To me, 'back in the day' is when there was no such thing as a CD-rom, let alone a CD-rw. Back in the day is when a 9600baud modem was fast and a 286/12 with 1 meg of ram and a 40meg HD was a good machine. Back in the day is when modem speed could be measured in baud and not bps.
Well, keep in mind that back when we were all on 14.4s (I still have my old Practical Peripheral's external, with the LCD screen.. *sigh*) stuff was a lot smaller. Ultima VI is one I remember fondly because it was large for it's day, and it was what, 6 1.44mb floppies? When games are that small, you can trade them across a modem link if you're determined. Try doing the same with a whole CD.. ouch!
So yah, the bandwidth has gone up significantly, but so have the size of the files. Maybe it's not proportional, and I agree with you that it's faster and easier now, but I just wanted to make a point.
Besides, don't you think there was something cool about the local warez communities we had back in the day? When your name could mean something to everyone within your area code? To this day I meet people in real life who remember me, who called the same BBSs I did and downloaded stuff I had a hand in cracking or distributing or whatever.
... to do so would only result in no further invitations to similar conferences, and getting them bad press amongst a market I'm sure they see as potential customers.
Showing off services for Unix goes much further toward generating revenue for Microsoft than trying to tell people why *nix is bad or somehow inferior. It actually shows that Microsoft cares about interoperability with *nix. True of false, that's probably the message they'll try to convey. I'll withold my opinions on the validity of that message.
This seems to me to have the potential to be HUGE in Japan. From what they're saying it'll allow the ability to display lyrics on screen, presumably in synch with the music. From what I've read, the Japanese are nuts about Karaoke, and also about Gameboys. There could be a huge market for this thing over there, probably less so in the US.
That said, how does one go about loading the songs on the unit, and what will it's capacity be? Those are the key things I consider in a portable MP3 player. So far, I've found nothing rivaling the iPod (pause for Nomad and Rio users to chime in). At the $99 price point I'm guessing there's not much storage there.
Re:Missed opportunity for Ogg Vorbis
on
MP3 for Gameboy
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· Score: 2
The average Joe on the street probably doesn't even know what Ogg is, and probably couldn't care less if their GB plays it or not.
That said, is their even a chip capable of decoding Ogg? Without hardware support, it seems unlikely devices like this will ever support Ogg. Having a general purpose processor with a software decoder is just too expensive, and has too much overhead to be worth doing within the tight resources of handhelds.
I agree almost entirely with everything you've said.
The way I see this shaking out is similar to the.net vs. liberty alliance thing. Microsoft will come up with their Standard(tm) way of doing something. Other companies will realize the intent is good (for them, not necessarily for consumers) but will be hesitant to trust MS and give them ownership of something so powerful and key to the future direction of the PC market. A few of these like minded companies will band together and create their own rival Standard(tm) way of doing the same thing. More companies will follow and pretty much Microsoft either backs off or singlehandedly faces the rest of the marketplace.
While MS is clearly a monolithic company, they still can't really fight the hardware makers if they all decide to band together against MS. MS is still very much at the mercy of many companies. Intel and AMD acceptance is key to MS' success. HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell, etc. also have a pretty large say in the direction of the PC market. While Microsoft has a huge hand in guiding the future direction of the PC market, a determined group of hardware manufacturers can still stop them or steer a different course. Hopefully that's how things play out here.
It seems to me that if these sorts of 'security systems' are meant to make the exchange of data between computers secure, there's already a lot of standards bodies which should be up to to the task of establishing an alternative to the MS-centric Palladium.
The key here is that any proposed security standard needs to be
Vendor Neutral
International
Respected by the industry
Respected by a majority of the world's nations.
Anything less than this *WILL* fail on a global market. MS probably has a shot at controlling the US PC market if the government and their anti-trust proceedings don't bitch slap them
According to a story on CNN.com He's done a whole lot of other impressive stuff too.
To quote; "Fossett's other adventures have including swimming the English Channel, piloting a dog sled in the Iditarod race in Alaska, driving in the LeMans auto endurance race in France and finishing the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii."
Well yah, if you consider devices which can't share applications and program data easily with a PC to be a 'computer' I guess tablet computers have been around for a while. In my mind, these are quite different than previous generations. Especially if their handwriting recognition works with any decency.
