... what the movie distributors do to us when we load a DVD into our player and we're forced -- by disabling all the remote control buttons -- to watch advertisements and/or previews for other DVDs? We recently rented a DVD that disallowed us from using the player's Pause button giving us the option of letting dinner get cold or resuming our viewing by searching for where we left off. (That disc didn't even have a scene menu; we had to fast forward -- oddly, that button still worked -- through the entire first half of the movie to resume watching it.)
So Apple thinks it's a good idea to be able to force you to watch ads while a cellphone is booting before it becomes functional? Let's say you're out on the street late one night and something horrible happens. Imagine the publicity -- and the inevitable close-the-doors-and-sell-all-the-furniture-you-are-now-bankrupt lawsuit -- when someone is robbed and killed or they die from a heart attack and it comes out that they were forced to wait for their cellphone to finish displaying an ad before they could dial 911. We can only hope that Apple only decided to patent this is because they plan on demanding licensing fees that are so outrageous that nobody on the panet would ever even consider developing such a function into their devices.
(When are those OSS-based cellphones coming out? November? I can hardly wait.)
"I live in a large urban area that has about a million people within a 20 minute drive from my house, and yet I only have two crappy options for broadband. My situation is not unique."
Similar sitation where I live. Actually there are four options for our household. (Five if no internet access is an option nowadays.) We have AT&T which may or may not (more on that below) allow me to operate the servers on the connection that supports my home-based work. Comcast which absolutely does not allow servers. A wireless provider which does not (despite offering a "business" plan with fixed IP addresses). And, finally, Covad which allows me to operate servers but with a lower bandwidth connection than I'd like and costs more than any of the other options. I would have additional options if we actually lived within the big city (Chicago) limits. (But it only takes one or two watches of the evening news by anyone with school-aged children to understand why that is not a reasonable option.)
"All that being said, I'm curious what innovation you've been seeing from the telcos that you think is so important to protect? These guys are basically dumb pipes. They just string the infrastructure across the land. They don't design and manufacture switches and servers, they just plug them in and connect them with wires. They don't design the web services that I use, nor do they create the content that I read."
The trouble with the telcos acting as providers of dumb pipes is that they cannot make as much money off that model. Look at what happened to banking. Taking customer deposits and lending them out didn't allow them to make billions in profits. So they got rid of the restrictions that prevented them from doing all the really profitable stuff -- like trading in derivatives -- and now they make money hand over fist.
If the telcos are restricted to being nothing more than electonic plumbers, they won't make the really big bucks. They drool over the ability to charge content providers a fee for delivering their content faster than someone who hasn't paid that fee. To the telcos, this would be innovation. It doesn't help the regular folks that use the Internet one iota (well movie streamers would benefit, I guess; big effin' deal.) But the innovation that the telcos are predicting would be prevented by Net Neutrality is not any technical innovation. (Cisco probably disagrees since they surely have equipment they're anxious to sell the telcos to assist them in their traffic management.) It's the new innovative ways they'll be able to suck money out of the pockets of the users of their pipes that'd be blocked by any net neutrality policy.
And $DEITY help us if the telcos were to begin designing the web services that people use. I occasionally visit AT&T's web site (most recently a couple of months ago) to see if switching to them would be possible. The site is almost impossible to navigate using anything other than IE. The information is difficult to find and understand. I have gotten two different web pages that purport to describe the service that I was interested in and after several visits I still can't figure out what's allowed. Calling them for more details was a completely useless exercise; they thought what I was looking for was available but could not point me to where I could confirm anything. (The people who you reach are totally oblivious as to what's on the company web site. It's really incredible. I'm told that the staff that mans the telco's phones experiences a very high turnover rate. That doesn't surprise me one bit.)
I used to see a heck of a lot more of that when there were easily a dozen or more local ISPs offering Internet access in my area. Once the telcos were allowed to cut them out of the picture, innovation has become non-existent.
Why even have a government... it just wants to take over everything!
While I can easily believe McCain to be that stupid, I have a bit of difficulty believing that his entire staff is that clueless. Somebody's just feeding far-right talking points to McCain. Time to look at who's been making big political donations to McCain. (Three guesses as to who's been writing those checks.)
