$49 = 156.25 kilobyyes maximum. That's not even 33 bytes per penny.
Sure it's not as cheap as email but its allot cheaper than it used to be.
That's like saying, "Sure, if you go to New York City, you'll get robbed and raped, but at least they probably won't murder you like they would have ten years ago....":-)
Well, DRM on ephemeral data isn't untenable. You don't really have to make it unbreakable. You just have to make it take long enough that you can't break it on the fly. Most people aren't willing to watch TV on a five minute delay while their computer queues up the encrypted data and attempts to determine the keys....
Unless, of course, your goal for DRM on the ephemeral data is preventing people from recording it... in which case, yeah, it is just as untenable for ephemeral content as it is for any other content....
SMS is cheap? It's something like a billion dollars a gig. That is how they are making profit---not through data charges, but through nickel and diming people who don't realize they're being screwed.
I get the whole push-pull thing, but I think it's an artificial limitation forced by the telcos. Instead of working around it, we should be pushing for unlimited international data plans. That way, you not only get the advantage of no huge surprise bills, but also get the benefit of data for non-mail purposes.
I never said we should abandon VGA suddenly. I said that it is getting harder to get decent VGA monitors, so going forward, buying a computer that lacks DVI is risky if you intend to use it with external displays long-term. The writing is on the wall.
As for the "cheap" thing, unfortunately, unlike full-size laptops (in which the more expensive ones have DVI), in the miniature laptop space, those alternatives don't seem to exist. That may not be a show-stopper for you, but at this point, it is the only flaw left that prevents me purchasing any of these laptops.
1. A DVI connector takes maybe an extra eighth of an inch on either side and a total of an eighth of an inch more in thickness. These machines aren't that tight on space. If they are, though, you could always use Mini-DVI or Micro-DVI (though the latter does not provide analog pins).
2. Go to any store and buy an LCD panel. You will see a handful of sad monitors that are VGA-only. You can recognize these because they are made by obscure manufacturers you've never heard of, are horribly miscalibrated, and are relatively low resolution. Good panels these days are all either DVI or DVI/VGA panels. DVI/VGA panels tend to cost a few bucks more than DVI-only panels.
3. You haven't bought an LCD panel lately, have you? In my experience buying one at Fry's, I'd estimate that more than half of the monitors I saw were DVI-only.
The pins are on the cable, not the computer. Breaking a cable isn't a big deal. Besides, the shell guides the pins into place very well. You have to really screw things up (usually involving foreign objects) to bend a pin on any modern video cable....:-)
My point, though, was that you can always take a DVI port and connect it to a VGA projector or monitor with a cheap, small, lightweight adapter (which any decent meeting space should already provide unless your media services staff is asleep at the switch). You can't easily take VGA and get a DVI output to drive any of the myriad models of flat panels that don't support VGA. Therefore, if you have to choose one or the other, DVI is the better choice regardless of how many people are likely to have to use an adapter.
That said, if you really want to cater to people with old equipment, either provide an adapter with the machine or provide a VGA connector in addition to the DVI output (mirrored only) using a cheap buffer amp to drive the second output. Either way, you're talking about pennies per unit....
It just doesn't make sense to make products that are not forward-compatible with the current standards just in case one out of a hundred of your users might want to use it with an older device with which the current standards are backwards-compatible.
I disagree. Most modern web pages need at least 1024 pixels wide. You can always make things bigger if a certain app hurts your eyes, but you can never get back resolution that the panel doesn't have. Thus, it is always better to go with a higher resolution than a lower one.
I'm really surprised, however, that nobody has criticized the fact that all these machines use legacy VGA. I mean, is it really too much to ask for them to use DVI? It already costs more money to buy a panel that still supports VGA even today. VGA is on its way out and the only computers I see that still use it are cheap PC laptops. Why!?! Why would anyone build a computer with only analog video output these days? It's not like it is that much more expensive to provide DVI, and I consider any machine that doesn't do so to be very non-future-proof, i.e. a dubious proposition.
These days, the only thing keeping me from buying any of the ultra-mobile machines is the lack of DVI in any machine with a small enough footprint to safely use on an airplane tray table. Netcraft confirmed VGA was dying five years ago. At this point, the only thing left to do is go through its pockets and look for loose change....
