Books are not going to be napsterised on the same level as music and movies because they are already abundantly available for cheap or for free. You can borrow from libraries, swap with friends, lend them to friends, or give them away. Books are also dirt cheap second hand, and most households have a reasonable collection of books.
It's a good thing. It means that the publishing industry can enjoy very little threat from piracy compared to other media industries.
Books are as heavily 'pirated' already (if you consider lending or second hand sales piracy, as the publisher doesn't see a penny), as pirated as possible without counting illegal copying.
Could this be just because it is new and spiffy that everyone is just saying what comes comes into their head so they have something to post?
This is largely what happens with any new forum, chatroom or blog you set up to communicate with a small user groups amongst friends or within an organisation.
Over time people loose interest in "HI U GUYS OMG LOL DIS IS WIERD" and start using it when they *need* to communicate something of actual importance.
Currently batteries are expensive large because of costly/scarce materials, recouping hefty r&d costs, and poor performance (simple need a big battery back for any usable mileage).
The price/performance is getting better all the time. At some point, I predict, electric cars will be cheaper per horsepower or mile of range. Because well you're cutting out, well gee, a few hundred moving parts, fluids, and reaping added cost savings to the chassis in flexibility of packaging and scalability (ie no need to route exhaust, drive line, cooling).
We better start building more roads, because in a decade (give or take) there will be a flood of new cars of all shapes and sizes, and they will be cheap.
IEtab is a plug in for rendering a web page in IE in a firefox tab, which has existed for some time without raising anyones hackles. This is not the only example and also nothing new: this kind of thing has been going on for a long time.
Have you noticed that Windows 7, is really really good, and infact is the the first time a Windows release has ever been anything resembling 'good'. In contrast, this marketing is the worst ever since that rap video for Windows 386.
Obviously the quality of the product at Microsoft is inversely proportional to the quality of the marketing.
Kids heading out of a degree mill to join the coal face should be under no illusions about glamour. You'll end up in a important job, but it will be far from glamourous. John Carmack can drive Ferraris and run his diy space program, Mark Zuckerburg can create a social networking site and screw groupies in the bathrooms. But these guys are not outright IT nerds, their Entrepreneurs first and foremost, they're made from different stuff and taken a different path right from early on.
I had always had a interest in shiny new things with blinkin lights, IT was an attractive career, however I had my bubble burst on day one. It seems the 9/10ths of anything is crap applied.
Getting to work with the latest and greatest, riding the bleeding edge of innovation... is not what 90% of IT jobs are about.
You will like not be working in a organisation of distinguished academics, with years of training in an academic institution. You will be working with 90% IT cowboys, who, like you learned 90% of everything they know in a self-taught DIY fashion, then went to do some 90-minute multichoice exams to have some certificates for their resume. The IT equivelent of a backyard mechanic.
You'll learn that everybody is an expert, according to them.
The blinking lights you learn to curse, well when they go off and leave a flashing red one at least.
The reality when you hit the ground in IT is that everything is somewhat old, no longer shiny, and being nursed along until the next upgrade cycle. Everything is out of date already when it's installed, everything is constantly broken or underperforming, therefore justifying an ecosystem of support and then eventual upgrade. Projects will always be late and overbudget.
In all likelyhood the coolest stuff you will be in your own time, your own projects.
The reality of IT is that most of the jobs are the IT equivelent of a plumber, when all the glory is had by the civil engineers who design and build the bridges and pipes, who get to feature in the news articles. Your job will be essiential, but not glamorous.
"If a netbook were to be stolen or sold, the DET is able to remotely disable the device over the network. Even if the hard drive of the machine was swapped out or the operating system wiped, it would be useless to unauthorised users."
It may be hackable yes,/. groupthink even posits how easy it may be. I think we've seen 'Windows' mentioned and somehow assumed they would inevitibly make obvious mistakes like allowing booting from usb/cd.
They appear to have some kind of kill switch at the BIOS level, which sounds pretty potent and difficult to circumvent to me. I would presume when the stolen machine connects ot the internet, it calls home, if it's been nuked, it then bricks itself and refuses to boot of anything.
