The trouble with the voice recognition on phones is that not only do you look a bit of a fool screaming a name into it repeatedly, but for the 10 or so people you'd have the voice recognition on it's so much quicker to have them on speed dial.
On my phone press 2 then dial to dial home. The alternative is hold down the side button to start voice recognition, wait a second, say "Home" into it, check it recognises it properly...
The only real use I can think of for voice recognition is either dictating things yourself, or making a recording of an entire meeting. Other things will simply be quicker to do by keyboard/pen input, and less irritating for those around you.
I wouldn't go that far. It's basic, simple to use, you can turn various things on and off to remove clutter etc. I'm not sure what makes it Windows like rather than any other graphical OS.
"I hate making a change to a document and then realizing I can't abort and reload the original."
Umm. Yes, you can. Ctrl-R reverts to saved. There is still a saving system - it's just you don't lose what you had before you saved when you turn it off. Try opening a file, modifying it and hitting CTRL-R, and it'll revert to saved.
I agree though, some kind of guesture recognition would be nice. The contrst on the screen could be better too - at least it's better with the 5mx than it was with the 5.
I still have a Psion 5mx which the batteries last for weeks of normal usage.
2] An actual keyboard (or a stylus that works)
Keyboard on my 5mx is *very* nice - and arguably still the best PDA keyboard around. I still see it being mentioned in magazine roundups for having the ultimate keyboard. It's small, but the buttons are big enough to touch type on.
3] Upgrade-able software
Hmm. There is a lot of useful software around, but I doubt devlopment is anything like it used to be.
4] Lots, LOTS of memory
Why? 16mb is fine for most things you want a PDA for, and you can always get extra memory. I *think* I read you can use the IBM Microdrive in it, but don't quote me on it.
Yeah, we've been getting that for ages on Sky One. I'm actually sick of it now - after repeating them all up to season 5 just in time for season 5 to start, when it was over they went back to the start of season one AGAIN.
Then, just when I thought they'd put something new on when they reached the end of season 5 once more...
You guessed it, back to the start we go.
Last I saw they must have just about got to the end of season 5 for what, the third time? Hopefully that'll be the end of it until season 6 appears.
Talk about milking it for all it's worth. They've ruined the Simpsons in my opinion by doing the same thing, but on a bigger scale. I think they're showing 4 a day on some days, 2 on others. Madness. What about repeating Family Guy? Futurama? Hell, I'd like them to do their neverending repeats on Farscape simply because I've missed so many through it being on at awkward times on BBC2..
Nevermind the fact that the console versions would be running at a lower resolution and thus require much less video capabilities to render the scenes
If the lower resolution doesn't bother you, and playing on a TV is fine, why not just hook up your PC TV Out to a TV? You get your speed boost for running at a lower res, and free anti-aliasing.
I doubt very very much that Doom III will be playable on the XBox <I>and</i> look half as good as it does on the PC.
Bang for buck, consoles do outperform PCs. However, PCs consistently stay at the front of the pack for multiplayer, graphics, controls (keyboard/mouse/joypads/joysticks). Not to mention the other things you use your PC for, and the price of games, I'd never ditch a PC for games.
What seems to be getting overlooked here, amidst cries against per MB/GB billing, is the fact that ISPs & Telcos don't pay for the data transfered, but the bandwidth.
For example, my colo charges me around $300 per Mbit, on a 95th percentile basis. This makes sense - think about it, once the lines and routers are in place, it doesn't cost to transfer data over them. Sure, there are overheads, maintainence work etc, but it's akin to making roads for fuel-less cars. It costs to get setup, but then the physical running costs are minimal. There is no direct costs associated with the level of utilisation of the pipes..
If they get their models right, they can split up the cost of their connections over the users and make a profit. It shouldn't matter if the customers use the bandwidth that they are paying for, becuase their costs should be covered.
What certainly should not be allowed, is advertising saying that usage is unlimited, when in fact is not. This is obvious infringment of the trade descriptions act, surely?
