Having a strong dislike for Microsoft is nothing new around here; we've seen their products and practices up close for years. It's only now that the media is discovering what we've known all along.
The problem with Microsoft isn't Vista or Clippy or XBOX360; those less-than-good products are just the result of the arrogance that runs through everything they do. They've turned out a few good products, too.
If you need to point a finger at them, how about pointing at - well, how about their anti-trust conviction? Did you notice how they changed their ways after this conviction? No? That's what's wrong with Microsoft. It's the anti-competitive way they insure that every new computer has Windows installed. It's the anti-competitive way they bundle other products. It's all the companies who were crushed by Microsoft - but not before Microsoft "liberated" the intellectual property from those doomed companies.
How about their shrink-wrap license agreements that they use to bind you - but if you disagree and try to use the remedy they've provided (return product for refund) you'll find that's virtually impossible to do? How about the way they're currently trying to subvert the ISO standardization process?
Remember when XP went out the door with a list of 50,000 bugs still unresolved? They're still sticking band-aids on it - but rather than complete that product they're off to yet another (arguably less functional) product which was also rushed out long before it was ready.
For those who want to defend this miserable excuse for a software company, here's a question for you: name 10 technologies that Microsoft has shipped that were invented in-house by Microsoft.
Many of the developments in display technology and "printed" electronics are leading to a future that I've been thinking about. It's almost a certainty, actually.
Imagine a world where every flat surface (that's not a window) is a electronic display. Probably not in homes right away; amusement parks / Las Vegas would be the first to implement it, followed by malls and other areas where large numbers of people visit.
Over time, the displays would spread to cover almost every surface. It's tempting to imagine being able to change the wallpaper in your living room as easily as you can change the wallpaper on your computer desktop.
But what it'll more likely be is advertising everywhere you look. Like Minority Report, but much more so. With low power displays and cheaply printed electronics - it'll be a quite different world.
The very first applications will be ones where small display size and high cost are justified. Like the labels on packages facing retail consumers. Minority Report got this one wrong; the package would put on it's "song and dance" for potential customers. Once it was purchased and taken home it'd probably quiet down via programming (or dead batteries).
Think about a classroom where the "blackboard" is an electronic display; not just the instructor's scribblings but video, too. How about a large screen TV you unroll and stick to your living room wall?
The future will be made of inventions like this one. How that future evolves will be determined by who wants to spend the money to develop / implement it. I can hardly wait until I can chuck Nerf balls at the guys running around on my walls...
This is just another ploy to continue their game. Those record companies and their lapdogs have made a lot of money by controlling the distribution of music. That worked well when distribution was difficult and they could control it - but this is a brave new world where music is digital and it can be distributed across the world as digital data at very low cost and out of the control of those who profited from scarcity previously.
Much like the surcharge on cassettes or recordable CDs, they'll take the cash and insist on more and more. It's all for the artists, but the artists never see any of the money - instead, the labels continue to figure out ways to cut the artist's share even more.
This will go on and on and they'll never be satisfied. The only real answer it to say NO and put these leeches out of their misery. Will our corporate overlords have the backbone to do this? I don't know...
I suspect that it won't be long before "internet" will be a basic service like "electricity" or "telephone".
The only big problem left to solve before true high speed access would be available to nearly everyone is the method of distribution. Using existing service wiring is problematic. Telephone wires aren't adequate due to bandwidth and signal / noise problems. Running networking over power wiring is not workable; it has all the problems of using the phone wiring but much, much worse. Running networking over the cable TV systems is the most functional - but cable doesn't go to every town and house and not all cable systems are compatible.
There's been a push to "wire" the country with glass fiber. They've even got it all the way to the house in some areas. As they build out the fiber networks they'll gradually reach more and more customers. But there's a BIG problem here: there's a huge number of houses and apartments to cover. The phone and electric systems grew up with the country, as each new home / subdivision was created these services were connected; essentially, the phone company took 100 years to get wiring to every residence.
To start out now and try to connect every residence - the magnitude of this problem is staggering. Assuming 100 million residences, if the army of installers could run fiber to and connect 10,000 residences every day - it'd take over 27 years. And that assumes the installers would be working 7 days per week. I'm not even going to try to estimate the cost of doing this.
If workable and reliable long-range wireless networking is developed / proven - and there's RF bandwidth that it can use - this could connect large number of residences inexpensively and quickly. Just plug your network cable into the "network radio" and you'd be online; no army of installers required. This would make it possible to make high speed access available to almost everyone in much, much less than 27 years.
I'm glad to see that Google is putting their resources behind making this a reality. It's not going to be easy to make this kind of technology work reliably but there's some very bright people at Google and if anyone can find a solution they can.
Seagate is getting ready to shoot itself in the foot. Making public claims that other companies are infringing on their patents without having any evidence of such infringement - well, ask SCO how that kind of legal threat is working for them.
Even if they do manage to prove some form of infringement, they won't get much out of it. Claiming that the infringement is causing immediate and irreparable harm doesn't accomplish much when they knew about the infringement previously and took no action. If it wasn't important to them then, it's still not that important.
What's really happening here is that Seagate is facing declining sales and can see that SSD technology will further erode their market. Rather than sit down at the drawing board and create new competitive products, they're choosing to use one or more patents that they own as weapons against current or future competitors. This is the very definition of anti-competitive behavior.
Ultimately Seagate will have to adapt or die. If they choose to pursue this through the courts it's quite likely that the industry will simply use a different interface to access their drives. A solid state drive can be connected to the system bus in many, many different ways and all modern operating systems would only need a new driver to access the data. In this scenario, Seagate doesn't get the bags of cash it's dreaming of from patent royalties and ends up in a much worse position than they're in now. They'd lose sales even faster because they spent their money litigating instead of innovating and their public image would go into the toilet.
