>..is that your sig seems to argue that freedom of speech is good..
Yes. We can and SHOULD speak openly and disagree as much as possible, especially about issues of war and peace. It is healthy for the Republic.
And if there is really a big government coverup it is healthy for someone to blow the whistle on it and then accept the consequences for that action. Assange isn't doing any of that though. He is leaking ordinary classified documents in an attempt to undermine our war efforts in the Afganistan dump, putting out doctored video to make our military appear to be mindless war criminals and now randomly spewing diplomatic cables to just sow discord, mistrust and chaos.
In none of the news accounts about this latest leak has there been even the hint of improper conduct. Just releases of normal acts of statecraft that are pretty much expected and the 'big reveals' aren't anything that those of us who follow new in more depth than the Daily Show already suspected but everyone in power had the fig leaf of deniability on, such as the Saudis wanting SOMEONE (us, the Israelis, hell anybody) to bomb Iran's nuke program. The sort of stuff that is dangerous to release because if diplomats can't speak in confidence they won't speak and thus bring diplomacy to a halt. Hint, if peaceful means of solving problems are made harder it makes less peaceful solutions more attractive.
> Where do you draw the line? Why is it OK to ridicule the prophet > of millions while it's wrong to provide government information?
Because you just can't conduct statecraft on CSPAN. Some conversations have to be secret. When a promise of confidentiality is given it MUST be honored.
Lemme put it in more personal terms. The 1st Amendment gives us the right to speak. The 4th and 5th gives us the equally important right to not speak and to have private affairs stay private. States have an equal need have certain acts of statecraft stay private... at least until the principles are old and writing their book. The debates of our own Constitutional Convention were so sealed.
> The US government sent thousands of young men to die based on lies.
You lefties keep saying that like if you repeat it often enough it will become true... or least Truthy. But it just ain't so.
> You also can't ensure that your government is legitimate without > being able to examine the workings of your government.
Sorry, the real world just doesn't work that way. You don't get to read every secret document. We have to build a government that can operate in the real world where three hundred plus million simply can't be trusted with every secret, even if the problem of making those secrets available to every Citizen were possible while keeping an enemy from accessing them. The solution is checks and balances, Congressional oversight and in a worst case scenario having someone with the balls to leak knowing it will mean legal consequences. Then leaving it up to jury nullification if the leak really needed doing to give the leaker justice.
Want to reform the current system that marks too much material Classified or Secret? Oh yea, doing that would have probably helped in this situation as well so lets do it. Installing a default time limit of say fifty years to hold a document Secret without direct Presidential intervention? Another good idea. But giving every disgruntled PFC and fruitcake Aussie the absolute power to publish every diplomatic cable for the last few years? Hell no.
We need to man up and spy harder. How can we ask our men in uniform to fight and die when the intelligence services are such pussies they can't/won't cover their backs by plugging a leak as big as Assange's Afganistan document dump? Honestly, if nobody in Afganistan has died yet from that dump it isn't from a lack of trying on Assange'e part. When you enter a war as a combatant on the side opposing the US you really can't bitch too loudly when the US tries to kill your ass. And yes, intelligence officers are considered combatants (even if unarmed) and that is exactly the role he (and all of Wikileaks) is playing.
When did it become debatable whether you kill enemies in war? I can promise you that a Nazi symp (though not a German or Axis citizen) in WWII operating on their behalf in an intelligence gathering capacity would have been a valid target regardless of the country he was operating from. In other words he damned sure wouldn't be granting press interviews to brag about his activities.
> No, it's not. It's like someone exposing corruption.
No it isn't. Exposing corruption is someone discovering their organization doing something horrible and leaking a selected set of documents to expose that. Wikileaks is randomly dumping documents hoping they sow chaos and fear in his enemies. See the difference?
> You mean the fact that the people hardly have any > control over their governments at all?
Leaking secret diplomatic communications helps citizens have oversight over their government how exactly? Oh right, it doesn't. What it does is cause incalculable harm to our diplomatic efforts worldwide, likely for decades. If foreign officials can't say things in confidence and have confidence that we will/can honor our commitment to discretion we are boned. Which is the goal, not the unfortunate side effect.
Stop getting blinded by the 'on the Internet' scam. If this asshole was sitting in Vienna with a quarter million classified State Dept cables shopping them to the highest bidder he would quietly catch a terminal case of metal poisioning and some low level CIA agent would be heading back to Langley with a box of CD-ROMS and writing his report on the plane. Put the word "Internet" into it and everyone looses their frickin mind thinking this idiot is some kind of hero.
> Just because some people are corrupt, that doesn't mean that all people are...
But it is the way to bet. Power corrupts. Put a 'reformer' in charge and wait. Odds are it won't be long until the new boss looks just like the old boss. That points to the fundamental difference in world view between conservatives and progressives. Conservatives realize man isn't perfect and more that he isn't even perfectable. Thus we design our social norms accordingly, with checks and balances and limits to minimize the damage. Progs do believe in the notion that man is perfectable and thus that utopia is possible. And every time they achieve enough power in an area to set their notions into practice the mass graves start filling up.
No, just a realist. I said killing Assange right now is the least bad option and I stand by it until someone proposes a better solution. If he isn't stopped and stopped in such a way as to serve as an example to the legion of fuckwads who would take his place were he simply arrested and given fifteen minutes of fame to bloviate in front of every TV camera on the frickin' planet, this crap won't cease. And it must cease because modern civilization can't exist in the climate of fear he is trying to create.
It is exactly like AQ and their suicide bombers, civilization won't work long if we are reduced to a choice of getting anal probed a dozen times a day or stuff going Foom! every week. Assange is on the same team, just attacking a different weak link in modern society.
The winning move is to say none of the above and make the decision that we won't play the game on the terrorists terms. That we refuse to accept that the only two choices are die or turn our free society into a police state. To have every secret published, surrender all privacy, or build the sort of technological locked IT infrastructure that will stop Wikileaks... but again leave us a Police State. That there is a third option. Kill them. While we still can.
> a lot of people recently said that Wikileaks has become > an anti-US organization.
People say? W. T. F! Ever listened to the founder of Wikileaks? A more raving BDS aflicted loon you wouldn't find posting at Kos or DU and a more dedicated foe of civilization you won't likely find outside a cave in Pakistan.
Listen up ya primitive screwheads. Wikileaks is BAD. You may think it is a good idea to throw all the world (of course you won't find Assange leaking secrets from an evil country that might actually KILL him... not that he disagrees with most of those countries enough to want to hurt them in the first place) and watch the powerful squirm but this won't end well. Not all information wants to be Free!
You can't do foreign policy without secret cables flying around. You can't fight wars without intelligence. You just can't. Eventually a critical mass realizes it and this problem is going to get fixed. And none of the 'fixes' are going to be things we (we meaning the typical/. reader) is going to like.
