Those carries have been open for a long time: I've been using unlocked GSM phones on them for years. The iPhone is a big step backwards: it's carrier-locked and non-programmable. Far from moving the industry forward, Apple has been taking it backwards.
If you want a nice phone, get an unlocked Nokia N95-3; you get 3G speeds, a 5Mpixel camera, stereo speakers, GPS (works with Google maps), a Safari web browser, and lots more. You aren't locked into a contract or carrier, and you can put in a different SIM card when you travel.
Reading the whitepaper, I find that the methodology behind BRR is so poor that it is useless, and may even be harmful.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a general trend now where software engineering researchers are reinventing the wheel in areas like statistics, polling, knowledge management, and artificial intelligence, without having much competency or experience in those areas.
The phrase "information wants to be free" elegantly conveys a particular view of information and its relation to society.
Natural language is not a set of logical propositions, it's a way of communicating emotions as well as facts. If you don't understand that, then the fault isn't with the people who coined the phrase, the fault is with your understanding of natural language.
It's clearly impossible in the US to criticize the government,
You can criticize the government just fine in the US (up to a point).
What gets you into trouble in the US is criticizing products and corporations. Some of that is explicit in our laws (e.g., food libel, food disparagement laws), some of that is the consequence of constituionally unintended applications trademark and trade secret laws.
Even though those restrictions are usually requested by private organizations, they are implemented by the US government.
If you're looking for trampling of free speech, you needn't look to the government; you need only look no further than our own academic institutions.
Private academic institutions have limited obligations in the area of free speech on campus.
And the web site you link to (thefire.org) is politically biased: apparently, it primarily finds fault with restrictions imposed by left-leaning institutions, but less with restrictions imposed by right-leaning or religious institutions. That kind of junk statistics is not helpful to a debate.
Good comments should explain these areas:
a) What you're doing.
b) Why you're doing it.
c) How you're doing it.
I took three assembly programming classes in College. The last one was on the 68k, where we wrote an embedded OS.
For assembly language programs, that's what you need to do because assembly language programs severely limit how you can name and abstract things.
For high level languages, the what/why/how should be mostly self-explanatory from the names and abstractions you use. If you feel the need to add long comments to code written in a high-level language, there is something wrong with the code.
Those screenshots looks increasingly like Gnome and Firefox. So, I guess it's called "Gnomedex" because Microsoft is cloning the Gnome desktop for their next release of Windows?
SCO is arguing that the GPL is invalid.
Real world: "We don't have a valid license for the software, therefore we can't use it."
SCO fictional universe: "We don't have a valid license for the software, therefore we can do with it whatever we like."
Fact is: SCO is highly inconsistent. If they argue that the GPL is invalid, then they can't ship any GPL'ed software at all because they don't have a license.
I sympathize with his frustration over Linux drivers: if you pull a random desktop or laptop off the shelf, it can take some fiddling to make it work with Linux.
Out of frustration, I went down the Macintosh route myself (the grass is always greener...), and while audio drivers (and OpenGL!) work out of the box, discovered that the Macintosh has its very own set of frustrations, which in the end bothered me a lot more than the Linux hassles.
In the end, the real reason Macintosh hardware works is not that Apple is any smarter or better than Linux developers, it's that they have a limited hardware range and bundle their hardware and software together.
Well, guess what, there are plenty of hardware vendors that support Linux on their systems. If you don't want to mess around with drivers, just buy a system from them. That way, you don't have to give up Linux goodness, and your Linux machine just works.
Most anything worthwhile that you can do in Linux, you can also do in OS X, and often much more easily. The reverse isn't *close* to being true.
Funny, I think it's the other way around; that's the reason why I use my Mac only when I need to port something or when I need to run MS Office. For day-to-day work, it just doesn't run the apps I want to run.
OS X is what Linux dreams of one day being. Why not use what Linux *may* have in 10 years, today?
Objective-C, NeXTStep (Cocoa), Mach, and Display PDF were largely developed in the 1980's. I don't know where Linux is going to go, but I hope it's not there.
