I don't know if any individual's disinterest or interest is indictative of the rest of the market. Neither do you. Either may turn out to be worthless as predictors.
You're still missing the point - superior performance is only important if consumers feel the need for better performance. Sales seem to show that picture quality is less important than slimness for displays. Sales show that MP3s are good enough for most people, and CDs are good enough for almost everyone. SACD and DVD-A flopped.
He did NOT say that upsampled DVDs look as good as BR. You invented that strawman. He said he was satisifed with his DVD player. Not that he couldn't tell the difference, but that the difference isn't worth the cost of a new player.
The people you saw at Best Buy have already passed the first hurdle. They have decided that they want something new. Any retailer can tell you that getting them in the store is the hard part. I'm pointing out that most people haven't gone to Best Buy to buy a movie player, they have one that is good enough, and they stayed home.
The problem Sony faces is not demonstrating that Blu-Ray looks better than DVD. That's easy. The problem is getting people to care about the improvement.
For example, the most popular beer in the US is Bud Light. It shouldn't be hard to find a better tasting beer. But most Bud Light drinkers are satisified, and aren't looking for anything better. Taste tests won't matter; they aren't looking. Winning the taste test is much easier than convincing people to take the test.
Most people in the US watch TV over cable or satellite, using a settop box from the service provider. They don't need a new TV. They may want one, but there's no urgency to it.
I do watch OTA, and switched to digital two years ago. But I still don't care about BR. If the drives and media get cheap enough, then I'll want one for backups on a computer. Movies? Not worth it.
His opinion is not worthless. Perception matters for market success. The first obstacle to BR success is the user's satisfaction with his current setup. The previous poster is satified, and therefore will not be trying a direct comparison.
It doesn't matter what wins a comparison without the desire to compare in the first place. It doesn't matter to me what the best car on the market today is because I already have a car, and I'm happy with it. When I am no longer happy with it, then I'll compare the cars on the market at that time.
I have a HDTV that I use to watch OTA digital broadcasts. It looks good. I'm sure BR discs would look great. I don't care. I rarely watch movies. I don't need to compare. BR would win the comparison, and the answer would still be that buying a BR player would be a waste of money for me.
Murdoch has owned the NY Post since 1976. I'd call it a tabloid. I'd call it lots of other things, but I'd need to call in the Marines to help expand my vocabulary.
The UN has stamped out smallpox. The WHO is part of the UN.
Made any international phone calls? The International Telecommunications Union is a UN agency.
Like any large organization, there are parts that work well and parts that work poorly. If the US were to withdraw from the UN, you can be sure that the working parts would work less well or stop working at all. The parts that don't work, the mismanagement, the corruption, would go on with even less oversight.
See maemo.org for a catalog of FLOSS applications.
Nokia uses the Hilden UI, based on GTK, designed for the touch screen and limited screen size. For the most part, I like it. When you click on a field needing text entry, a keyboard image pops up, and you click on the keys with the stylus or your finger. I use the stylus because I don't like fingerprints on the screen. The new model has a keyboard, but I doubt that it really makes typing much easier. You can select text and delete, replace, or copy the selected text.
I haven't tried spreadsheets, but don't see any reason why you couldn't work with them.
The 800x480 screen is great, but movie watching is a mixed bag. Some videos play well, others can't keep up and frames are skipped. I don't know if the bottleneck is CPU power or updating the screen. Rumor is that OS updates will bring faster drivers. Typical Internet video resolutions work OK, and others can be transcoded to be useable. I haven't played with this very much.
The included email application has a very minimal address book. I should install something better, but I mostly my n800 to read mail, rather than send.
The buzz now is about the n810, but there are many good reviews of the n800 on the web. With minor exceptions, everything said about the n800 applies to the n810. The software has been updated several times since those early reviews, but they should give you a feel for these devices.
Auto-correct would be less painful if it understood SI units. The proper symbol for milliwatt is mW. Word 'corrects' that to Mw. You would think that someone at Microsoft could those symbols in a table, but the metric system's only been around for two centuries, so perhaps it's too soon for that to happen.
I'll see your Word documents and raise you Excel spreadsheets. I used to get regular email from one fellow listing information about a handful of parts: company part number, vendor part number, and description. He'd attach a spreadsheet. I tried to explain the tab key to him, but this was an alien concept. I tried to get him to at least save in CSV format, but no luck. I hated waiting for Excel to open just so I could read 4 lines of data.
