People stress themselves out. If you worry, of course you will be stressed. Duh. Just relax and be happy that you're not a hooker in sub-saharan Africa with AIDS and various other parasites, with Moslem zealots looking to behead you in public.
I fool myself DAILY that my job is important, and it's easy to do, because when you fix the customer, they are quite often very appreciative, and say "thanks" or "you're great" or stuff like that. They send letters, they send coffee mugs, etc. I get to be the hero.
As far as materialism and motivation go - we get paid for survival purposes. Most people lose the fact that they're getting buy, that they're surviving, that they're paying the bills, feeding the kids, buying them college degrees, and even getting enough toys and trappings to keep up with the Joneses. Often, it's mistaken for greed, but it's the escalation of the perceived bar for survival. At some point, say when you have more than 5 or so million dollars, if you're still fighting for survival, you've got to sit back and realize you're sick and need help. Wonder if the reason you're working so hard is for survival, or if there's some other bogus rationalization, or if you're REALLY getting something beneficial out of it.
The world would be a better place.
Many of my wife's friends suffer from this. They're mainly housewives, and basically, their best work is undone again and again, daily. Very discouraging. But it keeps the flower-industry going. ..
Worse still - Americans tend to do vacations like cruises, where you're expected to run around, do this, see that, party party party, etc. When you're done with that, THEN you need a vacation.
Frankly, I went to Moorea last year for a week (near Tahiti), and it was the best vacation ever. We didn't do jack. We just layed around the beach drinking, watching the owner of the resort shoot the wild dogs with his BB gun.
My guess, is that Transmeta probably has a chance at making one of these deals EMULATE a PPC chip FASTER than the fastest G4 Motorola can currently produce. (which is the same speed they had 12 months ago).
I thought that the PPC could do this to. Not sure about power consumption, but I KNOW that the G4, and G3e will step down their speed if they get too hot, this is how Apple can ship computers without fans. Yes, convective cooling in a well-designed case DOES do the trick. But if it's too hot in the room, it's not as effective.
The important question is "how fast will it respond"?
My biggest complaint with computers is how quickly they respond to the users. Quite often, low-power mode is a terrible culprit here, especially when the HD spins down. You move the mouse, click on something, and wait 30 seconds while the machine pulls it's head out of it's ass and spins up the hard disk. If you do this often enough (if the cylce is short enough) it probably takes more energy to spin-up the disk that it would have taken to continue running it (newton's second law anyone?); and makes me sit and wait for my $5000 new spiffy super-fast 1.4 GHz PIV (exaggerating, but nonetheless, point is made, no?).
I'm not saying this is bad, but I'm saying that it's USUALLY implemented to make things worse. If the chip goes INSTANTLY from 300 to 500MHz the very moment I start moving the mouse after letting it sit, then it's okay. But latency sucks. Which is probably why there are now strong arguments that a 500MHz CPU is enough for most people. It's not, but when you pay the extra dough for the 1.4 Ghz one, and you don't see a performance improvement for MOST day to day tasks, the problem is your suffering from latency, and often reading data that was not cached. Poor implementation.
I don't know the actual value of the company, but I DO know that after the first year after this investment, (when they had their first 4 consecutive profitable quarters) Apple reported that they had ONE BILLION in cash. Versus the trivial $150 million MS invested.
Although I did omit a second "lever".
IE.
The fact that OmniWeb for OS X exists, is a sweet exit-strategy for Apple. As is AppleWorks, which is Carbon. MS Office is not yet Carbon.
I guess if the music industry wants it's garganuan profits now, it will need to do the following:
1. lobby congress to legalize murder.
2. hire disenfranchised serbian death squads.
3. locate any person with an IQ above 90.
4. kill all persons with an IQ above 90.
This will have two impacts. It will mean that they'll finally be able to sell Backdoor Boyz to EVERYONE, and that nobody smart enough to crack SDMI will be left alive.
That would be MUCH easier and cheaper than developing a crack-proof protection scheme.
I thought that when "they" reported that canals DO mean there was liquid water, "they" had carefully considered and ruled out other possibilities like CO2 jets.
I just *love* fundraisin^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hscience reporting.
