No one may be disadvantaged or favoured because of his gender, ancestry, race, language, motherland, land of origin, faith/religion, religious or political "ideology".
Unfortunately, that's just a bunch of words on paper. Germany's actual record on discrimination and intolerance continues to be dismal.
In many countries, private copying between friends is explicitly permissible; it's one of the reasons people pay taxes on blank media. It's reasonable to think that those activities might fall under "fair use", even in the US.
It is only in the past 3000 years that people are living more than 40 years.
Sorry, but that's wrong. Life expectancy may have been 35 or 40, but many individuals has lived twice as long; and those individuals have probably been very important in preliterate societies. In addition, 3000 years is plenty of time for big evolutionary changes.
Most metadata is in the MP3 file; the only additional one is last-played and rating, and that's of limited utility for general music.
As for playlists, actually, the no-name works better than the iPod, since it reflects the directory hierarchy in the browser. I find the iPod/iTunes disregard for directories to be a major nuisance.
Overall, I think the only area where the iPod is better than the no-name is for podcasts.
O'Reilly wrote: "I don't believe that the arguments about prior use of the term, or about "genericization" have a legal -- or even a moral -- basis."
This suggests that O'Reilly has a common, and incorrect, view of the basis of trademark law. He seems to think that trademark law gives people like him rights because he "invented" something and therefore should own it.
But the purpose of trademark law is not to give companies control of valuable pieces of our language, the purpose of trademark law is to ensure that the public has reliable identifiers for goods and services. It's a free market trick to achieve a service to the public that happens to have worked fairly well in the past because the interests of companies and the public align.
But make no mistake about it: the interest of the trademark holder is merely a means to an end; the ethical foundation of trademark law is exclusively the public interest.
iTunes is the reason iPod is so successful. If you don't use it, you're in a tiny minority.
I tossed iTunes the day that I bought my iPod. I use Anapod Explorer. On several computers.
I understand the sentiment, given that the iPod/iTunes combo is restrictive in some ways. However, many of the limitations that prompted you to get Anapod in the first place don't exist with other MP3 players. For example, with my other MP3 player, I just plug it into either a Mac or Windows machine, and I can transfer content (photos, audio, video, text) back and forth with no software installation at all.
None of those tools have ever been demonstrated to be cost-effective means of making software more dependable. It's an article of faith that adding a complex notation and another complex set of tools to the development process makes the product any better.
Yes, that's helped, a lot, but the biggest thing about it is it is easy. It's a music player. Nothing more.
No, it's not; by itself, the iPod is nearly useless. The iPod is really a integrated set of desktop tools, devices, and on-line services. That may be what you like and want, but it's anything but simple, and it also restricts what you can do with it to what Apple chooses to make easy to do with it.
Not trying to sound like an Apple Fanboy here, but it looks like SanDisk is only targeting geeks with this.
And the problem with that is what exactly? Why should the geeks have to live with the carefully managed, corporately designed experience that the iPod provides?
The counter culture thing is cool, but when you tell your friends you're gonna go get a sandisk whatever it's called, they'll say "Oh, that's really hard to use.
I think you underestimate both people and open source software. First of all, there is no basis for your assertion that RockBox's UI is worse than Apple's. Second, RockBox has plenty of useful music-specific capabilities that lots of people might want: better sound quality, on-the-go playlists, more codecs, voice interface, to name just a few.
As for the iPod, I have one (a Nano), and while it is good at some things (eg. Podcasts), it sucks at others. For example, it's a pain to travel with because it can't handle synchronization with multiple desktops and because of that stupid proprietary cable. On balance, if I had to make do with a single MP3 player, it wouldn't be the iPod, it would be my no-name Chinese player.
The problem with E-mail is the store and forward model of the servers, which allows people to inject spam, remain unaccountable, and impose the costs on others. That design made sense 20 years ago, but it doesn't today.
The solution is fairly simple: change to a different E-mail protocol; one simple approach is to have a protocol in which the sender stores the message until deliver and the only thing that gets delivered to the recipient is a small notification.
On a related note, it really is pretty silly as well that there is SMTP in addition to IMAP; in the future, the client-to-server protocol might well just be simple IMAP (with an "outgoing" folder), and there can be a separate server-to-server protocol like the one described above.
