What you are missing is that many people are willing to pay a *lot* more than you for a smaller lighter device. The fact the those of us who aren't rich can now also those desired features without paying a fortune is even better.
Just the fact that this thread is so popular means that if there doesn't already exist a major (cheap or free) webmail provider where one can set up temporary travel accounts with one-time-passwords plus transparent forwarding, this certainly sounds like an interesting dot-com business opportunity.
Or you could display a separate clickable on-screen keyboard from the captcha keyboard map, and move both around after every click. Then you would only be susceptible to a mouse click logger that does a full screen capture for every click.
Or one could use javascript to capture certain mouse gestures over the animated virtual keyboard. Logging in could become an interesting video game. How long would it take an attacker to get good enough for a "high score"?
Background tasks, especially networking ones (which frankly, are the most useful type), would flatten the battery really quickly. Even more so with several of them waking up at different times and connecting the network.
On the other hand, making the rule hard and fast is a bit tough. And Apple could provide some means of minimizing drain (waking every task up every few hours for example), but don't damn Apple totally on this one.
A phone should have a predictable minimum level of stand-by battery life and UI responsiveness to satisfy the bulk of customers, most of whom will have no understanding of how any installed applications could affect this.
The ill-fated PalmOS Cobalt OS attempted to solve this by requiring all non-vendor-provided background applications to share a very limited pool of both memory and time slice. I'm not sure they ever got that working "in the wild", e.g. with arbitrary apps contending for that pool; plus that may not have been a secure solution.
There might be some constraining rule set that would suffice to guarantee the foreground application (the phone rings, etc.) its DRAM allocation and responsiveness, but it's probably not ready yet, so the bar is set at the lower bound (zero) for background thread resources for which Apple has not already budgeted.
Honestly, this is my biggest problem with the environmental movement in the US today, it's never satisfied with even the slightest amount of progress.
There is a satisfactory direction towards progress according to Dogbert the Green Consultant:
"Stop eating, breathing, driving, defecating and procreating. Sit in the dark and decompose on some garden seeds. Or do you admit you hate Earth?"
Or rather, scientific ideology vs. social engineering and business sense.
A scientist might say careful and extensive testing fails to falsify hypothesis A, and theory A implies that policy B would be beneficial to mankind. Therefore, I will teach mankind scientific thinking, and B will obviously happen... ( 4. Profit! )
An engineer might say (1) so many dollars or hours of scientific education will cause x% of the populace to embrace theory A and act on policy B, (2) so many dollars or hours of (scientifically tested) political rhetoric will convince y% of the populace of the same, and (3) for similar efforts: y% > x%. Therefore (4), screw science education, rhetorical methods works better in getting the populace to "understand" theory A, and act on important policy B.
I suspect that it will be a monitor the app after the fact type of thing. Apple and AT&T know who you are as the app author. So if your app does something funky, then they pull the plug on it.
...and likely also permanently canceling your $99 developer account and signing certificate for violating the terms.
Until one developer in the consortium screws up, and all the developers sharing that same signing certificate get all their apps cancelled as well.
Better idea is to charge $1 for each of the first 99 downloads per year (an early adopter contribution), and then reset the app to be free for the rest of the year.
Why don't most common email programs allow one to turn off following any clicked links?
Or maybe sending them through a Google search first instead of directly to the default web client?
The GPL isn't enforceable except by the copyright holders. If those copyright holders don't pay the proposed maintenance tax, then their copyrights would expire, and their GPL'd "IP" would lapse into the public domain. Furthermore, corporations could pay the tax on their additions and bug fixes, and thus "lock up" their versions of the formerly GPL'd software.
I'd be tempted to look into cheap pocket-sized solutions. Maybe a Palm handheld, plus charger that can use AA cells; might not even need the folding keyboard, depending on how well you can use pen input (someone wrote a whole book this way). Bring two small card USB readers to use for duplicating SD cards at internet cafe's. No big, hard, laptop-sized bulge in your pack. And cheap enough that you can have a complete spare/duplicate set at home, pre-packaged to ship to you if your pack gets stolen.
What he means is: forget on-chip cache -- on-chip main memory. IOW, instead of having main memory on the motherboard, it would be embedded into your processor, running, presumable, at the same speed as the CPU.
You presume wrong... a least for decent processor speeds and memory sizes. A DRAM chip accesses and cycles slower not just because it is on another chip, but because the smaller transistors in the much larger memory arrays can only drive their bit-line capacitances so fast; plus the chip has to restore the data back to the DRAM (the D is for Dynamic) transistor after reading it, and before it can be read again. In a properly designed memory hierarchy, the cache SRAM is small enough that its memory cells can drive their bit-lines fast enough that it takes significantly fewer clock cycles for the CPU to access any cache memory cell than any main memory cell (or higher level cache).