Isn't that the idea behind the tablet computers MS was showing off the other day? Those things sound pretty cool, and they're due out in november. Around Christmas I'll probably be making a tough decision between an iBook and a tablet..
Okay, so we're talking about a potential customer base which is a subset of satellite users and digital cable users who want an xbox, and want PVR service. Still seems like a pretty small market to me. Plus I'd imagine the various digital cable companies each do things differently enough that the boxes wouldn't be interchangable to another network. I know I can't take a normal non-pvr non-xbox digital cable box and use it on a network other than the one it's designed for.
Ultimate TV has kind of faded into the shadows lately, but as I recall it was only for people with satellite service. Isn't Microsoft really limited their market if these all-in-one boxes can only be sold to people with satellite service, who want ultimate tv, and an xbox? How many people fit that profile? Not many is my guess considering that TiVo has only sold 500,000 units, and most of those are standalone (not satellite)
The Practice of System and Network Administration
on
General IT Books?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Slashdot had a review a while back of The Practice of System and Network Administration This is a really wonderful book about system administration methodoligies and best practices. It stays completely away from the technical aspects of administration, and instead focuses on the logical and organizational aspects. This should be required reading for all SAs. Many will think it's pretty basic, but even experienced SAs will pick up a nugget or two of information, and it's a great introduction to the career for newbies.
Ahh.. True, I did search for 'lindows' so I guess it's a valid assumption that I knew what it was, and was comfortable with it.
Still, they should be extremely careful about this. All it takes is for a few people to be upset, and both Walmart and Lindows have a serious PR problem on their hand. Or worse, with wording like 'ability to run most Microsoft programs' they could find themselves in legal trouble I imagine.
It's an interesting OS though, I'd love to play with it. I just worry they may be pushing it to your typical clueless end user a little too quickly.
Top Matches for "lindows"
If that's any indication how they're selling them in brick & mortar stores, expect a lot of pissed of people returning them. The text of the ad states Monitor not included! in bold, but only says 'Lindows OS'
I doubt the average Walmart computer shopper is going to understand exactly what they're buying here, or even notice that it's not a windows PC.
Well, it's a hotmail account.. so that's one strike against me to begin with, and I've had the same address for at least 7 years or so, so it's had time to circulate and stuff.
Still, the point is that it's a pretty pervasive problem, prosecuting all the offenders is probably too expensive and difficult to ever really work effectively as a means of deterrent.
You make some good points, but forget some important ones as well. Sure there's lots of existing laws that could apply, but the problem in a lot of cases is tracking down the offenders, and even then there's so many of them that the manpower to prosecute them is ridiculous.
SPAM and internet scams operate on a different scale than anything before. I probably get no less than 150-200 SPAM emails a day. Assuming they all from different senders, and are all fraudulent (which I realize is quite an assumption) let's figure out just how much time/money it would take to prosecute them all. Let's say for arguments sake that it takes 15-20 hours to collect information, and find the person to prosecute in the first place. Then let's suppose there's another 200 man hours involved in bringing this to trial. Including the judge, attorneys, etc this is probably a conservative estimate. Now let's suppose each of the people along the way (two attorneys, judge, technician to collect evidence) are making $40,000 each of taxpayer money, again that's probably conservative. Using the above estimate of 220 man hours per spam, that gives us a cost of $4230. Seems to me that's probably on the low side. Multiply this by the 200 messages a day I'm getting, and WOW $846,153 to prosecute the senders of one days worth of spam for one user. That's a lot of money.
All the laws in the world won't help with this problem. So long as the system is designed to allow the amount of spam that's out there, there's not much laws can do to change it. We need to either change the system so it costs the senders to spread around thousands upon thousands of emails, or find some other way to penalize without involving the already overburdened, underfunded, bureaucratic legal system.
Slashdot Mirror
To me, 'back in the day' is when there was no such thing as a CD-rom, let alone a CD-rw. Back in the day is when a 9600baud modem was fast and a 286/12 with 1 meg of ram and a 40meg HD was a good machine. Back in the day is when modem speed could be measured in baud and not bps.
