This doesn't seem like a time to be stingy. Better get both heads, just to be sure. Be sure to have the hitman interrupt right as they are sitting down to dinner and play the obnoxious "THIS IS YOUR CAPTAIN SPEAKING" horn noise before finishing the job, of course.
So shall the dialer VS the anti-dialer war continue.
My company makes an auto-dialer product used by a lot of these contact centers. We will just outsmart whatever technology sits between us and the callee. That said, some tech-savvy people may be able to beat us, but the general population won't.
Your candor is impressive. Most people who attract the loathing of virtually everybody for a living are a trifle more reticient about it.
It also remains to be seen whether the IEEE wants to go after some of the non-ethernet interconnects with this one, to try to get ethernet into use for larger-than-single-chassis interconnection of things that are usually confined to single boxes and 'internal' busses.
Your end user probably doesn't even need 1GbE; but his boring cheapo desktop probably has an 8(if 2.0) or 16(if 3.0) GB/s PCIe connector available for adding a graphics card. Hypertransport or QPI are faster still.
If one had the desires of people building larger-scale closely interconnected systems in mind, a very, very, very fast flavor of ethernet(with convenient ethernet features not generally available on internal busses, like the more sophisticated switching and routing capabilities); but enough speed to serve as an interconnect for a rack full of blade modules with virtualized storage and networking, or NUMA across all blades, or both, could be quite handy.
Such features have been available for a while in proprietary busses from the very expensive supercomputer outfits; but the IEEE may be looking to move in to that area with at least certain flavors of ethernet....
Didn't the supreme court just rule that the "first sale doctrine" stands?
In other words, if I buy a book, I can sell it to somebody else.
If I sell the mp3 and delete it off my computer / mp3 player, what is the difference between a book and an mp3 of a book?
The issue appears to be one of qualitative vs. numerical identity: If you buy a book, you have the right to resell that book. If you buy an mp3, you have the right to resell that mp3. The ruling here is that what is being sold isn't 'that mp3', it is a bit-for-bit copy(but nevertheless, a copy) of the mp3 that you actually had a right to sell.
Given the number of times that things get copied during the routine operations of a computer system, this would seem to totally gut any first sale of digital files in practice, and possibly even leave users requiring explicit authorization to do totally normal things(eg. If you play an mp3, your decoder software produces a 'derivative work' and stores it in system RAM, when it uncompresses the mp3, possibly with one or more additional links in the playback chain, software equalizers etc. producing further unauthorized derivative works in RAM; before the result is copied over a system bus to your sound card. If you defragment your HDD, chunks of the mp3 could easily end up being copied elsewhere and erased in the first location one or more times, possibly leaving you with no 'original' mp3 at all after a few fragmentation/defragmentation cycles.); but that seems to be the logic.
Redigi's business model relies upon making copies. The Thai bloke was importing copies. He wasn't making copies.
What might be more interesting(if less practical, because of higher transaction costs and longer wait times), would be a service equivalent to Redigi; but with the legally-troubling copying handled by the end user.
According to the ruling, Redigi isn't covered by first sale because the item sold is the copy that resides on User A's HDD; but the item Redigi is selling is an unauthorized duplicate residing on Redigi's servers, created from(but not the same as) the copy on User A's HDD. So, while the number of copies in the wild hasn't increased(Redigi's software deletes the copy on User A's HDD after uploading to their server), the goods being sold by Redigi are not the goods covered by first sale(yes, it probably is a bad sign that philosophy is getting dragged in; but it seems most accurate to say that Redigi's goods are qualitatively identical; but not numerically identical with the goods covered by first-sale rights. They are bit-for-bit identical; but they are nevertheless a copy.
However, given that 'buyers'(scare quotes because it looks like a sale and quacks like a sale; but is generally alleged to be a 'licence') aren't usually restricted from doing things like moving their music library between HDDs, or making/restoring backups, or time/place shifting by means of mp3 players and DVRs and the like, I'd be curious to know what the judge would say about a service that handled all the copying at the user end, like the following hypothetical:
Redigi-like software allows the user to easily notify the reseller what tracks they wish to sell. If a buyer appears, the reseller sends out a netflix-style envelope with a cheapo flash drive inside. When the user receives it, they pop it in and the software looks at the manifest file and copies and deletes the appropriate files. When it is finished, the user mails the flash drive back. The reseller then rewrites the manifest(to reflect that it is now going out to the buyer, not the seller) and sends it to the buyer, who pops it in, and has the software read the manifest, copy and delete the files, and finish the transaction.
