I'm kind of surprised that the approach towards Kazaa is that it's the 'right idea but wrong horse'.
We all agree that piracy isn't a good thing, but I'd like to think the P2P is viable even without copyright infringement. There was that innovative mechanism a while ago where you could download a file and other people could share the pieces they've already downloaded with you, distributing the load on-the-fly. And there's the unique streaming audio solution that works similarly. Just because some folks throw away the tags on their pillows doesn't mean we don't need a place to rest our heads, right?
There's a lot of interesting stuff coming out that's dual-use, and no doubt that'd be the motif of the interview if it didn't die before the second frigging comment was posted. Why aren't the links cached on here, again?
I might be able to offer some perspective on this.
Users don't want to have to learn the same thing eight or nine times. Windows doesn't do a whole lot that is fantastic, IMHO, but their interface offers the best compromise between range of operation and ease of use. On Linux, we've tilted the dial towards range of operation (well, except for Quicktime video...), but there's still the issues of compatibility and ease of use that have been largely disregarded.
The average user has an index of approximately 27 different motions that can be easily recalled. People generally start at the bottom of a surface such as the page of a book or the screen on their computer when they first look at it, but if they're going to be with it a while they begin looking at the top (when they turn the page or open an application). This is the type of research that you can see in Windows -- Start bar on bottom, menu options on top of the application.
So maybe duplication isn't such a bad thing... after all, even they just took the best parts from the innovators of the GUI (Apple) and improved on the rest.
I agree with you and the anonymous fellow that replied as well that older systems or computers that are underpowered because of their portability pose a problem to the scheme as written.
If there was a bulletproof technological answer to spam that was cheap or free and easy to implement, many of us would be using it by now. Any solution (technological or legislative) will create additional overhead -- the real concerns are where should the burden be placed and are the results worth the cost?
You may be on the same page as me, but I'll mention that I have no faith in legislation against spam. Look at how well the junk fax law is operating -- I've even gotten the things on a dial-in Debian box without realizing the getty package added fax reception. The worst case penalty if you can actually track down the sender is a slap on the wrist. I guarantee spam legislation will be every bit as half-assed, exempting all sorts of special-interest groups and even in the best scenario doing nothing to stop spam originating out-of-country.
Before discarding hashcash out of hand, however, give the concept some more thought:
False positives are a major concern for me; I don't want to find out that I've been ignoring someone for weeks because of an overzealous spam filter. Bayesian filtering is great, but not perfect. Barring a server outage or something similar, if a hashcash message is sent properly you know it won't be silently discarded at the recipient's filter.
Spam likely creates a larger overhead on the system than hashcash would. Billions of messages flying through the network nightly isn't cheap, and is costing all of us in responsiveness and bandwidth. Filters in the mail client mean that in many scenarios the recipient is paying to download spam even if it gets removed before it is read. While spam could still be sent in a hashcash environment, the reduction in volume would probably offset the overhead of hashcash generation.
I haven't looked at the algorithm, but it's probable that checking the hashcash signature on a message is negligible (which is the only operation mail servers need to care about -- generating a hashcash signature on outgoing messages would probably be done on the sender's computer in most cases or handled with a cheap peripheral). Most places have decided that virus scanning every incoming and outgoing message is worth the performance hit, so it's possible they'd be willing to compromise when it comes to unsolicited commercial e-mail too.
In the cases where someone is using a phone or handheld system to send e-mail, having a server that generates the hashcash would probably be necessary. It's also likely in these cases that the people with these devices would appreciate more than the rest of us not receiving spam, given the costs of airtime.
I recognize this isn't a perfect solution, but I think it's a very workable one given some thought. Alternatively, the amount of time it takes to send a message could be decoupled from processor speed by doing something like changing the process by which e-mail is sent on the Internet (have the client connect directly to the remote mail server) and having the server delay the reception process X seconds/mail.
A decent idea I've seen along these lines (barring your third criterion -- but I remind you we're still waiting for things as important as IPv6 to be deployed) has to do with requiring the sender of an e-mail to generate a computationally-expensive hash collision, dubbed 'hashcash', of the message that is computationally-inexpensive to verify by the systems forwarding the message to its destination.
