I went with a local wireless broadband provider. I had to buy a directional antenna for my roof, but now I have 3MBps symmetric w/ latency comparable to a land line, $50/month, (6mbps/$80 iirc) and they're customer support is a pleasure to deal with, especially compared to comcast...
The whole think is based on motorola canopy, though newer technologies might be available elsewhere.
For what it's worth, I just called T-Mobile, and asked about it. They said you have to go through the android store to install software, and that updates will come via T-Mobile using over-the-air programming.
I asked if you can bypass either of these things and install your own modifications, and they said "no".
Hopefully the person I spoke to is misinformed. Otherwise, people won't even have the ability to test their apps on the phone w/out running their test binaries through google, let alone upgrade to newer versions of Android (unless T-Mobile forces the upgrade upon all their customers...).
Also, if the person that holds the trademark "Tetris" decides to sue google, presumably google will have to start pulling tetris clones, just like apple did... So much for atari/nintendo emulators(?)
I think I'll wait until T-Mobile confirms these limitations in writing somewhere, then go back to ignoring Android until a phone vendor that "gets it" decides to give their customers root.
Personally, I'd be upset if web designers had precise control over font rendering. I've overridden Firefox's default fonts with ones that I prefer, and regularly use ctrl + and ctrl - to adjust font sizes. It's better to have a fluid, customizable presentation layer for on-screen reading. Otherwise, we'd probably be using PDF instead of HTML.
Also, I feel like we already have plenty of free (freedom) fonts, and high quality renderers; kerning for desktop computers was solved in the 80's. (Antialiasing was huge and recent though.) Anyway, I'd like a 300 dpi display, and resolution independent rendering will make them practical. Today's models have the resolution of a dot matrix printer in draft mode... No mater how good the font renderer, it's going to look lousy compared to a modern printer or a book.
Including closed source software on a Linux device is dangerous.
If the device is unusable without the proprietary software, then it's difficult or expensive to customize. You lose the benefits of open source software, and scare off developers. Customization is the main competitive advantage Linux devices have over other products. It's always a shame when device manufacturers don't get that, and try to control the software stack or lock down the hardware.
It's one thing if they ship it with a binary-only flash player; it's quite another if they ship with (for example) a proprietary, undocumented GUI toolkit. (This one uses Gnome, which is a good sign!)
Anyway, Intel' is in the hardware business, so they may as well give the source code away as long as it helps them sell more devices. I'm happy to hear the demos suggest this is an open platform.;)
MovieLink's business model requires DRM. Linux doesn't support DRM, and Apple only supports incompatible DRM schemes... Firefox apparently doesn't support DRM. (Microsoft just released a windows media player plugin for Firefox, so who knows...maybe it does now.)
Personally, I'm happy they hang a "GO AWAY; WE CAN'T DO BUSINESS WITH YOU" sign out front. It saves me from wasting time browsing their catalog, only to figure out that I can't play their stuff under Linux, or under Windows without ActiveX/DRM junk...
or, will it be like the TiVo, and prevent the end user from replacing the kernel?
If you can recompile and replace all the important parts of the OS (kernel, X, Gnome, touchscreen drivers...), then it's a viable competitor to the FIC Neo in my book. Otherwise, I'm worried the phone companies will get their hands on this thing and cripple it.:(
Also, why is some of the bundled software proprietary? That's so 1999...
Still, if it lets you install your own C software, it's a huge step forward. I'll be paying attention to this one.
Reading a potentially relevant patent opens you up to huge legal liability. It's called "willful infringement." Besides, with something like 90% of patents being laughable, for every one legitimate patent you find, you've opened yourself up to 9 lawsuits.
Alternatively, do the patent search from some back alley with unauthenticated wifi, but be sure to yank your laptop's drive, and boot off a CD. If you're paranoid, wear a big hat, and spoof your MAC address..
If you think I'm making this up, go ask a developer at a major software company... the first paragraph is standard practice. The second can get you into serious trouble with some employers, regardless of whether you try to cover your tracks.
Yes, just like we can't copy DVD's, and mplayer doesn't skip DVD FBI warnings by default...;)
I wonder if you even need to use gnash, or if the "DRM" is just stuff designed to confuse firefox plugins that grab the.flv's. Once someone figures out how to grab the data, I wonder if copying adobe's flv codec to my mplayer directory will solve the problem, or if someone will have to bother reverse engineering it.