We need to start to look more at the performance of the entire PC, rather than the CPU itself. For the record, I don't believe for one second that CPU development will halt in 10 years time - there will be something that comes around to enable us to continue increasing the speed of the processor. Better design, new technologies, lower power usage will all help in the race for speed.
However, the bottlenecks of our systems do need to be addressed. Storage, system buses, RAM bandwidth etc. are what's keeping our systems slow. Word takes hundreds of times longer to load than WordStar did on my old 8086. It takes an age for my system to boot, load apps and actually get doing work.
Yes, we can do a million more things with our PCs these days, and I could never go back - but I think the focus should be moved away from just the CPU. Manufacturers don't want to spend as much time looking at other bottlnecks, redesign components / systems when the average customer can't understand how a 2Ghz Athlon could be faster than a 2.2Ghz P4 - It's a bigger number, it must be faster! So, the companies give the cusotmers what they want. This is part of the problem. Inertia keeps us with the same x86 architecture; users aren't prepared to jump ship for some new design of system because they don't think anyone else will and so are scared of it failing, and manufacturers wouldn't come together to design a whole new system because they don't think anyone will come on board and use it!
Then again, a lot can change in 10 years. Think back to what you had on your desktop in 1992...
Is it me, or does this 'research' simply look like something a bored guy has just thrown together from a few minutes work, then submitted to Slashdot to see if it gets posted?
From the evidence, he searched for very few phrases. The sample size is way too low to be representive of the web - which some estimates put at several billion more pages than there are people on the planet! There are no signs of more than about 5 different phrases being searched for here..
Can a few simple searches on Google really generate a large enough sample to draw such large conclusions?
The report is one page long, hosted on Angelfire. There is no substantial data to back up his claims. Is this report reliable in any way?
I'm amazed this got posted on the front page of Slashdot..
"The main difference between physical books and usenet distribution of books is that each and every physical book (with a cover on it) can be traced back to a sale."
I'd say that most eBook copies or MP3s can be traced back a very long way back to a sale. Sure, some things are leaked on pre-release or whatever, but generally a CD is ripped, and then shared.
Just thought I'd chip in.. Something tells me they don't OCR the books to get an eBook. Where'd you think the original document came from to create the original book?
Just take that, do some formatting, on it, and you have your eBook. None of that OCRing lark:)
I don't think you quite get this, or the meaning of profit for that matter.
Lets say I have a CD with some incredibly expensive software on. Say it's worth $200,000,000.
Now, say a 16 year old kid borrows it, and copies it.
Has the kid suddenly made $200 million profit? No. Has the company selling the software just lost $200 million? No.
The problem with making assumptions as to the *actual* money lost by the music industry is the fact that you make two flawed assumptions:
1) That for each copy made, the person copying could have afforded it in the first place 2) That this person would also have actually *bought* it, even if they could afford it
Do you honestly think people with hundreds of gigabytes of MP3s would have bought all that music if they couldn't pirate it for free?
Of course not, they would've done without. So hang on, who has lost out here? This isn't stealing. This isn't theft. This is copyright infringement. The original is intact, and no-one has lost out on anything.
Lets say you *could* afford it, which most can't, would they have bought *all* of those songs they downloaded? No. If you paid for songs, you'd be a lot more picky about what songs you add to your collection.. What's a few minutes wasted on an MP3 it turns out you don't like - it's just time. I don't know about you, but I don't go around buying armfulls of CDs in music stores to see if they're any good..
Yes, there are some cases where the music industry is not getting sales they would otherwise, for example counterfit CDs - where the end buyer thinks they're getting a legit copy. Yes, this should be stopped, and is totally wrong.
I also object to people selling on music/software they've downloaded. That's also morally (and legally) very wrong. However, 9 times out of 10, that MP3 they just counted being copied on the net, or that CD bought (and that's assuming all CD-Rs are used to copy their music!), is a sale lost. This is simply NOT TRUE.
