Technologically, no, there's nothing new. But, Facebook is not a technology company.
What Facebook IS doing is providing a new service which people find adds value to their lives, and thus they use it. Finding new ways to produce value, even in non-technological fields, is still innovation*.
*Note: obviously Facebook didn't invent blogging, the social connection website, or a shared web gaming experience. However, they have clearly done it in a way that users enjoy more than previous attempts.
I see. I came to Debian from Red Hat, and from that perspective dpkg was an amazing improvement. I was used to hours of computing update sets with yum/rpm, and with dpkg it seemed like all I had to wait for was the time it took to download.
It doesn't really bother me either that I have to redownload the entire package instead of getting some sort of diff. I can see how it would, though, if I had a really slow connection.
In general though, dpkg is a solid package system and I certainly have no complaints about it. I wouldn't want it to be swapped out for something else just to get something new. If something works great, don't mess with it.
The best way to get music is still to buy used CDs, rip them, and stick the CD in a closet. Typical used prices are ~$3 per album, which is way cheaper than buying individual songs online as long as you aren't just interested in a single one on the disc. Plus, there is no DRM so you can easily move the stuff you purchased to wherever is most convenient for you. Plus, it is higher quality than almost everything you can buy online. Plus, if you decide you don't like the album anymore you can just delete the files and resell it to get your money back.
Of course, a firewall is merely a way of restricting certain services to a local network only. This does not apply to many appliance-type devices; usually they expose no services and instead only connect to services on other machines.
The only case where a firewall would have any meaning for these devices is if their core IP stack contained an exploitable bug. This kind of thing, however, has happened in the past. If you make every toaster individually addressable (no firewall), then every toaster is going to also need some method of updating the protocol stack in case a bug like this is discovered. Making only primary devices such as computers and routers externally addressable simplifies the problem, since these devices tend to already have an update method in place to deal with known exploits.
Also, even though your TV may not have an auto-update mechanism, it is likely it is running a somewhat complex OS if it is connected to the Internet. This means that if you don't care and allow TVs to be owned, they will present a large attack threat to everyone else by being added to botnets.
But is the burden of proof still on the accused in the "tribunal"? If so it still doesn't matter; almost nobody will be able to successfully defend themselves there without going to real court, which will cost them a ton.
Presumption of innocence is one of the most important protections of the accused, and it doesn't really help to say "But you can appeal under a different standard!".
Oh, you could check it yourselves . . . one of the Moon missions left a mirror on the surface of the Moon. All you need to do, is to shine a laser on it.
Hardly evidence, given that even the biggest conspiracy theorists probably believe that there were successful unmanned moon landings. Not that I don't think men landed on the moon, but it's difficult to conclusively prove if you have zero trust in official sources and somehow discount all the photographs and video.
For general use, dedicated calculators have gone the way of dedicated mp3 players or feaure phones.
Funny that you should use those as comparison examples; I 'still' have and use all three, and I am not the only one.
A quick search reveals the following article, which says that feature phones and smartphones currently have approximately equal market share. And how many people do you see still buying mp3-only players, such as the iPod Shuffle? They are extremely popular.
Another example: e-reader vs. full-featured tablet (eg. kindle vs ipad). More Kindles will be sold in 2011 than iPads.
The reason is that purpose-built appliances can still be simpler to use (think ergonomics, dedicated task buttons), cheaper, and have orders of magnitude better battery life than a general use device.
...how big piracy was even before DRM. People are attracted to piracy because it's free, not because of copy protection.
Before DRM? When was that?
Even with the old 5 1/4" floppy games you often had to be smart enough to make a copy of the install disk before installing, because everytime you ran the installer it would write to a counter on the disk and after a certain number prevent you from installing again.
I don't need to have my actions monitored just in case 20 years from now I can be prosecuted for things I do now which are legal.
What guarantee do I have that no future government will ever decide to punish people retroactively for acts they committed before the act was illegal?
i.e. blasphemy against private healthcare, saying bad things about the meat industry, about the church?
Of all the things to be scared of, I this one is a bit of a stretch. Of course it is right to worry about vast amounts of information in the hands of individuals with little actual oversight by the people. However, jurisprudence in the United States and many other western nations has long frowned upon ex post facto laws.
