Solitaire and AIM are not the problem...it's the people that are the problem.
I often play a game or two of solitaire while waiting for something to finish. Sure, I might be "wasting" time, but I almost never could do anything productive in that minute or two. But, if you have users who are playing solitaire for several hours straight, then there is no technical means that will keep them working the entire time they are in the office.
If you are talking full Blu-Ray disks, then local storage is the only way to go, as you probably can't get an affordable network connection that allows you to stream at 30Mbps with no dropouts (and certainly couldn't for "on the go"). Even if you could, with even a relatively large 250GB cap per month, that lets you watch about 10 movies/month (as long as you don't do anything else).
Now, in the real world, a terabyte drive will hold 250 movies at 720p resolution. I know, because I have exactly that with my Blu-Ray rips. Yes, I've sacrificed lossless audio (which I can't use anyway with my older receiver, so I "suffer" with DTS at 1536Kbps), and some video resolution, but the bitrate on the encode is more than enough to maintain quality at that resolution. On the other hand, I don't have to wait for menus to load, and I don't waste disk space on things I'll either never (no one in my house speaks Portuguese) or rarely (maybe I'll watch the trailer for the movie instead of the movie itself...nope, I guess not) use.
Conclusion: You can do it, but it would take an awful lot of space.
The trouble is that it still won't work in the real world.
First, you can't use agricultural land, and probably can't use any "urban" area. That cuts out about 10-20% of all land, so it's better to just use the oceans.
If you cover the entire ocean with collectors, you might be able to power most of the world. Everything about 40 degrees away from the equator will get a lot less than the 250/6 that you estimate. Then, you'd have transmission losses, and last you'd have storage and conversion losses (because of batteries and the DC <-> AC conversions). If you end up at 1% of total striking solar energy feeding the grid, you'd be doing really well, so adjust your numbers by at least a factor of 50, and maybe as much as 300 (which would mean you'd need a minimum of somewhere around 3-15 times the entire area of the US to power the world, and that that point, you're covering nearly 50% of the oceans).
Also, because you'd have to have many stacks of batteries each bigger than a nuclear plant, it might even be more dangerous. And, let's not get into what this would do to the environment if even 10% of the world's oceans stopped getting direct sunlight.
On the other hand, if every new construction was required to have 10 square meters of solar panels per housing unit, that would make a huge dent in the world's energy needs, even at crappy conversion percentages. Because the energy is local and can be pushed back into the grid, you wouldn't worry about storage.
Someone hasn't been keeping up with their enterprise grade equipment management.
And it's not like it's really and "enterprise" thing anymore.
I paid a $30 premium for each motherboard for my home servers to give me "lights-out" management. That's about 1% of the total cost of each server...well worth the investment. But, I rarely need to go to that level, because all the "working" servers are VMs, and it's easy to get a console on those.
If employees switch to telecommuting the company's rent won't just magically shrink, nor will there be a substantial change in utility bills because there's one less computer on at the office;
If one person in a 250-person company telecommutes, then you are correct. But, if 50 people do, then the company can downsize their space to save rent, and won't need dedicated on-site workstations for those 50 people. Just make sure to allocate some reasonable space for worktables for telecommuters who have to come in, and it would be fine.
Since much of my work concerns a client who is not at our site, and I can VPN in to the client from anywhere in the world, it would be better for both the company and me to telecommute every day.
I think that education needs to start with you, since you are the MPAA's wet dream.
The MPAA wants you to believe that you are buying a license when you buy a DVD, but both the written laws (17 USC in the United States) and case law shows that you truly have made a purchase. The only thing you are generally not allowed to do with the DVD is to distribute copies of it to other people.
You can make as many backups of the DVD as you want, as long as you don't distribute them to other people. You can change the format of the content so it works on other devices, as long as those devices are yours. You can loan, rent or sell the DVD to anyone you want as long as you don't keep a copy for yourself. You can invite as many friends as you want over to your house to watch the DVD, and you can do so on as large a screen as you want, as long as the "public" isn't allowed to watch.
It is alright if the dedicated 1% (and this is a generous estimate) can work around the censorship. As long as most people don't do it, what good does it do to them?
Censorship is like DRM...if it is not 100% effective, then it's a complete failure.
