I think we need to stop thinking of Sears and the Mafia as good vs. evil. They are both companies out to make a profit. Sears chooses to make a profit by buying clothing items in bulk and selling them individually at a higher price, while the Mafia chooses to make a profit by not burning down people's businesses in exchange for money. Neither is less or more evil than the other - they both answer to consumers when they screw up something, and since consumers control the almighty dollar, they are answerable to us. The problem is that most consumers can't agree on what color blue is, much less whether a company such as the Mafia is doing something that is too invasive or not.
Because the fact is, it isn't Microsoft, and when Microsoft did do the same thing previously, it wasn't an opt-in feature, and Microsoft was ramming it down people's throats.
Personally I find actual events that are actually happening or have happened to be much more interesting than the hypothetical reactions of hypothetical slashdotters to hypothetical situations.
The hope on slashdot previously seems to have been that something called "piercing the corporate veil", whatever that means, will happen and IBM will find a way to make their and Redhat's SCO countersuits and such continue-- only instead of against the defunct The SCO Group, they would continue against The SCO Group's boardmembers, or against The Canopy Group.
I think this is highly reasonable. Despite their supposed status as "investors" The Canopy Group has treated SCOX like SCOX was a puppet and they had their hand stuck up its ass. It would be hard to not consider them responsible for literally the entire SCO mess; they're a company which before SCO had repeatedly bought up near-death companies, milked them for potential lawsuit damages that the company could claim from others, then discarded the husks. They did this with Caldera. Then once SCO gets under the Canopy, suddenly the new CEO Darl McBride starts slinging strange copyright claims everywhere-- and it's becoming increasingly clear as SCO admits in court again and again that the "evidence" they purported at the start of the mess never existed that these claims were fraud from the beginning, and everyone involved at the time knew this. How could The Canopy Group be considered not to have directly engineered this?
Meanwhile the manners in which both SCOX's boardmembers and The Canopy Group have benefitted from SCOX's death spiral have been bizarre and incredibly poorly hidden. Right before the entire lawsuit started the SCOX board voted to issue themselves huge gobs of SCOX shares at virtually no cost, then set them all to sell once they reached a certain price-- then, funny that, started the lawsuit claims that briefly inflated the cost enough that those shares got sold. Meanwhile Canopy has done odd things such as stock transfers and "business deals" between SCOX and other Canopy holdings-- business deals that make no business sense whatsoever, what does a litigation company need with research XML technology?-- that essentially allowed them to convert SCOX stock into cash for the canopy board without directly raising anything at the SEC.
I don't know if this is realistic, it could just be wishful thinking on the part of slashdotters. I wish someone could make it clear to me whether it is. However it seems that if there's ever a situation under which corporate veil-piercing is possible, it should be this one. Corporations shouldn't be used as a shield to run around doing illegal things and then once the corporation suddenly dies say "whoops, it wasn't me, it was the corporation".
The people who made SCOX do this-- The Canopy Group and the boardmembers they installed-- clearly must have known big swaths of their claims early on were outright lies, and yet they used these claims to drive SCOX like a drunk driver behind the wheel of a bus, hurting others' businesses, costing IBM huge amounts in litigation that has gone and will go nowhere, violating the lanham act, misleading and defrauding investors and possibly even violating SEC rules, and placing SCOX into a situation where they are the target of multiple on-hold countersuits with real possibilities of damages being awarded-- and made fantastic amounts of money doing so. Once SCOX finally crashes with none of these debts or countersuits repaid, would the law really let them just walk away from this?
The unreliability wasn't the software's fault, it was due to operator misuse-- rather than following the normally expected operating procedure for an accurate simulation, the prosecution apparently just dropped all the simulated humans into a swimming pool and then deleted the ladders
The purpose of the OSI is to certify open source licenses. That's what they do. Okay, so they do other stuff. But how important is the rest of it? Can you honestly name the other things the OSI does, or purposes OSI serves that the FSF doesn't? Not "initiating open source", specific stuff. I somehow suspect that not many of you reading this are responding with "yes" right now.
If the OSI starts certifying fewer licenses, then what is their purpose exactly? Just to provide some kind of central "blessing" authority for open source? If so, who cares about them? I mean, I don't think that's what people expect of them. OSI's justification-- not justification to exist as an organization, but their justification in the public eye, the reason people remember their name-- is that insofar as this "approved licenses" list goes, they provide facts ("these licenses fit the criteria of being open source") not opinions ("these are some open source licenses we like"). And moreover, that justification represents a necessary service.
By which I mean, someone has to be a central authenticator for "this is the definition of open source and these are the licenses that fit it". Opinions and information work by supply and demand too; there is a real need for somebody to do this, for somebody to provide the concept we currently describe by the words "OSI-approved license", and if OSI doesn't meet that demand then someone else will. And once that starts happening, it will most likely be that someone else's name that people remember, not OSI's.
In my humble, 20-20 hindsight opinion TiVo missed a big chance by not sometime earlier beginning to research TV-over-IP, in order to create something where the TiVo becomes a component in an IPTV platform that bandwidth providers-- like DSL companies-- license. This would give Tivo a clear profit model, and do so in a way that directly makes use of their products' intrinsic advantages, rather than like they do now just giving away razors and desperately trying to convince disinterested people that they want to buy blades.