When were lap dances at a technical conference ever considered "cool"? And what's with the pudgy Bender character? The whole event seems a lot more creepy then cool.
...that aren't yet served by adequate high-bandwidth Internet access this is not going to work. According to the WSJ article:
"when a consumer buys a movie from a participating store, his accounts with other participating services--such as a mobile-phone provider or a video-on-demand cable service--would be updated to show the title as available for viewing. The movies wouldn't be downloaded; rather, they would reside with each particular delivery company, such as the Internet service provider, cable company or phone company."
Then how does one view the movide? If the movie doesn't need to be downloaded, the only way one can view it is to, um, download it. When you want to "access" your movie it's still being transferred from the remote storage to your viewing device. I don't care if you call it downloading or streaming. It still has to move across something with a hell of a lot of bandwidth. (Silly me for thinking that someone from the WSJ would pick up on that.) Sure I wouldn't have to store it on a computer or in/on a phone but -- and maybe it's just me -- I suspect that most people don't save movies on hard disks (other than those they've saved on their DVR's hard disk). When I can get a computer or a phone with a 57" screen, then maybe I'll consider watching movies on something other than my TV.
Want to bet how much your cable and/or phone bill will increase once you start "accessing" that movie you supposedly bought? And those folks who don't even have sufficient bandwidth to stream crappy YouTube videos? Imagine watching an entire feature-length movie in five second chunks. Boy, that's entertainment.
I have to agree with those posters who mentioned that this is a solution in search of a problem. A Rube Goldberg answer from entertainment industry engineers in response to a question posed by the company legal department.
``In order to provide the most choice, freedom, and protection for consumers''
You crack me up. You really do if you think Disney is proposing this for the "consumer's" benefit. Perhaps you merely forgot to include the "sarcasm" tags?
... the identities of the major campaign contributors for those 18 senators? And how much those contributors would really like to see net neutrality go away? I'm sure they've, you know, casually reminded those senators how many jobs they've got in their states that could disappear should net neutrality be allowed to be FCC policy.
... two forward slashes that sit directly in front of the 'www' in every internet website address?
Not to be too-o-o picky, but a great many website addresses do not begin with "www.". Now if the author had written "two forward slashes that sit directly after the ':' in every internet..." I'd have had time to get another cup of coffee before my next meeting. But when duty calls I just have to answer.
In one game that I like to play to blow off some steam, you can easily beat all the bots at one level (they seem to enjoy standing around waiting for you to blast 'em) and if you increase the difficulty by one level, the bots can be falling off a ledge or doing a double somersault and still manage to squeeze of a single shot that kills you. And that's after you've hit them with 2-3 rockets. Go figure. I haven't tried it yet but I can't even imagine what the "Godlike" level would be like except that I suspect I wouldn't even be completely reborn before a bot killed me.
... it's tough to complain about the Microsoft tax. It's so small as to be unnoticable. Still, once enough of these get out into the hands of ordinary folk, how long do you think it'll be before someone has Linux-based replacement software?
As is the norm for 99% of all astronomical events like comets, meteor showers, space station flyovers, etc. this one, too, will be obscured by dense cloud cover for anyone living in the Chicago area. (Argh!)
Sharepoint was being described as Microsoft's latest and greatest lock-in product almost as soon as it was announced; certainly before it was officially released. Beside most tech industry writers, who on earth didn't see this coming? Oh, yeah, that's right: the majority of IT managers in Fortune 500 companies. Complain away guys. The tech guys down in the trenches -- the ones you've been ignoring for years now -- could have told you this would happen.
"Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages -- not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,' he explained. 'All these things have been lost, and if not lost they're too slow to keep up with my thinking..."
This reminds me of an old, short essay I ran across years ago about someone who really reads books. (Wish I could find it now.)