Another possible scenario is for Seagate to design and build their own line of SSDs and compete on their merits. This would give them the best chance of surviving into the future - but those patents still aren't any help. They could give free or very low cost licenses to use the patented technology to all players - or they would be forced to use the new interface that everyone else is using. They couldn't sit back and use their own patented interface because it wouldn't be compatible with the industry standard.
Or they could simply do nothing and watch their company slowly wither away. Considering the rapid development pace of SSDs (capacities increasing, prices decreasing) it's just a matter of time until hard drives take their place in history just like floppy drives have already done.
While the candidates (and our elected leaders) ask for more and more H1B workers - they're putting American workers out of work. In some sections of the country (like Silicon Valley) there's thousands of unemployed IT workers looking for work.
Between "outsourcing" and "downsizing" a lot of American IT workers have lost their jobs. They're looking for work, but there's not enough openings to employ them all (not by a long shot).
Every time the call for more and more H1B workers goes out it further drives home the blatant fact that our government doesn't care about the citizens that it supposedly represents. All their actions do is further enrich their corporate masters.
But while this evil is transpiring, the simple fact that corporations need customers with money to spend seems to elude everyone. If your population is unemployed and unable to purchase your products, how can you continue to post increasing profits and make your shareholders happy?
Sure, it's cheaper to produce it in China or support it in India. But who is going to buy it? Those American workers you laid off were the customers you were selling your products to.
These corporations are very short-sighted. When their market contracts (due to fewer customers) their profits will decrease. Will they try to make up the difference by hiring even more cheap foreign labor and further erode their customer base? Will our corporate masters continue to believe that their actions have no repercussions?
Sometimes I wonder...
Microsoft continues to trumpet their excellence but their products don't preform as they claim. Look at Vista; piece of crap. Sure, they're selling a bunch of copies - mostly pre-installed copies on new computers and a few more from people who want the latest and greatest from Redmond. The majority of their market has decided to stay well away from Vista.
Internet Explorer is losing ground to Firefox, so they come out with a new version and claim that it meets standards and works better. Nope, it's just more of their marketing spin.
The real problem is that Microsoft has lost sight of the goal. They're supposed to be producing software that meets the needs and desires of their customers, but they're busily producing software that's only intended to further their goal of "world domination". Their marketing department is busy trying to make that pig look like a swan, but it's not working.
Too bad that Linux distributions aren't quite "there" yet - close, but not yet. This is a golden opportunity for a real competitor...
Copyright was intended to provide a compromise between the needs of those creating works, and the needs of the public. The deal was that we'd give the authors a monopoly for a limited time in exchange for them releasing their works to the public domain.
What's happened since is that the creators sold out to corporations and the corporations have been throwing their weight around with our lawmakers. The term of copyright has been extended and re-extended to the point where virtually nothing is entering the public domain anymore. They've even filed (and received) copyrights on things that were previously in the public domain.
Not satisfied with their greedy taking of the public domain, they decided to move on to getting paid multiple times for the same thing. Enter "digital rights management" and such travesties as the DMCA. That effectively puts an end to the first sale doctrine and completes the process of locking up all "intellectual property" (interesting phrase, isn't it?) and completely eliminates any possibility of anything entering the public domain.
The deal was that we'd give them a exclusive right over the works for a limited time in exchange for them releasing the works to the public domain. Our corporate government has eliminated the need for the rights holders to release their works to the public domain, so the deal is broken. They don't deserve their exclusive right over the work either; the deal is broken, remember?
This will all work out in the long term, our corporate masters will do their utmost to spin this into something that's supposedly good for us. But we're not fooled, are we?
One thing that the internet does very well is to provide access to far-flung data, routing around damage or blockage as necessary. Part of that is in the design of the basic system - and part of it is in the large number of people who won't allow anyone to "disappear" information.
The information revolution is still in its early stages; there are still many institutions that depend upon hiding information to exist which haven't realized that their cloak of secrecy is blowing away in the breeze. China's government is the largest of these institutions - but they'll eventually discover that the harder you try to hide the information the more widely distributed it becomes.
Those authoritarian leaders can block YouTube - and their team of spooks can try to discover all the proxy servers and block them too. But it's a lost cause; they may slow the spread, but they can't prevent their tales from being told to all who are interested.
Will those leaders finally discover how to totally hide their misdeeds - or will they finally fall when their subjects discover what kind of leaders they have and vote them out / overthrow them?
It's going to take a few years for all this stuff to sort itself out. But I think that in the end, there's going to be a lot more freedom in this world of ours.
Prior art on this goes back a long way. I helped develop studio end hardware for the "UPI Newstime" system back in the mid '70s - the commercial breaks in cable programming were marked by a touch-tone sequence and the local broadcaster inserted advertising at that point automatically.
That technology is still in use; ever hear a burst of fast touch-tone at a program break? That's this system at work. Other than that "using a computer" BS, what they're claiming is exactly what we were doing 30 years ago.
For what it's worth, reliably detecting and decoding those touch-tone burst sequences using the technology available then was more than a little challenging. The Signetics 567 was brand new and looked so promising - but turned out to be a time sink. Never could get those little PLL chips to lock up fast enough and reliably enough. The real solution was a big mess of discrete analog stuff; those were the days...
Let's see now: House of Representatives and secret session. If they have to keep it a secret from us, then who is it they're representing?
Don't answer, the truth of the situation has already become painfully clear. We've got two political parties who offer the candidates that best represent their party values. Those party values include greed, graft, corruption, etc, etc. You can't vote the rascals out of office because the only choices you have to vote on are the ones the parties select for you.