That's not quite accurate. The company that bought/took the formula was a company that manufactured electrolyte, not a capacitor company. That flawed electrolyte was sold to about a dozen capacitor manufacturers in Taiwan and Japan, who in turn sold the capacitors to probably thousands of companies. It affected products by almost every major computer vendor, including every manufacturer you mentioned in your post.
I doubt you can find any computer or motherboard vendor that didn't get bitten by those capacitors on at least one of their products.
That said, I do agree that buying from a major manufacturer is probably a good idea. The advantage of the more reputable, bigger name vendors is that when bad things happen that are outside their control (as this clearly was), they are more likely to stand behind their products even for people who didn't buy the extended warranty....
Well, I suspect we will soon see a lot more people (legally) downloading movies instead of buying DVDs. The average person buys something like 15 DVDs per year. If we transition to a download-based delivery system (which is almost inevitable, IMHO), then even at non-HD resolution, you're talking about the average person downloading and storing some 138 gigabytes per year. For an HD movie at 25 GB of content, you're talking about 375 GB per year.:-)
SheepShaver runs Mac OS 9 on top of the existing OS. Mac OS 9 provides 68k emulation. It should "just work" so long as the app in question could run on a PowerPC-based Mac and you have an appropriate version of Mac OS that was capable of running the app. I could be wrong, though. There might be some PPC instructions (probably supervisor mode) in the 68k emulation code that can't be emulated by Rosetta and/or SheepShaver. At some point, it might be easier to run a 68k emulator directly rather than running an emulator on top of another emulator.
http://www.thefreecountry.com/emulators/macintosh.shtml has a list of other emulators you might try. I'd imagine that any of the Linux-compatible X11-based 68k emulators would be pretty easy to port to Mac OS X's X11 implementation (if nobody has done it already).
The windowing system certainly is a part of the Windows OS, which is what this discussion is about. Even in the case of X11, though, it can be argued that it is a core runtime environment upon which that applications are built, which makes it effectively part of the OS, though I will agree that the line is somewhat fuzzier in that case.:-)
AFAIK, any CD-R disk will flake given a very small amount of abuse. Aluminum foil isn't naturally sticky, so the only thing holding it in place is the stiffness of the lacquer layer on top of it. All you have to do is take out a compass and drag it across the top of the disc a couple of times to fracture the lacquer layer, and even with the best CD-R media, the foil will come off in large clumps.
Don't get me wrong, such flaking shouldn't happen without abuse... but it's pretty easy to make it happen. Just give your two-year-old physical access to the media and your choice of a pair of scissors, a screwdriver, a spoon, a key, the corner of your computer desk....
Even people that have experienced hard disk failure or floppy disk failure think that burned discs simply will not fail. I'm surprised you haven't encountered such attitudes.
In practice, they're probably right far more often than they are wrong. While it is true that all media are inherently unreliable, magnetic media are particularly unreliable. At least if an optical disc fails, you usually only lose a small portion of the data (unless you break it in half or scratch off the silver layer on a CD-R). With a hard drive, you snap one head off and you're so totally screwed it isn't even funny.
Last night, I cloned off my dying MythTV box after a Seagate 500 GB SATA drive turned into a chainsaw (I could hear the grinding sound as I walked in the door of my house four rooms away). About a year old, incredibly well cooled (barely luke warm), never transported. Thankfully, I had a 500 GB Seagate PATA drive lying around because it wouldn't work in my Series 1 TiVo (a buggy ATA implementation caused it to fail to start loading the kernel about 90% of the time), so I'm back up and running. Even still, my level of trust in Seagate drives just took a rather massive nose dive. There are now precisely zero hard drive vendors on my preferred list.
I've even seen tape drives (okay, camcorders) where a fleck of something on the heads ripped oxide off the tape. Magnetic media is horribly fragile---far more so than optical.
I'd take optical media over any other media. At least there is no physical contact between the read/write mechanism and the recording surface (nor any possibility of accidental contact as is frequently the case in catastrophic hard drive deaths). In the worst case, if you scratch the thing, you can probably fix it by polishing the surface. Worst case is you have to add resin to replace the missing material, then polish it until it is smooth.