In a nutshell, a computer sending e-mail can be required to spend an arbitrary amount of time to generate this data, as the alternative would be to have the mail discarded by any mail server/relay implementing a check for the data.
There are more details here. Obviously, there's more to creating a workable system than this, because such an atmosphere would make it impossible to run a large-distribution mailing list, but it should be possible to get around such problems with a little ingeniuity, such as allowing the recipient of such mail to exempt certain IP addresses at the mail server from having to generate hashcash. My favorite part of this scheme is that, implemented properly, it could stop spam before it leaves the originating ISP.
Would it kill journalists to do a little research before submitting their stories to be run? Any actual examination of both sides of this debate should make it very clear that these court cases are not actually about a program that facilitates copying but about our access to information on the little plastic wafers we own. Outside of one or two pieces in Wired I haven't seen anybody get this right, but one would hope that Salon would be a little more with it than, say, CNN.
If you've been agreeing with them to date you're already OK with the idea that the software could wipe your system and electrocute your dog without setting Microsoft back more than $5, so I don't know what else you want.
As to spyware, it's not exactly like any software house has to be complicit to get it on your system if you use the Internet and download programs. Read here for details.
Possibly, but it's not like it really matters -- pretty much any new game requires a new card, because drivers for the Voodoo line under later Microsoft operating systems (2000+) suck even when you can find them. Old games run fine without bleeding-edge DirectX. So no worries any way you slice it.
We're pretty much at the point where you can get better cards for under $100, so it's probably worth upgrading even if the drivers were working well unless you're happy with what you've got. Again, why upgrade DirectX in this scenario... it's not like recent versions aren't making great strides in stability or speed for older hardware.
Mods are huffing airplane glue again, but you can probably get most of the Stallman experience by visiting gnu.org, reading the GNU Public License and a couple of essays, and grabbing one or two of his speeches (.ogg format) from here. Or visit your library. No doubt he'll have a few paragraphs in the book explaining why the book costs money.
That's one of the things about Free Software that's rather unfortunate. The same thing has been done with Linux in general (Red Hat) and X-Windows (numerous accelerated X implementations).
The people who believe most in the principles Free Software has to offer are the least likely to receive anything in return for their efforts (well, barring Richard Stallman himself, but even he is poorly compensated in comparison to Bill Gates or Bill Joy). If you're coding for the joy of coding, then it in and of itself is enough compensation, of course, but if Free Software developers were truly paid at the level at which they contribute to society their work would easily exceed everything Microsoft or other commercial developers have to offer.
According to ancient Chinese tradition, a crayfish (their word for lobster) symbolises a time of rebirth and enlightenment. A period piece from the 6th century AD, or their Han dynasty, demonstrate a crayfish circling the earth, holding the Moon ('pearl' in their language) and Sun ('golden pea') in the sky, with a philosopher riding its back. It's relatively like our Easter Bunny, except without the religious connotations.
From this perspective, I hope you can understand why they might find the idea of plunging a 'red' lobster into a tank of boiling water to be as offensive as any pornography our country has to offer.
That was kind of my point. If you send them an e-mail or two and get absolutely nothing back, you can't publish -- therefore, you're subject to their whims.
This provision renders dubious the actual security benefits gained from open examination of the source code, and I'll explain why:
If the corporation is on the top of its game and follows up on each and every report, sending an acknowledgement whether or not they actually decide to fix the flaw, we'll have a situation not unlike GPG or other open source projects. Anyone who agrees to a set of restrictions can examine the code and point out flaws in addition to offering fixes.
On the other hand, if they fail to acknowledge some of the issues being submitted to them, then the situation may actually be worse than not having the source code available at all. People with less-than-pure interests can find the flaws in the program much more easily, however those who actually want to help the community (perhaps making a name for themselves as well in the process) can neither disclose the vulnerability nor offer a patch.
No doubt this policy has been introduced as an attempt to encourage bugfinders to use more community-friendly methods of disclosure. My only problem with it as a potential customer would be that it fails to take into account the possibility that the company could be less than perfect with dealing with bug reports... and thirty days of operating a product of this nature with a known flaw is bad enough. Isn't RFP's policy fair?
