I think it would help if you told us what kind of projects you would like to contribute or to learn more about. Are you into OS kernels, IDEs, Ray Tracing, sound editing, etc. Then people might be able to suggest a manageable open source project to your liking (one which you will be more likely to brave through the learning curve), and resources for that specific project.
While I understand the caveat that texts go directly to the cell phone (ie, purely "push"), what is wrong with using e-mail for IP based messaging? Or Skype?
Since IP is so generic, and you can just download an app for a new protocol (I use the term loosely), isn't it more of an issue of getting your group of friends to agree than it is for there to be a single industry wide standard?
It's never quite as simple unless you're a hermit or a selfish/self-centered person.
Personally, I think the expectation by someone that others always be accessible by whatever form they want (texting, cell, e-mail) is more selfish than not having a text plan simply to accommodate said expectation.
Can you name me a movie that would not have been made if it were not for the paid product placement? Also, the absence of paid placement does not mean an absence of real products.
So what stops them from using variety of real products without the paid placement to keep things realistic?
Having a disproportionate amount of a single company's products filing a scene, or in use by characters throughout the show, is also quite noticeable. Outside of going in a company store, can you give me an example of going somewhere and having a brand image being a noticeable part of of the experience? I can't even say going into my school's computer labs, filled with desktops from a single brand of would have qualified, and that was over a course of four years.
Yet something about the camera angles, prevalence in the world, choice of local contrast, etc. makes you notice Dell in V for Vendetta, for example.
Haven't experienced this with my 2009 unibody with an nVidia card on Lion, but it does not seem like I should be expecting to either.
In any case, I have Windows on bootcamp if bugs in Lion ever become an issue. Unlike Lion which only has partial OpenGL 3.2 support, I get full OpenGL 3.3 support on the windows side, so I'm on there for my graphics coding projects anyway.
If there is a need to justify use of Adblock, I'll use the same justification the advertisers themselves use: because I can and because it benefits me.
EA has not gotten rid of their Online Pass system. Until that happens, I will not purchase from them. Activision does not penalize the used market, and that puts them above EA in my book.
Even if they are a generation behind in their GPU (I'm thinking mid to low-end GTX 4xx equivalent), that would still put them significantly ahead of XBox 360 and PS3 in terms of hardware. (Assuming other hardware is reasonably capable capable as well.) Considering how the Wii compared to the state of the art on its release, that seems the high end of something to reasonably expect.
If not mistaken, that would give them a two generation lead on the 360 and PS3 in terms of what they can actually program the cards to do. (Don't know the real term, thinking shader model though.) Think two generations in terms of a jump from DirectX 9 capable to DirectX 11 capable, not simply incremental GTX 2xx - 3xx card series generations. For starters, that would give them GPU tessellation in the "traditional" rendering pipeline, and real GPGPU capabilites (think CUDA, OpenCL, and DirectCompute), not just what you can shoehorn into shaders. Even the low of reasonable expectations, a simple DirectX 9 - DirectX 10 equivalent jump would give, them a lot of this.
I don't expect the hardware will be competitive to the Next Generation of XBox and PS systems, but even the low end of what to expect should still be significantly more capable than the 360 and PS3.
One of the things I have liked about the Wii is getting the games, and feeling like I have purchased a complete game. No "online passes", no resale penalties, not constantly feeling like I have to purchase additional DLC for the game to be complete. The simplicity of the Wii is what got me back into gaming, and the aforementioned aspects of the "Digital Market Place" being so integrated into the gaming experience, or at least how publishers exploit it, is what's driving me away.
To me, a true HD Wii with a modern GPU, decent raw processing power, and higher capacity media for games would be perfect.
That "selling a copy" did not stop working. Even with piracy, which has been around a lot longer than 10 years, it generates billions in revenue. It's more that it doesn't work for them in terms of the strict control they would like to have over your use of it. But for a sale, protecting a copyright and controlling use may overlap to a certain extent, but are very different things.
Copyright is not impossible to enforce to a reasonable extent. A system where revokable keys to copyrighted content would have to be provided to anyone able to pay some reasonable fee. Their device or application would stand up to a court assessment similar to the betamax and limewire cases (including risk for damages if it doesn't), and revokable keys would make such rulings enforceable enough. That would be enforcing copyright.
