Google wants it because their services are delivered via the last mile from Verion, Comcast, AT&T, and a few other that essentially controlling Google's destiny. It's related to network neutrality, but only slightly.
Ultimately Google knows that a handful of ISPs control the entire consumer network, and they're trying to poke holes in it to give themselves and others a shot at competing.
Are you sure that a gig of RAM isn't enough to run Vista perfectly fine? I think you can run the Ultimate version with that much RAM. I mean, you really can't add much more than 3G of RAM to Vista 32 bit (it won't recognize 4GB), and 2GB is probably as much as you'll need if you're doing specialty work.
It looks perfectly fine for web/office work. I can't see where it lacks for it's primary market. And if the only lack is RAM, then, presumably, you can bump it up to 2G for under $100.
Now, I'm not commenting on the PC, but even if it's crap, for $300 you can't lose. An $800 PC will depreciate by $300 as soon as you open the box. This PC almost makes sense to buy and throw away once a year and keep getting $300 PC's. But I doubt you need to do that.
The user interface is so ugly and awful that you get the feeling that Comcast hated designing the thing and wish you would just use the "on-demand" feature instead of the DVR. I had it for about 2 months and the user interface was hostile. You couldn't do much of any useful search, it looked like it was an early Alpha release of the software.
Forgot about things like "suggestions" and the web-based connectivity that I'd come to expect.
"that all any given Open Source project really represents is the right to have the source code AS IT EXISTS NOW."
What gives you any better choice?
When you buy Windows Vista, and you agree to the EULA, what exactly is it giving you the right to, except the license to run the binaries AS IT EXISTS NOW?
I "get" the purpose of GPL3. I "get" why companies like MS object to it. What I don't "get" is why this is an issue. The GPL2 is still there. BSD is still there. Apache is still there. Use those.
But implying that the GPL3 is taking something away from users is pretty silly. You know the score before you start... you get the candy for free, but you have to always share it with anybody who asks. If that's not okay, then don't use it! It doesn't limit your rights in any way.
Comcast has set up a web based application/page for your customers to use, find out it doesn't serve a significant minority of their customers, and your response is that Comcast need to raise prices to provide Firefox support (as if they needed an excuse)?
Let me quote you something from Comcast's 2006 annual report (their latest):
"We broke all records in 2006, driven by our cable business.(a) Cable revenues increased 12%, to $26.3 billion. Operating cash flow(b) rose 15%, to $10.5 billion, making 2006 our sixth straight year -- capping 26 consecutive quarters -- of double-digit operating cash flow growth. During the year, our customers bought five million new products -- or what we call "revenue-generating units" (RGUs)(c) -- an increase of 69% from 2005. And each of our services -- basic cable, digital cable, high-speed Internet and digital voice -- added more new customers than ever before. We have real momentum. The past year was sensational, but 2007 and the future have the potential to be even better."
Near as I can tell, Comcast HS internet had revenues of $11B in 2006, and somewhere out of that $11B, they can't take $50K to support anything other than IE 5.5?
I'm not saying Comcast charges too much, I'm just saying they show a real disregard for their customers when, by their own admission, they have a spectacular year financially, and they won't even do a small thing to support their customers.
Isn't it true that even if magically you didn't need money to attend a University, Duke would still have to limit it's admission?
And when they did, what would be the basis for those limits? How smart? How good looking? How successful some person thinks you'll be?
I mean, you've got to limit it somehow, Duke is private, they can make admissions anything they'd like.... hair color, how well you play basketball, family connections, even the ability to pay. Is that awful? Not really. My supermarket will throw out people who can't afford food. That doesn't make them immoral or even terrible.
I see it as an improvement in the entire virtual machine evolution. Why can't virtualized machines emulate any given set of hardware? I want to look like a P3, or a P4, or something newer? It would be nice to make random piece of hardware visible or invisible to allow the virtual machine access to hardware (or not) as desired. I'd like to ability to hide from my software that it's been virtualized.
As to VMWare, it's a great product, I've bought it and I use it, but the way it virtualizes CD's/DVD's, USB's and other hardware needs to be improved. Maybe the market is geared towards server virtualization. That's fine, but I'd like a lot more ability to control and configure the virtualized machine. Maybe I don't want it to emulate an S3 video card. Maybe I'd like it to emulate a USB sound card. More flexibility is better.
