Google is more like Sun Microsystems rather than Apple or Microsoft. Both Apple and Microsoft are "closed shops" and not hackeresque in their commercial culture. Google's culture is very much the hackeresque open source and technically centric. To me, Android seems like the equivalent of Java -- born from the energies of passionate technologists. Java was by no means a clear bet by Sun, it could have died and withered, but what it gave the internet just what it needed at the right time, a portable cross platform language that "opened up" programatically without being locked into a platform. I think Android is very similar to that, but applied to the mobile world.
"Forcing people to accept a change in the license without telling them? "
Umm, who forces anyone to accept anything: if you find that a new release has a license you don't like, then you don't have to accept it: use older versions or choose an alternative.
reclaim or replace the product/license
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Can CDs Be Recycled?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Depending upon what CD it is, and who the manufacturer is, you may be able to reclaim the license or a replacement CD. For example, you can do this with PowerDVD if you lose the license or the CD is damaged. Even if the software is not worth anything to you, it may be to someone else. If any of the CDs are for software of some original/current value, it may be worth taking the time to look into this. You could sell them on eBay for an earner.
I'm a parent of a 2 year old. I weigh the issue up like this: is a funny advertisement more important than the risk (whether actual, or potential - no matter how small) of a child imitating any of this and being hurt? There are many ways to make a funny advertisement, why not choose one that doesn't have this risk? Do we consider freedom of expression in an advertisement so important that we put it above this risk? If so, I'm a little worried about where we put our priorities in society.
... apparently Pepsi is doing a deal with Woolworths that if you buy a Pepsi from Woolworths, you get a bonus chocolate bar. I hear that Target has decided to subpoeona Pepsi because Pepsi won't offer the same deal to Target...
Of course, that's fiction, but it has the same absurdity. If you don't like the deal Skype has done with Intel, then go and use another VoIP client. There's nothing stopping AMD doing the same sort of deal with the Firefly IAX client. Even a simpleton should be able to see this.
For the majority of "standard web browsing users", there's not a great deal of difference between 512K down or 6400K down. Although occasional downloads of software or updates do matter. My father tells me that at dialup speeds, web surfing was okay, but microsoft updates were a killer.
However, so many average people are sharing music and video, and web content is including more music and video, so higher speed does matter. My father receives email from us with family photographs, and his pop3 sessions must take some time. Higher speeds are a big winner here.
The real killer application will be greater use of video downloading, whether IPTV or iPod video or something else. These have been available for "tech saavy" users for a while, but have only been hitting mainstream in the last year, if that.
One thing you forget is volume restrictions. We have a 10GB/month cap (and we use about 6-7GB of that), yet my father in Australia has a lowly 200MB cap - even though he has DSL rather than dialup speeds. 200MB is absolutely pitiful.
OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD serve different markets. FreeBSD is the larger enterprise class BSD, suitable for both desktop and server. NetBSD and OpenBSD can fit these roles but are far better on embedded systems. If you want SMP (typically not important for embedded systems), FreeBSD is further ahead. I've built a couple of commercial embedded systems, all proprietary, but my home network runs Linux, NetBSD and FreeBSD (and did run OpenBSD in the past). I'm familiar with the issues in embedded systems development, and if I had to choose an OS, I'd be tempted to Linux because of the commercial support available, and the ability to leverage off all sort of existing code and drivers, but I'd much prefer NetBSD because of licensing issues, and that it's far more compact, coherent and inherently easier to derisk.
That's a lot of FUD - your comments reveal a lot of bias - simply because a port becomes stale doesn't mean that there's anything less valid about "of court it runs NetBSD" -- it's the fact that the software has been ported to so many platforms that puts it in such good shape for being ported to new platforms. A quiet mailing list says nothing about a port either - perhaps it means that the port is in such good shape that no one needs to talk about it? Also, there's not much relevance about it not being ported to say Linksys routers - at the end of the day, it's about anyone who wants to take up the challenge - people have take up the challenge for netbsd playstation and netbsd dreamcast. Linux has a far larger proportion of home-brew hackers who happily port it to any new platform around - NetBSD doesn't the same community volume -- and quantity doesn't mean quality! Any software engineer looking at the kernels of either Linux or NetBSD will find NetBSD far better structured, more coherent and integrated, and easier to port - have you seen NetBSD's cross building tool chain that can build from any platform to any other -- does Linux have anything like this? I'm waiting to see how many manufacturers start to consider BSD platforms a viable alternative now that they've had a couple of years (in)experience with GPL violations and so on.
That may be old-spec for desktop/productivity use, but it's about on par for an embedded system, i.e. a router or other network appliance. That's something you shouldn't overlook.