The least bad outcome longterm would be for the US govt (impossible with the current people in charge) to nip this thing in the bud now. Assange is for all intents and purposes on the other fucking side. He is acting as AQ's Intelligence arm and helping generally sow chaos and fear. Accept that and the logical consequence that follows from that. Kill Julian Assange and make it known any datacenter hosting, in ANY way including just a p2p tracker, Wikileaks content will be destroyed if they refuse the takedown notice. Of course that path won't be taken and the required fixes later will be much worse. Expect secure computing inititives to go on steroids in government and industry. People MUST be able to keep secrets and will end up paying the price in liberties if forced into it.
> how would you call making $20000 worth of goods in a given month and being paid a $1000 salary?
I'd call it delusional or very stupid. If your sole labor is creating $20K of value and you are only getting $1K of it you are an idiot for not striking out on your own. But you are more likely just delusional and have an overly inflated sense of your worth and dismiss the other inputs in the value equation.
Your mythical worker is only adding a little more than $1K to the equation. On a typical product there is a lot of inputs, not just labor. There is raw materials, the plant & equipment, R&D costs, marketing, overhead (payroll/hr dept, health benefits, unemployment insurance, liability insurance, warranty & support costs) corporate taxes, financing costs (dem crafty joo bankers gotta get their cut) and a thousand other things the typical socialist never dreams of. Then there has to be profits left over to pay the owner/shareholders to grease the wheels of capitialism to launch the next round of companies, and ya might have to buy hookers and blow for the venture capitalists, etc. And that is equally important, no profits for the capitalists and no new jobs. See the current economic situation for an example.
> Do you want your doctor spending his time figuring out which confg > files he needs to edit, or researching better ways to keep you alive?
I'd rather the Dr. have a skilled admin maintain a stable and secure Linux based network for his office. And not be hitting patients with the "the computers are down today" crap or "the computers got infected, your information went to Russian gangs, sorry bout that dude." You talk outta yer ass like there is an option of a foolproof computing platform that doesn't ever require professional help and hold up this strawman as the alternative to Linux. Doesn't exist. Here in the real world the alternative is Windows. Reloading from a recovery partition a couple of times per year is insane. Futzing around endlessly with anti-virus subscriptions is insane.
And no, not even the Mac meets that no maintnance spec. There is a reason Macs are unseen in corporate installs outside the Art Dept. They can actually survive fairly well as a lone wolf but they don't manage in quantity very well. For all the hyped UNIX underpinnings all that is mostly vestigial, used only as a place to hang device drivers. The lack of available software for the Mac probably contributes to the lower maintaince burden as well.
> I hate installation steps that consist of following manual > configuration instructions in a rote manner.
Proves you haven't actually ran Linux lately. Nowadays we use package managers. RPM packages are explicitly forbidden from interaction during installation. Debian based systems aren't quite as pure in enforcing this design concept but few packages ask more than a question or two and the default is almost always sane.
> Do the Linux guys WANT to step up and compete with OSX and > Windows or not?
I have been seeing this word used all evening. I do not think it means what you think it means. I think the word you are looking for is copy.
We DO compete. At this point the Linux desktop, warts GConf and all, works at least as well as Windows and if you don't happen to agree 100% with Steve's Vision of the Way it works better than Apple's offerings.
> The world has spoken, and editing configs and CLI is a giant DO NOT WANT.
If the price for marketshare is to design a system for idiots then I don't want those users. I'm NOT an idiot and a system designed for idiots would slow me down. Seriously. Do me a favor. Get a VM up and running and install something that by virtue of what it IS must be complicated. Say Squid for example.
Now I want you to use your favorite text editor (hint, a CLI is not required if you are on the local machine) on/etc/squid.conf. See how it is almost complete in and of itself, practically making external documentation excessive. Detailed documentation right there beside the configuration items which need to be adjusted. And it is a plain text file so you can put it into a content management system to track changes, especially handy if multiple people will be making changes. And as a text file it is about as simple to edit it from ten thousand miles away as from the system console.
So tell me, how would you improve upon that method of managing Squid? Would this be the best way to manage Firefox? No. And Firefox on Linux is configured in almost exactly the same way as it us on Win/Mac because for Firefox that is the easiest way.
> They want hand holding, in short thinking should NEVER be required..
And this is the great divide. What are computers? Interractive televisions for the mindless or levers for the minds of humans? One paradigm probably can't be extended to perfectly cover both use cases.
> Gconf doing that is very rude, and it should definitely stop. Have you filed a bug?
Don't think it is GConf, but somehow tied into Nautilus's virtual file system feature. It is a FUSE filesystem mounted there. But no, there isn't a point in filing a bug report. It isn't a bug, it's a FEATURE! They are using some capability stuff beyond the normal UNIX API as a security measure. Forbidding root from even stating a file is just evil in my book though. Problem is the GNOMES know it breaks UNIX semantics and don't care because they are mostly Windows refugees who were never properly assimilated into UNIX culture enough for them to see the value in it. Filthy Philistines!:)
Same for this Wayland heresy getting started over at Ubuntu. The Computer is the Network, the Network is the Computer. Just words to em, merrily breaking X and the idea of network transparency, not because it will perform better but because the ignorant fools don't realize X's network transparancy isn't the cause of the performance issues they are trying to solve. But mostly because they probably don't personally use apps remotely and don't even realize that they are tossing one of the greatest ideas in computing history down the shitter.
Again, when you get a large influx of immigrants/refugees it is vitally important to ensure they assimilate BEFORE turning over important design work. That didn't happen because of this insane rush to bring about "The Year of the Linux Desktop." In the end we risk letting these hosers screw things up so badly the plumbing gets so screwed up we lose the server and embedded space as well. Those who refuse to learn UNIX will end up reinventing it... poorly.
> A Mac and PC user could switch computers and withing a few minutes either person > could get done what they were intending to get done. Not so with Linux.
Yes so with Linux. I admin a lab in a public library. We give em Linux with NFS mounted home directories and none of the locked down bullcrap Windows every other library in the State offers. They figure it out pretty quick. Hint: people who depend on the lab PCs in a public library aren't UNIX geeks. Hell, it wasn't too many years ago a fair chunk of them couldn't even hold the mouse right. But not long after they get comfortable logging in/out and using the rat they manage to figure out Mozilla/Firefox, OO.o and the usual application suite. Yea we have had our share of USB pen drive issues from time to time.... of course the other libraries in the State running the Gates Foundation's library model keep the USB ports disabled entirely. Same with CD burning, it works stable these days, didn't used to be the case especially if we bought too far down the CD burner food chain. Again, the other sites disconnect the optical drives unless they need to load new software. After all, gotta 'prevent' the spread of malware. Windows IS malware.