The main thing wrong with the Zune
on
Zune DRM Cracked
·
· Score: 1
The main thing wrong with the Zune was it was too expensive.
The iPod is the iPod. Love it or hate it. But there is an entire group of industries that have sprung up around it for cases, speakers, car adapters, microphones, software, so that when you buy an iPod, you have your choice of "stuff".
Along comes the Zune. It's kinda like the iPod, a little bit more Soviet looking, but for consumers, kinda the same. Except no comparable infrastructure like the iPod. So you're pioneer, but with no upside, because at best, even if the Zune took off, you'd be right where the iPod is today.
So Microsoft had to come in and blow away the iPod on price. Except it was the same price, with no options for a lower/entry level (i.e. $100) model.
So rationally, who would buy this thing, except by accident. Microsoft needed to price this thing at $199, routinely discounted to $150. It's just funny to me that in a company that probably has more MBA's than all of Wharton and Harvard combined that nobody saw this fatal flaw. And really, the Zune has bombed so badly that they've dug themselves a hole in terms of perception.
"Sure, but most desktops don't run more than one or two apps at a time."
I beg to differ. Boot up Windows XP or Vista. Hit cntl-alt-del, click on "show processes for all users", then count the processes.
That's why more processors will make your computers faster. The days of "1 or 2 applications" went away the day Windows 95 shipped.
I'll give you a perfect example. I just went from Windows XP with a 3.2ghz P4 to a machine I built, Windows Vista, E6600 processor (2 cores at 2.4 ghz), and I use dbPowerAmp to convert music from flac to mp3. On the old machine, it took about 10-15 minutes. The new machine will handle this same task in about a minute, utilizing both cores. And if I had 4 cores, it would go twice as fast.
I would suggest if anything, CPU architectures may consist of many smaller CPUs that allow the procesors to process ratio to get smaller.
The Amiga 1000 (I think) had 256K memory standard, and the best option was to get the 256K memory expansion to fill up "chip" memory. There was no standard way of adding "fast" memory to an amiga internally until the 500/2000.
Stuff like this will make VMWare, Parallels, and others improve their product so it becomes difficult (if not impossible) to detect that the host is virtual.
By the same token, it suggests a new attack against malware.... find out what makes a piece of malware think it's running on a VM and then make a physical machine react the same way. The possibilities are endless here.
What great insight... they know if you give the customer what they want, they'll come back and buy more. Customers have been begging them, please, put DRM on our music collection that we already purchased and was in DRM'd. I know that DRM is actually DCE and that it enables me more better!
That's why Vista and The Zune are such great hits. The customer was begging for them.
This move was predictable. The U.S. and Japanese consoles came out first with full PS/2 compatibility, the EU version had the software emulator. Since a reason to drop the PS/2 chips was to save cost, it was inevitable a new rev in the U.S. would not have the PS/2 hardware chips.
The PS3's made now are more desirable if you care about backwards compatibility.
"if *everybody* posts long, well-thought-out articles, it'd be hard to find 1."
Well, yeah, but that just means you have a lot of well-thought-out articles. It's hard to find a downside to that. More research is always better.
Blogs, on the other hand, are streams of consciousness. I don't see an "ecosystem" at work so much as just a bunch of people offering their opinions. It's like calling Bill O'Reilly a "verbal blogger".
My point is, there is a lot of value is well-thought-out articles. There is significantly less in offering opinion about the news.
"I have issues with most software players because they take Artist as some God-given way to sort, but between compilations, soundtracks/cast recordings, and one-off downloads, my artist list is so long it's practically unusable."
That's an excellent way to put it. And when you use your Ipod in the car, it makes the iPod unusable.
iTunes itself offers different ways of grouping songs than simple artist or album, but the iPod is pretty limited in that respect.
"You might want to look at what was actually painted back then. In particular, Peter Paul Rubens who was painting at that time."
I have no idea, but generally artists are displaying preferences, Rubens might've been painting what was an "ideal" at the time, or he might've been a considered a kook at the time and was doing the opposite.
