upgrades".
Your Archos device, as far as I know, isn't running general purpose (though modified) OS. Just because Apple hasn't opened the iPhone to 3rd party developers doesn't mean that there isn't a full SDK somewhere that allows you to make desktop-type applications for it.
It's a real computer, but just a closed platform. Those are different sorts of distinctions. I could make a closed platform desktop system and not allow people to write their own applications, but if it ran on a desktop chipset, had all the desktop hardware, and was running a real OS, it would still be a "real computer".
The iPhone *is* a real tablet computer running a real operating system. It is crippled a bit, yes, but some of us would like to have a couple key features without having to haul a laptop around.
Oh, yeah, and if you haul around that laptop and want mobile internet access, you're going to have to go through those cell phone companies and sign a contract.
Re:how connected do we have to be?
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Smartphone Shootout
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I have to disagree with you. The problem with the "all-in-one" model has traditionally been that you get a device that's a not-even-jack of all trades, master of nothing. There's a tremendous effort to cram everything possible into one device without any good design on how to have these features coexist. The result, in my assessment, has always been a device that isn't truly worth carrying around.
I've tried using devices from Palm, Blackberry, and Microsoft, and in each case I feel that same annoyance-- it does a lot of things, but does each of them too poorly. And they're big and clunky. Now, I have an iPhone, and it doesn't do everything, but what it does it does pretty well. Many have complained the that the touch screen interface would make it hard to type, but for the most part those complaints weren't made from experience. The touch screen, for the most part, has successfully navigated the interface problem of having all-in-one devices. Instead of trying to come up with one set of buttons that serves all the different functions, you make the buttons change depending on what you're doing.
You complain about the battery, but as an iPhone owner, I'll tell you that I regularly go a full day or two without charging it. That's not the best battery lifetime I've ever gotten, but it's acceptable. Admittedly, I mostly use the phone, PIM, and iPod functions. I don't really use it to watch video very often, and I only use the internet capabilities for the built-in e-mail client. Every once in a while, when I'm caught in a bind and need access to some particular bit of information, I'll use the web browser, and that's it.
As far as mobile web browsing goes, no, you don't really need 24/7 connectivity, and if you need to do very much, it's better to use a desktop client. However, now that I have a web browser in my pocket, I can tell you that I do find it more useful than I would have thought. I've been in situations where I couldn't find the location of something or I needed to find someone's phone number, and I was able to fetch that information on my iPhone web browser pretty easily. I would have otherwise been pretty lost, and had to wait until I found an internet connection to find the thing I was looking for, so the whole thing was really helpful.
And though I wouldn't advise using the iPhone on EDGE for heavy everyday surfing, it really will work in a pinch. You'll be able to load a real website, the website will render properly most of the time, and it isn't entirely frustrating to browse around a little. Using the web browser in short bursts won't drain your battery too terribly quickly. EDGE is slow and uses more battery than WiFi, but like I said, it'll do if you really need a web page or two right then.
So if all you're saying is that the iPhone isn't a good replacement for your laptop or desktop computer, I'll go along with that. But if you're saying it isn't useful to have your e-mail client, MP3 player, web browser, calendar, address book, Google maps, digital camera, and cell phone be all in one slim, easy to use device, then I think you're crazy. If you think the iPhone doesn't execute this decently well for most people's uses, then I think you're either biased or ignorant.
I guess you could also argue that we should all slow down, stop using our fancy gadgets and doodads, and just not be "connected" most of the time. Do most of us absolutely "need" a cellphone? I guess not. Human civilization went for a long time without any internet or telephones at all. But all things considered, I'd rather have a cell phone than a landline, and I'd rather have mobile e-mail than not. Ideally, in my mind, I wouldn't have to have a "phone" at all, but I could have a wireless IM/VOIP/e-mail device. However, you need ubiquitous wireless internet access in order to do that, and nobody is really providing that yet except cell phone companies. Cell phone companies won't sell a IM/VOIP/e-mail device unless it's also a phone.
P.S. The internet is just a reflection of life, so all those child molesters and teeny boppers exist in your meatspace. I imagine you filter them out in real life, is it really so hard to do the same online?
And yes, it's actually very difficult to filter people out online, because there are so many of them and everything is so quick and relatively anonymous. Even here on Slashdot, it's pretty hard to filter out all the people who would use the word "meatspace", but I refuse to deal with people like that in real life.