There will be some performance benefit from putting main memory on the same die, or just in the same package, if it were possible with enough yield, but that would not replace the need for (perhaps several levels of) cache for high performance CPUs.
How well the skills you learn in school fit the job market is almost a random lottery. A large subset of the courses a student takes usually turns out to be completely irrelevant to getting and succeeding in their eventual job position, but that subset might turn out to be almost completely different for two different students. One company will tell you that social skills are important, another company will pay a collection of social misfits just as much or more. Some company will tell you that communication skills are important, another will have a bunch of programmers who kahnt speal. Some company will be looking for people into some highly organized software practices fad, another will hire people who can get the job done by poking hex machine code into the debugger. Some jobs barely require any skill at basic arithmetic, others may require an intuitive knowledge of linear algebra and the calculus of complex variables. Etc. Etc.
Look for situations where the lottery odds are tilted and try to use that tilt in your favor. Talk to a large sample of people working in the type of industry in which you are interested. If 2X% are using some language, but only X% of students are studying that language, then look into learning that language as one way to help your odds at the job lottery.
People learn a lot through failure and pain. C is clearly the perfect choice when you look at it this way.
Nah... Some very "learned" hardware engineers first learned to program in Basic... with peek and poke instead of the cleaner typed pointers in C... Much more opportunities for failure and pain.
There's an even easier way to handle this. Just make a copyright extension beyond the authors life require a huge (multi-million) dollar fee. The government gets its bribe, and the mega-conglomerates can afford it for stuff that still contributes significantly enough to the bottom line.
This is simply insurance and has little to do with patenting something new. The patent office occasionally grants marginal and outright flaky patents, and will continue to do so even if the current process is improved somewhat. For a big company (read: deep pockets lawsuit target) it's cheaper to file a patent on something ambiguously new or obvious, and have it rejected, than to be the subject of a suit from a troll who got lucky with a nearly identical filing under some hidden submarine title. If granted, even if by sheer luck, it might still add to their cross-licensing/defense portfolio.
The GPL states that they may only distribute the code if they accompany it with the rights for any derivatives to use any patents it infringes. If they discover that they infringe some patents in Linux then they must stop distributing Linux until they have obtained a license to the patents that is compatible with the GPL (which means that anyone who is in the transitive closure of recipients of the code from them also gains the license).
In order to stop them from violating such a copying license, a copyright holder would have to prove (in court, most likely, and at very high cost) that their own code violates someone else's specific patent. Then the copyright holder themselves would end up no longer be able to distribute (or perhaps even use!) their own code, and might even end up liable for willful patent violation if the patent holder decides to get involved.
If the software is only likely, but lacking court proof, that it violates something somewhere in a set of patents, then this provision has no teeth. If some company discovers that they might infringe on some patents, will they fear a big lawyer-rich patent holding company, or some small copyright holder with little capability to engage in an expensive and negative patent battle?
The question is more along the lines of 'why should it be fine for them to mess with file downloads but not streaming video?'
They're businesses. They probably figured out how to extract more profits from video watchers on average at a lower infrastructure cost (maybe customer retention plus video advertising revenues versus symmetric provisioning costs, or some such...)
Name an operating system that can't be infected when a user gives an admin password.
An embedded OS on a system with the OS, all applications and all executable code segments in ROM. For example, some dumb cell phone and embedded DSP operating systems. Infection is still possible, but requires physical access, a screwdriver, and maybe some SMT soldering equipment.
Which OS's will boot and run from a write-protected HD partition (assuming some other HDs are partitioned for swap/log/tmp/user space, etc.)? Are there any HD's that come with a physical write-protect jumper? All those OS's might then qualify.
As far as Hertz, No such thing was possible in 1970 or 1990. Supercomputers don't use higher clock speeds to do their work - those 1980s Crays (the ones with the seat cushions!) ran at speeds on the order of 25MHz.
The first ones with the seat cushions were Cray 1's, 1976 vintage, single CPU, 80 MHz processor clock. A 1988 vintage Cray Y-MP had from 2 to 8 processors at around 167 MHz.
The problem domains between automotive safety and airliner hijacking aren't even close.
Unless you go around picking up random hitchhikers you are in control of who is in your car and what they are doing. Contrast this with an airliner where there are going to be 100+ people on it that you have zero control over or input into their accompaning you on your journey. Whatever the motivations of someone on an airliner might be, you aren't privy to them and aren't going to be consulted. You are therefore utterly dependent on the judgement of others.
As opposed to driving on public roads where dozens to thousands of other people may be driving in close proximity, merging, turning, approaching head-on, etc., some possibly drunk, some apparently blinded by their cell phone, etc.