Anyway, a similar feeling was recently stated by every member of my family when we saw an ad for a Kindle or some other ebook reader. (At least I think it was an ad; who pays that much attention to ads any more. I pay only enough attention to know when to hit the mute button.) If my wife can't fold over the page as a bookmark -- a practice that makes me cringe since the magazine I subscribe to include a half dozen convenient bookmarks with each issue -- she's not going to accept any electronic book. I'm a PostIt-on-the-important-pages guy myself. Being able to cart around an entire library on a Kindle isn't much of a selling point, at least to us. That not a benefit to most people; only a few folks read more than one book at a time. I guess we're all Luddites. Either that or we've just grown too damned tired of the incessant push by corporations to keep spending money on the next "greatest invention ever".
I'm not sure about the glory but the fun of working in IT is getting pretty rare. There are too darned many pointy hair bosses who think they've got high-powered technical chops because they read (and partially understood) a few articles in an in-flight magazine who then get back into the office and turn things upside down for no apparent reason.
Years ago, back in the prehistoric era when televisions had things called picture tubes, I can recall a time when a salescritter in a mall electronics store told me that one model of TV was better than another because it had more channels in the picture tube. Sensing that I now smelled raw meat, my wife had to drag me out of the store before I really got going in my attempt to see how stupid this guy might have actually been about the products he was selling.
Then there was the guy that explained to me and a friend that one RF amp cost more than that other one because it contained more dBs. Of course that was at a small town Radio Shack so that wasn't exactly surprising.
There will always be clueless sales people as long as there are retailers that care more about hiring warm bodies at a discount than having a knowledgable staff. Unfortunately, not all of them will see the same fate as Circuit City after they laid off all of their experienced staffers for lower paid entry level people. So we'll all have to do our own homework before walking into one of these places.
``15k RPM drives have been around for quite a while now, at least for 10 years, and there has not been an improvement in speed in that time. Where are my 30k RPM drives?''
Probably doubling as incandescent lights in the development lab. OK, that may be a bit of an exaggeration but have you ever touched a 15K RPM drive that's been running for a while? They get damned hot. I mean "burning your finger" hot. You don't use those in enclosures that aren't designed to provide a lot of air flow to prevent the drives from cooking themselves to death. (And more air flow inevitably means louder enclosures so most users will balk at deploying them in a non-data center environment.) Now imagine the heat dissipation and the cooling needed for a 30K RPM drive.
Yeah, yeah, I know, corporations exist according to state law that grants their charter and, in theory, a corporate charter could be revoked. Examples of this actually happening are welcomed. I've sure as hell never heard of one being yanked. (And I don't mean some little mom-n-pop outfit that decided to incorporate. I mean one that's publicly traded and that someone's actually heard of.)
What do the states whose governors received these laptops have in common? The referenced article didn't mention the complete list but West Virginia and Wyoming might have something commercial in common. Mining or energy for example. Wouldn't a lobbyist with some powerful clients in the mining/energy industry just love to have access to some state computer systems where they could snoop through internal emails discussing potential legislation restricting mining activities? West Virginia's had problems with mountaintop removal for years. There's been talk of stopping that for some time. Wyoming has their share of mining companies abusing the environment as well.
On the other hand, perhaps a bunch of environmentalists shipped the laptops in the hope of getting access to state information so they could blow the whistle on state govt./industry shenanigans (bribes and the like).
Anyone know where there's a complete list of the states where these laptops were shipped?
I didn't read any actual policy but one can easily see this as a rather innocent departmental policy whereby you aren't supposed to be listening to music from the Internet using government computers. That's not much different than many corporate policies regarding use of the company's assets. One wonders, though, if someone read "inappropriate" and interpreted that to mean "illegal". It wouldn't be the first time some bureaucrat interpreted something in such a way as to make themselves seem more powerful than they really are. Either way, violating the policy could still mean you're out of a job so why push it? Last time I read the news, unemployment was bad. Probably why said bureaucrat feels they can add things like this to the acceptable use policy.
So Comcast is getting to be nothing more than a faster form of the original AOL: they'll decide what you see, they'll decide where you can go.
Comcast is the monopoly cable company where I live. No thanks. The other major alternative is ATT. They're not much better. There is a wireless alternative but they're clueless and have to figure out why nobody's taking them up on their business-class-service-with-multiple-fixed-IP-addresses-but-no-you-cannot-run-servers option. (I doubt they're long for this world.) It almost makes you want to set a UUCP network again.