Sure, you have the problem of data retention due to dye fading and/or oxidization of the foil layer with optical media, but with modern magnetic media, you have several fundamental design flaws that can be just as bad: the medium being essentially inseparable from the drive mechanism (which is orders of magnitude more likely to fail than the medium), sharp objects (heads) in close proximity to the recording surface, the susceptibility to magnetic fields, the medium being inseparable from the drive electronics (again, orders of magnitude more likely to fail), the fragility risk of glass substrates, the extra cost associated with having to repurchase all of the electronics and mechanism along with the media, etc. That's not even considering the question of superparamagnetism and the need for increasingly complex checksums to prevent random bit flipping on the magnetic media....
IMHO, there are three basic requirements for a good backup medium:
It should be reliable for a reasonable period of time.
It should be cheap enough that you can afford to have at least three relatively recent, viable backups at all times. In the case of non-reusable media, this means you should be able to back up two or three times before the reliability of the earliest backup comes into question. In the case of reusable media, this means that you should be able to have at least three sets of media between which you alternate; failure detection takes care of itself for reusable media.
Individual discs/tapes/* should be large enough that an average computer can be backed up at least once without changing media so that users can do backups while they are at work or asleep.
#3 is currently the killer for all currently-available optical backup media. In fact, all but the most expensive tape drives also fail #3. And of course, if you are buying the really expensive tape drives, the price of the tapes causes them to fail #2.
Don't worry, though. There's little danger of this new technology changing the status quo significantly. By the time this media becomes av
CD-R discs flake. DVD-R discs have the metal layer between two layers of plastic, so they can't flake (unless you mean the label paint). They can oxidize, but not flake. As a result, DVD-R should be much less susceptible to accidental damage than CD-R media.
I'm losing my chance to moderate so I can reply to this. Yes, it is an OS feature. Simple gesture support for devices is easy to do in a driver, but is nowhere near what you really want out of multitouch. An ideal implementation should allow applications to deal with multiple simultaneous touches, drag events, etc. simultaneously. For example, an audio editor application should allow me to use three fingers to push three sliders simultaneously up and ride them while a finger on my other hand touches a mute button on channel 3 to pull it out of the mix because I'm planning to cut that 30 seconds out but haven't had a chance to do it yet.
To handle such things, the application must be able to simultaneously get multiple touch events at different locations that indicate that a finger has gone down at a particular spot and now is moving in a particular manner. These finger events must then remain individually trackable. To handle this correctly requires significant extensions to the event system of the host OS, probably on an opt-in basis to avoid confusing applications that only support simple events like click/drag or lightweight touch events like zoom in/zoom out. Therefore, it pretty much has to be an OS feature.
The only way I can think of to do this without OS changes would be to allow an application to capture the device and take exclusive control and communicate with it directly outside of normal OS channels (e.g. a user client). Those sorts of designs are okay for specialized devices like tablets that only one or two apps will ever care about, but they are hardly ideal for input devices that are intended to be general purpose.
Ten cents to listen to a song once? I gotta get in on that racket. Imagine if I could charge ten cents for every time somebody runs any piece of code I've ever written.... For that matter, can you imagine the Windows engineers adding gratuitous BSODs so people would pay more?:-D
The heck it didn't. It had to do with a complete lack of security on computer systems that were used in financial transactions. It's hard to keep accurate financial records if key financial systems can be trivially compromised. It also represents a HUGE threat to the financial viability of the company, and technically, failure to include such risks as part of your regular corporate reporting to the SEC is a pretty major case of investor fraud, which was the whole point of Sarbanes-Oxley....
Sadly, covering up security problems seems to be the norm in banking circles. Really gives you a lot of trust in their ability to guard your money, doesn't it?
Oh, and here's a similar story from 2005 that also suggests that this is likely SarbOx territory.
Slashdot Mirror
Most bunnies do....
$49 = 156.25 kilobyyes maximum. That's not even 33 bytes per penny.