> Erm, what's wrong with "chmod og-rwx somedir/"? Any decent backup > program should be able to deal with directories with unfriendly > permissions.
Root is immune to normal permissions. Thus backup programs running with root privileges assume they may read any file on the system. Taking a complete backup of a filesystem is otherwise impossible unless you go the dump2fs route and manually frob the raw device file. ~/.gvfs doesn't actually need to be backed up, but having to manually exclude it is a PITA and is certain to grow more exceptions over time.
The breakage of the UNIX API is in the fact it blows chunks just asking what sort of thing that name is and what it's permissions are. As a separate filesystem my configuration of rsnapshot wouldn't try to back it up anyway, but it gets into trouble just trying to determine that it is a mount point.
> Competing with Windows for customers ranges somewhere between silly and stupid. If > you want more Linux on the desktop, you need to court developers and software vendors.
Nope. If you want more users you need preloads. 90% of people would never survive a Windows install if it didn't come preloaded by an OEM who did all the twiddling to have the hardware mostly work out of the box. Anaconda actually does a better job compared to the Windows installer as far as leaving you a working machine when it finishes. Doesn't matter because end users can't use either one and refuse to even consider the possibility.
And that isn't a matter of techinical excellence, software availability or anything competition can address. It all about illegal monopolistic action. Microsoft signs consent decree after consent decree and over a decade after their first one you still can't buy a desktop PC without Windows proloaded except for a couple of bland Dell N series machines that are usually priced higher than the same machine preloaded with Windows.
The netbook revolution almost opened up the market but Microsoft just dumped XP into the hole until they could convince the manufactures to kill em off in favor of small notebooks running Win7. Go ahead, try to find a small flash drive based cheap netbook. All you find is three pounders with hard drives, crappy battery life and screens just a smidge smaller than a small notebook... and all running WIndows.
That plus it makes running a backup into black magic. And we have that going for us now as well, only not because of the registry (otherwise known as GConf). Tried to backup a machine that has someone logged in lately? I use rsnapshot, gotta add in special exceptions lest GNOME hose you because they just have to use features that almost no backup program is going to be expecting to find, files that you can't stat... even as root. Only the owning user can enter that directory, all others lose and go mad. Like meeting Cthulu or something. Totally breaking every assumption about how a file system on UNIX is supposed to behave.
It isn't just the distros. It is the desktop environments and all the plumbing underneath trying to shovel in the Fail as fast as they can.
Remove manual configuration. Remove features in general. Allow people who openly hate the UNIX Way to redesign core subsystems, losing important things like network transparency and human readable/understandable settings. Microsoft is ditching the registry because in the end users hated so much they finally had to listen to them while we are still chasing those taillights.
Oh yea. Outlook got exploited on a regular basis and still does. However we in the Free world should not start sucking each others dicks quite yet[1] either. Remember there was a remote exploit for pine[2]. libgif, libjpeg, libpng have also had security patches. The old theoretical division between dead data and live code never really existed. And while pretty much everyone else's code is better than the poop that Microsoft inflicts on the world the Free Software universe needs to pay a lot more attention to security lest we suffer a never ending string of exploits as well should we ever achieve 'world dominiation.' And the time to worry about security is now, not then because then it will be too late. Ask Microsoft.
[1] Do I have to point out this reference? Nah.
[2] Ok, it was really a metamail flaw but a Pine user could indeed get zapped simply by reading their mail.
No idea what the legal status would be in Canada. I'm not a lawyer even in the US so be sure you have your own ducks in a row.
Technically I'm probably talking about violating US law (DMCA) but pretty sure Sony would lose the PR war long before they won a legal fight. Telling a library they have to suppress knowledge is so obviously asking for a nightmare that I'm betting their legal department is smart enough to know it. The trick is I'm going to need a mostly TEXT site, too much software might confuse the issue too much, remember most librarians still miss their card catalogs, tech isn't a strength. But yell "Censorship!" and the reaction is pure Pavlovian reflex.
> As a pissed-off PS3 owner who used Linux on my PS3 and who uses my console for communication...
Good, you are probably the one to find the right dark dank corners of the Internet where the knowledge to get Linux back on a PS/3 is hiding from Sony's takedown notices. Somebody finds it either post a link in this thread, or if it can't take a slashdotting email me at the address/. has for me. My server here stood up strong to a glancing blow by slashdot in '05; we have a bigger pipe now, perhaps I'll find out if it can take a direct hit.:)
Willing to put in some time cleaning up, clarifying noisy web forum threads, etc. to get a page up. As an example, currently in the process of doing that sort of contribution for www.lg-hack.info, boiling down their research to a concise set of pages on my homepage. Not being a console owner, or even much of a gamer, I just don't hang out in the right places to know where to get good info and Google hasn't come through for me yet. Still poking around though.
I don't even own a PS3 (or any console for that matter) but I have about had it with this DMCA crap. There isn't any Sony copyrighted code in the crack is there? If somebody can point me to a good description of how to jailbreak one of these damned things I'll host it on my homepage and then toss the gauntlet down to Sony. I'm a humble librarian but one benefit is I can use a page on our server. Ever seen how rabid the library world gets when the word 'censorship' gets tossed their way?
Way I see it I can't be subject to a Sony EULA since the only Sony product I own is a fairly basic receiver. If there is no Sony code copied into the crack I can't be subject to copyright. And a text page describing something can't violate a patent. With the right disclaimers trademark is out. So that leaves it a pure DMCA play and I really don't think the bastards want that going to court. They will use em when they think they can get an instant takedown from a frightened ISP but I ain't one of those. Our lawyer happens to be the district attorney so we don't have to instantly fold at the threat of lawyering up.
The most defendable position would be detailed instructions on how to crack a PS3 for the purpose of installing Linux back on one. So has that been accomplished yet?
Haven't stuck a finger in the system's eye since my minor role in the Cuecat fiasco a decade ago. Looks like it is time to stand up again.
> You do realise Apple's the second biggest company in the world with a market cap of $263.2bn
You do realize that is a bubble waiting to burst. What exactly does Apple do that justifies that cap? They make nothing, everything is made by contract houses in China. They don't have a monopoly like Microsoft to justify it by virtue of an ensured future revenue stream. Yes they have pretty good sales numbers right now, but that could change in a quarter, especially if we have a double dip since the products they sell aren't exactly 'must have' for most people.
I have rode AAPL up twice in the past and wish I had got in for this last ride since it has been the biggest, but now is the time to be SELLING. This is.bomb territory now. Same as everyone with a clue looked at the dozens of huge cap.com companies and asked "ok, so what the hell justifies that price?" and couldn't find an answer... right before a critical mass realized the same thing.