Now it's probably too late for this. All the notable players are beginning to lock themselves into platforms for IPTV, and they're all choosing Microsoft's product. Yeah. Good luck getting THAT to integrate with a Tivo once it gets up and running.
a description (though not from a reliable source) I read once of a form of punishment in ancient china.
Once sentenced to this punishment, the sentenced would simply be allowed to walk free; but first, would have a great stone circle clamped to their neck and locked in place. The circle gave just enough room to breathe unrestricted, but was heavy, and just wide enough that someone thus encumbered would be barely unable to reach their hands to their mouths. The punishment was death or worse to any man who assisted someone thus sentenced in the removal of the circle.
And this punishment was considered, indeed, worse than a death sentence; for the criminal was allowed to live, but what kind of life is it?
It never ceases to amaze me the extent to which obliterations of human freedom and personal dignity that people of the modern world would never, ever accept being committed under any other circumstances... people will just shrug and indifferently accept it as long as a computer is involved somewhere.
Quantum "cryptography" is based on a two-party communication being carried out in a focused, unbroken beam of single particles, for example photons. It is not encryption in the traditional sense, not exactly. Instead the general idea is that if something starts interfering with your transmisson-- say by eavesdropping-- you cease transmitting until they stop.
Wireless technologies such as WiMax are not compatible with this paradigm. They are radiative in nature, and naturally and unavoidably so-- since they must deal with people who transmit and receive while moving, as well as inconveniences such as walls. Moreover many participants in the protocol, in particular hubs, must be able to communicate with many parties simultaneously; and ALL participants in the protocol must not only accept the presence of interference, but have an active plan for working around it when it occurs (in the case of 802.11 this is done by frequency hopping, but I am not familiar enough with WiMax to know their methods here). Quantum cryptography has yet to be shown compatible with any of these requirements; conceptions of quantum cryptography that are being researched in the lab now are compatible with none of them.
It may be conceivable that future research into quantum cryptography will uncover alternate forms of the quantum cryptography concept which will allow it to be the basis for a WiMax-like protocol. It is also conceivable this will never happen. However if such forms are discovered, they will definitely not be applicable to WiMax itself; quantum cryptography or anything like it will never just be a drop-in for WEP or whatever WiMax uses, since rather than an algorithm they are a fundamentally different conception of how to transmit information.
What phrase (ie, not "free software") might more accurately connote "free as in speech" without implying "free as in beer"?
Unfortunately the phrase the FSF has come up with to meet this exact situation is "libre", which has the same problems as "GNU" and then some, i.e., no one knows what it means until you explain it to them, and no one can pronounce it.
You call your buddy with an iTunes phone and are put on hold. What do you hear? How about something from Schubert? Someone calls you, and what do you hear? Why not Snoop Dog?
I believe the benefits conferred by this feature will be more than cancelled out by the resulting conspicuously high murder rate among users of the feature.
No one will buy it. No one is going to buy the Nokia/Microsoft thing either. Just like no one bought the Nokia N-Gage. People don't want this sort of thing.
The thing to remember about "convergence" devices is they only make sense if you can perform both functions without either interfering with the other. Let's say someone sells something that is both a video game system and a DVD player. This is a good idea. There is no interference, and the parts compliment the whole nicely; a DVD player needs some kind of MPEG decoder, a video game system needs some kind of optical drive, but the two never interfere-- you will never want to use your DVD player and video game system at the same time. Now let's say someone sells something that is both a video game system and a PVR. It will not sell. True, a hard drive and certain other features are desirable in both video games and PVRs. There is massive interference, though; you very much want to use both of these products at the same time. You want to be able to sit there and play GTA all night without worrying that you're missing Family Guy, because the Tivo will just pick it up. The engineer must thus either duplicate so much hardware that there is little or no benefit to the convergence, or just dictate "you can't use the pvr and video game features at once". (Your PC, of course, can act as both a PVR and a video game system without significant interference! But there you're trading functionality for convenience, ease of use, focus and cost. Someone could try to slap together a PC that plugs into a TV and say "look! it's a pvr and video game system!"... but they'll probably be as hard to use and charge as much as if you'd just bought a small PC.)
Now, let's think: What if someone tries to put an mp3 player in a phone? Even worse idea. The parts compliment each other poorly; you do not want or need the kind of playback quality on a phone that you need in an mp3 player, you do not want or need the kind of disk storage in a phone that you need in an mp3 player (unless you have the ability to record and save phone calls or ambient noise, which is a kickass potential feature, but unlikely due to legality). Meanwhile, there's interference. You want to be able to pause your mp3 player to answer your phone without losing your place; you want to be able to run your mp3 player all night without your phone battery being dead in the morning. The two features subtly, but distinctly, struggle for the hardware. Maybe if Apple is building the thing they can reconcile the two. If Motrorola designs it... probably not so much.
Basically the only benefit here is that unlike with PVRs or video game systems, people have shown themselves ready and willing in large quantities to pay too much for mp3 players and phones. OK... wait, actually that's a pretty good benefit, since people have demonstrated they're willing to pay more for a "luxury" product with the iPod name, and if this is a high-margin product it will make decent profit even if very few people buy one. Um, I might have just seriously damaged my own argument. But, you get the idea.
