You probably have gotten the idea wrong, a petition, referendum or popular initiative don't cause any change on their own. Let me explain:
A petition is the weakest of the three possibilities. Anyone (minors, companies, you name it) can start one and gather however many signatures he/she/it deems necessary for any purpose whatsoever (e.g. changing "Stockwell" to "Doris" in Mr. Day's name). The government only needs to acknowledge the existence of such a petition, period. There's no need to discuss it, comment on it or do anything at all about it apart from acknowledging it.
A referendum (signed by 50'000 out of some 7.4 million in the course of 100 days) forces a national vote on a recently-instated new law. Still, more than 50% of all voters participating in that vote will need to "nay" it in order for it not to be instated.
A public initiative (signed by 100k in 180 days) triggers a national vote about any issue at hand. If i can get 100k people to agree that all cars need to be yellow, the government is obligated to include this question in the next round of public voting. To date, some fifteen out of some 150 initiatives have been accepted in such a vote, chances are slim.
Of course, all details mentioned herein refer to the Swiss system (and IANTooFamiliarWithAllThis, so I may be wrong in some, many or all points), which I find to be rather nice (especially when compared to some other ones).
Nothing (except antitrust law, maybe) stops Google from "forgetting to include" live.com in it's indexes now and this situation is quite unlikely to change in the near future. The only two reasons I think of as relevant to leave competitors in are the outrage from both the internet community and the "forgotten" competitor (perhaps culminating in lawsuits for anti-competitive behaviour, IANAL) and the desire for the own index to be perceived as fair and complete.
An independent body deciding about the malness of any ware is, if a certain responsiveness could be guaranteed, a creepy idea. Forming such a commitee would very surely be a huge leap in the direction of an often-mentioned TCPA (Palladium, NGSCB, Donkey poop)-secured blacklist society. A small aristocraty of people in this decision commitee would become the target of a trillion-dollar industry and be able to decide exactly what piece of software is ran by anybody. On the other hand, allowing anybody to participate in these votes would guarantee this operation not to be effective because of the huge delay this would cause. The same goes for adding legal ways to fight a decision by this body - having one would cause the system to become as slow as many legal systems throughout the world are today, not having one would be a surefire way to cause dissatisfaction with lots and lots of developers (both natural and legal persons).
Also, don't forget to take into account the current legal trouble e.g. encryption software is going through. I'm certain an independent body would decide similar to lawmakers throughout the world. Essentially, you could probably forget about running Linux (Open Source? That could run anything, including highly illegal tools like decss without any way to stop it), any cd/dvd copying software (It's fun to break the D-M-C-A (sung to the tune of YMCA)), nmap (Remember germany banning "Hacker tools"?) or anything else.
Sorry for painting such a dystopian future, but letting any (independent, governmental or profit-oriented) body whatsoever decide what software's good and what's bad just isn't what you, me or most anybody else wants.
Most users of Windows and IE don't make a conscious decision to do so. It comes preloaded with a computer they buy, they don't question it. Blaming those users for using "poor quality software" (I, for one, find Windows XP a rather pleasant os to work with; IE on the other hand...) would be like blaming any driver for using "poor quality airbags" that came with his car or "poor quality doors" that came with his house after a break-in.
Not everybody is interested in knowing details about every single one of his possessions. You, me and the rest of the/. crowd cares about computers, but a majority of people (wild guess) probably cares as much about their inner workings as I care about the inner workings of my dishwasher. It's a tool ideally fulfilling one or more given tasks (e.g. "get stock quotes" or "clean my dirty dishes") and is to be professionally serviced upon failure to do so. Installing a more secure browser like Opera may be just as good an idea as adding multi-stage UltraSplash 3D cleaning rotors but as long as I can put dirty dishes in and get 'em out clean I wouldn't know why I should care.
"Porting" WoW isn't really necessary anymore. With a wee bit of wine magic it runs about as fast and at least as stable as on Windows. Starting the game from the console with the -opengl switch may be a bit of a problem, but Cedega has, I presume, it's users covered there.
