When die-hard Mac fanatics decide that Apple has over-DRM'd the OS and leave, it should be a wakeup call to Cupertino.
Unfortunately, there's only one guy at Cupertino who matters and that's Jobs. If he doesn't see why they're pissed off, he won't see it when 2 become 200,000.
Apple isn't alone here. Sony is just now getting a taste of consumers saying bleh to the company's products. Sony - makers of some of the coolest tech is facing hard times simply because they've forgotten that customer convenience matters more than making sure no one violates copyright. Sic transit gloria.
No, Microsoft doesn't disable your computer - it just disables your ability to install patches which, given the frequency of OS exploits, is tantamount to the same thing as disabling your computer.
I'm one of those.001% - WGA thinks I pirated my copy of XP even though I bought it at Costco. When I disabled the "you have an illegal copy of Windows" balloon via the security panel, another little message popped up saying that I would no longer be able to download patches. I suspect WGA was unhappy because I had disabled several services such as remote registry and alerter.
I can understand Microsoft's desire not to get ripped off but at the same time, I'm not sympathetic if their software falsely accuses me of being a thief and I end up losing a couple of hours figuring out what their problem is.
As you may recall we're already predicting hurricaine formation and movement days to a week or more in advance now, with a decent level of accuracy, and getting better all the time.
Really? How quickly we forget...The National Hurricane Center was saying this about Katrina on August 25, 2005
This forecast is rather difficult since one of the more reliable models...the GFS...shows that the cyclone barely touches the East Coast of Florida before moving northward....while the outstanding GFDL moves Katrina south of due west across extreme South Florida and the Keys as a very intense hurricane.
..barely touches the East Cost of Florida? Moves Northward? When the competing forecasts were made, there was no way to know which one would turn out to be correct. Notice there's absolutely no mention of New Orleans which happened three days later.
Richard Feynman had this to say about forecasting:
Speaking more precisely, given an arbitrary accuracy, no matter how precise, one can find a time long enough that we cannot make predictions valid for that long a time. Now the point is that this length of time is not very large... It turns out that in only a very, very tiny time we lose all our information...We can no longer predict what is going to happen!"
Feynman may be "outdated" but I think he was right.
Charging $27 to use the service on a coast to coast flight might have something to do with the poor uptake on the service. If that's close to what it's really costing them to provide the service then they were bound to lose and if it's several multiples over cost, they deserve to lose.
So they lose either for being stupid or being greedy.
Seems to me Griffin is hedging with a 2-pronged approach. He's saying he'll try this approach but keep CEV going in case this approach fails. General Groves did the same thing during the Manhattan project - he had three different uranium enrichment technologies developed at the same time because he couldn't see which one would win out.
Looking back over the past 800,000 years you can see a trend towards progressively warmer interglacials. Judging from the chart at the top, we've yet to match the temperature peak around 130,000 years ago.
Carl Sagan's documentary Cosmos, described an event that happened in the middle ages. Some monks were sitting outside one evening when a meteoroid hit the moon and caused a naked-eye visible fireball. Evidently the event lasted long enough for the entire monastary to see it. If this current one only lasted half a second, the one Sagan described must have been huge. Problem was that the event flew straight in the face of Psalm 119 which reads:
As it was in the beginning, is now, and always shall be: for ever and ever. Amen.
The significance for the monks was that the Bible was telling them that the earth and heavens were unchanged since Creation and would remain unchanged forever after. Here was evidence that what their faith was telling them wasn't true. Sagan said the event caused quite a bit of problems for the monastery as the monks tried to reconcile their faith and reality.
If anyone knows anything more about the event Sagan was talking about, I'd really like to hear it. I've often wondered if the crater it left has been identified.
Your argument boils down to "let the market work its magic." Markets work fine when there's no barrier to entry. Prices get too high and competitors enter the fray which drives down prices. Hunky dory.
Except when it comes to broadband, that's not the environment we live in. Telcos and cables have structured the law such that there are large barriers to entry. The end result is that most people have one choice for cable and one choice for telco and in some regions, both choices are run by the same company.
In that kind of environment, which is what most people experience, markets aren't going to function. You may respond - "well lets eliminate the barriers to entry..." - and I'd be with you but until that happens, you have to pass legislation that constrains monopolies.
Witness Cox blocking Craigslist to get an idea of what I'm talking about. In that case, Cox runs both the local paper and local broadband. Craigslist severely threatens Cox's classified ads so Cox blocks Craigslist. Cox also has it set up so its next to impossible for another broadband player to come in and compete. Is that really the future you want for broadband?
Societally, we have alot of collective experience modeling the types of problems you've described, and it would really only be a matter of modifying the initial parameters of our weather simulations to match those of Jupiter.
Codswallop.