It's cool for a hacker (good connotation intended) like Phil Zimmerman to publish something that goes against the grain. On the other hand, it's not cool for a hacker (good connotation still intended) like those that frequent Bugtraq to publish something that goes against the grain (making public a security flaw without the express permission of PGP Corporation).
Managing disclosures of security flaws may be a good thing if you intend to fix them, but their policy doesn't mention what happens if they decide to sit on the problem instead.
The cable/satellite fee subsidises the content to a degree, but it certainly doesn't cover the actual costs. If you want some actual figures, Seinfeld actors were getting something like $1 million/episode a piece. Likewise with Friends actors. Airing sports programs is ridiculously expensive largely because the franchises know the carriers will pick up the costs from sponsors.
Right now, the average cost/viewer for a channel works out to about $23,000 for a year. As you can see, while skipping commercials wouldn't fit a reasonable person's definition of piracy, it is important for sponsors to maintain confidence in the system or the whole thing will collapse like the Internet did in 1999.
It's harder than you might think.
on
The Apple Name Game
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Just about anything you can easily think of in English is bound to be claimed by someone out there. One-off attempts such as using a generic name appended to another generic name (X-Windows, Apple Telecommunications) are obviously coming under fire by the folks who own the generic names. Even making up something off the top of your head can open you to misfortune, because there are that many businesses out there.
Zlnasdng Telecommunications? Possible, but it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue...
While I'm certainly not wholly pleased with the way things have turned out, justice as we've come to collectively accept it has been done. How many times can you try the same entity for the same crime? Already countless dollars and several years has been spent on the "Was Microsoft wrong to integrate" case. Why is it OK to rake them over the coals over and over again when it's clearly wrong to try the same person twice for a crime when you don't like the last verdict?
For what it's worth, I've got a couple of three-year-old CD-RW backups that are still readable today that I made side-by-side with CD-R at the time to test them out. I've heard recent CD-RWs are more reliable, but as I mentioned I've had one experience too many with supposedly-good backup media failing on restore because it was pushed well beyond its limits.
Based on my extremely small experience with CD-RWs for medium-term backup, I'd trust the backup. At least, I'd trust it enough in a situation where I'd advised a client to put out another, say, $40 or so to alleviate risk and he refused my suggestion. I've heard some early (first-gen?) CD-RWs were unreliable to the point where they wrote fine, read fine, then a week later lost a bunch of data. I've heard recently here on Slashdot that a fellow who made his own TiVo type unit that could dump VCDs to CD-RW got something like 3-7 writes before the media got unacceptably screwy.
It's probable the backups you did will be just fine. Personally, I'd rely on them no more than a year or so if they were pristine and kept away from light and cigarette smoke, and I wouldn't reuse them for backups at the end, but this is just gut feeling. If made properly (and hopefully burned at slower than max speed, like 1X-4X), they'll last much longer, but the manufacturers muck too much with the composition of the things to permit me any real feeling of reliability even with a particular brand.
The blanks you've made are rewritable, but the user has to choose to blank the disc first, so it isn't likely someone is just going to drop the disc in the tray and blithely dump a new session over the backup.
If this takes off like Everquest, though, how much new stuff can they add to it to keep the universe fresh? They're kind of limited by the movies, aren't they?
First, you have to make sure your backup method isn't prone to mistakes. One setup I had to clean up involved reusing the same three backup tapes for god knows how long (about one file in three was properly restorable) and was missing perhaps the three most important datafiles on the system because they happened to be in use during the backup and the guy that set it up didn't realize that was a problem.
Right now, CD-Rs (not -RWs) seem to be a great way to store moderate amounts of data. -RWs suffer from degradation pretty quickly despite their rewriteability (I've never seen one live up to the '1000 writes' standard they claim -- more like 3-7). For larger amounts, DVD-R may be the wave of the future, but high-quality tapes are probably as good if you can persuade your boss to let you replace them from year to year.
