I like the idea of home control, lights that turn on and off, and I've been doing it with X10 for about 20 years. But I realize it has problems, poor reliability, requires neutral in the switch box for most installations, switches and outlets that actually stop functioning after 2 years, limited availability, poor selection of switch types and colors, and extremely high prices.
So Insteon comes out and solves the first problem, and nothing else. Hey, dig that light switch for $45 plus shipping! (http://www.smarthome.com/2476S/SwitchLinc-Relay-INSTEON-Remote-Control-On-Off-Switch-Non-Dimming-White/p.aspx). A standard switch costs all of $1.
And ZigBee doesn't even have interoperability on it's side? And I'm guessing we're not going to see remote switches for $1. I'd even settle for $5-10. I'm guessing the switches will cost $70. It's like they aim at the high-end of the market to get a little traction, then settle comfortably into selling $45 light switches.
It's been many years, and I guess the market isn't there, because everything we have now is overpriced and underperforming.
To ask whether it "works", one first have to define what "works" means.
That means you'd have to compare it against the requirements it was coded against. My read of Bruce Schneier's blog leads me to believe a certain amount of requirements exist (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/05/software_proble.html) but the code does not match the requirements. For example, the requirements apparently want multiple readings taken and averaged with each other. However, the code was not written to match the requirement. That hints to me that not only were requirements likely incomplete, but that insufficient test cases were generated. And it is likely that if this test case is missing, probably many more are missing as well.
It's also interesting that the interrupt to catch illegal instructions was disabled; it's easy to speculate this was done to hide a code crashing issue they couldn't fix before it was shipped. It wouldn't really do for a police officer in the field to be given an "illegal operation please reset" error while trying to check if somebody is alcohol impaired.
So we already know that it doesn't "work" as defined in it's requirements. What it apparently does is to produce some sort of reading indicating some level of alcohol which may or may not be accurate and it might crash all the time except for some electronic duct tape. While that's a pretty neat trick for a prototype, it's hardly what I'd call production level code, and I can't imagine that acceptable in a court of law. But of course, I know nothing about what's "okay" for a court to accept, so that's an uninformed opinion.
That's a long way of saying, "No. No it doesn't work.".
"If they turn around and say "Unblock or stop accessing", then that's perfectly within their "rights""
I agree with you in a very broad principle. It's also within my rights to ignore them.
If I use the definition at Wikipedia "A right is a legal or moral entitlement or permission.", then what I think is that their only right is to ask my nicely to look at their ads. Certainly not legally (at least not yet). I'd like to hear your argument as to why it's a moral right to compel me to view the ad.
The way I look at things is like this: I can surely put up an appealing ad on my site. I can't force anyone to look at it, no matter how much I might like people to.
Oh, exclusive games? That? Mostly a "who cares" these days. I think most serious gamers probably have 2 or 3 consoles since the used/refurb prices of them have now dropped enough to make it feasible to own at least two. For more casual gamers, they've made their choice of consoles, and they're probably happy. Exclusive games have been around since there's been game consoles. There's actually only a few exclusives these days, and they tend to break down based on the markets associated with each console.
When I say "nothing good" I'm referring to the article and the summary. The article itself is a mishmash of ideas, and the author never explores why exclusives happen (there's a lot of good articles out there already that explain it. I found some in literally 10 seconds of googling). But people might not be aware of this stuff, so perhaps that might be an interesting story, so of course, he doesn't do that story. He's confused about economics, because he refers to consumers as a resource, and he seems to think game exclusives are done for "fanboy" reasons, when the driving factor is economics (or the lack thereof). The bottom line is that game producers will go wherever the money is. If MS, Sony, or Nintendo have enough market to justify exclusives (or are willing to pay the producer), then exclusives will occur. If there is more money to be made by porting it to several consoles, then that will happen.
I'm really confused by the use of the word "hate" in this article. People will often use emotion to justify a reason to do something, but few companies become successful if they're driven by "hate". These decisions are driven by economics. There's a million games out there, I'm sure you'll find one to please you.
The other awful thing is the summary here on slashdot. They took an admitted incomprehensible article and somehow made it even worse.
After you read the summary and the article, it's one of those rare cases where you know less than when you started. This is something that everybody should be ashamed of.
"please, tell us how they were supposed to know that this was the Hotmail account they wanted to crack without doing anything illegal to get this information."
They couldn't possibly know and it starts to become a slippery slope. The argument you seem to be making is the same argument the government has been making for 8 years: we need to be able to look at anything anytime because there's no way to tell who is saying what to whom. Terrorists are amongst us!
