I think that an important difference between the "smartcard programmers" that DirectTV is suing for and the standard smartcard readers (which are also writers of course, since they really don't do anything but buffer some voltages as far as I can tell) is that the ones designed to reprogram DirectTV smart cards have specific circuitry to "glitch" the DirecTV card and bypass the tamper protection on the card. Granted you can use the readers with "glitching" circuitry to program normal legal cards but its hard to argue that a device with special circuitry to bypass tamper resistance is for any other purpose than the illegal one when for much cheaper you can get a normal writer that will achieve the legal results.
I think the missing fact here is that the readers in question have extra circuitry for "glitching" a card and thus bypassing any of the tamper-proof protection mechanisms. The reader/programmer from sun/amex/target does not have this extra circuitry and could not be used (without changes) to reprogram a DirecTV card.
ISP's will be willing to switch to mozilla when thier userbase is comfortable using it. Right now most ISP's require windows as an OS to use thier services (mainly support) and so IE is a given that they know everyone has and can teach them to use.
But if they freely offer it for upload on a public network like that, would they actually have a right to sue someone for accepting it? It seems like if they provide the files on a free network they are in effect saying we aren't asking anyone to pay for these. To come back later and impose some sort of contract or liability on the person that downloaded it seems sort of wrong somehow.
That said, the RIAA is going after people that share out the songs, which is a FAR more clear cut case. They get a list of your songs, make sure that at least a few of them are truely illegal songs, and bam you are in trouble. Chances are they will monitor the size of the share regularily to show a pattern of illegal behavior to strengthen thier case.
Anyone know the technicalities for sharing a cover song? I know there are specific rules but I'm not sure where to find them. I'm sort of surprised I haven't gotten any cease and desist letters for the cover songs I have on my site (other than the fact they are such low quality I doubt the RIAA would worry about anyone downloading them let alone confusing them for the original).
I think what they mean is that you disable ring detection. Most people have no reason to have the modem in the laptop "answer" the phone when it rings, they only use it to dial out.
Yeah the "disable phone line" probably just sends the ring voltage to ground, of course ground includes the entire frame of the computer (because thats easy). If you happen to complete the connection between the frame and a ground the energy will travel through you instead of down the power cord or into the battery.
Now that I understand it, I think its not such an uncommon occurance to have ring detection disabled (which is what I think they mean by "phone line disabled") and have the computer plugged into the wall. Then its just a matter of time before you connect yourself between the frame and ground.
My curiousity is up now because why wouldn't you get zapped for the same reason if you are running on battery power? Maybe the battery is better at soaking the extra current, or maybe the resistance on the connection to ground in the AC power supply is not good.
I thought that a lot of the new arcade platforms were going to more commodity hardware inside. I know that there were arcade machines slated to come out on an upgraded PS2 and upgraded XBOX platform.
I think the idea is develope for hardware that is easy to come by and well understood by your developers. Buy yourself some advantage from network effect and markets of scale.
Eh, the part of.NET that they hyped (centralized services) may or may not happen, it certainly failed to happen in the spectacular way that MS wanted in the first place (witness the end of hailstorm) but the ideas may still happen. Just look at the article on the economics of distributed computing, it had a whole section on how web services may be able to allow people to win the advantage of having megahosts do the computing work instead of having it done in house.
I think the issue is MS tried to revolutionize an industry that didn't want to be revolutionized. In the end I think many of the ideas of.NET will see fruitation (not necessarily through the work of MS) but its something that has to come slowly, people weren't ready to flip the switch and move all of thier computing to some central location owned by some big name that they had to trust. As the price points start to outweigh the fears I think we will see a move to.NET type services.
Not that you need a response, but I was on topic both for the thread and the entire conversation. The parent (or one of its parents) mentioned that the Fire GL card was supported for linux and I was stating why this wasn't really a good choice for most peoples use. Also, if you use the DRI/XFree86 drivers, are all the windows rendered in 3d? If they are no problem (until you hit the console) if not then my point stands.
Except that in my experience the Fire GL cards suck for consumer uses. They are highly optimized for CAD and other high end 3d tasks. I wish I could get the Fire GL on my dev machine ripped out and tossed in the gutter, it is awful at 2d graphics which is what a majority of the work for a windows workstation is.