It's a real pity that they even had to do this. The FCC regulations require (or at least used to) that anyone causing interference had to modify their equipment to eliminate the interference. It shouldn't have taken a court order to get the FCC to enforce their own regulations. (Just a wild guess, mind you: the incident occurred during the Bush administration, right?)
... in favor of so-called "virtual property" I find myself thinking that this seems like it might be an idea put out there by the same geniuses that, only recently, nearly destroyed the global economy.
Slashdot Mirror
... what the movie distributors do to us when we load a DVD into our player and we're forced -- by disabling all the remote control buttons -- to watch advertisements and/or previews for other DVDs? We recently rented a DVD that disallowed us from using the player's Pause button giving us the option of letting dinner get cold or resuming our viewing by searching for where we left off. (That disc didn't even have a scene menu; we had to fast forward -- oddly, that button still worked -- through the entire first half of the movie to resume watching it.)
So Apple thinks it's a good idea to be able to force you to watch ads while a cellphone is booting before it becomes functional? Let's say you're out on the street late one night and something horrible happens. Imagine the publicity -- and the inevitable close-the-doors-and-sell-all-the-furniture-you-are-now-bankrupt lawsuit -- when someone is robbed and killed or they die from a heart attack and it comes out that they were forced to wait for their cellphone to finish displaying an ad before they could dial 911. We can only hope that Apple only decided to patent this is because they plan on demanding licensing fees that are so outrageous that nobody on the panet would ever even consider developing such a function into their devices.
(When are those OSS-based cellphones coming out? November? I can hardly wait.)
Similar sitation where I live. Actually there are four options for our household. (Five if no internet access is an option nowadays.) We have AT&T which may or may not (more on that below) allow me to operate the servers on the connection that supports my home-based work. Comcast which absolutely does not allow servers. A wireless provider which does not (despite offering a "business" plan with fixed IP addresses). And, finally, Covad which allows me to operate servers but with a lower bandwidth connection than I'd like and costs more than any of the other options. I would have additional options if we actually lived within the big city (Chicago) limits. (But it only takes one or two watches of the evening news by anyone with school-aged children to understand why that is not a reasonable option.)
The trouble with the telcos acting as providers of dumb pipes is that they cannot make as much money off that model. Look at what happened to banking. Taking customer deposits and lending them out didn't allow them to make billions in profits. So they got rid of the restrictions that prevented them from doing all the really profitable stuff -- like trading in derivatives -- and now they make money hand over fist.
If the telcos are restricted to being nothing more than electonic plumbers, they won't make the really big bucks. They drool over the ability to charge content providers a fee for delivering their content faster than someone who hasn't paid that fee. To the telcos, this would be innovation. It doesn't help the regular folks that use the Internet one iota (well movie streamers would benefit, I guess; big effin' deal.) But the innovation that the telcos are predicting would be prevented by Net Neutrality is not any technical innovation. (Cisco probably disagrees since they surely have equipment they're anxious to sell the telcos to assist them in their traffic management.) It's the new innovative ways they'll be able to suck money out of the pockets of the users of their pipes that'd be blocked by any net neutrality policy.
And $DEITY help us if the telcos were to begin designing the web services that people use. I occasionally visit AT&T's web site (most recently a couple of months ago) to see if switching to them would be possible. The site is almost impossible to navigate using anything other than IE. The information is difficult to find and understand. I have gotten two different web pages that purport to describe the service that I was interested in and after several visits I still can't figure out what's allowed. Calling them for more details was a completely useless exercise; they thought what I was looking for was available but could not point me to where I could confirm anything. (The people who you reach are totally oblivious as to what's on the company web site. It's really incredible. I'm told that the staff that mans the telco's phones experiences a very high turnover rate. That doesn't surprise me one bit.)
I used to see a heck of a lot more of that when there were easily a dozen or more local ISPs offering Internet access in my area. Once the telcos were allowed to cut them out of the picture, innovation has become non-existent.
Why even have a government... it just wants to take over everything!
While I can easily believe McCain to be that stupid, I have a bit of difficulty believing that his entire staff is that clueless. Somebody's just feeding far-right talking points to McCain. Time to look at who's been making big political donations to McCain. (Three guesses as to who's been writing those checks.)