Hurricane forecasts on earth diverge the further out you get. None of them called the right turn Katrina pulled in the Gulf of Mexico before she first hit Florida. On 8/25/05, this was the forecast:
This forecast is rather difficult since one of the more reliable models...the GFS...shows that the cyclone barely touches the East Coast of Florida before moving northward....while the outstanding GFDL moves Katrina south of due west across extreme South Florida and the Keys as a very intense hurricane. The GFDL scenario would be very dangerous for South Florida. This appears to be unrealistic at this time but because of the good past performance of this model...we must pay close attention to future model runs.
Notice New Orleans isn't even mentioned? Those models had thousands of data point samples to work with including multiple flights into the heart of the hurricane and they still couldn't agree, let alone accurately forecast what happened to New Orleans. Those 'initial parameters' you so blithely dismiss have to be very accurate to make 24 hour forecasts, let alone forecast what's going to happen a month from now on a planet for which we have exactly zero weather buoys.
Taco - Love the new sleeker look but please, please,please,... give us control over the display font and font size in the preferences. The font you chose is presbyoptic phobic.
I'm headed off to mozilla.org to see if there's a "choose your own fontsize so you can read slashdot" extension for Firefox. Hmmm,... do I look under GeezerEyes or GeezerEyesGoodbye?
When the PS3 finally launches, then, and only then, will we know who played the smarter card. I see 3 outcomes:
There are piles of unsold PS3s at launch.
There are spot shortages but by and large, if you want a $600 PS3 you can get one.
PS3s sell so well you can't get one except on ebay for $1000.
From Sony's perspective, 2 out of 3 outcomes count as a win.
Moreover, once the intial "I'll buy no matter what the price" crowd has passed through, Sony can drop their price and/. will dutifully announce the price drop.
To see which way the chips fall, we'll have to wait until Sony ships. Until then, I'm skipping any PS3 rumors on/. .
Lest anyone think they actually ran "several scientific application kernels" on the Cell/AMD/Intel chips, what they actually did was run simulations of several different tasks such as FFT and matrix multiplication. Since they didn't actually run the code, they had to guess as to some parameters like DMA overhead. They also came up with a couple of hypothetical Cell processors that dispatched double precision instructions differently than how the Cell actually does it and present those results as well. They also said that IBM ran some prototype hardware that came within 2% of their simulation results, though they didn't say which hypothetical Cell the prototype hardware was implementing.
By the end of the article, I was looking for their idea of a hypothetical best-case pony.
The president has the authority to start the process to declassify things wherever he wants,...
During the Cuban missile crisis, Adlai Stevenson, our UN Ambassador, divulged top secret photos of Soviet missile installations to demonstrate why the US was on the verge of invading Cuba. The photos were declassified at President Kennedy's order.
Classification is an executive branch process and can be undone by the chief executive.
This legal process is an external law, imposed by the legislative branch.
Congress' power to constrain the executive branch is limited. In 1998, a California Congressman, Tom Campbell, sued Clinton for violating the War Powers Act. Clinton was clearly past the 60 day limit provided for by the act but continued the war in Kosovo without Congress' explicit authorization as mandated by the WPA.
In the end, it didn't matter. The case was dismissed because the judge said that Congress was sending mixed messages. The courts have tended to side with the executive branch when there's ever been a claim of the president breaking the law. Congress' power over the executive branch is constrained because the framers of the Constitution didn't want the Executive, Legislative, or Judicial branch to have unilateral sway.
Just google '"fbi files" Clinton' . The Clinton Whitehouse had several hundred FBI files that they had no business having access to.
I voted for Clinton both times but by 2000, I shared Hamilton Jordan's (Carter's Chief of Staff) view that Clinton is a grifter. The Marc Rich bribe/pardon was right up there with Nixon's suitcases of cash.
Clinton and Nixon were one of the worst abusers of governmental information gathering. Both of them used the FBI to dig up dirt on their opponents. There's a story of Nixon extorting a contribution for his re-election by threatening the contributor with an IRS audit if the contribution wasn't large enough.
Both political parties decry the others abuse of governmental power but think it's just fine when they're the ones doing the abusing. Its behavior like that that drives some people to call for smaller government.
If they were human-like meat-bags, they'd be squished human-like meat-bags. Pressing your face into a glass window doesn't even begin to give you the level of squishnessed involved.
OTOH, if the planets have oceans then the inhabitants might look like our marine creatures.
Seems to me that both the 360 and PS3 are overpriced but a lot of folks are buying 360's at $500-$700 on ebay so there's clearly a market for expensive game machines.
Microsoft introduced the 360 at an artificially low price and the product vanished. Prices are still high. I found a 360 for a shade under $500 at Costco Pricewatch has one offer at a $508.
Sony's saying the price is going to be $500 - right where the 360 is right now. When Microsoft finally delivers a $360 at the advertised $300 then, and only then, might you be able to afford a Revolution/360 bundle. Until then, they're just blowing smoke.