Personally, I can't wait for gnash to work for two reasons:
(1) Flash is always 2-3 years behind under Linux. What happened to Flash 8? Also, why isn't there a 64bit plugin yet? Flash has been the only 32bit program on my system for years... actually, that's not true, since I have to run flash inside 1gig 32-bit chroot, all just for Flash. It's like having a second OS (security patches and all), just for Flash!
(2) If there was a free (as in speech) Flash development and runtime environment, I might bother to learn how to use it.
Ever since the merger, I've wondered what would happen when AMD put GPU's on chip. After all, the GPU's instruction set is secret, but the processor's interface is nice and open. I figured it would go one of two ways. Hopefully, AMD would open up the GPU so people could develop software for their [CG]PU hybrid without going through binary blob compilers or JITs or whatever.
Alternatively, the ATI wing would lock down the CPU and bus infrastructure, and AMD would just give up on seriously serving Linux / BSD / server markets. (Binary blob motherboard / CPU drivers... they're not just a bad idea, they're the LAW.)
On the freedom of religion front, there's also Bush's attempt to withhold AIDS treatment from Africans that have access to abortions, and the faith based initiatives.
The other areas actually look worse. Under Clinton, US radio stations were consolidated into the hands of a few by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Television and newspapers are following. The trend has accelerated, and now the military (now, government) is even writing some of our news for us, and ISPs are lobbying congress so they can control speech online. The NSA has been building up networks to log all IP connections made over the Internet background.
Also, the US just opened a special not-so-secret illegal prison in Indiana for Muslim and middle eastern US citizens suspected of terrorism.
3D graphics cards allow hardware accelerated rendering of vector graphics and textured objects. This means the DPI of your display becomes independent of the size that text and widgets appear in. High DPI displays will simply look crisper than low resolution ones, just like HDTV looks better than NTSC.
Even without that, Linux lets you set the display DPI, and does a reasonable job adjusting font and icon sizes, at least under Gnome. I think MacOS is moving this direction if they're not already there. Hopefully Vista is too (XP's DPI adjustments tend to produce poor results), but I haven't gotten around to playing with it yet.
Put another way, 300 DPI seems to be the bare minimum for printed (on paper) text. At 100 DPI, current displays have a long way to go... Hopefully OLED will move us in that direction. Either way, they get rid of back lights, so they should lead to extended laptop battery life.
I don't really care if an individual believes he is above the law. When federal government believes it is above the law I start to worry. This is yet another example of the feds trying to silence political dissent by ignoring the law and our constitutional rights.
First the FCC killed off the small news agencies and radio stations. In response, journalists went freelance. Now the freelance journalists are using blogs to bypass the remaining few news agencies left in this country and the government is looking for excuses to toss them in jail.
Do you think it's a coincidence that this happened in San Francisco, which is fairly tolerant of political protest, and the local authorities didn't want to pursue the matter? The feds had to use a legal technicality to go after this guy, since the "crime" was outside of their jurisdiction.
By the way, this has been happening at the state level as well; look at the [inter-]national spy network the NYPD set up in order to prepare for the Republican National Convention.
*That* will increase HD-DVD sales... I'm already considering canceling cable since there's no way to use my PC to watch HD stations on my HDTV. Some day, someone will build a PCI -> cable card adapter that works under Linux, or under windows without DRM, and then I'll resubscribe.
Ensuring that I can't watch HD movies that I've paid for isn't going to get me to spring for a hardware HD-DVD player, even once I can pick up a hacked region-free one in chinatown for $20...
Here's a hint for the MPAA: Any business model that forces me to keep hundreds or thousands of shiny little disks in my living room is non-starter. So is any business model that breaks any of the following devices:
My Windows PC. Copy protection => crashiness, at least under XP and Win2003. At any rate, I expect to be able to use the "copy" command in DOS and Explorer for everything I can use it for today. Backup comes to mind. So does the ability to move stuff over my new fangled "ethernet" to my "laptop".
My Linux box. DeCSS is the only reason I bought my huge stack of DVDs. That's right, DeCSS increases movie sales. Go figure.
My portable video player, and the one I buy 20 years from now. My VHS tapes still work, but PlaysForSure doesn't play for sure now that the Zune is out... I doubt FairPlay will work a decade from now either. Sometime before VHS stops working, I can move VHS to mpeg4 if I want. I can't do that with DRMed stuff.