Simply put, you are in control in your car and have no control in an airliner.
But given the objectively measured relative fatality rates between when people are in control in their cars and when they aren't in shared transportation, you're making a case that people shouldn't be allowed to be in control of their vehicles for both their own and for the public's safety.
There is at least one application allowing a Palm Treo cell phone to be used for SSH. I SSH in from my Treo 650 using the built-in keyboard. Helps to have really good eyesight to read such a tiny text console though.
The copyrights to any GPL'd software are owned by the authors (or their assignee's). The copyright holders can offer their software under any additional licenses or conditions they wish. The copyright holders can also just not care to enforce any conditions on the distribution of their software.
So, basically, you can't do much about a perceived GPL "violation" unless the copyright holder cares to do something about that particular use other than permit it, and you are an agent for the copyright holder. You could add some code of your own, and then hope your fork becomes more popular in use, but then you'd only be able to do something about your fork, not the original.
...but IANAL, so the above is probably all nonsense, as per the usual on slashdot...
So what do you do if your kids download some game, P2P app, or other crapware-laden piece of stupidity? Take away the computer.Only give them accounts inside vmware-like environments. To "take away their computer" is just a reinstall from image.
Slashdot Mirror
What you are missing is that many people are willing to pay a *lot* more than you for a smaller lighter device. The fact the those of us who aren't rich can now also those desired features without paying a fortune is even better.
Do you think the Confederate states would have been better liberated, on under control of the U.S.? That's the point.
Just the fact that this thread is so popular means that if there doesn't already exist a major (cheap or free) webmail provider where one can set up temporary travel accounts with one-time-passwords plus transparent forwarding, this certainly sounds like an interesting dot-com business opportunity.
Or one could use javascript to capture certain mouse gestures over the animated virtual keyboard. Logging in could become an interesting video game. How long would it take an attacker to get good enough for a "high score"?
Background tasks, especially networking ones (which frankly, are the most useful type), would flatten the battery really quickly. Even more so with several of them waking up at different times and connecting the network.
On the other hand, making the rule hard and fast is a bit tough. And Apple could provide some means of minimizing drain (waking every task up every few hours for example), but don't damn Apple totally on this one.
A phone should have a predictable minimum level of stand-by battery life and UI responsiveness to satisfy the bulk of customers, most of whom will have no understanding of how any installed applications could affect this.
The ill-fated PalmOS Cobalt OS attempted to solve this by requiring all non-vendor-provided background applications to share a very limited pool of both memory and time slice. I'm not sure they ever got that working "in the wild", e.g. with arbitrary apps contending for that pool; plus that may not have been a secure solution.
There might be some constraining rule set that would suffice to guarantee the foreground application (the phone rings, etc.) its DRAM allocation and responsiveness, but it's probably not ready yet, so the bar is set at the lower bound (zero) for background thread resources for which Apple has not already budgeted.
There is a satisfactory direction towards progress according to Dogbert the Green Consultant:
"Stop eating, breathing, driving, defecating and procreating. Sit in the dark and decompose on some garden seeds. Or do you admit you hate Earth?"
A scientist might say careful and extensive testing fails to falsify hypothesis A, and theory A implies that policy B would be beneficial to mankind. Therefore, I will teach mankind scientific thinking, and B will obviously happen... ( 4. Profit! )
An engineer might say (1) so many dollars or hours of scientific education will cause x% of the populace to embrace theory A and act on policy B, (2) so many dollars or hours of (scientifically tested) political rhetoric will convince y% of the populace of the same, and (3) for similar efforts: y% > x%. Therefore (4), screw science education, rhetorical methods works better in getting the populace to "understand" theory A, and act on important policy B.
Or some such...
...and likely also permanently canceling your $99 developer account and signing certificate for violating the terms.
Better idea is to charge $1 for each of the first 99 downloads per year (an early adopter contribution), and then reset the app to be free for the rest of the year.
Why don't most common email programs allow one to turn off following any clicked links? Or maybe sending them through a Google search first instead of directly to the default web client?
The GPL isn't enforceable except by the copyright holders. If those copyright holders don't pay the proposed maintenance tax, then their copyrights would expire, and their GPL'd "IP" would lapse into the public domain. Furthermore, corporations could pay the tax on their additions and bug fixes, and thus "lock up" their versions of the formerly GPL'd software.
I'd be tempted to look into cheap pocket-sized solutions. Maybe a Palm handheld, plus charger that can use AA cells; might not even need the folding keyboard, depending on how well you can use pen input (someone wrote a whole book this way). Bring two small card USB readers to use for duplicating SD cards at internet cafe's. No big, hard, laptop-sized bulge in your pack. And cheap enough that you can have a complete spare/duplicate set at home, pre-packaged to ship to you if your pack gets stolen.
