C will be faster than either C++ or Java, but C++ and Java are on par for most things. The one exception I will note is in the realm of the GUI API's for Java which have an excessive amount of overhead and have always been slow.
Also with Java, your development time is going to be far lower than C++ because you don't have as much worry about memory leaks, pointers, etc.
But again, many of the worst issues are programmer rather than language issues.
While that's true, each language has semantics that either encourage or discourage their worst behaviors.
As far as Java in regards to your comments above. Java's scripted aspects are actually compiled into code and turned into byte code before run. So the first time a page runs, it will be slow because of conversion. Once run the first time it will be as fast as the compiled code.
As far as the issues of compiled code, development evironments for java really make a lot of this process quite easy. If you make changes to your code that don't require changes to method signatures, just the chunk of code you modified can be re-compiled. In NetBeans, what I use, I just click a button, and my code is ready to test in less than second.
Another aspect of Java for dealing with large sites is that it lends itself to cleaner code and better organization. PHP pages end up being a bunch of pages which means you get UI and business logic all entangled. In java, there's a lot of ways to avoid that mess and make a more organized and more readily maintained system.
It's a common policy of many coffeeshops I know of to have minimum purchase requirements. Even before the times of Wifi, cool coffeeshops were where a lot of the young and broke kids would hang out. Invariably they'd try to get away with buying a small cup of coffee then lingering for 3 hours.
The problem with codes or any sort of regulation of the access is that it creates a support problem. So you're slinging coffee and somebody gets a code that doesn't work. Now you have to take time away from making coffee and worry about tech support. It doesn't take too many things like that to screw up the cost/benefit of it. Does your barista know how to fix a WiFi network? Probably not.
Free WiFi became a popular concept because people don't demand much from a free service. If they log on and it doesn't work or it's slow they won't complain because they didn't pay for it. Those who can cope with it will use it and be happy, those who can't don't become a burden to you.
If you look at the area around the apple head quarters you can see a lot of undeveloped areas. There's a bunch of roads to the north which look like a housing development. In the MSN map, it's dirt, in the google map it's a bunch of houses.
How would Orkut be any different than having a coffee shop where some people were dealing drugs without your knowledge? Yes you provided a gathering place, but it's not like you really did anything other than that to facillitate it.
Obviously if you knew about it and didn't make some effort to stop it, that would be a different scenario but there's no indication that's the case here.
Rather than trusting some other provider to do this, why not roll your own? Use rdiff-backup and set up two backup servers. One of the backup servers resides locally, the other resides in a remote datacenter. They both run nightly differential backups of your data.
It's not that expensive to get a server rented at a data center. Just need to have enough bandwidth and storage space. This gives you redundancy and a reasonable amount of control over what's happening. If you need greater redundancy get more servers in more locations. There's some limitations to how far you can go but I should think you could have 2-3 backup servers without too many problems.
In the end, both numbers are probably correct according to the methodology that was used. The disparity is likely due to using vastly different methodologies.
Perhaps they used user surveys of on-line behavior. Perhaps they used traffic reports from popular sites to see where search hits came from. There's countless ways to figure it, but seeing as I can't remember the last time I used anything but google to do a search, I'd tend to favor the larger number.
This law makes perfect sense being a federal law. Why? Because almost all telemarketing calls are crossing state or possibly national borders. Thus there's a natural complication when you have different laws in different states with different abilities to enforce those laws on others.
Better to have one federal law to simplify things.
And I still wonder, why do those telemarketers want to call me if I'm on this list. Seems like they are being done a service here. I'm not going to buy their crap so no sense wasting time on a call.
The other thing to consider here is this: does having routing capabilities really distinguish the PS3? Are people going to buy a PS3 because of routing capabilities? No. Routers are a commodity item now and Windows can do it's own routing if need be. It exposes them to support costs, yes, but also risk. I mean what if somebody hacks those millions of PS3 routers?
So it seems an obvious business decision to drop it. I think it's one of those pie in the sky ideas that sounded good at the time, but now that they need to put their money where their mouth is, they realize it doesn't add any real value.
