It appears that, in this case, you are correct. The Archos devices all contain harddrives.

There are cases, however, where "firmware" is still appropriate, even if the thing runs linux. Sometimes, the OS is stored in a compressed image in flash - the Linksys WRT54G*, for example. In that case, you really do have to replace the OS to get a new feature.

That all being said, however, I was specifically responding to the question posed by the parent to my original comment. I'll grant that the rationale I provided won't apply to all devices/situations, perhaps (even probably) even this one.

I still maintain, however, that it is a perfectly valid reason to withhold development support.

Well, either the person knows what they're doing or they found a website that gave them instructions to follow and precompiled binaries to install.

It would also increase the number of calls to tech support and a dip in customer satisfaction.

"I'm sorry your $THING doesn't work correctly. Can you tell me what firmware version you are using? That's not an official firmware image built by $COMPANY. I can't tell you why it doesn't work right and I can't help you with it. I'd recommend going to $URL and downloading the latest official firmware"

"You say you called earlier and a support person had you update your firmware? And now you can't $UNSUPPORTED_FEATURE? You're right. You can't do that using the official firmware. I understand that you tried thirdparty firmware from $SOMEONE_ELSE because you wanted $UNSUPPORTED_FEATURE. We cannot help you with thirdparty firmware. If the official firmware behaves as expected and there's a problem with the thirdparty firmware, you will have to go to $SOMEONE_ELSE for support with it."

I have read Mosman's decision (the first two paragraphs of the PDF) and skimmed through the background info, (the bulk of the rest of the document) and I have to say that I agree with him.

First, he's not saying that a warrant is not required for law enforcement to search your email. All he's saying is that they are not *required* to actually tell the account holder that the email has been searched. They still have to present the warrant to the email host.

This is exactly the state of affairs when it comes to physical searches of property stored at a 3rd party location. If I have stuff at a storage locker somewhere, police will take their warrant to the management office of the storage facility and say "Let us into the locker." Legally speaking, that's all they're required to do.

Now, in either case, I would expect to be notified by the host or storage facility that they complied with the search warrant. That's just good business.

Where the original case makes me uneasy isn't that the warrant was only given to the ISP. It's that the warrant included a supplemental gag order preventing them from telling anyone, INCLUDING THE ACCOUNT HOLDER, that they were complying with the search warrant.

IMHO, and I'm by no means a legal professional, they chose the wrong grounds upon which to try to appeal the decision. Rather than appeal on the grounds that they weren't notified of the search, they should have appealed on the grounds that the gag order was unjustified. I don't know that it would necessarily have gotten them anywhere, either, but it'd at least be a stance I can agree with.

Yet another interesting point is made in Mosman's discussion. In a normal, physical, search and seizure, they're required to leave a list of things they take. That way, you know what should be missing and can reclaim your property after the trial (if you're in a position to do so).

He argued that because nothing was actually *taken* -- the police simply made copies of their mail folders -- there was no need to leave a receipt, which would have served as a different means of alerting the account holder that their account had been searched.

This could have some potentially interesting consequences in physical searches as well. What if the police execute a search warrant for documents and rather than physically taking the papers to the police station, they instead set up a few high-speed duplex scanners and just scanned in the documents on the premesis? If that's all they do, they're not "depriving you of property" so there's no reason to leave a receipt.

Really, really sad drugs.

You beat me to the suggestion.

SQLite is a very powerful SQL database engine that is highly powerful and comes in a single < 500K library. No server needed.

Interfaces to it exist for most modern languages.

Documentation for the C/C++ API is here

A more C++ friendly wrapper for SQLite is on CodeProject

Actually, the analogy of a crash rather than an infinite loop is more appropriate.

In an infinite loop, the same instructions are executed over and over.

In the hot-ice computer, "execution" occurs when the stuff crystallizes. Once the hot-ice crystallizes at a given spot in the matrix, it cannot crystallize again until you reset the system. (by boiling it and melting all of the crystals)

So, when the crystals form into a circular path in the system execution stops because there's no place for the reaction to spread before it stops.

Well, pisser.

You're right.

Wikipedia page on WCDMA

and CDMA2000

I guess that'll teach me to get my hopes up. /me goes to send Nokia some feedback asking them to support 3G CDMA.

You missed a big difference for people in the USA... Quoting the specifications page

Operating frequency

        * Quad-band GSM EDGE 850/900/1800/1900
        * WCDMA 900/1700/2100 MHz

That's right. This device will be available with CDMA support. Which means that people in the US who are customers of carriers who didn't adopt GSM like everybody else in the world ( eg: Sprint, Verizon ) will, in theory, be able to use the phone, too.

And before you say that we should all "get with the program" and switch carriers to one that uses GSM, for many of us, for various reasons, it really isn't an option.

Since you dragged the other discussion into this, allow me to point out a comment in that very discussion which points out why it's nowhere near the same thing. (Like the fact that Sun announced months in advance that they were going to do it, and the fact that you can, in fact remove it.)

That comment is +5 insightful. You don't even have to drill down to find it. Just scroll a bit. Given that (some of) the comments are regularly more fair and balanced than the article summaries, you ought to at least skim the discussion before you decide whether this guy is bringing something useful to the discussion or just throwing more FUD onto the pile.

Are you sure?

It certainly seems like Windsor is a suburb of Detroit.

You misunderstand the situation.

They're not manipulating produced chips to produce a false scarcity.

The X3 chips, just like the original Intel Celerons were born because somebody said "Gee, we've got all of these chips that *mostly* work except for one of the cores / the cache / XX feature. If we use some microcode to work around the dead portion of the chip, we can still sell them!"

When they run out of the "defective" chips, either because of high demand or because their process improves to produce fewer of them, they have to choose between saying "oops, sorry. we're out of them" or taking perfectly good chips and lobotomizing them.

I've got one word for you. It's an acronym, actually.

HUD. That is: Heads-Up Display

The Vuzix display linked to by the OP is transparent. Which means you can look at the data being displayed or you can look *through* the data at the world around you.

And trust me, when the display is ~ 1 inch away from your eye, you'll definitely notice the benefits from higher resolution displays.

Running Firefox 3 here, and it rendered just fine.
I did notice, however, that the page assumes that your browser window is at least 1000 pixels wide. I had to expand the Firefox window until the frame was 1019 pixels wide to make the horizontal scrollbar go away.

It's *possible* that the person fixed the page so it's more sane in the time between your comment and mine.

My statement about not requiring the previous version to be installed was not intended to imply that I sanction trying to save money by buying the upgrade release instead of the full version to set up a brand new computer.

In my experience, however, upgrading the OS frequently coincides with replacing the hard drive and possibly other components as well.

At any rate, are generally far better off, IMNSHO, installing the "upgrade OS" on a freshly wiped disk, or, if you must install on top of a previous version, reinstalling *that* on a freshly wiped disk and then performing the upgrade.

They do already. It's called the "Upgrade Edtition" which, contrary to popular belief *CAN* be used to perform a clean install of the OS, rather than requiring an older version to be installed first.

As can be seen on Microsoft's own website, the upgrade editions are all discounted $100 from the price of the full (new license) version.