Such a scheme would be pointlessly convoluted(and the transaction costs would probably swamp any gains for goods cheaper than an entire album or similar); but it would leave the hypothetical Redigi-analog with totally clean hands in terms of copying...
This may well be the case for some phones but I'm not convinced that it it is for all phones. Mind you I'm more than happy with my "dumb" phone and have no interest or use for a "smart" phone - who the fuck knows what they are sending out, off or on.
'Smartphones' generally know more, by virtue of having a UI that makes doing lots of personally-identifiable stuff and storing lots of potentially sensitive data attractive; but if it's a cellphone, it has cellular communications capabilities, which are ample for at least lowish resolution tracking.
Clearly these 'terrorists', however adequate their funding, are a bunch of amateurs.
As the recent history of the US(and more recently EU) banking sectors has demonstrated, the best way to disrupt financial infrastructure is to operate it. Plus, politicians will fight like dogs to see who can bail you out more generously, and you'll walk away with a fat bonus and no legal consequences!
No problem. I'm pretty sure you aren't even allowed citizenship in South Korea if you can't execute the standard terran openers with alarming speed and precision. The entire DMZ will be a wall of supply depots and swarming with marines within ~5 minutes.
$35 was the target subsidized price. The target actual price was around twice that(which is pretty much the going rate for 7 inch tablets of unknown-but-suspect quality from nameless pacific rim OEMS).
Looks like everybody is out to demonstrate how good they are at outsourcing. Just wait until the Chinese and Africans too get in on the act - then we might see jobs coming back to the US
And the Indian government was involved in creating a tablet because....?
The Indian government's interest in all this had something to do with an e-textbook initiative. Apparently their dead-tree versions are seriously uneven in terms of age and availability, so the prospect of something that could be updated more easily and be all 21st century and stuff was attractive.
What is somewhat less clear is why this got them involved in hardware, rather than just software and content. There are only about a zillion Chinese OEMs slitting each other's throats to build slightly cheaper crap-tablets, and many of them produce quite similar designs around a handful of cheap SoCs. Sure, doing platform validation is a pain in the ass; but they could have had multiple, interchangeable, vendors eating out of the palm of their hand instead of having one pet fuckup...
Curiously, they handed it to a London-headquartered Canadian firm(with a slightly... unenviable... reputation for order fulfillment), who then handed the manufacturing side back to an Indian firm. No word on whether the Indian firm is mostly a thin shell of management and a few field engineers who exist to look over the shoulders of the Chinese sub-subcontractors to keep them from swapping in cheaper parts when nobody is looking...
It sure does make for annoying headlines; but 'nanotechnology' is sort of a concept that is doomed by nature to be spread vacuously thin across all sorts of things, both incremental advances and more remarkable stuff.
There probably a material in existence whose bulk properties don't derive from its structure at a fine scale, so the entire history of fields like metallurgy is 'nanotechnology' in a weak sense. On the other hand, though, most of that history, even to the present for economically viable bulk production, is largely messing around with heating and cooling parameters, and throwing various trace impurities into the mix, and then hoping really hard that the right nanoscale structures self-assemble.
The real problem is deciding where to draw the line between 'yeah, it's "nanotech" in the vacuous sense that all materials engineering is' and 'actually "nanotech" in some sense that makes it worthy of the title'...
Given that TFA specifically name-checked 'Traumatic brain injury', it would appear that both "body armor" and "better packing material" are valid interpretations. They aren't looking to defeat penetrators(at least not notably better than existing systems); but are aiming to do something about the fact that dangerously powerful shockwaves propagate just fine through armor designed against fragments and less-zealous bullets.
Oh, I'd be the last to deny that they fucked up here. My point was just that, as best I can see, every previously-not-networked industry manages a period of impressive lousiness and seems to feel some sick need to learn from their own painful mistakes, rather than learning from somebody else's painful mistakes that have already been made. I don't know why.
Does anybody know how to say "Just for that, I'm going to do my best to genericize the shit out of your precious little 'trademark', motherfucker" in Swedish?
Also, GPUs tend not to be as fixed-function as they used to be. Some of the nastier mobile parts are still pretty inflexible; but Nvidia has certainly been pushing the nearly-general-purpose compute capabilities of their PC line down into their Tegra products, and they probably won't be the only one.
There are certainly a lot of existing and near future parts that are fixed function and will never support anything else; but if the pressure remains, newer fixed function devices might support it, and programmable devices will always be a firmware update away from doing so.