Isn't GCC part of the GNU "system". I'd say that the community would be a lot further behind where they are now if they didn't have a common complier to work with.
Another problem with Seattle traffic is that a major north south route not only for the area but for the entire west coast (I5) runs through the middle of downtown and cannot be expanded (what do we do with the convention center).
Traffic in seattle is a hard question, I would love mass transit if it did a better job of getting me from the outskirts to downtown. My biggest problem is late night runs, if you are downtown past 10pm (earlier to some locations) you can't get back to the eastside, or at least its not terribly easy.
Lets not even talk of the disaster that is light rail, a possibly great idea that got totally FUBAR and wasted billions of dollars that could have been applied to the problem of traffic.
Well the plan is to auction the stickers monthly on ebay until they abolish the program completely. It sounds like there will be a fixed number per month.
You are correct that they may cater to the very rich, but at this point all you need to do to get in the car pool lane is put another person in your car and they are virtually empty most of the day so it must not be worth much to people.
They will never use the Mobile version of windows on tablet PC. The whole idea of tablet pc is to have a full desktop OS (Windows XP Tablet Edition) on hardware the size of a notebook. Its a "full power" pc with features of a pocket PC.
PocketPC always has windows in the name, since it was Windows CE Pocket PC. Renaming is definitely a marketing thing though, when you rename something people think its new and give it another look. I don't think this is bad, its just the way things work. I'm glad that you can recognize that just because the name changed doesn't mean anything else changed, but its no reason to be upset about a product.
He said nothing about GPL software not being commercially viable, what he said was that when you released under the GPL your software was free. Both as in beer and as in speech. When you release under GPL the ONLY compensation you can expect (the only one garunteed by the license) is that your source remains open. Other than that you are lucky to get anything.
Thats the reality of the situation, and a further reality is that if people don't have to pay, they won't. I am a very firm believer that the OSS community will shrivel up and die if they succeed in making all software free. I have no way of actually knowing but my gut instinct is that the majority of OSS contributors fit in a few small classes, people learning to be programmers to get a job in industry, those currently in industry that do it as a hobby, and those that retired from industry and do it for fun, and teachers (who make money teaching people to program to go into industry). I think that if all software were to become free the monetary incentive to make that software would shrink to the point of not attracting good programmers, the industry would die, and the majority of contributors to open source would have to get real jobs like plumbing and checking groceries. Until that day we live in a utopia where everyone helps everyone out because we all love each other, OSS can't be successful or it will die.
What confuses me is whether the actual debugging process is slower, or whether it is the bug fixing process?
The speed of debugging the actual project is a function of code complexity and code quality which is not necessarily related to whether it is open or closed source. It may well be that more open source projects are less complex, or higher quality than closed source but this does not mean that if your project is open source it would be easier to debug.
On the other hand bug fix speed may well be impacted by the release model. If you release all the time (daily in some open source models) you would nearly always see bug fixes faster than a process that releases less often. Again this is not a function of open source or closed source. I will admit that open source projects allow "releases" more often because usually you can grab code directly from the CVS.
I don't know how that would work. I think you may not be counted as an MSN 8 subscriber unless you install the MSN 8 software (a wrapper around IE with some admittedly cool features but lots of bloat) and sign in. Basically this situation is supposed to be win/win for the ISP and MS. The ISP no longer needs to provide e-mail, homepage or web space because MS provides it as part of being and MSN 8 user and MS gets more MSN 8 users.
well MSN is partnering with quite a few broadband providers and cell phone providers to distribute MSN as the default software. (Verizon and qwest come to mind)
I think the big point here is MS has decided they can do a better job writing search software than the people they currently contract with. Personally I hope they can because I don't much like MSN search (even though I only hit it the few accidental times I typo on a URL)
It depends on why you are using the clustering, I use NT clusters at work all the time to increase reliability of the system. It doesn't help performance one bit in my situation (and isn't meant to) but if one node of the cluster goes down all the services start up on the other node and there is next to no downtime.