It seems like advertising gives a good idea of societal ideals more than pure art. Unfortunately, there are few TV ads before the 20th century so it's hard to use this to determine ideals.;)
"No one knows how to produce an authentic Word document to the last detail. I don't see an open source file system driver for Linux that lets you reliably write to NTFS formatted partition"
Here's the thing... you're not talking about security, you're talking about interoperability.
Is your Word document secure because Open Office can't perfectly reproduce it? It NTFS secure because nobody has a perfect driver for it in Linux? Is SMB secure because Samba isn't 100% perfect?
Obviously not. If the idea is to keep something both secure and readily accessible to the public, I can't say for sure it can't be done. But the empirical evidence suggests it's either impossible or so difficult that you can't do it cost-effectively, at least not for things that people really want. I mean, look at Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. They spent lots of money to secure the formats and apparently people can copy the disks at will in under 12 months. And that was not open source.
"but if the any part of the client's business model involves selling licenses to software products, it's not clear how wide the GPL can spread."
You do realize that if you write software and release it under GPL, you are also free to release it under other licenses as well, correct?
The trick is, if you use *somebody else's* GPL'd software to reduce development costs, then you incur an obligation to release the source code as well. It's not that hard. In fact, it's so easy that you don't need a lawyer.
Maybe that's why they suggest staying from it? Just a guess.
"What Microsoft is attempting to ensure here is to deny any party the ability to claim that there was some form of constructive agreement to the GPLv3 terms."
But if they distribute GPLv3 terms, then doesn't the distribution signal signal agreement with the terms? I'm just asking.
Seems to me, they're doing the equivalent of a consumer saying the EULA of MS's products don't apply because they never really agreed to it before they bought it.
"This has little to do with wages and everything to do with worker "loyalty.""
Well, it's a bit of both.
The idea is that the loyalty of the H1-B is enforced by the the U.S. Government. If you're not loyal, you get thrown out of the country. That probably makes you pretty loyal.
But the purpose of forcing such loyalty is that it allows the employer to pay less money. If the prevailing wage $60K per year, I'm guessing you can get by with $35K per year for the H1B, plus they're technically temps, so you don't have the additional expenses you would for a permanent employee.
Now that said, I think the H1B people coming over are good for the country, and really good for IT workers. If smart people want to come to the country and work, I think that's great. Imagine the best minds in the world coming to your country. Not only smart people, but people with the initiative to leave their country and move to another! I welcome anyone like that (and I work in IT). So with that in mind, I propose a solution. H1Bs after 6 months of employment with a company get their green card.
Boom. I've solved the problem. We get the pool of labor. Smart, talented, hard working labor. And they'd be paid at market rates. The companies would have to do that. Otherwise the H1B's they just spent 6 months training would go someplace else. The only people who could possibly object to this are people who have a vested interest in making sure H1B's are cheap. And that ultimately is not good for anybody.
The mistake you're making is imagining the RIAA is some sort of independent body that record labels pay, and the RIAA is busy on their behalf doing stuff that is just done with so much as a phone call.
In fact, there is no difference between the RIAA and the record labels. They are the same. The RIAA is essentially a beard for the record labels so that you say "those bastards at the RIAA, they're suing the children". Meanwhile, the lawsuits are the creation of the record labels completely.
To put it another way, the RIAA won't sneeze without specific instructions from the record labels.
"Taking a copy of a computer's RAM, which is technically possible in a running computer using, say and external hard drive, by order of a court, is a very real possibility,"
I don't see how, given today's state of the art. You'd have to somehow halt the processor so it couldn't change memory, and then have a device to walk memory and save it to another system. The act of reading the memory from the same system changes the contents of memory.
And since the contents of memory changes millions of times a second, "when" would you capture memory?
"It goes away when the power goes out, but it can be read -- and memorized -- by anyone on that system."
In any modern operating system a basic principle is you can only get to the process space that you own. In fact, even if you are the owner of a process, you cannot readily read the contents of RAM without specialized debugging software.
What this means in practice on a large server is that you can't get to someone else's memory space (or the contents of that space) unless you are the superuser of that system.
Slashdot Mirror
Google wants it because their services are delivered via the last mile from Verion, Comcast, AT&T, and a few other that essentially controlling Google's destiny. It's related to network neutrality, but only slightly.
