my parents are in their mid 60's and I installed Windows 7 on a home brew i7 machine I built them (i visited them during my holidays and built the machine and they live +900km from me) and trust me, no way in a million years would they have got all their hardware working. Right after the installing windows 7 the mouse driver would make the machine stall, then don't get me started on the video and keyboard drivers going ape shit. Recently my mum (aged 64) purchased a printer and installed the "windows 7" drivers and guess what "it doesnt work". Prints one page then the print cache shits itself. Tracked the problem down to Microsoft playing funny buggers with printers and the hardware makers not keeping things (installer problem) up-to-date. Funnily enough mum booted up into Linux (installed just in case windows self destructs) and the same printer works fine, no drivers needed. Also when I installed Ubuntu 10.04 "everything worked" it even asked me if I wanted to install the propriety ATi drivers. So now my mum prints in Linux because Windows crashes if she prints more than 1 job and it wont be fixed until my next visit later this year.
The iPOD to be honest never had a serious competitor who not only supplied the hardware but a simple way of buying and putting media on the device. Android is a different kettle of fish as it offers both a cross platform OS but also has a simple way of buying applications and music. The difference between the iPAD and Android tablets this time around is Apple have one and only one device and market place were Android has lots of devices with one central market place plus the option of third party installs.
you mean the cheap ass $150 unit that K-Mart is selling, next you will be comparing a $12,000 Kia with a $120,000 Mercedes S class saloon. The reality is "you only have one iPAD" were with Android in the next year you will have over 60 models, some cheap some expensive and many with more features than the iPAD. Good example is the MSI android tablet with a Webca,, SD card slot, USB, HDMI out and a bigger high res screen. I have even seen tablets with a LAN port just in case you have no WiFi access, the game has just started and Apple will have to seriously pick up its game. Soon I will be able to purchase a AU$500 Android tablet with 64GB of storage that can be upgraded and a bigger capacitive touch screen were right now Apple iPAD costs me AU$1,000 with no upgrade option and no USB/HDMI ports or webcam.
One problem with Windows 7, "it isnt a tablet OS" were Android and Apple iOS 4 are. Yes you can skin windows 7 but as soon as you open an application you are back were you started with a desktop orientated application with menu's etc that are not tablet friendly. This has been why Windows tablets have been a failure and why Apple has sold more tablets in the last few months than the PC/Windows makers have in 10 years. I must give apple kudos for the iPAD (and Google for Android) as it forces "all applications to be tablet friendly" this is not so with Windows 7. Microsoft do have Windows Mobile 7 due out later this year but I think it will be a hard sell especially considering it will have bugger all applications (sorry WM 6.5 apps wont work on WM 7) especially with Android now offering over 75,000 applications and apple now around 200,000.
I cant help but think maybe the decline in some mammals could also be effected by the lack of humans not living there anymore. Many mammals are scavengers and make use of what we waste. Good examples are species like foxes, badgers, rats, raccoons, they thrive around humans.
Apple didn't define the tablet either, personally I think the only reason Apple rushed the iPAD out (don't forget the iPhone started as a tablet) was because the Cruncpad (now called the JooJoo) was earmarked for production and may steal Apples opportunity in the lime light.
You are seriously deranged if you think China "with over 500 million people earning less than $2 a day" (higher than India) is a economic light for the rest of us to follow. The reality is China needs 12% growth just stop going backwards when compared to the west.
Were I work we have tons of recordings from engineering committees and we tried lots of free and commercial programs but at the end of the day due to the vagueness of the English language the best solution was to "hire a human". So thats what we did, we have found a few people in India who were happy to transcribe our recordings for a fraction of the cost of hiring someone to fix the stuff ups from the speech-text software (also good speech-text software costs a fortune and takes ages to train especially when most of the engineers sentences are full of acronyms). So save time and help those with less money and hire someone, not like we have a global shortage of people.
I can imagine it now, Microsoft buying Palm for WebOS then like the Kin it gets canned. If Microsoft purchased a race horse by the time it got through all the layers of admin crap that is Microsoft you would have a camel.