Licensing the ability to make devices that can access peoples' purchased content on the conditions that they will only function as content holders see fit is controlling use. That this scheme effectively supersedes any rights that a purchaser might legally have and, more than anything, I think has signified the shift to what could be described as an "Imaginary property" model. Since this model became prevalent with the rise DVD 10 years ago, that would coincide with your estimate.
I don't really see those "free as in beer" people as being all that different from the MPAA/RIAA. They both think they can define what property really means on the basis of the beliefs that suit them, actual laws (hopefully made without corrupting influences) that define such things and related rights be damned. They are just on the other side of the same coin.
I am not overly concerned about the content that is on my shelf being DRM-free. I am more concerned about that DRM being too big to fail. Examples: Blu-ray is cracked, but they have to live with it because it's just not practical to replace everyone's players and movie collections to close that hole. Same with the HDMI private key being out in the open. I just want devices for playback to be prevalent, and able to work with the content on my shelf even if I never had an Internet connection in my life.
That being said, all the other points you made are exactly why I will NEVER "purchase" a "cloud" copy of anything. It is reasoning that translates to the average joe pretty well, and they just might realize that for what they've spent on their purchases, they could have rented a stream the number of times they ended up watching them for a lot cheaper.
While I could see going over the limit, if you replaced all your TV, you'd still end up getting quite a bit of usage out of it. I also recommend going out and getting some fresh air if you manage to use up all that capacity.
Yes, If you replaced your TV with Internet based services, you'd go over the cap. That is exactly the point.
For a family of four, each with their own shows, that would be thirty minutes a day per person. Not much even for people who do get outside, if we overlook the fact that it's a red herring. Up the quality of the video to something that is not full of block artifacts or smoothed to wax, ie something that resembles HD in not just video resolution but also actual picture quality, and that time goes down significantly.
Whether people should go outside more or not has no bearing on the fact that the cap is about inhibiting competition.
The last tablet I helped someone with was a Microsoft Signature from HP. I'll grant that the bloatware was cut down. Instead, there was a lot crap related to the HP side of the "experience". They still had their pen software, and a lot of it was some part of HP Touch, provided by some other company that might have otherwise put the software as a "basic" edition on a non-signature machine. Some basic functions, such as the screen being reoriented when rotated, were buried in this heavyweight, HP branded "Touch" experience, when they could have been provided by small, "you don't know they're there" device drivers.
It is good to know Microsoft realizes the damage PC manufacturers are doing to Windows brand by including bloatware, but having it wrapped it in a custom "experience" does not get rid of it.
This kind of statement reminds me of Michael Bay saying something to the effect of, "I know people hate product placement, but without it, these movies would not be made."
Turns out that payment for the product placements was all of $850,000 on a movie with a budget of $126 million.
Manufacturers charge extra to provide a plain Windows install disc with your computer purchase. I guess you could consider that your "crapware free" fee.
You'll buy the machine regardless of what we put on the desktop, so there is no economic reason to remove it.
I know for a fact that is not true, because $1500 have been lost in sales from my immediate family alone, and the bloatware is the sole reason.
People ask me for advice on what to buy, and I now tell them Apple, and the problems with bloatware are the sole reason. That is $1500 is not the money that went to Apple, that is money the would have spent PC laptops. More went to Apple, and it has been worth the extra money.
Pretty much all the problems they were having were bloatware related, and when they would let format and put "plain, off the shelf" Windows their systems worked. However, they don't want to jump through the hoops to get the equivalent of a boxed OS from the manufacturer. They don't know how format the drive, and install a clean OS, and get the drivers. They don't want to wait til the next time I visit to get and use their computer. (And I don't want to spend that precious time building their systems either.)
It got to the point that I would refuse to assist them with their PC problems, in any way, if it the system had not been wiped (including the"recovery" partition), and had an "off the shelf" OS installed. If they did not want to do that, they could get an Apple, and feel free to call me with problems. A couple went the "wipe and start fresh" route, but most just decided to get Macs. Either way, support calls are now few and far between, and the Windows people were just as happy as the OS X people. But then, as the bloat on PCs become more and more attached to device drivers, all of their purchases became Macs.