Fact is, many, if not the majority of, gamers don't care about Windows' and Linux' conflicting ideologies. To them, Windows will be free because it either came with their computer or was handed to them from some friend (this includes BitTorrent peers). Linux may be just as free, but it'd force them to adapt some of the stuff they learned on Windows. Also, a surprisingly large number of such users keep installations of Photoshop and MS Office around (again, "free" versions). Although they'd probably not use more features than the GIMP or OOo could provide, there's no incentive to switch.
As unimportant as they may seem to most geeks, flashy stuff like compiz might be a step in the right direction to change this. If, while at the same time improving compatibility tools like wine, Linux can be made "cool" enough to make Vista users realize the lack of flashiness of their OS, the gamer audience could be talked into switching way easier.
No they don't. IIRC, they can't be forced to exclusively sell Windows or get discounts if they do so. Microsoft can help them out with their marketing budget a bit, though. It's kind of a "You only sell Windows machines, add '${company} recommends Genuine Windows Vista' to each and every one of your brochures and web sites, call the preinstalled versions 'Genuine Windows Vista/XP' and get $20m of marketing, free, annually" deal.
You can argue that not receiving this "gift" is no penalty, but if essentially your whole competition gets to spend heaps of cash for free, it is one.
So, 20% on everything. 20% if service's slow, the food sucks and nobody makes you feel welcome; 20% for great attentive service, great food at competitive prices and nice atmosphere?
With the U.S.' minimum wage differences between tipped and untipped workers I see the point of tipping 5-10% for an acceptable experience, but 20% is - imo - reserved for when service was great. I paid what's on the bill, thus I paid the goods and services I received. Everything after that point should be a way to express my gratitude for a better-than-average experience. Also I'd really like to see the car salesman's face after you tipped him $4k on an $20k car and your real estate agent's expression after you cut her an $80k cheque for that nice $400k home.
They don't have to hardcode data from the test set into their algorithm. Possible solution goes like this:
1) Have IMDb rating dump available (if this is trivially possible, retrieve it at runtime)
2) Load quiz data, create profiles
3) Create proviles out of the IMDb data (if not already done)
4) Correlate profiles from 2 and 3
5) Use some (e.g. Netflix') statistical method to determine the probability of user x linking film y
6) Override values from 5 with x's actual IMDb data where possible
Ta-daah, you're using all the advantages non-anonymity grants you while being nicely flexible and ignoring privacy:]
If the algorithm would be going to do more than just correlate past ratings with ids of other movies and sequels/tie-ins of other movies, more data about the movie is required. Crew data would be extremely useful here. If somebody liked Live Free or Die Hard and Perfect Stranger, The Fifth Element may also be of interest because of the common lead actor.
Including such data in the example sets would in turn allow to determine the correlation between movies and their internal id number pretty quickly. Even if the crew metadata was replaced by another set of internal ids, mapping (most of) those to actors and film ids to titles ought to be trivial for someone skilled in the art.
Netflix probably should have given their users the possibility to "opt-out" of the anonymized data set, but I feel the damage this particular incident has caused or may cause in the future is pretty minor. A high-probability match can be found for some users, if those users decided to both rate films on the IMDb and Netflix in the same time window, knowing at least the IMDb part of their votes was going to be public. I don't know Netflix' whole catalog but I'd assume they don't rent out really bad stuff and watching some porn (or non-classy films) at home isn't that bad, now is it?
The really large businesses (let's define that as some 5k+ users) probably have had a rather concise rollout plan for Vista for a year or more. Really bad stuff (e.g. Office 2007's 65k = 100k bug) might delay those schedules if not corrected fast enough, but the minor (yet constant) nuisances Vista holds for it's users mostly won't qualify.
Adoption or lack thereof in smaller businesses will be way quicker yet somewhat depending on the large corporate uptake. Looking forward to see what 2008 holds.
1] What's so special about KDE4? Qt4 with Windows support sure is nice, but I doubt it's going to catch on very fast, especially in the somewhat influential enterprise market. Same goes for most other innovations it incorporates. Plasma and Raptor are nice new ways of doing things, but don't forget we're (partially) talking about people sticking to Windows' classic start menu in spite of XP's innovations round there.