Someday a PDA, a video game system, a phone, and an mp3 player may all converge in a single cost-effective, battery-efficient device. Until that day it is unlikely consumers will bite on a product that is more than one, but not all of these.
(Note: If you object to anything above, pretend I prepended it with "In my opinion...)
I'd tend to suspect-- and if this news is true suspect even more-- Microsoft's goal with the XBox2 very much isn't profit. I mean, the "maybe it's profit" bit in the article is still a stupid comment, you're right. But I think the comment's wrong.
The thing is Microsoft seems very willing to do things for motivations other than profit. All of Microsoft's divisions except Server, OS and Office are consistent and heavy money losers. The XBox has been no exception. Microsoft doesn't really seem to ever show signs of minding this. If it's for purposes of expansion, no amount of money wasted seems to be too great.
Now, mind you, Microsoft insists they do very much intend to make a profit on the XBox 2. They claim this has been the goal all along, lose money on the XBox, make it back on the XBox2. But as I said, I'd question this. Here's why.
The chief reason the XBox has been such a money loser seems to be the cost of the console. Microsoft went out and bought a bunch of relatively expensive commodity PC components from off-the-shelf companies to build the XBox from, and the result seems to have been a console so expensive to manufacture that no realistic amount of game license sales that a single consumer might generate could recoup the loss from selling them that XBox. All signs are Microsoft has learned at least some lesson from the XBox that they will be applying on the XBox 2. Leaked information so far indicates that Microsoft has dropped the hard drive and will be contracting to more traditional video game console contractors-- like IBM-- rather than trying to buy PC components (important because IBM, since they're geared for contracting, will be able to lower their prices over time, whereas PC vendors, since they're geared for bulk, if anything raise prices over time-- because who, for example, makes 8GB hard drives anymore?). This by itself would indicate Microsoft is finally in a position to start making money-- though they'd have to make an awful lot to recoup the billions in losses from the XBox 1-- since they seem to be taking steps to manufacture a console that isn't sold at a large loss.
But I think Microsoft has given indication they aren't going to be taking advantage of that position. The problem is the release date. Microsoft has been very explicit that they intend to beat the PS3 and N5 to market-- and if this article is right, they'll be beating it to market by a LOT. But they probably realize at some level that whether they do that or not, they're going to have to retain the technical lead. Microsoft's entire strategy this generation has been based almost entirely on having the best hardware and attracting developers and users through that. They can't change strategies that quickly; surrendering the technical lead to Sony means potentially surrendering a huge chunk of their fanbase from this generation at the same time, if Sony shows even a hint of competence in marketing. This presents a problem. With the XBox, Microsoft had the advantage of two years to tinker with their hardware and let technology improve after the PS2 was released. With the XBox 2, Microsoft will be giving (or expect to be giving) Sony as much of an extra year to prepare their console, plus they'll have to overcome Sony's crazy vector processing ways (which were enough the PS2 was able to almost keep pace with the XBox and Gamecube when programmed by experts, despite being two years older). This would mean that they would have to design the box to be [i]so[/i] powerful that PPC or no, Hard drive or no, it's going to be sold at a loss.
If I'm right about this, and Microsoft does continue selling the XBox 2 at a loss anywhere near the scale of the XBox-- this seems to mean Microsoft simply doesn't, and never has, cared about profit with the XBox, their "it'll make money eventually" profits aside. Microsoft can sell at some loss and still make a profit, of course, technically, maybe, but the chances of this are so shaky it shows profit isn't actually a goal-- just a nice
What I am curious about is whether the XBox 2 will have backward compatibility. Sony has guaranteed backward compatibility in the PS3 all the way back to the PS1. Nintendo initially promised backward compatibility in their next console, though they seem to be retreating on this promise lately. Microsoft meanwhile has not said anything solid but has publicly downplayed the importance of backward compatibility in the XBox 2 when it has come up. Plus what we know about the hardware of each console means it would be relatively easy for Nintendo or Sony to provide backward compatibility, but relatively difficult for Microsoft to do the same. Microsoft did quietly buy an x86-on-PPC emulation company a few years back but the idea that could be used for backward compatibility in a game console is a long shot, plus there's the rumors about the hard drive.
This could potentially be a mistake from Microsoft's perspective. Whichever consoles in the next generation offer backward compatibility will have a much smoother transition from one to the next-- especially since in this next generation the switchover will occur while the previous generation's consoles are enjoying a vibrancy unprecedented in console generation changes in the past. Whichever consoles fail to provide backward compatibility will have a much harder sell to new consumers because they will begin with a disadvantage in game library size, and will also find themselves not just competing with the other two companies, but also competing with their own previous product-- "do I buy an XBox 1 or an XBox 2?" ceases to become a clear cut question for many people in such a situation.
The law applies differently to companies who hold or seek monopoly power than to other companies-- and in the opinion of many people, ethical concerns do as well.
(Please be aware that if you think "monopoly power" means "they are successful", you don't understand the term.)
Anyhow, perhaps there is some sort of distinction to be made between spending a portion of your profits on research, and dumping profits from one market into a consistently money-losing enterprise for years upon years as a way of buying oneself influence in another market.