The Dells, HPs, etc. (From your message, I assume you work for one of them.) can continue to think that bloatware does not take its toll on their bottom line. Or, they can open their eyes, see Apple kicking their asses in customer satisfaction, profits, and increasing market share. Ditch the bloatware, and maybe that trend will reverse.
So basically, Comcast has the right idea, they just need to be giving Netflix speed above that for which subscribers are paying?
All I really see happening with your suggested model is actual tier speeds remaining stagnant with insufficient caps, and ISPs using that as leverage to extort tolls from companies that wish to deliver to their customers. Why should an ISP offer a better speed at a reasonable rate to a single subsciber if they can extract multiple fees for that same bandwidth from every company that wants sufficient access to a potential customer?
Using the ISP's DNS may be a good solution for helping to find a more local streaming server, but it brings back all the reasons I went away from their servers in the first place. I have not noticed any performance issues on any of my Netflix devices, or other services, by using an alternate DNS server.
Despite what Comcast would have you believe, most ISPs PAY backbone providers to deliver thier customer's out of network requests. If my ISP cannot provide me with a DNS server that will actually return a NXDOMAIN response instead of trying monetize my typos, I am perfectly happy for their backbone fees to increase as an indirect result.
A "full-quality" BD is 50 GB. Most downloads don't approach the size of a "full quality" 4.5 GB DVD. (Which is really 9 GB.) Browse iTunes a bit, and you'll find their 720p downloads hover around 3 - 5 GB. A "1080p" movie could fit on a 9GB DVD, but compression artifacts would be very noticeable. A REAL 1080p movie will have the bit-rates required to make compression artifacts imperceptible, typically averaging at least 30 Mbps.
Think of what percentage of the downstream Internet traffic Netflix would be using if they were streaming REAL 1080p.
I think many are quite aware that limiting corporations in certain ways serves the greater good, Net Neutrality being a clear cut case. It does not serve their own good, especially when it comes to raising money for their next campaign. I don't think this is unique to the Right.
I used to like the OSX development tools but they are not portable, I wasted a lot of time with them, so this is as basic as I can make it now, so my software runs everywhere.
I really like the OS X development tools. I am even starting to like them more than Visual Studio. (I am still on 2008, though.) The insane licensing costs of anything but a bare-bones edition Visual Studio are insane, versus Xcode and its nice integration of lots of profiling tools that are freely provided. If you consider the Mac as the price for Xcode, it makes even a pretty souped up Mac Pro seem cheap by comparison.
Like mentioned before, Cocoa and.net are not really portable, but I have an easier time integrating third party libraries into Cocoa apps than.Net apps, and an easier time integrating external build steps, which I don't need to do as often with Xcode since it is already aware of more of those tools.
"And this guy totally focused on things he likes, if you didn't see what you are looking for in his video it isn't because its not there. Its because he skipped it."
Note, I have only been to Akihabara once, but I agree this was a limited view of the place. This guy seems to really be into electrical engineering and gives a great tour of that aspect. (Still well worth watching. It showed me that I only scratched the surface of the Labyrinth.)
Think about most of the other stuff a geek might be interested in, and realize it is probably there in similar quantities and also with stores that specialize in particular aspects of it. This includes the retro game stores and arcades that he mentioned more as a footnote. It includes porn shops with every fetish you can or can't imagine, that are many stories tall and packed so tight with DVDs and Blu-rays that even a healthy, averaged sized Japanese person can barely walk in the aisles. It includes similar shops for computer components, with a floor for cases, another for motherboards, etc. It includes countless anime and manga shops. It includes many shops that specialize in independent games. It includes shops for geek memorabilia. It includes "maids" on the sidewalks out to lure you into the maid cafes. And so on...
Some of the shops are bigger, with greater street presence, Yodobashi being a VERY extreme example. However, getting to and walking among of the most of the stores felt similar to the labyrinth, but more vertical with rooms of various sizes connected by thin halls and stair wells with collages of posters serving as the wallpaper. Come to think of it, those videos did give a good feel of urbanized multi-level bazaar type feel of the place, but was just narrow in its scope. While it had some good street views, it lacked some that really show the scale of the place. Still a very nice series of videes, with the Google maps being a nice supplement.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it would help if you told us what kind of projects you would like to contribute or to learn more about. Are you into OS kernels, IDEs, Ray Tracing, sound editing, etc. Then people might be able to suggest a manageable open source project to your liking (one which you will be more likely to brave through the learning curve), and resources for that specific project.
