First of all, no corporation on earth has a guarantee that their business model will remain valid.
...In an open and fair market.
Which is why Media Interests have purchased the best legislation that they can that enshrines their business models and profitability in laws that ensure that their business models and organization don't become invalidated by changing technology.
This seems to be an unfortunate trend everywhere -- once you get some measure of success, you use your money to purchase the force of law to guarantee your success into the future.
For a end-user OS, the metadata mechanism should not have "some glitches".
Name one widely used OS that has a perfect, glitch free metadata system? Windows has its problems, MacOS has its, Unix largely relies on extensions or ignores file metadata altogether.
Furthermore, I dont think any system will be perfect -- I can open EPS files in at least 3 or 4 applications, and there's nothing in the file that says I should open it with any of them, since I may go from Illustrator to Photoshop to Corel Draw or vice-versa with a file created by any of them. Only I can choose which file will open them yet I guarantee that the goal of most metadata systems is primarily to open the right program when you double-click on the file.
It's not perfect, but it relies on magic(5), the hints file with signatures of the various types of files. If you have a small magic(5) file you get stuff wrong, and some signatures need to be made "deeper" or smarter tests built in so that otherwise similar files can be told apart.
I can see where it would be advisable to have your file manager or desktop GUI be able to update the magic(5) file by being told that one or more of the files are different and that better signatures need to be generated -- eg, find out what's the same about files a and b but isn't the same as c and d.
Anything is naturally going to have some glitches, and some choices will always need to have an arbitrary definition since the definition of what they are may vary depending on interpretation.
I just think that the overwhelming majority of files *will* be machine-typable based on contents with hints and that adding a lot of extra data to the filesystem will cripple its speed in the long run.
As I see it the file system is for storing files and a *small* amount of system-related information about those files.
The need for metadata seems to be centered much higher in the system, at the user or application level, not at the filesystem level. I think that the best way to do this would be to implement a file(1) into the system that other applications (file manager, desktop GUI, applications) could use to determine what a file is.
Most files have header information in them anyway that describes the file's information in pretty great detail to begin with, and this and the way the data is structured can be more informative to the user or an application than either.xyz without making the filesystem so complicated and non-portable.
Linux is the new tinkerer's OS, and if it became untinkerable, what would be the point? Who would buy it?
That portion of the market that doesn't want to tinker with something?
The idea here is that AOL needs to come up with an AOL-only hardware platform that enables people who don't want the complexity of a computer to use their services.
To do this they need to make the smallest possible investment in a hardware design and the smallest possible investment in a non-Windows operating environment. Linux fits the bill for this. The GUI toolkits are there enough to build in the basic AOL software services, although multimedia might be a challenge.
It's not a question of supplying a general purpose computer to everyone -- that market is owned by other people. It's a question of supplying the basic hardware to access their software services for people who don't own or want a computer.
Microsoft is already getting ready to enter that market with future XBoxes. AOL will see less growth unless they can provide an equivilent to an XBox+MSN service.
I think the point is to protect people that take risks and run businesses without incurring personal debt.
Which makes sense if you're running a 2-person dry cleaners or something. It doesn't make sense that the sheild of the corporation can be used to rip off millions.
I would imagine that this is a lot closer than anyone would care to think:
I imagine a 15" flat panel display with a keyboard and a mouse. The display base houses 56K and G.lite modems, 10/100 ethernet and mainboard. The whole thing runs on a low-end x86 platform off of a ATA flash disk. It runs a customized Linux kernel with the AOL software as the only environment. As a bonus a printer can be connected and they include some truly basic AOL apps, a word processor and a checkbook program.
The likely hurdle is the cost of 15" LCDs and the tanked out economy, although the latter should be helping the former. I imagine an Asian manufacturer could build them for about $350 each and AOL could probably sell them at cost w/3 mos. free AOL.
It's basically WebTV with a good display, and I know tons of people that would buy it because all they want is web+email, they don't care about all the other crap. It fits on that little "desk" by the phone in the kitchen, requires no configuration and cuts AOLs tech support costs significantly.