Also, don't forget 2008 will bring KDE 4.0, which many just won't consider stable yet. I haven't worked with 4.0 enough, but if no dramatic advances have been made in regard of stability since the 3.5 versions, a.0 is definitely not going to be an option for me; I'll stick with Gnome, thank you.
2] Call me a pessimist but I'm sure OOXML won't just "lose out" against ODF all of a sudden. Microsoft has billions of dollars to throw at this issue, an ISO standard is more or less inevitable. Thanks to, apart from the/. crowd and similarily-interested folks, few people (as opposed to corporations and governments) actually caring about the issue at all, real public outrage is unlikely.
Even if OOXML was to fail, I'm sure MS could extremely quickly push out compatibility updates for Office 2007 or even decide to ignore ODF completely. Also, the proven embrace-extend-extinguish strategy could be used for a new MSFT-exclusive dialect of ODF.
3] I fail to see the particular significance of 8.4. Sure, it's an LTS version and sure, it'll have some effect on the further progressions Ubuntu is going to make, but why would everything depend on this particular version? Care to explain?:)
4] Vista SP1 is due very soon, a lot of corporates are going to use this as an opportunity to migrate. SP2 is probably also planned for late 2008 or early 09; by then MSFT should have had enough time to gather real world feedback about Vista and make it more or less usable. Also, the time frames for large migrations is quite a bit longer than you may think. A GO I used to work for in 2006 had very specific plans about switching tens of thousands of workstations to Vista in 2008/09, long before many of Vista's faults became widely known.
I fully agree to all the Vista problems you're citing here, except one: Vista is intended to be easily pirated if all you're going to do is take a few quick looks.
Vista is, IIRC, distributed in a one-DVD-fits-all (editions) way; what gets installed is determined by what product key you enter at setup. (Exceptions are two different DVDs for x86/x64 architectures. Not quite sure about volume licensed copies, but I think they ought to use the same DVDs, too.) The available choices include, apart from Home Business to Ultimate, an "unlicensed" 30-day trial with the feature range of an Ultimate edition. 30 days is, of course, not enough to use Vista on a long-term basis, but it surely suffices to take a quick glimpse at what it does, how it does that and how badly it sucks (my personal opinion).
Call me NO-BOD-E, but back when hard drive mp3 players still had limited space (20 Gig in this case), I did willingly and voluntary transcode a big part of my mp3 collection to Sony's atrac3+ even though my mp3 player would've supported mp3. I chose to do so to increase it's battery lifetime and storage capacity (when expressed in a number of minutes of music; not bytes) and of course, kept the original files.
While I usually tend not to like proprietary formats, in this case the hardware's potential could be used to a larger extent than if I had chosen to go the somewhat proprietary (mp3) or totally open (ogg, which my player doesn't even support) path.
If you're just looking at energy/money savings, it will, of course, seem pretty pointless. Before WD's "Green" drives hard drives didn't use up much, after they don't use much less (because they didn't use up much in the first place).
On the other hand, if those drives actually save an average of 5W when compared to the competition, I find that a pretty damn impressive feat. Put into perspective (4W idle, 7.5W seek; assuming about 30% of total running time spent is seek/read/write), that's like Ford's newest model suddenly getting 80 instead of 40 MPG or the new Dell XPS running at 100 instead of 200 W.
I don't know if anything WD's telling is in any way related to reality or if that 4/5W figures are pure droppings of male cows, all I'm saying is if this is true, it's a nice step ahead.
Nope, that's just plain wrong. In very few cases actual DVDRips are available before the official first screen date. I believe Michael Moore's Sicko was the last bigger production where this actually happened.
It's quite common to see DVD Screeners and (a bit later) R5s pop up rather quickly after the first U.S. screening date, Cam, TeleSyncs and (increasingly seldom, probably due to the rise of R5) TeleCines tend to be available right (as in "double-digit amounts of hours") after press/exclusive screenings and before official releases.