I mean, even if you believed Amazon was soon going to sell every book and video, when they had a market cap bigger than Boeing the smart money was cashing out. Simple matter of running the numbers. Total annual sales in the books/videos etc. market Amazon was attempting to dominate would never justify the market cap Amazon had in the peak of the bubble. Plus they had almost no assets on their balance sheet, only a couple of warehouses and rapidly depreciating server farms. The only real asset was their 'brand'.
Apple is now in the same position, they have almost zero physical assets, some useful IP but most of the balance is 'goodwill' from the RDF. The bulk of what you are buying is the theory that Apple will continue to dominate and sell a lot of really high margin product.... into a recession with new competitors ramping up.
> You do realize that the iPhone has already been wildly successful, right?
Yup, by opening up a new niche. It isn't new anymore and they aren't the only game in town anymore. Apple could compete well against the even more clueless cellphone makers. Symbian? Really? Palm was a contender but had tossed the founders for idiots by the time Apple released the iPhone. The cell phone makers might have been stupid enough to get in bed with Microsoft but the carriers knew enough to keep em at arms length and undermine em at every turn. (There is only room for ONE evil monopolist in a market and the cell networks intend it to be themselves.) So yea, Apple had little problem dominating. Until another competent player with enough clout to keep the carriers from screwing up every product's implementation showed up.
> and ultimately whoever designs (or supports) the shiniest phones will win.
No. Whoever designs the best phones at attractive pricepoints will win. Whoever has the hardware the must have app of the day runs on wins. Apple has never understood any of that, Steve certainly hasn't. Remember Next? Pure nerdporn but might as well dream of buying an exotic foreign car. Now that the iPhone has a viable competitor for the high end smartphone space we shall see if they learn it now. Doubt it though, these are the same geniuses who let Microsoft wipe the floor with em because they refused to compete on price or by alliance with the rest of the tech industry. Think about that for a moment, Microsoft! The company that truly defines the phrase "to know them is to loath them' totally dominated Apple to the point they have all but given up even dreaming of achieving parity on either the desktop or notebook. Got so far in their heads they can't even imagine competing directly, instead trying to find niches where Microsoft isn't a major force, like music players and phones.
And remember, Microsoft is utterly evil but their tech sucks which is a fairly exploitable weakness. Google doesn't suck. And when the rubber meets the road I fully expect Google to be at least as Evil(tm) as Apple or Microsoft. Interesting times. We only win if they all lose.
> How much of a future do you think HDDs have, really?
But how much of that is self fulfilling prophecy combined with it hitting right at the time the 2TB hard partition table limit is suppressing demand for huge media? If the HDD makers were to return to investing in R&D and we could get over the EPT transition there is no reason spinning hard drives can't get to 10TB in this decade. No way SSD is doing that in the same time frame. Of course there also has to be a demand for that sort of storage capacity in volume high enough to justify the R&D. And that is the third strike against spinning media. The reality is 1TB drives sell for under $100 and the 2TB drives don't carry enough of a premium to bring in the revenue to fund heavy R&D because all the price pressure is down; and that is because fewer and fewer customers need the largest offerings. All SSD has to do is get 'enough' capacity at a reasonable price to take out spinning media's mass market appeal.
That was the secret to the hard drive's success. Mass adoption of the lower capacity drives brought in the volume manufacturing discounts and the gushers of cash to fund R&D for expensive higher capacity models to keep the technology ahead of any proposed replacement. Manufacture of the expensive drive was perfected, new models introduced and the old expensive product became the new volume cash cow. SSD came along just as the equation was already becoming unbalanced by loss of interest in the new high cap offerings in favour of a preference by customers for lower price instead of higher capacity. SSD may have trouble scaling to TB capacities but few doubt its ability to scale costs down and that is where the market is right now.
>...people have been investigating the relationship between resolution and bit rates and they've found that the ideal is around 0.2 bits/pixel.
Are these 'people' visually impaired or cable execs trying to justify ramming too many HD signals on one carrier? Or is it the someone who depends on a paycheck from His Steveness or Netflix trying to goober people into believing you can stream HD on anything resembling the US broadband infrastructure?
Please..2bit/pixel? Really? Start with a HD deep color pixel at 30 bits. Do the YUV 4:1:1 thing on it and you have 15 bits. So you are asserting that 75:1 is a compression rate that can be achieved while maintaining a perfect BD quality image? Without sound of course. But even if we accept your fantasy your own math says you need 9.9Mb/Sec to send it and the number of households who have that sort of broadband[1] here in the US is unlikely to leave single digits before 2020. 10MB/sec is more like what your cable company allocates to non-premium HD channels. Doubt many customers would put up with such a low bitrate for HBO or Showtime's flagship channels. If I had a home theater setup around a 60" HD set I darned sure wouldn't consider streaming a major motion picture to it. Old SD tv shows? Why not. Sitcoms? Sure. Chick flicks? Maybe. Tentpole action blockbusters full of bandwidth consuming motion? No way. Doubt you actually would either.
[1] Actually have it, not were sold that much. Have it in the sense one can stream it for hours on end with 99.9% reliability. Have it in the sense that if you actually max it out for a few hours you won't hit a monthly cap and get throttled down to 128kb/s for the rest of the month. And forget five nines, cable and Internet companies just don't understand that concept for anything a consumer will ever be pitched.
> Ever had a lot of "shiny bicycles" that aren't so shiny after your wife and/or small kids get their hands on them?
A few differences. Even with less than careful children a bike will last months, if not a year or two. And a kids bike is pretty cheap at Wallyworld. Priced Disney DVDs lately? And the little ones can thrash one in under a month.
So oh hell yes they get DVD-R copies. And if I have to copy them it doesn't take too much more effort to nuke FastPlay.
> A PDA with a phone is more useful than a PDA, so PDAs died off.
Not really. Not at ~$50/mo per device with a cell modem and locked into a miltiyear contract when considering a product that has a fast product refresh cycle.
What I want is a really cheap and basic cell phone that tethers. Put the cell company evil in a disposable package and let me buy whatever computing devices I want and replace/upgrade them on my own schedule.
Oh, and I played with an iPad for a few minutes. Sorry, I don't buy computing devices I don't control. Especially when they are that overpriced and underfeatured. Yes the UI is cute but if you will sell your liberty for a few GL effects then I pity you. Steve is far more evil than Billy Gates ever was, the difference is that until quite recently (about when billg handed off to Balmer... hummm. Mayby Gates was just trying to save us from Apple's dark embrace all this time, maybe he is really a hero. Nah.) Jobs never had the opportunity to let his darkness shine. The second he achieved dominance he became about as as subtle as Emperor Palpatine.
Slashdot Mirror
> ..is that your sig seems to argue that freedom of speech is good..
