Airplane seats are already getting iPod connectors instead of generic connectors....
Maybe part of the problem is that the electronics industry still has their foot up their ass, and after 30+ years of portable media devices, there are still no standard connectors. Every device has it's own connector for charging (which is totally unnecessary today - a small connector that provided 5v and 1000 mv would be able to power almost all portable media devices).
And for the audio output, while most use the 1/8" phono plug, even this is non-standard, with some devices using the 1/16" plug, and phones all using totally different schemes for the four contact points in those plugs - meaningin you can't take a Morotola stereo headset and use it with a Treo and have both earphones work, even though they have the exact same form factor.
I don't blame the airline industries and auto industries for deciding to support only the iPod. It's kind of a "Hey asshats, if you're going to keep being retarded and uncooperative with eachother, then we will just support this guy who has 75% of the market anyway".
Why would it not be included? If the kernel is still shipping support for 15 year old legacy ISA hardware (yes it is) and Cyrix X86 optimization s(yes it is), it can include support for the PS3, which is likely more in use than either of the above.
There is support for hardware in the kernel that is so obscure that there are probably less than 100 people in the world still using it. There's nothing wrong with this - this is why Open Source beats closed source for overall hardware support - as long as someone is around using it, and someone else maintaining it, there is no reason to remove support for it.
These are *NOT* the same thing. The reason the search page isn't the default at Yahoo's WWW domain, is because their primary market is not as a search engine, it is as a web portal.
You're a sniper if you use an automated perl script or other program to bid on an item in the final minutes before an auction, up to your maximum.
UnWired buyer is NOT like this. It is no different from you checking on an item on your watch list in the final minutes and you manually typing in the bid. This is not sniping. Sniping is automated.
Shill bidding only affects morons who get caught up in the bidding frenzy and pay more than they wanted to for the item anyway. It doesn't affect anyone who knows what price they want to pay for what they're looking for.
I buy a lot of stuff on eBay. But I don't do any sniping, or bid hunting, or anything else. I just add things to my eBay watch list, and wait until 5 minutes before auction close, when Unwired Buyer calls my cell phone. I then either bid a bit higher than the current price on the item if it's at the right price, otherwise, I just hang up.
IMO this is the pinnacle of eBay services. No extra fees, and I can get the items *I* want with minimal hassle or worry.
If he had moved to Canada just before the drawing, and won the contest while living and working there, the contest would not be taxable, since Canada does not tax lottery or gambling winnings, unless they are your "primary source of income" (i.e. unless you're a professional gambler / poker player / etc).
I mean, after all, how often do you get to go into space?
If you only really care to watch 1 or 2 shows, then even the basic cable subscription (say, $20) is going to be more expensive than paying $1.99 / episode to download the show ( 2 bucks * 4 new shows a month = 8 bucks, 16 bucks for two shows ).
And on top of that, no commercials to wate time on, no schedule to keep or PVR to buy, etc etc.
Cable is only a better value for people who watch a lot of TV. I have digital cable, and the movies package, several other packages, etc etc. I pay over $90 a month for my cable. I love it, and think I get good value (I watch a lot of movies), but I can easily see the other side as well. I have friends and relatives who haven't had cable TV in years and are perfectly content to watch their 1-2 shows a week downloaded.
To each his own. There is never going to be a pricing model that fits everything. It's the same reason there is both subscription cell phone coverage, and PayGo cell phone coverage.
Both cable and pay-to-download are here to stay IMO.
Write an ActiveX control and a Mozilla plugin that install the Theora codec on their PC with a single click then.
The kind barriers you're describing are not difficult to bypass. The real problem is getting people to use your site en mass - which is never going to happen anyway since YouTube has already cornered the market. So there's really no point to what you're suggesting.
Considering that lots of planes (including low cost budget airlines) have had live satellite seat-back TV for many years, I think the satellite problem has been solved long ago. I don't know how offhand, but I imagine it involves GPS tracking the satellite location, and rotating antennae of some sort.
Firstly, posting a video on YouTube does not require any flash development at all. So the availability of FOSS flash development tools for POSTING is a non-starter.
Secondly, YouTube supports a plethora of codecs, some of which are already FOSS. For example, I know they support XVid for a fact. Now, I know this is an MPEG4 based codec and is therefore patent-encumbered in some parts of the world, but IMO this has nothing to do with if it is FOSS or not. YouTube may already support FOSS codecs like Theora, Dirac and Tarkin, I don't know I have never tried. But frankly, it would not surprise me if they did, especially since they already support obscure formats like "Sega Video".