When were lap dances at a technical conference ever considered "cool"? And what's with the pudgy Bender character? The whole event seems a lot more creepy then cool.
...that aren't yet served by adequate high-bandwidth Internet access this is not going to work. According to the WSJ article:
Then how does one view the movide? If the movie doesn't need to be downloaded, the only way one can view it is to, um, download it. When you want to "access" your movie it's still being transferred from the remote storage to your viewing device. I don't care if you call it downloading or streaming. It still has to move across something with a hell of a lot of bandwidth. (Silly me for thinking that someone from the WSJ would pick up on that.) Sure I wouldn't have to store it on a computer or in/on a phone but -- and maybe it's just me -- I suspect that most people don't save movies on hard disks (other than those they've saved on their DVR's hard disk). When I can get a computer or a phone with a 57" screen, then maybe I'll consider watching movies on something other than my TV.
Want to bet how much your cable and/or phone bill will increase once you start "accessing" that movie you supposedly bought? And those folks who don't even have sufficient bandwidth to stream crappy YouTube videos? Imagine watching an entire feature-length movie in five second chunks. Boy, that's entertainment.
I have to agree with those posters who mentioned that this is a solution in search of a problem. A Rube Goldberg answer from entertainment industry engineers in response to a question posed by the company legal department.
You crack me up. You really do if you think Disney is proposing this for the "consumer's" benefit. Perhaps you merely forgot to include the "sarcasm" tags?
... the identities of the major campaign contributors for those 18 senators? And how much those contributors would really like to see net neutrality go away? I'm sure they've, you know, casually reminded those senators how many jobs they've got in their states that could disappear should net neutrality be allowed to be FCC policy.
Not to be too-o-o picky, but a great many website addresses do not begin with "www.". Now if the author had written "two forward slashes that sit directly after the ':' in every internet..." I'd have had time to get another cup of coffee before my next meeting. But when duty calls I just have to answer.
In one game that I like to play to blow off some steam, you can easily beat all the bots at one level (they seem to enjoy standing around waiting for you to blast 'em) and if you increase the difficulty by one level, the bots can be falling off a ledge or doing a double somersault and still manage to squeeze of a single shot that kills you. And that's after you've hit them with 2-3 rockets. Go figure. I haven't tried it yet but I can't even imagine what the "Godlike" level would be like except that I suspect I wouldn't even be completely reborn before a bot killed me.
... it's tough to complain about the Microsoft tax. It's so small as to be unnoticable. Still, once enough of these get out into the hands of ordinary folk, how long do you think it'll be before someone has Linux-based replacement software?
As is the norm for 99% of all astronomical events like comets, meteor showers, space station flyovers, etc. this one, too, will be obscured by dense cloud cover for anyone living in the Chicago area. (Argh!)
Sharepoint was being described as Microsoft's latest and greatest lock-in product almost as soon as it was announced; certainly before it was officially released. Beside most tech industry writers, who on earth didn't see this coming? Oh, yeah, that's right: the majority of IT managers in Fortune 500 companies. Complain away guys. The tech guys down in the trenches -- the ones you've been ignoring for years now -- could have told you this would happen.
This reminds me of an old, short essay I ran across years ago about someone who really reads books. (Wish I could find it now.)
Anyway, a similar feeling was recently stated by every member of my family when we saw an ad for a Kindle or some other ebook reader. (At least I think it was an ad; who pays that much attention to ads any more. I pay only enough attention to know when to hit the mute button.) If my wife can't fold over the page as a bookmark -- a practice that makes me cringe since the magazine I subscribe to include a half dozen convenient bookmarks with each issue -- she's not going to accept any electronic book. I'm a PostIt-on-the-important-pages guy myself. Being able to cart around an entire library on a Kindle isn't much of a selling point, at least to us. That not a benefit to most people; only a few folks read more than one book at a time. I guess we're all Luddites. Either that or we've just grown too damned tired of the incessant push by corporations to keep spending money on the next "greatest invention ever".
I'm not sure about the glory but the fun of working in IT is getting pretty rare. There are too darned many pointy hair bosses who think they've got high-powered technical chops because they read (and partially understood) a few articles in an in-flight magazine who then get back into the office and turn things upside down for no apparent reason.