Frankly I think both consoles still have a lot of needless gadget wizardry that won't really sell them. A good example is the wireless controller. It's neat and all, but I can imagine it's going to be a hassle with controllers running out of batteries, getting interference, etc. We've had wired controllers for decades now and I don't think anybody out there is going to decide what to buy based on that.
Where they need to put their money is in the rendering and overall processor performance and the tools to make them easy to take advantage of. Nintendo does have some wisdom on this that, ultimately, games sell the consoles. I think it's fair to say that if we all had an ugly lump of plastic with wired controllers and no router, we'd be thrilled to own it if the games on it were really good.
DRM only becomes a problem when it inhibits the actual use of the product. ITunes and the IPod have been wildly successful because the average person is almost totally unaware that there's DRM involved. They download music, it plays on their computer and it plays on their IPod so what do they care.
The most recent effort I saw for this was a service where you could download a movie file for a fee but could only play it within 30 days and once played it would only remain playable for like 24 hours. That's problematic. In this case though, I should think the downloads would be consistent with the NetFlix style of movie watching where you can have so many movies available at a time but for an unlimited time. If that's the case it will be far more viable.
My ideal would be if I could take a netflix downloaded rental and play it on my TiVo. If I have to hook up a computer to my TV, it's a bit more of a hassle. I haven't been a NetFlix member for a while now because I got tired of discs piling up that I never got around to watching, but if I can download a movie in a few hours I may resubscribe.
I played Doom 3 for a couple weeks and I did love the scare factor. There were a couple moments that had me so creeped out I had to stop playing for a while. But in the end, most of the creepiness is something you get immune to by the end. So it has little if any replay value. "Oh yeah, this is the part where I step on the pentacle and the screen goes red, and I hear screams of, 'we took your 50 dollars muahahahaha', can be heard."
I think the big problem with most FPS games these days is that the story that goes into them always feels like a lame excuse to kill crap. You run into each bigger and badder boss of some level and you get some new uber weapon to kill him with. There's a story, but it's only to give some sense of logic to all these things you have to shoot.
Frankly, until the technology's evolution rate slows down, we'll have to deal with this crap. I mean, can somebody tell me what the plot is of far cry? I have no idea, I just know it has really realistic looking water. When the technology evolves to become more of a story telling medium than an R&D lab for rendering techniques, we may have something. Doom seems to forshadow that a bit, having effectivley ignored the multiplayer element in favor of atmospherics, etc, but it still seems too interested in graphics rendering navel gazing. In the meantime, the FPS genre will make up for it's utter lack of creativity by networking us so we can kill eachother and drool over the special effects wizardry.
Frankly the only game that I've seen recently that I thought was genuinely innovative was PlanetSide. I've been playing it for two years now and it's still way better than anything else out there. It's not that pretty and it's a massive resource hog, but it really is a good demonstration of where this goes. It falls a bit short, but it at least gives you a grander sense of some point to the fighting.
On most games, you fight a round and you kill, capture flags, etc, then the round ends and you start over. PlanetSide does get to feeling like a hampster wheel after a while because there is no win condition, but there's at least a larger sense of the battle always going on and that your contribution to it does have an influence. I think what comes after it should be really interesting, but we'll have to wait and see.
If you're worried about the data, then you should protect that, not the hardware. Have the system thoroughly encrypted locked to biometric data. Then have it keep back ups of critical data on a secure remote server. Then if you're laptop gets stolen, no big deal, they can't get the data and you've not lost much.
Personally I think this boils down to the fact that one can convey a message without necessarily getting the grammar and spelling right. If I use there, their, or they're, you're able to deduce from the context of it's use, what I mean. Thus it's really not critical for you that I even get it right.
When you are using IM, or IRC, the emphasis is on rapidity to keep up with the thoughts of a flowing conversation. So spelling and grammar go out the window in the interests of efficiency. You type it however it comes out of your mind. Invariavly this carries over into other areas like e-mail, blog postings, etc.
How many of us really thoroughly re-read a blog posting like we'd read an academic paper, or an important work document? Frankly, we don't have time to screw around with it. So we don't. We are able to transmit meaning, and for the most part nobody really cares about the little glitches.
So I think it's just that there's such a volume of information out there and such a rush to make more that the important of that accuracy has fallen by the wayside. It gets in the way of getting things done. And remember, if it's all digital, it can always be edited later to fix any problems. If everything's a beta, you can afford to screw it up a bit.