..you get the power supply cable in the right way. Yes, I know they have moulded plugs, but don't have it turned upside down and try and plug it in.
I once tried to plug a drive in, out of laziness, without turning the system off. While fumbling around trying to get the cables in, I had the power the wrong way up, tried to put it in, and it got close enough to spark - blowing the drive. I got a sweet smell of burning chips (the silicon, not potatoe variety), and some nice 'bubbles' on one chip in particular.
Needless to say, I wasn't very happy, and always turn the PC off first now..:)
Re:The kicker's in the tail
on
SuSE 7.3 vs XP
·
· Score: 1
Some more I know from the top of my head..
Windows Key + R = Run prompt
Windows Key + F = Find files
Windows Key + M = Minimise all [subtle difference to show desktop]
Windows Key + U = Utility Managager (Narrator etc.)
"It is not that many years ago that CD's were introduced. Today CD's dominate the marked completely. Why? I guess because the sound is superior and because the big companies went behind the format. "
CDs were not an overnight sucess. It took more than 3-5 years (as I said for OGG or another format to takeover MP3) before they were popular enough for the likes of Microsoft to stop releasing its OSes on floppy (remember the floppy install of Win 95?).
Also, the quality increase of OGG compared to MP3 is nothing like tape -> CD, or VHS -> DVD. Remember most people encode their MP3s at 128kbps for crying out loud! If they can't tell the difference between 128kbps MP3 and a CD, they won't hear the difference between MP3 and OGG.
I mean sure, technically Betamax was better than VHS, but we know that story. VHS seemed to make do for most people, as MP3 is for music.
What's in it for the corporations to back OGG? No money that's for sure - but backing DVD and CD meant profit. Pumping money into promoting one free format over another? Seems a bit far fetched. Yes, the likes of the BBC can stream OGG, but we don't exactly all store our audio in RealMedia format either do we?
Trying to thwart the argument because people moved from MS-DOS to Windows is akin to trying to break my reasoning by saying we moved from riding horses to driving cars.
Hands up who has more than 1GB of mp3s? How about 5GB? 10GB? 20GB? 50GB?
I'll bet a lot of you have huge collections of mp3s, and at the least a few gigabytes. Now just think about how long it'd take to rip all your cds again, download the downloaded tracks again (if you can even find them in.ogg format).
Think of the portable, car or hifi mp3 players you invested in that can't play the files, which will mean you'll need to keep every track on your hard drive twice, once in.ogg and once in.mp3. All for a little bit more quality? I can tell a 192Kbps from a CD, but damn - it's more than good enough to listen to on the whole.
I can't really see.ogg taking off the way mp3 has. Nearly everyone has heard of mp3s, in the newspapers, on TV, they know what Napster is, they know how to create and share mp3s.
The inertia behidn MP3 is too big to bring a total change in formats for most people for I'd say around 3-5 years. DVDs have been around for a while now, and STILL most people have a video player, huge amounts of videos are still sold and rented. Probably an unfair comparison - cheap DVD recorders aren't around - but you get the point.
Maybe for some.ogg is worthwhile - you have just started building your collection of music files from your CD collection, don't have an mp3 player, and have lots of time on your hands. For the average person though, I'd be amazed if they ever hear of.ogg, let alone switch their whole collections over.
Hang on, why shouldn't everyone be able to send files when they want?
I saw some argument going up about emails being delivered straight away in some cases, but sometimes taking days. Someone pointed out that 10 years ago you would never have got the speed of delivery you get now. Everyone promptly pointed out we're in the 21st century, the 'Internet Revolution' and we should have the ability to do reasonably simple things like this. Same applies here.
Yes, people should be able to send files, and yes, internet traffic *is going to increase* over the next few years. Pepole will want, and demand more, especially with broadband links going up left right and center. The backbone MUST be able to support this.