And while we're hyperventilating about our elected representatives, the real dirty work is done by career bureaucrats - you didn't vote for them, you don't know them, they'll be there until they retire and they'll do what they want to regardless of which party is in power.
Here's my bet: the House and the telecom companies will kiss and hold hands and when it's over nothing will be different. Same old stuff.
Our modern world (such as it is) is built upon cheap energy. Up to this point, we've been using oil to supply vast amounts of energy - as well as many, many products that are based upon oil. Plastics, fertilizers, medicines, etc. If you'd like to change your lifestyle to one where you have nothing other than what you can craft from stone or wood, line up over there.
The rest of you - we can't go on like this. Other countries are "coming on line" soon and will need their share of oil, too. There's just not enough to go around; not in the long term. All the wishful thinking in the world isn't going to change this - we need to find another energy source, go back to the stone age, or fight World War Three to secure what's left of a disappearing resource.
Those who think that hydrogen or ethanol are the solution - go to the back of the bus. There's no free hydrogen on this planet and to obtain free hydrogen you need to add energy. Current methods for obtaining hydrogen: electrolyse water (big energy) or catalytically extract it from natural gas (limited supply). There's no free energy here, hydrogen is an energy storage medium, not an energy supply.
The ethanol solution is also based on mostly fantasy. Sure, you can ferment carbohydrates at virtually no cost other than the carbohydrate source. But distilling it to obtain the ethanol is a high energy operation. Can ethanol be distilled using less energy than can be obtained by burning it? Maybe someday, but using today's technology it's a losing proposition. And don't forget that the carbohydrate source is the same one that we call "food". Our government's current push for ethanol is the reason that Mexican farmers are plowing under their agave crops and planting corn instead. When you notice that the price of your tequila has skyrocketed, thank your government.
When looking for an energy source, forget just looking at things you can burn to release energy. Look at things that can be found naturally in a state where they can be burned to release energy; these may be useful energy sources. That eliminates hydrogen and ethanol, both of those require energy input to manufacture.
Until something else is discovered, other than oil the only primary source of energy we know of is nuclear power. You can demonstrate against it - and it is indeed an imperfect source of power; disposal of the "exhaust" is a very difficult problem. But it's the only thing that we've got to work with in the long term.
Wind and water may provide some energy, but they won't be enough. If you don't want nuclear energy, suggest something else that will provide a positive energy result.
Anyone who has been around for a while knows that there's a wide gap between when MS projects a new product being released and when it actually gets shipped. And then a third date when they actually finish the product and ship the service packs to make it work right.
So why worry about Windows 7 now? It's years away - and it'll be essentially stillborn when it finally does arrive. By then, other better alternatives will be readily available for a far, far lower price.
The Iphone is first and foremost a cell phone. It competes in the same market as other cell phones. Sure, it has some other features and capabilities, but it's still a cell phone.
The real problem with the Iphone is that it's locked to AT&T wireless. Despite their "more bars in more places" advertising, their coverage is spotty even in major markets. Check it out: http://www.wireless.att.com/coverageviewer will show you what they claim their coverage to be. Look at the pretty colors, then check to see what those colors actually indicate. If you throw away everything from "probably get a signal standing in the street" down there's not a lot left. Keep in mind, that map is generous; your experience in real life may be much worse.
So why should I (or anyone else) buy a $500 phone with a $80/month service plan that can't be used at home or the office and only has a usable signal for about 1/2 mile along the daily commute? That's just plain silly - and there's nothing that Apple can do to make their cell phone more attractive to me (except change providers to someone with real coverage).
There's a lot of people like me who have to use Verizon phones; say what you want about that company, but they do a very good job of providing solid coverage. Around where I live: Verizon works, AT&T doesn't.
Having far too much experience with the way that Verizon cripples their phones, I find all the hyperbole about Apple's restrictions to be questionable at best. Music? Sure, but the only way to load a music file is through Verizon's pay site. Games? Only if you buy them from Verizon. Camera in your phone? Sure, but the only way to get the pictures off of the phone is through Verizon's pay site (at $1 per picture!) Bluetooth? Sure, but Verizon has disabled most of the BT profiles to the point where all it can work with is Bluetooth hands-free devices. And that support is limited, too. Internet access? Sure, but the browser is almost useless and only works through Verizon's gateway (for a fee, of course). And don't bother trying to visit sites that Verizon doesn't want you to visit.
Right now, with nothing more than the Iphone comes with out of the box, it's a far more functional and useful cell phone than anything you can get from Verizon. Too bad about that coverage problem...
eBay, like every other corporation, needs to earn an ever-increasing profit. They're legally required to do this.
But corporations like eBay have a natural limit to their growth - market saturation. That's where eBay is now; they can't find a significant number of additional users, so they are trying to find ways to make more money from the users they already have.
Keeping this simple idea in mind it's not hard at all to see why eBay is targeting the sellers - the sellers are receiving money and eBay can see just exactly how much the sellers are receiving. I can easily imagine a bunch of suits sitting around a conference table and looking at the huge dollar amount and trying to find painless ways to milk a few more tenths of a percent in fees.
They've already cut expenses - that's why their customer service department is becoming notorious for answering every question or complaint with a form letter and nothing more.
The hardest hit in this latest fee increase will be the sellers who buy "trinkets" at wholesale and auction them off; since they don't need a physical store their costs are lower and they could pass this savings along to the customer. Enough savings that even with the fees and shipping charges it was still a better deal than the local store. Higher seller fees can only be absorbed up to a point; when the sellers can't sell for less than retail and still make a profit then they're going to give up on eBay. If something is the same price on eBay and at the local department store then most would rather just go to the store; see the product in person before you buy it and take it home right now. Why pay the same price or more to buy something you can't see until after you buy it - and have to wait a week or more to get it?
