Sounds to me like HP is simply misled, once again. They've probably been developing a lot of fancy stuff for their Deskjet printers on the webOS platform and don't want to throw all of their work away. Unfortunately, HP doesn't seem to get that most of us are moving AWAY from the idea of printing on paper, wherever possible.
Or maybe they're recognizing this. Think about it. The obvious replacement for paper (if you're just viewing something) is a tablet. And HP has designed to integrate a tablet into a printer, which would (likely) allow you to view documents that had been 'printed'.
Yes, it's nothing we can't do now with CutePDF, etc. But the average consumer wants a simple, one-click process and something like this has the potential for that.
I remember using Win 3.1 (installed from 6 floppies), and even then HP's printer drivers took 3 floppies. Something is very wrong when the drivers are half the size of the OS.
The thing is, that pretty much mirrors the situation in Butcher. There was a disclaimer similar to what you suggested, and it was held to apply only in cases of high value transactions, since it would be unreasonable to expect the reasonable person to read the fine print on everything. (Although now that I think about it, I think Butcher may have be founded on a statutory claim, rather than estoppel. But misrepresentation is a pretty well established area, so I assume Canada has it's own laws on that point.)
Butcher is an Australian case, and a recent one at that, so it wouldn't surprise me if Canadian law was unclear or divergent on that point. But Curtis was a British case, so I'd have thought it would still apply.
Citations: (I really should have included these before) Curtis v Chemical Cleaning and Dyeing Co [1951] 1 KB 805 Butcher v Lachlan Elder Realty (2004) 218 CLR 592
The legal term for that is 'entire agreement clause'. i.e. the entire agreement is contained within the written contract, and no other representations can be included. While this is slightly less clear-cut, that wouldn't hold up in most cases either. Curtis (or modern applications of it) function via estoppel, which prevents the vendor from exercising their rights where it would be unconscionable to do so. (Estoppel is part of the law of equity, which evolved specifically to prevent the common law, which contract falls under, from being abused to effect unjust outcomes.) The unconsciousness is the grey area - where a reasonable person in the position of the plaintiff would have been expected to read the EULA in full, estoppel won't be made out. (see Butcher v Lachlan Elder Realty, where reliance on inaccurate information in the presence of a disclaimer was insufficient to found a claim in estoppel, given the value of the transaction. i.e. it was a house, not merely a piece of software).
My point was that there's no good way to differentiate between the EULA and the sale of goods when acceptance of either involves clicking on something. Also, the agreement is binding from the moment the promises to transfer the money and goods are exchanged, not merely when first is dispatched.
A summary would be legally binding, and would have the effect of limiting the contracts terms to those consistent with the summary. [see Curtis v Chemical Cleaning and Dyeing Co] This is why they're generally avoided by lawyers - they don't want to take the risk of any inconsistency.
IMO, the EULAs demonstrates a deeper problem - even if you 'buy' software, you still have to agree to the EULA in order to receive a license to use the software. The licensing and purchase should be inseparable. (There is also the question of how a EULA satisfies the issue of consideration - see http://www.lawiki.org/lawwiki/Shrink-wrapped_licence_agreements:_the_UK_legal_position).
(I am an Australian law student, this is not legal advice.)
If clicking 'I agree' wasn't binding, then how could you buy things online? The real problem with EULA is that their terms are often excessive and unfair. This has been largely ameliorated in Australia, due to a recent law which grants a court the power to set aside unfair terms in consumer contracts (see http://www.freehills.com/5908.aspx).
That's the other thing - what fraction of iPhones are sold in countries other than the US? If it needed it's own dedicated network, it would have lost out on all those sales.
I'll second this. I was somewhat forced into using Linux on my netbook (it's ARM, and Android wasn't really good enough), and Office is the only thing I've really missed. (Besides working drivers, but that's my fault for using an experimental kernel). KDE has Win7 beat in terms of usability, but decent Office compatibility is the one thing I'm missing. Hopefully this will be fixable with WINE once Win8 comes out with an ARM version of Office. (On an x86 system, I'd just use VirtualBox.)