The Nokia applications on my n800 are marginal. But underneath it all is an ARM port of Debian, so you can replace the Nokia apps with something better for your needs. WiFi connections work well and are easy to configure. Plug in the USB cable and the SD flash cards show up in exactly the same way as if you took the cards out and plugged them into a card reader. You can install ssh, ftp, and rsync if you like. The only Nokia-related software on my PC is a utility for flashing OS updates. Nokia provides a Windows-based flash tool which I've never used, as I use the Linux tool from maemo.org.
One problem that I haven't solved has to do with authenticating TLS connections to web servers using client certificates. HTTPS connections and IMAP TLS connections using server certs work OK. I use client certs to connect to my private home web server, and that works with every other browser I've tried, but not the n800.
I should note that while I see room for improvement in Nokia's mail client and media player, I still use them. Adequate is, after all, good enough. I'll switch when I find something that the default apps can't do. I bought the n800 to use with FBreader to read ebooks, and I'm very pleased with how that has worked out.
Privatization in and of itself does not provide an efficient market. Competition, not private ownership, is what provides the benefits found in modern economies. More often than not, private ownership enables competition. Sometimes it does not, sometimes it stifles competition, and results in an inefficient market.
Utilities are classic examples of natural monopolies. To be pedantic, this sometimes takes the form of oligarchies rather than pure monopolies, but the drawbacks are the same: the suppression of competition leads to high prices, poor service, and stagnation (lack of innovation). The oligarchs may divide the business by geography, like the railroads, or by type of service. Cable and telcos do both. Cable companies divide the country into exclusive territories, sometimes trade territories, but never battle over the same region. Telcos do the same. You local telco and cable may appear to compete with each other, but it is a very limited competition. They unite against any third party entering the market. They unite to lobby against any requirement to lease lines to real competitors. They unite to throw obstacles in the path of anyone foolish enough to try to run new lines.
If you look at true free markets, there are usually at least three strong players and several smaller ones. For example, US auto market share 2007 YTD: GM 22%, Toyota 16%, DaimlerChrysler 16%, Ford 15%, Honda 9%, and so forth. Real competition. The same picture emerges for fast food, supermarkets, gasoline, clothing, you name it.
Where I live, the phone company and the cable company combined have more than 90% of the Internet access market. Third place is down in the statistical noise. People ask whether I use cable or DSL, as if there were only two choices. They can't comprehend that there could be a third choice.
If there isn't a third choice, there isn't true competition. If the third largest market share isn't at least half the size of the largest, there isn't true competition. We don't have true competition for Internet access in the US. We have an oligarchy which restricts competition.
Privatization often increases competition. Privatization sometimes replaces one monopoly with another. Privatization is neither good nor bad. Competition is good, and when private enterprise is suppressing competition, then *anything* which increases competition is better. Including regulation, or even government ownership. As bad as government can be, sometimes private business is worse. Government lacks the feedback that competition provides, but provides feedback from voters that businesses lack. Even the DMV is easier to deal with than AT&T.
White Fence shows the options that they were paid to show. For my address, they did not show the cable company that covers half the county, or any third party DSL provider. Including the one I am using right now. There are at least a half dozen other DSL providers, several wireless companies, and as previously mentioned, the cable company that has covered this area for more than a decade. None are shown. Only $GIANT_TELCO and satellite TV are shown. I'm sure that the fact that only competitors to cable are shown is purely coincidence;-)
Broadbandreports.com does a much better job listing Internet access providers.
Not the radio listening audience, the audience for the open letter.
The author isn't trying to persuade the RIAA to be fair, that's impossible. That's why he wrote an open letter; a letter to the public ostensibly addressed to, but not really intended for, the RIAA.
The music business and its RIAA front will not change their agenda. They've given Congress their marching orders, accompanied by bales of money. Politicians understand that voters often vote for the candidate with the largest budget for ads. And it's not just the direct campaign contributions, it's that most of the music business is owned by media companies, the companies that own the TV and radio stations, newspapers, and even web sites that politicians advertize with. Why do you suppose that newspapers NEVER challenge the RIAA spin on any story?