Don't you understand? They are losing viewers because of the evil pirates who distribute their hard work for free on the Internet. This allows the terrorists to win. Please think of the children.
I don't know what everyone else will think about 13.1, but it kind of seems like overkill to me. I already, at times, wonder if there is really that much advantage in a 6.1, or 7.1 system, over a 5.1 system.
Think about all the movies that you really like and then imagine them without surround sound at all. Just simple stereo sound. Does it really diminish the movies? I mean I like surround sound but I've been unable to set it up for a while now and honestly, I don't miss it.
It's a neat gadget, and sure, if I have the equipment and room for it, why the heck not. But frankly good movies don't need surround sound. For example, I have Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon on DVD. It's a fantastic movie, and I've hooked up the surround sound to it. It is cool when a spear breaks and I hear the shards land behind my head. But if I didn't hear that, would it really make a difference to the movie? No.
So if you're talking 5.1 vs. 7.1 vs. 13.1, who really cares after a point. If it was easy to set up and I had the space for it, sure, that'd be neat, but in reality, it doesn't much matter.
1) When the IPod came out it was the only MP3 player that had that much capacity in that form factor. Others were close, but didn't quite match it.
2) The Ipod is really nicely finished. It's solid and sturdy. It feels well engineered like a BMW when you compare it to a chevy.
3) ITunes integration. Sure each company had their own way to manage MP3's, but none is so well integrated as the Ipod and itunes. It's simple and elegant.
4) Branding. But branding is something that can only come from the existence of the previous points. Yes, they made it cool, but they were able to make it cool because they made the actual product well.
I've owned an IPod for a couple of years now and I just got my wife a brand new IPod Photo for her birthday (her 15GB IPod was out of room). Every so often I look at the other players out there and none of them really do it for me.
When I look at a Rio Karma, for example, it looks like a cheap piece of plastic. It looks like, if I dropped it, it would fly apart into a million pieces. So when I see something like that I hardly ever get to considering the quality of other aspects like ITunes integration, etc.
Apple's IPod is successful because it's really good. Yes you pay a premium for it, but in the end, I get a quality product that works well and yes, looks good. The only thing they botched was the battery bit, but when you think about where they'd put a battery door you realize how much it impinges on the finish of the design.
It seems that this ruling is less about technology and more about the application of it. Presumably, you could have two P2P networks, running on identical software, with one running afoul of the law and the other one being clean based on how the software is promoted.
If you had a P2P network that you marketed as a way to get movies and music for free, you'd be in trouble. If you marketed it as a way for independent bands and musicians to distribute their art, you would probably be okay. Theoretically that could be the exact same software and it would mostly come down to how it was promoted.
There's nothing in this ruling that suggests a network must actively attempt to inhibit copyright infringement, it just cannot promote it. So then if you set up your network to be for independent artists to distribute legitimate works and some folks then used it for distributing illegal stuff, you should also have a defense.
I like the SCOTUS because they seem to be the last branch of government that routinely comes out with wise decisions:)
And, for the record, GPA, etc are *not* public record. The school has to be authorized by the student (or the student's parents/guardians) to release that information. This new plan would give them that.
Actually, readin the article, this new Pentagon plan has nothing to do with that. This plan is merely collating information that they already have. The GPA information was part of previous legislation tied to no child left behind. That I think is a privacy invasion and that that particular of NCLB should be challenged. But the Pentagon's database itself is not the issue.
That's a matter of interpretation. The letter claims that building a database of potential recruits is not with the Pentagon's purview, but the Pentagon thinks it is. This is definitely directly related to their basic operations.
This isn't a privacy violation. This is the exact same tactics used by telemarketers, etc. They get profiles of potential customers and then call those customers. Nothing new here, just taking existing publicly available information and putting it in a database. The Pentagon has no authority to get information not in the public record, so they aren't going to have GPA's, school subjects, etc, unless it's publicly available.
If you opt out of course they have to keep you in a different database. If they didn't then every time they reviews their records you'd keep getting added back to the database. How else would they keep track of the fact that you didn't want to be in their database in the first place.