Periodically, it's important to store your backups offsite. A safe-deposit box works well, or perhaps a fireproof safe if you're worried about the confidentialness of your information. But yeah, I'd move that stuff offsite biweekly or monthly at a minimum.
If you look at this with a technical eye, however, you recognize a few things that Microsoft probably picked up on:
First, although XML seems more 'open', in reality it is simply a higher-level encoding that may or may not be easier to understand but is guaranteed to both take longer to parse and take up more space than the conventional.doc format because of the size of the tags, making this a downgrade 'optimization' of both speed and size -- where is the win here?
Microsoft owns.doc, however XML is still a wildcard; are there submarine patents on the technology running silent and deep waiting for just the right moment to blow a hole in Microsoft's pocketbook? We've talked about this sort of thing on./ before.
Lack of features -- there's a reason people are still using.doc and.pdf instead of HTML, and giving HTML a fancier name for the new millenium isn't going to change it. Anything tougher than bold, italics, and tables has been proven to be an O(n^2) representation in HTML and has been neglected because nobody wants to download a meg of webpage.
So please, understand that while it would be cool for Microsoft to adopt these new standards, economically speaking they're doing the right thing.
I recognize this goes against the grain here, but here goes:
I think India's rationale for going with Bill Gates offering over Richard Stallman's offering is fairly simple to explain: Bill's offering a finished product, no polish necessary, at no cost. RMS is saying you can have the greatest software in the world if you put your mind to it and pointing to a bunch of half-written software.
Which would you rather have? Just take a look at the statistics in the places where people can choose to pay for Windows or get Linux free to get an idea of why the opportunity is so tasty to India.
While true that companies seek a way to wrap their media in such a way as to make it impossible to copy (the ideal), right now they'll settle for forcing some level of degradation into the copies to add a practical factor preventing the limitless illegal distribution from one source of their content.
I had the opportunity to engage a luminary in the field in friendly discussion at a September DRM luncheon in Prague. He made it clear that despite the feelings of a vocal minority (us), copy protection will be accepted if not welcomed by the general population. Consumers in both Europe and Japan currently purchase such content with minimal complaint, and it seems even more likely in field testing that America will actually desire the copy protection if they are told it will lead to better sound and picture quality.
Granted, he was working within the industry, but the devastating piracy figures in a recent poll conducted among computer users made it clear that DRM will save the industry a lot of money. The poll, performed by blind surveying at three recent trade shows across the U.S., showed a staggering amount of pirated content; broken down by operating system of preference (to see what kind of effect DeCSS has had) apparently Windows users 'only' pirate about a quarter of their movie content, against Linux users' 67% and Macintosh 30%.
In the wake of this information, and the lackluster performance of the music industry in recent years, it is little wonder that they're adopting a 'Chicken Little' approach -- for them, the sky truly is falling. Hopefully, a reasonable compromise between our rights to do with our hardware as we will and the rights of copyright holders to be renumerated for their efforts will be struck; however, I am assured that if one will give, it will be the continuance of Open Source media decoders.
Best you'll see in a while for a couple of reasons
on
Meet The Leonids
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Yes. For one thing, the Leonids are the brightest thing in the sky (barring the Sun, of course) at their apex, which will be finally reached this year before they decline. They'll still be visible next year but not again for decades.
Scientifically speaking, there is a lack of visible background radiation (VBR, also called 'solar drift' because of its origins) in the sky right now because of the unusually large amounts of sunspots, so the view will be exceptional. Additionally, they will be brighter through a process called 'blueshifting' because they are heading towards us. Blueshifting is an application of the Doppler effect with light rather than sound -- the speed of the objects stack up the light 'waves' in front of them and in effect make the objects look bluer because of the shift upwards in the visible spectrum. The opposite, 'redshifting', would occur if the objects were heading away from us, as they will be next year.
Make sure you're out from the city to watch this great event, because light pollution will drown out part of the spectra that otherwise make this such a treat to watch.
Slashdot Mirror
Will Linux and other alternative operating systems continue to install and function properly on computers containing AMI BIOSes?