Just like all it takes is one person to crack the DRM and share the unprotected content, all it takes is one person who can get through the "Great Firewall" and acquire non-censored information to spread via sneakernet.
If "format shifting" is truly illegal in the UK, then anything you transfer from your hard drive to your iPod (which involves making a copy) should also be illegal.
The only way to remain legal in the UK would be to move your music collection from your hard drive to the iPod, thus having only one copy.
Yea, now people will finally stop arguing for it and give solar, wind, etc. more attention. Awesome.
You must have a lot of stock in energy companies, because the only winner with less nuclear power will be companies that get to charge a lot more for power.
If you do the math, even by covering 100% of the world's surface (including the oceans) with solar collectors, you couldn't produce enough energy to keep the planet running. The same is true for wind turbines, and it won't even work if you had both covering the entire planet (stacked on top of each other). You need something with far more energy density than wind or solar, and the only one that will last for at least several centuries is nuclear.
Try getting a job these days when you tell them you don't have a cellphone, or you will only be reachable on it when it's convenient for you.
I've got a job exactly like that, and it really shouldn't be that hard to do, if you are working for a company that doesn't equate "job" with "indentured servitude". I do have a company-issued Blackberry, but it is only used for "system down" issues, and anyone calling for non-emergency reasons is allowed to be chewed out by me.
One way to combat this is if your manager demands your personal cell phone number, then make sure you get theirs, too. Then, if they abuse you by calling at all hours with insignificant items, return the favor with frequent "progress reports". Basically, you need to teach your company that unless you are part of some sort of "emergency response", there is no reason that you be contactable immediately outside of normal working hours. Letting them know that e-mail (or texts) will get a quick response in most cases will help them realize that "instant" is not a requirement for most jobs.
So, where in that paragraph is anything that says cell phones are the problem?
I see a lot about law enforcement people breaking the law and gathering evidence that can't be used in court, but I don't see anything about cell phones themselves being a problem.
I also see a need for better enforcement of privacy laws, but still don't see how cell phones by themselves are a problem, any more than credit cards, license plates, or shopping at Amazon are a problem by themselves. Illegal use of data from all these things might very well be a problem, but you don't solve it by getting rid of all these useful things.
The difference is that the telephone has a microphone and gps already, for good reason. But that is not a good reason not to let the end user control those
And how would you propose to "control" the GPS on your cellphone more than you already can?
First, if you want arbitrary access to the GPS just because it's in the phone, sorry, there's no reason for that. You bought a phone, and the cellphone company can quite reasonably say that the GPS is an "extra" you have to pay for, since it absolutely is not required to make cell phone calls.
Second, you already do have control over what outside your phone gets access to the GPS data, so although the phone could be used to spy on your movements, it would require a court order, which you would never have any control over, anyway.
Third, there is no way for you to control the other location information available (the cell phone tower you connect to), as that is required by the phone company to give you service.
So, other than malicious software (which could even be open source) and court orders, you really do control any GPS that you paid for (and similarly the microphone).
Whilst you are free to disagree with him, I think it is short-sighted to disregard his arguments as "shit", since they are perfectly rational.
No, they aren't rational. A rational argument from such a "smart" person would include the design for a portable communications system that does not have the "flaws" that he is whining about.
Instead of actually doing something with open source software and hardware, he just talks a lot. Basically, until Stallman comes up with an alternative to current cellphones that fit his model, he's just a well-known, loud-mouthed crackpot.
BTW, does anybody have know when the last time his name was on the "commit" of any open source project?
GPS will also work with signals from just 3 satellites if the software makes some assumptions about where you are (usually based on where you were when it had a full fix).
(Also, my music collection is currently just under 1TB, so storing it all in FLAC would probably expand it to 5TBs which is a bit unwieldy at present.)
At 320Kbps, with an average track being 4 minutes long, that's over 100,000 tracks. At US$1 per track, that's over US$100,000 spent on music. If you're bitrate is a lot less, it's even more. I'm gonna assume that you probably didn't acquire all those tracks legally.
This means that your opinion on format doesn't really matter much, as you don't really care what format online music stores sell. Personally, I don't care how you got the music...I'm just pointing out that the price of music and a typical somewhat narrow music taste tends to make even a 20,000 track collection a very far outlier to the average, which means a format that is a problem for only those people isn't a problem in reality.