I did read the parent post, though I don't know if you posted elsewhere. So what would the use case for this be? Just cause there are better options, doesn't mean it couldn't be used like that.
However, it would let turn a laptop or tablet into a 2nd monitor, which could be rather useful at times if you don't normally have a dual screen setup.
I don't think you can legitimately download music anywhere without correct metadata applied. Even when you rip CDs most programs auto magically look up the CDDB database for the tags.
It's not so much an issue with downloaded music as with ripped music, which is the case for more obscure stuff. The CDDB database lookup was the issue I referred to when I noted that it doesn't always get it right. Also, let's not forget that the vast majority of music in existence is old music, or that FLAC is the most popular lossless format.
There's also a problem with tags which use non-latin alphabets, like j-pop. The right tags for those consist entirely of characters impossible or extremely difficult to type on a conventional keyboard. I would concede that this is a much more niche issue though, if there's a native Japanese version of Android with a suitable keyboard.
There is no argument about Unity. We all agree that it sucks. There is minor disagreement about the degree to which it sucks.
Does that really stop anyone from writing Linux applications?
I'd say it does. Until now, Ubuntu has been regarded as the de facto OS for new users, and accordingly, developers have targeted it for development (along with maybe Fedora cause they like it). More capable users generally don't have any problems with downloading, compiling and installing the source. Now we have to seriously consider which distro to target, and the decision isn't as easy.
The metadata system is effectively a directory structure where the names correspond to the different fields. They compensate for this rigidity with playlists, but that isn't quite enough sometimes.
The big problem with this system is that you don't always have ID3 info. The non-technical user lacks the ability to modify their ID3 tags, or has them set incorrectly by an automated mechanism which misidentifies the piece. This is to say nothing of unusual formats which can be played via an addin, but don't get indexed properly. (e.g. Windows Media Player can't read FLAC tags) The problem is even worse for video, which usually lacks such tags (I don't even know if the major formats support it.)
I had a song I liked which I got off some guy's site about 10 years ago and had absolutely no idea where it came from (and neither did he). (It was instrumental, so no lyrics to search for.) I only found it's origin a few years ago on a geocities archive. For something like that, filename is the only thing you have. While it might be unusual, you can bet that people have their own names for songs. e.g. Axel F is best known as 'the crazy frog'.
What we need is an indexing system which supplements the conventional model. By all means build the indexing right into it so that there's no need to search for new files to add to the database, but don't force the user to effectively dump all their files in the one directory and rely on the ID3 tags.
Kids, actually, tend to care about what others think.
I'd say this is true of people in general. Humans are social creatures - if they didn't give some consideration to how they would be viewed society wouldn't work. The only difference between kids and adults is that the adults have different values informing who they respect and want to respect them.
ARM has an even more fundamental problem then that in it's current implementation. There's effectively no equivalent of 'IBM compatible' right now. If you look at the different devices which are using Tegra 2 chips (not just the same family, but the same actual chips), they're all using different GPIO pins. The end result is that we're using customized kernels for each device, which is obviously impractical. There's also no standardized way to load a bootloader - everyone's just using closed source bootloaders derived from copies of Android, with closed source tools like nvflash if we're lucky (since without these there's no way to unbrick devices with bad kernels). I'm not an open source fanatic, but these are real stumbling blocks in the adoption of ARM - for example, nvflash can't handle images greater than 4 GB.
These basic problems preventing compatibility need to be given priority over performance issues. I'm not saying that performance isn't important, but it doesn't matter how well it handles parallel operations if we need a separate kernel for each implementation. We need to standardize these things before we can start pushing for adoption. Drivers are another issue entirely. (Even though the Android/Linux kernel is open sourced, wifi drivers are usually closed source and a lot of stuff is handled with closed source user daemons).
DISCLAIMER: I don't claim to be an expert on these matters by any means, I'm just someone who's been following (and using) the attempts at porting Ubuntu to an ARM tablet/netbook.