I suspect that the real reason Microsoft is making these statements (and it's Microsoft, not Adobe) is that they are having second thoughts about including PDF writing in MS Office. They have their their own system now and they're probably looking for an excuse not to include PDF in the final release of Office 12.
nor do I see it as all that different from what Apple has done with its various releases of OS X.
You're right: it isn't all that different. What is different is that Microsoft has somewhere around 80-90% market share, and Apple has a few percent. That's why Apple can get away with doing things that would land Microsoft in federal court.
In any case, making DX10 Vista-only is probably still OK, even for Microsoft. On the other hand, as far as I'm concerned, it will probably mean that I will put a lot of game purchases off until they are in the bargain bin, rather than rush out and buy Vista.
The idea here is that our average bandwidth use has changed dramatically, and so the original definition of "unlimited bandwidth" may not be sustainable anymore.
Companies are generally not losing money, and if it really were a problem, they could easily move to specifying a peak/sustained bandwidth model as part of their contract.
Furthermore, even if it were necessary to balance something, ISPs can negotiate that between themselves, they don't need to put arbitrary content restrictions in place.
How this would affect anyone's free speech rights baffles me. As long as it's written speech, as on the overwhelming majority of blogs, better QOS is not going to be required.
If the QOS drops to zero bps for non-approved content, it will.
In order for consumers to choose not to buy the technology, they have to see that the technology is bad for them, and that requires information and object lessons.
The corporate strategies are pretty obvious: invest billions in confusing the consumer about the consequences of DRM, and make the technology pervasive before enabling the consumer-hostile functionality fully.
What the FSF is doing is the only thing opponents of DRM can do: it's trying to remind people that DRM imposes restrictions on them. And the FSF is trying to do its part to ensure that there are devices that do not support DRM because only then will consumers see that they are losing something.
And don't kid yourself: if DRM becomes standard and pervasive, there is no way in which it can be "boycotted". Art and culture are part of the human experience; you can boycott them no more than you can boycott the phone systtem, sidewalks, speech, or air.
It turns out there is a patent pending on Morfik's JST and today they issued a press release in defence of it.
Are we now going to see a series of patents on "translating language X into language Y" for all combinations of X and Y? Morfik's patent should be rejected, and it's a shame that the company can't be punished severely for even attempting to file such a patent.
In addition, Morfik's claims should be clearly recognized by everybody for what they are: an attempt to create far reaching new rights that would be devastating to this industry. Almost all successful products in this industry, whether open source or commercial, are to a large part based on clones or reimplementations of earlier systems. That's true for MS-DOS, Windows NT, OSX, Microsoft Office, Linux, Java, JavaScript, C, C++, and just about everything we use every day. If claims like Morfik's were allowed to stand and become widespread, the IT industry is going to turn into what the phone monopoly was to the US for many decades: overpriced and underperforming.
(I should add that I really don't care about GWT itself--Java is about as low on my list of favorite languages as JavaScript.)
We have "fight clubs": boxing, martial arts, football, rugby, and lots of other sports. But, I suppose, that requires more dedication and skill than these people can muster.
Trouble is, the benefits of open source are not always so clear-cut. Software is too complicated a creation to be captured in rhetoric, and assertions about some of the technical benefits of open source fail to tell the whole story.
The story is pure FUD, full of trite generalities that are intended to create doubt in the reader's mind.
In fact, the situation is quite simple: we have two kinds of software, free and open source one, and for-pay and closed-source software. Without further information, free and open source software is the default choice, in particular when it comes to tax-payer funded purchases.
The burden of proof is on those advocating proprietary software, not on those advocating free and open source software. It is people advocating proprietary software who must demonstrate, in each and every case, that the costs and risks associated with buying software from a vendor is offset by clear and significant benefits.
Sorry, but DTrace is a really great feature regardless of what your political OSS views are. Porting it to BSD only makes it that much cooler.
There are lots of "really great features" you could put into an OS. The devil is in the details. What's the cost of maintaining it? What is the actual utility? Etc.