My TV set. I paid for the friggin' pixels; I better be able to make use of them.
That said, I'm more than willing to pay for movies. Just not between 2008 to 2014, judging from the direction the industry is moving in, and the amount of time its taking the RIAA to start listening to it's customers.
Using a "serial hybrid", or "plug-in hybrid", which is essentially just a generator, a battery and an electric motor, has been practical for years. In fact, high school shop classes occasionally build them, since the design is so simple.
You lose a lot of energy from going to rotation to electricity, and then back. However, these vehicles save a lot of energy by doing without a transmission, and running the generator at constant speed, so they may get better mileage than today's hybrids.
Also, they're a breeze to repair, especially if you don't use a generator. After all, the electric motor has one moving part, and no coolant or motor oil. The drive train adds a differential, and some axles, but that's about it. More advanced designs have one motor per wheel. That gets rid of the axles and differentials, but requires more complicated electronics. Finally, if the generator is a modular component then you can pull it (or replace it with batteries) for short trips, and (more importantly) you don't have to throw out the rest of the car if you switch fuels.
To tune the car for longer trips, pull out most of the batteries, and run primarily off the generator. That way, you save weight on the batteries. The weight of the electric motor and (smaller) generator engine is going to be significantly less than the combined weight of all those components you ripped out, like the radiator, transmission, engine, axles, etc. If you pull enough batteries, the overall weight of the car will be less than when you started. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether or not doing that leaves you with a drivable car...
Considering retail outlets should exaggerate the iPod's market share, not underestimate it!
iPods are much easier to pick up at a local retailer than the other brands, since the new models are in stock and priced about the same as online. I think you can even get them at Walmart!
On the other hand, if you buy one of the "other brands," at a store you pay significantly more than you would online, and you end up with an out of date model. Physical stores can't compete with online retailers for niche items, so data based on retail sales will be biased toward the big sellers (or toward companies that buy up shelf space...)
An extreme example of this is Cowon's iAudio. Feature for feature, they kick the pants off comparably priced iPod's. As far as I can tell, they're *only* available online, and get 0% of the retail market share in the "anti-iPod" studies considered by the article.
I'm ticked that display DPI has been dropping since ~2000. Think of those old 19" 1840x1440 CRT's; I've seen the same trend with LCD's as well...
Gnome can deal with different font sizes just fine. However, I'll be forced to buy displays with ginormous pixels until Windows gets its act together... Hopefully they got this right in Vista so decent desktop displays will finally start to drop in price!
My hard drive can read 30mb/s and has a 16MB of cache. If the image is 2MB, and grub prefetches it into drive cache, can't it also boot this software in 6 sec? Drive spin-up should happen in parallel with POST, so the only time you lose is waiting for the legacy bios to do its thing...
Still, a diskless 2MB Linux + X is damn impressive! After all, "1.44" floppies are really 2MB...;)
It amounts to ~ $7,200 per station. How many song plays can a record producer buy for $7200? Probably not very many. The stations should at least have to fork over more money than the payola they received!
Does this "security" software really do anything at all?
After using Linux / Windows for over a decade, I've never installed a virus or adware (except in a virtual machine created for the purpose, once). When I actually ran antivirus software, I never had one of them programs save me from a virus or malware. Granted, I'm an experienced computer user, and know not to click on random attachments, or download pirated software from strange sites on the internet. I have had machines broken into remotely, but that was traced back to a remotely exploitable security hole. None of the current products would have helped with that. (Windows has a firewall; Linux does too.)
I know a few people who regularly have their anti-virus software block viruses in email attachments, exe's etc. All of those people also have viruses, keyloggers and spyware on their system, and probably need to reformat their drives.
I also know people who wouldn't get viruses, but run anti-virus and third party firewall software anyway (the network admins require it). They have consistent problems with Windows (horrendous performance, network crashing,...), that I've never seen while running microsoft's firewall (or zone alarm, for that matter), with no anti-virus software.
So, do customers actually benefit from antivirus software and personal firewalls that bombard you with suspicious packet notifications, or is it a waste of their time and money?