Well, keep in mind that back when we were all on 14.4s (I still have my old Practical Peripheral's external, with the LCD screen.. *sigh*) stuff was a lot smaller. Ultima VI is one I remember fondly because it was large for it's day, and it was what, 6 1.44mb floppies? When games are that small, you can trade them across a modem link if you're determined. Try doing the same with a whole CD.. ouch!
So yah, the bandwidth has gone up significantly, but so have the size of the files. Maybe it's not proportional, and I agree with you that it's faster and easier now, but I just wanted to make a point.
Besides, don't you think there was something cool about the local warez communities we had back in the day? When your name could mean something to everyone within your area code? To this day I meet people in real life who remember me, who called the same BBSs I did and downloaded stuff I had a hand in cracking or distributing or whatever.
Well, now the link is 'fixed' it's still messed up though.
The NY Times has a story story about a new bookshelf MP3/CD
"The L7HD stores audio in Sony's own Atrac3 format rather than the more common MP3 format."
This is not 'Sony's new bookshelf MP3 player' it's Sony's new bookshelf Atrac3 player.
The NY Times has a story about a story new bookshelf...
Huh? Is this some sort of meta-story? Did you mean to say a 'starry new bookshelf...' or more like just 'a story about a new...'
Yah, I'm sure the expense of filing suits against thousands of college kids is really going to help their bottom line.
Damn, I found an even better link just after posting. Sorry about that.
... to do so would only result in no further invitations to similar conferences, and getting them bad press amongst a market I'm sure they see as potential customers.
More likely, I expect they'll have information about their Microsoft Windows services for UNIX
Showing off services for Unix goes much further toward generating revenue for Microsoft than trying to tell people why *nix is bad or somehow inferior. It actually shows that Microsoft cares about interoperability with *nix. True of false, that's probably the message they'll try to convey. I'll withold my opinions on the validity of that message.
"Hump me Obi Wan, you're my only hope!"
This seems to me to have the potential to be HUGE in Japan. From what they're saying it'll allow the ability to display lyrics on screen, presumably in synch with the music. From what I've read, the Japanese are nuts about Karaoke, and also about Gameboys. There could be a huge market for this thing over there, probably less so in the US.
That said, how does one go about loading the songs on the unit, and what will it's capacity be? Those are the key things I consider in a portable MP3 player. So far, I've found nothing rivaling the iPod (pause for Nomad and Rio users to chime in). At the $99 price point I'm guessing there's not much storage there.
The average Joe on the street probably doesn't even know what Ogg is, and probably couldn't care less if their GB plays it or not.
That said, is their even a chip capable of decoding Ogg? Without hardware support, it seems unlikely devices like this will ever support Ogg. Having a general purpose processor with a software decoder is just too expensive, and has too much overhead to be worth doing within the tight resources of handhelds.
I agree almost entirely with everything you've said.
.net vs. liberty alliance thing. Microsoft will come up with their Standard(tm) way of doing something. Other companies will realize the intent is good (for them, not necessarily for consumers) but will be hesitant to trust MS and give them ownership of something so powerful and key to the future direction of the PC market. A few of these like minded companies will band together and create their own rival Standard(tm) way of doing the same thing. More companies will follow and pretty much Microsoft either backs off or singlehandedly faces the rest of the marketplace.
The way I see this shaking out is similar to the
While MS is clearly a monolithic company, they still can't really fight the hardware makers if they all decide to band together against MS. MS is still very much at the mercy of many companies. Intel and AMD acceptance is key to MS' success. HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell, etc. also have a pretty large say in the direction of the PC market. While Microsoft has a huge hand in guiding the future direction of the PC market, a determined group of hardware manufacturers can still stop them or steer a different course. Hopefully that's how things play out here.
IEEE, IETF, even the Liberty Alliance could put together a competing system.
The key here is that any proposed security standard needs to be
Anything less than this *WILL* fail on a global market. MS probably has a shot at controlling the US PC market if the government and their anti-trust proceedings don't bitch slap them
According to a story on CNN.com He's done a whole lot of other impressive stuff too.
To quote;
"Fossett's other adventures have including swimming the English Channel, piloting a dog sled in the Iditarod race in Alaska, driving in the LeMans auto endurance race in France and finishing the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii."