I think DTrace doesn't come out well in that regard. Pretty much all the things people regularly want to measure already have hooks in BSD and Linux. Furthermore, if one is going to put something of DTrace's complexity and pervasiveness into the kernel, I'd like to be able to use it for other purposes as well.
To me, DTrace is typical Sun thinking: too focused on kernel and systems issues. It's the reason I quit Solaris long ago, and I hope this sort of stuff won't infect too many other operating systems.
There are plenty of high-performance co-processor boards you could use. Often, they don't help at all because getting the data in and out is slower than just doing the operations on the CPU. Furthermore, the $500 is in addition to the CPU you already have. Third, the effort you invest in putting your code on the coprocessor is likely going to be a short-term investment, as these boards (whether GPU or otherwise) rapidly change, and as few other people are going to have exactly the same setup as you.
Overall, a 4x speedup for $500 for FFTs, impressive as it may sound at first sight, is probably not enough to help this sort of thing succeed widely. But it may find some uses in a few special niches.
It doesn't really matter what wireless encryption standards one uses, you can't trust them anyway. First of all, the companies involved have already demonstrated their incompetence with WEP. Second, I think at this point you have to assume that any encryption that's encoded in a chip has a backdoor in it and that a significant number of people will know about it.
If you want secure wireless communications, you have to use software encryption implemented in open source software.
Contrary to what the article says, pure oxygen is toxic to the lungs, at least at standard pressures. It may be possible to reduce pressure, but I think the long-term effects on humans of breathing pure oxygen at a significantly reduced pressure are still unknown; I wouldn't want to subject myself to it.
Over the last several decades, there have been lots of parallel architectures, many significantly more innovative and powerful than Cell. If Cell succeeds, it's not because of any innovation, but because it contains fairly little innovation and therefore doesn't require people to change their code too much.
One thing that Cell has that previous processors didn't is that the PS3 tie-in and IBM's backing may convince people that it's going to be around for a while; most previous efforts suffered from the problem that nobody wanted to invest time in adapting their code to an architecture that was not going to be around in a few years anyway.
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Unfortunately, that's just a bunch of words on paper. Germany's actual record on discrimination and intolerance continues to be dismal.
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
http://www.dw.de/european-body...
In many countries, private copying between friends is explicitly permissible; it's one of the reasons people pay taxes on blank media. It's reasonable to think that those activities might fall under "fair use", even in the US.
With laptops, I compute as often reclined on my couch as I do sitting on my desk.
It is only in the past 3000 years that people are living more than 40 years.
Sorry, but that's wrong. Life expectancy may have been 35 or 40, but many individuals has lived twice as long; and those individuals have probably been very important in preliterate societies. In addition, 3000 years is plenty of time for big evolutionary changes.
Most metadata is in the MP3 file; the only additional one is last-played and rating, and that's of limited utility for general music.
As for playlists, actually, the no-name works better than the iPod, since it reflects the directory hierarchy in the browser. I find the iPod/iTunes disregard for directories to be a major nuisance.
Overall, I think the only area where the iPod is better than the no-name is for podcasts.
O'Reilly wrote: "I don't believe that the arguments about prior use of the term, or about "genericization" have a legal -- or even a moral -- basis."
This suggests that O'Reilly has a common, and incorrect, view of the basis of trademark law. He seems to think that trademark law gives people like him rights because he "invented" something and therefore should own it.
But the purpose of trademark law is not to give companies control of valuable pieces of our language, the purpose of trademark law is to ensure that the public has reliable identifiers for goods and services. It's a free market trick to achieve a service to the public that happens to have worked fairly well in the past because the interests of companies and the public align.
But make no mistake about it: the interest of the trademark holder is merely a means to an end; the ethical foundation of trademark law is exclusively the public interest.
In English, "making NOUN more ADJ" is what you do to achieve the final state "ADJ NOUN". Sorry if that goes over your head.
iTunes is not iPod.
iTunes is the reason iPod is so successful. If you don't use it, you're in a tiny minority.
I tossed iTunes the day that I bought my iPod. I use Anapod Explorer. On several computers.
I understand the sentiment, given that the iPod/iTunes combo is restrictive in some ways. However, many of the limitations that prompted you to get Anapod in the first place don't exist with other MP3 players. For example, with my other MP3 player, I just plug it into either a Mac or Windows machine, and I can transfer content (photos, audio, video, text) back and forth with no software installation at all.