The big deal is first off they were trying to be devious and not include full speed parts but have people think they were getting full speed parts. The second problem is this isn't a device, its the host. If you buy a USB 2.0 device but it really runs at 12mbps no big deal if thats enough bandwidth to do the job. If you buy a USB 2.0 host expecting it to handle 480mbps and it doesn't you will be very upset when you hook up that high speed device (or more likely a couple slower speed devices) and it runs like crap.
I think the point he was making is there might be opportunity to create a home office solution from this technology. I am sure he assumed that someone would need to develop a low cost and easy to install solution before it would be useful.
I don't know but I think you might be better off with GigE over copper and run those extra wires.
I had a number of computers with 1mhz processors and 4k ram. I love looking at my old Kilobyte magazines and seeing advertisements for 4k memory boards for $600 and more:)
I think the bigger problem with getting newbies to program is that programmers are sort of elite. When I first started programming I did silly things like make an arrow "fly" across the screen by doing a very very simple text mode animation, which made my peers thing "wow that guy is amazing". Now I'd get laughed out of the room for the same program. I think that new programmers will have a hard time getting past that first hump because there isn't enough appreciation of the small stuff.
I think that an important difference between the "smartcard programmers" that DirectTV is suing for and the standard smartcard readers (which are also writers of course, since they really don't do anything but buffer some voltages as far as I can tell) is that the ones designed to reprogram DirectTV smart cards have specific circuitry to "glitch" the DirecTV card and bypass the tamper protection on the card. Granted you can use the readers with "glitching" circuitry to program normal legal cards but its hard to argue that a device with special circuitry to bypass tamper resistance is for any other purpose than the illegal one when for much cheaper you can get a normal writer that will achieve the legal results.
I think the missing fact here is that the readers in question have extra circuitry for "glitching" a card and thus bypassing any of the tamper-proof protection mechanisms. The reader/programmer from sun/amex/target does not have this extra circuitry and could not be used (without changes) to reprogram a DirecTV card.
ISP's will be willing to switch to mozilla when thier userbase is comfortable using it. Right now most ISP's require windows as an OS to use thier services (mainly support) and so IE is a given that they know everyone has and can teach them to use.
That said, the RIAA is going after people that share out the songs, which is a FAR more clear cut case. They get a list of your songs, make sure that at least a few of them are truely illegal songs, and bam you are in trouble. Chances are they will monitor the size of the share regularily to show a pattern of illegal behavior to strengthen thier case.
Anyone know the technicalities for sharing a cover song? I know there are specific rules but I'm not sure where to find them. I'm sort of surprised I haven't gotten any cease and desist letters for the cover songs I have on my site (other than the fact they are such low quality I doubt the RIAA would worry about anyone downloading them let alone confusing them for the original).
I think what they mean is that you disable ring detection. Most people have no reason to have the modem in the laptop "answer" the phone when it rings, they only use it to dial out.
Now that I understand it, I think its not such an uncommon occurance to have ring detection disabled (which is what I think they mean by "phone line disabled") and have the computer plugged into the wall. Then its just a matter of time before you connect yourself between the frame and ground.
My curiousity is up now because why wouldn't you get zapped for the same reason if you are running on battery power? Maybe the battery is better at soaking the extra current, or maybe the resistance on the connection to ground in the AC power supply is not good.
I think the idea is develope for hardware that is easy to come by and well understood by your developers. Buy yourself some advantage from network effect and markets of scale.
I think the issue is MS tried to revolutionize an industry that didn't want to be revolutionized. In the end I think many of the ideas of .NET will see fruitation (not necessarily through the work of MS) but its something that has to come slowly, people weren't ready to flip the switch and move all of thier computing to some central location owned by some big name that they had to trust. As the price points start to outweigh the fears I think we will see a move to .NET type services.
Not that you need a response, but I was on topic both for the thread and the entire conversation. The parent (or one of its parents) mentioned that the Fire GL card was supported for linux and I was stating why this wasn't really a good choice for most peoples use. Also, if you use the DRI/XFree86 drivers, are all the windows rendered in 3d? If they are no problem (until you hit the console) if not then my point stands.
Except that in my experience the Fire GL cards suck for consumer uses. They are highly optimized for CAD and other high end 3d tasks. I wish I could get the Fire GL on my dev machine ripped out and tossed in the gutter, it is awful at 2d graphics which is what a majority of the work for a windows workstation is.