Interesting. So (not to be insulting, but I only gave your site a cursory glance) is it an attempt to make an open source myspace-type clone, a set of online software (blogs, profiles, etc) that can easily be networked together, or is it a means to network pre-existing sites?
Don't be so silly. *nobody* needs to pay for my own site, my own profile, and my own weblog but me. And if someone wants to offer free hosting, it will probably still be making a profit from ad revenue.
My point is that these "social networks" aren't serious. They're crappy little sites that don't let you join their "network" unless you agree to their terms, view their ads. If you think they're serious social networks for serious people, you're probably 15 years old.
What I'm thinking is something where professionals, hosting their own sites (as many do), could build their own profiles according to their own needs. These could be professional resumes, personal profiles, company profiles, or pretty much anything else. Then, these already built sites could build a social network in an open, compatible way. No one needs to "build" that or "host" it. It's more like some official body needs to develop the standards for certifying that a certain page or site is part of your "network".
When someone does that, social networking online will be a real thing worth investing time in. As it is, it's simply ridiculous, like people who invest loads of time in Second Life building dildos and such.
I don't think the suggestion is that these sites be "open" in the sense that anyone can view and participate in your "social group". Rather, the suggestion I think is that these things should be able to interoperate, so that your profile didn't "belong to" Facebook or Myspace. As in, you could have your one profile that could be used in any social network you want. At least, something more like that than what we have now.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure it can be illegal to use patented technology without a license. Like I said, it's not in the case of MP3 because the people licensing the patent say you don't have to pay to encode/decode MP3s, but only if you're distributing MP3 encoders or decoders, or (and I'm a bit fuzzy on this issue) if you're selling or streaming MP3s. So if you're an online music retailer selling MP3 encoded songs, I believe you're supposed to pay a fee for each song sold.
The LAME issue is a bit harder to interpret, though. I thought the developers have claimed that their encoder actually doesn't use the patented methods in question, and so it should be exempt from the patent fees. I can't find this claim on their website anymore (though it used to be there), and I don't know whether this claim has been legally challenged somehow. But I thought LAME was at least somewhat legal.
Part of the reason I've always thought social networking sites were stupid is because it was a weird boundary to keep-- everything has to be on their site. Sure, that makes sense from the point of view of the business running the site, but I don't think it makes sense from a business standpoint.
It would make more sense to me if people were able to create a set of standards for online profiles, access-controlled by something like OpenID, that could be linked from various sites. That way, I could design my own site, my own profile, my own weblog, keep all my data in one place and under my control, and have the linking between these sites be the "social network".
I just think it's stupid that, if you want to participate in these communities, you have to go duplicating your data all over the place. I know people who had a profile on Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and their own site, and spent a bunch of time trying to keep the profiles in sync. i never joined any because I refuse to take these things seriously until it's an actual open and dynamic way to establish a real social network, rather than a means to generate ad revenue for some creepy company that caters to teeny-boppers and child-molesters.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but giving someone you know a jailed FTP/SFTP account shouldn't present a significant security risk for the server the account is on.
I don't know... companies that offer "online backup" still don't actually take responsibility for the integrity of your data. Also, you'd find out pretty quickly whether the person on the other end of your backup is doing a good job. Try accessing your data, running checksums, etc.
After all, you don't really need to make sure that the person you have the deal with never once loses a piece of data, but only that the chances are remote of him losing a piece of data at the same time you lose that same piece of data. Other than that, it would be an issue of protecting your data both locally and remotely. Everything you send offsite should be encrypted, and anyone accessing your computer should be jailed somehow.
The summary said "illegal software installer", which could be read as not implying that the "software installer" is illegal, but that it installs illegal software.
Now the "illegality" depends on which software you install and your local laws. I think that the DVD decoder violates the DMCA (is that right?), and MP3 encoders/decoders is a dicier issue. IANAL, but AFAIK you are not required to pay for an MP3 patent license for using an MP3 encoder or decoder, but only if you're distributing MP3 encoders, decoders, or MP3s. So there it's probably legal for users to have and use, but possibly illegal for distros to include.
However, I think sometimes distros steer clear in just to be on the safe side. I don't know-- like I don't really understand whether LAME is legal or not. They used to distribute it uncompiled and say it was for educational purposes, because otherwise they would have to pay a license fee for distributing (hence the name Lame Ain't an Mp3 Encoder, right?) But then they said they engineered their way around the patent issues and they have been distributing it for a while now. Still, some distros seem hesitant to include it.
So yeah, I don't get what the deal is with all of this stuff, legally.