MPEG-LA made a binding agreement that licensing of H.264 decoders would be free forever. They have already said that agreement would also apply to H.265, which is due to be formalized soon. VP8 is only about as efficient as H.264, H.265 is considerably more efficient.
The push for VP8 started when MPEG-LA wanted to charge a fee for licensing the decoder. It's now several years after that became a dead issue. The state of the art of video encoding has moved far past VP8. Why spend so much time and effort on an outdated codec?
They still charge for encoding. Perhaps more importantly, do you think that they made H.264 decoding free out of the goodness of their good little hearts, or because Google called their bluff?
The makers of the camera's want to produce the cheapest camera for the highest amount of profit possible..
I suspect that lacking the relevant institutional expertise doesn't help. The camera guys may have some fucking software wizards when it comes to crunching raw sensor data into an agreeable format at high speed, on a weedy little embedded chip, without crushing the battery; but(as Adobe demonstrates about three times a week) image-processing expertise is minimally connected with good software engineering practices, much less security-focused design...
Can anybody think of an industry that went from producing 'it doesn't need to be secure because it's air-gapped by nature' products to networked products without a ghastly trail of fuckups? Personal computers made the shift somewhere in the late 80's/early 90s, and they still aren't adequate, though they are better than they used to be. Industrial and medical embedded systems are still a total wreck, printers are still mostly fucked...
Even if terminals don't, monitors do(and, while it may have shown up earlier in specific proprietary or embedded systems, Embedded DisplayPort 1.3 even includes "Panel Self Refresh", a power-saving feature where the LCD panel itself has enough memory to store a single frame, to avoid the GPU having to keep the link active just to keep displaying a static image).
The developers of RFB(best known now as the basis of VNC) might also have a thing or two to say about the originality of a dumb client device that receives pre-rendered content(yes, VNC can operate in more sophisticated ways, updating only parts of the screen and using image compression; but at its dumbest it doesn't have to).
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This doesn't seem like a time to be stingy. Better get both heads, just to be sure. Be sure to have the hitman interrupt right as they are sitting down to dinner and play the obnoxious "THIS IS YOUR CAPTAIN SPEAKING" horn noise before finishing the job, of course.
So shall the dialer VS the anti-dialer war continue.
My company makes an auto-dialer product used by a lot of these contact centers. We will just outsmart whatever technology sits between us and the callee. That said, some tech-savvy people may be able to beat us, but the general population won't.
Your candor is impressive. Most people who attract the loathing of virtually everybody for a living are a trifle more reticient about it.
Like so many things in life, you can throw all the money you want at it; but until you solve the search problem it's mostly futile.
It also remains to be seen whether the IEEE wants to go after some of the non-ethernet interconnects with this one, to try to get ethernet into use for larger-than-single-chassis interconnection of things that are usually confined to single boxes and 'internal' busses.
Your end user probably doesn't even need 1GbE; but his boring cheapo desktop probably has an 8(if 2.0) or 16(if 3.0) GB/s PCIe connector available for adding a graphics card. Hypertransport or QPI are faster still.
If one had the desires of people building larger-scale closely interconnected systems in mind, a very, very, very fast flavor of ethernet(with convenient ethernet features not generally available on internal busses, like the more sophisticated switching and routing capabilities); but enough speed to serve as an interconnect for a rack full of blade modules with virtualized storage and networking, or NUMA across all blades, or both, could be quite handy.
Such features have been available for a while in proprietary busses from the very expensive supercomputer outfits; but the IEEE may be looking to move in to that area with at least certain flavors of ethernet....
Didn't the supreme court just rule that the "first sale doctrine" stands?
In other words, if I buy a book, I can sell it to somebody else.
If I sell the mp3 and delete it off my computer / mp3 player, what is the difference between a book and an mp3 of a book?
The issue appears to be one of qualitative vs. numerical identity: If you buy a book, you have the right to resell that book. If you buy an mp3, you have the right to resell that mp3. The ruling here is that what is being sold isn't 'that mp3', it is a bit-for-bit copy(but nevertheless, a copy) of the mp3 that you actually had a right to sell.
Given the number of times that things get copied during the routine operations of a computer system, this would seem to totally gut any first sale of digital files in practice, and possibly even leave users requiring explicit authorization to do totally normal things(eg. If you play an mp3, your decoder software produces a 'derivative work' and stores it in system RAM, when it uncompresses the mp3, possibly with one or more additional links in the playback chain, software equalizers etc. producing further unauthorized derivative works in RAM; before the result is copied over a system bus to your sound card. If you defragment your HDD, chunks of the mp3 could easily end up being copied elsewhere and erased in the first location one or more times, possibly leaving you with no 'original' mp3 at all after a few fragmentation/defragmentation cycles.); but that seems to be the logic.