As for sharing the information, the only bit of information they would have that would be new is your response to their inquiries. Fine they can tell people that you don't want to be in the military. Given the size of our military compared to the country's military age population, that's a pretty big list.
This notion of being labeled a dissident is just plain silly. Not wanting to be in the military is a common enough thing that it's insufficient for profiling "dissidents". The FBI has enough to keep track of with more active dissidents that they don't have the time to go through the Pentagon's database and find out who didn't want to be in the Marines.
Here's the thing. Ad revenue is based on what is actually getting responses. If I don't view an ad, obviously I'm not going to buy whatever the ad was for based on that ad. But the question is: would I have bought it anyhow?
Ad blocking could be legitimately claimed as hurting the bottom line of advertisers only if some portion of those ads would have been responded to in the first place. My impression is that if you are somebody who would go through the effort to block the popups and ads that you probably weren't going to be buying from them anyhow. It's the same priciple with spam. Spammers try to do everything to get an e-mail into your box, but if I've got layer upon layer of spam filters, perhaps I'm simply not a market worth reaching.
I do think it'd be an issue if it became default, and there might be a basis for a lawsuit if that happened in IE because it is the default browser for most people. Mozilla and Opera could probably get away with it if they wanted to. Frankly though I don't think it's worth it to them to do it. If people are hell bent on not seeing ads they'll have on problem finding a checkbox and turning it on.
You could spend $3.4 million on the batman shtick, or you could spend that money on hiring a vigilante army.
Think about it, what are they paying contractors in Iraq to do protection and security jobs where they are getting hsot at constantly. So pay for them, and then the equipment to arm them, and you'd have a wrecking crew far superior to you on your own.
Figure $250K/vigilante/year for salary and benefits and you could hire 10 of these guys for $2.5 million. Then you'd have about $1 million/year to spend on equipment for them. Body armor, assault rifles, etc.
Then whenever you want justice to be done, you give them a call and they crack some skulls for you. If you want, you can even give them bat ears to put on their helmet so they can keep with the theme.
The best part is, you don't have to worry about getting bruised or scarred. You can go to your rich parties, party it up and know that you've kept the streets safe without personally lifting a finger.
This could be really fascinating to see. Ultimately Dell and the like don't want to be selling commodity hardware. It takes a lot of resources for very little margin. They'd much rather focus on selling fashionable high end machines like their XPS systems.
So, OS X, could be sort of the bridge to getting the PC makers away from the commodity market. If you want a cheap bare bones PC, you get your wintel XP box. If you want something that's going to be high quality and last you a few years, you get yourself a macintel box.
The question that remains is whether Apple is willing to sacrifice some hardware sales to broaden the base of their OS support. I kinda doubt they will because their bread and butter really is making nice hardware. It's beneficial to them to have an exclusive lock on the apple faithful as far as that goes.
In the end, what I really hope for is being able to buy an Apple computer with OS X and be able to run my Windows games under that environment rather seamlessly. Then I can run OS X all the time, play my windows games when I want to, and then down the road hopefully mac games will come out and I can drop Windows all together.
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C will be faster than either C++ or Java, but C++ and Java are on par for most things. The one exception I will note is in the realm of the GUI API's for Java which have an excessive amount of overhead and have always been slow.
Also with Java, your development time is going to be far lower than C++ because you don't have as much worry about memory leaks, pointers, etc.
But again, many of the worst issues are programmer rather than language issues.
While that's true, each language has semantics that either encourage or discourage their worst behaviors.
As far as Java in regards to your comments above. Java's scripted aspects are actually compiled into code and turned into byte code before run. So the first time a page runs, it will be slow because of conversion. Once run the first time it will be as fast as the compiled code.
As far as the issues of compiled code, development evironments for java really make a lot of this process quite easy. If you make changes to your code that don't require changes to method signatures, just the chunk of code you modified can be re-compiled. In NetBeans, what I use, I just click a button, and my code is ready to test in less than second.
Another aspect of Java for dealing with large sites is that it lends itself to cleaner code and better organization. PHP pages end up being a bunch of pages which means you get UI and business logic all entangled. In java, there's a lot of ways to avoid that mess and make a more organized and more readily maintained system.