The letter is intended for the public, and voters in particular. Politicans need cover before standing up to the RIAA. When voters write and call, that helps counter the RIAA fundraising. Float a fair and reasonable proposal, and shift the burden to the RIAA of explaining the RIAA plan.
Write or call your elected officials. Many would like to do the right thing. Give them hope that doing the right thing won't end their careers.
Sure, some people need external drives. But that doesn't include everyone buying external drives, many of whom may be happier with another approach.
I'm suggesting that the OP take a step back from the details of his proposed solution and consider what his requirements really are. Most people don't need mobile storage, they need shared storage. Shared storage is easy. Cross-platform shared storage is easy.
Mobile storage is easy, too, if you stay with a single platform. Cross-platform mobile storage is harder.
Part of the problem is that portable has two meanings in the computer world. We sometimes use portable to mean cross-platform, and the OP does have cross-platform requirements. Portable also means mobile, and it isn't clear that the OP needs that. You do. You need both meanings of portable, which is fairly unusual. Ask about portable storage, and you'll get a confused mix of advice about both types.
Support for non-native filesystems carrys extra baggage that is best avoided if possible. It's worth checking to see if that's what you really need. People tend to latch on to the first solution that comes to mind, and define the requirements to fit that first solution. Of course, it should be the other way around, but people are funny that way.
An external drive is a good way to add storage to a single platform, and the mobility is sometimes useful. A small NAS box is a good way to add storage to multiple platforms, and the mobility is sometimes useful. If you're dealing with a single platform OR you don't have network access, then an external drive is right. If you're dealing with multiple platforms AND you have network access, then NAS is right.
If you're dealing with multiple platforms AND you don't have network access, you're screwed. All solutions suck, live with the suckage, and try not to paint yourself into that corner next time.
Trying to use a filesystem across multiple platforms is painful. That's a clue that you're tackling the wrong problem. You don't need to share filesystems, you need to share files. Different problem with different solutions.
I set up an old PC with Linux to solve many needs. NFS and Samba provide a common pool of storage for every OS that I use. Since setting that up, I haven't ever though about shared partitions. They aren't needed.
Linux and Samba worked for me, but that's not the only solution. A NAS box might work better for you. The point is that you need shared storage, not a shared drive. Every OS supports network storage. Every OS supports backups across the network.
Old motherboards can be stable now, if they were stable when they were new. Crap, however, does not improve with age.
My router is an Abit BX6.2 with an Celeron 300A (overclocked to 450MHz) that is and always has been rock solid. Once a year I put a drop of oil on the CPU fan, and it's good for another year. Intel's 440BX was a good chipset. Maxed out at 512KB of RAM, this system runs my personal domain, providing DNS, SMTP, IMAP, SSH, HTTP/TLS, NFS, SMB, and NTP services. It's only been down for kernel upgrades, new drives, or power outages.
This Everex Via c7 system looks like a reasonable replacement. Faster, more RAM, SATA drives, and all while using less power.
I would be cautious about old motherboards from the era of counterfeit capacitors, and even those may be worth using if you know how to solder.
The public does prefer lower prices. When earlier state laws allowing manufacturer control over retail prices were thrown out in 1975, prices went down. I remember. I could finally afford decent hifi gear. Mail order business boomed. Most store owners were not happy as their margins shrank. Manufacturers grumbled at losing one degree of control over dealers, but ending up selling higher volumes.
Price floors were only one form of market abuse. They were usually coupled with dealer territories. That meant that if you lived in an area belonging to a dealer with lousy service, you had very little recourse. You could drive to another city, or do without.
When retail controls were largely overturned, mail order became possible and effective. Prices came down. Exclusive territories were easily bypassed, and dealers had to compete not just on price, but also service. Sure, service was sacrificed at the extreme price cutters, but many customers saw improved service when they could buy from competing retailers.
Today's decision reverses that. Prices will go up. Service will go down.
You argue that the competitive pressure will shift from retail to wholesale. That won't happen. More manufacturer control over retailers makes collusion at the supplier level easier. Competition at the retail level acts as a check on supplier collusion. Lessen local competition and expect less competition globally.
It does not matter what the relationship between blogging and broadcasting is. That's a red herring.