I currently run my intranet network server on a HP 800 with 96MB RAM - dhcp, named, log server, nessus, etc. It runs NetBSD of course!
IMHO notebooks make ideal appliances of this sort.
They are cheap if you buy right, they draw little power (good for always-on 24/7 budget), then often have power-saving CPU/etc features (often you can turn off ports that are not needed), a built-in UPS (the notebook battery), easily-swappable drives (most notebook drive bays are easy to access/swapout), small form-factor, and a built-in compact-console. You can even kensington lock-it to a water pipe to prevent theft.
They're also a great learning experience - get to know what it's like and the real issues of rolling up your own appliance.
If they try to do this, you can be sure that the competition authorities will slap and fine them over it. Complain as you will about EU or national authorities, but as we've seen with Microsoft ruling, they are quite active on anti-competitive issues, and a teleco that tries to block VOIP so as to ensure the the customer has to use the telco services and can't choose to use a lower priced alternative service will find itself in lots of trouble.
Apple is too smart: it's not trying to introduce something _new_, it's simply building upon its existing infrastructure - i.e. the highly successful iTunes and iPod family and offer it with new features. Apple isn't trying to sell the new iPod as a "portable video device", it's still selling it as an "iPod, but now with video" - it's an incremental change, that doesn't cost Apple a whole lot of a risky bet, and gives them some leverage into a new revenue channel. This is probably the smartest way to go about it. So, even if the iPod doesn't become the de-facto "portable video player", then Apple doesn't lose much. Many people will still continue to buy the iPod because (as my brother in law did 4 weeks ago), it's the best portable music player out there, but now, people will be pleased that in addition, it offers video capability. Look at the price too - people were clearly willing to pay out at the existing price level for a standard non-video iPod, now for virtually the same price, you're getting video capability. In other words, it's such a low risk bet for Apple - they aren't taking a bet on mass-producing millions of these devices at a high price, with the risk that the product will fail - the product is already a solid seller, even without video capability.
You need to store a lot of data. You also don't need all the complicated overhead of configuring RAID, or dealing with tape backups or anything else. You want to spend your time on your work, not on the technical solution.
The best solution for you is to use USB or Fireware HDD drives. Simply buy the drives as needed (in a capacity that gives a good price-point, e.g. about 120GB now), and you don't need to buy performance, e.g. choose 2MB cache drives, not 8MB. You then need a USB/Firewire HDD caddy.
You then need somewhere to store them - buy a fireproof drawer/cabinet/etc to put somewhere in your house. As you make your backups, store the hardware in this place.
You then need some way to make the backups.
I'm not sure about the solution here, because I'm not sure whether you want backups, or you want archival storage.
If you want backup, you want an off-the-shelf desktop backup solution, that'll just allow you to make periodic incremental backups using the USB/Fireware HDD as the destination. This will be a monthly chore, for example.
If you want archival, then you just need to store your media on the drives, but retain thumbnails or an index, so that you can search and choose which archival drive to pull out of storage. I'm not sure of good software here either.
From what I'm hearing about your situation, you probably want archival, because you're generating a lot of data that you don't always need to have fully online.
The biggest confusion I'm seeing, and this is just another example of it, over this Apple move is that they are only moving to Intel _chipsets_, not to _IBMpc-platform_. There's a whole lot more to a platform than just a CPU.
In all likelihood, hackers will figure out how to make DRM hardware run alternate OS, or generic hardware run DRM OS. But at the end of the day, this is only going to be a small community, and from Apple's point of view, a relatively marginal one (despite the occasional slashdot headliner).
Most of the people who pay a bit of a premium for Apple's products do so because of the overall polish of the product incl. the seamless hardware/software integration. They don't want the kind of Windows annoyingness where things don't always work and so on. I don't see that this is really going to change.
For Apple, it's simply about making an adjustment under the hood. It's like they are an airplane manufacturer and found that rolls-royce engines just don't meet the requirements now, or on the future product roadmap, so they're pushing out the new rolls-royce engines, and putting in GE. For the customer (whether it's the airline itself, or the end user to takes journey on the airplane) there is really going to be little difference, except now the plane is going to go a little further with the new engines. The airplane manufacturer shows really good business sense by not locking themselves into one engine supplier: Apple has done the same thing. It's far more difficult for someone like Apple, because of how dependant the OS and applications are on the engine, but it looks like Apple's been sweating the stuff in the background to ensure that they aren't locked in.
For a powerbook user, they'll not know that Intel is under the hood: OS/X will continue to work just like it did before, but what the user will notice is improved power and performance. They would have noticed the same thing if the migration was to an improved PPC chip rather than an Intel one.