I have never met a music executive who DOES NOT understand that DRM is nearly useless as far as protection of content goes. So, they know there's no good reason for DRM(*), yet year-by-year they're killing their own businesses by sending customers to p2p networks and allofmp3.com?!? Didn't they sign contracts with artists to SELL MUSIC? Also, how can this possibly be in the shareholders best interest? It sounds criminal to me...
(*) I've heard people say that DRM is a way to attempt to trick customers and force them to "buy" the same content multiple times, but that would be dishonest at the best, and fraud in my book.
I am certainly not saying it is full of kind-hearted souls (very far from it!) but there is more to it than just "let's fuck the consumer and the artist to make a buck!". I'd like to believe this, but I've never heard evidence to the contrary. Do you have any?
As far as I can tell, they only exist because they're a cartel (artists must sign a contract to get concert promotion and payola money for radio play), and because before ~1993 their business model made sense and they haven't gone out of business yet.
If the MPAA puts a unique key in each player, people can still publish techniques to extract the keys from all players of a particular model. Then, people can buy the player (insecure players sell better; what a nice incentive for hardware manufacturers!), extract the keys, and share them with close friends and relatives. How's the MPAA to know that copy of the player has been cracked? They could revoke all keys for that model, but that gets them back where they started, with one key per model.
Besides, people can still publish any non-player specific keys (per movie, or the processing key) online, and let people use those to decrypt content. This would let people buy movies without worrying about whether their DVD player / operating system has been de-authorized. The MPAA could protect against that by putting using a different set of encryption keys for each copy of each movie.
This would still let people decrypt and share the movie online. The MPAA could protect against that with watermarking and mandatory registration of each DVD sold. Ignoring the fact that this may be prohibitively expensive (and has privacy implications), people could still decrypt the movie and put it online. When the MPAA came knocking they could claim the disk was lost or stolen.
Unfortunately for the MPAA, it wouldn't come to that; there are no known, secure, digital watermarking schemes. In practice, DVD-rippers would simply strip the watermark before saving the decrypted content.
In other words, this stuff has already been thought through, and mandatory registration doesn't help very much against small-scale piracy. Just like with DRM, these schemes just punish and annoy honest customers, making piracy more attractive.
Slashdot Mirror
I went with a local wireless broadband provider. I had to buy a directional antenna for my roof, but now I have 3MBps symmetric w/ latency comparable to a land line, $50/month, (6mbps/$80 iirc) and they're customer support is a pleasure to deal with, especially compared to comcast...
The whole think is based on motorola canopy, though newer technologies might be available elsewhere.
I found them here:
http://www.dslreports.com/gmaps/localisp
I use it all the time. It works great, especially under Linux. (Commercial DVD players tend to be a bit crippled for some reason...)
For what it's worth, I just called T-Mobile, and asked about it. They said you have to go through the android store to install software, and that updates will come via T-Mobile using over-the-air programming.
I asked if you can bypass either of these things and install your own modifications, and they said "no".
Hopefully the person I spoke to is misinformed. Otherwise, people won't even have the ability to test their apps on the phone w/out running their test binaries through google, let alone upgrade to newer versions of Android (unless T-Mobile forces the upgrade upon all their customers...).
Also, if the person that holds the trademark "Tetris" decides to sue google, presumably google will have to start pulling tetris clones, just like apple did... So much for atari/nintendo emulators(?)
I think I'll wait until T-Mobile confirms these limitations in writing somewhere, then go back to ignoring Android until a phone vendor that "gets it" decides to give their customers root.
Personally, I'd be upset if web designers had precise control over font rendering. I've overridden Firefox's default fonts with ones that I prefer, and regularly use ctrl + and ctrl - to adjust font sizes. It's better to have a fluid, customizable presentation layer for on-screen reading. Otherwise, we'd probably be using PDF instead of HTML.
Also, I feel like we already have plenty of free (freedom) fonts, and high quality renderers; kerning for desktop computers was solved in the 80's. (Antialiasing was huge and recent though.) Anyway, I'd like a 300 dpi display, and resolution independent rendering will make them practical. Today's models have the resolution of a dot matrix printer in draft mode... No mater how good the font renderer, it's going to look lousy compared to a modern printer or a book.
Including closed source software on a Linux device is dangerous.
;)
If the device is unusable without the proprietary software, then it's difficult or expensive to customize. You lose the benefits of open source software, and scare off developers. Customization is the main competitive advantage Linux devices have over other products. It's always a shame when device manufacturers don't get that, and try to control the software stack or lock down the hardware.
