I expect that you are right about them ending up in court, but why on earth would this not be legal?
You can't add components to your software product becuase someone else already sells those components and stands to lose money? I don't get it... What is the legal precedent here?
Don't worry about that!
They told the same about anti virus, web browsers and office suite!
Perhaps you should evaluate the logic of your statement?
Microsofts web browser put the competition out of business. (and got themselves in a bit of a legal battle too)
In the 80's and 90's Word Perfect was the defacto standard for an office suite, and Claris Works was popular on the mac. Then microsoft brought out it's office suite, and has all but put the competition out of buisness.
Not sure where you are going with the anti-virus, since Microsoft has never released one. But when they do, I'm pretty confident it'll steal the market share too.
The point i'm trying to make, is that while all of us know that plenty of non-microsoft products are becoming available, and are even better products in many cases, the fact still remains that microsoft obliterated the competition in all of these areas and only the FOSS community is able to gain any traction at all.
You gotta remember that just becuase you and I use FireFox and OpenOffice.org, doesn't change the fact that 99% of computer users are on Internet Explorer and MS Office.
I don't see why this is a big public story. Why did they even tell Lenovo about this.
If the U.S. is concerned (which is reasonable), then they just take a few laptops out of the shipment when it arrives and send it down to the lab to be inspected and tested. If everything is in order, pass out the rest of them.
If you do find something, then... uh... Bomb china or whatever it is we do when people piss us off. Oh, and ask for your money back.
I don't see why this should be a story, I would hope that anytime an electronics purchase is made which will involve classified data, that the devices are atleast mildly inspected before use. Especially when they are provided by a foreign country.
For those that don't know, here is a little background info:
People in Japan never purchase used electronics, in fact they purchase new electronics at a pace which dwarfs American technology purchases. It's just sort of a Japanese thing... They always want the newest/best/coolest bit of technology.
There are however, many poorer countries around Japan, and there is an amazing market for these used electronics in nearby countries. For some time now there has been a massive organized sale of used electronics to other countries, creating pretty substantial profits. This could be powered by anything from ebay to organized supply chains.
Basically the Japanese government felt like they could possibly direct some of this revenue to the electronics manufacturers, and increase the sales of new items, therefore promoting growth and new technologies, etc, etc.
The thing here to remember is that it never impacted the Japanese directly, as it is extremely rare for a japenese person to buy a used electronics item for themselves, but rather it impacted them indirectly by making it harder to profit from the resale of items.
A good portion of the U.S. are complete fucking idiots.
Your right. They are.
This is the problem that a representative republic like ours is supposed to solve. We accept that people largely do not know what is best for them, and allow a select few to make the day to day decisions.
Unfortunately there are many weaknesses in this system as well. For instance, it seems our congressmen have no interest in representing their constituants, but rather focus most of their time accepting bribes from the RIAA/MPAA, among others.
Second, when the general public elects officials, they would need to atleast be somewhat educated on who they are electing, but instead the official elected is almost entirely dependent on inaccurate television news coverage. (Not neccacerly the candidate the news channel is supporting though, we've seen CNN lose the election for candidates in the past. People can tell when you are blatantly lying to them.... They'd rather hear the truth)
Well I think your just being silly. Bush was REELECTED a second time. Even if you don't like him you should be able to admit that obviously a good portion of the U.S. did like him.
That's beside the point though, and I don't care to debate it. Let me just say, after seeing all the crap Gore has been up to since he lost the election, would you have wanted him to be president?
So do you actually believe that crap? Or are you just trying to troll? Hopefully it's the latter, but in that case, quit posting on/.
Our presidents are elected by the same damn process each time, with only insignificant amounts of successful voter fraud occuring on either side of party lines.
In case you missed civics class, here's an over simplified explanation of how it works:
You see the people in the states go and vote. Then the majority vote of each state determines what candidate their electorate votes will go to. We add up all those votes, and that determines the winner. It's really quite simple on the surface.
And in case your wondering, we don't do a popular election country-wide, because that would eliminate the power of the state. And our country is founded on the principle that the states maintain some power. We do call ourselves the 'United States' after all, not the 'One Big State'.
So I'm not sure where the 'Good Old Boys' network comes in to play. There are of course plenty of bizzare antics in play during campaigning, but this has nothing to do with voting or diebold.
Maybe Google has a secret strategy to easily increase the quality of their search results.
1) Make it easy to create a useless crap webpage.
2) All crap webpage designers flock to Google Pages.
3) Google just blocks Google Pages domain from search results.
4) ??????????