I like that Android uses the Linux kernel. It makes it extremely easy to port other Linux-based OSes like Meego or Ubuntu to it, since all you really need to modify is the kernel (which is GPLed). Admittedly, there's a fair bit of work involved, but it's nowhere near the amount that would be needed to get Linux running on the iPhone, for example.
If Android becomes the de factor mobile/tablet OS, then by virtue of the fact that it uses the Linux kernel, running a generic Linux distro designed for usage on mobile phones could very well become a reality. KDE even has an alpha version of Kubuntu for mobiles out now, and I wouldn't be surprised if Meego went down this line either.
I wanted to do the same thing on my N900. Found a cron-type program with a easy to use GUI that did exactly what I wanted and worked perfectly.
The Android market sells apps, which encourages people to churn out minimal quality apps in order to make some money out of it. AFAIK, nobody buys Maemo apps - the extras repository (yes, it uses Debian-style repositories with apt-get) has pretty much everything you'd need, and most of them are open source too. When no-one is paying sub-minimum wage for these apps, only the people who are actually interested in writing one do so. You have fewer apps (which sucks from a marketing perspective), but the overall quality is higher.
I'll continue to use my Asus Transformer as is, but only until there's a tablet friendly of Ubuntu up and running... or maybe I'll stick with Android if such changes are made. But until then, I won't be buying another tablet as an upgrade and I will continue to stay out of the smartphone market.
Gnome 3 seems pretty tablet friendly. Admittedly, it does require hardware acceleration, but the modified kernel for running Ubuntu on the TF is due to support that in it's next release (which is due sometime in the next few weeks/months). I've been running Kubuntu on mine for several months now (admittedly with the keyboard attached, but with the touchpad disabled) and it's worked pretty well.
I don't normally use AdBlock. I only installed it on my netbook the other day because I my wifi connection was at modem speed. But this sort of behaviour guarantees I'm not going to be reading that site.
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Don't forget the open source hentai...
Sounds to me like HP is simply misled, once again. They've probably been developing a lot of fancy stuff for their Deskjet printers on the webOS platform and don't want to throw all of their work away. Unfortunately, HP doesn't seem to get that most of us are moving AWAY from the idea of printing on paper, wherever possible.
Or maybe they're recognizing this. Think about it. The obvious replacement for paper (if you're just viewing something) is a tablet. And HP has designed to integrate a tablet into a printer, which would (likely) allow you to view documents that had been 'printed'.
Yes, it's nothing we can't do now with CutePDF, etc. But the average consumer wants a simple, one-click process and something like this has the potential for that.
I remember using Win 3.1 (installed from 6 floppies), and even then HP's printer drivers took 3 floppies. Something is very wrong when the drivers are half the size of the OS.
The thing is, that pretty much mirrors the situation in Butcher. There was a disclaimer similar to what you suggested, and it was held to apply only in cases of high value transactions, since it would be unreasonable to expect the reasonable person to read the fine print on everything. (Although now that I think about it, I think Butcher may have be founded on a statutory claim, rather than estoppel. But misrepresentation is a pretty well established area, so I assume Canada has it's own laws on that point.)
Butcher is an Australian case, and a recent one at that, so it wouldn't surprise me if Canadian law was unclear or divergent on that point. But Curtis was a British case, so I'd have thought it would still apply.
Citations: (I really should have included these before)
Curtis v Chemical Cleaning and Dyeing Co [1951] 1 KB 805
Butcher v Lachlan Elder Realty (2004) 218 CLR 592
The legal term for that is 'entire agreement clause'. i.e. the entire agreement is contained within the written contract, and no other representations can be included. While this is slightly less clear-cut, that wouldn't hold up in most cases either. Curtis (or modern applications of it) function via estoppel, which prevents the vendor from exercising their rights where it would be unconscionable to do so. (Estoppel is part of the law of equity, which evolved specifically to prevent the common law, which contract falls under, from being abused to effect unjust outcomes.) The unconsciousness is the grey area - where a reasonable person in the position of the plaintiff would have been expected to read the EULA in full, estoppel won't be made out. (see Butcher v Lachlan Elder Realty, where reliance on inaccurate information in the presence of a disclaimer was insufficient to found a claim in estoppel, given the value of the transaction. i.e. it was a house, not merely a piece of software).