For Apple to try and offer a generic Intel based OS/X would require a substantial undertaking: i.e. verification in a wide range of IBMpc system chipsets and busses, various types of PCCARD, USB and other interface controllers, etc. This would be a mammoth undertaking if they wanted to ensure that the end user quality was right.
So if we can discount that Apple is going down the "generic" IBMpc route, then really, the only other option is that Apple is going to allow third-party hardware, that is fully certified (as an entire product, rather than certifying individual components/peripherals) to run OS/X. If so, I don't see how using Intel cpu over PPC really makes a big difference here.
Intel for Apple is purely a cost, performance and availability move. It's about some engineering of components under the hood, that apart from price and performance issues, don't and won't impact the end user.
One of the key criteria I would look for is how much of the gear is on or off the shelf.
If you have off the shelf expensive/new-tech gear, I don't really consider that to be geeky: you're probably a toy boy. Many pseudo-geeks have lots of cool gear, but it's all standard issue and simply about their wallet.
From my point of view, geek has to do whether the network has custom gear, or intesting bespoke use of technology. Some examples are:
- old notebooks or other gear reflashed or converted into new devices, e.g. photo frame from a notebook, or a PDa turned into a remote control, etc.
- deployment of IPv6, or zeroconf, or multicast
- use and integration with asterisk or VOIP, or even using portable wireless device as a media phone, or video conferencing with wireless cam
That's a small amount I can come up with now: any others?
The war of specifications is really about marketing hype and gaining attention for the first round of games producers and buyers. Once the product is released, then the nature and availability of titles, the playability and all the other issues will become relevant, and one feature or another (e.g. bluetooth controllers) will pale away.
So it's great to speculate, and conjecture, but once we're into a couple of months beyond the product release, then we'll know the real story.
It may turn out that it is not "perfectly" backwards compatible: so what the XBOX 360 guys need to do is run and validate specific XBOX titles, and ensure that the specific title works properly. It may turn out that for any unvalidated titles, it's a case of "suck it and see": they may or may not work.
This article merely suggests that the content provider could have taken another strategy. It proposes another way. Just remember though, that the content provider is allowed to be stupid. If they are stupid, that doesn't justify piracy. I just hope this type of article isn't being apologetic, and making content pirates sleep better at night because they apparently made something better.
"They only get to disclaim the warranty as far as the third party product caused the fault."
It's not that straight forward, so I'm not sure that you're correct.
"On the other hand, if your custom firmware is working peachily and the power supply fails then they still have to replace the power supply, because your firmware wasn't responsible."
What if the new firmware used the platform in a different way so as to cause excessive power drain beyond the original design?
I'm not sure how these problems are handled, but I can easily see that there's a lot of scope for the manufacturer having to unfairly wear the cost here.
Of course, if the power supply fails and you send it back without mentioning that you reflashed the device, then fine; but if you take it into the service centre and the boot to find that it doesn't look like the original device as sold, then they may not be happy.
I don't think it's as clear as you suggest, there's a lot of grey in here.
"But what really amazes me is how slow companies like Dish are to understand the benefits that the GPL brings them. "
The GPL does not bring benefits to all companies.
"Not only does it make excellent business sense to re-release improvements to GPL'd software as cleanly and transparently as possibly, but it makes sense to release proprietary software exactly the same way."
It does not make good business sense when a cheaper competitor takes your work and sells a product at lower cost, in what is a market where cost prevails.
Your comments sound very "pro-GPL": in reality, software gives many businesses a competitive edge, and that's gained through the cost spent on making that software happen: businesses are relucant to give that away "for free" at the risk that a competitor will take the changes (at no cost) and produce a cheaper product with better margins.
For many businesses, GPL makes great sense as a consumer (i.e. to take the technology and use it), but usually less sense as a producer (to then give away the changes for free). Some businesses are smarter and realise how GPL can act as a strategic advantage: for example, Asterisk PBX: GPL has enabled a world-wide community of businesses around building and installing small to medium size PBX's.
From the few (two) products I have that were GPL based (and I obtained the Linux distributions for them), both were missing the source to key loadable modules and userland programs/tools: so it was possible to customise the platform, but not the proprietary functionality. This really doesn't do anything for the wider community, and certainly doesn't offer the total promise of "free software". About the only thing useful from these were a few low level drivers (clocks, eeproms, etc).
Honestly, from my point of view, the promise of free software has easily been defeated by manufacturers, and in theory, the GPL sounds like it offers a better outcome that BSD, but in practice, they pretty much well achieve the same results.