It's one thing if they ship it with a binary-only flash player; it's quite another if they ship with (for example) a proprietary, undocumented GUI toolkit. (This one uses Gnome, which is a good sign!)
Anyway, Intel' is in the hardware business, so they may as well give the source code away as long as it helps them sell more devices. I'm happy to hear the demos suggest this is an open platform.
MovieLink's business model requires DRM. Linux doesn't support DRM, and Apple only supports incompatible DRM schemes... Firefox apparently doesn't support DRM. (Microsoft just released a windows media player plugin for Firefox, so who knows...maybe it does now.)
Personally, I'm happy they hang a "GO AWAY; WE CAN'T DO BUSINESS WITH YOU" sign out front. It saves me from wasting time browsing their catalog, only to figure out that I can't play their stuff under Linux, or under Windows without ActiveX/DRM junk...
or, will it be like the TiVo, and prevent the end user from replacing the kernel?
:(
If you can recompile and replace all the important parts of the OS (kernel, X, Gnome, touchscreen drivers...), then it's a viable competitor to the FIC Neo in my book. Otherwise, I'm worried the phone companies will get their hands on this thing and cripple it.
Also, why is some of the bundled software proprietary? That's so 1999...
Still, if it lets you install your own C software, it's a huge step forward. I'll be paying attention to this one.
Reading a potentially relevant patent opens you up to huge legal liability. It's called "willful infringement." Besides, with something like 90% of patents being laughable, for every one legitimate patent you find, you've opened yourself up to 9 lawsuits.
Alternatively, do the patent search from some back alley with unauthenticated wifi, but be sure to yank your laptop's drive, and boot off a CD. If you're paranoid, wear a big hat, and spoof your MAC address..
If you think I'm making this up, go ask a developer at a major software company... the first paragraph is standard practice. The second can get you into serious trouble with some employers, regardless of whether you try to cover your tracks.
I found the link to the article on the second try! (Still no story though...) What do I win?
;)
Maybe I should patent "one link" slashdot submissions...
Yes, just like we can't copy DVD's, and mplayer doesn't skip DVD FBI warnings by default... ;)
.flv's. Once someone figures out how to grab the data, I wonder if copying adobe's flv codec to my mplayer directory will solve the problem, or if someone will have to bother reverse engineering it.
I wonder if you even need to use gnash, or if the "DRM" is just stuff designed to confuse firefox plugins that grab the
Personally, I can't wait for gnash to work for two reasons:
(1) Flash is always 2-3 years behind under Linux. What happened to Flash 8? Also, why isn't there a 64bit plugin yet? Flash has been the only 32bit program on my system for years... actually, that's not true, since I have to run flash inside 1gig 32-bit chroot, all just for Flash. It's like having a second OS (security patches and all), just for Flash!
(2) If there was a free (as in speech) Flash development and runtime environment, I might bother to learn how to use it.
Ever since the merger, I've wondered what would happen when AMD put GPU's on chip. After all, the GPU's instruction set is secret, but the processor's interface is nice and open. I figured it would go one of two ways. Hopefully, AMD would open up the GPU so people could develop software for their [CG]PU hybrid without going through binary blob compilers or JITs or whatever.
Alternatively, the ATI wing would lock down the CPU and bus infrastructure, and AMD would just give up on seriously serving Linux / BSD / server markets. (Binary blob motherboard / CPU drivers... they're not just a bad idea, they're the LAW.)
Round 1 just ended, and it's AMD 0, ATI 1.
*sigh*
On the freedom of religion front, there's also Bush's attempt to withhold AIDS treatment from Africans that have access to abortions, and the faith based initiatives.
The other areas actually look worse. Under Clinton, US radio stations were consolidated into the hands of a few by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Television and newspapers are following. The trend has accelerated, and now the military (now, government) is even writing some of our news for us, and ISPs are lobbying congress so they can control speech online. The NSA has been building up networks to log all IP connections made over the Internet background.
Also, the US just opened a special not-so-secret illegal prison in Indiana for Muslim and middle eastern US citizens suspected of terrorism.Three words: Resolution independent rendering.
3D graphics cards allow hardware accelerated rendering of vector graphics and textured objects. This means the DPI of your display becomes independent of the size that text and widgets appear in. High DPI displays will simply look crisper than low resolution ones, just like HDTV looks better than NTSC.