In the part where the RIAA bribes/partners with Microsoft,.NET figures in, because if all software is "rented", computers won't need CD players anymore, and since MS controls the manufacturers, CD players will become rare commodities. non standard items. Like ZIP disks.
The CD would never be playable in a player you could digitally connect to a computer. They're talking about replacing everyone's CD player. Most likely with some digital memory type player.
Sounds like a hard sell, until that new Backdoor Boyz CD is ONLY available in SDMI. Possibly given away in some kind of promotion. Then all the kiddies run out and buy SDMI players. (or they give them away at McDonalds or something) Then, armed with those sales figures, the industry approaches the hardware manufacturers and sez "hey, this is profitable" cash flies under the table, a blowjob here, a blowjob there, (my embellishment), then there are more SDMI players out there, and they don't threaten their revenue by making MORE music SDMI-only. Soon, only non-RIAA companies sell non-SDMI music, and while this is a competitive advantage in an ideal market, RIAA propaganda, promotion, marketing, legal-dirty-tricks, drive the indies out of business.
Then, the RIAA bribes, er partners with Microsoft to provide free SDMI players in the ONLY web browser still available, that just happens to be on 90% of desktops - and breaks other plugins that play MP3s, only geeks will be able to download MP3s and get them to play.
Then, you could likely download SDMI files and listen to them on your computer, but no player (in theory) will allow you to decode the content, other than directly to the speakers.
Of course, where this fails is when someone comes up with their own decoder, or even a sound-card driver that dumps the sound data to a place that can be decoded, instead of to the speakers. Or if someone figures out a hack for the player to do raw digital-out, or something like that. Worst-case scenario, if SDMI is better than CD sound quality (it would almost have to be to sell, unless they sell for a reduced price, unless they could fool all of the poeple all of the time - which isn't really necessary, you only have to fool most of the people with most of the money), then output from the player is audio, you simply take some decent equipment, and re-encode it. Some loss, but free distribution of previously copy-protected works makes it worth it, as long as the quality is acceptable.
The guys who came up with SDMI thought they could fool the RIAA companies into buying into this technology, and face it, they would have become incredibly wealthy, whether it failed or not. It was worth a try, eh?
yes. SDMI would have been a hard sell, until they "bundled" it with "better audio quality". It wouldn't have to sound better, they'd only have to bribe a few audiophile magazines, and run a small astroturf campaign, and it would BE better.
But yeah, indie labels (using unprotected MP3 technology) *is* what we really, ultimately want.
bocott coke, and maybe 20% of the people who agree with your cause will boycott it.
That translates into a 20% drop in revenues (um, if Coke didn't own every other company in existence, and only produced just coke).
but with this contest, if just one hacker doesn't boycott it, (and who wouldn't want an extra $10,000 for a few hours work?), then the boycott utterly fails. Y'all should've just gone for it.
It would have been nice to see the wasted effort to mass-market this stuff and watch it be cracked. That would have been sweet. But it's also pretty satisfying to watch a hacker-boycott still crack the thing in a matter of weeks. If all the hackers had gone full-tilt into this, can you imagine how quickly it would have fallen? Might have saved them a little hubris.
My guess is that the professional cryptographers they had working on this were trying to sell someone something (SMDI to the RIAA), and therefore had a conflict of interest going.
'cmon, spend another few million, see what you can come up with, hit us with your best shot! How many failed formats are you going to come up with before you free the information. You know it wants it!
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in my experience, programmers don't worry about bugs. They worry about schedules.
Bugs are for the support guys to find workarounds for.
so true.
People stress themselves out. If you worry, of course you will be stressed. Duh. Just relax and be happy that you're not a hooker in sub-saharan Africa with AIDS and various other parasites, with Moslem zealots looking to behead you in public.
I don't think it would be cool.
All those LCD panels would generate a lot of heat (as well as being heinously expensive).
better than nothing.
I do tech support.
I fool myself DAILY that my job is important, and it's easy to do, because when you fix the customer, they are quite often very appreciative, and say "thanks" or "you're great" or stuff like that. They send letters, they send coffee mugs, etc. I get to be the hero.