Yes it costs, and maybe the increased costs that I'm sure will be passed on to the customers may slow down things for a bit, but most people can see that the future is going to be a much faster, repsonsive and more importantly, *useful*, Internet for all of us. It's just a case of when.
Oh and one more thing, I believe hotmail is limited to 1 or 2mb per account. Most teenagers use hotmail. That's why they don't email mp3s (or one of the reasons).
I'd be impressed if you could remember which one was the real one though;)
It depends really how strong the encryption is as far as what's more likely to happen (Is it more probable someone will someone check out all the crap, or more probable that they'll crack your encryption?)
If it's going to take 1000 billion years and vast sums of money to crack the encryption using current tech, does it really matter?
What's easier to actually do yourself as well? Sure, ideally you have huge amounts of encrypted crap, but that's an awful lot of time to waste producing when, as you say, a machine can encrypt something almost instantly.
Point taken about the machine/human aspect though for breaking past it all.
That sounds like a really, really dumb idea. Just like the idea of security through obscurity, actually.
If you have subscribed to your ISP using your real address, you can be tracked. If you fill your hard drive with crap, the incriminating stuff can still be found.
If you really had something to hide, would you feel safe knowing you had lots of crap around to hide it, or rather know it was gone for good?
"I've plopped in the install CD for W2K, filled in a few simple details, walked away, came back 30 minutes later and had a system up-and-running without any problems"
OTOH, I've put in a W2K install cd in, only for the damn thing to constantly reboot my pc just as it started to load the installer. Then for a strange reason it decided to NOT reboot, install W2K, only for it to then reboot every time W2K started.
It turned out the motherboard (can't remember model, but was for a Pentium III), was incompatible, even with the latest BIOS. Had to get a new motherboard, and then it finally worked.
Ok this doens't happen that often, but talking on IRC the exact same thing had happened to a couple of people.:(
Slashdot Mirror
The trouble with the voice recognition on phones is that not only do you look a bit of a fool screaming a name into it repeatedly, but for the 10 or so people you'd have the voice recognition on it's so much quicker to have them on speed dial.
On my phone press 2 then dial to dial home. The alternative is hold down the side button to start voice recognition, wait a second, say "Home" into it, check it recognises it properly...
The only real use I can think of for voice recognition is either dictating things yourself, or making a recording of an entire meeting. Other things will simply be quicker to do by keyboard/pen input, and less irritating for those around you.
"Very Windows-like OS, in UI and design"
I wouldn't go that far. It's basic, simple to use, you can turn various things on and off to remove clutter etc. I'm not sure what makes it Windows like rather than any other graphical OS.
"I hate making a change to a document and then realizing I can't abort and reload the original."
Umm. Yes, you can. Ctrl-R reverts to saved. There is still a saving system - it's just you don't lose what you had before you saved when you turn it off. Try opening a file, modifying it and hitting CTRL-R, and it'll revert to saved.
I agree though, some kind of guesture recognition would be nice. The contrst on the screen could be better too - at least it's better with the 5mx than it was with the 5.
1] Longer battery life
I still have a Psion 5mx which the batteries last for weeks of normal usage.
2] An actual keyboard (or a stylus that works)
Keyboard on my 5mx is *very* nice - and arguably still the best PDA keyboard around. I still see it being mentioned in magazine roundups for having the ultimate keyboard. It's small, but the buttons are big enough to touch type on.
3] Upgrade-able software
Hmm. There is a lot of useful software around, but I doubt devlopment is anything like it used to be.
4] Lots, LOTS of memory
Why? 16mb is fine for most things you want a PDA for, and you can always get extra memory. I *think* I read you can use the IBM Microdrive in it, but don't quote me on it.
Yeah, we've been getting that for ages on Sky One. I'm actually sick of it now - after repeating them all up to season 5 just in time for season 5 to start, when it was over they went back to the start of season one AGAIN.
Then, just when I thought they'd put something new on when they reached the end of season 5 once more...
You guessed it, back to the start we go.