Redigi's business model relies upon making copies. The Thai bloke was importing copies. He wasn't making copies.
What might be more interesting(if less practical, because of higher transaction costs and longer wait times), would be a service equivalent to Redigi; but with the legally-troubling copying handled by the end user.
According to the ruling, Redigi isn't covered by first sale because the item sold is the copy that resides on User A's HDD; but the item Redigi is selling is an unauthorized duplicate residing on Redigi's servers, created from(but not the same as) the copy on User A's HDD. So, while the number of copies in the wild hasn't increased(Redigi's software deletes the copy on User A's HDD after uploading to their server), the goods being sold by Redigi are not the goods covered by first sale(yes, it probably is a bad sign that philosophy is getting dragged in; but it seems most accurate to say that Redigi's goods are qualitatively identical; but not numerically identical with the goods covered by first-sale rights. They are bit-for-bit identical; but they are nevertheless a copy.
However, given that 'buyers'(scare quotes because it looks like a sale and quacks like a sale; but is generally alleged to be a 'licence') aren't usually restricted from doing things like moving their music library between HDDs, or making/restoring backups, or time/place shifting by means of mp3 players and DVRs and the like, I'd be curious to know what the judge would say about a service that handled all the copying at the user end, like the following hypothetical:
Redigi-like software allows the user to easily notify the reseller what tracks they wish to sell. If a buyer appears, the reseller sends out a netflix-style envelope with a cheapo flash drive inside. When the user receives it, they pop it in and the software looks at the manifest file and copies and deletes the appropriate files. When it is finished, the user mails the flash drive back. The reseller then rewrites the manifest(to reflect that it is now going out to the buyer, not the seller) and sends it to the buyer, who pops it in, and has the software read the manifest, copy and delete the files, and finish the transaction.
Such a scheme would be pointlessly convoluted(and the transaction costs would probably swamp any gains for goods cheaper than an entire album or similar); but it would leave the hypothetical Redigi-analog with totally clean hands in terms of copying...
This may well be the case for some phones but I'm not convinced that it it is for all phones. Mind you I'm more than happy with my "dumb" phone and have no interest or use for a "smart" phone - who the fuck knows what they are sending out, off or on.
'Smartphones' generally know more, by virtue of having a UI that makes doing lots of personally-identifiable stuff and storing lots of potentially sensitive data attractive; but if it's a cellphone, it has cellular communications capabilities, which are ample for at least lowish resolution tracking.
Clearly these 'terrorists', however adequate their funding, are a bunch of amateurs.
As the recent history of the US(and more recently EU) banking sectors has demonstrated, the best way to disrupt financial infrastructure is to operate it. Plus, politicians will fight like dogs to see who can bail you out more generously, and you'll walk away with a fat bonus and no legal consequences!
No problem. I'm pretty sure you aren't even allowed citizenship in South Korea if you can't execute the standard terran openers with alarming speed and precision. The entire DMZ will be a wall of supply depots and swarming with marines within ~5 minutes.
I'm pretty sure that boring business desktops are why they still make 80 and 160 gig drives.
On the network side, we can't shove more 2TB nearlines in fast enough to keep the users happy; but every desktop still goes out largely empty.
Yeah, that approach works. Plus, how can you not trust a company whose slogan is "What needs shredding?"
$35 was the target subsidized price. The target actual price was around twice that(which is pretty much the going rate for 7 inch tablets of unknown-but-suspect quality from nameless pacific rim OEMS).
Looks like everybody is out to demonstrate how good they are at outsourcing. Just wait until the Chinese and Africans too get in on the act - then we might see jobs coming back to the US
And the Indian government was involved in creating a tablet because....?
The Indian government's interest in all this had something to do with an e-textbook initiative. Apparently their dead-tree versions are seriously uneven in terms of age and availability, so the prospect of something that could be updated more easily and be all 21st century and stuff was attractive.
What is somewhat less clear is why this got them involved in hardware, rather than just software and content. There are only about a zillion Chinese OEMs slitting each other's throats to build slightly cheaper crap-tablets, and many of them produce quite similar designs around a handful of cheap SoCs. Sure, doing platform validation is a pain in the ass; but they could have had multiple, interchangeable, vendors eating out of the palm of their hand instead of having one pet fuckup...
