If you think this issue is important, you should write some letters. Today, I wrote both my Senators, my House Rep, the FCC, and my cable company. Personally, I am appalled at this douchebaggery. Someone else said it best: selective throttling is censorship. It is therefore a violation of the First Amendment. Also keep in mind that some would-be ISPs are the same folks offering illegal wiretaps. Lastly, as consumers we *must* demand better. I live in Los Angeles, one of the most urbanized areas in the United States and, in my neighborhood, Time Warner is my only viable option for high speed internet access. It's just plain wrong. We must demand better.
The referenced article says nothing about packet resets. Perhaps you could point me to the article which provides proof that packets are being reset by comcast?
All the shrill and panicky anger I hear about this seems a bit suspect to me. Anyone who has studied operating system code should know that trade-offs are always required in the design of systems that manage a limited resource. If you are coding a scheduler to manage access to the cpu, there is no perfect solution. You have to make decisions about when to run BIG jobs (like computing PI to the 6-millionth decimal place) and when to run small jobs (like responding to a keystroke).
Handling network traffic is an analogous situation. There are big jobs (e.g., transferring that multi-GB collection of secret MySpace photos) and there are small jobs (e.g., signalling a head-shot in a game of Counterstrike). In order to make room for the applications that need immediate response and low latency, you have to limit the big jobs so you have some overhead in which to move.
I hate my cable company as much as anybody does, but let's not fly off the handle until there is more damning evidence.
US household current is 120 Volts AC with a period of 60Hz. Voltages worldwide vary and can be as high as 240V AC varying at 50hz. Most laptop power supplies these days have a 2-part cord. The transformer box (the heavy box in your laptop cord) connects to the laptop itself with some connector specific to the manufacturer. The transformer connect to the wall with the same kind of power connector a desktop pc uses. I'm not certain, but I think you can just swap out the cord that connects to the wall and many transformers should handle the varying voltages and frequencies you might encounter (look for AC 100-240V 50/60hz on the transformer box's label).
The trick then would be to get a cord for the many different wall outlets you might run into.
As for weight/ruggedness, I don't really know. My guess is that solid-state storage is lighter and more rugged than hard drives, but quite a bit more expensive.
Also, I'm not entirely certain, but I've heard stories about laptops you can power with a hand crank - although i doubt they can burn DVDs.
Bless you! I experienced the same explosion from two Irish guys and have been looking for a counterattack ever since. I now consider myself properly armed.
I think it's also worth pointing out that Noah Webster's "A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language" was published in 1806. The Oxford English Dictionary wasn't first published until 1928 or something...in fact, Oxford University only formed a "Unregistered Words Committee" in 1857 -- more than 50 years later.
Call this flamebait if you must, but the hubris of the British isles must be called to task. Even if it is the reason for America's existence.
I believe this is a case of M$ hedging their bets. The built-in hd-dvd player would have dramatically increased the unit cost. It also would have tied the X-box's fortunes to the HD format war. There is a distinct possibility that XBox will eventually offer an outboard bluray player. I believe some announcement was made acknowleding this possibility.
Personally, I think that was a prudent decision by Microsoft. Had they chosen to side with HD-DVD they wouldn't have gotten the early jump in console sales that they did due the higher price of the console.
What's killing me is that I've seen stand-alone Bluray players for $450! You can get a PS3 for almost the same price. I've seen internal bluray drives for PC for about $250.
The relationship between a population of creates and a population of predators that feed on that creature can be modeled by a nonlinear differential equation. I can't remember the specifics but the basic idea is that both populations experience periodic oscillations in their population. When there are a lot of mosquitoes, the creatures that eat them experience population growth because there's plenty of food around. When the predators population grows too large, they eat all the mosquitoes and then die off because there's nothing left to eat.
The bottom line is that we can likely expect a huge mosquito rebound at some point.
I like Edward Tufte's books, but he's got some kind of plugin in his page to show that video. When you try to click-install in firefox you get 'unknown plugin'. He should be on top of that.
I agree that RIAA's methods suck and that music industry is full of scumbags but that's pretty insular thinking on your part and wrong on several points:
1) It's just plain wrong to suggest that the music biz in its entirety doesn't care about consumers. Without consumers the music biz wouldn't exist in the first place. A more nuanced argument would suggest they don't care for consumers who rampantly share their purchases with friends in lossless format while at the same time loving those idiots who purchase ringtones of any kind. Your assertion that the industry has been itching to screw us sounds pretty paranoid to me.
2) Complaining that "jobs are getting eliminated" is not extortion. Whining? Maybe. But not extortion. It *is* a relevant fact.