Last I saw they must have just about got to the end of season 5 for what, the third time? Hopefully that'll be the end of it until season 6 appears.
Talk about milking it for all it's worth. They've ruined the Simpsons in my opinion by doing the same thing, but on a bigger scale. I think they're showing 4 a day on some days, 2 on others. Madness. What about repeating Family Guy? Futurama? Hell, I'd like them to do their neverending repeats on Farscape simply because I've missed so many through it being on at awkward times on BBC2..
Would you look at that. I bet all 13,000 are DVD-Rs, he must run a pirate DVD factory.
Look, a terrorist!!
Nevermind the fact that the console versions would be running at a lower resolution and thus require much less video capabilities to render the scenes
If the lower resolution doesn't bother you, and playing on a TV is fine, why not just hook up your PC TV Out to a TV? You get your speed boost for running at a lower res, and free anti-aliasing.
I doubt very very much that Doom III will be playable on the XBox <I>and</i> look half as good as it does on the PC.
Bang for buck, consoles do outperform PCs. However, PCs consistently stay at the front of the pack for multiplayer, graphics, controls (keyboard/mouse/joypads/joysticks). Not to mention the other things you use your PC for, and the price of games, I'd never ditch a PC for games.
Don't forget WinZip (like all other compression programs I've seen that use .zip) has a 'no compression' option...
What seems to be getting overlooked here, amidst cries against per MB/GB billing, is the fact that ISPs & Telcos don't pay for the data transfered, but the bandwidth.
For example, my colo charges me around $300 per Mbit, on a 95th percentile basis. This makes sense - think about it, once the lines and routers are in place, it doesn't cost to transfer data over them. Sure, there are overheads, maintainence work etc, but it's akin to making roads for fuel-less cars. It costs to get setup, but then the physical running costs are minimal. There is no direct costs associated with the level of utilisation of the pipes..
If they get their models right, they can split up the cost of their connections over the users and make a profit. It shouldn't matter if the customers use the bandwidth that they are paying for, becuase their costs should be covered.
What certainly should not be allowed, is advertising saying that usage is unlimited, when in fact is not. This is obvious infringment of the trade descriptions act, surely?
We need to start to look more at the performance of the entire PC, rather than the CPU itself. For the record, I don't believe for one second that CPU development will halt in 10 years time - there will be something that comes around to enable us to continue increasing the speed of the processor. Better design, new technologies, lower power usage will all help in the race for speed.
However, the bottlenecks of our systems do need to be addressed. Storage, system buses, RAM bandwidth etc. are what's keeping our systems slow. Word takes hundreds of times longer to load than WordStar did on my old 8086. It takes an age for my system to boot, load apps and actually get doing work.
Yes, we can do a million more things with our PCs these days, and I could never go back - but I think the focus should be moved away from just the CPU. Manufacturers don't want to spend as much time looking at other bottlnecks, redesign components / systems when the average customer can't understand how a 2Ghz Athlon could be faster than a 2.2Ghz P4 - It's a bigger number, it must be faster! So, the companies give the cusotmers what they want. This is part of the problem. Inertia keeps us with the same x86 architecture; users aren't prepared to jump ship for some new design of system because they don't think anyone else will and so are scared of it failing, and manufacturers wouldn't come together to design a whole new system because they don't think anyone will come on board and use it!
Then again, a lot can change in 10 years. Think back to what you had on your desktop in 1992...
From the evidence, he searched for very few phrases. The sample size is way too low to be representive of the web - which some estimates put at several billion more pages than there are people on the planet! There are no signs of more than about 5 different phrases being searched for here..
Can a few simple searches on Google really generate a large enough sample to draw such large conclusions?
The report is one page long, hosted on Angelfire. There is no substantial data to back up his claims. Is this report reliable in any way?
I'm amazed this got posted on the front page of Slashdot..
I'd say that most eBook copies or MP3s can be traced back a very long way back to a sale. Sure, some things are leaked on pre-release or whatever, but generally a CD is ripped, and then shared.