"The whole point of the GPL is that users can make modify the code. If the deriviative code they have released cannot be loaded without rendering the unit unusable, then they have clearly violated the spirit of the GPL."
You are wrong. The whole point about the GPL is to "keep the software free (free as in open, available, to the community)": this "guarantee of the GPL" refers to the software only, _not_ the product that the software may form part of.
It's entirely fair for a manufacturer to state that the warranty does not apply if you start "customising" the product with new code and builds. How does the manufacturer know that your cross-compilation of the firmware didn't produce a bad image?
1. if you leave before your contract allows you to, the employer can sue you: however bad the situation is, do not give your employer more ammunition.
2. your employer cannot (legally) withhold your paycheck or force you to find a replacement, etc: the only way your employer can withhold funds is if you are holding onto company assets, or you owe the company money or somethign else.
3. you need to remain civil, not just for your boss, but for everyone else around you: your reputation isn't held just by one person: the group consensus about who you are will reign supreme.
You need to make this a business case and get buy in from senior people in the company.
For example, the consequences of the work could get you or the company in big trouble. Constant use of CPU time will perhaps degrade performance of networks and desktop, or reduce the lifetime of computing components (e.g. extra swapping may reduce the life of hard drives on machines you're using), and not only that, cost time (e.g. support problems) and money (e.g. not only power requirements: but offices often don't have aircon enabled over the weekend, and excessive computing use may actually cause some problems with heating up the office).
On the other hand, if you put your case well, you could indicate how these costs and risks will actually pay back with the problems you're solving. You really do need to demonstrate concrete and business relevant outcomes: and possibly the different options for solving these. For example, the warehouse optimisation problem: why can't it be run on two commodity pc's: even if it is going to take an extra 2 weeks to finish the task, this may be considered safer alternative.
In summary: assess the problem you're trying to solve, look at it from all the business angles, come up with a proposal that takes into account the other options to give you an objective perspective, and if your case is good, put it forward, and ensure that you get buyin from others in the company: just don't go out and do it yourself alone.
1. Whether or not there is a trademark issue here is far more complex issue to sort out than any of the random speculation that is going on here at slashdot.
2. The courts won't look kindly upon the litigant if it can be shown that they actually chose to wait until the last minute to claim, i.e. an attempt to wield maximum damage on Apple.
The test for trademark infringement is basically whether or not the use of the mark causes confusion, and the use of the mark has to be within the same "area" that the original mark is registered for.
I don't think TigerDirect has a good case: Apple's use of "Tiger" has always been subordinate to "OS/X" and "10.4" - how often have you seen Apple use the word Tiger as itself? In addition, Apple demonstrate history of using cat words, of which Tiger is merely one in a line.
Good luck TigerDirect, you're _really_ going to need it.
You should just need long-range 802.11 equipment to link buildings, especially as you probably have line-of-sight, or simply trees. In the latter case, and possibly in the former case as well, you probably want an external and top-of-building antenna. All of these are commodity items, so should be buyable off the shelf.
For example, most standard 802.11 gear is 18dbm. The long-range gear is 22-23dbm. One PCCARD I looked at quoted an outdoor range at 1200-2300 feet, and that's obviously without any specialised antenna. One specialised antenna I looked at claimed up to 12 miles outdoor!
Searching for "long range 802.11" in google produces plenty of results to get you started.
Depending upon the topology, you may need to use differing channels and set up intermediate hops for the fixed network. You may need to allow your roaming clients to use the different channels, so they get best coverage as they move around.
The work you're about to take on requires a bit more than the usual degree of technical ability and competence: you should you have easily been able to find and research long-range 802.11 equipment.
it's not just about the user experience
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Opera 8 Released
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I read a lot of comments here about comparisons between firefox and opera, and why one is better than the other and so on. Some of the comments then discuss the sizes of the businesses,and how viable they are, and so on.
Please, don't forget that the desktop user experience is only _one_ dimension to the problem - remember that Opera aims its business at the embedded/mobile market by producing a light and fast browser. Don't forget that supporting embedded and mobile devices is more than just "porting to a new platform", so if Opera is well engineered from the bottom up to support this area, then it's leagues ahead of Firefox in that game.
There are many, many, many other markets for webbrowsers other than your desktop - phones, kiosks, consumer products, set top boxes, etc, etc, etc. This is a pretty big market, and probably has a greater revenue stream. Sure, firefox may quote user/download statistics: but just how many of them have resulted in cash back into the business? In addition, remember that someone like Opera may not be able to quote (or even know) its total user base because of commercial confidentiality issues.