That's like saying, "Sure, if you go to New York City, you'll get robbed and raped, but at least they probably won't murder you like they would have ten years ago...." :-)
Well, DRM on ephemeral data isn't untenable. You don't really have to make it unbreakable. You just have to make it take long enough that you can't break it on the fly. Most people aren't willing to watch TV on a five minute delay while their computer queues up the encrypted data and attempts to determine the keys....
Unless, of course, your goal for DRM on the ephemeral data is preventing people from recording it... in which case, yeah, it is just as untenable for ephemeral content as it is for any other content....
SMS is cheap? It's something like a billion dollars a gig. That is how they are making profit---not through data charges, but through nickel and diming people who don't realize they're being screwed.
I get the whole push-pull thing, but I think it's an artificial limitation forced by the telcos. Instead of working around it, we should be pushing for unlimited international data plans. That way, you not only get the advantage of no huge surprise bills, but also get the benefit of data for non-mail purposes.
I never said we should abandon VGA suddenly. I said that it is getting harder to get decent VGA monitors, so going forward, buying a computer that lacks DVI is risky if you intend to use it with external displays long-term. The writing is on the wall.
As for the "cheap" thing, unfortunately, unlike full-size laptops (in which the more expensive ones have DVI), in the miniature laptop space, those alternatives don't seem to exist. That may not be a show-stopper for you, but at this point, it is the only flaw left that prevents me purchasing any of these laptops.
1. A DVI connector takes maybe an extra eighth of an inch on either side and a total of an eighth of an inch more in thickness. These machines aren't that tight on space. If they are, though, you could always use Mini-DVI or Micro-DVI (though the latter does not provide analog pins).
2. Go to any store and buy an LCD panel. You will see a handful of sad monitors that are VGA-only. You can recognize these because they are made by obscure manufacturers you've never heard of, are horribly miscalibrated, and are relatively low resolution. Good panels these days are all either DVI or DVI/VGA panels. DVI/VGA panels tend to cost a few bucks more than DVI-only panels.
3. You haven't bought an LCD panel lately, have you? In my experience buying one at Fry's, I'd estimate that more than half of the monitors I saw were DVI-only.
The pins are on the cable, not the computer. Breaking a cable isn't a big deal. Besides, the shell guides the pins into place very well. You have to really screw things up (usually involving foreign objects) to bend a pin on any modern video cable.... :-)
My point, though, was that you can always take a DVI port and connect it to a VGA projector or monitor with a cheap, small, lightweight adapter (which any decent meeting space should already provide unless your media services staff is asleep at the switch). You can't easily take VGA and get a DVI output to drive any of the myriad models of flat panels that don't support VGA. Therefore, if you have to choose one or the other, DVI is the better choice regardless of how many people are likely to have to use an adapter.
That said, if you really want to cater to people with old equipment, either provide an adapter with the machine or provide a VGA connector in addition to the DVI output (mirrored only) using a cheap buffer amp to drive the second output. Either way, you're talking about pennies per unit....
It just doesn't make sense to make products that are not forward-compatible with the current standards just in case one out of a hundred of your users might want to use it with an older device with which the current standards are backwards-compatible.
The others support SSL-encrypted IMAP and SMTP. I just don't see the appeal of the way BB does this stuff....
I disagree. Most modern web pages need at least 1024 pixels wide. You can always make things bigger if a certain app hurts your eyes, but you can never get back resolution that the panel doesn't have. Thus, it is always better to go with a higher resolution than a lower one.
I'm really surprised, however, that nobody has criticized the fact that all these machines use legacy VGA. I mean, is it really too much to ask for them to use DVI? It already costs more money to buy a panel that still supports VGA even today. VGA is on its way out and the only computers I see that still use it are cheap PC laptops. Why!?! Why would anyone build a computer with only analog video output these days? It's not like it is that much more expensive to provide DVI, and I consider any machine that doesn't do so to be very non-future-proof, i.e. a dubious proposition.
These days, the only thing keeping me from buying any of the ultra-mobile machines is the lack of DVI in any machine with a small enough footprint to safely use on an airplane tray table. Netcraft confirmed VGA was dying five years ago. At this point, the only thing left to do is go through its pockets and look for loose change....