3) You reference an earlier era where copies were not IDENTICAL IN EVERY WAY to the original. Generation loss is perhaps a 'natural' form of copy protection but might be cynically deemed planned obsolescence. To argue that they "didn't need" this protection is begging the question in our current discussion. You say there's no need for DRM. I'm arguing that we just might need some level of DRM even if it's just generation loss.
4) The speed of tape vs. dvd downloading copying depends on several factors: tape length, tape copy mechanism, bandwith of network connection, etc. If you have a 100Mbps internet connection like you might at M.I.T or something, you can download 4.7GB in 6 and a half minutes. Copying a VHS tape requires maybe 1/3 of the running length of the movie if you have a high-speed copier and will look *horrible*.
Most importantly what you said contributes nothing to the discussion at hand. You hate the music biz? Fine! You won't be upset then when it dries up and all you get is home-made roadhouse blues (or some guy playing pachelbel's canon on guitar) on youtube.
The question at hand is "What sort of economic model replaces the existing one in the music industry". Some of us worry that when it's trivial to share music, then everyone gets it for free and no one pays for it and there will be no money made to make more music and what will happen is a general whithering of music in general. Yes the way I just expressed it sounds ridiculous and impossible but what doesn't sound so ridiculous is wondering if EMI and Universal music, etc. are gone, who else can afford to buy or use a Neve 88D? You might argue that the motion picture industry will still need them but movies are facing the same fate as music. It's just a matter of time. Does this mean everything is going to be recorded on some cheap ass tascam hard disk recorder? Who's gonna pay for artists to go in the studio for six months like Pink Floyd did for Dark Side of the Moon? OK fine you hate Dark Side of the Moon? Then go and listen to all those Korn and Linkin' Park ripoffs out there producing their own garbage music and giving it away for free./p
I know I sound like a music biz apologist here but I'm not. I just want to see what comes next. Also, I'm sincerely concerned about the demise of an entire industry. I don't even watch TV but the writer's strike here in LA has had an impact on everbody: waiters, actors, web designers, software developers, etc. If the music industry evaporates, then everyone who serves the music industry will be out of work. And after the music industry, it's the movie and TV industries. And after them, it's all digitizable intellectual property. The U.S. manafacturing segment is in decline and we are increasingly a service economy. Let's hope we don't all end up working at Starbucks slinging coffee.
What you fail to realize is that it's easier to email someone an MP3 file (which suffers no quality loss in transit) and copying a record 20 years ago meant making a shitty cassette copy. It's very very different.
Somebody tagged this article 'idiot' here at slashdot and I think that's not really fair.
As much as I hate DRM getting in the way of me enjoying my music as I like, I do believe that the music industry is completely screwed without *some* kind of DRM. Why? Because I can buy a song in MP3 format that has no DRM and email it to ALL of my friends. Free. With no penalty and no signal degradation. This is a very different than the old days when:
* Albums were big - who can copy an album? * Cassettes came out - the cassette copy always suffered generational loss * CDs were big - you'd still have to buy a cd and burn it and give it to someone.
I don't need to know the person I email some MP3 to. And that person can mail it to all his friends. This is a very very different situation. The barriers to lossless sharing are NULL.
I can't say it upsets me too much to see the horrible beast that is the music industry collapse on itself. On the other hand, what about lost jobs? There are all those CD manufacturing companies and the guys who'll burn 1000 copies of your demo for $1 each. Then there are the stores that sell CDs (R.I.P tower records).
I know - "DRM won't stop pirates." That's not the point. It *will* stop Cindy the Secretary from emailing Britney Spears' latest to all her friends.
I know I know = "But with each new distribution technology the overall money pie has grown". That may still be the case. Personally I applaud the dramatic decrease in the cost of music production technology and the digital distribution possibilities which are many-fold increase in efficiency. It means bands can make music with smaller investments and the consumer can get the music they want much more easily.
HOWEVER, jobs are getting eliminated. Where are the new jobs being created?
PHP is the shiznit. It's a got a huge collection of extremely useful native functions. Some of my favorite functions and primitives in 5.2: * json_encode * json_decode * file_get_contents * fgetcsv * preg_match * for...each
These make it really easy to import data from text files, interface with JSON, etc. I know it's pretty noobish, but I also like the weak data typing. These things are the building blocks which make PHP so easy and expressive for new users. You don't waste time writing your own file parsing routines or casting variable types or searching for some library.
I'd like to see a poll here at/. : WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE SERVER SCRIPTING LANGUAGE.
I have no first-hand experience, but I understand that the virtual machine implementation on any given platform is supposed to buffer your Java application from specifics of the platform. 'Immunity' of a sort. This would be helpful if you were trying to interact with GUI or implement a threaded application.