Thus effectively destroying the entire cinema industry? Hell, a good FullHD-capable home cinema will yield better picture and sound quality than most current (non-digital) cinemas do. Just for a minute, imagine the horrible protests coming from any cinema owner and you see why this isn't an option (yet).
I can't seem to find anything coming from WD mentioning RPM, so the data from some online stores near ("IntelliPower at 5400-7200 RPM) me isn't quite verifiable. According to independent reviews, the drives seem to clock in somewhere between those values, so those might be the theoretical upper and lower limits, respectively.
Assuming the [Green Power] also shares such a seek time, that leaves us with 15 ms [measured access time] minus 9.5 ms [assumed seek time] which equals 5.5 ms, almost exactly the rotational latency associated with a 5400 RPM spindle speed.
[I]t's easy to convert [WD's values for average rotational latency] to revolutions per minute, or RPM. 5.6 milliseconds of rotational latency works out to about 5,400 RPM, which just happens to be the low end of the GreenPower's spindle speed range. Western Digital says that's by design; the latency spec it lists in the GreenPower's data sheets is merely an estimate based on the spindle speed range of the drive.
Please excuse me for being a bit unnice, but (assuming WD provides correct specs) you sir are one huge moron.
According to the official product sheet (some javascript magic, click the "Specifications" tab to get to the interesting bits), one of those drives eats up 7.5W during reads/writes and 4.0W when idle. According to a (I think it was the first) law of thermodynamics, it cannot "use" -42.5W since then it'd suck up energy which is impossible to accomplish without increasing it's mass which typically only black holes do (or something to that amount, anyways).
According to some (probably marketing) sources, the rotational speed varies between 5400 and 7200 RPM. I've only seen this 2nd handed by now, trying to locate the original source; will get back if I do.
How long, do you think, would it take for people to use ICMP echo's payload as a means of communicating actual information (as oppossed to just "abcdefg" as it seems to be common now)?
Actually, I kinda like that idea. If traffic shaping is in place, ICMP probably would be in the low-latency, low-throughput group; perfect for "tunneling" IRC, IM protocols and the like.
IANAL, but building such a proxy might be very illegal. Comcast recently injected TCP RST packets into their users' BitTorrent traffic which was, IIRC, illegal because those replies were, of course, forged. Again, I'm not familiar enough with the U.S. legislation to judge if this may or may not be grounds for a lawsuit, but several seemingly insightful people thought it was.
Apart from those legal issues I doubt the possibility of implementing a protocol-agnostic proxy. Firstly, a huge amount of AI would need to be spent on analyzing and predicting entire streams of communication. Before doing any work, the proxy would probably need to gather enough data on each and every stream to be 99.9% (or something to that extent) sure what actions a given cacheable request generates. It'd also need to be able to identify if any given request would introduce a state change on whatever system it was sent to. Without very deep understanding of each individual protocol I highly doubt this to be possible. Don't forget about the possibilities of screwing up, either. If such a proxy was to mix up e.g. POP3 data (bad example; POP3 is too common and would surely be filtered. Just making an example here, bear with me) and supply you with the contents of somebody else's inbox, bad things (i.e. lawsuits) would happen. Secondly, IPSec, https, imaps and encrypted BitTorrent traffic are experiencing large surges. Even if a proxy was able to supply "normal" traffic out of it's caches, it'd need to break various encryptions to do so effectively if encrypted traffic continues to grow. If you believe in conspiracies, various government organizations have the processing power to decrypt most comms streams in real-time, but we're probably talking about hundreds of megabytes or a few gigs per day at max. That's what large ISPs have flowing thru their pipes any given second of any given day, so I highly doubt a private held, profit-oriented entity could afford ninety thousand times the processing power of a GO with next to none limitations in financing (as long as The War Against Terror (love the acronym, btw.) continues).