He can say what he likes about the game on his own property, on his own dime. The 1st Amendment does not address the issue of entering property belonging to others, such as the place where the game was played. The property owners may set conditions on entry. They did. He knew of those conditions. He violated those conditions. So he was ejected. The only legal issues are those regarding his permission to enter private property - not a free speech issue at all.
The University can eject anyone from their property for any reason or no reason at all. They did NOT restrict his speech; they restricted his access to the event that he wanted to speak about. If I decide to speak about your sex life, the 1st Amendment does not give me permission to enter your bedroom.
Linus isn't saying that CVS and Subversion have fixable bugs or missing features. It's not about the code.
He is saying that they solve the wrong problem. The Subversion team wants to solve Problem A, and Linus wants to solve Problem B. No amount of code will turn the solution to Problem A into a solution for Problem B. Bothering the Subversion team with code addressing Problem B will only irritate them, since they're working on Problem A.
The right way to handle differing goals is to start a different project. That's what he did.
Don't be confused by the labels. Source Code Management means different things to different people, and there isn't always much overlap in how each person defines it. Ships and airplanes are both 'vehicles', but that doesn't mean that a few changes will turn one to the other.
Perhaps I did express myself clearly. Rights are not entitlements. For example, you have a right to publish your thoughts, but you are not entitled to a printing press.
The basis of the Constitution is that people have inalienable rights, and it specifies one form of government derived from those rights. It enumerates certain rights, but in no way claims that the list of rights is exhaustive. Courts can and have held that other rights are inalienable and thus covered by the Constitution. These are not privileges granted by the government to the people, they are rights of the people. People are not given rights by the Constitution, they are born with inalienable rights.
Privacy has been ruled to be an inalienable right by the Supreme Court, even though it is not specifically listed in the Constitution. Of course, most of our familiar rights weren't listed in the original version. The First Amendment did not create the right to speak freely, we always had that right, it is inalienable. The First Amendment simply acknowledged it, similar to codifying common law into statute law. Some state constitutions, such as California's, do list privacy. Others don't. I'm convinced that privacy is an inalienable right.
Law is made where rights collide and conflict. As often put, your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. In the US, privacy is a right, but one that is poorly defined and with unknown boundaries. I think that European laws provide good guidance, and would like to similar laws here. My image and voice cannot be used without my permission, outside of fair use exemptions. How is other personal information any different?
No, Google does not have the right to do whatever they like with everything on their servers, and neither does anyone else. You may have heard of copyrights, patents, and trademarks. Google has copyrighted information on their servers. The law gives them limited rights to use that information, but they need permission from the copyright holder to do other things with it.
A case can be made that I hold copyright to information about me, or a right to privacy which may work like copyright. That is, Google is free to use any personal information which I provide them for internal use, but that they need my permission to distribute it to anyone else.
I'm not worried about first-hand information collection. It's the sharing and selling, and absense of responsibility for accuracy, that poses the potential for abuse.
You've made an assertion without providing any supporting evidence, explanation, or argument. The only value such unsupported assertion holds is as a litmus test to demonstrate that you belong to a group with a certain idealogy. Why isn't it the government's job to play a role in protecting the right to privacy? Arguably, government's most important job is to protect the rights of all people, such as life, liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom to associate with whoever you choose, and so on.
Corporations cannot and do not exist outside of laws created by governments. Corporations are not natural persons with inherent rights. It is government that provides the legal framework that limits the liability of the shareholders in a corporation, provides corporations with the ability to own property, and provides corporations any existence as a legal entities at all. The limits on the owner's liability are balanced with limits on the powers of the corporation. There is every reason for government to define and limit what corporations may and may not do.
The Founding Fathers of the US were familiar with the ways in which governments could abuse power, so they found ways to limit and control that power. But in today's world, corporations often hold as much or more power over our lives, and it is worth considering applying the same sort of checks and balances to corporations. The Constitution of the US flat-out prohibits the Federal Government from some areas, and perhaps the same thing needs to be done with corporations.
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I don't know if any individual's disinterest or interest is indictative of the rest of the market. Neither do you. Either may turn out to be worthless as predictors.
You're still missing the point - superior performance is only important if consumers feel the need for better performance. Sales seem to show that picture quality is less important than slimness for displays. Sales show that MP3s are good enough for most people, and CDs are good enough for almost everyone. SACD and DVD-A flopped.