But you can also make the opposite argument. Tracking down every possible electronic communication can't ever find every "terrorist activity" and the unfortunate side-effect is that we'd be in a situation where the government knows everything about everyone. This seems to be a cure worse than the disease.
"You can either pay transit fees OR maintain your network but either way you pay per bandwidth."
Well, okay. But the point is there is no additional cost to TW if the network is 1/4 used, 1/2 used, or fully used. And with DOSCIS 3.0 already here, the cost to upgrade is a one-time upgrade to make their internal network deliver a lot more bandwidth for the same cost. And they want to charge more for that?
So if user X is using 100% of his allocated "bits per second" and user Y is using.1% of his allocated "bits per seconds", it doesn't make any sense to charge user X more, since he isn't costing anything more. Likewise it doesn't make sense to charge user Y less, since he isn't costing you less.
Thus, you quickly conclude that it makes sense to tier users based on capability for marketing reasons (and let me be clear that I think it's a legitimate tiering), but there's no technical reason to tier users. And what's more, the argument that people make which goes something like this "Well, those that use more should pay more", they never say what we're using *more* of that we need to be charged for. You can't use it up, and you can't save it. It's nothing like electricity or water.
Verizon (for right now) has the right idea. Build a big frickin' network with fiber to people's homes put a modem in place that limits the rate so that they can't overload the network and then let people go to town. Perhaps they have a different viewpoint since they came from the data side and moved over to TV rather than the cable companies history of starting with TV and adding data as a sideline.
When you think about it, Comcast's and TW's biggest accomplishment to date is that they make Verizon look like a good guy when it comes to the internet.
I'd remind you it was Clinton that signed the DMCA into law.
It's now Obama that is putting the RIAA in charge of the justice department.
And you're talking about a guy who no longer has any political power? As to the rest of your thoughts about manufacturing and oil prices, it seems at best a simplification, and at worst a series of non-sequiturs.
"Stardock's game suffered rating drops in the various gaming magazines and websites because of that. Obviously that affected their bottom line."
I suspect gaming magazines only wished they had that kind of impact.
And the summaries said nothing about how Demigod's "bottom line" was affected. The way I read the articles, after a few days, their infrastructure was finally completed and there were no further issues. Presumably the illegitimate copies are still being used, too.
"Not for hardware hackers. Windows Vista 64-bit editions require all kernel-mode code to be digitally signed"
True enough and depending on what you're doing it can be a show stopper, but if you're writing drivers for USB, they don't need to be kernel mode: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511026.aspx . But you probably already know the options.
With 4G of RAM selling for $25-35 dollars these days on Newegg, it's a difficult to really get excited except for the fact (as you mention) XP's RAM usage is capped at about 3G of RAM.
Vista 64 is a good alternative, and I think Microsoft would do well to simply make the default install for Windows 7 the 64 bit version.
"Ideally, prices should boil down to a reasonable margin over actual costs. "
Not true. Prices should reflect what the market is willing to pay. That is ideal.
The cost of producing an item is not related to it's selling price. If the selling price is below the cost of production, nobody will produce it, of course. eBay is a pretty good indication of almost perfect competition (shill bidding aside). What you're proposing should be the end result of pricing, provided there is perfect competition, but in the absence of that, then pricing bears no relationship to cost.
I'd go further and say that I'm willing to pay what it costs and then some. But as I look on Time-Warner and Comcast's balance sheet (yes, available online), the margins on internet and TV are very high precisely because there is no competition. So I'm not willing to suffer higher costs and caps simply to make the balance sheet look better for these guys.
"The problem is, residential broadband networks were never designed to handle the uses many people make of them nowadays"
People say this, but I don't understand it.
So Comcast, Time Warner, et al were building these high speed networks just 5-10 years ago, but they only expected people to use them in little tiny burst for a few megabytes a month? That really doesn't make any sense if you sit down and think about it. If they only meant you to use a little, there wouldn't have been any need to go much beyond 1 Mb/s, because if you went beyond that they'd flood the network.
If you want my take, the big growth period for ISP's are over, and these guys are faced with one of two alternatives to keep profits growing: (1) Lower costs (2) Raise revenue. They've chosen to do both, which may work in the short term. But the usage caps don't make sense from a technical standpoint, rather they make sense from a business standpoing because they begin to lower the average cost per subscriber, and it will likely raise revenue across the board.
But I don't believe there is any technical limitation on the networks driving this change.
Contact every newspaper they summarize/index and say this: "Do you want us to index your site and make it available through http://news.google.com./ If you say 'yes', we'll index it. If you say 'no' we'll remove any link to your paper. Let us know by the end of the day."