That's not quite accurate. The company that bought/took the formula was a company that manufactured electrolyte, not a capacitor company. That flawed electrolyte was sold to about a dozen capacitor manufacturers in Taiwan and Japan, who in turn sold the capacitors to probably thousands of companies. It affected products by almost every major computer vendor, including every manufacturer you mentioned in your post.
IBM
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2003/06/22/ibms-capacitors-are-dodgy-too-but-its-hushed-up
HP
http://news.cnet.com/PCs-plagued-by-bad-capacitors/2100-1041_3-5942647.html
Apple
http://news.cnet.com/Apple-offers-repairs-for-problem-iMacs/2100-1041_3-5841331.html
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=2071244
While we're at it, Dell, Asus, MSI, Shuttle, ECS, Giga-Byte, Abit, and Compaq.
I doubt you can find any computer or motherboard vendor that didn't get bitten by those capacitors on at least one of their products.
That said, I do agree that buying from a major manufacturer is probably a good idea. The advantage of the more reputable, bigger name vendors is that when bad things happen that are outside their control (as this clearly was), they are more likely to stand behind their products even for people who didn't buy the extended warranty....
Well, I suspect we will soon see a lot more people (legally) downloading movies instead of buying DVDs. The average person buys something like 15 DVDs per year. If we transition to a download-based delivery system (which is almost inevitable, IMHO), then even at non-HD resolution, you're talking about the average person downloading and storing some 138 gigabytes per year. For an HD movie at 25 GB of content, you're talking about 375 GB per year. :-)
SheepShaver runs Mac OS 9 on top of the existing OS. Mac OS 9 provides 68k emulation. It should "just work" so long as the app in question could run on a PowerPC-based Mac and you have an appropriate version of Mac OS that was capable of running the app. I could be wrong, though. There might be some PPC instructions (probably supervisor mode) in the 68k emulation code that can't be emulated by Rosetta and/or SheepShaver. At some point, it might be easier to run a 68k emulator directly rather than running an emulator on top of another emulator.
http://www.thefreecountry.com/emulators/macintosh.shtml has a list of other emulators you might try. I'd imagine that any of the Linux-compatible X11-based 68k emulators would be pretty easy to port to Mac OS X's X11 implementation (if nobody has done it already).The windowing system certainly is a part of the Windows OS, which is what this discussion is about. Even in the case of X11, though, it can be argued that it is a core runtime environment upon which that applications are built, which makes it effectively part of the OS, though I will agree that the line is somewhat fuzzier in that case. :-)
AFAIK, any CD-R disk will flake given a very small amount of abuse. Aluminum foil isn't naturally sticky, so the only thing holding it in place is the stiffness of the lacquer layer on top of it. All you have to do is take out a compass and drag it across the top of the disc a couple of times to fracture the lacquer layer, and even with the best CD-R media, the foil will come off in large clumps.
Don't get me wrong, such flaking shouldn't happen without abuse... but it's pretty easy to make it happen. Just give your two-year-old physical access to the media and your choice of a pair of scissors, a screwdriver, a spoon, a key, the corner of your computer desk....
As somebody who does audio recording as a hobby, a terabyte is maybe six months worth of recording on the weekends.... Forget video....
I hear Geico might be hiring. Apparently, the caveman just isn't working out.
:-D
In practice, they're probably right far more often than they are wrong. While it is true that all media are inherently unreliable, magnetic media are particularly unreliable. At least if an optical disc fails, you usually only lose a small portion of the data (unless you break it in half or scratch off the silver layer on a CD-R). With a hard drive, you snap one head off and you're so totally screwed it isn't even funny.
Last night, I cloned off my dying MythTV box after a Seagate 500 GB SATA drive turned into a chainsaw (I could hear the grinding sound as I walked in the door of my house four rooms away). About a year old, incredibly well cooled (barely luke warm), never transported. Thankfully, I had a 500 GB Seagate PATA drive lying around because it wouldn't work in my Series 1 TiVo (a buggy ATA implementation caused it to fail to start loading the kernel about 90% of the time), so I'm back up and running. Even still, my level of trust in Seagate drives just took a rather massive nose dive. There are now precisely zero hard drive vendors on my preferred list.