Yes. We can and SHOULD speak openly and disagree as much as possible, especially about issues of war and peace. It is healthy for the Republic.
And if there is really a big government coverup it is healthy for someone to blow the whistle on it and then accept the consequences for that action. Assange isn't doing any of that though. He is leaking ordinary classified documents in an attempt to undermine our war efforts in the Afganistan dump, putting out doctored video to make our military appear to be mindless war criminals and now randomly spewing diplomatic cables to just sow discord, mistrust and chaos.
In none of the news accounts about this latest leak has there been even the hint of improper conduct. Just releases of normal acts of statecraft that are pretty much expected and the 'big reveals' aren't anything that those of us who follow new in more depth than the Daily Show already suspected but everyone in power had the fig leaf of deniability on, such as the Saudis wanting SOMEONE (us, the Israelis, hell anybody) to bomb Iran's nuke program. The sort of stuff that is dangerous to release because if diplomats can't speak in confidence they won't speak and thus bring diplomacy to a halt. Hint, if peaceful means of solving problems are made harder it makes less peaceful solutions more attractive.
> Where do you draw the line? Why is it OK to ridicule the prophet
> of millions while it's wrong to provide government information?
Because you just can't conduct statecraft on CSPAN. Some conversations have to be secret. When a promise of confidentiality is given it MUST be honored.
Lemme put it in more personal terms. The 1st Amendment gives us the right to speak. The 4th and 5th gives us the equally important right to not speak and to have private affairs stay private. States have an equal need have certain acts of statecraft stay private... at least until the principles are old and writing their book. The debates of our own Constitutional Convention were so sealed.
> The US government sent thousands of young men to die based on lies.
You lefties keep saying that like if you repeat it often enough it will become true... or least Truthy. But it just ain't so.
> You also can't ensure that your government is legitimate without
> being able to examine the workings of your government.
Sorry, the real world just doesn't work that way. You don't get to read every secret document. We have to build a government that can operate in the real world where three hundred plus million simply can't be trusted with every secret, even if the problem of making those secrets available to every Citizen were possible while keeping an enemy from accessing them. The solution is checks and balances, Congressional oversight and in a worst case scenario having someone with the balls to leak knowing it will mean legal consequences. Then leaving it up to jury nullification if the leak really needed doing to give the leaker justice.
Want to reform the current system that marks too much material Classified or Secret? Oh yea, doing that would have probably helped in this situation as well so lets do it. Installing a default time limit of say fifty years to hold a document Secret without direct Presidential intervention? Another good idea. But giving every disgruntled PFC and fruitcake Aussie the absolute power to publish every diplomatic cable for the last few years? Hell no.
We need to man up and spy harder. How can we ask our men in uniform to fight and die when the intelligence services are such pussies they can't/won't cover their backs by plugging a leak as big as Assange's Afganistan document dump? Honestly, if nobody in Afganistan has died yet from that dump it isn't from a lack of trying on Assange'e part. When you enter a war as a combatant on the side opposing the US you really can't bitch too loudly when the US tries to kill your ass. And yes, intelligence officers are considered combatants (even if unarmed) and that is exactly the role he (and all of Wikileaks) is playing.
When did it become debatable whether you kill enemies in war? I can promise you that a Nazi symp (though not a German or Axis citizen) in WWII operating on their behalf in an intelligence gathering capacity would have been a valid target regardless of the country he was operating from. In other words he damned sure wouldn't be granting press interviews to brag about his activities.
> No, it's not. It's like someone exposing corruption.
No it isn't. Exposing corruption is someone discovering their organization doing something horrible and leaking a selected set of documents to expose that. Wikileaks is randomly dumping documents hoping they sow chaos and fear in his enemies. See the difference?
> You mean the fact that the people hardly have any
> control over their governments at all?
Leaking secret diplomatic communications helps citizens have oversight over their government how exactly? Oh right, it doesn't. What it does is cause incalculable harm to our diplomatic efforts worldwide, likely for decades. If foreign officials can't say things in confidence and have confidence that we will/can honor our commitment to discretion we are boned. Which is the goal, not the unfortunate side effect.
Stop getting blinded by the 'on the Internet' scam. If this asshole was sitting in Vienna with a quarter million classified State Dept cables shopping them to the highest bidder he would quietly catch a terminal case of metal poisioning and some low level CIA agent would be heading back to Langley with a box of CD-ROMS and writing his report on the plane. Put the word "Internet" into it and everyone looses their frickin mind thinking this idiot is some kind of hero.
> Just because some people are corrupt, that doesn't mean that all people are...
But it is the way to bet. Power corrupts. Put a 'reformer' in charge and wait. Odds are it won't be long until the new boss looks just like the old boss. That points to the fundamental difference in world view between conservatives and progressives. Conservatives realize man isn't perfect and more that he isn't even perfectable. Thus we design our social norms accordingly, with checks and balances and limits to minimize the damage. Progs do believe in the notion that man is perfectable and thus that utopia is possible. And every time they achieve enough power in an area to set their notions into practice the mass graves start filling up.
> Or you're a sick bastard.
No, just a realist. I said killing Assange right now is the least bad option and I stand by it until someone proposes a better solution. If he isn't stopped and stopped in such a way as to serve as an example to the legion of fuckwads who would take his place were he simply arrested and given fifteen minutes of fame to bloviate in front of every TV camera on the frickin' planet, this crap won't cease. And it must cease because modern civilization can't exist in the climate of fear he is trying to create.
It is exactly like AQ and their suicide bombers, civilization won't work long if we are reduced to a choice of getting anal probed a dozen times a day or stuff going Foom! every week. Assange is on the same team, just attacking a different weak link in modern society.
The winning move is to say none of the above and make the decision that we won't play the game on the terrorists terms. That we refuse to accept that the only two choices are die or turn our free society into a police state. To have every secret published, surrender all privacy, or build the sort of technological locked IT infrastructure that will stop Wikileaks... but again leave us a Police State. That there is a third option. Kill them. While we still can.
> a lot of people recently said that Wikileaks has become
> an anti-US organization.
People say? W. T. F! Ever listened to the founder of Wikileaks? A more raving BDS aflicted loon you wouldn't find posting at Kos or DU and a more dedicated foe of civilization you won't likely find outside a cave in Pakistan.
Listen up ya primitive screwheads. Wikileaks is BAD. You may think it is a good idea to throw all the world (of course you won't find Assange leaking secrets from an evil country that might actually KILL him... not that he disagrees with most of those countries enough to want to hurt them in the first place) and watch the powerful squirm but this won't end well. Not all information wants to be Free!
You can't do foreign policy without secret cables flying around. You can't fight wars without intelligence. You just can't. Eventually a critical mass realizes it and this problem is going to get fixed. And none of the 'fixes' are going to be things we (we meaning the typical /. reader) is going to like.