And let's not forget the recent increases in shipping charges - and the weak economy that has cut down on the amount of discretionary spending. That's the root cause of eBay's slowdown; fewer buyers with less money to spend. I don't think that raising fees was a wise move for eBay to make at this point in time.
My "rules" for buying on eBay: Check prices at local stores and on eBay. Consider the total price; if you buy on eBay you'll pay a "shipping++" charge but no sales tax. Buying local means you pay sales tax but no shipping.
These has-been artists are using the legal system to prop up their declining income. Their sales are almost zero due to their "one or two hits many years ago" history; they've received as much money as their products would produce already.
They're hoping for a big payday - but once the lawyers get paid there won't be anything left. The lawyers are just using these people to support another attack against their customers.
A message for Prince, ABBA, and the Village People: your race has been run, get used to sitting in the sun. If you need more money, consider picking up trash and recycling the aluminum cans...
Apple sells mucho more portable music players than Microsoft does - because Apple's designs are (at least) a generation ahead of the Microsoft offering.
Firefox could take advantage of the same thing; Microsoft wasn't going to update IE until after they saw a substantial move from IE to Firefox. IE 7 has "emulated" many of Firefox's features now and it's going to be a while until MS can design / buy / copy / steal any more improvements. The Mozilla folks could take this opportunity to make Firefox the superior product it's so very close to being. Just polish the rough edges and fix some bugs, guys...
The previous "save the children" offensive failed, but the "save the artists" offensive is still in play. What's actually going on doesn't have anything to do with children or artists - it has everything to do with control over the free flow of information over the internet.
Those music and movie industry associations are dangerous - they are looking at their doom and fighting to save their gravy train. This attracts lots of attention. But this noise is also part of a larger agenda that's being played out - and something that's much, much more important than P2P sharing.
There are some governments in our world today which are led by frightened men. You can see their fear in their public statements and actions; they'll tell you it's the terrorists, or the communists, or that's the enemy. However, what those leaders are really scared of is the general population of the country they're "leading".
Those "leaders" can and will take whatever steps they can to prevent a popular revolution. They know that if the people are frightened and isolated they won't be forming any significant opposition; any "malcontents" are identified and disappear. One of the tools of an effective police state are laws. Laws that reduce / eliminate any "rights" that the people used to have, laws that make vaguely defined "offenses" punishable with draconian penalties, etc.
So here we are; we wail and gnash as the recording cartels push for ever stronger penalties for increasingly minor offenses. "This isn't right!" we claim in near unison. But our governments are all too willing to enact those laws; to them it's another law to beat up the "enemies of the state" with. Nice and vague, too: since what the internet does is transfer files from one machine to another (that's how you're reading this, you downloaded the html file) then enacting laws against file transfers of any kind is a big step on the slippery slope.
The internet presents those governments with another problem: it allows people to communicate freely across borders. This is dangerous to those paranoid leaders - too many people talking behind their backs, they might - no, probably are - plotting against the government. Anybody notice the recent push to allow the governements to intercept any and all internet traffic? If you're paying attention, these measures are being enacted on a local basis; the proposed monitoring applies to people inside their borders. With positive identification of every citizen (another issue of recent import) and a full record of their online activities, they believe they can find the "bad guys" and deal with them before they cause any problems. They can also make convenient examples out of some citizens - everybody's guilty of at least one crime.
This kind of "government policy" has been tried before; history is littered with examples. They clearly show what the results are likely to be - and in the modern day with computers and databases they can operate so much more efficiently; query the database, print out the resulting list and hand it to the enforcers.
Back to the topic: if you're in the UK and are suspected of "sharing files" then they can cut off your internet access. Sounds good on the surface; save the artists! But wait and see how this law really gets used. Very convenient for the government; outspoken critics can be silenced quickly and effectively. Will they be able to resist the temptation to use the law in this way? Think about it...
These changes to the eBay feedback system aren't going to make a lot of difference. Their feedback system has been broken for years now; preventing sellers from leaving negative feedback will put an end to the common seller practice of waiting for the buyer to give feedback first - then give a negative to any buyer that gave them less than positive feedback. Most sellers won't even leave buyer feedback unless the buyer does.
Back when this started happening I received a negative from a seller because I left a negative for them; that seller wanted me to pay additional "fees" that weren't disclosed in the auction listing. When I tried to discuss this with the seller he continued to insist that I pay a "paypal fee" and a "packaging fee". After he left his retaliatory negative feedback I complained to eBay - this was a clear violation of their "no retaliatory feedback" rule. Back then, eBay did claim to investigate and correct feedback that was not in compliance with their rules.
eBay sent a form letter email saying that they received my complaint - and I haven't heard anything more about it since. They did change their rules shortly afterward; now they insist that it's between the buyer and seller and they won't investigate or change any feedback. That eliminated most of the value in the feedback system and created the problem that they're trying to deal with now. Since giving honest feedback about a seller can and does result in retaliation, it's no surprise that there's so many sellers with high ratings.
It's been going along for long enough now that you can't tell anything about a seller by looking at their feedback. Even a truly awful seller can maintain a %100 positive rating. This new "no negatives for buyers" rule will not fix the problem - all it'll do is create a new class of awful buyers with %100 positive ratings.
Net result: the one tool that buyers and sellers had to evaluate each other is almost totally useless now.
I've contacted my representatives regarding the attempts by the media companies to make their continued existence and profitability a legal requirement. The responses I've received are less than useless.