Curiously, they handed it to a London-headquartered Canadian firm(with a slightly... unenviable... reputation for order fulfillment), who then handed the manufacturing side back to an Indian firm. No word on whether the Indian firm is mostly a thin shell of management and a few field engineers who exist to look over the shoulders of the Chinese sub-subcontractors to keep them from swapping in cheaper parts when nobody is looking...
Too many cooks, etc.
Nanotechnology... the next big thing.
I'll get my coat
It sure does make for annoying headlines; but 'nanotechnology' is sort of a concept that is doomed by nature to be spread vacuously thin across all sorts of things, both incremental advances and more remarkable stuff.
There probably a material in existence whose bulk properties don't derive from its structure at a fine scale, so the entire history of fields like metallurgy is 'nanotechnology' in a weak sense. On the other hand, though, most of that history, even to the present for economically viable bulk production, is largely messing around with heating and cooling parameters, and throwing various trace impurities into the mix, and then hoping really hard that the right nanoscale structures self-assemble.
The real problem is deciding where to draw the line between 'yeah, it's "nanotech" in the vacuous sense that all materials engineering is' and 'actually "nanotech" in some sense that makes it worthy of the title'...
Given that TFA specifically name-checked 'Traumatic brain injury', it would appear that both "body armor" and "better packing material" are valid interpretations. They aren't looking to defeat penetrators(at least not notably better than existing systems); but are aiming to do something about the fact that dangerously powerful shockwaves propagate just fine through armor designed against fragments and less-zealous bullets.
I would LOVE for them to figure out a better foam for armor for us motorcyclists.
Try sintered armorgel! "Feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books."
Human nature is a technical problem.
Oh, I'd be the last to deny that they fucked up here. My point was just that, as best I can see, every previously-not-networked industry manages a period of impressive lousiness and seems to feel some sick need to learn from their own painful mistakes, rather than learning from somebody else's painful mistakes that have already been made. I don't know why.
Does anybody know how to say "Just for that, I'm going to do my best to genericize the shit out of your precious little 'trademark', motherfucker" in Swedish?
Also, GPUs tend not to be as fixed-function as they used to be. Some of the nastier mobile parts are still pretty inflexible; but Nvidia has certainly been pushing the nearly-general-purpose compute capabilities of their PC line down into their Tegra products, and they probably won't be the only one.
There are certainly a lot of existing and near future parts that are fixed function and will never support anything else; but if the pressure remains, newer fixed function devices might support it, and programmable devices will always be a firmware update away from doing so.
MPEG-LA made a binding agreement that licensing of H.264 decoders would be free forever. They have already said that agreement would also apply to H.265, which is due to be formalized soon. VP8 is only about as efficient as H.264, H.265 is considerably more efficient.
The push for VP8 started when MPEG-LA wanted to charge a fee for licensing the decoder. It's now several years after that became a dead issue. The state of the art of video encoding has moved far past VP8. Why spend so much time and effort on an outdated codec?
They still charge for encoding. Perhaps more importantly, do you think that they made H.264 decoding free out of the goodness of their good little hearts, or because Google called their bluff?
That might make it a better product; but not a better patent.
The makers of the camera's want to produce the cheapest camera for the highest amount of profit possible..
I suspect that lacking the relevant institutional expertise doesn't help. The camera guys may have some fucking software wizards when it comes to crunching raw sensor data into an agreeable format at high speed, on a weedy little embedded chip, without crushing the battery; but(as Adobe demonstrates about three times a week) image-processing expertise is minimally connected with good software engineering practices, much less security-focused design...
Can anybody think of an industry that went from producing 'it doesn't need to be secure because it's air-gapped by nature' products to networked products without a ghastly trail of fuckups? Personal computers made the shift somewhere in the late 80's/early 90s, and they still aren't adequate, though they are better than they used to be. Industrial and medical embedded systems are still a total wreck, printers are still mostly fucked...
Even if terminals don't, monitors do(and, while it may have shown up earlier in specific proprietary or embedded systems, Embedded DisplayPort 1.3 even includes "Panel Self Refresh", a power-saving feature where the LCD panel itself has enough memory to store a single frame, to avoid the GPU having to keep the link active just to keep displaying a static image).
The developers of RFB(best known now as the basis of VNC) might also have a thing or two to say about the originality of a dumb client device that receives pre-rendered content(yes, VNC can operate in more sophisticated ways, updating only parts of the screen and using image compression; but at its dumbest it doesn't have to).