5) Profit!
In 1951 Remington Rand was selling UNIVAC1 computers to the government. The thing could do about 1,900 operations per second and had I think about 72kilobits of ram.
It drew 125 Kwatts of electricity.
The laptop sitting in front of me now is about 300,000 times faster and draws 25 watts during peak usage.
What on earth makes you think that just becuase something is faster/better, it therefore must (by some magical law of physics I'm sure) draw more power?
With advances in chip fabrication alone, it is possible to massively reduce power usage. Not to mention any progress they make in the actual protocol being used by the system that may reduce transmission.
Also, you seem to be mistaken on the work the chip actually does. It is not processing any audio or video streams, it could care less if it was transmitting HD video or text, it'd just passing on the packets.
This isn't exactly news nor does it have anything to do with ViiV. We all know we don't need a computer in our living room, who would want that.
Since the original xbox which was a media center client, plenty of people have been accessing their windows media center via a media adapter, and now microsoft plans to have the new xbox360 act as a media adapter for everyones tv. I can say from personal experience that the 360 does a great job of connecting to my Media Center PC, with the exception of the missing DIVX support.
There must be 20 other media adapters that have been available for atleast a year, for linksys, dlink, etc.
Great commentary, I just want to reply to one thing that appeared to be a bit of a theme in your post.
It appears to me that Microsofts 'innovation strategy' is what many people anticipate is about to be the new hot market -- The connected home/media center/media centric idea.
Even Apple is pursuing this a bit, but I think they are just feeling out the waters so far.
I expect this sort of thing is inevitable, and if microsoft can make all the devices in your house (computer/tv/dvd/xbox/etc) happily share media, record media, etc, then they will likely be pretty successful.
We've also got Sony with this infamous ViiV marketing campaign pushing the microsoft solutions.
The only thing that could get in the way of success in this area would be DRM making media unusable and the general public deciding to stop buying from large content providers.
On similar hardware it outperforms any other O/S i've seen doing the same tasks.
Try starting up KDE and launching OpenOffice.Org and tell me how it responds compared to Windows XP and MS Office.
Try starting up MacOSX and launching Office or OOo and let me know how it is compared to Windows XP.
Try checking email, browsing the web, watching movies/media/audio, and show me where the performance is better.
Find me even a company that can release this mammoth software with such huge software and hardware support in the same amount of time, while also releasing quality development tools and fighting several massive lawsuits requiring them to remake versions of their software.
Hey I don't really care for Windows much, I'm a Ubuntu and MacOSX person myself, but what is with the New York Times FUD'ing Microsoft lately? Maybe they should try to find something to write about that they actually have some knowledge of.... like best selling book lists or something.
It's been nearly 5 years since the last major revision of Windows--it's getting kind of ridiculous.
You are right, it has been nearly 5 years, but I don't know that it is getting ridiculous.
Windows XP is fast, (relatively) stable, pretty, and easy for the average user. Microsoft has kept it patched and updated (to some degree), and provided a service pack for some larger upgrades. And at the same time they've released several versions of media center, tablet pc, etc. All the while building the tools for their future strategies, including VS.net 2005,.net2.0, MSSQL Server 2005, biztalk.
What is it that you need so bad from Vista other than 3d desktop graphics? XP will still do everything my MacOSX box will do (and much faster) and with the proper tweaking, it'll do everything my Ubuntu laptop does as well. I personally prefer to work on a Linux box, but Windows XP is a great operating system, and I'm glad to have something stable enough that we don't have to upgrade every year like we used to do with windows.
I've never installed anything on windows that was as easy as apt-get install x.
Lets see, for Windows I must:
1) Goto Store
2) Pay for Software
3) Insert CD
4) Wonder what Autoplay is going to do
5) Navigate non-standard installation
For my debian/ubuntu systems:
1) apt-get install softwarex
Or if I don't even know what I want to install, I can always do an 'apt-cache search pron' and search the ~16k free and tested packages for numerous architectures.
Although I suppose I'm gleefully overlooking the times it would be neccacery to download kernel source, configure the source, set up symbolic links, make && make install, etc. But hey, if it's not in the package repository, a Windows user probably doesn't need it.
The Dubai ports deal was far more superficial than even stereotypes, racism, and FUD. It was simply a fear of missing an opportunity for election time issues.
You are absolutely correct that the dual core doesn't handle multiple processes in a simple fashion as many may assume, but that is not to say that there aren't great advantages. The real advantage is in increasing processing power on a single chip and reducing power consumption.
Also, with software that is written with the multiple cores in mind, there can be other significant advantages.