The worst response reward goes to Barbara Boxer. When I contacted her regarding proposed legislation that was intended to further erode fair use and hand more of the public rights to the media companies I got a form letter in reply. That form letter thanked me for my letter and let me know that Barbara Boxer was listening and fully intended to support the legislation that I was writing about (and against).
I don't expect any representative to do what I wish - but it would be nice if they took a few moments to actually READ and maybe THINK a little about what the people they supposedly represent are thinking. Ms. Boxer has clearly identified herself as being on the side of further abuses by the media companies - I don't know about other "representatives" but this one clearly does NOT represent the people who elected her.
Not sure which is more troubling - those who believe in such speculative ideas, or those who think that our current understanding of the physical world is absolutely correct.
The steps along the way to actual teleportation of human beings would be revolutionary in and of themselves. At a simple level, a teleporter would "scan" the source item then duplicate / recreate it at another location. That implies that the receiving end could recreate a complex physical object from "scratch" given a "template" - so before we arrived at the necessary level of perfection that would allow humans to be transported without damage we'd have machines that could create all kinds of simpler items - such as computers, eyes, steaks, crude oil, or whatever at low cost and upon demand. That'd shake the world economy up...
The scientific process has brought us a long way over the last 100 years - but all the miracles and wonders that have resulted are just a tiny, tiny fraction of a small piece of a limited understanding. Assuming that scientific research isn't hobbled by misguided politics there's many, many more and better things just around the corner. Teleporters? Maybe not tomorrow - but they're not impossible either.
When they get all their new tiers and pricing in place it'll turn out that the light users pay the same as they always have and the heavier users will pay much, much more. No improvements in service will be provided and the cable company will collect more money for the same old thing. Good old corporate greed is alive and well...
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The problem with Microsoft isn't Vista or Clippy or XBOX360; those less-than-good products are just the result of the arrogance that runs through everything they do. They've turned out a few good products, too.
If you need to point a finger at them, how about pointing at - well, how about their anti-trust conviction? Did you notice how they changed their ways after this conviction? No? That's what's wrong with Microsoft. It's the anti-competitive way they insure that every new computer has Windows installed. It's the anti-competitive way they bundle other products. It's all the companies who were crushed by Microsoft - but not before Microsoft "liberated" the intellectual property from those doomed companies.
How about their shrink-wrap license agreements that they use to bind you - but if you disagree and try to use the remedy they've provided (return product for refund) you'll find that's virtually impossible to do? How about the way they're currently trying to subvert the ISO standardization process?
Remember when XP went out the door with a list of 50,000 bugs still unresolved? They're still sticking band-aids on it - but rather than complete that product they're off to yet another (arguably less functional) product which was also rushed out long before it was ready.
For those who want to defend this miserable excuse for a software company, here's a question for you: name 10 technologies that Microsoft has shipped that were invented in-house by Microsoft.
Imagine a world where every flat surface (that's not a window) is a electronic display. Probably not in homes right away; amusement parks / Las Vegas would be the first to implement it, followed by malls and other areas where large numbers of people visit.
Over time, the displays would spread to cover almost every surface. It's tempting to imagine being able to change the wallpaper in your living room as easily as you can change the wallpaper on your computer desktop.
But what it'll more likely be is advertising everywhere you look. Like Minority Report, but much more so. With low power displays and cheaply printed electronics - it'll be a quite different world.
The very first applications will be ones where small display size and high cost are justified. Like the labels on packages facing retail consumers. Minority Report got this one wrong; the package would put on it's "song and dance" for potential customers. Once it was purchased and taken home it'd probably quiet down via programming (or dead batteries).
Think about a classroom where the "blackboard" is an electronic display; not just the instructor's scribblings but video, too. How about a large screen TV you unroll and stick to your living room wall?
The future will be made of inventions like this one. How that future evolves will be determined by who wants to spend the money to develop / implement it. I can hardly wait until I can chuck Nerf balls at the guys running around on my walls...
Much like the surcharge on cassettes or recordable CDs, they'll take the cash and insist on more and more. It's all for the artists, but the artists never see any of the money - instead, the labels continue to figure out ways to cut the artist's share even more.
This will go on and on and they'll never be satisfied. The only real answer it to say NO and put these leeches out of their misery. Will our corporate overlords have the backbone to do this? I don't know...
The only big problem left to solve before true high speed access would be available to nearly everyone is the method of distribution. Using existing service wiring is problematic. Telephone wires aren't adequate due to bandwidth and signal / noise problems. Running networking over power wiring is not workable; it has all the problems of using the phone wiring but much, much worse. Running networking over the cable TV systems is the most functional - but cable doesn't go to every town and house and not all cable systems are compatible.
There's been a push to "wire" the country with glass fiber. They've even got it all the way to the house in some areas. As they build out the fiber networks they'll gradually reach more and more customers. But there's a BIG problem here: there's a huge number of houses and apartments to cover. The phone and electric systems grew up with the country, as each new home / subdivision was created these services were connected; essentially, the phone company took 100 years to get wiring to every residence.
To start out now and try to connect every residence - the magnitude of this problem is staggering. Assuming 100 million residences, if the army of installers could run fiber to and connect 10,000 residences every day - it'd take over 27 years. And that assumes the installers would be working 7 days per week. I'm not even going to try to estimate the cost of doing this.
If workable and reliable long-range wireless networking is developed / proven - and there's RF bandwidth that it can use - this could connect large number of residences inexpensively and quickly. Just plug your network cable into the "network radio" and you'd be online; no army of installers required. This would make it possible to make high speed access available to almost everyone in much, much less than 27 years.