If you're a business looking to integrate web browser, I think the nit-picky user issues may be traded off against cost and technical issues, and that's where Opera may have an advantage over Firefox (and over IE/CE).
Slashdot Mirror
Google is more like Sun Microsystems rather than Apple or Microsoft. Both Apple and Microsoft are "closed shops" and not hackeresque in their commercial culture. Google's culture is very much the hackeresque open source and technically centric. To me, Android seems like the equivalent of Java -- born from the energies of passionate technologists. Java was by no means a clear bet by Sun, it could have died and withered, but what it gave the internet just what it needed at the right time, a portable cross platform language that "opened up" programatically without being locked into a platform. I think Android is very similar to that, but applied to the mobile world.
"Forcing people to accept a change in the license without telling them? "
Umm, who forces anyone to accept anything: if you find that a new release has a license you don't like, then you don't have to accept it: use older versions or choose an alternative.
Depending upon what CD it is, and who the manufacturer is, you may be able to reclaim the license or a replacement CD. For example, you can do this with PowerDVD if you lose the license or the CD is damaged. Even if the software is not worth anything to you, it may be to someone else. If any of the CDs are for software of some original/current value, it may be worth taking the time to look into this. You could sell them on eBay for an earner.
I'm a parent of a 2 year old. I weigh the issue up like this: is a funny advertisement more important than the risk (whether actual, or potential - no matter how small) of a child imitating any of this and being hurt? There are many ways to make a funny advertisement, why not choose one that doesn't have this risk? Do we consider freedom of expression in an advertisement so important that we put it above this risk? If so, I'm a little worried about where we put our priorities in society.
Of course, that's fiction, but it has the same absurdity. If you don't like the deal Skype has done with Intel, then go and use another VoIP client. There's nothing stopping AMD doing the same sort of deal with the Firefly IAX client. Even a simpleton should be able to see this.
It depends upon your application.
For the majority of "standard web browsing users", there's not a great deal of difference between 512K down or 6400K down. Although occasional downloads of software or updates do matter. My father tells me that at dialup speeds, web surfing was okay, but microsoft updates were a killer.
However, so many average people are sharing music and video, and web content is including more music and video, so higher speed does matter. My father receives email from us with family photographs, and his pop3 sessions must take some time. Higher speeds are a big winner here.
The real killer application will be greater use of video downloading, whether IPTV or iPod video or something else. These have been available for "tech saavy" users for a while, but have only been hitting mainstream in the last year, if that.
One thing you forget is volume restrictions. We have a 10GB/month cap (and we use about 6-7GB of that), yet my father in Australia has a lowly 200MB cap - even though he has DSL rather than dialup speeds. 200MB is absolutely pitiful.
OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD serve different markets. FreeBSD is the larger enterprise class BSD, suitable for both desktop and server. NetBSD and OpenBSD can fit these roles but are far better on embedded systems. If you want SMP (typically not important for embedded systems), FreeBSD is further ahead. I've built a couple of commercial embedded systems, all proprietary, but my home network runs Linux, NetBSD and FreeBSD (and did run OpenBSD in the past). I'm familiar with the issues in embedded systems development, and if I had to choose an OS, I'd be tempted to Linux because of the commercial support available, and the ability to leverage off all sort of existing code and drivers, but I'd much prefer NetBSD because of licensing issues, and that it's far more compact, coherent and inherently easier to derisk.
That's a lot of FUD - your comments reveal a lot of bias - simply because a port becomes stale doesn't mean that there's anything less valid about "of court it runs NetBSD" -- it's the fact that the software has been ported to so many platforms that puts it in such good shape for being ported to new platforms. A quiet mailing list says nothing about a port either - perhaps it means that the port is in such good shape that no one needs to talk about it? Also, there's not much relevance about it not being ported to say Linksys routers - at the end of the day, it's about anyone who wants to take up the challenge - people have take up the challenge for netbsd playstation and netbsd dreamcast. Linux has a far larger proportion of home-brew hackers who happily port it to any new platform around - NetBSD doesn't the same community volume -- and quantity doesn't mean quality! Any software engineer looking at the kernels of either Linux or NetBSD will find NetBSD far better structured, more coherent and integrated, and easier to port - have you seen NetBSD's cross building tool chain that can build from any platform to any other -- does Linux have anything like this? I'm waiting to see how many manufacturers start to consider BSD platforms a viable alternative now that they've had a couple of years (in)experience with GPL violations and so on.
That may be old-spec for desktop/productivity use, but it's about on par for an embedded system, i.e. a router or other network appliance. That's something you shouldn't overlook.