What he means is: forget on-chip cache -- on-chip main memory. IOW, instead of having main memory on the motherboard, it would be embedded into your processor, running, presumable, at the same speed as the CPU.
You presume wrong... a least for decent processor speeds and memory sizes. A DRAM chip accesses and cycles slower not just because it is on another chip, but because the smaller transistors in the much larger memory arrays can only drive their bit-line capacitances so fast; plus the chip has to restore the data back to the DRAM (the D is for Dynamic) transistor after reading it, and before it can be read again. In a properly designed memory hierarchy, the cache SRAM is small enough that its memory cells can drive their bit-lines fast enough that it takes significantly fewer clock cycles for the CPU to access any cache memory cell than any main memory cell (or higher level cache).
There will be some performance benefit from putting main memory on the same die, or just in the same package, if it were possible with enough yield, but that would not replace the need for (perhaps several levels of) cache for high performance CPUs.
Look for situations where the lottery odds are tilted and try to use that tilt in your favor. Talk to a large sample of people working in the type of industry in which you are interested. If 2X% are using some language, but only X% of students are studying that language, then look into learning that language as one way to help your odds at the job lottery.
Good luck!
Nah... Some very "learned" hardware engineers first learned to program in Basic... with peek and poke instead of the cleaner typed pointers in C... Much more opportunities for failure and pain.
There's an even easier way to handle this. Just make a copyright extension beyond the authors life require a huge (multi-million) dollar fee. The government gets its bribe, and the mega-conglomerates can afford it for stuff that still contributes significantly enough to the bottom line.
This is simply insurance and has little to do with patenting something new. The patent office occasionally grants marginal and outright flaky patents, and will continue to do so even if the current process is improved somewhat. For a big company (read: deep pockets lawsuit target) it's cheaper to file a patent on something ambiguously new or obvious, and have it rejected, than to be the subject of a suit from a troll who got lucky with a nearly identical filing under some hidden submarine title. If granted, even if by sheer luck, it might still add to their cross-licensing/defense portfolio.
In order to stop them from violating such a copying license, a copyright holder would have to prove (in court, most likely, and at very high cost) that their own code violates someone else's specific patent. Then the copyright holder themselves would end up no longer be able to distribute (or perhaps even use!) their own code, and might even end up liable for willful patent violation if the patent holder decides to get involved.
If the software is only likely, but lacking court proof, that it violates something somewhere in a set of patents, then this provision has no teeth. If some company discovers that they might infringe on some patents, will they fear a big lawyer-rich patent holding company, or some small copyright holder with little capability to engage in an expensive and negative patent battle?
But IANAL, so the above is random line noise...
They're businesses. They probably figured out how to extract more profits from video watchers on average at a lower infrastructure cost (maybe customer retention plus video advertising revenues versus symmetric provisioning costs, or some such...)
An embedded OS on a system with the OS, all applications and all executable code segments in ROM. For example, some dumb cell phone and embedded DSP operating systems. Infection is still possible, but requires physical access, a screwdriver, and maybe some SMT soldering equipment.
Which OS's will boot and run from a write-protected HD partition (assuming some other HDs are partitioned for swap/log/tmp/user space, etc.)? Are there any HD's that come with a physical write-protect jumper? All those OS's might then qualify.
The first ones with the seat cushions were Cray 1's, 1976 vintage, single CPU, 80 MHz processor clock. A 1988 vintage Cray Y-MP had from 2 to 8 processors at around 167 MHz.
As opposed to driving on public roads where dozens to thousands of other people may be driving in close proximity, merging, turning, approaching head-on, etc., some possibly drunk, some apparently blinded by their cell phone, etc.
Simply put, you are in control in your car and have no control in an airliner.
But given the objectively measured relative fatality rates between when people are in control in their cars and when they aren't in shared transportation, you're making a case that people shouldn't be allowed to be in control of their vehicles for both their own and for the public's safety.
There is at least one application allowing a Palm Treo cell phone to be used for SSH. I SSH in from my Treo 650 using the built-in keyboard. Helps to have really good eyesight to read such a tiny text console though.
So, basically, you can't do much about a perceived GPL "violation" unless the copyright holder cares to do something about that particular use other than permit it, and you are an agent for the copyright holder. You could add some code of your own, and then hope your fork becomes more popular in use, but then you'd only be able to do something about your fork, not the original.
...but IANAL, so the above is probably all nonsense, as per the usual on slashdot...
So what do you do if your kids download some game, P2P app, or other crapware-laden piece of stupidity? Take away the computer.Only give them accounts inside vmware-like environments. To "take away their computer" is just a reinstall from image.