(P.S. I know that my introductory paragraph was inflammatory, but did you read the rest of my post? Very little of what I proposed was socialistic in nature.)
Yes, I did. It was a very insightful reply.
People who you might consider parasites are edge cases.
I have no clear data on whether this is the case or not. I expect that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Just drawing on people that I come into contact with, I often see a single mother working hard at two jobs, but at the same time spending all her money on liquer and meth. I'm afraid this is the norm, and I hate that we encourage her by giving her food stamps and other benefits. If she knew no one else would provide for her, she'd likely organize her life in a better way.
It's a very complex problem, and I certainly haven't heard of any good solutions yet. On one hand it is unacceptable to have people suffering in poverty in our country. (And I mean actually suffering, not sitting on the edge of our legal 'poverty' line). And on the other hand we want to promote self improvement and self reliance, and handouts don't do this.
I don't know that I follow the purpose of this. The iPod plays generic mp3 and aac files. The player doesn't care where you get these files from.
The iTunes software of course only connects to apples own music store, but that makes sense, being that its a client for their store.
The iPod isn't exactly rocket science, all that is required is that you create an XML file on the disc with the playlists and song names. Anyone can create a nice client for it, just like the nice open source linux clients I use.
Not to mention, you could buy music from other stores and copy it onto your iPod via the iTunes software package (or plenty of other freeware packages).
I have thousands of mp3's on my iPod, and none of them came from iTunes, nor has it ever been connected to iTunes. And I've done it all without breaking any laws or EULA's I think.
It's substantially easier and less overkill to just catch the video output directly. Building them off of svideo or component is easy becuase the color signals are already seperated out for you. I made mine with svideo, but come to think of it you might be able to do it with component with hardly any components (no pun intended).
If your a bit of a techy you can make your own using the color component of an svideo output and a little pile of LED's. I think mine was about $21 of parts from radio shack, and its got 3 ultra bright LEDS for R, G, and B (9 total), and you get the color in sync with a little varistor.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect that you are right about them ending up in court, but why on earth would this not be legal?
You can't add components to your software product becuase someone else already sells those components and stands to lose money? I don't get it... What is the legal precedent here?
Don't worry about that! They told the same about anti virus, web browsers and office suite!
Perhaps you should evaluate the logic of your statement?
Microsofts web browser put the competition out of business. (and got themselves in a bit of a legal battle too)
In the 80's and 90's Word Perfect was the defacto standard for an office suite, and Claris Works was popular on the mac. Then microsoft brought out it's office suite, and has all but put the competition out of buisness.
Not sure where you are going with the anti-virus, since Microsoft has never released one. But when they do, I'm pretty confident it'll steal the market share too.
The point i'm trying to make, is that while all of us know that plenty of non-microsoft products are becoming available, and are even better products in many cases, the fact still remains that microsoft obliterated the competition in all of these areas and only the FOSS community is able to gain any traction at all.
You gotta remember that just becuase you and I use FireFox and OpenOffice.org, doesn't change the fact that 99% of computer users are on Internet Explorer and MS Office.
Probably they should ship the laptops to Jerry Taylor in Tuttle, Oklahoma for inspection.
I don't see why this is a big public story. Why did they even tell Lenovo about this.
If the U.S. is concerned (which is reasonable), then they just take a few laptops out of the shipment when it arrives and send it down to the lab to be inspected and tested. If everything is in order, pass out the rest of them.
If you do find something, then... uh... Bomb china or whatever it is we do when people piss us off. Oh, and ask for your money back.
I don't see why this should be a story, I would hope that anytime an electronics purchase is made which will involve classified data, that the devices are atleast mildly inspected before use. Especially when they are provided by a foreign country.
Your absolutely right about that, The japanese love old guitars/amps from America and Europe.
For those that don't know, here is a little background info:
People in Japan never purchase used electronics, in fact they purchase new electronics at a pace which dwarfs American technology purchases. It's just sort of a Japanese thing... They always want the newest/best/coolest bit of technology.
There are however, many poorer countries around Japan, and there is an amazing market for these used electronics in nearby countries. For some time now there has been a massive organized sale of used electronics to other countries, creating pretty substantial profits.
This could be powered by anything from ebay to organized supply chains.
Basically the Japanese government felt like they could possibly direct some of this revenue to the electronics manufacturers, and increase the sales of new items, therefore promoting growth and new technologies, etc, etc.
The thing here to remember is that it never impacted the Japanese directly, as it is extremely rare for a japenese person to buy a used electronics item for themselves, but rather it impacted them indirectly by making it harder to profit from the resale of items.