Even without that, Linux lets you set the display DPI, and does a reasonable job adjusting font and icon sizes, at least under Gnome. I think MacOS is moving this direction if they're not already there. Hopefully Vista is too (XP's DPI adjustments tend to produce poor results), but I haven't gotten around to playing with it yet.
Put another way, 300 DPI seems to be the bare minimum for printed (on paper) text. At 100 DPI, current displays have a long way to go... Hopefully OLED will move us in that direction. Either way, they get rid of back lights, so they should lead to extended laptop battery life.
Feinstein (one of California's senators) is totally bought off by hollywood (dupe here) amongst others.
I don't really care if an individual believes he is above the law. When federal government believes it is above the law I start to worry. This is yet another example of the feds trying to silence political dissent by ignoring the law and our constitutional rights.
First the FCC killed off the small news agencies and radio stations. In response, journalists went freelance. Now the freelance journalists are using blogs to bypass the remaining few news agencies left in this country and the government is looking for excuses to toss them in jail.
Do you think it's a coincidence that this happened in San Francisco, which is fairly tolerant of political protest, and the local authorities didn't want to pursue the matter? The feds had to use a legal technicality to go after this guy, since the "crime" was outside of their jurisdiction.
By the way, this has been happening at the state level as well; look at the [inter-]national spy network the NYPD set up in order to prepare for the Republican National Convention.
*That* will increase HD-DVD sales... I'm already considering canceling cable since there's no way to use my PC to watch HD stations on my HDTV. Some day, someone will build a PCI -> cable card adapter that works under Linux, or under windows without DRM, and then I'll resubscribe.
Ensuring that I can't watch HD movies that I've paid for isn't going to get me to spring for a hardware HD-DVD player, even once I can pick up a hacked region-free one in chinatown for $20...
Here's a hint for the MPAA: Any business model that forces me to keep hundreds or thousands of shiny little disks in my living room is non-starter. So is any business model that breaks any of the following devices:
My Windows PC. Copy protection => crashiness, at least under XP and Win2003. At any rate, I expect to be able to use the "copy" command in DOS and Explorer for everything I can use it for today. Backup comes to mind. So does the ability to move stuff over my new fangled "ethernet" to my "laptop".
My Linux box. DeCSS is the only reason I bought my huge stack of DVDs. That's right, DeCSS increases movie sales. Go figure.
My portable video player, and the one I buy 20 years from now. My VHS tapes still work, but PlaysForSure doesn't play for sure now that the Zune is out... I doubt FairPlay will work a decade from now either. Sometime before VHS stops working, I can move VHS to mpeg4 if I want. I can't do that with DRMed stuff.
My TV set. I paid for the friggin' pixels; I better be able to make use of them.
That said, I'm more than willing to pay for movies. Just not between 2008 to 2014, judging from the direction the industry is moving in, and the amount of time its taking the RIAA to start listening to it's customers.
Using a "serial hybrid", or "plug-in hybrid", which is essentially just a generator, a battery and an electric motor, has been practical for years. In fact, high school shop classes occasionally build them, since the design is so simple.
You lose a lot of energy from going to rotation to electricity, and then back. However, these vehicles save a lot of energy by doing without a transmission, and running the generator at constant speed, so they may get better mileage than today's hybrids.
Also, they're a breeze to repair, especially if you don't use a generator. After all, the electric motor has one moving part, and no coolant or motor oil. The drive train adds a differential, and some axles, but that's about it. More advanced designs have one motor per wheel. That gets rid of the axles and differentials, but requires more complicated electronics. Finally, if the generator is a modular component then you can pull it (or replace it with batteries) for short trips, and (more importantly) you don't have to throw out the rest of the car if you switch fuels.
To tune the car for longer trips, pull out most of the batteries, and run primarily off the generator. That way, you save weight on the batteries. The weight of the electric motor and (smaller) generator engine is going to be significantly less than the combined weight of all those components you ripped out, like the radiator, transmission, engine, axles, etc. If you pull enough batteries, the overall weight of the car will be less than when you started. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether or not doing that leaves you with a drivable car...
Alternatively, give them to the Free Software Foundation. The GNU project could use a militant wing.
Considering retail outlets should exaggerate the iPod's market share, not underestimate it!
iPods are much easier to pick up at a local retailer than the other brands, since the new models are in stock and priced about the same as online. I think you can even get them at Walmart!