While I understand the caveat that texts go directly to the cell phone (ie, purely "push"), what is wrong with using e-mail for IP based messaging? Or Skype?
Since IP is so generic, and you can just download an app for a new protocol (I use the term loosely), isn't it more of an issue of getting your group of friends to agree than it is for there to be a single industry wide standard?
It's never quite as simple unless you're a hermit or a selfish/self-centered person.
Personally, I think the expectation by someone that others always be accessible by whatever form they want (texting, cell, e-mail) is more selfish than not having a text plan simply to accommodate said expectation.
Can you name me a movie that would not have been made if it were not for the paid product placement? Also, the absence of paid placement does not mean an absence of real products.
So what stops them from using variety of real products without the paid placement to keep things realistic?
Having a disproportionate amount of a single company's products filing a scene, or in use by characters throughout the show, is also quite noticeable. Outside of going in a company store, can you give me an example of going somewhere and having a brand image being a noticeable part of of the experience? I can't even say going into my school's computer labs, filled with desktops from a single brand of would have qualified, and that was over a course of four years.
Yet something about the camera angles, prevalence in the world, choice of local contrast, etc. makes you notice Dell in V for Vendetta, for example.
Haven't experienced this with my 2009 unibody with an nVidia card on Lion, but it does not seem like I should be expecting to either.
In any case, I have Windows on bootcamp if bugs in Lion ever become an issue. Unlike Lion which only has partial OpenGL 3.2 support, I get full OpenGL 3.3 support on the windows side, so I'm on there for my graphics coding projects anyway.
If there is a need to justify use of Adblock, I'll use the same justification the advertisers themselves use: because I can and because it benefits me.
EA has not gotten rid of their Online Pass system. Until that happens, I will not purchase from them. Activision does not penalize the used market, and that puts them above EA in my book.
Even if they are a generation behind in their GPU (I'm thinking mid to low-end GTX 4xx equivalent), that would still put them significantly ahead of XBox 360 and PS3 in terms of hardware. (Assuming other hardware is reasonably capable capable as well.) Considering how the Wii compared to the state of the art on its release, that seems the high end of something to reasonably expect.
If not mistaken, that would give them a two generation lead on the 360 and PS3 in terms of what they can actually program the cards to do. (Don't know the real term, thinking shader model though.) Think two generations in terms of a jump from DirectX 9 capable to DirectX 11 capable, not simply incremental GTX 2xx - 3xx card series generations. For starters, that would give them GPU tessellation in the "traditional" rendering pipeline, and real GPGPU capabilites (think CUDA, OpenCL, and DirectCompute), not just what you can shoehorn into shaders. Even the low of reasonable expectations, a simple DirectX 9 - DirectX 10 equivalent jump would give, them a lot of this.
I don't expect the hardware will be competitive to the Next Generation of XBox and PS systems, but even the low end of what to expect should still be significantly more capable than the 360 and PS3.
One of the things I have liked about the Wii is getting the games, and feeling like I have purchased a complete game. No "online passes", no resale penalties, not constantly feeling like I have to purchase additional DLC for the game to be complete. The simplicity of the Wii is what got me back into gaming, and the aforementioned aspects of the "Digital Market Place" being so integrated into the gaming experience, or at least how publishers exploit it, is what's driving me away.
To me, a true HD Wii with a modern GPU, decent raw processing power, and higher capacity media for games would be perfect.
That "selling a copy" did not stop working. Even with piracy, which has been around a lot longer than 10 years, it generates billions in revenue. It's more that it doesn't work for them in terms of the strict control they would like to have over your use of it. But for a sale, protecting a copyright and controlling use may overlap to a certain extent, but are very different things.
Copyright is not impossible to enforce to a reasonable extent. A system where revokable keys to copyrighted content would have to be provided to anyone able to pay some reasonable fee. Their device or application would stand up to a court assessment similar to the betamax and limewire cases (including risk for damages if it doesn't), and revokable keys would make such rulings enforceable enough. That would be enforcing copyright.