We all agree that piracy isn't a good thing, but I'd like to think the P2P is viable even without copyright infringement. There was that innovative mechanism a while ago where you could download a file and other people could share the pieces they've already downloaded with you, distributing the load on-the-fly. And there's the unique streaming audio solution that works similarly. Just because some folks throw away the tags on their pillows doesn't mean we don't need a place to rest our heads, right?
There's a lot of interesting stuff coming out that's dual-use, and no doubt that'd be the motif of the interview if it didn't die before the second frigging comment was posted. Why aren't the links cached on here, again?
Users don't want to have to learn the same thing eight or nine times. Windows doesn't do a whole lot that is fantastic, IMHO, but their interface offers the best compromise between range of operation and ease of use. On Linux, we've tilted the dial towards range of operation (well, except for Quicktime video...), but there's still the issues of compatibility and ease of use that have been largely disregarded.
The average user has an index of approximately 27 different motions that can be easily recalled. People generally start at the bottom of a surface such as the page of a book or the screen on their computer when they first look at it, but if they're going to be with it a while they begin looking at the top (when they turn the page or open an application). This is the type of research that you can see in Windows -- Start bar on bottom, menu options on top of the application.
So maybe duplication isn't such a bad thing... after all, even they just took the best parts from the innovators of the GUI (Apple) and improved on the rest.
If there was a bulletproof technological answer to spam that was cheap or free and easy to implement, many of us would be using it by now. Any solution (technological or legislative) will create additional overhead -- the real concerns are where should the burden be placed and are the results worth the cost?
You may be on the same page as me, but I'll mention that I have no faith in legislation against spam. Look at how well the junk fax law is operating -- I've even gotten the things on a dial-in Debian box without realizing the getty package added fax reception. The worst case penalty if you can actually track down the sender is a slap on the wrist. I guarantee spam legislation will be every bit as half-assed, exempting all sorts of special-interest groups and even in the best scenario doing nothing to stop spam originating out-of-country.
Before discarding hashcash out of hand, however, give the concept some more thought:
False positives are a major concern for me; I don't want to find out that I've been ignoring someone for weeks because of an overzealous spam filter. Bayesian filtering is great, but not perfect. Barring a server outage or something similar, if a hashcash message is sent properly you know it won't be silently discarded at the recipient's filter.
Spam likely creates a larger overhead on the system than hashcash would. Billions of messages flying through the network nightly isn't cheap, and is costing all of us in responsiveness and bandwidth. Filters in the mail client mean that in many scenarios the recipient is paying to download spam even if it gets removed before it is read. While spam could still be sent in a hashcash environment, the reduction in volume would probably offset the overhead of hashcash generation.
I haven't looked at the algorithm, but it's probable that checking the hashcash signature on a message is negligible (which is the only operation mail servers need to care about -- generating a hashcash signature on outgoing messages would probably be done on the sender's computer in most cases or handled with a cheap peripheral). Most places have decided that virus scanning every incoming and outgoing message is worth the performance hit, so it's possible they'd be willing to compromise when it comes to unsolicited commercial e-mail too.
In the cases where someone is using a phone or handheld system to send e-mail, having a server that generates the hashcash would probably be necessary. It's also likely in these cases that the people with these devices would appreciate more than the rest of us not receiving spam, given the costs of airtime.
I recognize this isn't a perfect solution, but I think it's a very workable one given some thought. Alternatively, the amount of time it takes to send a message could be decoupled from processor speed by doing something like changing the process by which e-mail is sent on the Internet (have the client connect directly to the remote mail server) and having the server delay the reception process X seconds/mail.
There are more details here. Obviously, there's more to creating a workable system than this, because such an atmosphere would make it impossible to run a large-distribution mailing list, but it should be possible to get around such problems with a little ingeniuity, such as allowing the recipient of such mail to exempt certain IP addresses at the mail server from having to generate hashcash. My favorite part of this scheme is that, implemented properly, it could stop spam before it leaves the originating ISP.
I'd moderate, except that my privileges mysteriously disappeared never to return after The Day Of The Thousand Moderations.
Would it kill journalists to do a little research before submitting their stories to be run? Any actual examination of both sides of this debate should make it very clear that these court cases are not actually about a program that facilitates copying but about our access to information on the little plastic wafers we own. Outside of one or two pieces in Wired I haven't seen anybody get this right, but one would hope that Salon would be a little more with it than, say, CNN.
