*Your* logic is faulty. Florian paints himself out to be an independent expert on patents. It is his character he is pimping out to all the news outlets as credible. The fact is that whilst blogging posing as an independent expert, he reveals in his latest post that behinds the scenes he has been negotiating with Oracle for cash. Now take a look at that post to see if it is strongly in favour of Oracle in its current case against Google. Coincidence? No.
I'm guessing outlets like the BBC must be feeling pretty stupid about now for having been duped.
Again you are wrong. Acorn was not a group of academics, it was a company. IBM employes academics and undergraduates but that doesn't make them an educational establishment. I have no intention of revising the fact: Acorn were not philanthopists liasing with all the schools to produce the ideal education computer, they fought for a contract with the BBC who came up with a spec in order to make money.
You fail to see the discrepancy between your "glory days" of the BBC Micro being a bunch of foreign components glued together and the new BBC Micro being a bunch of foreign components glued together. Next you will be trying to warp semantics to justify your argument of what is a "computer". The fact is that the world is now more global. The Pi is a British designed processor, running a kernal designed by a Finnish guy, using memory designed in Asia, viewed via graphic chips designed in America, and assembled in China.
That's an interesting rewrite of history. The BBC Microcomputer revolution was about entrepeneurs Chris Curry and Herman Hauser bidding against other rivals (Sinclair, Newbury, Dragon) to produce a computer under contract for the BBC. Acorn was already selling the Acorn Atom commercially and the BBC Micro was an upgrade to this. There was no liasing en masse with schools. The academics, inc Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber, were working for Acorn not acting out of charity.
The sad thing is you don't recognise the 6502 had nothing to do with British engineering, yet the ARM chip 100% is. This is very much the BBC micro revolution Mark 2, minus the OS.
I think you are wrong. The difference at school between using an Acorn Archimedes and using a Microsoft PC was huge. The latter was always locked down, you couldn't tinker with the OS (even if you could understand the mess of DLLs), limited as to what software you could install on there, couldn't drop down to assembler at the drop of a hat, and couldn't write full-screen arcade games in a few lines of BASIC. If I was forced to use Microsoft Windows rather than the Acorn computers when I was a child I would not be a software engineer today, that is for sure.
Forget tutorials for the raspberry pi. Load it up with Python, QtDesigner, and plenty of other goodies. Have a box full of them kids can pull out and play with during lunch and after school. I was publishing software by 14 yrs old and I never had a computer programming class. Don't bind them into a curriculum. Some might be inspired to write games, others control robots, maybe create a disco lighting system, an advanced art project, who knows??
You should try Google, it often can find interesting information. For example you could type in "ira code bomb". The search engine can also find information on many other subjects.
The IRA were as pissed as the police with false bomb threats as theirs would be taken less seriously, hence the IRA giving code words to go along with the threat so the police could verify it was from them.
Too late, urban trams already have this. They have a "ding ding" which they use to signal to somebody they think is too close and a larger horn much like a car when there is danger of a collision. If you want a good idea for the grandkids, throw in a third beeper that signals "thank you". I'd love that.
Actually it makes it a Classic car, and in the UK you would no longer have to pay road tax any more. Give it another couple of decades and it will become an Antique car. You need to get something pre-1930 for it to be a Vintage car. Ancient? Probably have to buy one off Barney Rubble.
We have a tram system in Nice and one of the key selling features is how quiet it is. They run straight through all the major squares and streets with no barriers, yet people manage to avoid them without any problem. However just in case they have a horn which when they press a button it goes "beep".
When I get an electric car one of the things I will enjoy reducing is the noise pollution as much as any other kind. I don't see the problem with Audi making engine sounds, it's just nobody is going to buy an Audi,
So Nokia produces its first Microsoft Windows phone, and it's already found to be buggy. On top of that Nokia are now an empty shell with a brand name, so the value of the company will be eroded with its reputation. Microsoft picking up Nokia for pennies draws closer, possibly around the time Nokia's customers have beta tested enough for them to get their OS stable.
Totally agree. Just clicked to say PLEASE don't leave any comments on this thread to perpetuate it (apart from whinges like above). If you want to discuss this issue bugger off to somewhere like Reddit. Let this thread die the death it deserves (and perhaps suggest the replacement of samzenpus to/. management).