I suspect my post above was unclear, I am sorry. What I was trying to point out is that gamesindustry.biz has no evidence in their article more solid than "according to sources". I was not trying to say Microsoft couldn't or wouldn't or shouldn't release their console in that timeframe, just trying to observe that maybe readers should be aware that this news is not from official sources and should not be taken simply at the Slashdot headline's word. We don't know anything for certain yet.
The one H&E quarterly profit is a phantom, resulting completely and entirely from the release of Halo 2. It will not be repeated. Microsoft got a large spike in revenue since they are the publisher of Halo 2, and it was a fantastically quickly-selling game. This spike was large enough to cancel out their losses from the quarter in which the game was released, hence the profit. Unfortunately this doesn't really mean much of anything. The "profit" from that quarter was absolutely measly in comparison to their general losses, and wasn't enough to cancel out the loss from the quarter before-- if you look over the last six months instead of just the last quarter they lost money in that period. And there seems no reason to believe anything but that the next three months will devour that profit just as nicely.
Bungie seems to have been the one good investment H&E has made since the beginning of the XBox. But there is no chance they are going to be able to make the segment float on its own. Meanwhile if you can produce an event which causes a quarterly profit once, this isn't terribly impressive. H&E might as well have put $50 million in a savings account every quarter for a few years, then withdrawn it all at once and said "look! we made a profit this quarter!"
If the advantage of sexual reproduction is so great, why did giardia give it up?
Because they're an intestinal parasite and don't need it?
We can consistently see that asexual reproduction is popular among simple life and sexual reproduction is popular among complex life. This post in this thread gives a possible reason why. Is it that unreasonable to suspect that the more complex a lifeform is, the more benefit sexual reproduction confers? And if we are to take this suspicion seriously, then why would it be surprising that computer simulated models-- which by their very essence are simple-- would fail to demonstrate this benefit? And why would it be surprising that an organism that at one time used sexual reproduction would revert to exclusive use of asexual reproduction after settling into a very simple evolutionary niche, as giardia has?
I do not really see anything in your post that contradicts the purported advantages of sexual reproduction.
I see him as what is wrong the with the Democratic party. Full of venom, hate, and far to the left.
In other words, the only thing that's wrong with the Democratic party is that it still, if only barely, contain members who don't just idly stand by while the Republicans do whatever they want?
Like Republicans always do, you are judging events within the Democratic party-- whether you want to admit it to yourself or not-- on the basis of whether or not it is good for you. Dean becoming DNC chairman-- or anything which takes power away from the weak, disinterested self-promoting "democrats" like John Kerry who have enabled the RNC to do absolutely whatever it wants since the moment Newt Gingrinch entered office-- is indeed bad for you. What you don't understand is that the entire point of the DNC is to be bad for you. The DNC does not exist to promote the interests of the Republican Party, and it has existed to promote the interests of the Republican Party for too long. The John Kerrys of the DNC have had their turn, and shown themselves unable to succeed at anything.
You say opposition to the RNC is "venom" and "hate". I say "venom" and "hate" is what allows the RNC to survive on a platform with little more substance than attacking gays at home and muslims in foreign countries. I also say failure to differentiate itself from the Republican Party is the sole reason the Democrat Party keeps losing elections. Well, that's beginning to change. It is time for the Democrat Party to stand for something again. This likely will not be a good thing from your perspective. Too bad.
Well I'd rather Cisco buy their way into the market than, say, Microsoft. Bought in or no, if Cisco wants to get somewhere meaningful, they're going to have to do it entirely based on quality products. If Symantec has to improve their own products to keep up, or Cisco's mainline products are indirectly improved in the process, well, so much the better.
Is there some reason why self-assembled quantum dots might be more promising, useful or easily mass produced than ones created by photolithography?
Conversely is there some reason why lithographically constructed quantum dots might be more promising, useful or easily mass produced than "self-assembled" ones?
They could be finding cures to cancer, or making better space shuttles, or doing a ton of things with applications that would be useful
Uh.. wow.
The people designing better computers aren't curing cancer because they aren't biologists. It isn't like intelligence is just something you can put in a pipe and direct it whereever you want. Some people are just better at certain things than others. Meanwhile the kinds of people who gravitate toward research fields tend to only be effective when they're doing things they find interesting and exciting. What they personally most enjoy or can best apply their talents toward may or may not be the most important thing in the world, but if it's productive and makes some sort of difference, who are we to question?
And why target the people improving computing power, and not any other "nonuseful" field? In particular, why on earth target people like the ones from this article, who are improving computing power by expanding our understanding of and ability to harness basic physics, and working in an area where discoveries potentially have direct applicability to all kinds of other nanoscale technologies, like, I don't know, smart medicines.
Even if your "couldn't they be doing something more useful" thing made sense, your examples are very poor. Better space shuttles aren't being built for a lack of ingenuity, they're being built for a lack of funding. And curing cancer in particular is a horrible example because much of the interesting expanding work in the medical research field at the moment is in bioinformatics. Meaning that cancer research would directly and seriously benefit from a major jump in the capacity of computing power, such as the one these nanocomputer people could make possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we need to stop thinking of Sears and the Mafia as good vs. evil. They are both companies out to make a profit. Sears chooses to make a profit by buying clothing items in bulk and selling them individually at a higher price, while the Mafia chooses to make a profit by not burning down people's businesses in exchange for money. Neither is less or more evil than the other - they both answer to consumers when they screw up something, and since consumers control the almighty dollar, they are answerable to us. The problem is that most consumers can't agree on what color blue is, much less whether a company such as the Mafia is doing something that is too invasive or not.