I'm not the OP, but I have nearly 1000 CDs, and the shelves for them take up just the part of one wall in one room...hardly a "dedicated room".
Although many people today have more than 20,000 tracks in their audio collection, I suspect that not all the tracks are legally obtained. It's really a different mindset today, where the quality of the audio isn't as important as the quantity.
My parents CDs skip, have scratches, won't play, etc. They're essentially useless.
Many of my CDs went through college with me, including parties, and I've only had a few that became unplayable due to scratches. Mostly, that's because I didn't just throw the discs down anywhere, but instead put them back into the case after playing. It's amazing how much longer things last when you take care of them. But, I also did not have a portable CD player until after I also had a CD burner in my computer, so I always played the backups in situations that were more likely to damage them.
You don't seem to value your time very highly.. it took me months to re-rip my CD collection when I decided that 128kbps wasn't good enough anymore.
You must have many thousands of CDs, as I just dealt with re-ripping due to corruption that had made its way into the backups, too. It takes me about an hour to rip 30 CDs in the background (so I'm not really dedicating my time to the ripping...I'm just swapping disks). It helps that my music software remembers all the tagging from the first rip. I finished my nearly 1000 CD collection in less than a week, with the biggest pain being carrying the CDs from the shelves to the computer and back. Then, it was one day of computer time to re-create the MP3s for the portables.
Your real mistake, as you can see from my timeline, was not ripping to a lossless format in the first place, as it would have allowed you to just set up the conversion and run it in the background, and be done in a day or so with no real work on your part. That's one of the big points of TFA as far as downloaded music purchases are concerned...lossless allows you to easily do whatever you want with the music while maintaining the maximum possible quality.
I re-ripped at 192kbps, and decided that if I wanted any more quality I'd just torrent FLACs.
And, you've made the same mistake again on this re-rip, so look forward to spending a few months again, since it's quite likely that most of your music isn't available on torrents as FLAC.
While much of the hacking was surprisingly accurate, I hated the part where he plugged in a speaker in his bedroom so his girlfriend could "hear the computer" -- and from then on, in any location, for the rest of the whole movie, the computer would talk -- without the speaker. Huh?
The speaking computer is just a device for the audience. It's almost exactly like how the Russians start speaking English for the rest of the movie in The Hunt for Red October.
Computers speaking all the time, people speaking to computers while they are typing, really big text, and other devices to allow the audience to know what is happening can be forgiven. Viruses that infect every OS and hardware, five pixel high image portions that are "enhanced" to show three readable lines of text, and breaking any decent encryption in less than a few weeks are all things that should be banned from movies forever.
For example, the only technical issue I had a real problem with in Enemy of the State was surveillance satellites that could hover over one location on the planet. Although it could be done, the optics would be prohibitively expensive compared to what actually exists (basically, it would have to be able to resolve about 50 times as many pixels as current technology). Otherwise, if you assume that the NSA really wanted to build a system that could access most every bit of public information and correlate it to receivers they had planted for picking up the tracking devices placed on Will Smith's character, then they probably could. That movie also suffered from having to have one "bad guy organization", so they had the NSA murdering people, but that's not a technical or computer issue.
That was kinda bad, but at least it really was Unix.
It was still really bad.
/. has lots of geeks, but I suspect that less than a handful had ever seen that interface before the movie came out, so there was no chance the little girl had seen it.
A quality GPS receiver could tell you which floor of a building you're on
If GPS worked reliably indoors.
Which it does for a quality GPS receiver.
I have a unit that works just fine indoors, although it's got a slower time to first fix than when it has stronger signals. Once it has good signals, though, nothing seems to bother it. It's only real fault is that it is just a GPS receiver (no software), so it's at the mercy of the software for many things (like getting a fix after it has been turned off and moved thousands of miles before being turned back on).
It's wasn't very expensive, either. Look for any GPS with the "Sirf Star III" chipset.
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Solitaire and AIM are not the problem...it's the people that are the problem.
I often play a game or two of solitaire while waiting for something to finish. Sure, I might be "wasting" time, but I almost never could do anything productive in that minute or two. But, if you have users who are playing solitaire for several hours straight, then there is no technical means that will keep them working the entire time they are in the office.
A 1TB drive will hold a whole 33 bluerays.