You can't have it both ways. You can't hope for the exposure of Google, and then complain when Google won't give you money for providing the exposure.
"Have you actually tried to program a simple robot to be capable of everything that a lobster is capable of?"
I haven't, but nature got a couple billion years to perfect the algorithms and shrink the code down so it will fit in the tiny memory space of the lobster. I assume you'll give us a little time to do the same?
"Pretty sure the slavemasters had spears, swords and whips whereas the slaves had none of these"
You're right. And the slaves in the American South didn't have those weapons either. The point being that guns had nothing to do with the maintenance of slaves in the old south. If you do some research here http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwjc.html you'll see the Bill of Rights adoption was not at all related to the question of slavery.
"The accusation was that she had prescription-strength ibuprofen, which is not OTC medication."
Do you know how you can get prescription-strength ibuprofen? It's the same medication, just a higher dose. And not a significantly higher dose, either.
Actually, looking in the article, she was accused of having 400mg tablets. Read the back of a bottle... 400mg is a *standard dose* of OTC ibuprofen when you pull a muscle or over-do it at the gym.
Calling it "prescription-strength" is just a way to make it sound like something serious was going on. It wasn't. You can't get high on ibuprofen. I'm sure you could OD on it, but then, you can OD on aspirin. So let's push that out of the way. She had ibuprofen, what I keep in my desk drawer, what you get at the Rite-Aid for $2 for a bottle of 50 and the school's reaction is to strip search her.
Speaking of drugs, the school's administrators must be on crack to think that's an okay reaction.
Slashdot Mirror
"Anyway it will take the black boxes to confirm what happened. Anything before that is pure speculation"
Smartest thing I've read in this thread. Heck, the other day, wasn't somebody speculating that it was a meteor that struck the plane?
I like the idea of home control, lights that turn on and off, and I've been doing it with X10 for about 20 years. But I realize it has problems, poor reliability, requires neutral in the switch box for most installations, switches and outlets that actually stop functioning after 2 years, limited availability, poor selection of switch types and colors, and extremely high prices.
So Insteon comes out and solves the first problem, and nothing else. Hey, dig that light switch for $45 plus shipping! (http://www.smarthome.com/2476S/SwitchLinc-Relay-INSTEON-Remote-Control-On-Off-Switch-Non-Dimming-White/p.aspx). A standard switch costs all of $1.
And ZigBee doesn't even have interoperability on it's side? And I'm guessing we're not going to see remote switches for $1. I'd even settle for $5-10. I'm guessing the switches will cost $70. It's like they aim at the high-end of the market to get a little traction, then settle comfortably into selling $45 light switches.
It's been many years, and I guess the market isn't there, because everything we have now is overpriced and underperforming.
I'm in a generous mood today, so I'll help:
http://www.teamamerica.com/
You're welcome!
"That removing this device would be illegal."
So is speeding.
"Age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill"
-- Attributed to John Barrymore
To ask whether it "works", one first have to define what "works" means.
That means you'd have to compare it against the requirements it was coded against. My read of Bruce Schneier's blog leads me to believe a certain amount of requirements exist (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/05/software_proble.html) but the code does not match the requirements. For example, the requirements apparently want multiple readings taken and averaged with each other. However, the code was not written to match the requirement. That hints to me that not only were requirements likely incomplete, but that insufficient test cases were generated. And it is likely that if this test case is missing, probably many more are missing as well.
It's also interesting that the interrupt to catch illegal instructions was disabled; it's easy to speculate this was done to hide a code crashing issue they couldn't fix before it was shipped. It wouldn't really do for a police officer in the field to be given an "illegal operation please reset" error while trying to check if somebody is alcohol impaired.
So we already know that it doesn't "work" as defined in it's requirements. What it apparently does is to produce some sort of reading indicating some level of alcohol which may or may not be accurate and it might crash all the time except for some electronic duct tape. While that's a pretty neat trick for a prototype, it's hardly what I'd call production level code, and I can't imagine that acceptable in a court of law. But of course, I know nothing about what's "okay" for a court to accept, so that's an uninformed opinion.
That's a long way of saying, "No. No it doesn't work.".
"If they turn around and say "Unblock or stop accessing", then that's perfectly within their "rights""
I agree with you in a very broad principle. It's also within my rights to ignore them.
If I use the definition at Wikipedia "A right is a legal or moral entitlement or permission.", then what I think is that their only right is to ask my nicely to look at their ads. Certainly not legally (at least not yet). I'd like to hear your argument as to why it's a moral right to compel me to view the ad.