It's a common policy of many coffeeshops I know of to have minimum purchase requirements. Even before the times of Wifi, cool coffeeshops were where a lot of the young and broke kids would hang out. Invariably they'd try to get away with buying a small cup of coffee then lingering for 3 hours.
The problem with codes or any sort of regulation of the access is that it creates a support problem. So you're slinging coffee and somebody gets a code that doesn't work. Now you have to take time away from making coffee and worry about tech support. It doesn't take too many things like that to screw up the cost/benefit of it. Does your barista know how to fix a WiFi network? Probably not.
Free WiFi became a popular concept because people don't demand much from a free service. If they log on and it doesn't work or it's slow they won't complain because they didn't pay for it. Those who can cope with it will use it and be happy, those who can't don't become a burden to you.
If you look at the area around the apple head quarters you can see a lot of undeveloped areas. There's a bunch of roads to the north which look like a housing development. In the MSN map, it's dirt, in the google map it's a bunch of houses.
:)
So MSN's map service sucks apparently
How would Orkut be any different than having a coffee shop where some people were dealing drugs without your knowledge? Yes you provided a gathering place, but it's not like you really did anything other than that to facillitate it.
Obviously if you knew about it and didn't make some effort to stop it, that would be a different scenario but there's no indication that's the case here.
Rather than trusting some other provider to do this, why not roll your own? Use rdiff-backup and set up two backup servers. One of the backup servers resides locally, the other resides in a remote datacenter. They both run nightly differential backups of your data.
It's not that expensive to get a server rented at a data center. Just need to have enough bandwidth and storage space. This gives you redundancy and a reasonable amount of control over what's happening. If you need greater redundancy get more servers in more locations. There's some limitations to how far you can go but I should think you could have 2-3 backup servers without too many problems.
In the end, both numbers are probably correct according to the methodology that was used. The disparity is likely due to using vastly different methodologies.
Perhaps they used user surveys of on-line behavior. Perhaps they used traffic reports from popular sites to see where search hits came from. There's countless ways to figure it, but seeing as I can't remember the last time I used anything but google to do a search, I'd tend to favor the larger number.
This law makes perfect sense being a federal law. Why? Because almost all telemarketing calls are crossing state or possibly national borders. Thus there's a natural complication when you have different laws in different states with different abilities to enforce those laws on others.
Better to have one federal law to simplify things.
And I still wonder, why do those telemarketers want to call me if I'm on this list. Seems like they are being done a service here. I'm not going to buy their crap so no sense wasting time on a call.
The other thing to consider here is this: does having routing capabilities really distinguish the PS3? Are people going to buy a PS3 because of routing capabilities? No. Routers are a commodity item now and Windows can do it's own routing if need be. It exposes them to support costs, yes, but also risk. I mean what if somebody hacks those millions of PS3 routers?
So it seems an obvious business decision to drop it. I think it's one of those pie in the sky ideas that sounded good at the time, but now that they need to put their money where their mouth is, they realize it doesn't add any real value.
Frankly I think both consoles still have a lot of needless gadget wizardry that won't really sell them. A good example is the wireless controller. It's neat and all, but I can imagine it's going to be a hassle with controllers running out of batteries, getting interference, etc. We've had wired controllers for decades now and I don't think anybody out there is going to decide what to buy based on that.
Where they need to put their money is in the rendering and overall processor performance and the tools to make them easy to take advantage of. Nintendo does have some wisdom on this that, ultimately, games sell the consoles. I think it's fair to say that if we all had an ugly lump of plastic with wired controllers and no router, we'd be thrilled to own it if the games on it were really good.
DRM only becomes a problem when it inhibits the actual use of the product. ITunes and the IPod have been wildly successful because the average person is almost totally unaware that there's DRM involved. They download music, it plays on their computer and it plays on their IPod so what do they care.
The most recent effort I saw for this was a service where you could download a movie file for a fee but could only play it within 30 days and once played it would only remain playable for like 24 hours. That's problematic. In this case though, I should think the downloads would be consistent with the NetFlix style of movie watching where you can have so many movies available at a time but for an unlimited time. If that's the case it will be far more viable.