None of those tools have ever been demonstrated to be cost-effective means of making software more dependable. It's an article of faith that adding a complex notation and another complex set of tools to the development process makes the product any better.
Apple is doing the same thing--they are insulting PC users, PC users they are hoping will switch to Apple.
Yes, that's helped, a lot, but the biggest thing about it is it is easy. It's a music player. Nothing more.
No, it's not; by itself, the iPod is nearly useless. The iPod is really a integrated set of desktop tools, devices, and on-line services. That may be what you like and want, but it's anything but simple, and it also restricts what you can do with it to what Apple chooses to make easy to do with it.
Not trying to sound like an Apple Fanboy here, but it looks like SanDisk is only targeting geeks with this.
And the problem with that is what exactly? Why should the geeks have to live with the carefully managed, corporately designed experience that the iPod provides?
The counter culture thing is cool, but when you tell your friends you're gonna go get a sandisk whatever it's called, they'll say "Oh, that's really hard to use.
I think you underestimate both people and open source software. First of all, there is no basis for your assertion that RockBox's UI is worse than Apple's. Second, RockBox has plenty of useful music-specific capabilities that lots of people might want: better sound quality, on-the-go playlists, more codecs, voice interface, to name just a few.
As for the iPod, I have one (a Nano), and while it is good at some things (eg. Podcasts), it sucks at others. For example, it's a pain to travel with because it can't handle synchronization with multiple desktops and because of that stupid proprietary cable. On balance, if I had to make do with a single MP3 player, it wouldn't be the iPod, it would be my no-name Chinese player.
The problem with E-mail is the store and forward model of the servers, which allows people to inject spam, remain unaccountable, and impose the costs on others. That design made sense 20 years ago, but it doesn't today.
The solution is fairly simple: change to a different E-mail protocol; one simple approach is to have a protocol in which the sender stores the message until deliver and the only thing that gets delivered to the recipient is a small notification.
On a related note, it really is pretty silly as well that there is SMTP in addition to IMAP; in the future, the client-to-server protocol might well just be simple IMAP (with an "outgoing" folder), and there can be a separate server-to-server protocol like the one described above.
I suspect that the real reason Microsoft is making these statements (and it's Microsoft, not Adobe) is that they are having second thoughts about including PDF writing in MS Office. They have their their own system now and they're probably looking for an excuse not to include PDF in the final release of Office 12.
nor do I see it as all that different from what Apple has done with its various releases of OS X.
You're right: it isn't all that different. What is different is that Microsoft has somewhere around 80-90% market share, and Apple has a few percent. That's why Apple can get away with doing things that would land Microsoft in federal court.
In any case, making DX10 Vista-only is probably still OK, even for Microsoft. On the other hand, as far as I'm concerned, it will probably mean that I will put a lot of game purchases off until they are in the bargain bin, rather than rush out and buy Vista.
The idea here is that our average bandwidth use has changed dramatically, and so the original definition of "unlimited bandwidth" may not be sustainable anymore.
Companies are generally not losing money, and if it really were a problem, they could easily move to specifying a peak/sustained bandwidth model as part of their contract.
Furthermore, even if it were necessary to balance something, ISPs can negotiate that between themselves, they don't need to put arbitrary content restrictions in place.
How this would affect anyone's free speech rights baffles me. As long as it's written speech, as on the overwhelming majority of blogs, better QOS is not going to be required.
If the QOS drops to zero bps for non-approved content, it will.
In order for consumers to choose not to buy the technology, they have to see that the technology is bad for them, and that requires information and object lessons.
The corporate strategies are pretty obvious: invest billions in confusing the consumer about the consequences of DRM, and make the technology pervasive before enabling the consumer-hostile functionality fully.
What the FSF is doing is the only thing opponents of DRM can do: it's trying to remind people that DRM imposes restrictions on them. And the FSF is trying to do its part to ensure that there are devices that do not support DRM because only then will consumers see that they are losing something.
And don't kid yourself: if DRM becomes standard and pervasive, there is no way in which it can be "boycotted". Art and culture are part of the human experience; you can boycott them no more than you can boycott the phone systtem, sidewalks, speech, or air.