I've even seen tape drives (okay, camcorders) where a fleck of something on the heads ripped oxide off the tape. Magnetic media is horribly fragile---far more so than optical.
I'd take optical media over any other media. At least there is no physical contact between the read/write mechanism and the recording surface (nor any possibility of accidental contact as is frequently the case in catastrophic hard drive deaths). In the worst case, if you scratch the thing, you can probably fix it by polishing the surface. Worst case is you have to add resin to replace the missing material, then polish it until it is smooth.
Sure, you have the problem of data retention due to dye fading and/or oxidization of the foil layer with optical media, but with modern magnetic media, you have several fundamental design flaws that can be just as bad: the medium being essentially inseparable from the drive mechanism (which is orders of magnitude more likely to fail than the medium), sharp objects (heads) in close proximity to the recording surface, the susceptibility to magnetic fields, the medium being inseparable from the drive electronics (again, orders of magnitude more likely to fail), the fragility risk of glass substrates, the extra cost associated with having to repurchase all of the electronics and mechanism along with the media, etc. That's not even considering the question of superparamagnetism and the need for increasingly complex checksums to prevent random bit flipping on the magnetic media....
IMHO, there are three basic requirements for a good backup medium:
#3 is currently the killer for all currently-available optical backup media. In fact, all but the most expensive tape drives also fail #3. And of course, if you are buying the really expensive tape drives, the price of the tapes causes them to fail #2.
Don't worry, though. There's little danger of this new technology changing the status quo significantly. By the time this media becomes av
CD-R discs flake. DVD-R discs have the metal layer between two layers of plastic, so they can't flake (unless you mean the label paint). They can oxidize, but not flake. As a result, DVD-R should be much less susceptible to accidental damage than CD-R media.
I'm losing my chance to moderate so I can reply to this. Yes, it is an OS feature. Simple gesture support for devices is easy to do in a driver, but is nowhere near what you really want out of multitouch. An ideal implementation should allow applications to deal with multiple simultaneous touches, drag events, etc. simultaneously. For example, an audio editor application should allow me to use three fingers to push three sliders simultaneously up and ride them while a finger on my other hand touches a mute button on channel 3 to pull it out of the mix because I'm planning to cut that 30 seconds out but haven't had a chance to do it yet.
To handle such things, the application must be able to simultaneously get multiple touch events at different locations that indicate that a finger has gone down at a particular spot and now is moving in a particular manner. These finger events must then remain individually trackable. To handle this correctly requires significant extensions to the event system of the host OS, probably on an opt-in basis to avoid confusing applications that only support simple events like click/drag or lightweight touch events like zoom in/zoom out. Therefore, it pretty much has to be an OS feature.
The only way I can think of to do this without OS changes would be to allow an application to capture the device and take exclusive control and communicate with it directly outside of normal OS channels (e.g. a user client). Those sorts of designs are okay for specialized devices like tablets that only one or two apps will ever care about, but they are hardly ideal for input devices that are intended to be general purpose.
Run SheepShaver.
Ten cents to listen to a song once? I gotta get in on that racket. Imagine if I could charge ten cents for every time somebody runs any piece of code I've ever written.... For that matter, can you imagine the Windows engineers adding gratuitous BSODs so people would pay more? :-D
The heck it didn't. It had to do with a complete lack of security on computer systems that were used in financial transactions. It's hard to keep accurate financial records if key financial systems can be trivially compromised. It also represents a HUGE threat to the financial viability of the company, and technically, failure to include such risks as part of your regular corporate reporting to the SEC is a pretty major case of investor fraud, which was the whole point of Sarbanes-Oxley....
Sadly, covering up security problems seems to be the norm in banking circles. Really gives you a lot of trust in their ability to guard your money, doesn't it?
Oh, and here's a similar story from 2005 that also suggests that this is likely SarbOx territory.
Remember, kids, like TSA Panda says, the appearance of security is more important than actual security.
BTW, Sarbanes-Oxley has whistleblower protection that may get this company in deep, deep s**t for firing this blogger....