Doesn't mean you couldn't strip the laptops for parts if stolen. That is if you didn't go the trouble of replacing bios chip (if not flashable)
Despite that, they do seem to have to gone to significant lengths to thwart theft more than anything. However whatever IT outfit told them that the product would be 'unhackable' is guilty of telling lies, that kind of statement smacks of marketing department (not engineers) of some company telling it's ignorant client what it wants to hear (yet can't reasonably expect to get) just to get paid.
So it will be hacked, of course and the blame will fall everywhere (ie students) except the marketing people who made the claims.
Noobs genearlly want to customize and personalise fast, easily, and it's usually the first thing they want to do with a new toy like a OS. I've always observed teh expertz are the ones who don't make significant changes to their UI settings.
Users have been throwing this one at Gnome/KDE devs for years. It seems it is too Windows for the idealists, to the point that it's become quite a fun troll in the bug reports.
In reality, its a stupidly simple feature to save uncessary repetitive steps. Working with a graphical file manager is more efficient, and for some tasks necessary if you want to be productive, having to pop a terminal open for something a file manager *should* be able to do is silly and should have been fixed by KDE 1.0. A silly example itself, there are much better (longer) examples which demostrate how Linux groupthink raises my hackles. 'Free' as in gratis/beer, sure but at times non-Free in terms of thinking. (The hell with karma)
...1 year to 18 months. There is a plethora of tablets about to hit the market it seems obvious to me that waiting will yield much more choice and better value. Prices would fall after a handful of competiting products have gotten on the market. This will also put more pressure on netbooks which will become cheaper, and the low end of the full laptop market will ratchet down in price too.
Apple, Crunchpad and Microsoft, would be the three I'd seriously consider. A lean towards the latter two depending on what software you want to run.
[window pop up] "Are you sure you want to send this?"
[countdown timer on OK button] 5...4...3...2...1...
[user clicks OK prematurely]
[window pop up] "NO! Penalty timeout!"
[countdown timer on OK button] 39...38...37...36...
I ROFLd very hard at this. Now who hasn't heard of something like this happening or been in a work place where this has happend? Of all the security measures companies fret over these days they fail to recognise the threat of abject stupidity.
Yes some asshat will accidentally forward whatever. How this occurs is demonstrated by my example below (I witnessed this, details altered). I've see co-workers make this mistake, and I've been a customer when the same fault happend and I got sent a 700kb spreadsheet of confidental information. But anyway, here is the two step method to epic fail:
Step 1: Email staff with a template for them to send, and attach a spreadsheet of the customers
-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Smart [mailto: Bob.Smart@[-------].co.--]
Sent: Thursday, 23 September 2008 10:53
To: [-------] Outbound Contact Team
Subject: FW: eBill template
Hi Team,
Please send this template below to all customers in the attached spreadsheet. You three can divide the work amongst yourselves.
>
Dear customer-name-here, [etc..]
.....
Step 2: Your keyboard jockeys forward the email, deletes the header and Boss's message. Inserts customer details into template. Send, Boom, Done.
By default, forwarding in pretty much all mail applications keeps the attachment.
I'm sure this is the principal way documents are leaked from just about any organisation.
Cursive was faster to write, but sacrificed readibility, being slower to read than print until one adapts to the individuals style.
Sound familiar?
Texting is faster than proper spelling and grammar, but sacrifices readibility, being slower to read than proper text, until one adapts to the txter's style.
It's much less pretty, and certainly more irritating, but the reasons are the same. Cursive handwriting is a kludge, because the english alphabet is terribly slow to write by hand compared to more writing friendly alphabets around the world.
1 Exaflop matches up with some estimates of the net raw processing power of the human brain. Note I say raw and net, because that excludes likely optimization methods and weeding out parts of the mind that don't need to be simulated 1:1 (retina for example).
1 Exabyte far exceeds the memory capacity (by 1000x) to store a human brain... uncompressed.
They plan to have this thing running in 10 years.
$1000 computing equipment is hovering around 5-6 years behind Top500 http://www.top500.org/ computers (maybe less these days when you consider a single $100 graphics card bests 1997's 1 teraflop supercomputer).
6-7 years later (at a guess), when all the Top500 supercomputers reach at least the level of 1exaflop+1exabyte, their total storage capacity could store 1 billion human minds.