I'm glad to see that Google is putting their resources behind making this a reality. It's not going to be easy to make this kind of technology work reliably but there's some very bright people at Google and if anyone can find a solution they can.
Even if they do manage to prove some form of infringement, they won't get much out of it. Claiming that the infringement is causing immediate and irreparable harm doesn't accomplish much when they knew about the infringement previously and took no action. If it wasn't important to them then, it's still not that important.
What's really happening here is that Seagate is facing declining sales and can see that SSD technology will further erode their market. Rather than sit down at the drawing board and create new competitive products, they're choosing to use one or more patents that they own as weapons against current or future competitors. This is the very definition of anti-competitive behavior.
Ultimately Seagate will have to adapt or die. If they choose to pursue this through the courts it's quite likely that the industry will simply use a different interface to access their drives. A solid state drive can be connected to the system bus in many, many different ways and all modern operating systems would only need a new driver to access the data. In this scenario, Seagate doesn't get the bags of cash it's dreaming of from patent royalties and ends up in a much worse position than they're in now. They'd lose sales even faster because they spent their money litigating instead of innovating and their public image would go into the toilet.
Another possible scenario is for Seagate to design and build their own line of SSDs and compete on their merits. This would give them the best chance of surviving into the future - but those patents still aren't any help. They could give free or very low cost licenses to use the patented technology to all players - or they would be forced to use the new interface that everyone else is using. They couldn't sit back and use their own patented interface because it wouldn't be compatible with the industry standard.
Or they could simply do nothing and watch their company slowly wither away. Considering the rapid development pace of SSDs (capacities increasing, prices decreasing) it's just a matter of time until hard drives take their place in history just like floppy drives have already done.
Between "outsourcing" and "downsizing" a lot of American IT workers have lost their jobs. They're looking for work, but there's not enough openings to employ them all (not by a long shot).
Every time the call for more and more H1B workers goes out it further drives home the blatant fact that our government doesn't care about the citizens that it supposedly represents. All their actions do is further enrich their corporate masters.
But while this evil is transpiring, the simple fact that corporations need customers with money to spend seems to elude everyone. If your population is unemployed and unable to purchase your products, how can you continue to post increasing profits and make your shareholders happy?
Sure, it's cheaper to produce it in China or support it in India. But who is going to buy it? Those American workers you laid off were the customers you were selling your products to.
These corporations are very short-sighted. When their market contracts (due to fewer customers) their profits will decrease. Will they try to make up the difference by hiring even more cheap foreign labor and further erode their customer base? Will our corporate masters continue to believe that their actions have no repercussions? Sometimes I wonder...
Internet Explorer is losing ground to Firefox, so they come out with a new version and claim that it meets standards and works better. Nope, it's just more of their marketing spin.
The real problem is that Microsoft has lost sight of the goal. They're supposed to be producing software that meets the needs and desires of their customers, but they're busily producing software that's only intended to further their goal of "world domination". Their marketing department is busy trying to make that pig look like a swan, but it's not working.
Too bad that Linux distributions aren't quite "there" yet - close, but not yet. This is a golden opportunity for a real competitor...
What's happened since is that the creators sold out to corporations and the corporations have been throwing their weight around with our lawmakers. The term of copyright has been extended and re-extended to the point where virtually nothing is entering the public domain anymore. They've even filed (and received) copyrights on things that were previously in the public domain.
Not satisfied with their greedy taking of the public domain, they decided to move on to getting paid multiple times for the same thing. Enter "digital rights management" and such travesties as the DMCA. That effectively puts an end to the first sale doctrine and completes the process of locking up all "intellectual property" (interesting phrase, isn't it?) and completely eliminates any possibility of anything entering the public domain.
The deal was that we'd give them a exclusive right over the works for a limited time in exchange for them releasing the works to the public domain. Our corporate government has eliminated the need for the rights holders to release their works to the public domain, so the deal is broken. They don't deserve their exclusive right over the work either; the deal is broken, remember?
This will all work out in the long term, our corporate masters will do their utmost to spin this into something that's supposedly good for us. But we're not fooled, are we?
The information revolution is still in its early stages; there are still many institutions that depend upon hiding information to exist which haven't realized that their cloak of secrecy is blowing away in the breeze. China's government is the largest of these institutions - but they'll eventually discover that the harder you try to hide the information the more widely distributed it becomes.
Those authoritarian leaders can block YouTube - and their team of spooks can try to discover all the proxy servers and block them too. But it's a lost cause; they may slow the spread, but they can't prevent their tales from being told to all who are interested.
Will those leaders finally discover how to totally hide their misdeeds - or will they finally fall when their subjects discover what kind of leaders they have and vote them out / overthrow them?
It's going to take a few years for all this stuff to sort itself out. But I think that in the end, there's going to be a lot more freedom in this world of ours.
The server saw all the nerds coming and had an emotional breakdown.
That technology is still in use; ever hear a burst of fast touch-tone at a program break? That's this system at work. Other than that "using a computer" BS, what they're claiming is exactly what we were doing 30 years ago.
For what it's worth, reliably detecting and decoding those touch-tone burst sequences using the technology available then was more than a little challenging. The Signetics 567 was brand new and looked so promising - but turned out to be a time sink. Never could get those little PLL chips to lock up fast enough and reliably enough. The real solution was a big mess of discrete analog stuff; those were the days...
I'd be more interested in what they filtered out...
Don't answer, the truth of the situation has already become painfully clear. We've got two political parties who offer the candidates that best represent their party values. Those party values include greed, graft, corruption, etc, etc. You can't vote the rascals out of office because the only choices you have to vote on are the ones the parties select for you.