The way I look at things is like this: I can surely put up an appealing ad on my site. I can't force anyone to look at it, no matter how much I might like people to.
If I discover some weird piece of electronics on my car, and I take it off and throw it away, have I committed a crime?
Probably not.
Now what if the police put it there. Does removing it suddenly become a crime? Remember, I have no idea the police planted it.
Oh, exclusive games? That? Mostly a "who cares" these days. I think most serious gamers probably have 2 or 3 consoles since the used/refurb prices of them have now dropped enough to make it feasible to own at least two. For more casual gamers, they've made their choice of consoles, and they're probably happy. Exclusive games have been around since there's been game consoles. There's actually only a few exclusives these days, and they tend to break down based on the markets associated with each console.
When I say "nothing good" I'm referring to the article and the summary. The article itself is a mishmash of ideas, and the author never explores why exclusives happen (there's a lot of good articles out there already that explain it. I found some in literally 10 seconds of googling). But people might not be aware of this stuff, so perhaps that might be an interesting story, so of course, he doesn't do that story. He's confused about economics, because he refers to consumers as a resource, and he seems to think game exclusives are done for "fanboy" reasons, when the driving factor is economics (or the lack thereof). The bottom line is that game producers will go wherever the money is. If MS, Sony, or Nintendo have enough market to justify exclusives (or are willing to pay the producer), then exclusives will occur. If there is more money to be made by porting it to several consoles, then that will happen.
I'm really confused by the use of the word "hate" in this article. People will often use emotion to justify a reason to do something, but few companies become successful if they're driven by "hate". These decisions are driven by economics. There's a million games out there, I'm sure you'll find one to please you.
The other awful thing is the summary here on slashdot. They took an admitted incomprehensible article and somehow made it even worse.
After you read the summary and the article, it's one of those rare cases where you know less than when you started. This is something that everybody should be ashamed of.
"please, tell us how they were supposed to know that this was the Hotmail account they wanted to crack without doing anything illegal to get this information."
They couldn't possibly know and it starts to become a slippery slope. The argument you seem to be making is the same argument the government has been making for 8 years: we need to be able to look at anything anytime because there's no way to tell who is saying what to whom. Terrorists are amongst us!
But you can also make the opposite argument. Tracking down every possible electronic communication can't ever find every "terrorist activity" and the unfortunate side-effect is that we'd be in a situation where the government knows everything about everyone. This seems to be a cure worse than the disease.
"You can either pay transit fees OR maintain your network but either way you pay per bandwidth."
Well, okay. But the point is there is no additional cost to TW if the network is 1/4 used, 1/2 used, or fully used. And with DOSCIS 3.0 already here, the cost to upgrade is a one-time upgrade to make their internal network deliver a lot more bandwidth for the same cost. And they want to charge more for that?
So if user X is using 100% of his allocated "bits per second" and user Y is using .1% of his allocated "bits per seconds", it doesn't make any sense to charge user X more, since he isn't costing anything more. Likewise it doesn't make sense to charge user Y less, since he isn't costing you less.
Thus, you quickly conclude that it makes sense to tier users based on capability for marketing reasons (and let me be clear that I think it's a legitimate tiering), but there's no technical reason to tier users. And what's more, the argument that people make which goes something like this "Well, those that use more should pay more", they never say what we're using *more* of that we need to be charged for. You can't use it up, and you can't save it. It's nothing like electricity or water.
Verizon (for right now) has the right idea. Build a big frickin' network with fiber to people's homes put a modem in place that limits the rate so that they can't overload the network and then let people go to town. Perhaps they have a different viewpoint since they came from the data side and moved over to TV rather than the cable companies history of starting with TV and adding data as a sideline.
When you think about it, Comcast's and TW's biggest accomplishment to date is that they make Verizon look like a good guy when it comes to the internet.
"W and the neo-cons are no longer in control"
I'd remind you it was Clinton that signed the DMCA into law.
It's now Obama that is putting the RIAA in charge of the justice department.
And you're talking about a guy who no longer has any political power? As to the rest of your thoughts about manufacturing and oil prices, it seems at best a simplification, and at worst a series of non-sequiturs.
"Stardock's game suffered rating drops in the various gaming magazines and websites because of that. Obviously that affected their bottom line."
I suspect gaming magazines only wished they had that kind of impact.
And the summaries said nothing about how Demigod's "bottom line" was affected. The way I read the articles, after a few days, their infrastructure was finally completed and there were no further issues. Presumably the illegitimate copies are still being used, too.
"And how much for a motherboard and CPU that can take that much RAM?"