Because the fact is, it isn't Microsoft, and when Microsoft did do the same thing previously, it wasn't an opt-in feature, and Microsoft was ramming it down people's throats.
Personally I find actual events that are actually happening or have happened to be much more interesting than the hypothetical reactions of hypothetical slashdotters to hypothetical situations.
Their french onion soup is heavenly.
The hope on slashdot previously seems to have been that something called "piercing the corporate veil", whatever that means, will happen and IBM will find a way to make their and Redhat's SCO countersuits and such continue-- only instead of against the defunct The SCO Group, they would continue against The SCO Group's boardmembers, or against The Canopy Group.
I think this is highly reasonable. Despite their supposed status as "investors" The Canopy Group has treated SCOX like SCOX was a puppet and they had their hand stuck up its ass. It would be hard to not consider them responsible for literally the entire SCO mess; they're a company which before SCO had repeatedly bought up near-death companies, milked them for potential lawsuit damages that the company could claim from others, then discarded the husks. They did this with Caldera. Then once SCO gets under the Canopy, suddenly the new CEO Darl McBride starts slinging strange copyright claims everywhere-- and it's becoming increasingly clear as SCO admits in court again and again that the "evidence" they purported at the start of the mess never existed that these claims were fraud from the beginning, and everyone involved at the time knew this. How could The Canopy Group be considered not to have directly engineered this?
Meanwhile the manners in which both SCOX's boardmembers and The Canopy Group have benefitted from SCOX's death spiral have been bizarre and incredibly poorly hidden. Right before the entire lawsuit started the SCOX board voted to issue themselves huge gobs of SCOX shares at virtually no cost, then set them all to sell once they reached a certain price-- then, funny that, started the lawsuit claims that briefly inflated the cost enough that those shares got sold. Meanwhile Canopy has done odd things such as stock transfers and "business deals" between SCOX and other Canopy holdings-- business deals that make no business sense whatsoever, what does a litigation company need with research XML technology?-- that essentially allowed them to convert SCOX stock into cash for the canopy board without directly raising anything at the SEC.
I don't know if this is realistic, it could just be wishful thinking on the part of slashdotters. I wish someone could make it clear to me whether it is. However it seems that if there's ever a situation under which corporate veil-piercing is possible, it should be this one. Corporations shouldn't be used as a shield to run around doing illegal things and then once the corporation suddenly dies say "whoops, it wasn't me, it was the corporation".
The people who made SCOX do this-- The Canopy Group and the boardmembers they installed-- clearly must have known big swaths of their claims early on were outright lies, and yet they used these claims to drive SCOX like a drunk driver behind the wheel of a bus, hurting others' businesses, costing IBM huge amounts in litigation that has gone and will go nowhere, violating the lanham act, misleading and defrauding investors and possibly even violating SEC rules, and placing SCOX into a situation where they are the target of multiple on-hold countersuits with real possibilities of damages being awarded-- and made fantastic amounts of money doing so. Once SCOX finally crashes with none of these debts or countersuits repaid, would the law really let them just walk away from this?
The unreliability wasn't the software's fault, it was due to operator misuse-- rather than following the normally expected operating procedure for an accurate simulation, the prosecution apparently just dropped all the simulated humans into a swimming pool and then deleted the ladders
The purpose of the OSI is to certify open source licenses. That's what they do. Okay, so they do other stuff. But how important is the rest of it? Can you honestly name the other things the OSI does, or purposes OSI serves that the FSF doesn't? Not "initiating open source", specific stuff. I somehow suspect that not many of you reading this are responding with "yes" right now.
If the OSI starts certifying fewer licenses, then what is their purpose exactly? Just to provide some kind of central "blessing" authority for open source? If so, who cares about them? I mean, I don't think that's what people expect of them. OSI's justification-- not justification to exist as an organization, but their justification in the public eye, the reason people remember their name-- is that insofar as this "approved licenses" list goes, they provide facts ("these licenses fit the criteria of being open source") not opinions ("these are some open source licenses we like"). And moreover, that justification represents a necessary service.
By which I mean, someone has to be a central authenticator for "this is the definition of open source and these are the licenses that fit it". Opinions and information work by supply and demand too; there is a real need for somebody to do this, for somebody to provide the concept we currently describe by the words "OSI-approved license", and if OSI doesn't meet that demand then someone else will. And once that starts happening, it will most likely be that someone else's name that people remember, not OSI's.
In my humble, 20-20 hindsight opinion TiVo missed a big chance by not sometime earlier beginning to research TV-over-IP, in order to create something where the TiVo becomes a component in an IPTV platform that bandwidth providers-- like DSL companies-- license. This would give Tivo a clear profit model, and do so in a way that directly makes use of their products' intrinsic advantages, rather than like they do now just giving away razors and desperately trying to convince disinterested people that they want to buy blades.
Now it's probably too late for this. All the notable players are beginning to lock themselves into platforms for IPTV, and they're all choosing Microsoft's product. Yeah. Good luck getting THAT to integrate with a Tivo once it gets up and running.
a description (though not from a reliable source) I read once of a form of punishment in ancient china.