He did NOT say that upsampled DVDs look as good as BR. You invented that strawman. He said he was satisifed with his DVD player. Not that he couldn't tell the difference, but that the difference isn't worth the cost of a new player.
The people you saw at Best Buy have already passed the first hurdle. They have decided that they want something new. Any retailer can tell you that getting them in the store is the hard part. I'm pointing out that most people haven't gone to Best Buy to buy a movie player, they have one that is good enough, and they stayed home.
The problem Sony faces is not demonstrating that Blu-Ray looks better than DVD. That's easy. The problem is getting people to care about the improvement.
For example, the most popular beer in the US is Bud Light. It shouldn't be hard to find a better tasting beer. But most Bud Light drinkers are satisified, and aren't looking for anything better. Taste tests won't matter; they aren't looking. Winning the taste test is much easier than convincing people to take the test.
Most people in the US watch TV over cable or satellite, using a settop box from the service provider. They don't need a new TV. They may want one, but there's no urgency to it.
I do watch OTA, and switched to digital two years ago. But I still don't care about BR. If the drives and media get cheap enough, then I'll want one for backups on a computer. Movies? Not worth it.
His opinion is not worthless. Perception matters for market success. The first obstacle to BR success is the user's satisfaction with his current setup. The previous poster is satified, and therefore will not be trying a direct comparison.
It doesn't matter what wins a comparison without the desire to compare in the first place. It doesn't matter to me what the best car on the market today is because I already have a car, and I'm happy with it. When I am no longer happy with it, then I'll compare the cars on the market at that time.
I have a HDTV that I use to watch OTA digital broadcasts. It looks good. I'm sure BR discs would look great. I don't care. I rarely watch movies. I don't need to compare. BR would win the comparison, and the answer would still be that buying a BR player would be a waste of money for me.
"There is no way in hell you're going to do that with a standard external battery."
Welcome to Hell. It can, and has, been done. If you meant internal rather than external battery.
My Nokia n800 is smaller and thinner than the MacBook Air. It has longer battery life than the Air. The battery is replaceable.
No, it's not going after the same market segment. The n800 aims at an even smaller form factor and does it with a replaceable battery.
Murdoch has owned the NY Post since 1976. I'd call it a tabloid. I'd call it lots of other things, but I'd need to call in the Marines to help expand my vocabulary.
The UN has stamped out smallpox. The WHO is part of the UN.
Made any international phone calls? The International Telecommunications Union is a UN agency.
Like any large organization, there are parts that work well and parts that work poorly. If the US were to withdraw from the UN, you can be sure that the working parts would work less well or stop working at all. The parts that don't work, the mismanagement, the corruption, would go on with even less oversight.
The automotive version is that the only thing that beats cubic inches is cubic money.
See maemo.org for a catalog of FLOSS applications.
Nokia uses the Hilden UI, based on GTK, designed for the touch screen and limited screen size. For the most part, I like it. When you click on a field needing text entry, a keyboard image pops up, and you click on the keys with the stylus or your finger. I use the stylus because I don't like fingerprints on the screen. The new model has a keyboard, but I doubt that it really makes typing much easier. You can select text and delete, replace, or copy the selected text.
I haven't tried spreadsheets, but don't see any reason why you couldn't work with them.
The 800x480 screen is great, but movie watching is a mixed bag. Some videos play well, others can't keep up and frames are skipped. I don't know if the bottleneck is CPU power or updating the screen. Rumor is that OS updates will bring faster drivers. Typical Internet video resolutions work OK, and others can be transcoded to be useable. I haven't played with this very much.
The included email application has a very minimal address book. I should install something better, but I mostly my n800 to read mail, rather than send.
The buzz now is about the n810, but there are many good reviews of the n800 on the web. With minor exceptions, everything said about the n800 applies to the n810. The software has been updated several times since those early reviews, but they should give you a feel for these devices.
Auto-correct would be less painful if it understood SI units. The proper symbol for milliwatt is mW. Word 'corrects' that to Mw. You would think that someone at Microsoft could those symbols in a table, but the metric system's only been around for two centuries, so perhaps it's too soon for that to happen.
Is Microsoft time the inverse of Internet time?