There is a lot of rewriting history here. There were plenty of quick and reliable phones before the iPhone, which is no quicker or more reliable than any of its predecessors. The way it revolutionised the mobile phone market was to turn something as mundane as a phone into an expensive must-have fashion icon. The only original feature was the "Visual Voicemail". The contact integration (email/fb/phone/etc) is not some new killer app of WP7, Blackberry has been doing it for years.
MS is similar to Android in that it has to work with all the handset manufacturers. This does not stop them from differentiating themselves. No.1 is by hardware, a nicer camera or bigger screen. No.2 is by initial touch/feel, which is where Android scores over MS with the ability to customise as much as needed. No.3 is exclusive content coming bundled. I can see no reason why any manufacturer would want to offer Microsoft Windows instead of Android though.
Android tablets are going for under $90 new on ebay (average price for 7" tablet appears to be £55). However combine something like the Raspberry Pi with the plastic eink display by LG that Slashdot was covering a couple of days ago and I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to halve that. Forward-wind into the future where those printable solar cells could be put on the back of the eReader to make them totally self-powered and we have the perfect educational delivery device for developing countries. It takes time to build up a library of good quality content so it makes sense to start now. In a few years when the library catalogue has filled out then technology might have caught up at the same time.
I don't think people that write code are the target audience. I'm not going to bother watching the video, but I presume it's aimed at ISPs. The price would presumably be pitched at a price which would be competitive to not having to deal with all the "I've been hacked" support calls from customers. They would then have a "SQL injection protection" tick they can put on their front page, and icon on their control panel users can activate.
He worked on behalf of all United States citizens for years, protecting your rights, so maybe he should receive more. Who says it needs to come from the courts? Get him to put up a page with his Paypal details. If you all sent him $10 for the 5 years of work he put in on your behalf then you can probably double his $50k compensation within a day.
It is not insanity, and it is not kidnapping. The term for it is false imprisonment. A bit like the Enright v. Groves case mentioned, what he was arrested for doing was not a crime. The police officers commited a criminal offence and should be punished for it. Compensation for the victim is just a bonus.
With Facebook there is an expectation that all your information is public, even your private chats. With MSN it's always been implicit that private conversations are between just the two users despite passing over their networks. The fact they are tampering with your messages is rather a big deal. Once they have broken that barrier of trust, which they now have, a significant share of that market will now move to an alternative. Which is not really a problem for Microsoft, they aren't making any money out of providing the MSN service, and the users will fragment rather than going to any of their rivals which as pointed out aren't any better.
The video you generate comes out of your devices in h.264, for which the manufacturers are already paying a royalty. Now if you then want to generate some actual content, using the raw video, then you now have to pay a license unless you use WebM. There is no "winner", as a poster above pointed out the user will just use the format the provider spits out, the codec used will just be a balance of cost versus convenience. It's not that big a deal to use WebM instead of h.264 for general use, and pay a license to generate mobile content which you generally charge a premium for until WebM reaches the same hardware acceleration as h.264.
Not quite sure I quite understand the concept of $98bn in terms of Apple. How may lawyer-hours is that? Or can you put it in terms of simultaneous court-cases?
Uh huh, Apple leads using parts outsourced to rival tablet makers. Apple got lucky in their timing and then have been using the profits trying to screw over rivals and consumers with frivolous lawsuits suppressing the competition rather than innovating. If somebody had said a couple of years ago that Apple would be seen as the scum of the computer industry even beneath Microsoft nobody would have believed it:-(. How low they have sunk.
Randi obtains results on the various fields he's interested in debunking not by collecting a representative sample through the offer of independent testing but by dangling the offer of $1,000,000 under the assumption that any opponents he selects will be misguided or fraudsters. This creates an obviously biased self-selecting sample and provides that justice is not seen to be done. Do you deny this?
Would you like to substantiate this by pointing out cases of people with genuine psychic powers that Randi has refused to test? And he is doing better than testing a representative sample, he has made the offer open to every single person on the planet.
Randi does not bring independent third parties to establish the tests but finalises his own terms for the tests. After all, this isn't an exercise is proving what's correct but in protecting his own money.
He has enough experience to formuate his own tests. What makes you think a third party would establish any better ones? If they can I am sure Randi would be happy to adopt it.
Even though Randi chooses his own terms, there is no peer review process for his work - e.g. through stringent analysis before publication in some third party journal with a reputation for adherence to academic standards.
What's that got to do with anything? He's exposing frauds, not proposing a theory on the origins of the universe.