It hasn't worked before because the people doing it were trying to provide a generic solution. Coupled with AOL it *has* to work, and AOL will need to do it anyway since MS will be bundling XBoxen in the future as web terminals connecting to MSN.
It'd be too bad if suing a putatively abusive monopolist became the market's self-adjusting technique for dealing with monopolies -- just suing them to get a payoff which is enough to benefit you but doesn't correct the monopoly or actually punish them that much.
I mean, what kind of a lawsuit that paid out in cash could actually *harm* Microsoft? $1 billion? 5? 10? 100?
Another thing is that neither the Chinese, nor the Vikings, nor anyone else who may have done it initiated a genocide campaign on such a scale as Columbus'
The Arabs were more interested in slave traffic -- why kill your conquered people when they were valuable slaves! Certainly no expansionist people in history has a clean moral scorecard, particularly when judged by the moral standards practiced today.
I'd also take issue with a genocide campaign. Where specifically was it the stated goal of the Spanish or Portuguese to kill off everyone they met? Certainly they approached it with a military mindset (ie, subdue organized opposition with force). They did bring diseases with them nonexistant in the western hemisphere, but how do you blame anyone for that given the level of scientific and medical understanding in the 16th century?
You called it. The Democratic party is consistantly and strongly supported by Hollywood interests, although it would be wrong to assume Hollywood's corporate parents don't also pad the Republican party.
I do think, though, that the Republicans wouldn't mind seeing Hollywood taken down a notch, even if it does involve potentially limiting the profit machine of a business interest.
Bush Jr's presidency was bought and paid for by the country-club Republicans he so aptly represents.
Is it any surprise that they didn't also buy the loyalty of his chief policy makers, like the DOJ.
What I find so richly ironic about the obvious political biases of the Republican DOJ is the constant nattering the Replublicans have done throughout time regarding the political activism of the Supreme Court.
The job of the DOJ is to enforce the law, not do it selectively or caprciously.
I've been laughing at Popular Science since I was a kid at the barber shop (and this was over 25 years ago, kids). Without fail, every article has an "artists conception" of some outrageous new technological innovation that's just around the corner! -- super vaccines, military of the future, cruise ships the size of cities, rocket planes, and so on. The only thing they seem to leave out is ESP.
I'm sure many of the stories really do represent new applications for halfway-grounded-in-reality technology, but they extend it so far beyond reality. It'd be amusing to take 20 year old popular science cover stories and see what percentage even remotely resemble developed technologies.
Why do video stores exist? Shouldn't the MPAA be burning them down, or whatever it is that happens to offenders that enable piracy?
Not that it necessarily undermines your larger point, but doesn't VHS already include two issues that limit the propegation of unauthorized copies? Macrovision does work for the most part, and analog copies don't go very many generations without significant degredation.
Q:So why did the price of my CD *increase* instead of *decreasing*?
I'm sure they'd argue their costs have gone up. The aluminum/polycarbonate discs have gotten cheaper, but I'm pretty sure there's been across the board increases in the material and labor costs associated with printing, packaging, shipping and merchandising CDs, as well as the costs involved in making them (bigger advances, more expensive studio time, stars demanding ever-richer deals, etc).
And I'm pretty sure they're half right, but they're also probably looking to protect a healthy margin. Although Vivendi Universal as an example only has a 5% operating margin.
I think they do this with car batteries, too, due to the lead/acid problem.
Personally I think these are awesome ideas. I think we're all collectively better off shelling out a couple of bucks each to deal responsibly with hazardous waste, rather than assuming that people will do the right thing. I think they've demonstrated that they'll do the wrong thing every time when it comes to asbestos, batteries, tires, etc.
I'm far from a sophisticated programmer, but I can bang out the odd script in Perl and I use procmail.
I've been actually collecting Spam for an idea that I have -- Spam can be identified by the subject matter based upon the vocabulary. This weekend I hacked out a script that goes through a spam mbox and builds an index of words and two-word phrases.
I ran it against my main inbox and it generated an entirely different vocabulary than the one generated by my spam mailbox. This leads me to believe that a new mail message could be judged by subject alone to see if contained a lot of spam vocabulary, and if it did its words could get added to the dictionary.