Anyone feel free to correct me on this.........
A good portion of the U.S. are complete fucking idiots.
Your right. They are.
This is the problem that a representative republic like ours is supposed to solve. We accept that people largely do not know what is best for them, and allow a select few to make the day to day decisions.
Unfortunately there are many weaknesses in this system as well. For instance, it seems our congressmen have no interest in representing their constituants, but rather focus most of their time accepting bribes from the RIAA/MPAA, among others.
Second, when the general public elects officials, they would need to atleast be somewhat educated on who they are electing, but instead the official elected is almost entirely dependent on inaccurate television news coverage. (Not neccacerly the candidate the news channel is supporting though, we've seen CNN lose the election for candidates in the past. People can tell when you are blatantly lying to them.... They'd rather hear the truth)
Well I think your just being silly. Bush was REELECTED a second time. Even if you don't like him you should be able to admit that obviously a good portion of the U.S. did like him.
That's beside the point though, and I don't care to debate it. Let me just say, after seeing all the crap Gore has been up to since he lost the election, would you have wanted him to be president?
I suppose he did invent the internet though.
So do you actually believe that crap? Or are you just trying to troll? Hopefully it's the latter, but in that case, quit posting on /.
Our presidents are elected by the same damn process each time, with only insignificant amounts of successful voter fraud occuring on either side of party lines.
In case you missed civics class, here's an over simplified explanation of how it works:
You see the people in the states go and vote. Then the majority vote of each state determines what candidate their electorate votes will go to. We add up all those votes, and that determines the winner. It's really quite simple on the surface.
And in case your wondering, we don't do a popular election country-wide, because that would eliminate the power of the state. And our country is founded on the principle that the states maintain some power. We do call ourselves the 'United States' after all, not the 'One Big State'.
So I'm not sure where the 'Good Old Boys' network comes in to play. There are of course plenty of bizzare antics in play during campaigning, but this has nothing to do with voting or diebold.
Will you experience an increase in bone and muscle mass if you sleep with your head at the higher end?
I know it makes my bone massive.
Maybe Google has a secret strategy to easily increase the quality of their search results.
1) Make it easy to create a useless crap webpage.
2) All crap webpage designers flock to Google Pages.
3) Google just blocks Google Pages domain from search results.
4) ??????????
5) Profit!
That's just being ignorant.
In 1951 Remington Rand was selling UNIVAC1 computers to the government. The thing could do about 1,900 operations per second and had I think about 72kilobits of ram.
It drew 125 Kwatts of electricity.
The laptop sitting in front of me now is about 300,000 times faster and draws 25 watts during peak usage.
What on earth makes you think that just becuase something is faster/better, it therefore must (by some magical law of physics I'm sure) draw more power?
With advances in chip fabrication alone, it is possible to massively reduce power usage. Not to mention any progress they make in the actual protocol being used by the system that may reduce transmission.
Also, you seem to be mistaken on the work the chip actually does. It is not processing any audio or video streams, it could care less if it was transmitting HD video or text, it'd just passing on the packets.
This isn't exactly news nor does it have anything to do with ViiV. We all know we don't need a computer in our living room, who would want that.
Since the original xbox which was a media center client, plenty of people have been accessing their windows media center via a media adapter, and now microsoft plans to have the new xbox360 act as a media adapter for everyones tv. I can say from personal experience that the 360 does a great job of connecting to my Media Center PC, with the exception of the missing DIVX support.
There must be 20 other media adapters that have been available for atleast a year, for linksys, dlink, etc.
Great commentary, I just want to reply to one thing that appeared to be a bit of a theme in your post.
It appears to me that Microsofts 'innovation strategy' is what many people anticipate is about to be the new hot market -- The connected home/media center/media centric idea.
Even Apple is pursuing this a bit, but I think they are just feeling out the waters so far.
I expect this sort of thing is inevitable, and if microsoft can make all the devices in your house (computer/tv/dvd/xbox/etc) happily share media, record media, etc, then they will likely be pretty successful.
We've also got Sony with this infamous ViiV marketing campaign pushing the microsoft solutions.
The only thing that could get in the way of success in this area would be DRM making media unusable and the general public deciding to stop buying from large content providers.
I didn't know Windows was slow.
On similar hardware it outperforms any other O/S i've seen doing the same tasks.
Try starting up KDE and launching OpenOffice.Org and tell me how it responds compared to Windows XP and MS Office.
Try starting up MacOSX and launching Office or OOo and let me know how it is compared to Windows XP.