Licensing the ability to make devices that can access peoples' purchased content on the conditions that they will only function as content holders see fit is controlling use. That this scheme effectively supersedes any rights that a purchaser might legally have and, more than anything, I think has signified the shift to what could be described as an "Imaginary property" model. Since this model became prevalent with the rise DVD 10 years ago, that would coincide with your estimate.
I don't really see those "free as in beer" people as being all that different from the MPAA/RIAA. They both think they can define what property really means on the basis of the beliefs that suit them, actual laws (hopefully made without corrupting influences) that define such things and related rights be damned. They are just on the other side of the same coin.
I am not overly concerned about the content that is on my shelf being DRM-free. I am more concerned about that DRM being too big to fail. Examples: Blu-ray is cracked, but they have to live with it because it's just not practical to replace everyone's players and movie collections to close that hole. Same with the HDMI private key being out in the open. I just want devices for playback to be prevalent, and able to work with the content on my shelf even if I never had an Internet connection in my life.
That being said, all the other points you made are exactly why I will NEVER "purchase" a "cloud" copy of anything. It is reasoning that translates to the average joe pretty well, and they just might realize that for what they've spent on their purchases, they could have rented a stream the number of times they ended up watching them for a lot cheaper.
For number four, is being a physician really relevant? :)~
While I could see going over the limit, if you replaced all your TV, you'd still end up getting quite a bit of usage out of it. I also recommend going out and getting some fresh air if you manage to use up all that capacity.
Yes, If you replaced your TV with Internet based services, you'd go over the cap. That is exactly the point.
For a family of four, each with their own shows, that would be thirty minutes a day per person. Not much even for people who do get outside, if we overlook the fact that it's a red herring. Up the quality of the video to something that is not full of block artifacts or smoothed to wax, ie something that resembles HD in not just video resolution but also actual picture quality, and that time goes down significantly.
Whether people should go outside more or not has no bearing on the fact that the cap is about inhibiting competition.
The last tablet I helped someone with was a Microsoft Signature from HP. I'll grant that the bloatware was cut down. Instead, there was a lot crap related to the HP side of the "experience". They still had their pen software, and a lot of it was some part of HP Touch, provided by some other company that might have otherwise put the software as a "basic" edition on a non-signature machine. Some basic functions, such as the screen being reoriented when rotated, were buried in this heavyweight, HP branded "Touch" experience, when they could have been provided by small, "you don't know they're there" device drivers.
It is good to know Microsoft realizes the damage PC manufacturers are doing to Windows brand by including bloatware, but having it wrapped it in a custom "experience" does not get rid of it.
This kind of statement reminds me of Michael Bay saying something to the effect of, "I know people hate product placement, but without it, these movies would not be made."
Turns out that payment for the product placements was all of $850,000 on a movie with a budget of $126 million.
Manufacturers charge extra to provide a plain Windows install disc with your computer purchase. I guess you could consider that your "crapware free" fee.
You'll buy the machine regardless of what we put on the desktop, so there is no economic reason to remove it.
I know for a fact that is not true, because $1500 have been lost in sales from my immediate family alone, and the bloatware is the sole reason.
People ask me for advice on what to buy, and I now tell them Apple, and the problems with bloatware are the sole reason. That is $1500 is not the money that went to Apple, that is money the would have spent PC laptops. More went to Apple, and it has been worth the extra money.
Pretty much all the problems they were having were bloatware related, and when they would let format and put "plain, off the shelf" Windows their systems worked. However, they don't want to jump through the hoops to get the equivalent of a boxed OS from the manufacturer. They don't know how format the drive, and install a clean OS, and get the drivers. They don't want to wait til the next time I visit to get and use their computer. (And I don't want to spend that precious time building their systems either.)
It got to the point that I would refuse to assist them with their PC problems, in any way, if it the system had not been wiped (including the"recovery" partition), and had an "off the shelf" OS installed. If they did not want to do that, they could get an Apple, and feel free to call me with problems. A couple went the "wipe and start fresh" route, but most just decided to get Macs. Either way, support calls are now few and far between, and the Windows people were just as happy as the OS X people. But then, as the bloat on PCs become more and more attached to device drivers, all of their purchases became Macs.