Once sentenced to this punishment, the sentenced would simply be allowed to walk free; but first, would have a great stone circle clamped to their neck and locked in place. The circle gave just enough room to breathe unrestricted, but was heavy, and just wide enough that someone thus encumbered would be barely unable to reach their hands to their mouths. The punishment was death or worse to any man who assisted someone thus sentenced in the removal of the circle.
And this punishment was considered, indeed, worse than a death sentence; for the criminal was allowed to live, but what kind of life is it?
It never ceases to amaze me the extent to which obliterations of human freedom and personal dignity that people of the modern world would never, ever accept being committed under any other circumstances... people will just shrug and indifferently accept it as long as a computer is involved somewhere.
you know what it means.
Quantum "cryptography" is based on a two-party communication being carried out in a focused, unbroken beam of single particles, for example photons. It is not encryption in the traditional sense, not exactly. Instead the general idea is that if something starts interfering with your transmisson-- say by eavesdropping-- you cease transmitting until they stop.
Wireless technologies such as WiMax are not compatible with this paradigm. They are radiative in nature, and naturally and unavoidably so-- since they must deal with people who transmit and receive while moving, as well as inconveniences such as walls. Moreover many participants in the protocol, in particular hubs, must be able to communicate with many parties simultaneously; and ALL participants in the protocol must not only accept the presence of interference, but have an active plan for working around it when it occurs (in the case of 802.11 this is done by frequency hopping, but I am not familiar enough with WiMax to know their methods here). Quantum cryptography has yet to be shown compatible with any of these requirements; conceptions of quantum cryptography that are being researched in the lab now are compatible with none of them.
It may be conceivable that future research into quantum cryptography will uncover alternate forms of the quantum cryptography concept which will allow it to be the basis for a WiMax-like protocol. It is also conceivable this will never happen. However if such forms are discovered, they will definitely not be applicable to WiMax itself; quantum cryptography or anything like it will never just be a drop-in for WEP or whatever WiMax uses, since rather than an algorithm they are a fundamentally different conception of how to transmit information.
What phrase (ie, not "free software") might more accurately connote "free as in speech" without implying "free as in beer"?
Unfortunately the phrase the FSF has come up with to meet this exact situation is "libre", which has the same problems as "GNU" and then some, i.e., no one knows what it means until you explain it to them, and no one can pronounce it.
Um you do realize the PS3 and the Revolution will both be launched (in japan) early next year right?
What is your source for this?
You call your buddy with an iTunes phone and are put on hold. What do you hear? How about something from Schubert? Someone calls you, and what do you hear? Why not Snoop Dog?
I believe the benefits conferred by this feature will be more than cancelled out by the resulting conspicuously high murder rate among users of the feature.
No one will buy it. No one is going to buy the Nokia/Microsoft thing either. Just like no one bought the Nokia N-Gage. People don't want this sort of thing.
The thing to remember about "convergence" devices is they only make sense if you can perform both functions without either interfering with the other. Let's say someone sells something that is both a video game system and a DVD player. This is a good idea. There is no interference, and the parts compliment the whole nicely; a DVD player needs some kind of MPEG decoder, a video game system needs some kind of optical drive, but the two never interfere-- you will never want to use your DVD player and video game system at the same time. Now let's say someone sells something that is both a video game system and a PVR. It will not sell. True, a hard drive and certain other features are desirable in both video games and PVRs. There is massive interference, though; you very much want to use both of these products at the same time. You want to be able to sit there and play GTA all night without worrying that you're missing Family Guy, because the Tivo will just pick it up. The engineer must thus either duplicate so much hardware that there is little or no benefit to the convergence, or just dictate "you can't use the pvr and video game features at once". (Your PC, of course, can act as both a PVR and a video game system without significant interference! But there you're trading functionality for convenience, ease of use, focus and cost. Someone could try to slap together a PC that plugs into a TV and say "look! it's a pvr and video game system!"... but they'll probably be as hard to use and charge as much as if you'd just bought a small PC.)
Now, let's think: What if someone tries to put an mp3 player in a phone? Even worse idea. The parts compliment each other poorly; you do not want or need the kind of playback quality on a phone that you need in an mp3 player, you do not want or need the kind of disk storage in a phone that you need in an mp3 player (unless you have the ability to record and save phone calls or ambient noise, which is a kickass potential feature, but unlikely due to legality). Meanwhile, there's interference. You want to be able to pause your mp3 player to answer your phone without losing your place; you want to be able to run your mp3 player all night without your phone battery being dead in the morning. The two features subtly, but distinctly, struggle for the hardware. Maybe if Apple is building the thing they can reconcile the two. If Motrorola designs it... probably not so much.
Basically the only benefit here is that unlike with PVRs or video game systems, people have shown themselves ready and willing in large quantities to pay too much for mp3 players and phones. OK... wait, actually that's a pretty good benefit, since people have demonstrated they're willing to pay more for a "luxury" product with the iPod name, and if this is a high-margin product it will make decent profit even if very few people buy one. Um, I might have just seriously damaged my own argument. But, you get the idea.
Someday a PDA, a video game system, a phone, and an mp3 player may all converge in a single cost-effective, battery-efficient device. Until that day it is unlikely consumers will bite on a product that is more than one, but not all of these.