I currently run my intranet network server on a HP 800 with 96MB RAM - dhcp, named, log server, nessus, etc. It runs NetBSD of course!
IMHO notebooks make ideal appliances of this sort.
They are cheap if you buy right, they draw little power (good for always-on 24/7 budget), then often have power-saving CPU/etc features (often you can turn off ports that are not needed), a built-in UPS (the notebook battery), easily-swappable drives (most notebook drive bays are easy to access/swapout), small form-factor, and a built-in compact-console. You can even kensington lock-it to a water pipe to prevent theft.
They're also a great learning experience - get to know what it's like and the real issues of rolling up your own appliance.
If they try to do this, you can be sure that the competition authorities will slap and fine them over it. Complain as you will about EU or national authorities, but as we've seen with Microsoft ruling, they are quite active on anti-competitive issues, and a teleco that tries to block VOIP so as to ensure the the customer has to use the telco services and can't choose to use a lower priced alternative service will find itself in lots of trouble.
Apple is too smart: it's not trying to introduce something _new_, it's simply building upon its existing infrastructure - i.e. the highly successful iTunes and iPod family and offer it with new features. Apple isn't trying to sell the new iPod as a "portable video device", it's still selling it as an "iPod, but now with video" - it's an incremental change, that doesn't cost Apple a whole lot of a risky bet, and gives them some leverage into a new revenue channel. This is probably the smartest way to go about it. So, even if the iPod doesn't become the de-facto "portable video player", then Apple doesn't lose much. Many people will still continue to buy the iPod because (as my brother in law did 4 weeks ago), it's the best portable music player out there, but now, people will be pleased that in addition, it offers video capability. Look at the price too - people were clearly willing to pay out at the existing price level for a standard non-video iPod, now for virtually the same price, you're getting video capability. In other words, it's such a low risk bet for Apple - they aren't taking a bet on mass-producing millions of these devices at a high price, with the risk that the product will fail - the product is already a solid seller, even without video capability.
You need to store a lot of data. You also don't need all the complicated overhead of configuring RAID, or dealing with tape backups or anything else. You want to spend your time on your work, not on the technical solution.
The best solution for you is to use USB or Fireware HDD drives. Simply buy the drives as needed (in a capacity that gives a good price-point, e.g. about 120GB now), and you don't need to buy performance, e.g. choose 2MB cache drives, not 8MB. You then need a USB/Firewire HDD caddy.
You then need somewhere to store them - buy a fireproof drawer/cabinet/etc to put somewhere in your house. As you make your backups, store the hardware in this place.
You then need some way to make the backups.
I'm not sure about the solution here, because I'm not sure whether you want backups, or you want archival storage.
If you want backup, you want an off-the-shelf desktop backup solution, that'll just allow you to make periodic incremental backups using the USB/Fireware HDD as the destination. This will be a monthly chore, for example.
If you want archival, then you just need to store your media on the drives, but retain thumbnails or an index, so that you can search and choose which archival drive to pull out of storage. I'm not sure of good software here either.
From what I'm hearing about your situation, you probably want archival, because you're generating a lot of data that you don't always need to have fully online.
The biggest confusion I'm seeing, and this is just another example of it, over this Apple move is that they are only moving to Intel _chipsets_, not to _IBMpc-platform_. There's a whole lot more to a platform than just a CPU.
In all likelihood, hackers will figure out how to make DRM hardware run alternate OS, or generic hardware run DRM OS. But at the end of the day, this is only going to be a small community, and from Apple's point of view, a relatively marginal one (despite the occasional slashdot headliner).
Most of the people who pay a bit of a premium for Apple's products do so because of the overall polish of the product incl. the seamless hardware/software integration. They don't want the kind of Windows annoyingness where things don't always work and so on. I don't see that this is really going to change.
For Apple, it's simply about making an adjustment under the hood. It's like they are an airplane manufacturer and found that rolls-royce engines just don't meet the requirements now, or on the future product roadmap, so they're pushing out the new rolls-royce engines, and putting in GE. For the customer (whether it's the airline itself, or the end user to takes journey on the airplane) there is really going to be little difference, except now the plane is going to go a little further with the new engines. The airplane manufacturer shows really good business sense by not locking themselves into one engine supplier: Apple has done the same thing. It's far more difficult for someone like Apple, because of how dependant the OS and applications are on the engine, but it looks like Apple's been sweating the stuff in the background to ensure that they aren't locked in.
For a powerbook user, they'll not know that Intel is under the hood: OS/X will continue to work just like it did before, but what the user will notice is improved power and performance. They would have noticed the same thing if the migration was to an improved PPC chip rather than an Intel one.