You may remember hearing the name Starfire in conjunction with this picture.
I'm a little surprised that people are upset about this technology now. It was developed in the late 80's. I know/. dotes on old news but isn't this over the top for old news?
Way back when dialup was running at a blazing 1200 baud (4 x faster than 300 !) Pac Bell tried to levy a surcharge on houses that used modems. Their argument was that since modem users tended to be on the phone longer than people who were just chatting, that modem users consumed a disproportionate share of the telephone infrastructure. Fortunately, the California Utilities Commission had a moment of clarity and said "No, you can't have that surcharge."
Comcast and AT&T are now trying a reverse gambit - charging the most popular sites more to carry their traffic. The number one problem of course, is that the carriers will muscle in on the most popular sites by offering their own content for less. Movies are a prime example. If Apple has to pay Comcast a premium to get delivery and Comcast doesn't have to pay itself the same premium, Apple is going to have a tough time competing.
The point is: Tiered Access = road to Monopoly whereas a flat Internet = road to more competition. The carriers know that and it has them running scared. They've never had to compete before now.
Slashdot Mirror
When die-hard Mac fanatics decide that Apple has over-DRM'd the OS and leave, it should be a wakeup call to Cupertino.
Unfortunately, there's only one guy at Cupertino who matters and that's Jobs. If he doesn't see why they're pissed off, he won't see it when 2 become 200,000.
Apple isn't alone here. Sony is just now getting a taste of consumers saying bleh to the company's products. Sony - makers of some of the coolest tech is facing hard times simply because they've forgotten that customer convenience matters more than making sure no one violates copyright. Sic transit gloria.
No, Microsoft doesn't disable your computer - it just disables your ability to install patches which, given the frequency of OS exploits, is tantamount to the same thing as disabling your computer.
.001% - WGA thinks I pirated my copy of XP even though I bought it at Costco. When I disabled the "you have an illegal copy of Windows" balloon via the security panel, another little message popped up saying that I would no longer be able to download patches. I suspect WGA was unhappy because I had disabled several services such as remote registry and alerter.
I'm one of those
I can understand Microsoft's desire not to get ripped off but at the same time, I'm not sympathetic if their software falsely accuses me of being a thief and I end up losing a couple of hours figuring out what their problem is.
Care to back that up or are you just trolling?
Really? How quickly we forget ...The National Hurricane Center was saying this about Katrina on August 25, 2005
..barely touches the East Cost of Florida? Moves Northward? When the competing forecasts were made, there was no way to know which one would turn out to be correct. Notice there's absolutely no mention of New Orleans which happened three days later.Richard Feynman had this to say about forecasting:
Feynman may be "outdated" but I think he was right.Charging $27 to use the service on a coast to coast flight might have something to do with the poor uptake on the service. If that's close to what it's really costing them to provide the service then they were bound to lose and if it's several multiples over cost, they deserve to lose.
So they lose either for being stupid or being greedy.
Seems to me Griffin is hedging with a 2-pronged approach. He's saying he'll try this approach but keep CEV going in case this approach fails. General Groves did the same thing during the Manhattan project - he had three different uranium enrichment technologies developed at the same time because he couldn't see which one would win out.
Looking back over the past 800,000 years you can see a trend towards progressively warmer interglacials. Judging from the chart at the top, we've yet to match the temperature peak around 130,000 years ago.
Ahhh /. Where factual corrections get moderated as trolls.
YO MODERATORS!!! The parent is correct - the grandparent does have the temperature/speed relationship backwards.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and always shall be: for ever and ever. Amen.
The significance for the monks was that the Bible was telling them that the earth and heavens were unchanged since Creation and would remain unchanged forever after. Here was evidence that what their faith was telling them wasn't true. Sagan said the event caused quite a bit of problems for the monastery as the monks tried to reconcile their faith and reality.
If anyone knows anything more about the event Sagan was talking about, I'd really like to hear it. I've often wondered if the crater it left has been identified.
Except when it comes to broadband, that's not the environment we live in. Telcos and cables have structured the law such that there are large barriers to entry. The end result is that most people have one choice for cable and one choice for telco and in some regions, both choices are run by the same company.
In that kind of environment, which is what most people experience, markets aren't going to function. You may respond - "well lets eliminate the barriers to entry..." - and I'd be with you but until that happens, you have to pass legislation that constrains monopolies.
Witness Cox blocking Craigslist to get an idea of what I'm talking about. In that case, Cox runs both the local paper and local broadband. Craigslist severely threatens Cox's classified ads so Cox blocks Craigslist. Cox also has it set up so its next to impossible for another broadband player to come in and compete. Is that really the future you want for broadband?
Here's the house roll call. If your local crook^h^h^h^h^h representative is in the yea column, you might want to write him a note.