Nor are the experiments repeated independently (especially not with a representative sample).
??? Anybody is able to repeat the test independently. Any why would anybody want to test somebody exposed as a fraud. The only time worth testing independently is if Randi can't expose them.
his "no-one's claimed my $1,000,000!" has nothing to do with the strength of his underlying claim
Er I think the general public would disagree. $1M is a pretty good incentive.
No, the credit card company only gets to see the total amount you spent and not an itemised list. A store is able to track an increase in your alcohol intake and sell that information to your health insurance company, the credit card company cannot.
Great answer. "People in accidents have often braked sharply, ergo we will reduce the premium for people that don't brake sharply". What do you think will happen in an environment where nobody on the road wants to be the one to brake sharply to avoid an accident as it will raise their premium?
Too right it has nothing to do with the car being stolen. When I went to get my first insurance, the price was up to £5,000 per year for a car costing £1000. Even after shopping and bargaining my insurance still cost more per year than the total capital cost of my car for 3rd party only. The two factors that determine insurance price are age and class of vehicle (loosely linked to engine capacity).
You can see why compulsory 3rd party is a good thing. You would hate it if somebody crashed into your car but then turned around and said "Would love to help out mate but I'm a bit skint at the moment". Jaster is right that the UK insurance companies run it like a cartel, though watchdogs have recently started to clamp down.
KDE and Gnome (now Unity) have always continually edged past each other. KDE dropped the ball with 4.0 but now is the most polished desktop out there. Unity is a bit buggy and not so usable at the moment but I wouldn't be surprised if it pulled back past KDE in the short to medium term considering the resources being thrown at it.
People don't migrate from Unity to KDE... they move sideways from Ubuntu with one DE to Ubuntu with another DE. Having Kubuntu as a more polished DE until Unity gets sorted keeps users on the *buntu base. I would expect most users going to Kubuntu will be from Microsoft Windows, but even if a few Unity users switch they are never more than an apt-get away.
I don't see anything more sinister than Canonical going broke and not being able to afford to spare a developer.
Slashdot Mirror
*Your* logic is faulty. Florian paints himself out to be an independent expert on patents. It is his character he is pimping out to all the news outlets as credible. The fact is that whilst blogging posing as an independent expert, he reveals in his latest post that behinds the scenes he has been negotiating with Oracle for cash. Now take a look at that post to see if it is strongly in favour of Oracle in its current case against Google. Coincidence? No.
I'm guessing outlets like the BBC must be feeling pretty stupid about now for having been duped.
Phillip.
Again you are wrong. Acorn was not a group of academics, it was a company. IBM employes academics and undergraduates but that doesn't make them an educational establishment. I have no intention of revising the fact: Acorn were not philanthopists liasing with all the schools to produce the ideal education computer, they fought for a contract with the BBC who came up with a spec in order to make money.
You fail to see the discrepancy between your "glory days" of the BBC Micro being a bunch of foreign components glued together and the new BBC Micro being a bunch of foreign components glued together. Next you will be trying to warp semantics to justify your argument of what is a "computer". The fact is that the world is now more global. The Pi is a British designed processor, running a kernal designed by a Finnish guy, using memory designed in Asia, viewed via graphic chips designed in America, and assembled in China.
Phillip.
That's an interesting rewrite of history. The BBC Microcomputer revolution was about entrepeneurs Chris Curry and Herman Hauser bidding against other rivals (Sinclair, Newbury, Dragon) to produce a computer under contract for the BBC. Acorn was already selling the Acorn Atom commercially and the BBC Micro was an upgrade to this. There was no liasing en masse with schools. The academics, inc Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber, were working for Acorn not acting out of charity.
The sad thing is you don't recognise the 6502 had nothing to do with British engineering, yet the ARM chip 100% is. This is very much the BBC micro revolution Mark 2, minus the OS.
Phillip.
I think you are wrong. The difference at school between using an Acorn Archimedes and using a Microsoft PC was huge. The latter was always locked down, you couldn't tinker with the OS (even if you could understand the mess of DLLs), limited as to what software you could install on there, couldn't drop down to assembler at the drop of a hat, and couldn't write full-screen arcade games in a few lines of BASIC. If I was forced to use Microsoft Windows rather than the Acorn computers when I was a child I would not be a software engineer today, that is for sure.