US Constitution: Article 1, Section 9
[Referring to restrictions on Congress] No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
US Constitution: Article 1, Section 10
No State shall...pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law...
Similarly, ex post facto laws are prohibited in the EU and other countries under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Rather, what you SHOULD be worried about is the laws which already exist. There are already thousands of Orwellian laws in place covering things which the average person would not consider 'wrong'. These laws are constantly being created by politicians who want to be 'tough on crime': in order to force defendants to accept plea agreements rather than going to trial, they create dozens of tangentially related offenses that can be piled on and later bargained away. Under this system, anyone attempting to prove their innocence faces an almost insane additional penalty for doing so should they be convicted.
If you're in a supermarket and you see two seemingly unrelated items next to each other, there's a chance that there's a purchasing correlation.
While your main point is valid, this part is not necessarily correct. Items which are strongly correlated are not put next to each other; rather, they are put in different places so that people who are going to buy both of them anyway will have to visit multiple places in the store. Then, analysis determines which items are more likely to be purchased if they're someplace the person has to walk by anyway. These items are placed next to the initial items.
It sounds like what is really needed here is for the computer to have some way of telling the pilot which instrument(s) it believes are not working correctly. Maybe a red background or something.
It seems that if the computers have already figured out with pretty good certainty what has failed, and what is probably still working, that information would be very useful to the pilot.
Just because it is not a defamation claim does not preclude the application of the first amendment, though. SCOTUS has regularly ruled that speech generally regarding issues of public interest is protected, even when there is intent to commit harm.
Perhaps the most applicable case to this situation is Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, wherein the Court ruled that the first amendment protection applied to an intentional infliction of emotional distress of a public figure.
So the real question instead should be, does the topic of the researcher qualify as a "matter of public interest and concern"?
I've seen plenty of benchmarks where a higher-power draw chip that can get done with a task quickly and drop back to low-power idle mode is actually more energy efficient than a lower-power chip that takes longer to get the task done.
Maybe if you have to do some simple task very frequently? Seems like a realistic usage scenario for this kind of chip.
Just because markets produce some undesirable effects doesn't mean that they are not far outweighed by the desirable effects. Without the free market, you probably wouldn't even have a home computer in the first place.
Chrome has a builtin capability to disable scripting on a host basis or globally, and it also has a functional adblock extension. Oh, and in terms of UI speed it leaves Firefox in the dust. The only real downside: it crashes more often.
That's true, but it's not like things are in any danger of falling apart overnight. And, pretty much everything is in place for the construction of more nuclear plants within a few years. To not be able to do so would pretty much require a cataclysmic event that would destroy a large amount of the world's infrastructure at one time, such as nuclear war or an asteroid hitting the planet. I don't think there's much chance that oil supplies will all simultaneously dry up fast enough that other things couldn't be easily built before the shortage led to a breakdown of society.
Fortunately, there is enough easily accessible uranium in the Earth's crust to power civilization for tens of thousands of years. Modern nuclear plant designs are incredibly safe, and the French have proved that spent fuel reprocessing can be done quite efficiently. If there's a true civilization-ending energy crisis ahead, we have a LONG time to work on it. For now, the main issue is improving battery/fuel cell technology so that electricity generated by nuclear reactors can be used for transportation.
That is, assuming you buy into the concept of near-term "peak oil" in the first place.
Also the Review-Journal publication should be careful to keep track of which articles they have sold off the rights, otherwise they may end up on the receiving end of a law suit.
They probably sold the copyright, and as a part of the deal got an unlimited license for it.
I think the real issue here is that these laws ignore genericide. For instance, if most people believe that 'sparking wine' and 'champagne' are the same thing, why should 'champagne' be protected? Such protection is not for the benefit of the customer (as in trademark law) and instead is for the benefit of the producer.
But is it already obsolete -- will LightPeak make USB 3.0 irrelevant?
No. Presumably USB 3.0 will be backwards compatible with USB 2 and 1. Therefore, it will continue to be the standard. Backwards compatibility is king in desktop computing.
Or is the author writing this from an Itanium-CPU machine?
Slashdot Mirror
Technologically, no, there's nothing new. But, Facebook is not a technology company.
What Facebook IS doing is providing a new service which people find adds value to their lives, and thus they use it. Finding new ways to produce value, even in non-technological fields, is still innovation*.