The only FOSS-related issue, as far as YouTube goes, is the fact that you (supposedly) need a binary flash PLAYER to VIEW the content. I say "supposedly" because in actual fact, anyone can download the.flv file and use FOSS tools to transcode it to any format you want, including simply changing the container losslessly. Since these tools are already available, it would not be out of reach to envision a simple FOSS Firefox plugin that did this on the fly for YouTube and other similar sites.
It's high time Americans have some content unavailable due to ridiculous licensing, since the rest of the world has had to put up with it for years.
Example - here, in Canada, I can't buy episodes of The Daily Show on iTunes. This is despite the fact that it's aired at the exact same time every day here as it is in the US, so there is therefore no possible way Comedy Central is losing more potential viewers than in the US. The same is true of 95% of the content on iTunes video, it's simply not offered here, for no good reason whatsoever.
I mean, thats what everyone was predicting here in NA as well... that all the consoles would sell out, and it'd be next to impossible to get your hand on a unit at retail prices until March or later.
The reality is, the PS3 is FAR from sold out, and you can walk into any major retailer anywhere in North America and see 5 or more units on the shelf, with who knows how many out back. Prices for the unit on eBay have sunk to BELOW RETAIL. Meanwhile the Wii is still nowhere to be found in stores, despite having more available units shipped, and it looks like this trend will keep up for at least the near future.
The moral of the story is
a) Nothing is a "sure thing", and b) Never bet on a new Sony medium (Blu-Ray).
The point is, we can't KNOW that we're making anything worse, but we DO KNOW we're not making it better.
The whole goal should be to reduce our impact on the planet as much as possible - to make nature progress as if no humans ever existed. Does that mean that global warming will happen significantly less? Who the hell knows - we're making too much of an impact.
Humans are the only species on the planet who have the capacity to modify their actions to affect future outcomes - this is because humans INVENTED the future - it didn't exist for anyone until some human conceptualized the fact that there is "a time after right now". As such, we should have a moral imperative to try to not change the future of the planet beyond what it would be without us.
A little OT, but just FYI water is unmetered in most of North American cities. This is a large reason why we're the worlds worst wasters of wate rper capita.
(/me is is favour of widespread water metering and strict enforcement of water useage a-la gas usage - however water should never be privatized ).
I wish people would just wake up and ask themselves a simple question:
What if there were no humans?
Would the planet be:
a) Better off as a whole for other animals in it b) The same c) Worse off?
I think the answer is obviously not (c), seeing how humanity has not really done much beneficial for any species except their own (well.. perhaps rats).
As such, sure, we can't be certain that humans are making global warming worse - but we can be sure as hell we aren't making it any better, especially not by dumping megatons of pollution into the atmosphere that certainly would not be there if it weren't for us.
This all sounds well and good, until you are asked to deploy and support intreanet-based applications on private IP address ranges, like the company I work for.
The UI for our product is web-based, and of course we prefer it be SSL encrypted, as it can contain sensitive information. But because the product is always deployed AFTER sale by our customers on some private IP address, with god-knows-what hostname, there is NO WAAY for us to provide them with a valid SSL cert. that will not pop up these annoying warning dialogs.
The problem is exasperated even more by the new IE7, which doesn't just provide a warning dialog, but a full page near-error message.
There is no way around these messages, aside from ample documentation. This is where the SSL standard falls FLAT ON ITS FACE. It is only acceptable for PUBLIC FACING, INTERNET BASED SIDES. It is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE for intranet based solutions.
Now, this really is not totally an SSL problem. The browsers are to blame as well. There should be a simple setting you can enable (and I would even go so far as to say it should be turned on by default), that excludes the need for SSL authentication on the private IP address ranges (172.16/16, 192.168/16, 10/8, etc. ).
Just use a black brush and brush over the stuff you want hidden. This is what I always do.
I don't care what algorithm you're using, you can't reverse a black paint stroke to discover what is underneath, those pixels are gone. (short of using code that exploits the multi-layers aspect of some image formats - but paint is not susceptable to this:P)
This means that parents will most likely have an easier time protecting their children from these sites and these sites will be more tightly regulated and easier to scrutinize by authorities.
I can't even count the number of ways this statement is blatently false.
Well, here's a few:
A new XXX TLD does nothing to remove porn from existing TLDs
It is trivial for anyone to show porn on any non-XXX TLD, or for that matter, a subdirectory of such TLD.