Am I the only one who sees the weirdness in how people are reacting to the Chinese removing anonymity when western countries have been doing this for years now without so much as a "WTF!!". For example in Italy you cant even walk into a cafe now and go on the internet without some type of ID. Here in Australia if one buys a mobile phone sim card you have to contact the telco and confirm your name and address before they will even let you make calls. This whole thing reminds me of a sad but true saying
While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State.- Lenin (1870 - 1924)
me of the saying "what is the difference between a pizza and a musician, the pizza can feed a family of four". If you become a musician to become rich and famous you are seriously wrong.
Actually a ton of wheat in China is the same as in the US so your theory doesn't work on all levels, the same goes for commodities and electronics products (A good PC motherboard actually costs more in China than the USA). Yes there are some things cheaper in china like locally grown foods (not much cheaper actually) or poor copies of western goods but that wont hide the fact that the poor are being left behind. The comparison that I am trying to draw attention to in my post (poverty aside) is the difference between "India" who are a democracy and China who are not. Being poor is bad enough but when one feels like they are being left behind as the difference between the poor and rich grow ever wider to also have to deal with corrupt and arrogant officials (down side to not having elected officials) can only lead to resentment. Although India's poor are still a big problem (less than China though) they at least have a say in what their officials can and cant do thus there is a way for them to let of steam publically (or as Americans say "feel empowered").
Most Chinese know the government is full of it and take anything said with a grain of salt. The issue for the chines communist party (an oxymoron in itself) is that they haven't grasped that public hearsay without "truth" can be just as dangerous as the actual truth as embarrassing as it may. Right now the Chinese Government have over 500 million citizens who earn less than US$2 a day (higher number than India). So the poor in China not only feel like they are being left behind but unlike the poor in India also feel like they have no say in their futures. Then add in the chinese bureaucratic arrogance (imagine officials who cant be voted out, or reported in public) and you now have a powder keg just waiting for it to be lit. Yes the Chinese communist party will like a children try and plug the ever rising dam of truth with poorly implemented fixes like todays. Unfortunately the truth is patient and immortal and sooner or later it will start to spill over the poorly managed and built dam of denial and bury its makers. So for all those officials out there, lie and cheat all you want but history sooner or later will destroy any goodness that your short life produced.
Last I looked Patents do not remove the right to "free speech" in any country. Also the take down notice doesnt specifically show "what code infringes their patent" so a lawyer would then ask them to be more specific. In most countries "methods" wont stand up in court even to some certain degree in the USA Then there is the other issue were software patents mean squat in many countries outside the USA.
actually the whole Star Wars trilogy is basically a rip-off of Blakes 7. Evil space empire with a central nemesis, rebels fighting a lost cause, soldiers wearing battle armor that hides their faces.
If you want a project that would make you popular as hell why don't you code an open source Skype client. Skype have released lots of API info recently and the libs are available for download. The reason why I am saying this would be a good project is because right now the propriety client offered by Skype is to put it mildly "lacking in stability and function". At the moment making a Skype video call under any version of Ubuntu released in the last 2 years is rubbish with the video dropping out all over the place.
Qualcom have released "some" open source 3D driver code, yes folks there is a lot of code missing or obfuscated by proprietary libs . The qualcom snapdragon cpu isnt much better either. After the FOSS community having to deal with Qualcoms shenanigans I can understand why Apple bought it's own arm design house and is now getting samsung to fab a CPU for the iPhone and iPAD called the A4. Why put up with all the qualcom crap that android devs/device makers are putting up with when you can stick your middle finger up and make your own CPU. There is an upside though, Intel is porting Android to X86 so we may get some nice Atom cpu tablets on the market soon without all the stupidity that qualcom and its lawyers are introducing.
forgot to mention in USB mode it shows up as a Fat32 device (not the actual file system in use though, in my case the NAS uses XFS) the fat32 transfer limits still apply but feeds the data stored out in chunks to get around this.
+ 1, why stuff around with a filesystems when you can get a small compact single or dual disk NAS that is specifically designed for storing large chunks of data and wont unlike USB based externals disk randomly turn your data into junk. I have a small dual disk NAS with two 2.5" hardisks setup in raid 1 (thus if one disk dies I have another with a copy) that I can ssh/ftp from any PC (also my mobile phone if you have WiFi) on the network. It does have a USB port as well as a LAN socket so I can still use it as an external USB disk if need be.