If you are talking full Blu-Ray disks, then local storage is the only way to go, as you probably can't get an affordable network connection that allows you to stream at 30Mbps with no dropouts (and certainly couldn't for "on the go"). Even if you could, with even a relatively large 250GB cap per month, that lets you watch about 10 movies/month (as long as you don't do anything else).
Now, in the real world, a terabyte drive will hold 250 movies at 720p resolution. I know, because I have exactly that with my Blu-Ray rips. Yes, I've sacrificed lossless audio (which I can't use anyway with my older receiver, so I "suffer" with DTS at 1536Kbps), and some video resolution, but the bitrate on the encode is more than enough to maintain quality at that resolution. On the other hand, I don't have to wait for menus to load, and I don't waste disk space on things I'll either never (no one in my house speaks Portuguese) or rarely (maybe I'll watch the trailer for the movie instead of the movie itself...nope, I guess not) use.
Conclusion: You can do it, but it would take an awful lot of space.
The trouble is that it still won't work in the real world.
First, you can't use agricultural land, and probably can't use any "urban" area. That cuts out about 10-20% of all land, so it's better to just use the oceans.
If you cover the entire ocean with collectors, you might be able to power most of the world. Everything about 40 degrees away from the equator will get a lot less than the 250/6 that you estimate. Then, you'd have transmission losses, and last you'd have storage and conversion losses (because of batteries and the DC <-> AC conversions). If you end up at 1% of total striking solar energy feeding the grid, you'd be doing really well, so adjust your numbers by at least a factor of 50, and maybe as much as 300 (which would mean you'd need a minimum of somewhere around 3-15 times the entire area of the US to power the world, and that that point, you're covering nearly 50% of the oceans).
Also, because you'd have to have many stacks of batteries each bigger than a nuclear plant, it might even be more dangerous. And, let's not get into what this would do to the environment if even 10% of the world's oceans stopped getting direct sunlight.
On the other hand, if every new construction was required to have 10 square meters of solar panels per housing unit, that would make a huge dent in the world's energy needs, even at crappy conversion percentages. Because the energy is local and can be pushed back into the grid, you wouldn't worry about storage.
Wow I wish I had found regular PC mobos with that feature.
Almost everything from SuperMicro has IPMI as an option. Look for the "-F" model numbers.
Someone hasn't been keeping up with their enterprise grade equipment management.
And it's not like it's really and "enterprise" thing anymore.
I paid a $30 premium for each motherboard for my home servers to give me "lights-out" management. That's about 1% of the total cost of each server...well worth the investment. But, I rarely need to go to that level, because all the "working" servers are VMs, and it's easy to get a console on those.
If employees switch to telecommuting the company's rent won't just magically shrink, nor will there be a substantial change in utility bills because there's one less computer on at the office;
If one person in a 250-person company telecommutes, then you are correct. But, if 50 people do, then the company can downsize their space to save rent, and won't need dedicated on-site workstations for those 50 people. Just make sure to allocate some reasonable space for worktables for telecommuters who have to come in, and it would be fine.
Since much of my work concerns a client who is not at our site, and I can VPN in to the client from anywhere in the world, it would be better for both the company and me to telecommute every day.
it starts with education, then they will care.
I think that education needs to start with you, since you are the MPAA's wet dream.
The MPAA wants you to believe that you are buying a license when you buy a DVD, but both the written laws (17 USC in the United States) and case law shows that you truly have made a purchase. The only thing you are generally not allowed to do with the DVD is to distribute copies of it to other people.
You can make as many backups of the DVD as you want, as long as you don't distribute them to other people. You can change the format of the content so it works on other devices, as long as those devices are yours. You can loan, rent or sell the DVD to anyone you want as long as you don't keep a copy for yourself. You can invite as many friends as you want over to your house to watch the DVD, and you can do so on as large a screen as you want, as long as the "public" isn't allowed to watch.
It is alright if the dedicated 1% (and this is a generous estimate) can work around the censorship. As long as most people don't do it, what good does it do to them?
Censorship is like DRM...if it is not 100% effective, then it's a complete failure.
Just like all it takes is one person to crack the DRM and share the unprotected content, all it takes is one person who can get through the "Great Firewall" and acquire non-censored information to spread via sneakernet.
If "format shifting" is truly illegal in the UK, then anything you transfer from your hard drive to your iPod (which involves making a copy) should also be illegal.