*Note: obviously Facebook didn't invent blogging, the social connection website, or a shared web gaming experience. However, they have clearly done it in a way that users enjoy more than previous attempts.
I see. I came to Debian from Red Hat, and from that perspective dpkg was an amazing improvement. I was used to hours of computing update sets with yum/rpm, and with dpkg it seemed like all I had to wait for was the time it took to download.
It doesn't really bother me either that I have to redownload the entire package instead of getting some sort of diff. I can see how it would, though, if I had a really slow connection.
In general though, dpkg is a solid package system and I certainly have no complaints about it. I wouldn't want it to be swapped out for something else just to get something new. If something works great, don't mess with it.
No, Ubuntu ends up somewhere in the middle. They certainly aren't "the edge" -- they're still using dpkg, FFS
What exactly is wrong with dpkg???
Yet another example for people who say that the cloud is a good place to permanently store their data....
The best way to get music is still to buy used CDs, rip them, and stick the CD in a closet. Typical used prices are ~$3 per album, which is way cheaper than buying individual songs online as long as you aren't just interested in a single one on the disc. Plus, there is no DRM so you can easily move the stuff you purchased to wherever is most convenient for you. Plus, it is higher quality than almost everything you can buy online. Plus, if you decide you don't like the album anymore you can just delete the files and resell it to get your money back.
Yes, the CD is still king.
Of course, a firewall is merely a way of restricting certain services to a local network only. This does not apply to many appliance-type devices; usually they expose no services and instead only connect to services on other machines.
The only case where a firewall would have any meaning for these devices is if their core IP stack contained an exploitable bug. This kind of thing, however, has happened in the past. If you make every toaster individually addressable (no firewall), then every toaster is going to also need some method of updating the protocol stack in case a bug like this is discovered. Making only primary devices such as computers and routers externally addressable simplifies the problem, since these devices tend to already have an update method in place to deal with known exploits.
Also, even though your TV may not have an auto-update mechanism, it is likely it is running a somewhat complex OS if it is connected to the Internet. This means that if you don't care and allow TVs to be owned, they will present a large attack threat to everyone else by being added to botnets.
But is the burden of proof still on the accused in the "tribunal"? If so it still doesn't matter; almost nobody will be able to successfully defend themselves there without going to real court, which will cost them a ton.
Presumption of innocence is one of the most important protections of the accused, and it doesn't really help to say "But you can appeal under a different standard!".
Oh, you could check it yourselves . . . one of the Moon missions left a mirror on the surface of the Moon. All you need to do, is to shine a laser on it.
Hardly evidence, given that even the biggest conspiracy theorists probably believe that there were successful unmanned moon landings. Not that I don't think men landed on the moon, but it's difficult to conclusively prove if you have zero trust in official sources and somehow discount all the photographs and video.
As opposed to the development of the computer?
For general use, dedicated calculators have gone the way of dedicated mp3 players or feaure phones.
Funny that you should use those as comparison examples; I 'still' have and use all three, and I am not the only one.
A quick search reveals the following article, which says that feature phones and smartphones currently have approximately equal market share. And how many people do you see still buying mp3-only players, such as the iPod Shuffle? They are extremely popular.
Another example: e-reader vs. full-featured tablet (eg. kindle vs ipad). More Kindles will be sold in 2011 than iPads.
The reason is that purpose-built appliances can still be simpler to use (think ergonomics, dedicated task buttons), cheaper, and have orders of magnitude better battery life than a general use device.
...how big piracy was even before DRM. People are attracted to piracy because it's free, not because of copy protection.
Before DRM? When was that?
Even with the old 5 1/4" floppy games you often had to be smart enough to make a copy of the install disk before installing, because everytime you ran the installer it would write to a counter on the disk and after a certain number prevent you from installing again.
I don't need to have my actions monitored just in case 20 years from now I can be prosecuted for things I do now which are legal.
What guarantee do I have that no future government will ever decide to punish people retroactively for acts they committed before the act was illegal?
i.e. blasphemy against private healthcare, saying bad things about the meat industry, about the church?
Of all the things to be scared of, I this one is a bit of a stretch. Of course it is right to worry about vast amounts of information in the hands of individuals with little actual oversight by the people. However, jurisprudence in the United States and many other western nations has long frowned upon ex post facto laws.