As to spyware, it's not exactly like any software house has to be complicit to get it on your system if you use the Internet and download programs. Read here for details.
We're pretty much at the point where you can get better cards for under $100, so it's probably worth upgrading even if the drivers were working well unless you're happy with what you've got. Again, why upgrade DirectX in this scenario... it's not like recent versions aren't making great strides in stability or speed for older hardware.
ps you fail it sry
Mods are huffing airplane glue again, but you can probably get most of the Stallman experience by visiting gnu.org, reading the GNU Public License and a couple of essays, and grabbing one or two of his speeches (.ogg format) from here. Or visit your library. No doubt he'll have a few paragraphs in the book explaining why the book costs money.
The people who believe most in the principles Free Software has to offer are the least likely to receive anything in return for their efforts (well, barring Richard Stallman himself, but even he is poorly compensated in comparison to Bill Gates or Bill Joy). If you're coding for the joy of coding, then it in and of itself is enough compensation, of course, but if Free Software developers were truly paid at the level at which they contribute to society their work would easily exceed everything Microsoft or other commercial developers have to offer.
From this perspective, I hope you can understand why they might find the idea of plunging a 'red' lobster into a tank of boiling water to be as offensive as any pornography our country has to offer.
This provision renders dubious the actual security benefits gained from open examination of the source code, and I'll explain why:
If the corporation is on the top of its game and follows up on each and every report, sending an acknowledgement whether or not they actually decide to fix the flaw, we'll have a situation not unlike GPG or other open source projects. Anyone who agrees to a set of restrictions can examine the code and point out flaws in addition to offering fixes.
On the other hand, if they fail to acknowledge some of the issues being submitted to them, then the situation may actually be worse than not having the source code available at all. People with less-than-pure interests can find the flaws in the program much more easily, however those who actually want to help the community (perhaps making a name for themselves as well in the process) can neither disclose the vulnerability nor offer a patch.
No doubt this policy has been introduced as an attempt to encourage bugfinders to use more community-friendly methods of disclosure. My only problem with it as a potential customer would be that it fails to take into account the possibility that the company could be less than perfect with dealing with bug reports... and thirty days of operating a product of this nature with a known flaw is bad enough. Isn't RFP's policy fair?
Managing disclosures of security flaws may be a good thing if you intend to fix them, but their policy doesn't mention what happens if they decide to sit on the problem instead.
Right now, the average cost/viewer for a channel works out to about $23,000 for a year. As you can see, while skipping commercials wouldn't fit a reasonable person's definition of piracy, it is important for sponsors to maintain confidence in the system or the whole thing will collapse like the Internet did in 1999.
Zlnasdng Telecommunications? Possible, but it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue...
While I'm certainly not wholly pleased with the way things have turned out, justice as we've come to collectively accept it has been done. How many times can you try the same entity for the same crime? Already countless dollars and several years has been spent on the "Was Microsoft wrong to integrate" case. Why is it OK to rake them over the coals over and over again when it's clearly wrong to try the same person twice for a crime when you don't like the last verdict?
Based on my extremely small experience with CD-RWs for medium-term backup, I'd trust the backup. At least, I'd trust it enough in a situation where I'd advised a client to put out another, say, $40 or so to alleviate risk and he refused my suggestion. I've heard some early (first-gen?) CD-RWs were unreliable to the point where they wrote fine, read fine, then a week later lost a bunch of data. I've heard recently here on Slashdot that a fellow who made his own TiVo type unit that could dump VCDs to CD-RW got something like 3-7 writes before the media got unacceptably screwy.
It's probable the backups you did will be just fine. Personally, I'd rely on them no more than a year or so if they were pristine and kept away from light and cigarette smoke, and I wouldn't reuse them for backups at the end, but this is just gut feeling. If made properly (and hopefully burned at slower than max speed, like 1X-4X), they'll last much longer, but the manufacturers muck too much with the composition of the things to permit me any real feeling of reliability even with a particular brand.