I'll see your Word documents and raise you Excel spreadsheets. I used to get regular email from one fellow listing information about a handful of parts: company part number, vendor part number, and description. He'd attach a spreadsheet. I tried to explain the tab key to him, but this was an alien concept. I tried to get him to at least save in CSV format, but no luck. I hated waiting for Excel to open just so I could read 4 lines of data.
The Nokia applications on my n800 are marginal. But underneath it all is an ARM port of Debian, so you can replace the Nokia apps with something better for your needs. WiFi connections work well and are easy to configure. Plug in the USB cable and the SD flash cards show up in exactly the same way as if you took the cards out and plugged them into a card reader. You can install ssh, ftp, and rsync if you like. The only Nokia-related software on my PC is a utility for flashing OS updates. Nokia provides a Windows-based flash tool which I've never used, as I use the Linux tool from maemo.org.
One problem that I haven't solved has to do with authenticating TLS connections to web servers using client certificates. HTTPS connections and IMAP TLS connections using server certs work OK. I use client certs to connect to my private home web server, and that works with every other browser I've tried, but not the n800.
I should note that while I see room for improvement in Nokia's mail client and media player, I still use them. Adequate is, after all, good enough. I'll switch when I find something that the default apps can't do. I bought the n800 to use with FBreader to read ebooks, and I'm very pleased with how that has worked out.
Privatization in and of itself does not provide an efficient market. Competition, not private ownership, is what provides the benefits found in modern economies. More often than not, private ownership enables competition. Sometimes it does not, sometimes it stifles competition, and results in an inefficient market.
Utilities are classic examples of natural monopolies. To be pedantic, this sometimes takes the form of oligarchies rather than pure monopolies, but the drawbacks are the same: the suppression of competition leads to high prices, poor service, and stagnation (lack of innovation). The oligarchs may divide the business by geography, like the railroads, or by type of service. Cable and telcos do both. Cable companies divide the country into exclusive territories, sometimes trade territories, but never battle over the same region. Telcos do the same. You local telco and cable may appear to compete with each other, but it is a very limited competition. They unite against any third party entering the market. They unite to lobby against any requirement to lease lines to real competitors. They unite to throw obstacles in the path of anyone foolish enough to try to run new lines.
If you look at true free markets, there are usually at least three strong players and several smaller ones. For example, US auto market share 2007 YTD: GM 22%, Toyota 16%, DaimlerChrysler 16%, Ford 15%, Honda 9%, and so forth. Real competition. The same picture emerges for fast food, supermarkets, gasoline, clothing, you name it.
Where I live, the phone company and the cable company combined have more than 90% of the Internet access market. Third place is down in the statistical noise. People ask whether I use cable or DSL, as if there were only two choices. They can't comprehend that there could be a third choice.
If there isn't a third choice, there isn't true competition. If the third largest market share isn't at least half the size of the largest, there isn't true competition. We don't have true competition for Internet access in the US. We have an oligarchy which restricts competition.
Privatization often increases competition. Privatization sometimes replaces one monopoly with another. Privatization is neither good nor bad. Competition is good, and when private enterprise is suppressing competition, then *anything* which increases competition is better. Including regulation, or even government ownership. As bad as government can be, sometimes private business is worse. Government lacks the feedback that competition provides, but provides feedback from voters that businesses lack. Even the DMV is easier to deal with than AT&T.
White Fence shows the options that they were paid to show. For my address, they did not show the cable company that covers half the county, or any third party DSL provider. Including the one I am using right now. There are at least a half dozen other DSL providers, several wireless companies, and as previously mentioned, the cable company that has covered this area for more than a decade. None are shown. Only $GIANT_TELCO and satellite TV are shown. I'm sure that the fact that only competitors to cable are shown is purely coincidence ;-)
Broadbandreports.com does a much better job listing Internet access providers.
Forget that the XO is a computer. Think of it as a book. A library of books, easily updated.
There will still be some people arguing that teaching people how to read diverts funds away from giving them food.
Calling the XO a laptop was a huge mistake. It's an embedded system, not a replacement for MacBooks and Dells.
Not the radio listening audience, the audience for the open letter.
The author isn't trying to persuade the RIAA to be fair, that's impossible. That's why he wrote an open letter; a letter to the public ostensibly addressed to, but not really intended for, the RIAA.