Years ago, back in the prehistoric era when televisions had things called picture tubes, I can recall a time when a salescritter in a mall electronics store told me that one model of TV was better than another because it had more channels in the picture tube. Sensing that I now smelled raw meat, my wife had to drag me out of the store before I really got going in my attempt to see how stupid this guy might have actually been about the products he was selling.
Then there was the guy that explained to me and a friend that one RF amp cost more than that other one because it contained more dBs. Of course that was at a small town Radio Shack so that wasn't exactly surprising.
There will always be clueless sales people as long as there are retailers that care more about hiring warm bodies at a discount than having a knowledgable staff. Unfortunately, not all of them will see the same fate as Circuit City after they laid off all of their experienced staffers for lower paid entry level people. So we'll all have to do our own homework before walking into one of these places.
Probably doubling as incandescent lights in the development lab. OK, that may be a bit of an exaggeration but have you ever touched a 15K RPM drive that's been running for a while? They get damned hot. I mean "burning your finger" hot. You don't use those in enclosures that aren't designed to provide a lot of air flow to prevent the drives from cooking themselves to death. (And more air flow inevitably means louder enclosures so most users will balk at deploying them in a non-data center environment.) Now imagine the heat dissipation and the cooling needed for a 30K RPM drive.
... so a century isn't that long a period.
Yeah, yeah, I know, corporations exist according to state law that grants their charter and, in theory, a corporate charter could be revoked. Examples of this actually happening are welcomed. I've sure as hell never heard of one being yanked. (And I don't mean some little mom-n-pop outfit that decided to incorporate. I mean one that's publicly traded and that someone's actually heard of.)
Because, you know, ZFS cures cancer and stops bad breath, too. No to be too snarky but jeez... what did everybody do before ZFS came along?
What do the states whose governors received these laptops have in common? The referenced article didn't mention the complete list but West Virginia and Wyoming might have something commercial in common. Mining or energy for example. Wouldn't a lobbyist with some powerful clients in the mining/energy industry just love to have access to some state computer systems where they could snoop through internal emails discussing potential legislation restricting mining activities? West Virginia's had problems with mountaintop removal for years. There's been talk of stopping that for some time. Wyoming has their share of mining companies abusing the environment as well.
On the other hand, perhaps a bunch of environmentalists shipped the laptops in the hope of getting access to state information so they could blow the whistle on state govt./industry shenanigans (bribes and the like).
Anyone know where there's a complete list of the states where these laptops were shipped?
I didn't read any actual policy but one can easily see this as a rather innocent departmental policy whereby you aren't supposed to be listening to music from the Internet using government computers. That's not much different than many corporate policies regarding use of the company's assets. One wonders, though, if someone read "inappropriate" and interpreted that to mean "illegal". It wouldn't be the first time some bureaucrat interpreted something in such a way as to make themselves seem more powerful than they really are. Either way, violating the policy could still mean you're out of a job so why push it? Last time I read the news, unemployment was bad. Probably why said bureaucrat feels they can add things like this to the acceptable use policy.
"Arrogance" would have been my guess. I mean who knows better about how you should use your computer than Microsoft?
So Comcast is getting to be nothing more than a faster form of the original AOL: they'll decide what you see, they'll decide where you can go.
Comcast is the monopoly cable company where I live. No thanks. The other major alternative is ATT. They're not much better. There is a wireless alternative but they're clueless and have to figure out why nobody's taking them up on their business-class-service-with-multiple-fixed-IP-addresses-but-no-you-cannot-run-servers option. (I doubt they're long for this world.) It almost makes you want to set a UUCP network again.
It's a real pity that they even had to do this. The FCC regulations require (or at least used to) that anyone causing interference had to modify their equipment to eliminate the interference. It shouldn't have taken a court order to get the FCC to enforce their own regulations. (Just a wild guess, mind you: the incident occurred during the Bush administration, right?)
... in favor of so-called "virtual property" I find myself thinking that this seems like it might be an idea put out there by the same geniuses that, only recently, nearly destroyed the global economy.