Entities like ACAT can only blame themselves for the massive push back by the public regarding copyright. If copyright holders and managers had not gone out of there way to bri.. cough, give certain political entities rather large financial enticements to change copyright law so as the public are denied access to their own cultural heritage for an ever extended period of time then the push back by joe average they are experiencing now would not be happening, to put it simply, they (copyright holders) broke the original deal and now the public are saying stuff you. What I find amusing is that "all culture derives from prior works". For example I don't see bands paying chuck berries estate money for ripping of his guitar riffs but at the same time copyright lawyers are blocking all avenues or derivative works by the public even if it is satire.
I have an Android phone and I have seen and played with the Apple iPAD. To be honest the concept of putting a mobile phone UI on a tablet although good in some respects I personally found the experience limiting. I think there will be tiers of touch UI with Android being used on sub 5" touch screen devices and the likes of Meego being used on +9" touch screen devices purely because the applications dynamics are visually different. It is a shame though that the Android and Meego application market space cant be done through a single service so you can load the same app on both devices (you can with android but not with a mixed android-meego setup).
I think Skype's sudden rush to get some sort of functional API and relevance that Linux users/programmers can use to be honest is interesting but to little to late. Yes there is a huge 10,000lb gorilla in the room called Google and just recently they (google) have opened access to the general public (USA only right now but there are hacks to get around that). Were Google has got it right is not so much the integration of different services like mobiles and home/work telephones is the fact they have gone with a open industry standard protocol called SIP. That means I can use my (in my case Ericsson 6755i desktop SIP phone) with Google Voice and my normal SIP service without having to worry about some SIP->Skype stuffing around. I think we are seeing the dieing days of a great idea in its day but has now become over shadowed by a more competitive (as in cheaper), open and disruptive technology called SIP. One thing I must admit though is no one has created a PC based SIP client yet with as much functionality as Skype's but I can see those days being numbered (Skype under 64 bit Linux I must admit is a pain right now especially for video calls).
I think Frontier forgot to mention Call Forwarding in their patent application. The fact that call forwarding has been around for over 30 years within the communications industry seems to make me again wonder what the patent office is for, definitely not for reviewing patent applications thats for sure. I remember conjoining my mobile. home number and work number on a NEC pabx way back in the late 80's ffs, yes that is what call forwarding is.
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my parents are in their mid 60's and I installed Windows 7 on a home brew i7 machine I built them (i visited them during my holidays and built the machine and they live +900km from me) and trust me, no way in a million years would they have got all their hardware working. Right after the installing windows 7 the mouse driver would make the machine stall, then don't get me started on the video and keyboard drivers going ape shit. Recently my mum (aged 64) purchased a printer and installed the "windows 7" drivers and guess what "it doesnt work". Prints one page then the print cache shits itself. Tracked the problem down to Microsoft playing funny buggers with printers and the hardware makers not keeping things (installer problem) up-to-date. Funnily enough mum booted up into Linux (installed just in case windows self destructs) and the same printer works fine, no drivers needed. Also when I installed Ubuntu 10.04 "everything worked" it even asked me if I wanted to install the propriety ATi drivers. So now my mum prints in Linux because Windows crashes if she prints more than 1 job and it wont be fixed until my next visit later this year.
The iPOD to be honest never had a serious competitor who not only supplied the hardware but a simple way of buying and putting media on the device. Android is a different kettle of fish as it offers both a cross platform OS but also has a simple way of buying applications and music. The difference between the iPAD and Android tablets this time around is Apple have one and only one device and market place were Android has lots of devices with one central market place plus the option of third party installs.
you mean the cheap ass $150 unit that K-Mart is selling, next you will be comparing a $12,000 Kia with a $120,000 Mercedes S class saloon. The reality is "you only have one iPAD" were with Android in the next year you will have over 60 models, some cheap some expensive and many with more features than the iPAD. Good example is the MSI android tablet with a Webca,, SD card slot, USB, HDMI out and a bigger high res screen. I have even seen tablets with a LAN port just in case you have no WiFi access, the game has just started and Apple will have to seriously pick up its game. Soon I will be able to purchase a AU$500 Android tablet with 64GB of storage that can be upgraded and a bigger capacitive touch screen were right now Apple iPAD costs me AU$1,000 with no upgrade option and no USB/HDMI ports or webcam.