On the other hand, if you buy one of the "other brands," at a store you pay significantly more than you would online, and you end up with an out of date model. Physical stores can't compete with online retailers for niche items, so data based on retail sales will be biased toward the big sellers (or toward companies that buy up shelf space...)
An extreme example of this is Cowon's iAudio. Feature for feature, they kick the pants off comparably priced iPod's. As far as I can tell, they're *only* available online, and get 0% of the retail market share in the "anti-iPod" studies considered by the article.
I'm ticked that display DPI has been dropping since ~2000. Think of those old 19" 1840x1440 CRT's; I've seen the same trend with LCD's as well...
Gnome can deal with different font sizes just fine. However, I'll be forced to buy displays with ginormous pixels until Windows gets its act together... Hopefully they got this right in Vista so decent desktop displays will finally start to drop in price!
My hard drive can read 30mb/s and has a 16MB of cache. If the image is 2MB, and grub prefetches it into drive cache, can't it also boot this software in 6 sec? Drive spin-up should happen in parallel with POST, so the only time you lose is waiting for the legacy bios to do its thing...
;)
Still, a diskless 2MB Linux + X is damn impressive! After all, "1.44" floppies are really 2MB...
It amounts to ~ $7,200 per station. How many song plays can a record producer buy for $7200? Probably not very many. The stations should at least have to fork over more money than the payola they received!
Does this "security" software really do anything at all?
After using Linux / Windows for over a decade, I've never installed a virus or adware (except in a virtual machine created for the purpose, once). When I actually ran antivirus software, I never had one of them programs save me from a virus or malware. Granted, I'm an experienced computer user, and know not to click on random attachments, or download pirated software from strange sites on the internet. I have had machines broken into remotely, but that was traced back to a remotely exploitable security hole. None of the current products would have helped with that. (Windows has a firewall; Linux does too.)
I know a few people who regularly have their anti-virus software block viruses in email attachments, exe's etc. All of those people also have viruses, keyloggers and spyware on their system, and probably need to reformat their drives.
I also know people who wouldn't get viruses, but run anti-virus and third party firewall software anyway (the network admins require it). They have consistent problems with Windows (horrendous performance, network crashing,...), that I've never seen while running microsoft's firewall (or zone alarm, for that matter), with no anti-virus software.
So, do customers actually benefit from antivirus software and personal firewalls that bombard you with suspicious packet notifications, or is it a waste of their time and money?
(*) I've heard people say that DRM is a way to attempt to trick customers and force them to "buy" the same content multiple times, but that would be dishonest at the best, and fraud in my book. I am certainly not saying it is full of kind-hearted souls (very far from it!) but there is more to it than just "let's fuck the consumer and the artist to make a buck!". I'd like to believe this, but I've never heard evidence to the contrary. Do you have any?
As far as I can tell, they only exist because they're a cartel (artists must sign a contract to get concert promotion and payola money for radio play), and because before ~1993 their business model made sense and they haven't gone out of business yet.
If the MPAA puts a unique key in each player, people can still publish techniques to extract the keys from all players of a particular model. Then, people can buy the player (insecure players sell better; what a nice incentive for hardware manufacturers!), extract the keys, and share them with close friends and relatives. How's the MPAA to know that copy of the player has been cracked? They could revoke all keys for that model, but that gets them back where they started, with one key per model.
Besides, people can still publish any non-player specific keys (per movie, or the processing key) online, and let people use those to decrypt content. This would let people buy movies without worrying about whether their DVD player / operating system has been de-authorized. The MPAA could protect against that by putting using a different set of encryption keys for each copy of each movie.
This would still let people decrypt and share the movie online. The MPAA could protect against that with watermarking and mandatory registration of each DVD sold. Ignoring the fact that this may be prohibitively expensive (and has privacy implications), people could still decrypt the movie and put it online. When the MPAA came knocking they could claim the disk was lost or stolen.
Unfortunately for the MPAA, it wouldn't come to that; there are no known, secure, digital watermarking schemes. In practice, DVD-rippers would simply strip the watermark before saving the decrypted content.
In other words, this stuff has already been thought through, and mandatory registration doesn't help very much against small-scale piracy. Just like with DRM, these schemes just punish and annoy honest customers, making piracy more attractive.