(Note: If you object to anything above, pretend I prepended it with "In my opinion...)
I'd tend to suspect-- and if this news is true suspect even more-- Microsoft's goal with the XBox2 very much isn't profit. I mean, the "maybe it's profit" bit in the article is still a stupid comment, you're right. But I think the comment's wrong.
The thing is Microsoft seems very willing to do things for motivations other than profit. All of Microsoft's divisions except Server, OS and Office are consistent and heavy money losers. The XBox has been no exception. Microsoft doesn't really seem to ever show signs of minding this. If it's for purposes of expansion, no amount of money wasted seems to be too great.
Now, mind you, Microsoft insists they do very much intend to make a profit on the XBox 2. They claim this has been the goal all along, lose money on the XBox, make it back on the XBox2. But as I said, I'd question this. Here's why.
The chief reason the XBox has been such a money loser seems to be the cost of the console. Microsoft went out and bought a bunch of relatively expensive commodity PC components from off-the-shelf companies to build the XBox from, and the result seems to have been a console so expensive to manufacture that no realistic amount of game license sales that a single consumer might generate could recoup the loss from selling them that XBox. All signs are Microsoft has learned at least some lesson from the XBox that they will be applying on the XBox 2. Leaked information so far indicates that Microsoft has dropped the hard drive and will be contracting to more traditional video game console contractors-- like IBM-- rather than trying to buy PC components (important because IBM, since they're geared for contracting, will be able to lower their prices over time, whereas PC vendors, since they're geared for bulk, if anything raise prices over time-- because who, for example, makes 8GB hard drives anymore?). This by itself would indicate Microsoft is finally in a position to start making money-- though they'd have to make an awful lot to recoup the billions in losses from the XBox 1-- since they seem to be taking steps to manufacture a console that isn't sold at a large loss.
But I think Microsoft has given indication they aren't going to be taking advantage of that position. The problem is the release date. Microsoft has been very explicit that they intend to beat the PS3 and N5 to market-- and if this article is right, they'll be beating it to market by a LOT. But they probably realize at some level that whether they do that or not, they're going to have to retain the technical lead. Microsoft's entire strategy this generation has been based almost entirely on having the best hardware and attracting developers and users through that. They can't change strategies that quickly; surrendering the technical lead to Sony means potentially surrendering a huge chunk of their fanbase from this generation at the same time, if Sony shows even a hint of competence in marketing. This presents a problem. With the XBox, Microsoft had the advantage of two years to tinker with their hardware and let technology improve after the PS2 was released. With the XBox 2, Microsoft will be giving (or expect to be giving) Sony as much of an extra year to prepare their console, plus they'll have to overcome Sony's crazy vector processing ways (which were enough the PS2 was able to almost keep pace with the XBox and Gamecube when programmed by experts, despite being two years older). This would mean that they would have to design the box to be [i]so[/i] powerful that PPC or no, Hard drive or no, it's going to be sold at a loss.
If I'm right about this, and Microsoft does continue selling the XBox 2 at a loss anywhere near the scale of the XBox-- this seems to mean Microsoft simply doesn't, and never has, cared about profit with the XBox, their "it'll make money eventually" profits aside. Microsoft can sell at some loss and still make a profit, of course, technically, maybe, but the chances of this are so shaky it shows profit isn't actually a goal-- just a nice
What I am curious about is whether the XBox 2 will have backward compatibility. Sony has guaranteed backward compatibility in the PS3 all the way back to the PS1. Nintendo initially promised backward compatibility in their next console, though they seem to be retreating on this promise lately. Microsoft meanwhile has not said anything solid but has publicly downplayed the importance of backward compatibility in the XBox 2 when it has come up. Plus what we know about the hardware of each console means it would be relatively easy for Nintendo or Sony to provide backward compatibility, but relatively difficult for Microsoft to do the same. Microsoft did quietly buy an x86-on-PPC emulation company a few years back but the idea that could be used for backward compatibility in a game console is a long shot, plus there's the rumors about the hard drive.
This could potentially be a mistake from Microsoft's perspective. Whichever consoles in the next generation offer backward compatibility will have a much smoother transition from one to the next-- especially since in this next generation the switchover will occur while the previous generation's consoles are enjoying a vibrancy unprecedented in console generation changes in the past. Whichever consoles fail to provide backward compatibility will have a much harder sell to new consumers because they will begin with a disadvantage in game library size, and will also find themselves not just competing with the other two companies, but also competing with their own previous product-- "do I buy an XBox 1 or an XBox 2?" ceases to become a clear cut question for many people in such a situation.
But, we'll see what happens.
Try to put logic into an argument.
Okay:
The law applies differently to companies who hold or seek monopoly power than to other companies-- and in the opinion of many people, ethical concerns do as well.
(Please be aware that if you think "monopoly power" means "they are successful", you don't understand the term.)
Anyhow, perhaps there is some sort of distinction to be made between spending a portion of your profits on research, and dumping profits from one market into a consistently money-losing enterprise for years upon years as a way of buying oneself influence in another market.
Are you responding to me or someone else?