The Dells, HPs, etc. (From your message, I assume you work for one of them.) can continue to think that bloatware does not take its toll on their bottom line. Or, they can open their eyes, see Apple kicking their asses in customer satisfaction, profits, and increasing market share. Ditch the bloatware, and maybe that trend will reverse.
So basically, Comcast has the right idea, they just need to be giving Netflix speed above that for which subscribers are paying?
All I really see happening with your suggested model is actual tier speeds remaining stagnant with insufficient caps, and ISPs using that as leverage to extort tolls from companies that wish to deliver to their customers. Why should an ISP offer a better speed at a reasonable rate to a single subsciber if they can extract multiple fees for that same bandwidth from every company that wants sufficient access to a potential customer?
Using the ISP's DNS may be a good solution for helping to find a more local streaming server, but it brings back all the reasons I went away from their servers in the first place. I have not noticed any performance issues on any of my Netflix devices, or other services, by using an alternate DNS server.
Despite what Comcast would have you believe, most ISPs PAY backbone providers to deliver thier customer's out of network requests. If my ISP cannot provide me with a DNS server that will actually return a NXDOMAIN response instead of trying monetize my typos, I am perfectly happy for their backbone fees to increase as an indirect result.
A "full-quality" BD is 50 GB. Most downloads don't approach the size of a "full quality" 4.5 GB DVD. (Which is really 9 GB.) Browse iTunes a bit, and you'll find their 720p downloads hover around 3 - 5 GB. A "1080p" movie could fit on a 9GB DVD, but compression artifacts would be very noticeable. A REAL 1080p movie will have the bit-rates required to make compression artifacts imperceptible, typically averaging at least 30 Mbps.
Think of what percentage of the downstream Internet traffic Netflix would be using if they were streaming REAL 1080p.
I think many are quite aware that limiting corporations in certain ways serves the greater good, Net Neutrality being a clear cut case. It does not serve their own good, especially when it comes to raising money for their next campaign. I don't think this is unique to the Right.
So, major differences of sects comes down to disagreements between historians and translators?
YOUR SCIENCE IS FLAWED!!
I used to like the OSX development tools but they are not portable, I wasted a lot of time with them, so this is as basic as I can make it now, so my software runs everywhere.
I really like the OS X development tools. I am even starting to like them more than Visual Studio. (I am still on 2008, though.) The insane licensing costs of anything but a bare-bones edition Visual Studio are insane, versus Xcode and its nice integration of lots of profiling tools that are freely provided. If you consider the Mac as the price for Xcode, it makes even a pretty souped up Mac Pro seem cheap by comparison.
Like mentioned before, Cocoa and .net are not really portable, but I have an easier time integrating third party libraries into Cocoa apps than .Net apps, and an easier time integrating external build steps, which I don't need to do as often with Xcode since it is already aware of more of those tools.
"And this guy totally focused on things he likes, if you didn't see what you are looking for in his video it isn't because its not there. Its because he skipped it."
Note, I have only been to Akihabara once, but I agree this was a limited view of the place. This guy seems to really be into electrical engineering and gives a great tour of that aspect. (Still well worth watching. It showed me that I only scratched the surface of the Labyrinth.)
Think about most of the other stuff a geek might be interested in, and realize it is probably there in similar quantities and also with stores that specialize in particular aspects of it. This includes the retro game stores and arcades that he mentioned more as a footnote. It includes porn shops with every fetish you can or can't imagine, that are many stories tall and packed so tight with DVDs and Blu-rays that even a healthy, averaged sized Japanese person can barely walk in the aisles. It includes similar shops for computer components, with a floor for cases, another for motherboards, etc. It includes countless anime and manga shops. It includes many shops that specialize in independent games. It includes shops for geek memorabilia. It includes "maids" on the sidewalks out to lure you into the maid cafes. And so on...
Some of the shops are bigger, with greater street presence, Yodobashi being a VERY extreme example. However, getting to and walking among of the most of the stores felt similar to the labyrinth, but more vertical with rooms of various sizes connected by thin halls and stair wells with collages of posters serving as the wallpaper. Come to think of it, those videos did give a good feel of urbanized multi-level bazaar type feel of the place, but was just narrow in its scope. While it had some good street views, it lacked some that really show the scale of the place. Still a very nice series of videes, with the Google maps being a nice supplement.