The least bad outcome longterm would be for the US govt (impossible with the current people in charge) to nip this thing in the bud now. Assange is for all intents and purposes on the other fucking side. He is acting as AQ's Intelligence arm and helping generally sow chaos and fear. Accept that and the logical consequence that follows from that. Kill Julian Assange and make it known any datacenter hosting, in ANY way including just a p2p tracker, Wikileaks content will be destroyed if they refuse the takedown notice. Of course that path won't be taken and the required fixes later will be much worse. Expect secure computing inititives to go on steroids in government and industry. People MUST be able to keep secrets and will end up paying the price in liberties if forced into it.
> how would you call making $20000 worth of goods in a given month and being paid a $1000 salary?
I'd call it delusional or very stupid. If your sole labor is creating $20K of value and you are only getting $1K of it you are an idiot for not striking out on your own. But you are more likely just delusional and have an overly inflated sense of your worth and dismiss the other inputs in the value equation.
Your mythical worker is only adding a little more than $1K to the equation. On a typical product there is a lot of inputs, not just labor. There is raw materials, the plant & equipment, R&D costs, marketing, overhead (payroll/hr dept, health benefits, unemployment insurance, liability insurance, warranty & support costs) corporate taxes, financing costs (dem crafty joo bankers gotta get their cut) and a thousand other things the typical socialist never dreams of. Then there has to be profits left over to pay the owner/shareholders to grease the wheels of capitialism to launch the next round of companies, and ya might have to buy hookers and blow for the venture capitalists, etc. And that is equally important, no profits for the capitalists and no new jobs. See the current economic situation for an example.
> Do you want your doctor spending his time figuring out which confg
> files he needs to edit, or researching better ways to keep you alive?
I'd rather the Dr. have a skilled admin maintain a stable and secure Linux based network for his office. And not be hitting patients with the "the computers are down today" crap or "the computers got infected, your information went to Russian gangs, sorry bout that dude." You talk outta yer ass like there is an option of a foolproof computing platform that doesn't ever require professional help and hold up this strawman as the alternative to Linux. Doesn't exist. Here in the real world the alternative is Windows. Reloading from a recovery partition a couple of times per year is insane. Futzing around endlessly with anti-virus subscriptions is insane.
And no, not even the Mac meets that no maintnance spec. There is a reason Macs are unseen in corporate installs outside the Art Dept. They can actually survive fairly well as a lone wolf but they don't manage in quantity very well. For all the hyped UNIX underpinnings all that is mostly vestigial, used only as a place to hang device drivers. The lack of available software for the Mac probably contributes to the lower maintaince burden as well.
> I hate installation steps that consist of following manual
> configuration instructions in a rote manner.
Proves you haven't actually ran Linux lately. Nowadays we use package managers. RPM packages are explicitly forbidden from interaction during installation. Debian based systems aren't quite as pure in enforcing this design concept but few packages ask more than a question or two and the default is almost always sane.
> Do the Linux guys WANT to step up and compete with OSX and
> Windows or not?
I have been seeing this word used all evening. I do not think it means what you think it means. I think the word you are looking for is copy.
We DO compete. At this point the Linux desktop, warts GConf and all, works at least as well as Windows and if you don't happen to agree 100% with Steve's Vision of the Way it works better than Apple's offerings.
> The world has spoken, and editing configs and CLI is a giant DO NOT WANT.
If the price for marketshare is to design a system for idiots then I don't want those users. I'm NOT an idiot and a system designed for idiots would slow me down. Seriously. Do me a favor. Get a VM up and running and install something that by virtue of what it IS must be complicated. Say Squid for example.
Now I want you to use your favorite text editor (hint, a CLI is not required if you are on the local machine) on /etc/squid.conf. See how it is almost complete in and of itself, practically making external documentation excessive. Detailed documentation right there beside the configuration items which need to be adjusted. And it is a plain text file so you can put it into a content management system to track changes, especially handy if multiple people will be making changes. And as a text file it is about as simple to edit it from ten thousand miles away as from the system console.
So tell me, how would you improve upon that method of managing Squid? Would this be the best way to manage Firefox? No. And Firefox on Linux is configured in almost exactly the same way as it us on Win/Mac because for Firefox that is the easiest way.
> They want hand holding, in short thinking should NEVER be required..
And this is the great divide. What are computers? Interractive televisions for the mindless or levers for the minds of humans? One paradigm probably can't be extended to perfectly cover both use cases.
> Gconf doing that is very rude, and it should definitely stop. Have you filed a bug?
Don't think it is GConf, but somehow tied into Nautilus's virtual file system feature. It is a FUSE filesystem mounted there. But no, there isn't a point in filing a bug report. It isn't a bug, it's a FEATURE! They are using some capability stuff beyond the normal UNIX API as a security measure. Forbidding root from even stating a file is just evil in my book though. Problem is the GNOMES know it breaks UNIX semantics and don't care because they are mostly Windows refugees who were never properly assimilated into UNIX culture enough for them to see the value in it. Filthy Philistines! :)
Same for this Wayland heresy getting started over at Ubuntu. The Computer is the Network, the Network is the Computer. Just words to em, merrily breaking X and the idea of network transparency, not because it will perform better but because the ignorant fools don't realize X's network transparancy isn't the cause of the performance issues they are trying to solve. But mostly because they probably don't personally use apps remotely and don't even realize that they are tossing one of the greatest ideas in computing history down the shitter.
Again, when you get a large influx of immigrants/refugees it is vitally important to ensure they assimilate BEFORE turning over important design work. That didn't happen because of this insane rush to bring about "The Year of the Linux Desktop." In the end we risk letting these hosers screw things up so badly the plumbing gets so screwed up we lose the server and embedded space as well. Those who refuse to learn UNIX will end up reinventing it... poorly.
> A Mac and PC user could switch computers and withing a few minutes either person
> could get done what they were intending to get done. Not so with Linux.
Yes so with Linux. I admin a lab in a public library. We give em Linux with NFS mounted home directories and none of the locked down bullcrap Windows every other library in the State offers. They figure it out pretty quick. Hint: people who depend on the lab PCs in a public library aren't UNIX geeks. Hell, it wasn't too many years ago a fair chunk of them couldn't even hold the mouse right. But not long after they get comfortable logging in/out and using the rat they manage to figure out Mozilla/Firefox, OO.o and the usual application suite. Yea we have had our share of USB pen drive issues from time to time.... of course the other libraries in the State running the Gates Foundation's library model keep the USB ports disabled entirely. Same with CD burning, it works stable these days, didn't used to be the case especially if we bought too far down the CD burner food chain. Again, the other sites disconnect the optical drives unless they need to load new software. After all, gotta 'prevent' the spread of malware. Windows IS malware.