US Constitution: Article 1, Section 9
[Referring to restrictions on Congress] No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
US Constitution: Article 1, Section 10
No State shall...pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law...
Similarly, ex post facto laws are prohibited in the EU and other countries under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Rather, what you SHOULD be worried about is the laws which already exist. There are already thousands of Orwellian laws in place covering things which the average person would not consider 'wrong'. These laws are constantly being created by politicians who want to be 'tough on crime': in order to force defendants to accept plea agreements rather than going to trial, they create dozens of tangentially related offenses that can be piled on and later bargained away. Under this system, anyone attempting to prove their innocence faces an almost insane additional penalty for doing so should they be convicted.
It wouldn't surprise me if Sony had a few employees whose sole job was to write favorable comments...
If you're in a supermarket and you see two seemingly unrelated items next to each other, there's a chance that there's a purchasing correlation.
While your main point is valid, this part is not necessarily correct. Items which are strongly correlated are not put next to each other; rather, they are put in different places so that people who are going to buy both of them anyway will have to visit multiple places in the store. Then, analysis determines which items are more likely to be purchased if they're someplace the person has to walk by anyway. These items are placed next to the initial items.
It sounds like what is really needed here is for the computer to have some way of telling the pilot which instrument(s) it believes are not working correctly. Maybe a red background or something.
It seems that if the computers have already figured out with pretty good certainty what has failed, and what is probably still working, that information would be very useful to the pilot.
Just because it is not a defamation claim does not preclude the application of the first amendment, though. SCOTUS has regularly ruled that speech generally regarding issues of public interest is protected, even when there is intent to commit harm.
Perhaps the most applicable case to this situation is Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, wherein the Court ruled that the first amendment protection applied to an intentional infliction of emotional distress of a public figure.
So the real question instead should be, does the topic of the researcher qualify as a "matter of public interest and concern"?
I've seen plenty of benchmarks where a higher-power draw chip that can get done with a task quickly and drop back to low-power idle mode is actually more energy efficient than a lower-power chip that takes longer to get the task done.
Maybe if you have to do some simple task very frequently? Seems like a realistic usage scenario for this kind of chip.
Just because markets produce some undesirable effects doesn't mean that they are not far outweighed by the desirable effects. Without the free market, you probably wouldn't even have a home computer in the first place.
Chrome has a builtin capability to disable scripting on a host basis or globally, and it also has a functional adblock extension. Oh, and in terms of UI speed it leaves Firefox in the dust. The only real downside: it crashes more often.
What about composing music?
That's true, but it's not like things are in any danger of falling apart overnight. And, pretty much everything is in place for the construction of more nuclear plants within a few years. To not be able to do so would pretty much require a cataclysmic event that would destroy a large amount of the world's infrastructure at one time, such as nuclear war or an asteroid hitting the planet. I don't think there's much chance that oil supplies will all simultaneously dry up fast enough that other things couldn't be easily built before the shortage led to a breakdown of society.
Fortunately, there is enough easily accessible uranium in the Earth's crust to power civilization for tens of thousands of years. Modern nuclear plant designs are incredibly safe, and the French have proved that spent fuel reprocessing can be done quite efficiently. If there's a true civilization-ending energy crisis ahead, we have a LONG time to work on it. For now, the main issue is improving battery/fuel cell technology so that electricity generated by nuclear reactors can be used for transportation.
That is, assuming you buy into the concept of near-term "peak oil" in the first place.
Also the Review-Journal publication should be careful to keep track of which articles they have sold off the rights, otherwise they may end up on the receiving end of a law suit.
They probably sold the copyright, and as a part of the deal got an unlimited license for it.
I think the real issue here is that these laws ignore genericide. For instance, if most people believe that 'sparking wine' and 'champagne' are the same thing, why should 'champagne' be protected? Such protection is not for the benefit of the customer (as in trademark law) and instead is for the benefit of the producer.
But is it already obsolete -- will LightPeak make USB 3.0 irrelevant?
No. Presumably USB 3.0 will be backwards compatible with USB 2 and 1. Therefore, it will continue to be the standard. Backwards compatibility is king in desktop computing.
Or is the author writing this from an Itanium-CPU machine?