Ultimately Google knows that a handful of ISPs control the entire consumer network, and they're trying to poke holes in it to give themselves and others a shot at competing.
Are you sure that a gig of RAM isn't enough to run Vista perfectly fine? I think you can run the Ultimate version with that much RAM. I mean, you really can't add much more than 3G of RAM to Vista 32 bit (it won't recognize 4GB), and 2GB is probably as much as you'll need if you're doing specialty work.
It looks perfectly fine for web/office work. I can't see where it lacks for it's primary market. And if the only lack is RAM, then, presumably, you can bump it up to 2G for under $100.
Now, I'm not commenting on the PC, but even if it's crap, for $300 you can't lose. An $800 PC will depreciate by $300 as soon as you open the box. This PC almost makes sense to buy and throw away once a year and keep getting $300 PC's. But I doubt you need to do that.
The user interface is so ugly and awful that you get the feeling that Comcast hated designing the thing and wish you would just use the "on-demand" feature instead of the DVR. I had it for about 2 months and the user interface was hostile. You couldn't do much of any useful search, it looked like it was an early Alpha release of the software.
Forgot about things like "suggestions" and the web-based connectivity that I'd come to expect.
"that all any given Open Source project really represents is the right to have the source code AS IT EXISTS NOW."
What gives you any better choice?
When you buy Windows Vista, and you agree to the EULA, what exactly is it giving you the right to, except the license to run the binaries AS IT EXISTS NOW?
I "get" the purpose of GPL3. I "get" why companies like MS object to it. What I don't "get" is why this is an issue. The GPL2 is still there. BSD is still there. Apache is still there. Use those.
But implying that the GPL3 is taking something away from users is pretty silly. You know the score before you start... you get the candy for free, but you have to always share it with anybody who asks. If that's not okay, then don't use it! It doesn't limit your rights in any way.
Comcast has set up a web based application/page for your customers to use, find out it doesn't serve a significant minority of their customers, and your response is that Comcast need to raise prices to provide Firefox support (as if they needed an excuse)?
l -reportsAnnual)
Let me quote you something from Comcast's 2006 annual report (their latest):
"We broke all records in 2006, driven by our cable business.(a) Cable revenues increased 12%, to $26.3 billion. Operating cash flow(b) rose 15%, to $10.5 billion, making 2006 our sixth straight year -- capping 26 consecutive quarters -- of double-digit operating cash flow growth. During the year, our customers bought five million new products -- or what we call "revenue-generating units" (RGUs)(c) -- an increase of 69% from 2005. And each of our services -- basic cable, digital cable, high-speed Internet and digital voice -- added more new customers than ever before. We have real momentum. The past year was sensational, but 2007 and the future have the potential to be even better."
(source: http://www.cmcsk.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=118591&p=iro
Near as I can tell, Comcast HS internet had revenues of $11B in 2006, and somewhere out of that $11B, they can't take $50K to support anything other than IE 5.5?
I'm not saying Comcast charges too much, I'm just saying they show a real disregard for their customers when, by their own admission, they have a spectacular year financially, and they won't even do a small thing to support their customers.
Isn't it true that even if magically you didn't need money to attend a University, Duke would still have to limit it's admission?
And when they did, what would be the basis for those limits? How smart? How good looking? How successful some person thinks you'll be?
I mean, you've got to limit it somehow, Duke is private, they can make admissions anything they'd like.... hair color, how well you play basketball, family connections, even the ability to pay. Is that awful? Not really. My supermarket will throw out people who can't afford food. That doesn't make them immoral or even terrible.
I see it as an improvement in the entire virtual machine evolution. Why can't virtualized machines emulate any given set of hardware? I want to look like a P3, or a P4, or something newer? It would be nice to make random piece of hardware visible or invisible to allow the virtual machine access to hardware (or not) as desired. I'd like to ability to hide from my software that it's been virtualized.
As to VMWare, it's a great product, I've bought it and I use it, but the way it virtualizes CD's/DVD's, USB's and other hardware needs to be improved. Maybe the market is geared towards server virtualization. That's fine, but I'd like a lot more ability to control and configure the virtualized machine. Maybe I don't want it to emulate an S3 video card. Maybe I'd like it to emulate a USB sound card. More flexibility is better.