How is that different to the library system?
Just thought I'd chip in.. Something tells me they don't OCR the books to get an eBook. Where'd you think the original document came from to create the original book?
:)
Just take that, do some formatting, on it, and you have your eBook. None of that OCRing lark
I don't think you quite get this, or the meaning of profit for that matter.
Lets say I have a CD with some incredibly expensive software on. Say it's worth $200,000,000.
Now, say a 16 year old kid borrows it, and copies it.
Has the kid suddenly made $200 million profit? No.
Has the company selling the software just lost $200 million? No.
The problem with making assumptions as to the *actual* money lost by the music industry is the fact that you make two flawed assumptions:
1) That for each copy made, the person copying could have afforded it in the first place
2) That this person would also have actually *bought* it, even if they could afford it
Do you honestly think people with hundreds of gigabytes of MP3s would have bought all that music if they couldn't pirate it for free?
Of course not, they would've done without. So hang on, who has lost out here? This isn't stealing. This isn't theft. This is copyright infringement. The original is intact, and no-one has lost out on anything.
Lets say you *could* afford it, which most can't, would they have bought *all* of those songs they downloaded? No. If you paid for songs, you'd be a lot more picky about what songs you add to your collection.. What's a few minutes wasted on an MP3 it turns out you don't like - it's just time. I don't know about you, but I don't go around buying armfulls of CDs in music stores to see if they're any good..
Yes, there are some cases where the music industry is not getting sales they would otherwise, for example counterfit CDs - where the end buyer thinks they're getting a legit copy. Yes, this should be stopped, and is totally wrong.
I also object to people selling on music/software they've downloaded. That's also morally (and legally) very wrong. However, 9 times out of 10, that MP3 they just counted being copied on the net, or that CD bought (and that's assuming all CD-Rs are used to copy their music!), is a sale lost. This is simply NOT TRUE.
..you get the power supply cable in the right way. Yes, I know they have moulded plugs, but don't have it turned upside down and try and plug it in.
:)
I once tried to plug a drive in, out of laziness, without turning the system off. While fumbling around trying to get the cables in, I had the power the wrong way up, tried to put it in, and it got close enough to spark - blowing the drive. I got a sweet smell of burning chips (the silicon, not potatoe variety), and some nice 'bubbles' on one chip in particular.
Needless to say, I wasn't very happy, and always turn the PC off first now..
Some more I know from the top of my head..
Windows Key + R = Run prompt
Windows Key + F = Find files
Windows Key + M = Minimise all [subtle difference to show desktop]
Windows Key + U = Utility Managager (Narrator etc.)
You can get boot loaders that let you read CD-Rs, never tried them (no PS2), but I'm informed they work - how do you think people pirate PS2 games?
"It is not that many years ago that CD's were introduced. Today CD's dominate the marked completely. Why? I guess because the sound is superior and because the big companies went behind the format. "
CDs were not an overnight sucess. It took more than 3-5 years (as I said for OGG or another format to takeover MP3) before they were popular enough for the likes of Microsoft to stop releasing its OSes on floppy (remember the floppy install of Win 95?).
Also, the quality increase of OGG compared to MP3 is nothing like tape -> CD, or VHS -> DVD. Remember most people encode their MP3s at 128kbps for crying out loud! If they can't tell the difference between 128kbps MP3 and a CD, they won't hear the difference between MP3 and OGG.
I mean sure, technically Betamax was better than VHS, but we know that story. VHS seemed to make do for most people, as MP3 is for music.
What's in it for the corporations to back OGG? No money that's for sure - but backing DVD and CD meant profit. Pumping money into promoting one free format over another? Seems a bit far fetched. Yes, the likes of the BBC can stream OGG, but we don't exactly all store our audio in RealMedia format either do we?
Trying to thwart the argument because people moved from MS-DOS to Windows is akin to trying to break my reasoning by saying we moved from riding horses to driving cars.