> Erm, what's wrong with "chmod og-rwx somedir/"? Any decent backup
> program should be able to deal with directories with unfriendly
> permissions.
Root is immune to normal permissions. Thus backup programs running with root privileges assume they may read any file on the system. Taking a complete backup of a filesystem is otherwise impossible unless you go the dump2fs route and manually frob the raw device file. ~/.gvfs doesn't actually need to be backed up, but having to manually exclude it is a PITA and is certain to grow more exceptions over time.
The breakage of the UNIX API is in the fact it blows chunks just asking what sort of thing that name is and what it's permissions are. As a separate filesystem my configuration of rsnapshot wouldn't try to back it up anyway, but it gets into trouble just trying to determine that it is a mount point.
> Competing with Windows for customers ranges somewhere between silly and stupid. If
> you want more Linux on the desktop, you need to court developers and software vendors.
Nope. If you want more users you need preloads. 90% of people would never survive a Windows install if it didn't come preloaded by an OEM who did all the twiddling to have the hardware mostly work out of the box. Anaconda actually does a better job compared to the Windows installer as far as leaving you a working machine when it finishes. Doesn't matter because end users can't use either one and refuse to even consider the possibility.
And that isn't a matter of techinical excellence, software availability or anything competition can address. It all about illegal monopolistic action. Microsoft signs consent decree after consent decree and over a decade after their first one you still can't buy a desktop PC without Windows proloaded except for a couple of bland Dell N series machines that are usually priced higher than the same machine preloaded with Windows.
The netbook revolution almost opened up the market but Microsoft just dumped XP into the hole until they could convince the manufactures to kill em off in favor of small notebooks running Win7. Go ahead, try to find a small flash drive based cheap netbook. All you find is three pounders with hard drives, crappy battery life and screens just a smidge smaller than a small notebook... and all running WIndows.
That plus it makes running a backup into black magic. And we have that going for us now as well, only not because of the registry (otherwise known as GConf). Tried to backup a machine that has someone logged in lately? I use rsnapshot, gotta add in special exceptions lest GNOME hose you because they just have to use features that almost no backup program is going to be expecting to find, files that you can't stat... even as root. Only the owning user can enter that directory, all others lose and go mad. Like meeting Cthulu or something. Totally breaking every assumption about how a file system on UNIX is supposed to behave.
It isn't just the distros. It is the desktop environments and all the plumbing underneath trying to shovel in the Fail as fast as they can.
Remove manual configuration. Remove features in general. Allow people who openly hate the UNIX Way to redesign core subsystems, losing important things like network transparency and human readable/understandable settings. Microsoft is ditching the registry because in the end users hated so much they finally had to listen to them while we are still chasing those taillights.
> Remember the "good times virus"?
Oh yea. Outlook got exploited on a regular basis and still does. However we in the Free world should not start sucking each others dicks quite yet[1] either. Remember there was a remote exploit for pine[2]. libgif, libjpeg, libpng have also had security patches. The old theoretical division between dead data and live code never really existed. And while pretty much everyone else's code is better than the poop that Microsoft inflicts on the world the Free Software universe needs to pay a lot more attention to security lest we suffer a never ending string of exploits as well should we ever achieve 'world dominiation.' And the time to worry about security is now, not then because then it will be too late. Ask Microsoft.
[1] Do I have to point out this reference? Nah.
[2] Ok, it was really a metamail flaw but a Pine user could indeed get zapped simply by reading their mail.
> Let me know if you want a Canadian mirror.
No idea what the legal status would be in Canada. I'm not a lawyer even in the US so be sure you have your own ducks in a row.
Technically I'm probably talking about violating US law (DMCA) but pretty sure Sony would lose the PR war long before they won a legal fight. Telling a library they have to suppress knowledge is so obviously asking for a nightmare that I'm betting their legal department is smart enough to know it. The trick is I'm going to need a mostly TEXT site, too much software might confuse the issue too much, remember most librarians still miss their card catalogs, tech isn't a strength. But yell "Censorship!" and the reaction is pure Pavlovian reflex.
> As a pissed-off PS3 owner who used Linux on my PS3 and who uses my console for communication...
Good, you are probably the one to find the right dark dank corners of the Internet where the knowledge to get Linux back on a PS/3 is hiding from Sony's takedown notices. Somebody finds it either post a link in this thread, or if it can't take a slashdotting email me at the address /. has for me. My server here stood up strong to a glancing blow by slashdot in '05; we have a bigger pipe now, perhaps I'll find out if it can take a direct hit. :)
Willing to put in some time cleaning up, clarifying noisy web forum threads, etc. to get a page up. As an example, currently in the process of doing that sort of contribution for www.lg-hack.info, boiling down their research to a concise set of pages on my homepage. Not being a console owner, or even much of a gamer, I just don't hang out in the right places to know where to get good info and Google hasn't come through for me yet. Still poking around though.
I don't even own a PS3 (or any console for that matter) but I have about had it with this DMCA crap. There isn't any Sony copyrighted code in the crack is there? If somebody can point me to a good description of how to jailbreak one of these damned things I'll host it on my homepage and then toss the gauntlet down to Sony. I'm a humble librarian but one benefit is I can use a page on our server. Ever seen how rabid the library world gets when the word 'censorship' gets tossed their way?
Way I see it I can't be subject to a Sony EULA since the only Sony product I own is a fairly basic receiver. If there is no Sony code copied into the crack I can't be subject to copyright. And a text page describing something can't violate a patent. With the right disclaimers trademark is out. So that leaves it a pure DMCA play and I really don't think the bastards want that going to court. They will use em when they think they can get an instant takedown from a frightened ISP but I ain't one of those. Our lawyer happens to be the district attorney so we don't have to instantly fold at the threat of lawyering up.
The most defendable position would be detailed instructions on how to crack a PS3 for the purpose of installing Linux back on one. So has that been accomplished yet?
Haven't stuck a finger in the system's eye since my minor role in the Cuecat fiasco a decade ago. Looks like it is time to stand up again.
> You do realise Apple's the second biggest company in the world with a market cap of $263.2bn
You do realize that is a bubble waiting to burst. What exactly does Apple do that justifies that cap? They make nothing, everything is made by contract houses in China. They don't have a monopoly like Microsoft to justify it by virtue of an ensured future revenue stream. Yes they have pretty good sales numbers right now, but that could change in a quarter, especially if we have a double dip since the products they sell aren't exactly 'must have' for most people.
I have rode AAPL up twice in the past and wish I had got in for this last ride since it has been the biggest, but now is the time to be SELLING. This is .bomb territory now. Same as everyone with a clue looked at the dozens of huge cap .com companies and asked "ok, so what the hell justifies that price?" and couldn't find an answer... right before a critical mass realized the same thing.