Well there's my problem. I want this (specifically, I want to be able to have a SSH client on my iPhone), but i don't want to fuck around with my iPhone. First, I'm not the sort of guy who gets joy out of fucking around with a device getting it to do things it's not supposed to do, and second I'm nervous about somehow bricking my phone.
So can someone come up with a simple installer or something? Is that not possible for some reason?
I agree. At most, we might assume that the fact there hasn't been some "cease and desist" letter sent asking for the project to be taken down means that Apple won't do much to prevent hacking the iPhone. Of course, they still might do what they do when people hack iTunes's DRM: they release an update to prevent known hacks.
Don't get me wrong, I really hope that Apple changes their mind and opens the device for 3rd party development, and I think it's possible they still might. However, I don't think we've seen any sign of this yet.
You joke, but I have an iPhone and one of the big things I'd really want is a SSH client (along with a ToDo list that syncs with my mac and an IM client). Web apps aren't good enough, IMO.
I am usually an opponent for the use of OpenOffice stating it is a sub-par replacement for office...
Even if it's true that OOo is a sub-par replacement for MS Office, it's still "good enough" for most people. So given the choice, would you rather get a good Office suite for free, or spend hundreds of dollars for an Office suite with extra features that you won't use. Further, in some cases, OOo has better support for MSO files than MSO does.
In my office, we were having trouble opening a.docx file, and no one could get the "Office Genuine Advantage" to verify their copy as legitimate, even though they're entirely legal copies. Because OGA wasn't working, they couldn't install the patch to allow Office 2003 to read.docx files. The solution? I had NeoOffice on my Mac (a OSX port of OpenOffice), and that was able to open the.docx file and save it as a.odt and.doc for everyone else.
I understand that that still might not be convincing. Some people just absolutely need a feature that in Excel that OpenOffice doesn't have (I hear people get hung up more on Excel or Outlook features than on Word features). Still, OOo is quite a lot better than Works.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, you're trying to draw distinctions that don't mean anything, so I'm not going to bother trying. Find me a PC motherboard being sold today that doesn't have USB suport on it. I doubt there are any. Does that mean it must have USB to be a PC motherboard? Find me a Palm device that doesn't have a stylus. I don't remember there being any, but does that mean it wouldn't be a Palm device if they made it to be entirely operated by your fingers?
The real question here isn't whether anyone is choosing to release tablet PCs without styluses, but rather is a tablet PC without a stylus still a tablet PC? The answer is unequivocally "yes".
A "tablet" has always been a device for writing.
The most credit I can give you here is that this much is true. Tablets do imply a kind of "writing", and the fact that tablet PCs allow for text input is part of why they call them "tablets".
Oooooo, look at me, I can link to irrelevant Wikipedia articles!
So we have a definition for wax tablets, clay tablets, medicine tablets, and Scots tablets. Now what's relevant here? How about we actually link to the Wikipedia article on tablet PCs. That's what we're talking about, right? Ok, so here's what the Wikipedia has to say:
The emphasis is mine, but the article talks in a couple places about touch screens and virtual keyboards. I don't know why you feel compelled to manufacture false distinctions, but there's nothing in the computer industry that says that tablet PCs necessarily have styluses. What do you call the form factor of a portable PC that doesn't have a keyboard or mouse, but operation is achieved through a touchscreen? You can make up your own terms, but everyone in the computer industry calls that a tablet.
Who decided that you need a stylus to have it be a "tablet"? What kind of arbitrary distinction is that?
It seems to me that what distinguishes a tablet from other form factors is that it's only a screen, without any separate input device to speak of. Basically, if you make a laptop that doesn't fold over and make it so the screen is always exposed, it's a tablet PC.
And don't fall into the trap of thinking that gold is somehow magical in its ability to have value. Gold is only valuable because people say it is, just like the US dollar. The only difference is that the scarcity of gold is based on physics and the relative difficulty of building a supercollider, while the scarcity of US dollars is based on the desire of the US to have a functioning economy.
Right. In fact, the value of gold isn't entirely due to its scarcity, either. I may be exaggerating a bit when I say this, but the value of gold is determined by the fact that it's rare *and* shiny. If it were scarce and grimy, if it were just a rare rock, it probably wouldn't be worth jack. The value of gold has a lot to do with the fact that it was pretty and has traditionally been desirable as a material for jewelry, which means people would hoard it as a status symbol. That's all. It's not some magical inherent value that makes gold valuable, and it's not really scarcity. It's that it's shiny and your girlfriend thinks it's pretty.