For Apple to try and offer a generic Intel based OS/X would require a substantial undertaking: i.e. verification in a wide range of IBMpc system chipsets and busses, various types of PCCARD, USB and other interface controllers, etc. This would be a mammoth undertaking if they wanted to ensure that the end user quality was right.
So if we can discount that Apple is going down the "generic" IBMpc route, then really, the only other option is that Apple is going to allow third-party hardware, that is fully certified (as an entire product, rather than certifying individual components/peripherals) to run OS/X. If so, I don't see how using Intel cpu over PPC really makes a big difference here.
Intel for Apple is purely a cost, performance and availability move. It's about some engineering of components under the hood, that apart from price and performance issues, don't and won't impact the end user.
One of the key criteria I would look for is how much of the gear is on or off the shelf.
If you have off the shelf expensive/new-tech gear, I don't really consider that to be geeky: you're probably a toy boy. Many pseudo-geeks have lots of cool gear, but it's all standard issue and simply about their wallet.
From my point of view, geek has to do whether the network has custom gear, or intesting bespoke use of technology. Some examples are:
- old notebooks or other gear reflashed or converted into new devices, e.g. photo frame from a notebook, or a PDa turned into a remote control, etc.
- deployment of IPv6, or zeroconf, or multicast
- use and integration with asterisk or VOIP, or even using portable wireless device as a media phone, or video conferencing with wireless cam
That's a small amount I can come up with now: any others?
The war of specifications is really about marketing hype and gaining attention for the first round of games producers and buyers. Once the product is released, then the nature and availability of titles, the playability and all the other issues will become relevant, and one feature or another (e.g. bluetooth controllers) will pale away.
So it's great to speculate, and conjecture, but once we're into a couple of months beyond the product release, then we'll know the real story.
It may turn out that it is not "perfectly" backwards compatible: so what the XBOX 360 guys need to do is run and validate specific XBOX titles, and ensure that the specific title works properly. It may turn out that for any unvalidated titles, it's a case of "suck it and see": they may or may not work.
This article merely suggests that the content provider could have taken another strategy. It proposes another way. Just remember though, that the content provider is allowed to be stupid. If they are stupid, that doesn't justify piracy. I just hope this type of article isn't being apologetic, and making content pirates sleep better at night because they apparently made something better.
"They only get to disclaim the warranty as far as the third party product caused the fault."
It's not that straight forward, so I'm not sure that you're correct.
"On the other hand, if your custom firmware is working peachily and the power supply fails then they still have to replace the power supply, because your firmware wasn't responsible."
What if the new firmware used the platform in a different way so as to cause excessive power drain beyond the original design?
I'm not sure how these problems are handled, but I can easily see that there's a lot of scope for the manufacturer having to unfairly wear the cost here.
Of course, if the power supply fails and you send it back without mentioning that you reflashed the device, then fine; but if you take it into the service centre and the boot to find that it doesn't look like the original device as sold, then they may not be happy.
I don't think it's as clear as you suggest, there's a lot of grey in here.
"But what really amazes me is how slow companies like Dish are to understand the benefits that the GPL brings them. "
The GPL does not bring benefits to all companies.
"Not only does it make excellent business sense to re-release improvements to GPL'd software as cleanly and transparently as possibly, but it makes sense to release proprietary software exactly the same way."
It does not make good business sense when a cheaper competitor takes your work and sells a product at lower cost, in what is a market where cost prevails.
Your comments sound very "pro-GPL": in reality, software gives many businesses a competitive edge, and that's gained through the cost spent on making that software happen: businesses are relucant to give that away "for free" at the risk that a competitor will take the changes (at no cost) and produce a cheaper product with better margins.
For many businesses, GPL makes great sense as a consumer (i.e. to take the technology and use it), but usually less sense as a producer (to then give away the changes for free). Some businesses are smarter and realise how GPL can act as a strategic advantage: for example, Asterisk PBX: GPL has enabled a world-wide community of businesses around building and installing small to medium size PBX's.
From the few (two) products I have that were GPL based (and I obtained the Linux distributions for them), both were missing the source to key loadable modules and userland programs/tools: so it was possible to customise the platform, but not the proprietary functionality. This really doesn't do anything for the wider community, and certainly doesn't offer the total promise of "free software". About the only thing useful from these were a few low level drivers (clocks, eeproms, etc).
Honestly, from my point of view, the promise of free software has easily been defeated by manufacturers, and in theory, the GPL sounds like it offers a better outcome that BSD, but in practice, they pretty much well achieve the same results.
"The whole point of the GPL is that users can make modify the code. If the deriviative code they have released cannot be loaded without rendering the unit unusable, then they have clearly violated the spirit of the GPL."