As far as materialism and motivation go - we get paid for survival purposes. Most people lose the fact that they're getting buy, that they're surviving, that they're paying the bills, feeding the kids, buying them college degrees, and even getting enough toys and trappings to keep up with the Joneses. Often, it's mistaken for greed, but it's the escalation of the perceived bar for survival. At some point, say when you have more than 5 or so million dollars, if you're still fighting for survival, you've got to sit back and realize you're sick and need help. Wonder if the reason you're working so hard is for survival, or if there's some other bogus rationalization, or if you're REALLY getting something beneficial out of it.
The world would be a better place.
Many of my wife's friends suffer from this. They're mainly housewives, and basically, their best work is undone again and again, daily. Very discouraging. But it keeps the flower-industry going. . .
oddly enough, my cube has 3 walls. The 4th is open to the hallway. So, I don't feel as penned in, and I can't be depressed.
Because I have to smile at every freaking person who walks by, and have no way of stopping people who want to strike up conversations.
Worse still - Americans tend to do vacations like cruises, where you're expected to run around, do this, see that, party party party, etc. When you're done with that, THEN you need a vacation.
Frankly, I went to Moorea last year for a week (near Tahiti), and it was the best vacation ever. We didn't do jack. We just layed around the beach drinking, watching the owner of the resort shoot the wild dogs with his BB gun.
remember the "turbo" button we used to have on all the 286's? From a rather pedestrian 10MHz to - whoopee! 14 MHz!
Apple better not watch out.
Fucking Motorola better watch out.
My guess, is that Transmeta probably has a chance at making one of these deals EMULATE a PPC chip FASTER than the fastest G4 Motorola can currently produce. (which is the same speed they had 12 months ago).
I thought that the PPC could do this to. Not sure about power consumption, but I KNOW that the G4, and G3e will step down their speed if they get too hot, this is how Apple can ship computers without fans. Yes, convective cooling in a well-designed case DOES do the trick. But if it's too hot in the room, it's not as effective.
The important question is "how fast will it respond"?
My biggest complaint with computers is how quickly they respond to the users. Quite often, low-power mode is a terrible culprit here, especially when the HD spins down. You move the mouse, click on something, and wait 30 seconds while the machine pulls it's head out of it's ass and spins up the hard disk. If you do this often enough (if the cylce is short enough) it probably takes more energy to spin-up the disk that it would have taken to continue running it (newton's second law anyone?); and makes me sit and wait for my $5000 new spiffy super-fast 1.4 GHz PIV (exaggerating, but nonetheless, point is made, no?).
I'm not saying this is bad, but I'm saying that it's USUALLY implemented to make things worse. If the chip goes INSTANTLY from 300 to 500MHz the very moment I start moving the mouse after letting it sit, then it's okay. But latency sucks. Which is probably why there are now strong arguments that a 500MHz CPU is enough for most people. It's not, but when you pay the extra dough for the 1.4 Ghz one, and you don't see a performance improvement for MOST day to day tasks, the problem is your suffering from latency, and often reading data that was not cached. Poor implementation.
I don't know the actual value of the company, but I DO know that after the first year after this investment, (when they had their first 4 consecutive profitable quarters) Apple reported that they had ONE BILLION in cash. Versus the trivial $150 million MS invested.
Although I did omit a second "lever".
IE.
The fact that OmniWeb for OS X exists, is a sweet exit-strategy for Apple. As is AppleWorks, which is Carbon. MS Office is not yet Carbon.
I guess if the music industry wants it's garganuan profits now, it will need to do the following:
1. lobby congress to legalize murder.
2. hire disenfranchised serbian death squads.
3. locate any person with an IQ above 90.
4. kill all persons with an IQ above 90.
This will have two impacts. It will mean that they'll finally be able to sell Backdoor Boyz to EVERYONE, and that nobody smart enough to crack SDMI will be left alive.
That would be MUCH easier and cheaper than developing a crack-proof protection scheme.
Oh wait, I forgot, there's always DONGLES!
MS does not own a chunk of Apple. They bought a TRIVIAL peice of non-voting stock like 3 years ago.
The only leverage MS has over Apple is Office. Yes, that's a big lever. But it's the only one.