The only way to remain legal in the UK would be to move your music collection from your hard drive to the iPod, thus having only one copy.
Yea, now people will finally stop arguing for it and give solar, wind, etc. more attention. Awesome.
You must have a lot of stock in energy companies, because the only winner with less nuclear power will be companies that get to charge a lot more for power.
If you do the math, even by covering 100% of the world's surface (including the oceans) with solar collectors, you couldn't produce enough energy to keep the planet running. The same is true for wind turbines, and it won't even work if you had both covering the entire planet (stacked on top of each other). You need something with far more energy density than wind or solar, and the only one that will last for at least several centuries is nuclear.
Try getting a job these days when you tell them you don't have a cellphone, or you will only be reachable on it when it's convenient for you.
I've got a job exactly like that, and it really shouldn't be that hard to do, if you are working for a company that doesn't equate "job" with "indentured servitude". I do have a company-issued Blackberry, but it is only used for "system down" issues, and anyone calling for non-emergency reasons is allowed to be chewed out by me.
One way to combat this is if your manager demands your personal cell phone number, then make sure you get theirs, too. Then, if they abuse you by calling at all hours with insignificant items, return the favor with frequent "progress reports". Basically, you need to teach your company that unless you are part of some sort of "emergency response", there is no reason that you be contactable immediately outside of normal working hours. Letting them know that e-mail (or texts) will get a quick response in most cases will help them realize that "instant" is not a requirement for most jobs.
To make money off one of them, you need 1) the ability to deliver, 2) a method for getting paid, and 3) wealthy customers.
You only need #2, since I believe Zuckerberg made all his money from the IPO, before Facebook was profitable.
So, he got paid based on people believing he would eventually have both #1 and #3, and it's really just the belief that matters.
So, where in that paragraph is anything that says cell phones are the problem?
I see a lot about law enforcement people breaking the law and gathering evidence that can't be used in court, but I don't see anything about cell phones themselves being a problem.
I also see a need for better enforcement of privacy laws, but still don't see how cell phones by themselves are a problem, any more than credit cards, license plates, or shopping at Amazon are a problem by themselves. Illegal use of data from all these things might very well be a problem, but you don't solve it by getting rid of all these useful things.
The difference is that the telephone has a microphone and gps already, for good reason. But that is not a good reason not to let the end user control those
And how would you propose to "control" the GPS on your cellphone more than you already can?
First, if you want arbitrary access to the GPS just because it's in the phone, sorry, there's no reason for that. You bought a phone, and the cellphone company can quite reasonably say that the GPS is an "extra" you have to pay for, since it absolutely is not required to make cell phone calls.
Second, you already do have control over what outside your phone gets access to the GPS data, so although the phone could be used to spy on your movements, it would require a court order, which you would never have any control over, anyway.
Third, there is no way for you to control the other location information available (the cell phone tower you connect to), as that is required by the phone company to give you service.
So, other than malicious software (which could even be open source) and court orders, you really do control any GPS that you paid for (and similarly the microphone).
Whilst you are free to disagree with him, I think it is short-sighted to disregard his arguments as "shit", since they are perfectly rational.
No, they aren't rational. A rational argument from such a "smart" person would include the design for a portable communications system that does not have the "flaws" that he is whining about.
Instead of actually doing something with open source software and hardware, he just talks a lot. Basically, until Stallman comes up with an alternative to current cellphones that fit his model, he's just a well-known, loud-mouthed crackpot.
BTW, does anybody have know when the last time his name was on the "commit" of any open source project?
GPS will also work with signals from just 3 satellites if the software makes some assumptions about where you are (usually based on where you were when it had a full fix).
(Also, my music collection is currently just under 1TB, so storing it all in FLAC would probably expand it to 5TBs which is a bit unwieldy at present.)
At 320Kbps, with an average track being 4 minutes long, that's over 100,000 tracks. At US$1 per track, that's over US$100,000 spent on music. If you're bitrate is a lot less, it's even more. I'm gonna assume that you probably didn't acquire all those tracks legally.
This means that your opinion on format doesn't really matter much, as you don't really care what format online music stores sell. Personally, I don't care how you got the music...I'm just pointing out that the price of music and a typical somewhat narrow music taste tends to make even a 20,000 track collection a very far outlier to the average, which means a format that is a problem for only those people isn't a problem in reality.