Once again, this is not legal advice.
My point was that there's no good way to differentiate between the EULA and the sale of goods when acceptance of either involves clicking on something. Also, the agreement is binding from the moment the promises to transfer the money and goods are exchanged, not merely when first is dispatched.
A summary would be legally binding, and would have the effect of limiting the contracts terms to those consistent with the summary. [see Curtis v Chemical Cleaning and Dyeing Co] This is why they're generally avoided by lawyers - they don't want to take the risk of any inconsistency.
IMO, the EULAs demonstrates a deeper problem - even if you 'buy' software, you still have to agree to the EULA in order to receive a license to use the software. The licensing and purchase should be inseparable. (There is also the question of how a EULA satisfies the issue of consideration - see http://www.lawiki.org/lawwiki/Shrink-wrapped_licence_agreements:_the_UK_legal_position).
(I am an Australian law student, this is not legal advice.)
If clicking 'I agree' wasn't binding, then how could you buy things online?
The real problem with EULA is that their terms are often excessive and unfair. This has been largely ameliorated in Australia, due to a recent law which grants a court the power to set aside unfair terms in consumer contracts (see http://www.freehills.com/5908.aspx).
In Australia, unfair terms in consumer contracts can be set aside - see http://www.freehills.com/5908.aspx
That's the other thing - what fraction of iPhones are sold in countries other than the US? If it needed it's own dedicated network, it would have lost out on all those sales.
This will be especially interesting where there are existing adult entertainment businesses with the same name.
I'll second this. I was somewhat forced into using Linux on my netbook (it's ARM, and Android wasn't really good enough), and Office is the only thing I've really missed. (Besides working drivers, but that's my fault for using an experimental kernel). KDE has Win7 beat in terms of usability, but decent Office compatibility is the one thing I'm missing. Hopefully this will be fixable with WINE once Win8 comes out with an ARM version of Office. (On an x86 system, I'd just use VirtualBox.)
I did read the parent post, though I don't know if you posted elsewhere.
So what would the use case for this be? Just cause there are better options, doesn't mean it couldn't be used like that.
However, it would let turn a laptop or tablet into a 2nd monitor, which could be rather useful at times if you don't normally have a dual screen setup.
I don't think you can legitimately download music anywhere without correct metadata applied. Even when you rip CDs most programs auto magically look up the CDDB database for the tags.
It's not so much an issue with downloaded music as with ripped music, which is the case for more obscure stuff. The CDDB database lookup was the issue I referred to when I noted that it doesn't always get it right. Also, let's not forget that the vast majority of music in existence is old music, or that FLAC is the most popular lossless format.
There's also a problem with tags which use non-latin alphabets, like j-pop. The right tags for those consist entirely of characters impossible or extremely difficult to type on a conventional keyboard. I would concede that this is a much more niche issue though, if there's a native Japanese version of Android with a suitable keyboard.
There is no argument about Unity. We all agree that it sucks. There is minor disagreement about the degree to which it sucks.
Does that really stop anyone from writing Linux applications?
I'd say it does. Until now, Ubuntu has been regarded as the de facto OS for new users, and accordingly, developers have targeted it for development (along with maybe Fedora cause they like it). More capable users generally don't have any problems with downloading, compiling and installing the source. Now we have to seriously consider which distro to target, and the decision isn't as easy.
The metadata system is effectively a directory structure where the names correspond to the different fields. They compensate for this rigidity with playlists, but that isn't quite enough sometimes.
The big problem with this system is that you don't always have ID3 info. The non-technical user lacks the ability to modify their ID3 tags, or has them set incorrectly by an automated mechanism which misidentifies the piece. This is to say nothing of unusual formats which can be played via an addin, but don't get indexed properly. (e.g. Windows Media Player can't read FLAC tags) The problem is even worse for video, which usually lacks such tags (I don't even know if the major formats support it.)