The music business and its RIAA front will not change their agenda. They've given Congress their marching orders, accompanied by bales of money. Politicians understand that voters often vote for the candidate with the largest budget for ads. And it's not just the direct campaign contributions, it's that most of the music business is owned by media companies, the companies that own the TV and radio stations, newspapers, and even web sites that politicians advertize with. Why do you suppose that newspapers NEVER challenge the RIAA spin on any story?
The letter is intended for the public, and voters in particular. Politicans need cover before standing up to the RIAA. When voters write and call, that helps counter the RIAA fundraising. Float a fair and reasonable proposal, and shift the burden to the RIAA of explaining the RIAA plan.
Write or call your elected officials. Many would like to do the right thing. Give them hope that doing the right thing won't end their careers.
Sure, some people need external drives. But that doesn't include everyone buying external drives, many of whom may be happier with another approach.
I'm suggesting that the OP take a step back from the details of his proposed solution and consider what his requirements really are. Most people don't need mobile storage, they need shared storage. Shared storage is easy. Cross-platform shared storage is easy.
Mobile storage is easy, too, if you stay with a single platform. Cross-platform mobile storage is harder.
Part of the problem is that portable has two meanings in the computer world. We sometimes use portable to mean cross-platform, and the OP does have cross-platform requirements. Portable also means mobile, and it isn't clear that the OP needs that. You do. You need both meanings of portable, which is fairly unusual. Ask about portable storage, and you'll get a confused mix of advice about both types.
Support for non-native filesystems carrys extra baggage that is best avoided if possible. It's worth checking to see if that's what you really need. People tend to latch on to the first solution that comes to mind, and define the requirements to fit that first solution. Of course, it should be the other way around, but people are funny that way.
An external drive is a good way to add storage to a single platform, and the mobility is sometimes useful. A small NAS box is a good way to add storage to multiple platforms, and the mobility is sometimes useful. If you're dealing with a single platform OR you don't have network access, then an external drive is right. If you're dealing with multiple platforms AND you have network access, then NAS is right.
If you're dealing with multiple platforms AND you don't have network access, you're screwed. All solutions suck, live with the suckage, and try not to paint yourself into that corner next time.
Trying to use a filesystem across multiple platforms is painful. That's a clue that you're tackling the wrong problem. You don't need to share filesystems, you need to share files. Different problem with different solutions.
I set up an old PC with Linux to solve many needs. NFS and Samba provide a common pool of storage for every OS that I use. Since setting that up, I haven't ever though about shared partitions. They aren't needed.
Linux and Samba worked for me, but that's not the only solution. A NAS box might work better for you. The point is that you need shared storage, not a shared drive. Every OS supports network storage. Every OS supports backups across the network.
Old motherboards can be stable now, if they were stable when they were new. Crap, however, does not improve with age.
My router is an Abit BX6.2 with an Celeron 300A (overclocked to 450MHz) that is and always has been rock solid. Once a year I put a drop of oil on the CPU fan, and it's good for another year. Intel's 440BX was a good chipset. Maxed out at 512KB of RAM, this system runs my personal domain, providing DNS, SMTP, IMAP, SSH, HTTP/TLS, NFS, SMB, and NTP services. It's only been down for kernel upgrades, new drives, or power outages.
This Everex Via c7 system looks like a reasonable replacement. Faster, more RAM, SATA drives, and all while using less power.
I would be cautious about old motherboards from the era of counterfeit capacitors, and even those may be worth using if you know how to solder.
The public does prefer lower prices. When earlier state laws allowing manufacturer control over retail prices were thrown out in 1975, prices went down. I remember. I could finally afford decent hifi gear. Mail order business boomed. Most store owners were not happy as their margins shrank. Manufacturers grumbled at losing one degree of control over dealers, but ending up selling higher volumes.
Price floors were only one form of market abuse. They were usually coupled with dealer territories. That meant that if you lived in an area belonging to a dealer with lousy service, you had very little recourse. You could drive to another city, or do without.
When retail controls were largely overturned, mail order became possible and effective. Prices came down. Exclusive territories were easily bypassed, and dealers had to compete not just on price, but also service. Sure, service was sacrificed at the extreme price cutters, but many customers saw improved service when they could buy from competing retailers.
Today's decision reverses that. Prices will go up. Service will go down.