The best shot universities and co. have in reducing P2P filesharing traffic would thus probably be a few standard nodes gathering information about what's being shared by non-encrypting nodes, then picking said files up themselves and sharing locally at great speeds. Combined with very selective traffic shaping (i.e. after a torrent (or part of it) is available on the local node, outside connections for said torrent are throttled to a sensitive yet low bandwidth, "soft-forcing" the client to pull most everything from the local cache), this might be the easiest solution. It'd require a seperate solution for each known P2P network and be faced with problems if it can't extrapolate all of the required data by sniffing what's going around (Can a complete.torrent be regenerated by just listening to traffic?) or too many connections were encrypted.
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A petition is the weakest of the three possibilities. Anyone (minors, companies, you name it) can start one and gather however many signatures he/she/it deems necessary for any purpose whatsoever (e.g. changing "Stockwell" to "Doris" in Mr. Day's name). The government only needs to acknowledge the existence of such a petition, period. There's no need to discuss it, comment on it or do anything at all about it apart from acknowledging it.
A referendum (signed by 50'000 out of some 7.4 million in the course of 100 days) forces a national vote on a recently-instated new law. Still, more than 50% of all voters participating in that vote will need to "nay" it in order for it not to be instated.
A public initiative (signed by 100k in 180 days) triggers a national vote about any issue at hand. If i can get 100k people to agree that all cars need to be yellow, the government is obligated to include this question in the next round of public voting. To date, some fifteen out of some 150 initiatives have been accepted in such a vote, chances are slim.
Of course, all details mentioned herein refer to the Swiss system (and IANTooFamiliarWithAllThis, so I may be wrong in some, many or all points), which I find to be rather nice (especially when compared to some other ones).
Nothing (except antitrust law, maybe) stops Google from "forgetting to include" live.com in it's indexes now and this situation is quite unlikely to change in the near future. The only two reasons I think of as relevant to leave competitors in are the outrage from both the internet community and the "forgotten" competitor (perhaps culminating in lawsuits for anti-competitive behaviour, IANAL) and the desire for the own index to be perceived as fair and complete.
An independent body deciding about the malness of any ware is, if a certain responsiveness could be guaranteed, a creepy idea. Forming such a commitee would very surely be a huge leap in the direction of an often-mentioned TCPA (Palladium, NGSCB, Donkey poop)-secured blacklist society. A small aristocraty of people in this decision commitee would become the target of a trillion-dollar industry and be able to decide exactly what piece of software is ran by anybody. On the other hand, allowing anybody to participate in these votes would guarantee this operation not to be effective because of the huge delay this would cause. The same goes for adding legal ways to fight a decision by this body - having one would cause the system to become as slow as many legal systems throughout the world are today, not having one would be a surefire way to cause dissatisfaction with lots and lots of developers (both natural and legal persons).
Also, don't forget to take into account the current legal trouble e.g. encryption software is going through. I'm certain an independent body would decide similar to lawmakers throughout the world. Essentially, you could probably forget about running Linux (Open Source? That could run anything, including highly illegal tools like decss without any way to stop it), any cd/dvd copying software (It's fun to break the D-M-C-A (sung to the tune of YMCA)), nmap (Remember germany banning "Hacker tools"?) or anything else.
Sorry for painting such a dystopian future, but letting any (independent, governmental or profit-oriented) body whatsoever decide what software's good and what's bad just isn't what you, me or most anybody else wants.
Most users of Windows and IE don't make a conscious decision to do so. It comes preloaded with a computer they buy, they don't question it. Blaming those users for using "poor quality software" (I, for one, find Windows XP a rather pleasant os to work with; IE on the other hand...) would be like blaming any driver for using "poor quality airbags" that came with his car or "poor quality doors" that came with his house after a break-in. /. crowd cares about computers, but a majority of people (wild guess) probably cares as much about their inner workings as I care about the inner workings of my dishwasher. It's a tool ideally fulfilling one or more given tasks (e.g. "get stock quotes" or "clean my dirty dishes") and is to be professionally serviced upon failure to do so. Installing a more secure browser like Opera may be just as good an idea as adding multi-stage UltraSplash 3D cleaning rotors but as long as I can put dirty dishes in and get 'em out clean I wouldn't know why I should care.