I had a song I liked which I got off some guy's site about 10 years ago and had absolutely no idea where it came from (and neither did he). (It was instrumental, so no lyrics to search for.) I only found it's origin a few years ago on a geocities archive. For something like that, filename is the only thing you have. While it might be unusual, you can bet that people have their own names for songs. e.g. Axel F is best known as 'the crazy frog'.
What we need is an indexing system which supplements the conventional model. By all means build the indexing right into it so that there's no need to search for new files to add to the database, but don't force the user to effectively dump all their files in the one directory and rely on the ID3 tags.
Who cares?
Kids, actually, tend to care about what others think.
I'd say this is true of people in general. Humans are social creatures - if they didn't give some consideration to how they would be viewed society wouldn't work. The only difference between kids and adults is that the adults have different values informing who they respect and want to respect them.
As a law student who just finished his units on contract law, I'd like to point out that this guy does know what he's talking about.
And as an added bonus, here's a similar case.
ARM has an even more fundamental problem then that in it's current implementation. There's effectively no equivalent of 'IBM compatible' right now. If you look at the different devices which are using Tegra 2 chips (not just the same family, but the same actual chips), they're all using different GPIO pins. The end result is that we're using customized kernels for each device, which is obviously impractical. There's also no standardized way to load a bootloader - everyone's just using closed source bootloaders derived from copies of Android, with closed source tools like nvflash if we're lucky (since without these there's no way to unbrick devices with bad kernels). I'm not an open source fanatic, but these are real stumbling blocks in the adoption of ARM - for example, nvflash can't handle images greater than 4 GB.
These basic problems preventing compatibility need to be given priority over performance issues. I'm not saying that performance isn't important, but it doesn't matter how well it handles parallel operations if we need a separate kernel for each implementation. We need to standardize these things before we can start pushing for adoption. Drivers are another issue entirely. (Even though the Android/Linux kernel is open sourced, wifi drivers are usually closed source and a lot of stuff is handled with closed source user daemons).
DISCLAIMER: I don't claim to be an expert on these matters by any means, I'm just someone who's been following (and using) the attempts at porting Ubuntu to an ARM tablet/netbook.
However, in Win8 you can just clickthrough to the full, standard windows desktop, so at least they haven't removed the option.
Not in the ARM edition.
I like that Android uses the Linux kernel. It makes it extremely easy to port other Linux-based OSes like Meego or Ubuntu to it, since all you really need to modify is the kernel (which is GPLed). Admittedly, there's a fair bit of work involved, but it's nowhere near the amount that would be needed to get Linux running on the iPhone, for example.
If Android becomes the de factor mobile/tablet OS, then by virtue of the fact that it uses the Linux kernel, running a generic Linux distro designed for usage on mobile phones could very well become a reality. KDE even has an alpha version of Kubuntu for mobiles out now, and I wouldn't be surprised if Meego went down this line either.
I wanted to do the same thing on my N900. Found a cron-type program with a easy to use GUI that did exactly what I wanted and worked perfectly.
The Android market sells apps, which encourages people to churn out minimal quality apps in order to make some money out of it. AFAIK, nobody buys Maemo apps - the extras repository (yes, it uses Debian-style repositories with apt-get) has pretty much everything you'd need, and most of them are open source too. When no-one is paying sub-minimum wage for these apps, only the people who are actually interested in writing one do so. You have fewer apps (which sucks from a marketing perspective), but the overall quality is higher.
I'll continue to use my Asus Transformer as is, but only until there's a tablet friendly of Ubuntu up and running... or maybe I'll stick with Android if such changes are made. But until then, I won't be buying another tablet as an upgrade and I will continue to stay out of the smartphone market.
Gnome 3 seems pretty tablet friendly. Admittedly, it does require hardware acceleration, but the modified kernel for running Ubuntu on the TF is due to support that in it's next release (which is due sometime in the next few weeks/months). I've been running Kubuntu on mine for several months now (admittedly with the keyboard attached, but with the touchpad disabled) and it's worked pretty well.
I don't normally use AdBlock. I only installed it on my netbook the other day because I my wifi connection was at modem speed. But this sort of behaviour guarantees I'm not going to be reading that site.