I've always wondered whether there was any good reason these days to have the pre-defined elements the way we do. Is the current selection of elements really efficient and meaningful? Is there a good reason to prohibit people from making up their own elements?
Back in the day, of course, web pages were pretty simple, and I guess it made sense that you would come up with a couple generic tags and assign each of them formatting. The "P" tag was a paragraph, and "LI" was a list item. Since pages were mostly plain text, and mostly paragraphs and lists, it made sense.
But now? The type of data contained in a web page is so variable and people want to be more in control of layout and design. So sometimes, when I'm thinking about it, I start to feel like the whole thing is kind of weird. This is a weird debate for me, and I find myself having trouble articulating my thoughts.
The main things I use are "A", "P", "H*", "DIV", "SPAN", "BLOCKQUOTE", "UL", "OL", and "LI"... I guess some others sometimes ("CITE", "DL", "DT", "DD"). But does that selection of default elements really make sense? Were they derived systematically? Even these new elements, were they derived systematically, or were they just pulled from what would go into a weblog or something?
I don't know. The new elements seem good to me. There have been loads of times when I've had so many "DIV" tags with semantic classes that I've just wanted to make up my own elements specific to the data I'm working with. Yeah, I know it shouldn't be any harder to write "div class="article" vs. "article", but it would just make more sense in my own head and be easier to read.
At the same time, I've spent a fair amount of time coming up with CSS that will just reset all the elements to a standard display (P and BLOCKQUOTE display as normal DIVs, no bullets on UL, H1 the same size as normal text, etc). Call me crazy, but sometimes it's just easier for me to start from scratch.
Put these two ideas together, and sometimes I kind of feel like no web browser should have any default elements defined, and you should be able to make up any tag you want. The whole thing should be handled by convention, and there should be an agreed-upon default CSS file that you attach to get the display that would give you the layout browsers give you now without CSS. Hell, even include that CSS with the browser, but allow an easy switch in the HTML spec to disable the whole thing. Drop the "A" tag altogether and make anything a link if you include "href='http://example.com'".
Then again, it seems like that might lead to chaos. I don't know. Sometimes HTML makes a lot of sense to me, and sometimes it seems like the stupidest set of conventions I've ever seen.
iLife? It's had nothing added, they just repackaged every single feature?
You know, sometimes software companies release a new version of software, including many of the same features, but with some smaller new features and general refinement in the software. This is a pretty common practice, and it even is appreciated by the customers of the software developers. Legend has it that there was even some developer near Seattle that would release newer versions which were worse than prior versions of their software, and for some reason people would still buy these "upgrades".
Your Archos device, as far as I know, isn't running general purpose (though modified) OS. Just because Apple hasn't opened the iPhone to 3rd party developers doesn't mean that there isn't a full SDK somewhere that allows you to make desktop-type applications for it.
It's a real computer, but just a closed platform. Those are different sorts of distinctions. I could make a closed platform desktop system and not allow people to write their own applications, but if it ran on a desktop chipset, had all the desktop hardware, and was running a real OS, it would still be a "real computer".
The iPhone *is* a real tablet computer running a real operating system. It is crippled a bit, yes, but some of us would like to have a couple key features without having to haul a laptop around.
Oh, yeah, and if you haul around that laptop and want mobile internet access, you're going to have to go through those cell phone companies and sign a contract.
I have to disagree with you. The problem with the "all-in-one" model has traditionally been that you get a device that's a not-even-jack of all trades, master of nothing. There's a tremendous effort to cram everything possible into one device without any good design on how to have these features coexist. The result, in my assessment, has always been a device that isn't truly worth carrying around.
I've tried using devices from Palm, Blackberry, and Microsoft, and in each case I feel that same annoyance-- it does a lot of things, but does each of them too poorly. And they're big and clunky. Now, I have an iPhone, and it doesn't do everything, but what it does it does pretty well. Many have complained the that the touch screen interface would make it hard to type, but for the most part those complaints weren't made from experience. The touch screen, for the most part, has successfully navigated the interface problem of having all-in-one devices. Instead of trying to come up with one set of buttons that serves all the different functions, you make the buttons change depending on what you're doing.
You complain about the battery, but as an iPhone owner, I'll tell you that I regularly go a full day or two without charging it. That's not the best battery lifetime I've ever gotten, but it's acceptable. Admittedly, I mostly use the phone, PIM, and iPod functions. I don't really use it to watch video very often, and I only use the internet capabilities for the built-in e-mail client. Every once in a while, when I'm caught in a bind and need access to some particular bit of information, I'll use the web browser, and that's it.