My ideal would be if I could take a netflix downloaded rental and play it on my TiVo. If I have to hook up a computer to my TV, it's a bit more of a hassle. I haven't been a NetFlix member for a while now because I got tired of discs piling up that I never got around to watching, but if I can download a movie in a few hours I may resubscribe.
I played Doom 3 for a couple weeks and I did love the scare factor. There were a couple moments that had me so creeped out I had to stop playing for a while. But in the end, most of the creepiness is something you get immune to by the end. So it has little if any replay value. "Oh yeah, this is the part where I step on the pentacle and the screen goes red, and I hear screams of, 'we took your 50 dollars muahahahaha', can be heard."
I think the big problem with most FPS games these days is that the story that goes into them always feels like a lame excuse to kill crap. You run into each bigger and badder boss of some level and you get some new uber weapon to kill him with. There's a story, but it's only to give some sense of logic to all these things you have to shoot.
Frankly, until the technology's evolution rate slows down, we'll have to deal with this crap. I mean, can somebody tell me what the plot is of far cry? I have no idea, I just know it has really realistic looking water. When the technology evolves to become more of a story telling medium than an R&D lab for rendering techniques, we may have something. Doom seems to forshadow that a bit, having effectivley ignored the multiplayer element in favor of atmospherics, etc, but it still seems too interested in graphics rendering navel gazing. In the meantime, the FPS genre will make up for it's utter lack of creativity by networking us so we can kill eachother and drool over the special effects wizardry.
Frankly the only game that I've seen recently that I thought was genuinely innovative was PlanetSide. I've been playing it for two years now and it's still way better than anything else out there. It's not that pretty and it's a massive resource hog, but it really is a good demonstration of where this goes. It falls a bit short, but it at least gives you a grander sense of some point to the fighting.
On most games, you fight a round and you kill, capture flags, etc, then the round ends and you start over. PlanetSide does get to feeling like a hampster wheel after a while because there is no win condition, but there's at least a larger sense of the battle always going on and that your contribution to it does have an influence. I think what comes after it should be really interesting, but we'll have to wait and see.
If you're worried about the data, then you should protect that, not the hardware. Have the system thoroughly encrypted locked to biometric data. Then have it keep back ups of critical data on a secure remote server. Then if you're laptop gets stolen, no big deal, they can't get the data and you've not lost much.
Personally I think this boils down to the fact that one can convey a message without necessarily getting the grammar and spelling right. If I use there, their, or they're, you're able to deduce from the context of it's use, what I mean. Thus it's really not critical for you that I even get it right.
When you are using IM, or IRC, the emphasis is on rapidity to keep up with the thoughts of a flowing conversation. So spelling and grammar go out the window in the interests of efficiency. You type it however it comes out of your mind. Invariavly this carries over into other areas like e-mail, blog postings, etc.
How many of us really thoroughly re-read a blog posting like we'd read an academic paper, or an important work document? Frankly, we don't have time to screw around with it. So we don't. We are able to transmit meaning, and for the most part nobody really cares about the little glitches.
So I think it's just that there's such a volume of information out there and such a rush to make more that the important of that accuracy has fallen by the wayside. It gets in the way of getting things done. And remember, if it's all digital, it can always be edited later to fix any problems. If everything's a beta, you can afford to screw it up a bit.
Are you questioning me? TRAITOR!
Don't you understand? They are losing viewers because of the evil pirates who distribute their hard work for free on the Internet. This allows the terrorists to win. Please think of the children.
I don't know what everyone else will think about 13.1, but it kind of seems like overkill to me. I already, at times, wonder if there is really that much advantage in a 6.1, or 7.1 system, over a 5.1 system.
Think about all the movies that you really like and then imagine them without surround sound at all. Just simple stereo sound. Does it really diminish the movies? I mean I like surround sound but I've been unable to set it up for a while now and honestly, I don't miss it.
It's a neat gadget, and sure, if I have the equipment and room for it, why the heck not. But frankly good movies don't need surround sound. For example, I have Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon on DVD. It's a fantastic movie, and I've hooked up the surround sound to it. It is cool when a spear breaks and I hear the shards land behind my head. But if I didn't hear that, would it really make a difference to the movie? No.