Around $125 for the pair right here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.178918
"Not for hardware hackers. Windows Vista 64-bit editions require all kernel-mode code to be digitally signed"
True enough and depending on what you're doing it can be a show stopper, but if you're writing drivers for USB, they don't need to be kernel mode: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511026.aspx . But you probably already know the options.
With 4G of RAM selling for $25-35 dollars these days on Newegg, it's a difficult to really get excited except for the fact (as you mention) XP's RAM usage is capped at about 3G of RAM.
Vista 64 is a good alternative, and I think Microsoft would do well to simply make the default install for Windows 7 the 64 bit version.
"Ideally, prices should boil down to a reasonable margin over actual costs. "
Not true. Prices should reflect what the market is willing to pay. That is ideal.
The cost of producing an item is not related to it's selling price. If the selling price is below the cost of production, nobody will produce it, of course. eBay is a pretty good indication of almost perfect competition (shill bidding aside). What you're proposing should be the end result of pricing, provided there is perfect competition, but in the absence of that, then pricing bears no relationship to cost.
I'd go further and say that I'm willing to pay what it costs and then some. But as I look on Time-Warner and Comcast's balance sheet (yes, available online), the margins on internet and TV are very high precisely because there is no competition. So I'm not willing to suffer higher costs and caps simply to make the balance sheet look better for these guys.
"The problem is, residential broadband networks were never designed to handle the uses many people make of them nowadays"
People say this, but I don't understand it.
So Comcast, Time Warner, et al were building these high speed networks just 5-10 years ago, but they only expected people to use them in little tiny burst for a few megabytes a month? That really doesn't make any sense if you sit down and think about it. If they only meant you to use a little, there wouldn't have been any need to go much beyond 1 Mb/s, because if you went beyond that they'd flood the network.
If you want my take, the big growth period for ISP's are over, and these guys are faced with one of two alternatives to keep profits growing: (1) Lower costs (2) Raise revenue. They've chosen to do both, which may work in the short term. But the usage caps don't make sense from a technical standpoint, rather they make sense from a business standpoing because they begin to lower the average cost per subscriber, and it will likely raise revenue across the board.
But I don't believe there is any technical limitation on the networks driving this change.
In AT&T's world, you can have unlimited access to the Internet, provided all you want to do is look at static web pages and check your email.
"why would you have them risk their lives?"
That's easy.
Put a EULA on the front of the car that says:
"By standing in front of this car, you agree that whatever happens is your own damned fault!"
Hey, if it's good enough for Microsoft, it's good enough for the little people!
Contact every newspaper they summarize/index and say this: "Do you want us to index your site and make it available through http://news.google.com./ If you say 'yes', we'll index it. If you say 'no' we'll remove any link to your paper. Let us know by the end of the day."
You can't have it both ways. You can't hope for the exposure of Google, and then complain when Google won't give you money for providing the exposure.
The 64 bit version is significantly faster than the 32 bit version. And it is very solid.
"Have you actually tried to program a simple robot to be capable of everything that a lobster is capable of?"
I haven't, but nature got a couple billion years to perfect the algorithms and shrink the code down so it will fit in the tiny memory space of the lobster. I assume you'll give us a little time to do the same?
"There aren't a lot of people killing lobsters our of necessity."
Of course there is a necessity... how are you going to have a lobster party without the lobster?
"Pretty sure the slavemasters had spears, swords and whips whereas the slaves had none of these"
You're right. And the slaves in the American South didn't have those weapons either. The point being that guns had nothing to do with the maintenance of slaves in the old south. If you do some research here http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwjc.html you'll see the Bill of Rights adoption was not at all related to the question of slavery.
A much more interesting read can be found here: http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_slav.html where you'll see that the 2nd Amendment and the slavery question have no intersection.
Or do some googling and see for yourself.
"The accusation was that she had prescription-strength ibuprofen, which is not OTC medication."
Do you know how you can get prescription-strength ibuprofen? It's the same medication, just a higher dose. And not a significantly higher dose, either.
Actually, looking in the article, she was accused of having 400mg tablets. Read the back of a bottle... 400mg is a *standard dose* of OTC ibuprofen when you pull a muscle or over-do it at the gym.
Calling it "prescription-strength" is just a way to make it sound like something serious was going on. It wasn't. You can't get high on ibuprofen. I'm sure you could OD on it, but then, you can OD on aspirin. So let's push that out of the way. She had ibuprofen, what I keep in my desk drawer, what you get at the Rite-Aid for $2 for a bottle of 50 and the school's reaction is to strip search her.
Speaking of drugs, the school's administrators must be on crack to think that's an okay reaction.