As far as mobile web browsing goes, no, you don't really need 24/7 connectivity, and if you need to do very much, it's better to use a desktop client. However, now that I have a web browser in my pocket, I can tell you that I do find it more useful than I would have thought. I've been in situations where I couldn't find the location of something or I needed to find someone's phone number, and I was able to fetch that information on my iPhone web browser pretty easily. I would have otherwise been pretty lost, and had to wait until I found an internet connection to find the thing I was looking for, so the whole thing was really helpful.
And though I wouldn't advise using the iPhone on EDGE for heavy everyday surfing, it really will work in a pinch. You'll be able to load a real website, the website will render properly most of the time, and it isn't entirely frustrating to browse around a little. Using the web browser in short bursts won't drain your battery too terribly quickly. EDGE is slow and uses more battery than WiFi, but like I said, it'll do if you really need a web page or two right then.
So if all you're saying is that the iPhone isn't a good replacement for your laptop or desktop computer, I'll go along with that. But if you're saying it isn't useful to have your e-mail client, MP3 player, web browser, calendar, address book, Google maps, digital camera, and cell phone be all in one slim, easy to use device, then I think you're crazy. If you think the iPhone doesn't execute this decently well for most people's uses, then I think you're either biased or ignorant.
I guess you could also argue that we should all slow down, stop using our fancy gadgets and doodads, and just not be "connected" most of the time. Do most of us absolutely "need" a cellphone? I guess not. Human civilization went for a long time without any internet or telephones at all. But all things considered, I'd rather have a cell phone than a landline, and I'd rather have mobile e-mail than not. Ideally, in my mind, I wouldn't have to have a "phone" at all, but I could have a wireless IM/VOIP/e-mail device. However, you need ubiquitous wireless internet access in order to do that, and nobody is really providing that yet except cell phone companies. Cell phone companies won't sell a IM/VOIP/e-mail device unless it's also a phone.
P.S. The internet is just a reflection of life, so all those child molesters and teeny boppers exist in your meatspace. I imagine you filter them out in real life, is it really so hard to do the same online?
And yes, it's actually very difficult to filter people out online, because there are so many of them and everything is so quick and relatively anonymous. Even here on Slashdot, it's pretty hard to filter out all the people who would use the word "meatspace", but I refuse to deal with people like that in real life.
Interesting. So (not to be insulting, but I only gave your site a cursory glance) is it an attempt to make an open source myspace-type clone, a set of online software (blogs, profiles, etc) that can easily be networked together, or is it a means to network pre-existing sites?
Does that question make sense? I can't tell.
Don't be so silly. *nobody* needs to pay for my own site, my own profile, and my own weblog but me. And if someone wants to offer free hosting, it will probably still be making a profit from ad revenue.
My point is that these "social networks" aren't serious. They're crappy little sites that don't let you join their "network" unless you agree to their terms, view their ads. If you think they're serious social networks for serious people, you're probably 15 years old.
What I'm thinking is something where professionals, hosting their own sites (as many do), could build their own profiles according to their own needs. These could be professional resumes, personal profiles, company profiles, or pretty much anything else. Then, these already built sites could build a social network in an open, compatible way. No one needs to "build" that or "host" it. It's more like some official body needs to develop the standards for certifying that a certain page or site is part of your "network".
When someone does that, social networking online will be a real thing worth investing time in. As it is, it's simply ridiculous, like people who invest loads of time in Second Life building dildos and such.
Good point. I'll volunteer to receive the millions, if that will make things easier.
I don't think the suggestion is that these sites be "open" in the sense that anyone can view and participate in your "social group". Rather, the suggestion I think is that these things should be able to interoperate, so that your profile didn't "belong to" Facebook or Myspace. As in, you could have your one profile that could be used in any social network you want. At least, something more like that than what we have now.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure it can be illegal to use patented technology without a license. Like I said, it's not in the case of MP3 because the people licensing the patent say you don't have to pay to encode/decode MP3s, but only if you're distributing MP3 encoders or decoders, or (and I'm a bit fuzzy on this issue) if you're selling or streaming MP3s. So if you're an online music retailer selling MP3 encoded songs, I believe you're supposed to pay a fee for each song sold.
The LAME issue is a bit harder to interpret, though. I thought the developers have claimed that their encoder actually doesn't use the patented methods in question, and so it should be exempt from the patent fees. I can't find this claim on their website anymore (though it used to be there), and I don't know whether this claim has been legally challenged somehow. But I thought LAME was at least somewhat legal.