Well look at you and your dedicated room.
I'm not the OP, but I have nearly 1000 CDs, and the shelves for them take up just the part of one wall in one room...hardly a "dedicated room".
Although many people today have more than 20,000 tracks in their audio collection, I suspect that not all the tracks are legally obtained. It's really a different mindset today, where the quality of the audio isn't as important as the quantity.
My parents CDs skip, have scratches, won't play, etc. They're essentially useless.
Many of my CDs went through college with me, including parties, and I've only had a few that became unplayable due to scratches. Mostly, that's because I didn't just throw the discs down anywhere, but instead put them back into the case after playing. It's amazing how much longer things last when you take care of them. But, I also did not have a portable CD player until after I also had a CD burner in my computer, so I always played the backups in situations that were more likely to damage them.
You don't seem to value your time very highly.. it took me months to re-rip my CD collection when I decided that 128kbps wasn't good enough anymore.
You must have many thousands of CDs, as I just dealt with re-ripping due to corruption that had made its way into the backups, too. It takes me about an hour to rip 30 CDs in the background (so I'm not really dedicating my time to the ripping...I'm just swapping disks). It helps that my music software remembers all the tagging from the first rip. I finished my nearly 1000 CD collection in less than a week, with the biggest pain being carrying the CDs from the shelves to the computer and back. Then, it was one day of computer time to re-create the MP3s for the portables.
Your real mistake, as you can see from my timeline, was not ripping to a lossless format in the first place, as it would have allowed you to just set up the conversion and run it in the background, and be done in a day or so with no real work on your part. That's one of the big points of TFA as far as downloaded music purchases are concerned...lossless allows you to easily do whatever you want with the music while maintaining the maximum possible quality.
I re-ripped at 192kbps, and decided that if I wanted any more quality I'd just torrent FLACs.
And, you've made the same mistake again on this re-rip, so look forward to spending a few months again, since it's quite likely that most of your music isn't available on torrents as FLAC.
While much of the hacking was surprisingly accurate, I hated the part where he plugged in a speaker in his bedroom so his girlfriend could "hear the computer" -- and from then on, in any location, for the rest of the whole movie, the computer would talk -- without the speaker. Huh?
The speaking computer is just a device for the audience. It's almost exactly like how the Russians start speaking English for the rest of the movie in The Hunt for Red October.
Computers speaking all the time, people speaking to computers while they are typing, really big text, and other devices to allow the audience to know what is happening can be forgiven. Viruses that infect every OS and hardware, five pixel high image portions that are "enhanced" to show three readable lines of text, and breaking any decent encryption in less than a few weeks are all things that should be banned from movies forever.
For example, the only technical issue I had a real problem with in Enemy of the State was surveillance satellites that could hover over one location on the planet. Although it could be done, the optics would be prohibitively expensive compared to what actually exists (basically, it would have to be able to resolve about 50 times as many pixels as current technology). Otherwise, if you assume that the NSA really wanted to build a system that could access most every bit of public information and correlate it to receivers they had planted for picking up the tracking devices placed on Will Smith's character, then they probably could. That movie also suffered from having to have one "bad guy organization", so they had the NSA murdering people, but that's not a technical or computer issue.
It's a Unix system, I know this!
That was kinda bad, but at least it really was Unix.
It was still really bad.
/. has lots of geeks, but I suspect that less than a handful had ever seen that interface before the movie came out, so there was no chance the little girl had seen it.
They look strange because the GP forgot to use HTML entities where needed, so some of the code disappeared.
The original source (with comments) should explain things.
I love stories like this. Why were you arrested TWICE? What made "some cop not like you"?
Perhaps he was arrested during protests against the erosion of his civil rights.
technology is not capitalized.
FTFY
A quality GPS receiver could tell you which floor of a building you're on
If GPS worked reliably indoors.
Which it does for a quality GPS receiver.
I have a unit that works just fine indoors, although it's got a slower time to first fix than when it has stronger signals. Once it has good signals, though, nothing seems to bother it. It's only real fault is that it is just a GPS receiver (no software), so it's at the mercy of the software for many things (like getting a fix after it has been turned off and moved thousands of miles before being turned back on).
It's wasn't very expensive, either. Look for any GPS with the "Sirf Star III" chipset.