I suspect my post above was unclear, I am sorry. What I was trying to point out is that gamesindustry.biz has no evidence in their article more solid than "according to sources". I was not trying to say Microsoft couldn't or wouldn't or shouldn't release their console in that timeframe, just trying to observe that maybe readers should be aware that this news is not from official sources and should not be taken simply at the Slashdot headline's word. We don't know anything for certain yet.
The one H&E quarterly profit is a phantom, resulting completely and entirely from the release of Halo 2. It will not be repeated. Microsoft got a large spike in revenue since they are the publisher of Halo 2, and it was a fantastically quickly-selling game. This spike was large enough to cancel out their losses from the quarter in which the game was released, hence the profit. Unfortunately this doesn't really mean much of anything. The "profit" from that quarter was absolutely measly in comparison to their general losses, and wasn't enough to cancel out the loss from the quarter before-- if you look over the last six months instead of just the last quarter they lost money in that period. And there seems no reason to believe anything but that the next three months will devour that profit just as nicely.
Bungie seems to have been the one good investment H&E has made since the beginning of the XBox. But there is no chance they are going to be able to make the segment float on its own. Meanwhile if you can produce an event which causes a quarterly profit once, this isn't terribly impressive. H&E might as well have put $50 million in a savings account every quarter for a few years, then withdrawn it all at once and said "look! we made a profit this quarter!"
"Sources".
Right.
Whatever you say.
that some of the scariest 1984ish stuff would be coming out of the fricking entertainment industry fer chrissakes.
Funny? Dunno. But if in addition to 1984 you read Fahrenheit 411 and Brave New World, you'll find it isn't something that people didn't see coming...
If the advantage of sexual reproduction is so great, why did giardia give it up?
Because they're an intestinal parasite and don't need it?
We can consistently see that asexual reproduction is popular among simple life and sexual reproduction is popular among complex life. This post in this thread gives a possible reason why. Is it that unreasonable to suspect that the more complex a lifeform is, the more benefit sexual reproduction confers? And if we are to take this suspicion seriously, then why would it be surprising that computer simulated models-- which by their very essence are simple-- would fail to demonstrate this benefit? And why would it be surprising that an organism that at one time used sexual reproduction would revert to exclusive use of asexual reproduction after settling into a very simple evolutionary niche, as giardia has?
I do not really see anything in your post that contradicts the purported advantages of sexual reproduction.
I see him as what is wrong the with the Democratic party. Full of venom, hate, and far to the left.
In other words, the only thing that's wrong with the Democratic party is that it still, if only barely, contain members who don't just idly stand by while the Republicans do whatever they want?
Like Republicans always do, you are judging events within the Democratic party-- whether you want to admit it to yourself or not-- on the basis of whether or not it is good for you. Dean becoming DNC chairman-- or anything which takes power away from the weak, disinterested self-promoting "democrats" like John Kerry who have enabled the RNC to do absolutely whatever it wants since the moment Newt Gingrinch entered office-- is indeed bad for you. What you don't understand is that the entire point of the DNC is to be bad for you. The DNC does not exist to promote the interests of the Republican Party, and it has existed to promote the interests of the Republican Party for too long. The John Kerrys of the DNC have had their turn, and shown themselves unable to succeed at anything.
You say opposition to the RNC is "venom" and "hate". I say "venom" and "hate" is what allows the RNC to survive on a platform with little more substance than attacking gays at home and muslims in foreign countries. I also say failure to differentiate itself from the Republican Party is the sole reason the Democrat Party keeps losing elections. Well, that's beginning to change. It is time for the Democrat Party to stand for something again. This likely will not be a good thing from your perspective. Too bad.
Well I'd rather Cisco buy their way into the market than, say, Microsoft. Bought in or no, if Cisco wants to get somewhere meaningful, they're going to have to do it entirely based on quality products. If Symantec has to improve their own products to keep up, or Cisco's mainline products are indirectly improved in the process, well, so much the better.
Is there some reason why self-assembled quantum dots might be more promising, useful or easily mass produced than ones created by photolithography?
Conversely is there some reason why lithographically constructed quantum dots might be more promising, useful or easily mass produced than "self-assembled" ones?
What is the importance of the distinction?
They could be finding cures to cancer, or making better space shuttles, or doing a ton of things with applications that would be useful
Uh.. wow.
The people designing better computers aren't curing cancer because they aren't biologists. It isn't like intelligence is just something you can put in a pipe and direct it whereever you want. Some people are just better at certain things than others. Meanwhile the kinds of people who gravitate toward research fields tend to only be effective when they're doing things they find interesting and exciting. What they personally most enjoy or can best apply their talents toward may or may not be the most important thing in the world, but if it's productive and makes some sort of difference, who are we to question?
And why target the people improving computing power, and not any other "nonuseful" field? In particular, why on earth target people like the ones from this article, who are improving computing power by expanding our understanding of and ability to harness basic physics, and working in an area where discoveries potentially have direct applicability to all kinds of other nanoscale technologies, like, I don't know, smart medicines.
Even if your "couldn't they be doing something more useful" thing made sense, your examples are very poor. Better space shuttles aren't being built for a lack of ingenuity, they're being built for a lack of funding. And curing cancer in particular is a horrible example because much of the interesting expanding work in the medical research field at the moment is in bioinformatics. Meaning that cancer research would directly and seriously benefit from a major jump in the capacity of computing power, such as the one these nanocomputer people could make possible.