Codswallop.
Hurricane forecasts on earth diverge the further out you get. None of them called the right turn Katrina pulled in the Gulf of Mexico before she first hit Florida. On 8/25/05, this was the forecast:
Notice New Orleans isn't even mentioned?
Those models had thousands of data point samples to work with including multiple flights into the heart of the hurricane and they still couldn't agree, let alone accurately forecast what happened to New Orleans. Those 'initial parameters' you so blithely dismiss have to be very accurate to make 24 hour forecasts, let alone forecast what's going to happen a month from now on a planet for which we have exactly zero weather buoys.
Taco - Love the new sleeker look but please, please,please,... give us control over the display font and font size in the preferences. The font you chose is presbyoptic phobic.
I'm headed off to mozilla.org to see if there's a "choose your own fontsize so you can read slashdot" extension for Firefox. Hmmm,... do I look under GeezerEyes or GeezerEyesGoodbye?
You still need u238 to dilute the u235.
What the grandparent is saying is there's no need to enrich given the surplus u235 that's lying around.
- There are piles of unsold PS3s at launch.
- There are spot shortages but by and large, if you want a $600 PS3 you can get one.
- PS3s sell so well you can't get one except on ebay for $1000.
From Sony's perspective, 2 out of 3 outcomes count as a win.Moreover, once the intial "I'll buy no matter what the price" crowd has passed through, Sony can drop their price and /. will dutifully announce the price drop.
To see which way the chips fall, we'll have to wait until Sony ships. Until then, I'm skipping any PS3 rumors on /. .
By the end of the article, I was looking for their idea of a hypothetical best-case pony.
During the Cuban missile crisis, Adlai Stevenson, our UN Ambassador, divulged top secret photos of Soviet missile installations to demonstrate why the US was on the verge of invading Cuba. The photos were declassified at President Kennedy's order.
Classification is an executive branch process and can be undone by the chief executive.
This legal process is an external law, imposed by the legislative branch.
Congress' power to constrain the executive branch is limited. In 1998, a California Congressman, Tom Campbell, sued Clinton for violating the War Powers Act. Clinton was clearly past the 60 day limit provided for by the act but continued the war in Kosovo without Congress' explicit authorization as mandated by the WPA.
In the end, it didn't matter. The case was dismissed because the judge said that Congress was sending mixed messages. The courts have tended to side with the executive branch when there's ever been a claim of the president breaking the law. Congress' power over the executive branch is constrained because the framers of the Constitution didn't want the Executive, Legislative, or Judicial branch to have unilateral sway.
Just google '"fbi files" Clinton' . The Clinton Whitehouse had several hundred FBI files that they had no business having access to.
I voted for Clinton both times but by 2000, I shared Hamilton Jordan's (Carter's Chief of Staff) view that Clinton is a grifter. The Marc Rich bribe/pardon was right up there with Nixon's suitcases of cash.
Clinton and Nixon were one of the worst abusers of governmental information gathering. Both of them used the FBI to dig up dirt on their opponents. There's a story of Nixon extorting a contribution for his re-election by threatening the contributor with an IRS audit if the contribution wasn't large enough.
Both political parties decry the others abuse of governmental power but think it's just fine when they're the ones doing the abusing. Its behavior like that that drives some people to call for smaller government.
OTOH, if the planets have oceans then the inhabitants might look like our marine creatures.
Seems to me that both the 360 and PS3 are overpriced but a lot of folks are buying 360's at $500-$700 on ebay so there's clearly a market for expensive game machines.
Microsoft introduced the 360 at an artificially low price and the product vanished. Prices are still high. I found a 360 for a shade under $500 at Costco Pricewatch has one offer at a $508.
Sony's saying the price is going to be $500 - right where the 360 is right now. When Microsoft finally delivers a $360 at the advertised $300 then, and only then, might you be able to afford a Revolution/360 bundle. Until then, they're just blowing smoke.
Anandtech posted these video sequences to show what you see with and without the card.
The Anandtech article states that the physics hardware slows down the framerates which Aegis can't possibly be happy about.
They could have named them Duo Core Venti and Duo Core Grande.
You may remember hearing the name Starfire in conjunction with this picture.
/. dotes on old news but isn't this over the top for old news?
I'm a little surprised that people are upset about this technology now. It was developed in the late 80's. I know
Comcast and AT&T are now trying a reverse gambit - charging the most popular sites more to carry their traffic. The number one problem of course, is that the carriers will muscle in on the most popular sites by offering their own content for less. Movies are a prime example. If Apple has to pay Comcast a premium to get delivery and Comcast doesn't have to pay itself the same premium, Apple is going to have a tough time competing.
The point is: Tiered Access = road to Monopoly whereas a flat Internet = road to more competition. The carriers know that and it has them running scared. They've never had to compete before now.