Yet Android 2.0 is going to be the worthwhile update. It is expected to include multi-touch. Its irrating how slow development on the official Android source seems to be, it would have been nice to see this stuff 6 months to a year ago. Never fear, the community has taken matters in to their own hands. Modded ROMs such as Cyanogenmod http://www.cyanogenmod.com/ already incorporate the latest code far ahead of any ROM official releases from OEMs.
If your on a edgy modded ROM your likely using 1.6 (Cupcake) and some 2.0 (Donut) code.
(The latest experiemental Cyanogen ROM includes BFS (!) my first taste of the new scheduler on any system all I can say is the speed is mind boggling).
Delightfully, there is a glut of android phones on the way from various OEMs which should see the market grow and the code improve. Not that Android needs improving, in a year of having a G1 it never needed a hard reset, even with shitty crashing applications. I can't say as much for my iPhone.
Multitouch is coming to Android, now that Google is no longer affraid of Apple.
We'd probably call it a camper van. A large camper van.
A caravan is something old people tow behind their hysterically underpowered cars in order to clog up the smaller roads in rural Britain with maximum effectiveness for any public holiday weekend.
You forget mentioning holding up a long stream of traffic.
1) Once the road rage is about to boil over you make sure you speed back up when you hit a long straight suitable for overtaking.
2) Then on a four lane highway make sure you really stand on it ensure as little as possible of the queue can get ahead of you ready for the next congested B-road.
3) Go up hills at about half the typical speed of traffic, ignore the slow vehicle turn outs.
4) If you have a poorly maintained diesel make sure you keep your foot firmly planted for billowing black smoke.
5) Do your best to ignore the speed wobbles from towing your caravan above the speed limit, sure it's scary, but delightfully, it's frightening the hell out of anyone following you.
Remeber the cops will all but ignore your dangerous driving yet pull over those who overtake you at a rate of knots (revenue related - taking you to court for dangerous driving is expensive, dishing out fines is profit).
Slashdot Mirror
If I'm not mistaken the Zune HD was a pretty impressive piece of hardware spec compared to a iPod touch. For only $10 more.
Get your class to read this, then use the oppurtunity discuss freedom of information, piracy, DRM.
What? I can't hear any grinding axe..?
Books are not going to be napsterised on the same level as music and movies because they are already abundantly available for cheap or for free. You can borrow from libraries, swap with friends, lend them to friends, or give them away. Books are also dirt cheap second hand, and most households have a reasonable collection of books.
It's a good thing. It means that the publishing industry can enjoy very little threat from piracy compared to other media industries.
Books are as heavily 'pirated' already (if you consider lending or second hand sales piracy, as the publisher doesn't see a penny), as pirated as possible without counting illegal copying.
Could this be just because it is new and spiffy that everyone is just saying what comes comes into their head so they have something to post?
This is largely what happens with any new forum, chatroom or blog you set up to communicate with a small user groups amongst friends or within an organisation.
Over time people loose interest in "HI U GUYS OMG LOL DIS IS WIERD" and start using it when they *need* to communicate something of actual importance.
Currently batteries are expensive large because of costly/scarce materials, recouping hefty r&d costs, and poor performance (simple need a big battery back for any usable mileage).
The price/performance is getting better all the time. At some point, I predict, electric cars will be cheaper per horsepower or mile of range. Because well you're cutting out, well gee, a few hundred moving parts, fluids, and reaping added cost savings to the chassis in flexibility of packaging and scalability (ie no need to route exhaust, drive line, cooling).
We better start building more roads, because in a decade (give or take) there will be a flood of new cars of all shapes and sizes, and they will be cheap.
IEtab is a plug in for rendering a web page in IE in a firefox tab, which has existed for some time without raising anyones hackles. This is not the only example and also nothing new: this kind of thing has been going on for a long time.
I played mahjong with my force feed-back steering wheel but I didn't get a slashdot article!
Request for *facepalm* mod category please.
Have you noticed that Windows 7, is really really good, and infact is the the first time a Windows release has ever been anything resembling 'good'. In contrast, this marketing is the worst ever since that rap video for Windows 386.
Obviously the quality of the product at Microsoft is inversely proportional to the quality of the marketing.
Kids heading out of a degree mill to join the coal face should be under no illusions about glamour. You'll end up in a important job, but it will be far from glamourous. John Carmack can drive Ferraris and run his diy space program, Mark Zuckerburg can create a social networking site and screw groupies in the bathrooms. But these guys are not outright IT nerds, their Entrepreneurs first and foremost, they're made from different stuff and taken a different path right from early on.