The virtue of this is that its self-learning -- the more you get, the better it gets at finding them since the spam vocabularly gets even better defined.
Of course, I haven't worked out the scheme for matching new mail against the dictionary yet (either in a logical sense or an implementation sense), so it may prove much harder than it seems -- but the fact that Spam is spottable in the subject by me just reading it vs normal mail shows me that the vocabulary is significant.
You make the best point. Corporate America (and it may apply to European countries, but I see most glaringly in the US) has a real love economic double standards.
Another example: They *want* restrictions and high tarrifs on products they can't compete on. They *don't* want restrictions on the importation of labor, because it cuts their costs.
I often wonder if maybe capitalism isn't a huge, very long running ponzi scheme that requires the continuous shifting of labor and materials costs to cheaper and cheaper countries in order to keep the payouts working and higher and higher prices paid in the "expensive" countries to offset the decreasing savings of production shifts. I just wonder if/when it will break.
If you remove the ability to region lock, then many companies will probably cease to sell their products in the poorer countries. The end result is that importation would probably slow down as well, since new laws would have to be created to stop the flood of low-cost knockoffs from outside the U.S
I think you've got it half right. Lack of region locks prevents low-cost selling in poor countries due to fears of re-importation. They're probably more afraid, though, of the loss in poor countries from outright piracy if they're not offered a deeply discounted product.
Poor countries aren't going to stop buying $5 DVDs, they're going to stop buying official $5 DVDs. They will continue to buy pirated DVDs at that price point, which will become more prevelant.
What galls me, though, is if they can sell DVDs in India for $5 and make money why don't they do that here? I own exactly 1 DVD (Mad Max deluxe, has Australian sound track) at $20 each. If DVDs were $5 I'd own a lot more. They're not, so I just refuse to buy them and either rent them once for $2 or watch them on TV for nothing.
The motion picture people are losing a shitpile of money on people like me just because they want to make their 500% margin here in the "rich" US.
But the original specification was to defeat keyboard loggers and to confuse ESCHELON-type listening devices which otherwise might be able to grab the screen (and can be confused by obfuscated color schemes).
I didn't say it was easy, but it would be nearly impossible through remote monitoring to figure out what the fuck was going on, which was the primary goal.
I think'd be a waste of time as a real-world system. Too hard, too complicated.
No, you can map a click to a symbol, but there's no guarantee that the symbol for "A" will appear in the upper left corner of the display the next time its entered. The character positions are randomized each time the symbol matrix is displayed. To be truly user hostile and spy hostile, randomize the display each time a character is clicked so that even "AAAA" will appear to be a bunch a different characters since the icon location would change every time its clicked.
I was asssuming that the "icons" would actually be somewhat representative of the characters displayed. If you can't fit the full alphabet on the screen at once, make it scrollable. I would however randomly position the character/icons on the screen so that the x,y coords of a click wouldn't be translatable into a specific character by coordinate.
Any system securable enough is also going to be so unusable from a get-shit-done perspective that criticizing some security feature as "difficult to cope with" implies that security breaches are easy to cope with.
From the description of "video-game style selection" I was assuming that instead of typing, they'd put an (ascii-)graphical collection of letters and numbers on the screen, in a random pattern, that you would click on. Since no real text characters were written to the screen, the character-replacements are in random places on the screen each time you use it (annoying as shit for repetition) it would be tough to guess from afar what you were clicking on.
Hasn't it always seemed like tomorrow's CPUs were going to deliver so much performance you could share the excess capacity? Except that the OS/Apps of tomorrow always seem to grow to suck up that CPU so there's never any extra to hand out.
Prison rapes are not rare. During a legislative internship in college I toured a maximum security prison. The head doctor of the prison said they sew up about 3-4 rectums every month, presumably from people raped badly enough to require stitches. Ouch.
And lets question the idea of consent. If I tell you you have a choice between being sodomized or beat to shit, how long until you "consent"? At least if you consent, you may get a chance to smear some lotion on to prevent a trip to the infirmary.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, no corporation on earth has a guarantee that their business model will remain valid.
...In an open and fair market.