The blanks you've made are rewritable, but the user has to choose to blank the disc first, so it isn't likely someone is just going to drop the disc in the tray and blithely dump a new session over the backup.
Maybe they can be a bit less draconian with their schemes? Nobody's forcing them to lock people out at all, right?
If this takes off like Everquest, though, how much new stuff can they add to it to keep the universe fresh? They're kind of limited by the movies, aren't they?
Right now, CD-Rs (not -RWs) seem to be a great way to store moderate amounts of data. -RWs suffer from degradation pretty quickly despite their rewriteability (I've never seen one live up to the '1000 writes' standard they claim -- more like 3-7). For larger amounts, DVD-R may be the wave of the future, but high-quality tapes are probably as good if you can persuade your boss to let you replace them from year to year.
Periodically, it's important to store your backups offsite. A safe-deposit box works well, or perhaps a fireproof safe if you're worried about the confidentialness of your information. But yeah, I'd move that stuff offsite biweekly or monthly at a minimum.
- First, although XML seems more 'open', in reality it is simply a higher-level encoding that may or may not be easier to understand but is guaranteed to both take longer to parse and take up more space than the conventional
.doc format because of the size of the tags, making this a downgrade 'optimization' of both speed and size -- where is the win here?
- Microsoft owns
.doc, however XML is still a wildcard; are there submarine patents on the technology running silent and deep waiting for just the right moment to blow a hole in Microsoft's pocketbook? We've talked about this sort of thing on ./ before.
- Lack of features -- there's a reason people are still using
.doc and .pdf instead of HTML, and giving HTML a fancier name for the new millenium isn't going to change it. Anything tougher than bold, italics, and tables has been proven to be an O(n^2) representation in HTML and has been neglected because nobody wants to download a meg of webpage.
So please, understand that while it would be cool for Microsoft to adopt these new standards, economically speaking they're doing the right thing.I think India's rationale for going with Bill Gates offering over Richard Stallman's offering is fairly simple to explain: Bill's offering a finished product, no polish necessary, at no cost. RMS is saying you can have the greatest software in the world if you put your mind to it and pointing to a bunch of half-written software.
Which would you rather have? Just take a look at the statistics in the places where people can choose to pay for Windows or get Linux free to get an idea of why the opportunity is so tasty to India.
I had the opportunity to engage a luminary in the field in friendly discussion at a September DRM luncheon in Prague. He made it clear that despite the feelings of a vocal minority (us), copy protection will be accepted if not welcomed by the general population. Consumers in both Europe and Japan currently purchase such content with minimal complaint, and it seems even more likely in field testing that America will actually desire the copy protection if they are told it will lead to better sound and picture quality.
Granted, he was working within the industry, but the devastating piracy figures in a recent poll conducted among computer users made it clear that DRM will save the industry a lot of money. The poll, performed by blind surveying at three recent trade shows across the U.S., showed a staggering amount of pirated content; broken down by operating system of preference (to see what kind of effect DeCSS has had) apparently Windows users 'only' pirate about a quarter of their movie content, against Linux users' 67% and Macintosh 30%.
In the wake of this information, and the lackluster performance of the music industry in recent years, it is little wonder that they're adopting a 'Chicken Little' approach -- for them, the sky truly is falling. Hopefully, a reasonable compromise between our rights to do with our hardware as we will and the rights of copyright holders to be renumerated for their efforts will be struck; however, I am assured that if one will give, it will be the continuance of Open Source media decoders.
Scientifically speaking, there is a lack of visible background radiation (VBR, also called 'solar drift' because of its origins) in the sky right now because of the unusually large amounts of sunspots, so the view will be exceptional. Additionally, they will be brighter through a process called 'blueshifting' because they are heading towards us. Blueshifting is an application of the Doppler effect with light rather than sound -- the speed of the objects stack up the light 'waves' in front of them and in effect make the objects look bluer because of the shift upwards in the visible spectrum. The opposite, 'redshifting', would occur if the objects were heading away from us, as they will be next year.
Make sure you're out from the city to watch this great event, because light pollution will drown out part of the spectra that otherwise make this such a treat to watch.