I'm certainly not pining for them, but it would appear that the state of Maryland is--at least for data storage. They offer interesting security improvements too! Hacking a punch-card stack requires that you (or your robot minion) have direct physical access to the stack. Also, your punch cards might have a better chance of retaining their data in the event of a huge electromagnetic blast in your area whereas your tape might be wiped clean if the janitor gets too close with the vacuum motor.
Yeah you're right no one wants to go back there. I personally don't see the vast majority of programmers (if you can call them that) wanting to go back to c/c++ when they can write code without regard to the underlying OS or platform.
I had to learn assembler, pascal, c, and c++ in college and I'm thankful for the understanding I have. On the other hand, I was delighted to work with PHP, a weakly-typed language which would automatically cast variables from one type to another depending on context. As far as I can tell the performance penalty for that hand-holding is trivial in the web applications I've written.
And what about all the system calls you might need in a C or C++ program to get at a socket or file system? Write it for Linux then try to run your program on Windows or a Mac. It might work. It probably won't.
I doubt the variety of applications and data available on the internet would be nearly as vast if everything had to be written in C or C++. Or Perl for that matter. If you're writing a first-person shooter and need 500 frames per second, then C or C++ is your best friend. If you are writing Zork for myStupidGameSite.com then you no longer have to write in MDL.
From an economic perspective I think these 'easier' languages have obvious benefits. They result in a larger, more robust, more diverse application ecosystem where a creative mind need not be discouraged by the tedium of learning pointer arithmetic to implement a useful program with modest resource needs. People who need better performance can always hire an expert like you!
Java runs on a virtual machine, isolating the programmer from the details of the OS. Write once, run almost anywhere, right? Seems if I was a teacher I'd want to teach that rather than wasting time on some specific OS which won't even exist when they get out of college.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone have a link to the original filings by the scumbag telcos?
If you think this issue is important, you should write some letters. Today, I wrote both my Senators, my House Rep, the FCC, and my cable company. Personally, I am appalled at this douchebaggery. Someone else said it best: selective throttling is censorship. It is therefore a violation of the First Amendment. Also keep in mind that some would-be ISPs are the same folks offering illegal wiretaps. Lastly, as consumers we *must* demand better. I live in Los Angeles, one of the most urbanized areas in the United States and, in my neighborhood, Time Warner is my only viable option for high speed internet access. It's just plain wrong. We must demand better.
Find your Senate rep here:
http://www.senate.gov/
Find your house rep here:
http://www.house.gov/
You can comment on the FCC proceedings here using proceeding numbers 07-52 and 08-7
http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/upload_v2.cgi
I would highly encourage use of snail mail. It has greater impact when bags of mail arrive in somebody's office.
WELL SAID. It's that damn easy.
The referenced article says nothing about packet resets. Perhaps you could point me to the article which provides proof that packets are being reset by comcast?
The referenced article says nothing like that.
All the shrill and panicky anger I hear about this seems a bit suspect to me. Anyone who has studied operating system code should know that trade-offs are always required in the design of systems that manage a limited resource. If you are coding a scheduler to manage access to the cpu, there is no perfect solution. You have to make decisions about when to run BIG jobs (like computing PI to the 6-millionth decimal place) and when to run small jobs (like responding to a keystroke).
Handling network traffic is an analogous situation. There are big jobs (e.g., transferring that multi-GB collection of secret MySpace photos) and there are small jobs (e.g., signalling a head-shot in a game of Counterstrike). In order to make room for the applications that need immediate response and low latency, you have to limit the big jobs so you have some overhead in which to move.
I hate my cable company as much as anybody does, but let's not fly off the handle until there is more damning evidence.
If the voltate is 240V then BE VERY VERY CAREFUL. It hurts like a motherfucker to get shocked by that stuff.
Except for the part about weed, this interview is completely useless.
US household current is 120 Volts AC with a period of 60Hz. Voltages worldwide vary and can be as high as 240V AC varying at 50hz. Most laptop power supplies these days have a 2-part cord. The transformer box (the heavy box in your laptop cord) connects to the laptop itself with some connector specific to the manufacturer. The transformer connect to the wall with the same kind of power connector a desktop pc uses. I'm not certain, but I think you can just swap out the cord that connects to the wall and many transformers should handle the varying voltages and frequencies you might encounter (look for AC 100-240V 50/60hz on the transformer box's label).
The trick then would be to get a cord for the many different wall outlets you might run into.
As for weight/ruggedness, I don't really know. My guess is that solid-state storage is lighter and more rugged than hard drives, but quite a bit more expensive.