Not everybody is interested in knowing details about every single one of his possessions. You, me and the rest of the
"Porting" WoW isn't really necessary anymore. With a wee bit of wine magic it runs about as fast and at least as stable as on Windows. Starting the game from the console with the -opengl switch may be a bit of a problem, but Cedega has, I presume, it's users covered there.
Fact is, many, if not the majority of, gamers don't care about Windows' and Linux' conflicting ideologies. To them, Windows will be free because it either came with their computer or was handed to them from some friend (this includes BitTorrent peers). Linux may be just as free, but it'd force them to adapt some of the stuff they learned on Windows. Also, a surprisingly large number of such users keep installations of Photoshop and MS Office around (again, "free" versions). Although they'd probably not use more features than the GIMP or OOo could provide, there's no incentive to switch.
As unimportant as they may seem to most geeks, flashy stuff like compiz might be a step in the right direction to change this. If, while at the same time improving compatibility tools like wine, Linux can be made "cool" enough to make Vista users realize the lack of flashiness of their OS, the gamer audience could be talked into switching way easier.
You can argue that not receiving this "gift" is no penalty, but if essentially your whole competition gets to spend heaps of cash for free, it is one.
So, 20% on everything. 20% if service's slow, the food sucks and nobody makes you feel welcome; 20% for great attentive service, great food at competitive prices and nice atmosphere?
With the U.S.' minimum wage differences between tipped and untipped workers I see the point of tipping 5-10% for an acceptable experience, but 20% is - imo - reserved for when service was great. I paid what's on the bill, thus I paid the goods and services I received. Everything after that point should be a way to express my gratitude for a better-than-average experience. Also I'd really like to see the car salesman's face after you tipped him $4k on an $20k car and your real estate agent's expression after you cut her an $80k cheque for that nice $400k home.
Sure, where do I join? :)
Sounds like a nice opportunity to learn something. I don't have any idea on how to implement any of the stuff I mentioned before, though.
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They don't have to hardcode data from the test set into their algorithm. Possible solution goes like this: 1) Have IMDb rating dump available (if this is trivially possible, retrieve it at runtime) 2) Load quiz data, create profiles 3) Create proviles out of the IMDb data (if not already done) 4) Correlate profiles from 2 and 3 5) Use some (e.g. Netflix') statistical method to determine the probability of user x linking film y 6) Override values from 5 with x's actual IMDb data where possible Ta-daah, you're using all the advantages non-anonymity grants you while being nicely flexible and ignoring privacy :]
If the algorithm would be going to do more than just correlate past ratings with ids of other movies and sequels/tie-ins of other movies, more data about the movie is required. Crew data would be extremely useful here. If somebody liked Live Free or Die Hard and Perfect Stranger, The Fifth Element may also be of interest because of the common lead actor.
Including such data in the example sets would in turn allow to determine the correlation between movies and their internal id number pretty quickly. Even if the crew metadata was replaced by another set of internal ids, mapping (most of) those to actors and film ids to titles ought to be trivial for someone skilled in the art.
Netflix probably should have given their users the possibility to "opt-out" of the anonymized data set, but I feel the damage this particular incident has caused or may cause in the future is pretty minor. A high-probability match can be found for some users, if those users decided to both rate films on the IMDb and Netflix in the same time window, knowing at least the IMDb part of their votes was going to be public. I don't know Netflix' whole catalog but I'd assume they don't rent out really bad stuff and watching some porn (or non-classy films) at home isn't that bad, now is it?
The really large businesses (let's define that as some 5k+ users) probably have had a rather concise rollout plan for Vista for a year or more. Really bad stuff (e.g. Office 2007's 65k = 100k bug) might delay those schedules if not corrected fast enough, but the minor (yet constant) nuisances Vista holds for it's users mostly won't qualify.
Adoption or lack thereof in smaller businesses will be way quicker yet somewhat depending on the large corporate uptake. Looking forward to see what 2008 holds.