And while we're hyperventilating about our elected representatives, the real dirty work is done by career bureaucrats - you didn't vote for them, you don't know them, they'll be there until they retire and they'll do what they want to regardless of which party is in power.
Here's my bet: the House and the telecom companies will kiss and hold hands and when it's over nothing will be different. Same old stuff.
The rest of you - we can't go on like this. Other countries are "coming on line" soon and will need their share of oil, too. There's just not enough to go around; not in the long term. All the wishful thinking in the world isn't going to change this - we need to find another energy source, go back to the stone age, or fight World War Three to secure what's left of a disappearing resource.
Those who think that hydrogen or ethanol are the solution - go to the back of the bus. There's no free hydrogen on this planet and to obtain free hydrogen you need to add energy. Current methods for obtaining hydrogen: electrolyse water (big energy) or catalytically extract it from natural gas (limited supply). There's no free energy here, hydrogen is an energy storage medium, not an energy supply.
The ethanol solution is also based on mostly fantasy. Sure, you can ferment carbohydrates at virtually no cost other than the carbohydrate source. But distilling it to obtain the ethanol is a high energy operation. Can ethanol be distilled using less energy than can be obtained by burning it? Maybe someday, but using today's technology it's a losing proposition. And don't forget that the carbohydrate source is the same one that we call "food". Our government's current push for ethanol is the reason that Mexican farmers are plowing under their agave crops and planting corn instead. When you notice that the price of your tequila has skyrocketed, thank your government.
When looking for an energy source, forget just looking at things you can burn to release energy. Look at things that can be found naturally in a state where they can be burned to release energy; these may be useful energy sources. That eliminates hydrogen and ethanol, both of those require energy input to manufacture.
Until something else is discovered, other than oil the only primary source of energy we know of is nuclear power. You can demonstrate against it - and it is indeed an imperfect source of power; disposal of the "exhaust" is a very difficult problem. But it's the only thing that we've got to work with in the long term.
Wind and water may provide some energy, but they won't be enough. If you don't want nuclear energy, suggest something else that will provide a positive energy result.
So why worry about Windows 7 now? It's years away - and it'll be essentially stillborn when it finally does arrive. By then, other better alternatives will be readily available for a far, far lower price.
The real problem with the Iphone is that it's locked to AT&T wireless. Despite their "more bars in more places" advertising, their coverage is spotty even in major markets. Check it out: http://www.wireless.att.com/coverageviewer will show you what they claim their coverage to be. Look at the pretty colors, then check to see what those colors actually indicate. If you throw away everything from "probably get a signal standing in the street" down there's not a lot left. Keep in mind, that map is generous; your experience in real life may be much worse.
So why should I (or anyone else) buy a $500 phone with a $80/month service plan that can't be used at home or the office and only has a usable signal for about 1/2 mile along the daily commute? That's just plain silly - and there's nothing that Apple can do to make their cell phone more attractive to me (except change providers to someone with real coverage).
There's a lot of people like me who have to use Verizon phones; say what you want about that company, but they do a very good job of providing solid coverage. Around where I live: Verizon works, AT&T doesn't.
Having far too much experience with the way that Verizon cripples their phones, I find all the hyperbole about Apple's restrictions to be questionable at best. Music? Sure, but the only way to load a music file is through Verizon's pay site. Games? Only if you buy them from Verizon. Camera in your phone? Sure, but the only way to get the pictures off of the phone is through Verizon's pay site (at $1 per picture!) Bluetooth? Sure, but Verizon has disabled most of the BT profiles to the point where all it can work with is Bluetooth hands-free devices. And that support is limited, too. Internet access? Sure, but the browser is almost useless and only works through Verizon's gateway (for a fee, of course). And don't bother trying to visit sites that Verizon doesn't want you to visit.
Right now, with nothing more than the Iphone comes with out of the box, it's a far more functional and useful cell phone than anything you can get from Verizon. Too bad about that coverage problem...
But corporations like eBay have a natural limit to their growth - market saturation. That's where eBay is now; they can't find a significant number of additional users, so they are trying to find ways to make more money from the users they already have.
Keeping this simple idea in mind it's not hard at all to see why eBay is targeting the sellers - the sellers are receiving money and eBay can see just exactly how much the sellers are receiving. I can easily imagine a bunch of suits sitting around a conference table and looking at the huge dollar amount and trying to find painless ways to milk a few more tenths of a percent in fees.
They've already cut expenses - that's why their customer service department is becoming notorious for answering every question or complaint with a form letter and nothing more.
The hardest hit in this latest fee increase will be the sellers who buy "trinkets" at wholesale and auction them off; since they don't need a physical store their costs are lower and they could pass this savings along to the customer. Enough savings that even with the fees and shipping charges it was still a better deal than the local store. Higher seller fees can only be absorbed up to a point; when the sellers can't sell for less than retail and still make a profit then they're going to give up on eBay. If something is the same price on eBay and at the local department store then most would rather just go to the store; see the product in person before you buy it and take it home right now. Why pay the same price or more to buy something you can't see until after you buy it - and have to wait a week or more to get it?
And let's not forget the recent increases in shipping charges - and the weak economy that has cut down on the amount of discretionary spending. That's the root cause of eBay's slowdown; fewer buyers with less money to spend. I don't think that raising fees was a wise move for eBay to make at this point in time.
My "rules" for buying on eBay: Check prices at local stores and on eBay. Consider the total price; if you buy on eBay you'll pay a "shipping++" charge but no sales tax. Buying local means you pay sales tax but no shipping.
They're hoping for a big payday - but once the lawyers get paid there won't be anything left. The lawyers are just using these people to support another attack against their customers.