People who want porn know where to get it. People who don't want porn will only encounter it via accidental search or spam email, neither of which this new TLD will do anyting to prevent.
OK... let's pretend for a sec that all of the above is solved... all a kid who wants access to a.XXX TLD has to do is discover the IP address of it via a WHOIS lookup or other means, then create a DynDNS domain name pointing at this new IP. You think this is too complicated fro a kid to do? I know kids in elementary who have their own DynDNS hosts. It's not rocket science.
Here's a newsflash - since the advent of photography, kids have had porn. Hell, even before then hey had nude sketches of women. Kids have ALWAYS had porn. What guy on here hadn't seen a playboy by the time they were 12?
If your kicker in KDE 3.4+ dies, it's supposed to be auto-restarted (by kdeinit I think), just like Windows Explorer does in XP. I have never had kicker crash and not auto restart.
Plasma will likely be the same.
If you aren't talking out your ass and you actually have more bathrooms in your house than you use in a month, than you should seriously be thinking about retrofitting your plumbing since it is not properly constructed for your dwelling habits.
If a bathroom fixture is going to often not be in use for a long period of time, the correct solution IS NOT "oh drip water in it all the time", it is to install a proper trap primer. This will use much less water than a dripping tap and ensure the trap is sealed.
A natural monopoly is a monopoly that comes to exist all on it's own, and can usually be predicted far in advance. It will exist even in spite of competition.
eBay is a natural monopoly because a dominant online auction has a self-reinforcing properties. It's not simple for a buyer to switch to another auction site, because it will not have many listings, so they won't find what they want to buy. And it's not simple for a seller to switch to another site, because no one goes there to buy things (because there are no sellers), so you don't sell anything.
It's a huge catch-22 situation. These kinds of monopolies usually take drastic change to break - some huge event that will cause a critical mass of buyers and sellers to move to another site. As long as eBays price increases stay small and incremental, it is unlikely this will occur.
Slashdot Mirror
Airplane seats are already getting iPod connectors instead of generic connectors....
Maybe part of the problem is that the electronics industry still has their foot up their ass, and after 30+ years of portable media devices, there are still no standard connectors. Every device has it's own connector for charging (which is totally unnecessary today - a small connector that provided 5v and 1000 mv would be able to power almost all portable media devices).
And for the audio output, while most use the 1/8" phono plug, even this is non-standard, with some devices using the 1/16" plug, and phones all using totally different schemes for the four contact points in those plugs - meaningin you can't take a Morotola stereo headset and use it with a Treo and have both earphones work, even though they have the exact same form factor.
I don't blame the airline industries and auto industries for deciding to support only the iPod. It's kind of a "Hey asshats, if you're going to keep being retarded and uncooperative with eachother, then we will just support this guy who has 75% of the market anyway".
It's support for the cell, and some PS3 hardware.
Why would it not be included? If the kernel is still shipping support for 15 year old legacy ISA hardware (yes it is) and Cyrix X86 optimization s(yes it is), it can include support for the PS3, which is likely more in use than either of the above.
There is support for hardware in the kernel that is so obscure that there are probably less than 100 people in the world still using it. There's nothing wrong with this - this is why Open Source beats closed source for overall hardware support - as long as someone is around using it, and someone else maintaining it, there is no reason to remove support for it.
Once again, you made the common /. mistake when comparing Yahoo! to Google.
http://www.yahoo.com/ is the Yahoo! web portal. If you're going to comapre that to something on Google, compare it to http://www.google.com/ig, which is the Google portal (actually http://www.google.com/ig is more like http://my.yahoo.com/ but anyways...)
http://search.yahoo.com/ is the Yahoo! search page.
These are *NOT* the same thing. The reason the search page isn't the default at Yahoo's WWW domain, is because their primary market is not as a search engine, it is as a web portal.
You really think you can find that many Pro-Bono Attorneys?
I mean sure, The Joshua Tree was great, but they've been going downhill for awhile....
Who hid anything? It's a legitimate comment.
Sniping is an automated, not a manual process.
You're a sniper if you use an automated perl script or other program to bid on an item in the final minutes before an auction, up to your maximum.
UnWired buyer is NOT like this. It is no different from you checking on an item on your watch list in the final minutes and you manually typing in the bid. This is not sniping. Sniping is automated.
Shill bidding only affects morons who get caught up in the bidding frenzy and pay more than they wanted to for the item anyway. It doesn't affect anyone who knows what price they want to pay for what they're looking for.