For a second there I thought that said 'Rainman Hypothesis.' Somethine to do with counting cards maybe?
Well yah, if you consider devices which can't share applications and program data easily with a PC to be a 'computer' I guess tablet computers have been around for a while. In my mind, these are quite different than previous generations. Especially if their handwriting recognition works with any decency.
Isn't that the idea behind the tablet computers MS was showing off the other day? Those things sound pretty cool, and they're due out in november. Around Christmas I'll probably be making a tough decision between an iBook and a tablet..
Okay, so we're talking about a potential customer base which is a subset of satellite users and digital cable users who want an xbox, and want PVR service. Still seems like a pretty small market to me. Plus I'd imagine the various digital cable companies each do things differently enough that the boxes wouldn't be interchangable to another network. I know I can't take a normal non-pvr non-xbox digital cable box and use it on a network other than the one it's designed for.
Ultimate TV has kind of faded into the shadows lately, but as I recall it was only for people with satellite service. Isn't Microsoft really limited their market if these all-in-one boxes can only be sold to people with satellite service, who want ultimate tv, and an xbox? How many people fit that profile? Not many is my guess considering that TiVo has only sold 500,000 units, and most of those are standalone (not satellite)
Slashdot had a review a while back of The Practice of System and Network Administration This is a really wonderful book about system administration methodoligies and best practices. It stays completely away from the technical aspects of administration, and instead focuses on the logical and organizational aspects. This should be required reading for all SAs. Many will think it's pretty basic, but even experienced SAs will pick up a nugget or two of information, and it's a great introduction to the career for newbies.
Ahh.. True, I did search for 'lindows' so I guess it's a valid assumption that I knew what it was, and was comfortable with it.
Still, they should be extremely careful about this. All it takes is for a few people to be upset, and both Walmart and Lindows have a serious PR problem on their hand. Or worse, with wording like 'ability to run most Microsoft programs' they could find themselves in legal trouble I imagine.
It's an interesting OS though, I'd love to play with it. I just worry they may be pushing it to your typical clueless end user a little too quickly.
Hell, nimda is a better feature than that stupid paperclip thing!
Top Matches for "lindows" If that's any indication how they're selling them in brick & mortar stores, expect a lot of pissed of people returning them. The text of the ad states Monitor not included! in bold, but only says 'Lindows OS' I doubt the average Walmart computer shopper is going to understand exactly what they're buying here, or even notice that it's not a windows PC.
Can anyone explain how the two companies are related? Which is a subsidiary of which?
Well, it's a hotmail account.. so that's one strike against me to begin with, and I've had the same address for at least 7 years or so, so it's had time to circulate and stuff.
Still, the point is that it's a pretty pervasive problem, prosecuting all the offenders is probably too expensive and difficult to ever really work effectively as a means of deterrent.
You make some good points, but forget some important ones as well. Sure there's lots of existing laws that could apply, but the problem in a lot of cases is tracking down the offenders, and even then there's so many of them that the manpower to prosecute them is ridiculous.
SPAM and internet scams operate on a different scale than anything before. I probably get no less than 150-200 SPAM emails a day. Assuming they all from different senders, and are all fraudulent (which I realize is quite an assumption) let's figure out just how much time/money it would take to prosecute them all. Let's say for arguments sake that it takes 15-20 hours to collect information, and find the person to prosecute in the first place. Then let's suppose there's another 200 man hours involved in bringing this to trial. Including the judge, attorneys, etc this is probably a conservative estimate. Now let's suppose each of the people along the way (two attorneys, judge, technician to collect evidence) are making $40,000 each of taxpayer money, again that's probably conservative. Using the above estimate of 220 man hours per spam, that gives us a cost of $4230. Seems to me that's probably on the low side. Multiply this by the 200 messages a day I'm getting, and WOW $846,153 to prosecute the senders of one days worth of spam for one user. That's a lot of money.
All the laws in the world won't help with this problem. So long as the system is designed to allow the amount of spam that's out there, there's not much laws can do to change it. We need to either change the system so it costs the senders to spread around thousands upon thousands of emails, or find some other way to penalize without involving the already overburdened, underfunded, bureaucratic legal system.