Isn't GCC part of the GNU "system". I'd say that the community would be a lot further behind where they are now if they didn't have a common complier to work with.
Yeah my mom and dad would both freak the second C: went away. They wouldn't be able to find any files.
Traffic in seattle is a hard question, I would love mass transit if it did a better job of getting me from the outskirts to downtown. My biggest problem is late night runs, if you are downtown past 10pm (earlier to some locations) you can't get back to the eastside, or at least its not terribly easy.
Lets not even talk of the disaster that is light rail, a possibly great idea that got totally FUBAR and wasted billions of dollars that could have been applied to the problem of traffic.
You are correct that they may cater to the very rich, but at this point all you need to do to get in the car pool lane is put another person in your car and they are virtually empty most of the day so it must not be worth much to people.
PocketPC always has windows in the name, since it was Windows CE Pocket PC. Renaming is definitely a marketing thing though, when you rename something people think its new and give it another look. I don't think this is bad, its just the way things work. I'm glad that you can recognize that just because the name changed doesn't mean anything else changed, but its no reason to be upset about a product.
Thats the reality of the situation, and a further reality is that if people don't have to pay, they won't. I am a very firm believer that the OSS community will shrivel up and die if they succeed in making all software free. I have no way of actually knowing but my gut instinct is that the majority of OSS contributors fit in a few small classes, people learning to be programmers to get a job in industry, those currently in industry that do it as a hobby, and those that retired from industry and do it for fun, and teachers (who make money teaching people to program to go into industry). I think that if all software were to become free the monetary incentive to make that software would shrink to the point of not attracting good programmers, the industry would die, and the majority of contributors to open source would have to get real jobs like plumbing and checking groceries. Until that day we live in a utopia where everyone helps everyone out because we all love each other, OSS can't be successful or it will die.
The speed of debugging the actual project is a function of code complexity and code quality which is not necessarily related to whether it is open or closed source. It may well be that more open source projects are less complex, or higher quality than closed source but this does not mean that if your project is open source it would be easier to debug.
On the other hand bug fix speed may well be impacted by the release model. If you release all the time (daily in some open source models) you would nearly always see bug fixes faster than a process that releases less often. Again this is not a function of open source or closed source. I will admit that open source projects allow "releases" more often because usually you can grab code directly from the CVS.
I don't know how that would work. I think you may not be counted as an MSN 8 subscriber unless you install the MSN 8 software (a wrapper around IE with some admittedly cool features but lots of bloat) and sign in. Basically this situation is supposed to be win/win for the ISP and MS. The ISP no longer needs to provide e-mail, homepage or web space because MS provides it as part of being and MSN 8 user and MS gets more MSN 8 users.
I think the big point here is MS has decided they can do a better job writing search software than the people they currently contract with. Personally I hope they can because I don't much like MSN search (even though I only hit it the few accidental times I typo on a URL)
It depends on why you are using the clustering, I use NT clusters at work all the time to increase reliability of the system. It doesn't help performance one bit in my situation (and isn't meant to) but if one node of the cluster goes down all the services start up on the other node and there is next to no downtime.
The big deal is first off they were trying to be devious and not include full speed parts but have people think they were getting full speed parts. The second problem is this isn't a device, its the host. If you buy a USB 2.0 device but it really runs at 12mbps no big deal if thats enough bandwidth to do the job. If you buy a USB 2.0 host expecting it to handle 480mbps and it doesn't you will be very upset when you hook up that high speed device (or more likely a couple slower speed devices) and it runs like crap.
I don't know but I think you might be better off with GigE over copper and run those extra wires.
I had a number of computers with 1mhz processors and 4k ram. I love looking at my old Kilobyte magazines and seeing advertisements for 4k memory boards for $600 and more :)
I think the bigger problem with getting newbies to program is that programmers are sort of elite. When I first started programming I did silly things like make an arrow "fly" across the screen by doing a very very simple text mode animation, which made my peers thing "wow that guy is amazing". Now I'd get laughed out of the room for the same program. I think that new programmers will have a hard time getting past that first hump because there isn't enough appreciation of the small stuff.