A message for Prince, ABBA, and the Village People: your race has been run, get used to sitting in the sun. If you need more money, consider picking up trash and recycling the aluminum cans...
Firefox could take advantage of the same thing; Microsoft wasn't going to update IE until after they saw a substantial move from IE to Firefox. IE 7 has "emulated" many of Firefox's features now and it's going to be a while until MS can design / buy / copy / steal any more improvements. The Mozilla folks could take this opportunity to make Firefox the superior product it's so very close to being. Just polish the rough edges and fix some bugs, guys...
Those music and movie industry associations are dangerous - they are looking at their doom and fighting to save their gravy train. This attracts lots of attention. But this noise is also part of a larger agenda that's being played out - and something that's much, much more important than P2P sharing.
There are some governments in our world today which are led by frightened men. You can see their fear in their public statements and actions; they'll tell you it's the terrorists, or the communists, or that's the enemy. However, what those leaders are really scared of is the general population of the country they're "leading".
Those "leaders" can and will take whatever steps they can to prevent a popular revolution. They know that if the people are frightened and isolated they won't be forming any significant opposition; any "malcontents" are identified and disappear. One of the tools of an effective police state are laws. Laws that reduce / eliminate any "rights" that the people used to have, laws that make vaguely defined "offenses" punishable with draconian penalties, etc.
So here we are; we wail and gnash as the recording cartels push for ever stronger penalties for increasingly minor offenses. "This isn't right!" we claim in near unison. But our governments are all too willing to enact those laws; to them it's another law to beat up the "enemies of the state" with. Nice and vague, too: since what the internet does is transfer files from one machine to another (that's how you're reading this, you downloaded the html file) then enacting laws against file transfers of any kind is a big step on the slippery slope.
The internet presents those governments with another problem: it allows people to communicate freely across borders. This is dangerous to those paranoid leaders - too many people talking behind their backs, they might - no, probably are - plotting against the government. Anybody notice the recent push to allow the governements to intercept any and all internet traffic? If you're paying attention, these measures are being enacted on a local basis; the proposed monitoring applies to people inside their borders. With positive identification of every citizen (another issue of recent import) and a full record of their online activities, they believe they can find the "bad guys" and deal with them before they cause any problems. They can also make convenient examples out of some citizens - everybody's guilty of at least one crime.
This kind of "government policy" has been tried before; history is littered with examples. They clearly show what the results are likely to be - and in the modern day with computers and databases they can operate so much more efficiently; query the database, print out the resulting list and hand it to the enforcers.
Back to the topic: if you're in the UK and are suspected of "sharing files" then they can cut off your internet access. Sounds good on the surface; save the artists! But wait and see how this law really gets used. Very convenient for the government; outspoken critics can be silenced quickly and effectively. Will they be able to resist the temptation to use the law in this way? Think about it...
Back when this started happening I received a negative from a seller because I left a negative for them; that seller wanted me to pay additional "fees" that weren't disclosed in the auction listing. When I tried to discuss this with the seller he continued to insist that I pay a "paypal fee" and a "packaging fee". After he left his retaliatory negative feedback I complained to eBay - this was a clear violation of their "no retaliatory feedback" rule. Back then, eBay did claim to investigate and correct feedback that was not in compliance with their rules.
eBay sent a form letter email saying that they received my complaint - and I haven't heard anything more about it since. They did change their rules shortly afterward; now they insist that it's between the buyer and seller and they won't investigate or change any feedback. That eliminated most of the value in the feedback system and created the problem that they're trying to deal with now. Since giving honest feedback about a seller can and does result in retaliation, it's no surprise that there's so many sellers with high ratings.
It's been going along for long enough now that you can't tell anything about a seller by looking at their feedback. Even a truly awful seller can maintain a %100 positive rating. This new "no negatives for buyers" rule will not fix the problem - all it'll do is create a new class of awful buyers with %100 positive ratings.
Net result: the one tool that buyers and sellers had to evaluate each other is almost totally useless now.
The worst response reward goes to Barbara Boxer. When I contacted her regarding proposed legislation that was intended to further erode fair use and hand more of the public rights to the media companies I got a form letter in reply. That form letter thanked me for my letter and let me know that Barbara Boxer was listening and fully intended to support the legislation that I was writing about (and against).
I don't expect any representative to do what I wish - but it would be nice if they took a few moments to actually READ and maybe THINK a little about what the people they supposedly represent are thinking. Ms. Boxer has clearly identified herself as being on the side of further abuses by the media companies - I don't know about other "representatives" but this one clearly does NOT represent the people who elected her.
If this does bother you, consider upgrading your head to Linux or even Firefox. It's much easier than raving about the same old stuff...
The steps along the way to actual teleportation of human beings would be revolutionary in and of themselves. At a simple level, a teleporter would "scan" the source item then duplicate / recreate it at another location. That implies that the receiving end could recreate a complex physical object from "scratch" given a "template" - so before we arrived at the necessary level of perfection that would allow humans to be transported without damage we'd have machines that could create all kinds of simpler items - such as computers, eyes, steaks, crude oil, or whatever at low cost and upon demand. That'd shake the world economy up...
The scientific process has brought us a long way over the last 100 years - but all the miracles and wonders that have resulted are just a tiny, tiny fraction of a small piece of a limited understanding. Assuming that scientific research isn't hobbled by misguided politics there's many, many more and better things just around the corner. Teleporters? Maybe not tomorrow - but they're not impossible either.
When they get all their new tiers and pricing in place it'll turn out that the light users pay the same as they always have and the heavier users will pay much, much more. No improvements in service will be provided and the cable company will collect more money for the same old thing. Good old corporate greed is alive and well...