I thought that when "they" reported that canals DO mean there was liquid water, "they" had carefully considered and ruled out other possibilities like CO2 jets.
I just *love* fundraisin^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hscience reporting.
I forgot one other angle;
.NET figures in, because if all software is "rented", computers won't need CD players anymore, and since MS controls the manufacturers, CD players will become rare commodities. non standard items. Like ZIP disks.
In the part where the RIAA bribes/partners with Microsoft,
The CD would never be playable in a player you could digitally connect to a computer. They're talking about replacing everyone's CD player. Most likely with some digital memory type player.
Sounds like a hard sell, until that new Backdoor Boyz CD is ONLY available in SDMI. Possibly given away in some kind of promotion. Then all the kiddies run out and buy SDMI players. (or they give them away at McDonalds or something) Then, armed with those sales figures, the industry approaches the hardware manufacturers and sez "hey, this is profitable" cash flies under the table, a blowjob here, a blowjob there, (my embellishment), then there are more SDMI players out there, and they don't threaten their revenue by making MORE music SDMI-only. Soon, only non-RIAA companies sell non-SDMI music, and while this is a competitive advantage in an ideal market, RIAA propaganda, promotion, marketing, legal-dirty-tricks, drive the indies out of business.
Then, the RIAA bribes, er partners with Microsoft to provide free SDMI players in the ONLY web browser still available, that just happens to be on 90% of desktops - and breaks other plugins that play MP3s, only geeks will be able to download MP3s and get them to play.
Then, you could likely download SDMI files and listen to them on your computer, but no player (in theory) will allow you to decode the content, other than directly to the speakers.
Of course, where this fails is when someone comes up with their own decoder, or even a sound-card driver that dumps the sound data to a place that can be decoded, instead of to the speakers. Or if someone figures out a hack for the player to do raw digital-out, or something like that. Worst-case scenario, if SDMI is better than CD sound quality (it would almost have to be to sell, unless they sell for a reduced price, unless they could fool all of the poeple all of the time - which isn't really necessary, you only have to fool most of the people with most of the money), then output from the player is audio, you simply take some decent equipment, and re-encode it. Some loss, but free distribution of previously copy-protected works makes it worth it, as long as the quality is acceptable.
But DAT wasn't that well established yet.
Computers are big. I think a lot of the manufacturers out there would have something to say about a tax like that.
My lobbyist can beat up your lobbyist.
The guys who came up with SDMI thought they could fool the RIAA companies into buying into this technology, and face it, they would have become incredibly wealthy, whether it failed or not. It was worth a try, eh?
yes. SDMI would have been a hard sell, until they "bundled" it with "better audio quality". It wouldn't have to sound better, they'd only have to bribe a few audiophile magazines, and run a small astroturf campaign, and it would BE better.
But yeah, indie labels (using unprotected MP3 technology) *is* what we really, ultimately want.
Well, the boycott idea was stupid anyway.
bocott coke, and maybe 20% of the people who agree with your cause will boycott it.
That translates into a 20% drop in revenues (um, if Coke didn't own every other company in existence, and only produced just coke).
but with this contest, if just one hacker doesn't boycott it, (and who wouldn't want an extra $10,000 for a few hours work?), then the boycott utterly fails. Y'all should've just gone for it.
It would have been nice to see the wasted effort to mass-market this stuff and watch it be cracked. That would have been sweet. But it's also pretty satisfying to watch a hacker-boycott still crack the thing in a matter of weeks. If all the hackers had gone full-tilt into this, can you imagine how quickly it would have fallen? Might have saved them a little hubris.
more like 5 or 10 cents.
But the record companies want to charge 3 to 5 bucks.
My guess is that the professional cryptographers they had working on this were trying to sell someone something (SMDI to the RIAA), and therefore had a conflict of interest going.
'cmon, spend another few million, see what you can come up with, hit us with your best shot! How many failed formats are you going to come up with before you free the information. You know it wants it!
you make the best possible point.
.
Those who believe in such a thing as uncrackable encryption are either poorly misinformed, or have no imagination.
For some reason, money seems to gravitate towards such individuals. .