Forget tutorials for the raspberry pi. Load it up with Python, QtDesigner, and plenty of other goodies. Have a box full of them kids can pull out and play with during lunch and after school. I was publishing software by 14 yrs old and I never had a computer programming class. Don't bind them into a curriculum. Some might be inspired to write games, others control robots, maybe create a disco lighting system, an advanced art project, who knows??
Phillip.
You should try Google, it often can find interesting information. For example you could type in "ira code bomb". The search engine can also find information on many other subjects.
Phillip.
The IRA were as pissed as the police with false bomb threats as theirs would be taken less seriously, hence the IRA giving code words to go along with the threat so the police could verify it was from them.
Phillip.
Too late, urban trams already have this. They have a "ding ding" which they use to signal to somebody they think is too close and a larger horn much like a car when there is danger of a collision. If you want a good idea for the grandkids, throw in a third beeper that signals "thank you". I'd love that.
Phillip.
Actually it makes it a Classic car, and in the UK you would no longer have to pay road tax any more. Give it another couple of decades and it will become an Antique car. You need to get something pre-1930 for it to be a Vintage car. Ancient? Probably have to buy one off Barney Rubble.
Phillip.
We have a tram system in Nice and one of the key selling features is how quiet it is. They run straight through all the major squares and streets with no barriers, yet people manage to avoid them without any problem. However just in case they have a horn which when they press a button it goes "beep".
When I get an electric car one of the things I will enjoy reducing is the noise pollution as much as any other kind. I don't see the problem with Audi making engine sounds, it's just nobody is going to buy an Audi,
Phillip.
So Nokia produces its first Microsoft Windows phone, and it's already found to be buggy. On top of that Nokia are now an empty shell with a brand name, so the value of the company will be eroded with its reputation. Microsoft picking up Nokia for pennies draws closer, possibly around the time Nokia's customers have beta tested enough for them to get their OS stable.
Phillip.
Totally agree. Just clicked to say PLEASE don't leave any comments on this thread to perpetuate it (apart from whinges like above). If you want to discuss this issue bugger off to somewhere like Reddit. Let this thread die the death it deserves (and perhaps suggest the replacement of samzenpus to /. management).
Phillip.
There is a lot of rewriting history here. There were plenty of quick and reliable phones before the iPhone, which is no quicker or more reliable than any of its predecessors. The way it revolutionised the mobile phone market was to turn something as mundane as a phone into an expensive must-have fashion icon. The only original feature was the "Visual Voicemail". The contact integration (email/fb/phone/etc) is not some new killer app of WP7, Blackberry has been doing it for years.
MS is similar to Android in that it has to work with all the handset manufacturers. This does not stop them from differentiating themselves. No.1 is by hardware, a nicer camera or bigger screen. No.2 is by initial touch/feel, which is where Android scores over MS with the ability to customise as much as needed. No.3 is exclusive content coming bundled. I can see no reason why any manufacturer would want to offer Microsoft Windows instead of Android though.
Phillip.
Android tablets are going for under $90 new on ebay (average price for 7" tablet appears to be £55). However combine something like the Raspberry Pi with the plastic eink display by LG that Slashdot was covering a couple of days ago and I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to halve that. Forward-wind into the future where those printable solar cells could be put on the back of the eReader to make them totally self-powered and we have the perfect educational delivery device for developing countries. It takes time to build up a library of good quality content so it makes sense to start now. In a few years when the library catalogue has filled out then technology might have caught up at the same time.
Phillip.
I don't think people that write code are the target audience. I'm not going to bother watching the video, but I presume it's aimed at ISPs. The price would presumably be pitched at a price which would be competitive to not having to deal with all the "I've been hacked" support calls from customers. They would then have a "SQL injection protection" tick they can put on their front page, and icon on their control panel users can activate.
Phillip.
He worked on behalf of all United States citizens for years, protecting your rights, so maybe he should receive more. Who says it needs to come from the courts? Get him to put up a page with his Paypal details. If you all sent him $10 for the 5 years of work he put in on your behalf then you can probably double his $50k compensation within a day.
Phillip.
It is not insanity, and it is not kidnapping. The term for it is false imprisonment . A bit like the Enright v. Groves case mentioned, what he was arrested for doing was not a crime. The police officers commited a criminal offence and should be punished for it. Compensation for the victim is just a bonus.
Phillip.