Part of the reason I've always thought social networking sites were stupid is because it was a weird boundary to keep-- everything has to be on their site. Sure, that makes sense from the point of view of the business running the site, but I don't think it makes sense from a business standpoint.
It would make more sense to me if people were able to create a set of standards for online profiles, access-controlled by something like OpenID, that could be linked from various sites. That way, I could design my own site, my own profile, my own weblog, keep all my data in one place and under my control, and have the linking between these sites be the "social network".
I just think it's stupid that, if you want to participate in these communities, you have to go duplicating your data all over the place. I know people who had a profile on Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and their own site, and spent a bunch of time trying to keep the profiles in sync. i never joined any because I refuse to take these things seriously until it's an actual open and dynamic way to establish a real social network, rather than a means to generate ad revenue for some creepy company that caters to teeny-boppers and child-molesters.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but giving someone you know a jailed FTP/SFTP account shouldn't present a significant security risk for the server the account is on.
I don't know... companies that offer "online backup" still don't actually take responsibility for the integrity of your data. Also, you'd find out pretty quickly whether the person on the other end of your backup is doing a good job. Try accessing your data, running checksums, etc.
After all, you don't really need to make sure that the person you have the deal with never once loses a piece of data, but only that the chances are remote of him losing a piece of data at the same time you lose that same piece of data. Other than that, it would be an issue of protecting your data both locally and remotely. Everything you send offsite should be encrypted, and anyone accessing your computer should be jailed somehow.
The summary said "illegal software installer", which could be read as not implying that the "software installer" is illegal, but that it installs illegal software.
Now the "illegality" depends on which software you install and your local laws. I think that the DVD decoder violates the DMCA (is that right?), and MP3 encoders/decoders is a dicier issue. IANAL, but AFAIK you are not required to pay for an MP3 patent license for using an MP3 encoder or decoder, but only if you're distributing MP3 encoders, decoders, or MP3s. So there it's probably legal for users to have and use, but possibly illegal for distros to include.
However, I think sometimes distros steer clear in just to be on the safe side. I don't know-- like I don't really understand whether LAME is legal or not. They used to distribute it uncompiled and say it was for educational purposes, because otherwise they would have to pay a license fee for distributing (hence the name Lame Ain't an Mp3 Encoder, right?) But then they said they engineered their way around the patent issues and they have been distributing it for a while now. Still, some distros seem hesitant to include it.
So yeah, I don't get what the deal is with all of this stuff, legally.
Well there's my problem. I want this (specifically, I want to be able to have a SSH client on my iPhone), but i don't want to fuck around with my iPhone. First, I'm not the sort of guy who gets joy out of fucking around with a device getting it to do things it's not supposed to do, and second I'm nervous about somehow bricking my phone.
So can someone come up with a simple installer or something? Is that not possible for some reason?
I agree. At most, we might assume that the fact there hasn't been some "cease and desist" letter sent asking for the project to be taken down means that Apple won't do much to prevent hacking the iPhone. Of course, they still might do what they do when people hack iTunes's DRM: they release an update to prevent known hacks.
Don't get me wrong, I really hope that Apple changes their mind and opens the device for 3rd party development, and I think it's possible they still might. However, I don't think we've seen any sign of this yet.
You joke, but I have an iPhone and one of the big things I'd really want is a SSH client (along with a ToDo list that syncs with my mac and an IM client). Web apps aren't good enough, IMO.
I am usually an opponent for the use of OpenOffice stating it is a sub-par replacement for office...
Even if it's true that OOo is a sub-par replacement for MS Office, it's still "good enough" for most people. So given the choice, would you rather get a good Office suite for free, or spend hundreds of dollars for an Office suite with extra features that you won't use. Further, in some cases, OOo has better support for MSO files than MSO does.
In my office, we were having trouble opening a .docx file, and no one could get the "Office Genuine Advantage" to verify their copy as legitimate, even though they're entirely legal copies. Because OGA wasn't working, they couldn't install the patch to allow Office 2003 to read .docx files. The solution? I had NeoOffice on my Mac (a OSX port of OpenOffice), and that was able to open the .docx file and save it as a .odt and .doc for everyone else.
I understand that that still might not be convincing. Some people just absolutely need a feature that in Excel that OpenOffice doesn't have (I hear people get hung up more on Excel or Outlook features than on Word features). Still, OOo is quite a lot better than Works.