1] What's so special about KDE4? Qt4 with Windows support sure is nice, but I doubt it's going to catch on very fast, especially in the somewhat influential enterprise market. Same goes for most other innovations it incorporates. Plasma and Raptor are nice new ways of doing things, but don't forget we're (partially) talking about people sticking to Windows' classic start menu in spite of XP's innovations round there. .0 is definitely not going to be an option for me; I'll stick with Gnome, thank you. /. crowd and similarily-interested folks, few people (as opposed to corporations and governments) actually caring about the issue at all, real public outrage is unlikely. :)
Also, don't forget 2008 will bring KDE 4.0, which many just won't consider stable yet. I haven't worked with 4.0 enough, but if no dramatic advances have been made in regard of stability since the 3.5 versions, a
2] Call me a pessimist but I'm sure OOXML won't just "lose out" against ODF all of a sudden. Microsoft has billions of dollars to throw at this issue, an ISO standard is more or less inevitable. Thanks to, apart from the
Even if OOXML was to fail, I'm sure MS could extremely quickly push out compatibility updates for Office 2007 or even decide to ignore ODF completely. Also, the proven embrace-extend-extinguish strategy could be used for a new MSFT-exclusive dialect of ODF.
3] I fail to see the particular significance of 8.4. Sure, it's an LTS version and sure, it'll have some effect on the further progressions Ubuntu is going to make, but why would everything depend on this particular version? Care to explain?
4] Vista SP1 is due very soon, a lot of corporates are going to use this as an opportunity to migrate. SP2 is probably also planned for late 2008 or early 09; by then MSFT should have had enough time to gather real world feedback about Vista and make it more or less usable. Also, the time frames for large migrations is quite a bit longer than you may think. A GO I used to work for in 2006 had very specific plans about switching tens of thousands of workstations to Vista in 2008/09, long before many of Vista's faults became widely known.
I fully agree to all the Vista problems you're citing here, except one: Vista is intended to be easily pirated if all you're going to do is take a few quick looks.
Vista is, IIRC, distributed in a one-DVD-fits-all (editions) way; what gets installed is determined by what product key you enter at setup. (Exceptions are two different DVDs for x86/x64 architectures. Not quite sure about volume licensed copies, but I think they ought to use the same DVDs, too.) The available choices include, apart from Home Business to Ultimate, an "unlicensed" 30-day trial with the feature range of an Ultimate edition. 30 days is, of course, not enough to use Vista on a long-term basis, but it surely suffices to take a quick glimpse at what it does, how it does that and how badly it sucks (my personal opinion).
Call me NO-BOD-E, but back when hard drive mp3 players still had limited space (20 Gig in this case), I did willingly and voluntary transcode a big part of my mp3 collection to Sony's atrac3+ even though my mp3 player would've supported mp3. I chose to do so to increase it's battery lifetime and storage capacity (when expressed in a number of minutes of music; not bytes) and of course, kept the original files.
While I usually tend not to like proprietary formats, in this case the hardware's potential could be used to a larger extent than if I had chosen to go the somewhat proprietary (mp3) or totally open (ogg, which my player doesn't even support) path.
If you're just looking at energy/money savings, it will, of course, seem pretty pointless. Before WD's "Green" drives hard drives didn't use up much, after they don't use much less (because they didn't use up much in the first place).
On the other hand, if those drives actually save an average of 5W when compared to the competition, I find that a pretty damn impressive feat. Put into perspective (4W idle, 7.5W seek; assuming about 30% of total running time spent is seek/read/write), that's like Ford's newest model suddenly getting 80 instead of 40 MPG or the new Dell XPS running at 100 instead of 200 W.
I don't know if anything WD's telling is in any way related to reality or if that 4/5W figures are pure droppings of male cows, all I'm saying is if this is true, it's a nice step ahead.
Nope, that's just plain wrong. In very few cases actual DVDRips are available before the official first screen date. I believe Michael Moore's Sicko was the last bigger production where this actually happened.