I had always had a interest in shiny new things with blinkin lights, IT was an attractive career, however I had my bubble burst on day one. It seems the 9/10ths of anything is crap applied.
Getting to work with the latest and greatest, riding the bleeding edge of innovation... is not what 90% of IT jobs are about.
You will like not be working in a organisation of distinguished academics, with years of training in an academic institution. You will be working with 90% IT cowboys, who, like you learned 90% of everything they know in a self-taught DIY fashion, then went to do some 90-minute multichoice exams to have some certificates for their resume. The IT equivelent of a backyard mechanic.
You'll learn that everybody is an expert, according to them.
The blinking lights you learn to curse, well when they go off and leave a flashing red one at least.
The reality when you hit the ground in IT is that everything is somewhat old, no longer shiny, and being nursed along until the next upgrade cycle. Everything is out of date already when it's installed, everything is constantly broken or underperforming, therefore justifying an ecosystem of support and then eventual upgrade. Projects will always be late and overbudget.
In all likelyhood the coolest stuff you will be in your own time, your own projects.
The reality of IT is that most of the jobs are the IT equivelent of a plumber, when all the glory is had by the civil engineers who design and build the bridges and pipes, who get to feature in the news articles. Your job will be essiential, but not glamorous.
Hi this guy left his computer unlocked and on slashdot! stupid haha!!
"If a netbook were to be stolen or sold, the DET is able to remotely disable the device over the network. Even if the hard drive of the machine was swapped out or the operating system wiped, it would be useless to unauthorised users."
/. groupthink even posits how easy it may be. I think we've seen 'Windows' mentioned and somehow assumed they would inevitibly make obvious mistakes like allowing booting from usb/cd.
It may be hackable yes,
They appear to have some kind of kill switch at the BIOS level, which sounds pretty potent and difficult to circumvent to me. I would presume when the stolen machine connects ot the internet, it calls home, if it's been nuked, it then bricks itself and refuses to boot of anything.
Doesn't mean you couldn't strip the laptops for parts if stolen. That is if you didn't go the trouble of replacing bios chip (if not flashable)
Despite that, they do seem to have to gone to significant lengths to thwart theft more than anything. However whatever IT outfit told them that the product would be 'unhackable' is guilty of telling lies, that kind of statement smacks of marketing department (not engineers) of some company telling it's ignorant client what it wants to hear (yet can't reasonably expect to get) just to get paid.
So it will be hacked, of course and the blame will fall everywhere (ie students) except the marketing people who made the claims.
Noobs genearlly want to customize and personalise fast, easily, and it's usually the first thing they want to do with a new toy like a OS. I've always observed teh expertz are the ones who don't make significant changes to their UI settings.
Double-click, to open executables.
Users have been throwing this one at Gnome/KDE devs for years. It seems it is too Windows for the idealists, to the point that it's become quite a fun troll in the bug reports.
In reality, its a stupidly simple feature to save uncessary repetitive steps. Working with a graphical file manager is more efficient, and for some tasks necessary if you want to be productive, having to pop a terminal open for something a file manager *should* be able to do is silly and should have been fixed by KDE 1.0. A silly example itself, there are much better (longer) examples which demostrate how Linux groupthink raises my hackles. 'Free' as in gratis/beer, sure but at times non-Free in terms of thinking. (The hell with karma)
...1 year to 18 months. There is a plethora of tablets about to hit the market it seems obvious to me that waiting will yield much more choice and better value. Prices would fall after a handful of competiting products have gotten on the market. This will also put more pressure on netbooks which will become cheaper, and the low end of the full laptop market will ratchet down in price too. Apple, Crunchpad and Microsoft, would be the three I'd seriously consider. A lean towards the latter two depending on what software you want to run.
[window pop up] "Are you sure you want to send this?"
[countdown timer on OK button] 5...4...3...2...1...
[user clicks OK prematurely]
[window pop up] "NO! Penalty timeout!"
[countdown timer on OK button] 39...38...37...36...
Huh? My is password cleartext it's always ******** no matter what I type, so insecure!