You argue that the competitive pressure will shift from retail to wholesale. That won't happen. More manufacturer control over retailers makes collusion at the supplier level easier. Competition at the retail level acts as a check on supplier collusion. Lessen local competition and expect less competition globally.
It does not matter what the relationship between blogging and broadcasting is. That's a red herring.
He can say what he likes about the game on his own property, on his own dime. The 1st Amendment does not address the issue of entering property belonging to others, such as the place where the game was played. The property owners may set conditions on entry. They did. He knew of those conditions. He violated those conditions. So he was ejected. The only legal issues are those regarding his permission to enter private property - not a free speech issue at all.
The University can eject anyone from their property for any reason or no reason at all. They did NOT restrict his speech; they restricted his access to the event that he wanted to speak about. If I decide to speak about your sex life, the 1st Amendment does not give me permission to enter your bedroom.
Linus isn't saying that CVS and Subversion have fixable bugs or missing features. It's not about the code.
He is saying that they solve the wrong problem. The Subversion team wants to solve Problem A, and Linus wants to solve Problem B. No amount of code will turn the solution to Problem A into a solution for Problem B. Bothering the Subversion team with code addressing Problem B will only irritate them, since they're working on Problem A.
The right way to handle differing goals is to start a different project. That's what he did.
Don't be confused by the labels. Source Code Management means different things to different people, and there isn't always much overlap in how each person defines it. Ships and airplanes are both 'vehicles', but that doesn't mean that a few changes will turn one to the other.
Perhaps I did express myself clearly. Rights are not entitlements. For example, you have a right to publish your thoughts, but you are not entitled to a printing press.
The basis of the Constitution is that people have inalienable rights, and it specifies one form of government derived from those rights. It enumerates certain rights, but in no way claims that the list of rights is exhaustive. Courts can and have held that other rights are inalienable and thus covered by the Constitution. These are not privileges granted by the government to the people, they are rights of the people. People are not given rights by the Constitution, they are born with inalienable rights.
Privacy has been ruled to be an inalienable right by the Supreme Court, even though it is not specifically listed in the Constitution. Of course, most of our familiar rights weren't listed in the original version. The First Amendment did not create the right to speak freely, we always had that right, it is inalienable. The First Amendment simply acknowledged it, similar to codifying common law into statute law. Some state constitutions, such as California's, do list privacy. Others don't. I'm convinced that privacy is an inalienable right.
Law is made where rights collide and conflict. As often put, your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. In the US, privacy is a right, but one that is poorly defined and with unknown boundaries. I think that European laws provide good guidance, and would like to similar laws here. My image and voice cannot be used without my permission, outside of fair use exemptions. How is other personal information any different?
A person has a right to privacy. Google is not a person.
No, Google does not have the right to do whatever they like with everything on their servers, and neither does anyone else. You may have heard of copyrights, patents, and trademarks. Google has copyrighted information on their servers. The law gives them limited rights to use that information, but they need permission from the copyright holder to do other things with it.
A case can be made that I hold copyright to information about me, or a right to privacy which may work like copyright. That is, Google is free to use any personal information which I provide them for internal use, but that they need my permission to distribute it to anyone else.
I'm not worried about first-hand information collection. It's the sharing and selling, and absense of responsibility for accuracy, that poses the potential for abuse.
You've made an assertion without providing any supporting evidence, explanation, or argument. The only value such unsupported assertion holds is as a litmus test to demonstrate that you belong to a group with a certain idealogy. Why isn't it the government's job to play a role in protecting the right to privacy? Arguably, government's most important job is to protect the rights of all people, such as life, liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom to associate with whoever you choose, and so on.
Corporations cannot and do not exist outside of laws created by governments. Corporations are not natural persons with inherent rights. It is government that provides the legal framework that limits the liability of the shareholders in a corporation, provides corporations with the ability to own property, and provides corporations any existence as a legal entities at all. The limits on the owner's liability are balanced with limits on the powers of the corporation. There is every reason for government to define and limit what corporations may and may not do.
The Founding Fathers of the US were familiar with the ways in which governments could abuse power, so they found ways to limit and control that power. But in today's world, corporations often hold as much or more power over our lives, and it is worth considering applying the same sort of checks and balances to corporations. The Constitution of the US flat-out prohibits the Federal Government from some areas, and perhaps the same thing needs to be done with corporations.