It's quite common to see DVD Screeners and (a bit later) R5s pop up rather quickly after the first U.S. screening date, Cam, TeleSyncs and (increasingly seldom, probably due to the rise of R5) TeleCines tend to be available right (as in "double-digit amounts of hours") after press/exclusive screenings and before official releases.
Thus effectively destroying the entire cinema industry? Hell, a good FullHD-capable home cinema will yield better picture and sound quality than most current (non-digital) cinemas do. Just for a minute, imagine the horrible protests coming from any cinema owner and you see why this isn't an option (yet).
That's a mistake in TFS. TFA clearly is talking about internet access, not limited to http/port80.
(from storagereview.com) (from techreport.com)
Aside from those missing values, the drive's power consumption (4W idle, 7.5W read/write) seem pretty nice compared to the rest of the market.
Please excuse me for being a bit unnice, but (assuming WD provides correct specs) you sir are one huge moron.
According to the official product sheet (some javascript magic, click the "Specifications" tab to get to the interesting bits), one of those drives eats up 7.5W during reads/writes and 4.0W when idle. According to a (I think it was the first) law of thermodynamics, it cannot "use" -42.5W since then it'd suck up energy which is impossible to accomplish without increasing it's mass which typically only black holes do (or something to that amount, anyways).
According to some (probably marketing) sources, the rotational speed varies between 5400 and 7200 RPM. I've only seen this 2nd handed by now, trying to locate the original source; will get back if I do.
How long, do you think, would it take for people to use ICMP echo's payload as a means of communicating actual information (as oppossed to just "abcdefg" as it seems to be common now)?
Actually, I kinda like that idea. If traffic shaping is in place, ICMP probably would be in the low-latency, low-throughput group; perfect for "tunneling" IRC, IM protocols and the like.
IANAL, but building such a proxy might be very illegal. Comcast recently injected TCP RST packets into their users' BitTorrent traffic which was, IIRC, illegal because those replies were, of course, forged. Again, I'm not familiar enough with the U.S. legislation to judge if this may or may not be grounds for a lawsuit, but several seemingly insightful people thought it was.
.torrent be regenerated by just listening to traffic?) or too many connections were encrypted.
Apart from those legal issues I doubt the possibility of implementing a protocol-agnostic proxy. Firstly, a huge amount of AI would need to be spent on analyzing and predicting entire streams of communication. Before doing any work, the proxy would probably need to gather enough data on each and every stream to be 99.9% (or something to that extent) sure what actions a given cacheable request generates. It'd also need to be able to identify if any given request would introduce a state change on whatever system it was sent to. Without very deep understanding of each individual protocol I highly doubt this to be possible. Don't forget about the possibilities of screwing up, either. If such a proxy was to mix up e.g. POP3 data (bad example; POP3 is too common and would surely be filtered. Just making an example here, bear with me) and supply you with the contents of somebody else's inbox, bad things (i.e. lawsuits) would happen.
Secondly, IPSec, https, imaps and encrypted BitTorrent traffic are experiencing large surges. Even if a proxy was able to supply "normal" traffic out of it's caches, it'd need to break various encryptions to do so effectively if encrypted traffic continues to grow. If you believe in conspiracies, various government organizations have the processing power to decrypt most comms streams in real-time, but we're probably talking about hundreds of megabytes or a few gigs per day at max. That's what large ISPs have flowing thru their pipes any given second of any given day, so I highly doubt a private held, profit-oriented entity could afford ninety thousand times the processing power of a GO with next to none limitations in financing (as long as The War Against Terror (love the acronym, btw.) continues).
The best shot universities and co. have in reducing P2P filesharing traffic would thus probably be a few standard nodes gathering information about what's being shared by non-encrypting nodes, then picking said files up themselves and sharing locally at great speeds. Combined with very selective traffic shaping (i.e. after a torrent (or part of it) is available on the local node, outside connections for said torrent are throttled to a sensitive yet low bandwidth, "soft-forcing" the client to pull most everything from the local cache), this might be the easiest solution. It'd require a seperate solution for each known P2P network and be faced with problems if it can't extrapolate all of the required data by sniffing what's going around (Can a complete