One problem with Windows 7, "it isnt a tablet OS" were Android and Apple iOS 4 are. Yes you can skin windows 7 but as soon as you open an application you are back were you started with a desktop orientated application with menu's etc that are not tablet friendly. This has been why Windows tablets have been a failure and why Apple has sold more tablets in the last few months than the PC/Windows makers have in 10 years. I must give apple kudos for the iPAD (and Google for Android) as it forces "all applications to be tablet friendly" this is not so with Windows 7. Microsoft do have Windows Mobile 7 due out later this year but I think it will be a hard sell especially considering it will have bugger all applications (sorry WM 6.5 apps wont work on WM 7) especially with Android now offering over 75,000 applications and apple now around 200,000.
I cant help but think maybe the decline in some mammals could also be effected by the lack of humans not living there anymore. Many mammals are scavengers and make use of what we waste. Good examples are species like foxes, badgers, rats, raccoons, they thrive around humans.
Apple didn't define the tablet either, personally I think the only reason Apple rushed the iPAD out (don't forget the iPhone started as a tablet) was because the Cruncpad (now called the JooJoo) was earmarked for production and may steal Apples opportunity in the lime light.
You are seriously deranged if you think China "with over 500 million people earning less than $2 a day" (higher than India) is a economic light for the rest of us to follow. The reality is China needs 12% growth just stop going backwards when compared to the west.
Were I work we have tons of recordings from engineering committees and we tried lots of free and commercial programs but at the end of the day due to the vagueness of the English language the best solution was to "hire a human". So thats what we did, we have found a few people in India who were happy to transcribe our recordings for a fraction of the cost of hiring someone to fix the stuff ups from the speech-text software (also good speech-text software costs a fortune and takes ages to train especially when most of the engineers sentences are full of acronyms). So save time and help those with less money and hire someone, not like we have a global shortage of people.
I can imagine it now, Microsoft buying Palm for WebOS then like the Kin it gets canned. If Microsoft purchased a race horse by the time it got through all the layers of admin crap that is Microsoft you would have a camel.
Am I the only one who sees the weirdness in how people are reacting to the Chinese removing anonymity when western countries have been doing this for years now without so much as a "WTF!!". For example in Italy you cant even walk into a cafe now and go on the internet without some type of ID. Here in Australia if one buys a mobile phone sim card you have to contact the telco and confirm your name and address before they will even let you make calls. This whole thing reminds me of a sad but true saying
While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State.- Lenin (1870 - 1924)
me of the saying "what is the difference between a pizza and a musician, the pizza can feed a family of four". If you become a musician to become rich and famous you are seriously wrong.
Actually a ton of wheat in China is the same as in the US so your theory doesn't work on all levels, the same goes for commodities and electronics products (A good PC motherboard actually costs more in China than the USA). Yes there are some things cheaper in china like locally grown foods (not much cheaper actually) or poor copies of western goods but that wont hide the fact that the poor are being left behind. The comparison that I am trying to draw attention to in my post (poverty aside) is the difference between "India" who are a democracy and China who are not. Being poor is bad enough but when one feels like they are being left behind as the difference between the poor and rich grow ever wider to also have to deal with corrupt and arrogant officials (down side to not having elected officials) can only lead to resentment. Although India's poor are still a big problem (less than China though) they at least have a say in what their officials can and cant do thus there is a way for them to let of steam publically (or as Americans say "feel empowered").
Most Chinese know the government is full of it and take anything said with a grain of salt. The issue for the chines communist party (an oxymoron in itself) is that they haven't grasped that public hearsay without "truth" can be just as dangerous as the actual truth as embarrassing as it may. Right now the Chinese Government have over 500 million citizens who earn less than US$2 a day (higher number than India). So the poor in China not only feel like they are being left behind but unlike the poor in India also feel like they have no say in their futures. Then add in the chinese bureaucratic arrogance (imagine officials who cant be voted out, or reported in public) and you now have a powder keg just waiting for it to be lit. Yes the Chinese communist party will like a children try and plug the ever rising dam of truth with poorly implemented fixes like todays. Unfortunately the truth is patient and immortal and sooner or later it will start to spill over the poorly managed and built dam of denial and bury its makers. So for all those officials out there, lie and cheat all you want but history sooner or later will destroy any goodness that your short life produced.
Last I looked Patents do not remove the right to "free speech" in any country. Also the take down notice doesnt specifically show "what code infringes their patent" so a lawyer would then ask them to be more specific. In most countries "methods" wont stand up in court even to some certain degree in the USA Then there is the other issue were software patents mean squat in many countries outside the USA.
actually the whole Star Wars trilogy is basically a rip-off of Blakes 7. Evil space empire with a central nemesis, rebels fighting a lost cause, soldiers wearing battle armor that hides their faces.