Which is why Media Interests have purchased the best legislation that they can that enshrines their business models and profitability in laws that ensure that their business models and organization don't become invalidated by changing technology.
This seems to be an unfortunate trend everywhere -- once you get some measure of success, you use your money to purchase the force of law to guarantee your success into the future.
For a end-user OS, the metadata mechanism should not have "some glitches".
Name one widely used OS that has a perfect, glitch free metadata system? Windows has its problems, MacOS has its, Unix largely relies on extensions or ignores file metadata altogether.
Furthermore, I dont think any system will be perfect -- I can open EPS files in at least 3 or 4 applications, and there's nothing in the file that says I should open it with any of them, since I may go from Illustrator to Photoshop to Corel Draw or vice-versa with a file created by any of them. Only I can choose which file will open them yet I guarantee that the goal of most metadata systems is primarily to open the right program when you double-click on the file.
It's not perfect, but it relies on magic(5), the hints file with signatures of the various types of files. If you have a small magic(5) file you get stuff wrong, and some signatures need to be made "deeper" or smarter tests built in so that otherwise similar files can be told apart.
I can see where it would be advisable to have your file manager or desktop GUI be able to update the magic(5) file by being told that one or more of the files are different and that better signatures need to be generated -- eg, find out what's the same about files a and b but isn't the same as c and d.
Anything is naturally going to have some glitches, and some choices will always need to have an arbitrary definition since the definition of what they are may vary depending on interpretation.
I just think that the overwhelming majority of files *will* be machine-typable based on contents with hints and that adding a lot of extra data to the filesystem will cripple its speed in the long run.
As I see it the file system is for storing files and a *small* amount of system-related information about those files.
.xyz without making the filesystem so complicated and non-portable.
The need for metadata seems to be centered much higher in the system, at the user or application level, not at the filesystem level. I think that the best way to do this would be to implement a file(1) into the system that other applications (file manager, desktop GUI, applications) could use to determine what a file is.
Most files have header information in them anyway that describes the file's information in pretty great detail to begin with, and this and the way the data is structured can be more informative to the user or an application than either
Linux is the new tinkerer's OS, and if it became untinkerable, what would be the point? Who would buy it?
That portion of the market that doesn't want to tinker with something?
The idea here is that AOL needs to come up with an AOL-only hardware platform that enables people who don't want the complexity of a computer to use their services.
To do this they need to make the smallest possible investment in a hardware design and the smallest possible investment in a non-Windows operating environment. Linux fits the bill for this. The GUI toolkits are there enough to build in the basic AOL software services, although multimedia might be a challenge.
It's not a question of supplying a general purpose computer to everyone -- that market is owned by other people. It's a question of supplying the basic hardware to access their software services for people who don't own or want a computer.
Microsoft is already getting ready to enter that market with future XBoxes. AOL will see less growth unless they can provide an equivilent to an XBox+MSN service.
I think the point is to protect people that take risks and run businesses without incurring personal debt.
Which makes sense if you're running a 2-person dry cleaners or something. It doesn't make sense that the sheild of the corporation can be used to rip off millions.
I would imagine that this is a lot closer than anyone would care to think:
I imagine a 15" flat panel display with a keyboard and a mouse. The display base houses 56K and G.lite modems, 10/100 ethernet and mainboard. The whole thing runs on a low-end x86 platform off of a ATA flash disk. It runs a customized Linux kernel with the AOL software as the only environment. As a bonus a printer can be connected and they include some truly basic AOL apps, a word processor and a checkbook program.
The likely hurdle is the cost of 15" LCDs and the tanked out economy, although the latter should be helping the former. I imagine an Asian manufacturer could build them for about $350 each and AOL could probably sell them at cost w/3 mos. free AOL.
It's basically WebTV with a good display, and I know tons of people that would buy it because all they want is web+email, they don't care about all the other crap. It fits on that little "desk" by the phone in the kitchen, requires no configuration and cuts AOLs tech support costs significantly.
It hasn't worked before because the people doing it were trying to provide a generic solution. Coupled with AOL it *has* to work, and AOL will need to do it anyway since MS will be bundling XBoxen in the future as web terminals connecting to MSN.