Last night I installed 8.1 on my nice freshly built dedicated Linux machine, and I was going to get sorting everything out this week..
:)
And now 8.2 is just around the corner? Grrrrrr.
Not upgrading would seem wrong, wouldn't it
Hands up who has more than 1GB of mp3s? How about 5GB? 10GB? 20GB? 50GB?
.ogg format).
.ogg and once in .mp3. All for a little bit more quality? I can tell a 192Kbps from a CD, but damn - it's more than good enough to listen to on the whole.
.ogg taking off the way mp3 has. Nearly everyone has heard of mp3s, in the newspapers, on TV, they know what Napster is, they know how to create and share mp3s.
.ogg is worthwhile - you have just started building your collection of music files from your CD collection, don't have an mp3 player, and have lots of time on your hands. For the average person though, I'd be amazed if they ever hear of .ogg, let alone switch their whole collections over.
I'll bet a lot of you have huge collections of mp3s, and at the least a few gigabytes. Now just think about how long it'd take to rip all your cds again, download the downloaded tracks again (if you can even find them in
Think of the portable, car or hifi mp3 players you invested in that can't play the files, which will mean you'll need to keep every track on your hard drive twice, once in
I can't really see
The inertia behidn MP3 is too big to bring a total change in formats for most people for I'd say around 3-5 years. DVDs have been around for a while now, and STILL most people have a video player, huge amounts of videos are still sold and rented. Probably an unfair comparison - cheap DVD recorders aren't around - but you get the point.
Maybe for some
LOL, mod this up someone :)
Hang on, why shouldn't everyone be able to send files when they want?
I saw some argument going up about emails being delivered straight away in some cases, but sometimes taking days. Someone pointed out that 10 years ago you would never have got the speed of delivery you get now. Everyone promptly pointed out we're in the 21st century, the 'Internet Revolution' and we should have the ability to do reasonably simple things like this. Same applies here.
Yes, people should be able to send files, and yes, internet traffic *is going to increase* over the next few years. Pepole will want, and demand more, especially with broadband links going up left right and center. The backbone MUST be able to support this.
Yes it costs, and maybe the increased costs that I'm sure will be passed on to the customers may slow down things for a bit, but most people can see that the future is going to be a much faster, repsonsive and more importantly, *useful*, Internet for all of us. It's just a case of when.
Oh and one more thing, I believe hotmail is limited to 1 or 2mb per account. Most teenagers use hotmail. That's why they don't email mp3s (or one of the reasons).
I'd be impressed if you could remember which one was the real one though ;)
It depends really how strong the encryption is as far as what's more likely to happen (Is it more probable someone will someone check out all the crap, or more probable that they'll crack your encryption?)
If it's going to take 1000 billion years and vast sums of money to crack the encryption using current tech, does it really matter?
What's easier to actually do yourself as well? Sure, ideally you have huge amounts of encrypted crap, but that's an awful lot of time to waste producing when, as you say, a machine can encrypt something almost instantly.
Point taken about the machine/human aspect though for breaking past it all.
That sounds like a really, really dumb idea. Just like the idea of security through obscurity, actually.
If you have subscribed to your ISP using your real address, you can be tracked. If you fill your hard drive with crap, the incriminating stuff can still be found.
If you really had something to hide, would you feel safe knowing you had lots of crap around to hide it, or rather know it was gone for good?
"I've plopped in the install CD for W2K, filled in a few simple details, walked away, came back 30 minutes later and had a system up-and-running without any problems" OTOH, I've put in a W2K install cd in, only for the damn thing to constantly reboot my pc just as it started to load the installer. Then for a strange reason it decided to NOT reboot, install W2K, only for it to then reboot every time W2K started. It turned out the motherboard (can't remember model, but was for a Pentium III), was incompatible, even with the latest BIOS. Had to get a new motherboard, and then it finally worked. Ok this doens't happen that often, but talking on IRC the exact same thing had happened to a couple of people. :(