Luke "dam I hate this iSabre 4, every time I hold it in my left hand it turns off"
Steve "you are holding it wrong"
If you want a project that would make you popular as hell why don't you code an open source Skype client. Skype have released lots of API info recently and the libs are available for download. The reason why I am saying this would be a good project is because right now the propriety client offered by Skype is to put it mildly "lacking in stability and function". At the moment making a Skype video call under any version of Ubuntu released in the last 2 years is rubbish with the video dropping out all over the place.
Qualcom have released "some" open source 3D driver code, yes folks there is a lot of code missing or obfuscated by proprietary libs . The qualcom snapdragon cpu isnt much better either. After the FOSS community having to deal with Qualcoms shenanigans I can understand why Apple bought it's own arm design house and is now getting samsung to fab a CPU for the iPhone and iPAD called the A4. Why put up with all the qualcom crap that android devs/device makers are putting up with when you can stick your middle finger up and make your own CPU. There is an upside though, Intel is porting Android to X86 so we may get some nice Atom cpu tablets on the market soon without all the stupidity that qualcom and its lawyers are introducing.
try it costs apple 9c for each bumper, I work for a company that buys products in china and these things are that cheap.
forgot to mention in USB mode it shows up as a Fat32 device (not the actual file system in use though, in my case the NAS uses XFS) the fat32 transfer limits still apply but feeds the data stored out in chunks to get around this.
+ 1, why stuff around with a filesystems when you can get a small compact single or dual disk NAS that is specifically designed for storing large chunks of data and wont unlike USB based externals disk randomly turn your data into junk. I have a small dual disk NAS with two 2.5" hardisks setup in raid 1 (thus if one disk dies I have another with a copy) that I can ssh/ftp from any PC (also my mobile phone if you have WiFi) on the network. It does have a USB port as well as a LAN socket so I can still use it as an external USB disk if need be.
Entities like ACAT can only blame themselves for the massive push back by the public regarding copyright. If copyright holders and managers had not gone out of there way to bri.. cough, give certain political entities rather large financial enticements to change copyright law so as the public are denied access to their own cultural heritage for an ever extended period of time then the push back by joe average they are experiencing now would not be happening, to put it simply, they (copyright holders) broke the original deal and now the public are saying stuff you. What I find amusing is that "all culture derives from prior works". For example I don't see bands paying chuck berries estate money for ripping of his guitar riffs but at the same time copyright lawyers are blocking all avenues or derivative works by the public even if it is satire.
I have an Android phone and I have seen and played with the Apple iPAD. To be honest the concept of putting a mobile phone UI on a tablet although good in some respects I personally found the experience limiting. I think there will be tiers of touch UI with Android being used on sub 5" touch screen devices and the likes of Meego being used on +9" touch screen devices purely because the applications dynamics are visually different. It is a shame though that the Android and Meego application market space cant be done through a single service so you can load the same app on both devices (you can with android but not with a mixed android-meego setup).
I think Skype's sudden rush to get some sort of functional API and relevance that Linux users/programmers can use to be honest is interesting but to little to late. Yes there is a huge 10,000lb gorilla in the room called Google and just recently they (google) have opened access to the general public (USA only right now but there are hacks to get around that). Were Google has got it right is not so much the integration of different services like mobiles and home/work telephones is the fact they have gone with a open industry standard protocol called SIP. That means I can use my (in my case Ericsson 6755i desktop SIP phone) with Google Voice and my normal SIP service without having to worry about some SIP->Skype stuffing around. I think we are seeing the dieing days of a great idea in its day but has now become over shadowed by a more competitive (as in cheaper), open and disruptive technology called SIP. One thing I must admit though is no one has created a PC based SIP client yet with as much functionality as Skype's but I can see those days being numbered (Skype under 64 bit Linux I must admit is a pain right now especially for video calls).
I think Frontier forgot to mention Call Forwarding in their patent application. The fact that call forwarding has been around for over 30 years within the communications industry seems to make me again wonder what the patent office is for, definitely not for reviewing patent applications thats for sure. I remember conjoining my mobile. home number and work number on a NEC pabx way back in the late 80's ffs, yes that is what call forwarding is.