It turns out there is a patent pending on Morfik's JST and today they issued a press release in defence of it.
Are we now going to see a series of patents on "translating language X into language Y" for all combinations of X and Y? Morfik's patent should be rejected, and it's a shame that the company can't be punished severely for even attempting to file such a patent.
In addition, Morfik's claims should be clearly recognized by everybody for what they are: an attempt to create far reaching new rights that would be devastating to this industry. Almost all successful products in this industry, whether open source or commercial, are to a large part based on clones or reimplementations of earlier systems. That's true for MS-DOS, Windows NT, OSX, Microsoft Office, Linux, Java, JavaScript, C, C++, and just about everything we use every day. If claims like Morfik's were allowed to stand and become widespread, the IT industry is going to turn into what the phone monopoly was to the US for many decades: overpriced and underperforming.
(I should add that I really don't care about GWT itself--Java is about as low on my list of favorite languages as JavaScript.)
We have "fight clubs": boxing, martial arts, football, rugby, and lots of other sports. But, I suppose, that requires more dedication and skill than these people can muster.
Trouble is, the benefits of open source are not always so clear-cut. Software is too complicated a creation to be captured in rhetoric, and assertions about some of the technical benefits of open source fail to tell the whole story.
The story is pure FUD, full of trite generalities that are intended to create doubt in the reader's mind.
In fact, the situation is quite simple: we have two kinds of software, free and open source one, and for-pay and closed-source software. Without further information, free and open source software is the default choice, in particular when it comes to tax-payer funded purchases.
The burden of proof is on those advocating proprietary software, not on those advocating free and open source software. It is people advocating proprietary software who must demonstrate, in each and every case, that the costs and risks associated with buying software from a vendor is offset by clear and significant benefits.
Sorry, but DTrace is a really great feature regardless of what your political OSS views are. Porting it to BSD only makes it that much cooler.
There are lots of "really great features" you could put into an OS. The devil is in the details. What's the cost of maintaining it? What is the actual utility? Etc.
I think DTrace doesn't come out well in that regard. Pretty much all the things people regularly want to measure already have hooks in BSD and Linux. Furthermore, if one is going to put something of DTrace's complexity and pervasiveness into the kernel, I'd like to be able to use it for other purposes as well.
To me, DTrace is typical Sun thinking: too focused on kernel and systems issues. It's the reason I quit Solaris long ago, and I hope this sort of stuff won't infect too many other operating systems.
There are plenty of high-performance co-processor boards you could use. Often, they don't help at all because getting the data in and out is slower than just doing the operations on the CPU. Furthermore, the $500 is in addition to the CPU you already have. Third, the effort you invest in putting your code on the coprocessor is likely going to be a short-term investment, as these boards (whether GPU or otherwise) rapidly change, and as few other people are going to have exactly the same setup as you.
Overall, a 4x speedup for $500 for FFTs, impressive as it may sound at first sight, is probably not enough to help this sort of thing succeed widely. But it may find some uses in a few special niches.
It doesn't really matter what wireless encryption standards one uses, you can't trust them anyway. First of all, the companies involved have already demonstrated their incompetence with WEP. Second, I think at this point you have to assume that any encryption that's encoded in a chip has a backdoor in it and that a significant number of people will know about it.
If you want secure wireless communications, you have to use software encryption implemented in open source software.
Contrary to what the article says, pure oxygen is toxic to the lungs, at least at standard pressures. It may be possible to reduce pressure, but I think the long-term effects on humans of breathing pure oxygen at a significantly reduced pressure are still unknown; I wouldn't want to subject myself to it.
If the world really were that black and white, things would be a lot simpler.
Over the last several decades, there have been lots of parallel architectures, many significantly more innovative and powerful than Cell. If Cell succeeds, it's not because of any innovation, but because it contains fairly little innovation and therefore doesn't require people to change their code too much.
One thing that Cell has that previous processors didn't is that the PS3 tie-in and IBM's backing may convince people that it's going to be around for a while; most previous efforts suffered from the problem that nobody wanted to invest time in adapting their code to an architecture that was not going to be around in a few years anyway.