You are wrong. The whole point about the GPL is to "keep the software free (free as in open, available, to the community)": this "guarantee of the GPL" refers to the software only, _not_ the product that the software may form part of.
It's entirely fair for a manufacturer to state that the warranty does not apply if you start "customising" the product with new code and builds. How does the manufacturer know that your cross-compilation of the firmware didn't produce a bad image?
1. if you leave before your contract allows you to, the employer can sue you: however bad the situation is, do not give your employer more ammunition.
2. your employer cannot (legally) withhold your paycheck or force you to find a replacement, etc: the only way your employer can withhold funds is if you are holding onto company assets, or you owe the company money or somethign else.
3. you need to remain civil, not just for your boss, but for everyone else around you: your reputation isn't held just by one person: the group consensus about who you are will reign supreme.
You need to make this a business case and get buy in from senior people in the company.
For example, the consequences of the work could get you or the company in big trouble. Constant use of CPU time will perhaps degrade performance of networks and desktop, or reduce the lifetime of computing components (e.g. extra swapping may reduce the life of hard drives on machines you're using), and not only that, cost time (e.g. support problems) and money (e.g. not only power requirements: but offices often don't have aircon enabled over the weekend, and excessive computing use may actually cause some problems with heating up the office).
On the other hand, if you put your case well, you could indicate how these costs and risks will actually pay back with the problems you're solving. You really do need to demonstrate concrete and business relevant outcomes: and possibly the different options for solving these. For example, the warehouse optimisation problem: why can't it be run on two commodity pc's: even if it is going to take an extra 2 weeks to finish the task, this may be considered safer alternative.
In summary: assess the problem you're trying to solve, look at it from all the business angles, come up with a proposal that takes into account the other options to give you an objective perspective, and if your case is good, put it forward, and ensure that you get buyin from others in the company: just don't go out and do it yourself alone.
1. Whether or not there is a trademark issue here is far more complex issue to sort out than any of the random speculation that is going on here at slashdot.
2. The courts won't look kindly upon the litigant if it can be shown that they actually chose to wait until the last minute to claim, i.e. an attempt to wield maximum damage on Apple.
The test for trademark infringement is basically whether or not the use of the mark causes confusion, and the use of the mark has to be within the same "area" that the original mark is registered for.
I don't think TigerDirect has a good case: Apple's use of "Tiger" has always been subordinate to "OS/X" and "10.4" - how often have you seen Apple use the word Tiger as itself? In addition, Apple demonstrate history of using cat words, of which Tiger is merely one in a line.
Good luck TigerDirect, you're _really_ going to need it.
This is a non-brainer.
You should just need long-range 802.11 equipment to link buildings, especially as you probably have line-of-sight, or simply trees. In the latter case, and possibly in the former case as well, you probably want an external and top-of-building antenna. All of these are commodity items, so should be buyable off the shelf.
For example, most standard 802.11 gear is 18dbm. The long-range gear is 22-23dbm. One PCCARD I looked at quoted an outdoor range at 1200-2300 feet, and that's obviously without any specialised antenna. One specialised antenna I looked at claimed up to 12 miles outdoor!
Searching for "long range 802.11" in google produces plenty of results to get you started.
Depending upon the topology, you may need to use differing channels and set up intermediate hops for the fixed network. You may need to allow your roaming clients to use the different channels, so they get best coverage as they move around.
The work you're about to take on requires a bit more than the usual degree of technical ability and competence: you should you have easily been able to find and research long-range 802.11 equipment.
I read a lot of comments here about comparisons between firefox and opera, and why one is better than the other and so on. Some of the comments then discuss the sizes of the businesses ,and how viable they are, and so on.
Please, don't forget that the desktop user experience is only _one_ dimension to the problem - remember that Opera aims its business at the embedded/mobile market by producing a light and fast browser. Don't forget that supporting embedded and mobile devices is more than just "porting to a new platform", so if Opera is well engineered from the bottom up to support this area, then it's leagues ahead of Firefox in that game.
There are many, many, many other markets for webbrowsers other than your desktop - phones, kiosks, consumer products, set top boxes, etc, etc, etc. This is a pretty big market, and probably has a greater revenue stream. Sure, firefox may quote user/download statistics: but just how many of them have resulted in cash back into the business? In addition, remember that someone like Opera may not be able to quote (or even know) its total user base because of commercial confidentiality issues.
If you're a business looking to integrate web browser, I think the nit-picky user issues may be traded off against cost and technical issues, and that's where Opera may have an advantage over Firefox (and over IE/CE).