It'd be too bad if suing a putatively abusive monopolist became the market's self-adjusting technique for dealing with monopolies -- just suing them to get a payoff which is enough to benefit you but doesn't correct the monopoly or actually punish them that much.
I mean, what kind of a lawsuit that paid out in cash could actually *harm* Microsoft? $1 billion? 5? 10? 100?
Another thing is that neither the Chinese, nor the Vikings, nor anyone else who may have done it initiated a genocide campaign on such a scale as Columbus'
The Arabs were more interested in slave traffic -- why kill your conquered people when they were valuable slaves! Certainly no expansionist people in history has a clean moral scorecard, particularly when judged by the moral standards practiced today.
I'd also take issue with a genocide campaign. Where specifically was it the stated goal of the Spanish or Portuguese to kill off everyone they met? Certainly they approached it with a military mindset (ie, subdue organized opposition with force). They did bring diseases with them nonexistant in the western hemisphere, but how do you blame anyone for that given the level of scientific and medical understanding in the 16th century?
You called it. The Democratic party is consistantly and strongly supported by Hollywood interests, although it would be wrong to assume Hollywood's corporate parents don't also pad the Republican party.
I do think, though, that the Republicans wouldn't mind seeing Hollywood taken down a notch, even if it does involve potentially limiting the profit machine of a business interest.
Bush Jr's presidency was bought and paid for by the country-club Republicans he so aptly represents.
Is it any surprise that they didn't also buy the loyalty of his chief policy makers, like the DOJ.
What I find so richly ironic about the obvious political biases of the Republican DOJ is the constant nattering the Replublicans have done throughout time regarding the political activism of the Supreme Court.
The job of the DOJ is to enforce the law, not do it selectively or caprciously.
Heh, I thought that was just Scientific American where the modern and predicted actually matched.
I've been laughing at Popular Science since I was a kid at the barber shop (and this was over 25 years ago, kids). Without fail, every article has an "artists conception" of some outrageous new technological innovation that's just around the corner! -- super vaccines, military of the future, cruise ships the size of cities, rocket planes, and so on. The only thing they seem to leave out is ESP.
I'm sure many of the stories really do represent new applications for halfway-grounded-in-reality technology, but they extend it so far beyond reality. It'd be amusing to take 20 year old popular science cover stories and see what percentage even remotely resemble developed technologies.
Why do video stores exist? Shouldn't the MPAA be burning them down, or whatever it is that happens to offenders that enable piracy?
Not that it necessarily undermines your larger point, but doesn't VHS already include two issues that limit the propegation of unauthorized copies? Macrovision does work for the most part, and analog copies don't go very many generations without significant degredation.
Q:So why did the price of my CD *increase* instead of *decreasing*?
I'm sure they'd argue their costs have gone up. The aluminum/polycarbonate discs have gotten cheaper, but I'm pretty sure there's been across the board increases in the material and labor costs associated with printing, packaging, shipping and merchandising CDs, as well as the costs involved in making them (bigger advances, more expensive studio time, stars demanding ever-richer deals, etc).
And I'm pretty sure they're half right, but they're also probably looking to protect a healthy margin. Although Vivendi Universal as an example only has a 5% operating margin.
I think they do this with car batteries, too, due to the lead/acid problem.
Personally I think these are awesome ideas. I think we're all collectively better off shelling out a couple of bucks each to deal responsibly with hazardous waste, rather than assuming that people will do the right thing. I think they've demonstrated that they'll do the wrong thing every time when it comes to asbestos, batteries, tires, etc.
I'm far from a sophisticated programmer, but I can bang out the odd script in Perl and I use procmail.
I've been actually collecting Spam for an idea that I have -- Spam can be identified by the subject matter based upon the vocabulary. This weekend I hacked out a script that goes through a spam mbox and builds an index of words and two-word phrases.
I ran it against my main inbox and it generated an entirely different vocabulary than the one generated by my spam mailbox. This leads me to believe that a new mail message could be judged by subject alone to see if contained a lot of spam vocabulary, and if it did its words could get added to the dictionary.