The main thing wrong with the Zune was it was too expensive.
The iPod is the iPod. Love it or hate it. But there is an entire group of industries that have sprung up around it for cases, speakers, car adapters, microphones, software, so that when you buy an iPod, you have your choice of "stuff".
Along comes the Zune. It's kinda like the iPod, a little bit more Soviet looking, but for consumers, kinda the same. Except no comparable infrastructure like the iPod. So you're pioneer, but with no upside, because at best, even if the Zune took off, you'd be right where the iPod is today.
So Microsoft had to come in and blow away the iPod on price. Except it was the same price, with no options for a lower/entry level (i.e. $100) model.
So rationally, who would buy this thing, except by accident. Microsoft needed to price this thing at $199, routinely discounted to $150. It's just funny to me that in a company that probably has more MBA's than all of Wharton and Harvard combined that nobody saw this fatal flaw. And really, the Zune has bombed so badly that they've dug themselves a hole in terms of perception.
"Sure, but most desktops don't run more than one or two apps at a time."
I beg to differ. Boot up Windows XP or Vista. Hit cntl-alt-del, click on "show processes for all users", then count the processes.
That's why more processors will make your computers faster. The days of "1 or 2 applications" went away the day Windows 95 shipped.
I'll give you a perfect example. I just went from Windows XP with a 3.2ghz P4 to a machine I built, Windows Vista, E6600 processor (2 cores at 2.4 ghz), and I use dbPowerAmp to convert music from flac to mp3. On the old machine, it took about 10-15 minutes. The new machine will handle this same task in about a minute, utilizing both cores. And if I had 4 cores, it would go twice as fast.
I would suggest if anything, CPU architectures may consist of many smaller CPUs that allow the procesors to process ratio to get smaller.
The Amiga 1000 (I think) had 256K memory standard, and the best option was to get the 256K memory expansion to fill up "chip" memory. There was no standard way of adding "fast" memory to an amiga internally until the 500/2000.
I have to admit, I miss my Amiga 4000.
Stuff like this will make VMWare, Parallels, and others improve their product so it becomes difficult (if not impossible) to detect that the host is virtual.
By the same token, it suggests a new attack against malware.... find out what makes a piece of malware think it's running on a VM and then make a physical machine react the same way. The possibilities are endless here.
What great insight... they know if you give the customer what they want, they'll come back and buy more. Customers have been begging them, please, put DRM on our music collection that we already purchased and was in DRM'd. I know that DRM is actually DCE and that it enables me more better!
That's why Vista and The Zune are such great hits. The customer was begging for them.
This move was predictable. The U.S. and Japanese consoles came out first with full PS/2 compatibility, the EU version had the software emulator. Since a reason to drop the PS/2 chips was to save cost, it was inevitable a new rev in the U.S. would not have the PS/2 hardware chips.
The PS3's made now are more desirable if you care about backwards compatibility.
"if *everybody* posts long, well-thought-out articles, it'd be hard to find 1."
Well, yeah, but that just means you have a lot of well-thought-out articles. It's hard to find a downside to that. More research is always better.
Blogs, on the other hand, are streams of consciousness. I don't see an "ecosystem" at work so much as just a bunch of people offering their opinions. It's like calling Bill O'Reilly a "verbal blogger".
My point is, there is a lot of value is well-thought-out articles. There is significantly less in offering opinion about the news.
"I have issues with most software players because they take Artist as some God-given way to sort, but between compilations, soundtracks/cast recordings, and one-off downloads, my artist list is so long it's practically unusable."
That's an excellent way to put it. And when you use your Ipod in the car, it makes the iPod unusable.
iTunes itself offers different ways of grouping songs than simple artist or album, but the iPod is pretty limited in that respect.
Keeping copper buried in the ground can't be cost effective. It's also 100 year old technology.
So Verizon is fixing that, and it seems a bit whiny to complain about it.
"You might want to look at what was actually painted back then. In particular, Peter Paul Rubens who was painting at that time."
;)
I have no idea, but generally artists are displaying preferences, Rubens might've been painting what was an "ideal" at the time, or he might've been a considered a kook at the time and was doing the opposite.