I mean, even if you believed Amazon was soon going to sell every book and video, when they had a market cap bigger than Boeing the smart money was cashing out. Simple matter of running the numbers. Total annual sales in the books/videos etc. market Amazon was attempting to dominate would never justify the market cap Amazon had in the peak of the bubble. Plus they had almost no assets on their balance sheet, only a couple of warehouses and rapidly depreciating server farms. The only real asset was their 'brand'.
Apple is now in the same position, they have almost zero physical assets, some useful IP but most of the balance is 'goodwill' from the RDF. The bulk of what you are buying is the theory that Apple will continue to dominate and sell a lot of really high margin product.... into a recession with new competitors ramping up.
> You do realize that the iPhone has already been wildly successful, right?
Yup, by opening up a new niche. It isn't new anymore and they aren't the only game in town anymore. Apple could compete well against the even more clueless cellphone makers. Symbian? Really? Palm was a contender but had tossed the founders for idiots by the time Apple released the iPhone. The cell phone makers might have been stupid enough to get in bed with Microsoft but the carriers knew enough to keep em at arms length and undermine em at every turn. (There is only room for ONE evil monopolist in a market and the cell networks intend it to be themselves.) So yea, Apple had little problem dominating. Until another competent player with enough clout to keep the carriers from screwing up every product's implementation showed up.
> and ultimately whoever designs (or supports) the shiniest phones will win.
No. Whoever designs the best phones at attractive pricepoints will win. Whoever has the hardware the must have app of the day runs on wins. Apple has never understood any of that, Steve certainly hasn't. Remember Next? Pure nerdporn but might as well dream of buying an exotic foreign car. Now that the iPhone has a viable competitor for the high end smartphone space we shall see if they learn it now. Doubt it though, these are the same geniuses who let Microsoft wipe the floor with em because they refused to compete on price or by alliance with the rest of the tech industry. Think about that for a moment, Microsoft! The company that truly defines the phrase "to know them is to loath them' totally dominated Apple to the point they have all but given up even dreaming of achieving parity on either the desktop or notebook. Got so far in their heads they can't even imagine competing directly, instead trying to find niches where Microsoft isn't a major force, like music players and phones.
And remember, Microsoft is utterly evil but their tech sucks which is a fairly exploitable weakness. Google doesn't suck. And when the rubber meets the road I fully expect Google to be at least as Evil(tm) as Apple or Microsoft. Interesting times. We only win if they all lose.
> How much of a future do you think HDDs have, really?
But how much of that is self fulfilling prophecy combined with it hitting right at the time the 2TB hard partition table limit is suppressing demand for huge media? If the HDD makers were to return to investing in R&D and we could get over the EPT transition there is no reason spinning hard drives can't get to 10TB in this decade. No way SSD is doing that in the same time frame. Of course there also has to be a demand for that sort of storage capacity in volume high enough to justify the R&D. And that is the third strike against spinning media. The reality is 1TB drives sell for under $100 and the 2TB drives don't carry enough of a premium to bring in the revenue to fund heavy R&D because all the price pressure is down; and that is because fewer and fewer customers need the largest offerings. All SSD has to do is get 'enough' capacity at a reasonable price to take out spinning media's mass market appeal.
That was the secret to the hard drive's success. Mass adoption of the lower capacity drives brought in the volume manufacturing discounts and the gushers of cash to fund R&D for expensive higher capacity models to keep the technology ahead of any proposed replacement. Manufacture of the expensive drive was perfected, new models introduced and the old expensive product became the new volume cash cow. SSD came along just as the equation was already becoming unbalanced by loss of interest in the new high cap offerings in favour of a preference by customers for lower price instead of higher capacity. SSD may have trouble scaling to TB capacities but few doubt its ability to scale costs down and that is where the market is right now.
> ...people have been investigating the relationship between resolution and bit rates and they've found that the ideal is around 0.2 bits/pixel.
Are these 'people' visually impaired or cable execs trying to justify ramming too many HD signals on one carrier? Or is it the someone who depends on a paycheck from His Steveness or Netflix trying to goober people into believing you can stream HD on anything resembling the US broadband infrastructure?
Please. .2bit/pixel? Really? Start with a HD deep color pixel at 30 bits. Do the YUV 4:1:1 thing on it and you have 15 bits. So you are asserting that 75:1 is a compression rate that can be achieved while maintaining a perfect BD quality image? Without sound of course. But even if we accept your fantasy your own math says you need 9.9Mb/Sec to send it and the number of households who have that sort of broadband[1] here in the US is unlikely to leave single digits before 2020. 10MB/sec is more like what your cable company allocates to non-premium HD channels. Doubt many customers would put up with such a low bitrate for HBO or Showtime's flagship channels. If I had a home theater setup around a 60" HD set I darned sure wouldn't consider streaming a major motion picture to it. Old SD tv shows? Why not. Sitcoms? Sure. Chick flicks? Maybe. Tentpole action blockbusters full of bandwidth consuming motion? No way. Doubt you actually would either.
[1] Actually have it, not were sold that much. Have it in the sense one can stream it for hours on end with 99.9% reliability. Have it in the sense that if you actually max it out for a few hours you won't hit a monthly cap and get throttled down to 128kb/s for the rest of the month. And forget five nines, cable and Internet companies just don't understand that concept for anything a consumer will ever be pitched.
> Ever had a lot of "shiny bicycles" that aren't so shiny after your wife and/or small kids get their hands on them?
A few differences. Even with less than careful children a bike will last months, if not a year or two. And a kids bike is pretty cheap at Wallyworld. Priced Disney DVDs lately? And the little ones can thrash one in under a month.
So oh hell yes they get DVD-R copies. And if I have to copy them it doesn't take too much more effort to nuke FastPlay.
> A PDA with a phone is more useful than a PDA, so PDAs died off.
Not really. Not at ~$50/mo per device with a cell modem and locked into a miltiyear contract when considering a product that has a fast product refresh cycle.
What I want is a really cheap and basic cell phone that tethers. Put the cell company evil in a disposable package and let me buy whatever computing devices I want and replace/upgrade them on my own schedule.
Oh, and I played with an iPad for a few minutes. Sorry, I don't buy computing devices I don't control. Especially when they are that overpriced and underfeatured. Yes the UI is cute but if you will sell your liberty for a few GL effects then I pity you. Steve is far more evil than Billy Gates ever was, the difference is that until quite recently (about when billg handed off to Balmer... hummm. Mayby Gates was just trying to save us from Apple's dark embrace all this time, maybe he is really a hero. Nah.) Jobs never had the opportunity to let his darkness shine. The second he achieved dominance he became about as as subtle as Emperor Palpatine.