The virtue of this is that its self-learning -- the more you get, the better it gets at finding them since the spam vocabularly gets even better defined.
Of course, I haven't worked out the scheme for matching new mail against the dictionary yet (either in a logical sense or an implementation sense), so it may prove much harder than it seems -- but the fact that Spam is spottable in the subject by me just reading it vs normal mail shows me that the vocabulary is significant.
You make the best point. Corporate America (and it may apply to European countries, but I see most glaringly in the US) has a real love economic double standards. Another example: They *want* restrictions and high tarrifs on products they can't compete on. They *don't* want restrictions on the importation of labor, because it cuts their costs. I often wonder if maybe capitalism isn't a huge, very long running ponzi scheme that requires the continuous shifting of labor and materials costs to cheaper and cheaper countries in order to keep the payouts working and higher and higher prices paid in the "expensive" countries to offset the decreasing savings of production shifts. I just wonder if/when it will break.
If you remove the ability to region lock, then many companies will probably cease to sell their products in the poorer countries. The end result is that importation would probably slow down as well, since new laws would have to be created to stop the flood of low-cost knockoffs from outside the U.S
I think you've got it half right. Lack of region locks prevents low-cost selling in poor countries due to fears of re-importation. They're probably more afraid, though, of the loss in poor countries from outright piracy if they're not offered a deeply discounted product.
Poor countries aren't going to stop buying $5 DVDs, they're going to stop buying official $5 DVDs. They will continue to buy pirated DVDs at that price point, which will become more prevelant.
What galls me, though, is if they can sell DVDs in India for $5 and make money why don't they do that here? I own exactly 1 DVD (Mad Max deluxe, has Australian sound track) at $20 each. If DVDs were $5 I'd own a lot more. They're not, so I just refuse to buy them and either rent them once for $2 or watch them on TV for nothing.
The motion picture people are losing a shitpile of money on people like me just because they want to make their 500% margin here in the "rich" US.
It occurred to me that very few people probably need a 2GHz P4 in their inkjet printers and mobile phones.
And very few people needed more than 640k of memory.
But the original specification was to defeat keyboard loggers and to confuse ESCHELON-type listening devices which otherwise might be able to grab the screen (and can be confused by obfuscated color schemes).
I didn't say it was easy, but it would be nearly impossible through remote monitoring to figure out what the fuck was going on, which was the primary goal.
I think'd be a waste of time as a real-world system. Too hard, too complicated.
No, you can map a click to a symbol, but there's no guarantee that the symbol for "A" will appear in the upper left corner of the display the next time its entered. The character positions are randomized each time the symbol matrix is displayed. To be truly user hostile and spy hostile, randomize the display each time a character is clicked so that even "AAAA" will appear to be a bunch a different characters since the icon location would change every time its clicked.
I was asssuming that the "icons" would actually be somewhat representative of the characters displayed. If you can't fit the full alphabet on the screen at once, make it scrollable. I would however randomly position the character/icons on the screen so that the x,y coords of a click wouldn't be translatable into a specific character by coordinate.
Any system securable enough is also going to be so unusable from a get-shit-done perspective that criticizing some security feature as "difficult to cope with" implies that security breaches are easy to cope with.
From the description of "video-game style selection" I was assuming that instead of typing, they'd put an (ascii-)graphical collection of letters and numbers on the screen, in a random pattern, that you would click on. Since no real text characters were written to the screen, the character-replacements are in random places on the screen each time you use it (annoying as shit for repetition) it would be tough to guess from afar what you were clicking on.
Hasn't it always seemed like tomorrow's CPUs were going to deliver so much performance you could share the excess capacity? Except that the OS/Apps of tomorrow always seem to grow to suck up that CPU so there's never any extra to hand out.
Prison rapes are not rare. During a legislative internship in college I toured a maximum security prison. The head doctor of the prison said they sew up about 3-4 rectums every month, presumably from people raped badly enough to require stitches. Ouch.
And lets question the idea of consent. If I tell you you have a choice between being sodomized or beat to shit, how long until you "consent"? At least if you consent, you may get a chance to smear some lotion on to prevent a trip to the infirmary.