With Facebook there is an expectation that all your information is public, even your private chats. With MSN it's always been implicit that private conversations are between just the two users despite passing over their networks. The fact they are tampering with your messages is rather a big deal. Once they have broken that barrier of trust, which they now have, a significant share of that market will now move to an alternative. Which is not really a problem for Microsoft, they aren't making any money out of providing the MSN service, and the users will fragment rather than going to any of their rivals which as pointed out aren't any better.
Phillip.
The video you generate comes out of your devices in h.264, for which the manufacturers are already paying a royalty. Now if you then want to generate some actual content, using the raw video, then you now have to pay a license unless you use WebM. There is no "winner", as a poster above pointed out the user will just use the format the provider spits out, the codec used will just be a balance of cost versus convenience. It's not that big a deal to use WebM instead of h.264 for general use, and pay a license to generate mobile content which you generally charge a premium for until WebM reaches the same hardware acceleration as h.264.
Phillip.
Not quite sure I quite understand the concept of $98bn in terms of Apple. How may lawyer-hours is that? Or can you put it in terms of simultaneous court-cases?
Phillip.
Uh huh, Apple leads using parts outsourced to rival tablet makers. Apple got lucky in their timing and then have been using the profits trying to screw over rivals and consumers with frivolous lawsuits suppressing the competition rather than innovating. If somebody had said a couple of years ago that Apple would be seen as the scum of the computer industry even beneath Microsoft nobody would have believed it :-(. How low they have sunk.
Phillip.
Randi obtains results on the various fields he's interested in debunking not by collecting a representative sample through the offer of independent testing but by dangling the offer of $1,000,000 under the assumption that any opponents he selects will be misguided or fraudsters. This creates an obviously biased self-selecting sample and provides that justice is not seen to be done. Do you deny this?
Would you like to substantiate this by pointing out cases of people with genuine psychic powers that Randi has refused to test? And he is doing better than testing a representative sample, he has made the offer open to every single person on the planet.
Randi does not bring independent third parties to establish the tests but finalises his own terms for the tests. After all, this isn't an exercise is proving what's correct but in protecting his own money.
He has enough experience to formuate his own tests. What makes you think a third party would establish any better ones? If they can I am sure Randi would be happy to adopt it.
Even though Randi chooses his own terms, there is no peer review process for his work - e.g. through stringent analysis before publication in some third party journal with a reputation for adherence to academic standards.
What's that got to do with anything? He's exposing frauds, not proposing a theory on the origins of the universe.
Nor are the experiments repeated independently (especially not with a representative sample).
??? Anybody is able to repeat the test independently. Any why would anybody want to test somebody exposed as a fraud. The only time worth testing independently is if Randi can't expose them.
his "no-one's claimed my $1,000,000!" has nothing to do with the strength of his underlying claim
Er I think the general public would disagree. $1M is a pretty good incentive.
Phillip.
No, the credit card company only gets to see the total amount you spent and not an itemised list. A store is able to track an increase in your alcohol intake and sell that information to your health insurance company, the credit card company cannot.
Phillip.
Great answer. "People in accidents have often braked sharply, ergo we will reduce the premium for people that don't brake sharply". What do you think will happen in an environment where nobody on the road wants to be the one to brake sharply to avoid an accident as it will raise their premium?
Phillip.
Too right it has nothing to do with the car being stolen. When I went to get my first insurance, the price was up to £5,000 per year for a car costing £1000. Even after shopping and bargaining my insurance still cost more per year than the total capital cost of my car for 3rd party only. The two factors that determine insurance price are age and class of vehicle (loosely linked to engine capacity).
You can see why compulsory 3rd party is a good thing. You would hate it if somebody crashed into your car but then turned around and said "Would love to help out mate but I'm a bit skint at the moment". Jaster is right that the UK insurance companies run it like a cartel, though watchdogs have recently started to clamp down.
Phillip.
KDE and Gnome (now Unity) have always continually edged past each other. KDE dropped the ball with 4.0 but now is the most polished desktop out there. Unity is a bit buggy and not so usable at the moment but I wouldn't be surprised if it pulled back past KDE in the short to medium term considering the resources being thrown at it.
People don't migrate from Unity to KDE... they move sideways from Ubuntu with one DE to Ubuntu with another DE. Having Kubuntu as a more polished DE until Unity gets sorted keeps users on the *buntu base. I would expect most users going to Kubuntu will be from Microsoft Windows, but even if a few Unity users switch they are never more than an apt-get away.
I don't see anything more sinister than Canonical going broke and not being able to afford to spare a developer.
Phillip.