I buy a lot of stuff on eBay. But I don't do any sniping, or bid hunting, or anything else. I just add things to my eBay watch list, and wait until 5 minutes before auction close, when Unwired Buyer calls my cell phone. I then either bid a bit higher than the current price on the item if it's at the right price, otherwise, I just hang up.
IMO this is the pinnacle of eBay services. No extra fees, and I can get the items *I* want with minimal hassle or worry.
If he had moved to Canada just before the drawing, and won the contest while living and working there, the contest would not be taxable, since Canada does not tax lottery or gambling winnings, unless they are your "primary source of income" (i.e. unless you're a professional gambler / poker player / etc).
I mean, after all, how often do you get to go into space?
If you only really care to watch 1 or 2 shows, then even the basic cable subscription (say, $20) is going to be more expensive than paying $1.99 / episode to download the show ( 2 bucks * 4 new shows a month = 8 bucks, 16 bucks for two shows ).
And on top of that, no commercials to wate time on, no schedule to keep or PVR to buy, etc etc.
Cable is only a better value for people who watch a lot of TV. I have digital cable, and the movies package, several other packages, etc etc. I pay over $90 a month for my cable. I love it, and think I get good value (I watch a lot of movies), but I can easily see the other side as well. I have friends and relatives who haven't had cable TV in years and are perfectly content to watch their 1-2 shows a week downloaded.
To each his own. There is never going to be a pricing model that fits everything. It's the same reason there is both subscription cell phone coverage, and PayGo cell phone coverage.
Both cable and pay-to-download are here to stay IMO.
Write an ActiveX control and a Mozilla plugin that install the Theora codec on their PC with a single click then.
The kind barriers you're describing are not difficult to bypass. The real problem is getting people to use your site en mass - which is never going to happen anyway since YouTube has already cornered the market. So there's really no point to what you're suggesting.
Considering that lots of planes (including low cost budget airlines) have had live satellite seat-back TV for many years, I think the satellite problem has been solved long ago. I don't know how offhand, but I imagine it involves GPS tracking the satellite location, and rotating antennae of some sort.
You're mixing up several issues here.
.flv file and use FOSS tools to transcode it to any format you want, including simply changing the container losslessly. Since these tools are already available, it would not be out of reach to envision a simple FOSS Firefox plugin that did this on the fly for YouTube and other similar sites.
Firstly, posting a video on YouTube does not require any flash development at all. So the availability of FOSS flash development tools for POSTING is a non-starter.
Secondly, YouTube supports a plethora of codecs, some of which are already FOSS. For example, I know they support XVid for a fact. Now, I know this is an MPEG4 based codec and is therefore patent-encumbered in some parts of the world, but IMO this has nothing to do with if it is FOSS or not. YouTube may already support FOSS codecs like Theora, Dirac and Tarkin, I don't know I have never tried. But frankly, it would not surprise me if they did, especially since they already support obscure formats like "Sega Video".
The only FOSS-related issue, as far as YouTube goes, is the fact that you (supposedly) need a binary flash PLAYER to VIEW the content. I say "supposedly" because in actual fact, anyone can download the
It's high time Americans have some content unavailable due to ridiculous licensing, since the rest of the world has had to put up with it for years.
Example - here, in Canada, I can't buy episodes of The Daily Show on iTunes. This is despite the fact that it's aired at the exact same time every day here as it is in the US, so there is therefore no possible way Comedy Central is losing more potential viewers than in the US. The same is true of 95% of the content on iTunes video, it's simply not offered here, for no good reason whatsoever.
I mean, thats what everyone was predicting here in NA as well... that all the consoles would sell out, and it'd be next to impossible to get your hand on a unit at retail prices until March or later.
The reality is, the PS3 is FAR from sold out, and you can walk into any major retailer anywhere in North America and see 5 or more units on the shelf, with who knows how many out back. Prices for the unit on eBay have sunk to BELOW RETAIL. Meanwhile the Wii is still nowhere to be found in stores, despite having more available units shipped, and it looks like this trend will keep up for at least the near future.
The moral of the story is
a) Nothing is a "sure thing", and
b) Never bet on a new Sony medium (Blu-Ray).
Just because some of the great universities are in the area doesn't make the area in general very smart.
Big Dig anyone? If that isn't a giant 30 year brainfart I don't know what is.
Even at 100,000, it would take around 125 years for most people to break even.
You're missing the point.
The point is, we can't KNOW that we're making anything worse, but we DO KNOW we're not making it better.