It seems like advertising gives a good idea of societal ideals more than pure art. Unfortunately, there are few TV ads before the 20th century so it's hard to use this to determine ideals.
"No one knows how to produce an authentic Word document to the last detail. I don't see an open source file system driver for Linux that lets you reliably write to NTFS formatted partition"
Here's the thing... you're not talking about security, you're talking about interoperability.
Is your Word document secure because Open Office can't perfectly reproduce it? It NTFS secure because nobody has a perfect driver for it in Linux? Is SMB secure because Samba isn't 100% perfect?
Obviously not. If the idea is to keep something both secure and readily accessible to the public, I can't say for sure it can't be done. But the empirical evidence suggests it's either impossible or so difficult that you can't do it cost-effectively, at least not for things that people really want. I mean, look at Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. They spent lots of money to secure the formats and apparently people can copy the disks at will in under 12 months. And that was not open source.
"but if the any part of the client's business model involves selling licenses to software products, it's not clear how wide the GPL can spread."
You do realize that if you write software and release it under GPL, you are also free to release it under other licenses as well, correct?
The trick is, if you use *somebody else's* GPL'd software to reduce development costs, then you incur an obligation to release the source code as well. It's not that hard. In fact, it's so easy that you don't need a lawyer.
Maybe that's why they suggest staying from it? Just a guess.
"What Microsoft is attempting to ensure here is to deny any party the ability to claim that there was some form of constructive agreement to the GPLv3 terms."
But if they distribute GPLv3 terms, then doesn't the distribution signal signal agreement with the terms? I'm just asking.
Seems to me, they're doing the equivalent of a consumer saying the EULA of MS's products don't apply because they never really agreed to it before they bought it.
"Going out dancing or bar hopping with a Treo clipped to your hip just looks stupid"
Actually, clipping anything to your belt, whether it's a sliderule, calculator or phone looks stupid.
"This has little to do with wages and everything to do with worker "loyalty.""
Well, it's a bit of both.
The idea is that the loyalty of the H1-B is enforced by the the U.S. Government. If you're not loyal, you get thrown out of the country. That probably makes you pretty loyal.
But the purpose of forcing such loyalty is that it allows the employer to pay less money. If the prevailing wage $60K per year, I'm guessing you can get by with $35K per year for the H1B, plus they're technically temps, so you don't have the additional expenses you would for a permanent employee.
Now that said, I think the H1B people coming over are good for the country, and really good for IT workers. If smart people want to come to the country and work, I think that's great. Imagine the best minds in the world coming to your country. Not only smart people, but people with the initiative to leave their country and move to another! I welcome anyone like that (and I work in IT). So with that in mind, I propose a solution. H1Bs after 6 months of employment with a company get their green card.
Boom. I've solved the problem. We get the pool of labor. Smart, talented, hard working labor. And they'd be paid at market rates. The companies would have to do that. Otherwise the H1B's they just spent 6 months training would go someplace else. The only people who could possibly object to this are people who have a vested interest in making sure H1B's are cheap. And that ultimately is not good for anybody.
The mistake you're making is imagining the RIAA is some sort of independent body that record labels pay, and the RIAA is busy on their behalf doing stuff that is just done with so much as a phone call.
In fact, there is no difference between the RIAA and the record labels. They are the same. The RIAA is essentially a beard for the record labels so that you say "those bastards at the RIAA, they're suing the children". Meanwhile, the lawsuits are the creation of the record labels completely.
To put it another way, the RIAA won't sneeze without specific instructions from the record labels.
"Taking a copy of a computer's RAM, which is technically possible in a running computer using, say and external hard drive, by order of a court, is a very real possibility,"
I don't see how, given today's state of the art. You'd have to somehow halt the processor so it couldn't change memory, and then have a device to walk memory and save it to another system. The act of reading the memory from the same system changes the contents of memory.
And since the contents of memory changes millions of times a second, "when" would you capture memory?
"It goes away when the power goes out, but it can be read -- and memorized -- by anyone on that system."
In any modern operating system a basic principle is you can only get to the process space that you own. In fact, even if you are the owner of a process, you cannot readily read the contents of RAM without specialized debugging software.
What this means in practice on a large server is that you can't get to someone else's memory space (or the contents of that space) unless you are the superuser of that system.