Also, I'm not entirely certain, but I've heard stories about laptops you can power with a hand crank - although i doubt they can burn DVDs.
Bless you! I experienced the same explosion from two Irish guys and have been looking for a counterattack ever since. I now consider myself properly armed.
I think it's also worth pointing out that Noah Webster's "A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language" was published in 1806. The Oxford English Dictionary wasn't first published until 1928 or something...in fact, Oxford University only formed a "Unregistered Words Committee" in 1857 -- more than 50 years later.
Call this flamebait if you must, but the hubris of the British isles must be called to task. Even if it is the reason for America's existence.
Don't really mean to say the "maths don't add up". 'Math' after all is short for 'mathematics,' which is pural.
I believe this is a case of M$ hedging their bets. The built-in hd-dvd player would have dramatically increased the unit cost. It also would have tied the X-box's fortunes to the HD format war. There is a distinct possibility that XBox will eventually offer an outboard bluray player. I believe some announcement was made acknowleding this possibility.
Personally, I think that was a prudent decision by Microsoft. Had they chosen to side with HD-DVD they wouldn't have gotten the early jump in console sales that they did due the higher price of the console.
What's killing me is that I've seen stand-alone Bluray players for $450! You can get a PS3 for almost the same price. I've seen internal bluray drives for PC for about $250.
The relationship between a population of creates and a population of predators that feed on that creature can be modeled by a nonlinear differential equation. I can't remember the specifics but the basic idea is that both populations experience periodic oscillations in their population. When there are a lot of mosquitoes, the creatures that eat them experience population growth because there's plenty of food around. When the predators population grows too large, they eat all the mosquitoes and then die off because there's nothing left to eat.
The bottom line is that we can likely expect a huge mosquito rebound at some point.
I like Edward Tufte's books, but he's got some kind of plugin in his page to show that video. When you try to click-install in firefox you get 'unknown plugin'. He should be on top of that.
I agree that RIAA's methods suck and that music industry is full of scumbags but that's pretty insular thinking on your part and wrong on several points: 1) It's just plain wrong to suggest that the music biz in its entirety doesn't care about consumers. Without consumers the music biz wouldn't exist in the first place. A more nuanced argument would suggest they don't care for consumers who rampantly share their purchases with friends in lossless format while at the same time loving those idiots who purchase ringtones of any kind. Your assertion that the industry has been itching to screw us sounds pretty paranoid to me.
2) Complaining that "jobs are getting eliminated" is not extortion. Whining? Maybe. But not extortion. It *is* a relevant fact.
3) You reference an earlier era where copies were not IDENTICAL IN EVERY WAY to the original. Generation loss is perhaps a 'natural' form of copy protection but might be cynically deemed planned obsolescence. To argue that they "didn't need" this protection is begging the question in our current discussion. You say there's no need for DRM. I'm arguing that we just might need some level of DRM even if it's just generation loss.
4) The speed of tape vs. dvd downloading copying depends on several factors: tape length, tape copy mechanism, bandwith of network connection, etc. If you have a 100Mbps internet connection like you might at M.I.T or something, you can download 4.7GB in 6 and a half minutes. Copying a VHS tape requires maybe 1/3 of the running length of the movie if you have a high-speed copier and will look *horrible*. Most importantly what you said contributes nothing to the discussion at hand. You hate the music biz? Fine! You won't be upset then when it dries up and all you get is home-made roadhouse blues (or some guy playing pachelbel's canon on guitar) on youtube. The question at hand is "What sort of economic model replaces the existing one in the music industry". Some of us worry that when it's trivial to share music, then everyone gets it for free and no one pays for it and there will be no money made to make more music and what will happen is a general whithering of music in general. Yes the way I just expressed it sounds ridiculous and impossible but what doesn't sound so ridiculous is wondering if EMI and Universal music, etc. are gone, who else can afford to buy or use a Neve 88D? You might argue that the motion picture industry will still need them but movies are facing the same fate as music. It's just a matter of time. Does this mean everything is going to be recorded on some cheap ass tascam hard disk recorder? Who's gonna pay for artists to go in the studio for six months like Pink Floyd did for Dark Side of the Moon? OK fine you hate Dark Side of the Moon? Then go and listen to all those Korn and Linkin' Park ripoffs out there producing their own garbage music and giving it away for free./p I know I sound like a music biz apologist here but I'm not. I just want to see what comes next. Also, I'm sincerely concerned about the demise of an entire industry. I don't even watch TV but the writer's strike here in LA has had an impact on everbody: waiters, actors, web designers, software developers, etc. If the music industry evaporates, then everyone who serves the music industry will be out of work. And after the music industry, it's the movie and TV industries. And after them, it's all digitizable intellectual property. The U.S. manafacturing segment is in decline and we are increasingly a service economy. Let's hope we don't all end up working at Starbucks slinging coffee.