Yes some asshat will accidentally forward whatever. How this occurs is demonstrated by my example below (I witnessed this, details altered). I've see co-workers make this mistake, and I've been a customer when the same fault happend and I got sent a 700kb spreadsheet of confidental information. But anyway, here is the two step method to epic fail:
Step 1: Email staff with a template for them to send, and attach a spreadsheet of the customers
-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Smart [mailto: Bob.Smart@[-------].co.--]
Sent: Thursday, 23 September 2008 10:53
To: [-------] Outbound Contact Team
Subject: FW: eBill template
Hi Team,
Please send this template below to all customers in the attached spreadsheet. You three can divide the work amongst yourselves.
>
Dear customer-name-here,
[etc..]
Step 2: Your keyboard jockeys forward the email, deletes the header and Boss's message. Inserts customer details into template. Send, Boom, Done.
By default, forwarding in pretty much all mail applications keeps the attachment.
I'm sure this is the principal way documents are leaked from just about any organisation.
Eagle Eye is not a blueprint for your surviellence computers. Thanks.
Cursive was faster to write, but sacrificed readibility, being slower to read than print until one adapts to the individuals style.
Sound familiar?
Texting is faster than proper spelling and grammar, but sacrifices readibility, being slower to read than proper text, until one adapts to the txter's style.
It's much less pretty, and certainly more irritating, but the reasons are the same. Cursive handwriting is a kludge, because the english alphabet is terribly slow to write by hand compared to more writing friendly alphabets around the world.
1 Exaflop matches up with some estimates of the net raw processing power of the human brain. Note I say raw and net, because that excludes likely optimization methods and weeding out parts of the mind that don't need to be simulated 1:1 (retina for example).
1 Exabyte far exceeds the memory capacity (by 1000x) to store a human brain... uncompressed.
They plan to have this thing running in 10 years.
$1000 computing equipment is hovering around 5-6 years behind Top500 http://www.top500.org/ computers (maybe less these days when you consider a single $100 graphics card bests 1997's 1 teraflop supercomputer).
6-7 years later (at a guess), when all the Top500 supercomputers reach at least the level of 1exaflop+1exabyte, their total storage capacity could store 1 billion human minds.
All I know now is my brain hurts.
Here in NZ the boss mandated anyone caught leaving their screen unlocked must buy beers at the local after work.
Then, at the time, OS/2 was twice the OS Windows 95 was.
Why is it that Android (and other cell phones) seem to have some obvious feature left out that developers are unwilling to fix?
It's Linux after all.
Yet Android 2.0 is going to be the worthwhile update. It is expected to include multi-touch. Its irrating how slow development on the official Android source seems to be, it would have been nice to see this stuff 6 months to a year ago. Never fear, the community has taken matters in to their own hands. Modded ROMs such as Cyanogenmod http://www.cyanogenmod.com/ already incorporate the latest code far ahead of any ROM official releases from OEMs.
If your on a edgy modded ROM your likely using 1.6 (Cupcake) and some 2.0 (Donut) code.
(The latest experiemental Cyanogen ROM includes BFS (!) my first taste of the new scheduler on any system all I can say is the speed is mind boggling).
Delightfully, there is a glut of android phones on the way from various OEMs which should see the market grow and the code improve. Not that Android needs improving, in a year of having a G1 it never needed a hard reset, even with shitty crashing applications. I can't say as much for my iPhone.
Multitouch is coming to Android, now that Google is no longer affraid of Apple.
We'd probably call it a camper van. A large camper van.
A caravan is something old people tow behind their hysterically underpowered cars in order to clog up the smaller roads in rural Britain with maximum effectiveness for any public holiday weekend.
You forget mentioning holding up a long stream of traffic.
1) Once the road rage is about to boil over you make sure you speed back up when you hit a long straight suitable for overtaking.
2) Then on a four lane highway make sure you really stand on it ensure as little as possible of the queue can get ahead of you ready for the next congested B-road.
3) Go up hills at about half the typical speed of traffic, ignore the slow vehicle turn outs.
4) If you have a poorly maintained diesel make sure you keep your foot firmly planted for billowing black smoke.
5) Do your best to ignore the speed wobbles from towing your caravan above the speed limit, sure it's scary, but delightfully, it's frightening the hell out of anyone following you.
Remeber the cops will all but ignore your dangerous driving yet pull over those who overtake you at a rate of knots (revenue related - taking you to court for dangerous driving is expensive, dishing out fines is profit).