The whole goal should be to reduce our impact on the planet as much as possible - to make nature progress as if no humans ever existed. Does that mean that global warming will happen significantly less? Who the hell knows - we're making too much of an impact.
Humans are the only species on the planet who have the capacity to modify their actions to affect future outcomes - this is because humans INVENTED the future - it didn't exist for anyone until some human conceptualized the fact that there is "a time after right now". As such, we should have a moral imperative to try to not change the future of the planet beyond what it would be without us.
A little OT, but just FYI water is unmetered in most of North American cities. This is a large reason why we're the worlds worst wasters of wate rper capita.
/me is is favour of widespread water metering and strict enforcement of water useage a-la gas usage - however water should never be privatized ).
(
I wish people would just wake up and ask themselves a simple question:
What if there were no humans?
Would the planet be:
a) Better off as a whole for other animals in it
b) The same
c) Worse off?
I think the answer is obviously not (c), seeing how humanity has not really done much beneficial for any species except their own (well.. perhaps rats).
As such, sure, we can't be certain that humans are making global warming worse - but we can be sure as hell we aren't making it any better, especially not by dumping megatons of pollution into the atmosphere that certainly would not be there if it weren't for us.
This all sounds well and good, until you are asked to deploy and support intreanet-based applications on private IP address ranges, like the company I work for.
The UI for our product is web-based, and of course we prefer it be SSL encrypted, as it can contain sensitive information. But because the product is always deployed AFTER sale by our customers on some private IP address, with god-knows-what hostname, there is NO WAAY for us to provide them with a valid SSL cert. that will not pop up these annoying warning dialogs.
The problem is exasperated even more by the new IE7, which doesn't just provide a warning dialog, but a full page near-error message.
There is no way around these messages, aside from ample documentation. This is where the SSL standard falls FLAT ON ITS FACE. It is only acceptable for PUBLIC FACING, INTERNET BASED SIDES. It is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE for intranet based solutions.
Now, this really is not totally an SSL problem. The browsers are to blame as well. There should be a simple setting you can enable (and I would even go so far as to say it should be turned on by default), that excludes the need for SSL authentication on the private IP address ranges (172.16/16, 192.168/16, 10/8, etc. ).
Just use a black brush and brush over the stuff you want hidden. This is what I always do.
:P)
I don't care what algorithm you're using, you can't reverse a black paint stroke to discover what is underneath, those pixels are gone. (short of using code that exploits the multi-layers aspect of some image formats - but paint is not susceptable to this
This means that parents will most likely have an easier time protecting their children from these sites and these sites will be more tightly regulated and easier to scrutinize by authorities.
I can't even count the number of ways this statement is blatently false.
Well, here's a few:
OK... let's pretend for a sec that all of the above is solved... all a kid who wants access to a .XXX TLD has to do is discover the IP address of it via a WHOIS lookup or other means, then create a DynDNS domain name pointing at this new IP. You think this is too complicated fro a kid to do? I know kids in elementary who have their own DynDNS hosts. It's not rocket science.
Here's a newsflash - since the advent of photography, kids have had porn. Hell, even before then hey had nude sketches of women. Kids have ALWAYS had porn. What guy on here hadn't seen a playboy by the time they were 12?
If your kicker in KDE 3.4+ dies, it's supposed to be auto-restarted (by kdeinit I think), just like Windows Explorer does in XP. I have never had kicker crash and not auto restart. Plasma will likely be the same.
If you aren't talking out your ass and you actually have more bathrooms in your house than you use in a month, than you should seriously be thinking about retrofitting your plumbing since it is not properly constructed for your dwelling habits.
If a bathroom fixture is going to often not be in use for a long period of time, the correct solution IS NOT "oh drip water in it all the time", it is to install a proper trap primer. This will use much less water than a dripping tap and ensure the trap is sealed.
A natural monopoly is a monopoly that comes to exist all on it's own, and can usually be predicted far in advance. It will exist even in spite of competition.
eBay is a natural monopoly because a dominant online auction has a self-reinforcing properties. It's not simple for a buyer to switch to another auction site, because it will not have many listings, so they won't find what they want to buy. And it's not simple for a seller to switch to another site, because no one goes there to buy things (because there are no sellers), so you don't sell anything.
It's a huge catch-22 situation. These kinds of monopolies usually take drastic change to break - some huge event that will cause a critical mass of buyers and sellers to move to another site. As long as eBays price increases stay small and incremental, it is unlikely this will occur.