Try checking email, browsing the web, watching movies/media/audio, and show me where the performance is better.
Find me even a company that can release this mammoth software with such huge software and hardware support in the same amount of time, while also releasing quality development tools and fighting several massive lawsuits requiring them to remake versions of their software.
Hey I don't really care for Windows much, I'm a Ubuntu and MacOSX person myself, but what is with the New York Times FUD'ing Microsoft lately? Maybe they should try to find something to write about that they actually have some knowledge of.... like best selling book lists or something.
It's been nearly 5 years since the last major revision of Windows--it's getting kind of ridiculous.
.net2.0, MSSQL Server 2005, biztalk.
You are right, it has been nearly 5 years, but I don't know that it is getting ridiculous.
Windows XP is fast, (relatively) stable, pretty, and easy for the average user. Microsoft has kept it patched and updated (to some degree), and provided a service pack for some larger upgrades. And at the same time they've released several versions of media center, tablet pc, etc. All the while building the tools for their future strategies, including VS.net 2005,
What is it that you need so bad from Vista other than 3d desktop graphics? XP will still do everything my MacOSX box will do (and much faster) and with the proper tweaking, it'll do everything my Ubuntu laptop does as well. I personally prefer to work on a Linux box, but Windows XP is a great operating system, and I'm glad to have something stable enough that we don't have to upgrade every year like we used to do with windows.
I've never installed anything on windows that was as easy as apt-get install x.
Lets see, for Windows I must:
1) Goto Store
2) Pay for Software
3) Insert CD
4) Wonder what Autoplay is going to do
5) Navigate non-standard installation
For my debian/ubuntu systems:
1) apt-get install softwarex
Or if I don't even know what I want to install, I can always do an 'apt-cache search pron' and search the ~16k free and tested packages for numerous architectures.
Although I suppose I'm gleefully overlooking the times it would be neccacery to download kernel source, configure the source, set up symbolic links, make && make install, etc. But hey, if it's not in the package repository, a Windows user probably doesn't need it.
but it's not OK for Ford to charge you per mile driven
It's called a lease.
The Dubai ports deal was far more superficial than even stereotypes, racism, and FUD. It was simply a fear of missing an opportunity for election time issues.
Or several billiards.
You are absolutely correct that the dual core doesn't handle multiple processes in a simple fashion as many may assume, but that is not to say that there aren't great advantages. The real advantage is in increasing processing power on a single chip and reducing power consumption.
Also, with software that is written with the multiple cores in mind, there can be other significant advantages.
(P.S. I know that my introductory paragraph was inflammatory, but did you read the rest of my post? Very little of what I proposed was socialistic in nature.)
Yes, I did. It was a very insightful reply.
People who you might consider parasites are edge cases.
I have no clear data on whether this is the case or not. I expect that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Just drawing on people that I come into contact with, I often see a single mother working hard at two jobs, but at the same time spending all her money on liquer and meth. I'm afraid this is the norm, and I hate that we encourage her by giving her food stamps and other benefits. If she knew no one else would provide for her, she'd likely organize her life in a better way.
It's a very complex problem, and I certainly haven't heard of any good solutions yet. On one hand it is unacceptable to have people suffering in poverty in our country. (And I mean actually suffering, not sitting on the edge of our legal 'poverty' line). And on the other hand we want to promote self improvement and self reliance, and handouts don't do this.
I don't know that I follow the purpose of this. The iPod plays generic mp3 and aac files. The player doesn't care where you get these files from.
The iTunes software of course only connects to apples own music store, but that makes sense, being that its a client for their store.
The iPod isn't exactly rocket science, all that is required is that you create an XML file on the disc with the playlists and song names. Anyone can create a nice client for it, just like the nice open source linux clients I use.
Not to mention, you could buy music from other stores and copy it onto your iPod via the iTunes software package (or plenty of other freeware packages).
I have thousands of mp3's on my iPod, and none of them came from iTunes, nor has it ever been connected to iTunes. And I've done it all without breaking any laws or EULA's I think.
So what's the deal here?
It's substantially easier and less overkill to just catch the video output directly. Building them off of svideo or component is easy becuase the color signals are already seperated out for you. I made mine with svideo, but come to think of it you might be able to do it with component with hardly any components (no pun intended).
If your a bit of a techy you can make your own using the color component of an svideo output and a little pile of LED's. I think mine was about $21 of parts from radio shack, and its got 3 ultra bright LEDS for R, G, and B (9 total), and you get the color in sync with a little varistor.