What you fail to realize is that it's easier to email someone an MP3 file (which suffers no quality loss in transit) and copying a record 20 years ago meant making a shitty cassette copy. It's very very different.
Somebody tagged this article 'idiot' here at slashdot and I think that's not really fair.
As much as I hate DRM getting in the way of me enjoying my music as I like, I do believe that the music industry is completely screwed without *some* kind of DRM. Why? Because I can buy a song in MP3 format that has no DRM and email it to ALL of my friends. Free. With no penalty and no signal degradation. This is a very different than the old days when:
* Albums were big - who can copy an album?
* Cassettes came out - the cassette copy always suffered generational loss
* CDs were big - you'd still have to buy a cd and burn it and give it to someone.
I don't need to know the person I email some MP3 to. And that person can mail it to all his friends. This is a very very different situation. The barriers to lossless sharing are NULL.
I can't say it upsets me too much to see the horrible beast that is the music industry collapse on itself. On the other hand, what about lost jobs? There are all those CD manufacturing companies and the guys who'll burn 1000 copies of your demo for $1 each. Then there are the stores that sell CDs (R.I.P tower records).
I know - "DRM won't stop pirates." That's not the point. It *will* stop Cindy the Secretary from emailing Britney Spears' latest to all her friends.
I know I know = "But with each new distribution technology the overall money pie has grown". That may still be the case. Personally I applaud the dramatic decrease in the cost of music production technology and the digital distribution possibilities which are many-fold increase in efficiency. It means bands can make music with smaller investments and the consumer can get the music they want much more easily.
HOWEVER, jobs are getting eliminated. Where are the new jobs being created?
WELL PUT!
/. : WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE SERVER SCRIPTING LANGUAGE.
PHP is the shiznit. It's a got a huge collection of extremely useful native functions. Some of my favorite functions and primitives in 5.2:
* json_encode
* json_decode
* file_get_contents
* fgetcsv
* preg_match
* for...each
These make it really easy to import data from text files, interface with JSON, etc. I know it's pretty noobish, but I also like the weak data typing. These things are the building blocks which make PHP so easy and expressive for new users. You don't waste time writing your own file parsing routines or casting variable types or searching for some library.
I'd like to see a poll here at
The official wow site is worldofwarcraft.com
The standard monthly rate for US Subscribers is $15/month. I understand that the Asian average is considerably lower. The average is NOT $15/month.
I have no first-hand experience, but I understand that the virtual machine implementation on any given platform is supposed to buffer your Java application from specifics of the platform. 'Immunity' of a sort. This would be helpful if you were trying to interact with GUI or implement a threaded application.
I'm certainly not pining for them, but it would appear that the state of Maryland is--at least for data storage. They offer interesting security improvements too! Hacking a punch-card stack requires that you (or your robot minion) have direct physical access to the stack. Also, your punch cards might have a better chance of retaining their data in the event of a huge electromagnetic blast in your area whereas your tape might be wiped clean if the janitor gets too close with the vacuum motor.
Yeah you're right no one wants to go back there. I personally don't see the vast majority of programmers (if you can call them that) wanting to go back to c/c++ when they can write code without regard to the underlying OS or platform.
Perhaps you should try to think of a Java assignment that requires any system-specific code?
I had to learn assembler, pascal, c, and c++ in college and I'm thankful for the understanding I have. On the other hand, I was delighted to work with PHP, a weakly-typed language which would automatically cast variables from one type to another depending on context. As far as I can tell the performance penalty for that hand-holding is trivial in the web applications I've written.
And what about all the system calls you might need in a C or C++ program to get at a socket or file system? Write it for Linux then try to run your program on Windows or a Mac. It might work. It probably won't.
I doubt the variety of applications and data available on the internet would be nearly as vast if everything had to be written in C or C++. Or Perl for that matter. If you're writing a first-person shooter and need 500 frames per second, then C or C++ is your best friend. If you are writing Zork for myStupidGameSite.com then you no longer have to write in MDL.
From an economic perspective I think these 'easier' languages have obvious benefits. They result in a larger, more robust, more diverse application ecosystem where a creative mind need not be discouraged by the tedium of learning pointer arithmetic to implement a useful program with modest resource needs. People who need better performance can always hire an expert like you!
Java runs on a virtual machine, isolating the programmer from the details of the OS. Write once, run almost anywhere, right? Seems if I was a teacher I'd want to teach that rather than wasting time on some specific OS which won't even exist when they get out of college.