The current Linux desktop roadmap, C#, Gtk+/Gnome, Linux Kernel, and X.org looks a lot more attractive to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Those carries have been open for a long time: I've been using unlocked GSM phones on them for years. The iPhone is a big step backwards: it's carrier-locked and non-programmable. Far from moving the industry forward, Apple has been taking it backwards.
If you want a nice phone, get an unlocked Nokia N95-3; you get 3G speeds, a 5Mpixel camera, stereo speakers, GPS (works with Google maps), a Safari web browser, and lots more. You aren't locked into a contract or carrier, and you can put in a different SIM card when you travel.
Reading the whitepaper, I find that the methodology behind BRR is so poor that it is useless, and may even be harmful.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a general trend now where software engineering researchers are reinventing the wheel in areas like statistics, polling, knowledge management, and artificial intelligence, without having much competency or experience in those areas.
The phrase "information wants to be free" elegantly conveys a particular view of information and its relation to society.
Natural language is not a set of logical propositions, it's a way of communicating emotions as well as facts. If you don't understand that, then the fault isn't with the people who coined the phrase, the fault is with your understanding of natural language.
It's clearly impossible in the US to criticize the government,
You can criticize the government just fine in the US (up to a point).
What gets you into trouble in the US is criticizing products and corporations. Some of that is explicit in our laws (e.g., food libel, food disparagement laws), some of that is the consequence of constituionally unintended applications trademark and trade secret laws.
Even though those restrictions are usually requested by private organizations, they are implemented by the US government.
If you're looking for trampling of free speech, you needn't look to the government; you need only look no further than our own academic institutions.
Private academic institutions have limited obligations in the area of free speech on campus.
And the web site you link to (thefire.org) is politically biased: apparently, it primarily finds fault with restrictions imposed by left-leaning institutions, but less with restrictions imposed by right-leaning or religious institutions. That kind of junk statistics is not helpful to a debate.
That device doesn't look small to me, and I suspect it isn't very low power or cheap either.
If ZigBee wants to compete with X10 and Bluetooth, it needs thumbnail sized modules costing a few bucks each.
Those screenshots looks increasingly like Gnome and Firefox. So, I guess it's called "Gnomedex" because Microsoft is cloning the Gnome desktop for their next release of Windows?
SCO is arguing that the GPL is invalid. Real world: "We don't have a valid license for the software, therefore we can't use it." SCO fictional universe: "We don't have a valid license for the software, therefore we can do with it whatever we like." Fact is: SCO is highly inconsistent. If they argue that the GPL is invalid, then they can't ship any GPL'ed software at all because they don't have a license.
I sympathize with his frustration over Linux drivers: if you pull a random desktop or laptop off the shelf, it can take some fiddling to make it work with Linux.
Out of frustration, I went down the Macintosh route myself (the grass is always greener...), and while audio drivers (and OpenGL!) work out of the box, discovered that the Macintosh has its very own set of frustrations, which in the end bothered me a lot more than the Linux hassles.
In the end, the real reason Macintosh hardware works is not that Apple is any smarter or better than Linux developers, it's that they have a limited hardware range and bundle their hardware and software together.
Well, guess what, there are plenty of hardware vendors that support Linux on their systems. If you don't want to mess around with drivers, just buy a system from them. That way, you don't have to give up Linux goodness, and your Linux machine just works.
Most anything worthwhile that you can do in Linux, you can also do in OS X, and often much more easily. The reverse isn't *close* to being true.
Funny, I think it's the other way around; that's the reason why I use my Mac only when I need to port something or when I need to run MS Office. For day-to-day work, it just doesn't run the apps I want to run.
OS X is what Linux dreams of one day being. Why not use what Linux *may* have in 10 years, today?
Objective-C, NeXTStep (Cocoa), Mach, and Display PDF were largely developed in the 1980's. I don't know where Linux is going to go, but I hope it's not there.
The current Linux desktop roadmap, C#, Gtk+/Gnome, Linux Kernel, and X.org looks a lot more attractive to me.