So if you're talking 5.1 vs. 7.1 vs. 13.1, who really cares after a point. If it was easy to set up and I had the space for it, sure, that'd be neat, but in reality, it doesn't much matter.
1) When the IPod came out it was the only MP3 player that had that much capacity in that form factor. Others were close, but didn't quite match it.
2) The Ipod is really nicely finished. It's solid and sturdy. It feels well engineered like a BMW when you compare it to a chevy.
3) ITunes integration. Sure each company had their own way to manage MP3's, but none is so well integrated as the Ipod and itunes. It's simple and elegant.
4) Branding. But branding is something that can only come from the existence of the previous points. Yes, they made it cool, but they were able to make it cool because they made the actual product well.
I've owned an IPod for a couple of years now and I just got my wife a brand new IPod Photo for her birthday (her 15GB IPod was out of room). Every so often I look at the other players out there and none of them really do it for me.
When I look at a Rio Karma, for example, it looks like a cheap piece of plastic. It looks like, if I dropped it, it would fly apart into a million pieces. So when I see something like that I hardly ever get to considering the quality of other aspects like ITunes integration, etc.
Apple's IPod is successful because it's really good. Yes you pay a premium for it, but in the end, I get a quality product that works well and yes, looks good. The only thing they botched was the battery bit, but when you think about where they'd put a battery door you realize how much it impinges on the finish of the design.
It seems that this ruling is less about technology and more about the application of it. Presumably, you could have two P2P networks, running on identical software, with one running afoul of the law and the other one being clean based on how the software is promoted.
:)
If you had a P2P network that you marketed as a way to get movies and music for free, you'd be in trouble. If you marketed it as a way for independent bands and musicians to distribute their art, you would probably be okay. Theoretically that could be the exact same software and it would mostly come down to how it was promoted.
There's nothing in this ruling that suggests a network must actively attempt to inhibit copyright infringement, it just cannot promote it. So then if you set up your network to be for independent artists to distribute legitimate works and some folks then used it for distributing illegal stuff, you should also have a defense.
I like the SCOTUS because they seem to be the last branch of government that routinely comes out with wise decisions
And, for the record, GPA, etc are *not* public record. The school has to be authorized by the student (or the student's parents/guardians) to release that information. This new plan would give them that.
Actually, readin the article, this new Pentagon plan has nothing to do with that. This plan is merely collating information that they already have. The GPA information was part of previous legislation tied to no child left behind. That I think is a privacy invasion and that that particular of NCLB should be challenged. But the Pentagon's database itself is not the issue.
That's a matter of interpretation. The letter claims that building a database of potential recruits is not with the Pentagon's purview, but the Pentagon thinks it is. This is definitely directly related to their basic operations.
This isn't a privacy violation. This is the exact same tactics used by telemarketers, etc. They get profiles of potential customers and then call those customers. Nothing new here, just taking existing publicly available information and putting it in a database. The Pentagon has no authority to get information not in the public record, so they aren't going to have GPA's, school subjects, etc, unless it's publicly available.
If you opt out of course they have to keep you in a different database. If they didn't then every time they reviews their records you'd keep getting added back to the database. How else would they keep track of the fact that you didn't want to be in their database in the first place.
As for sharing the information, the only bit of information they would have that would be new is your response to their inquiries. Fine they can tell people that you don't want to be in the military. Given the size of our military compared to the country's military age population, that's a pretty big list.
This notion of being labeled a dissident is just plain silly. Not wanting to be in the military is a common enough thing that it's insufficient for profiling "dissidents". The FBI has enough to keep track of with more active dissidents that they don't have the time to go through the Pentagon's database and find out who didn't want to be in the Marines.
So stop with the paranoia, it isn't 1984 yet.
Here's the thing. Ad revenue is based on what is actually getting responses. If I don't view an ad, obviously I'm not going to buy whatever the ad was for based on that ad. But the question is: would I have bought it anyhow?
Ad blocking could be legitimately claimed as hurting the bottom line of advertisers only if some portion of those ads would have been responded to in the first place. My impression is that if you are somebody who would go through the effort to block the popups and ads that you probably weren't going to be buying from them anyhow. It's the same priciple with spam. Spammers try to do everything to get an e-mail into your box, but if I've got layer upon layer of spam filters, perhaps I'm simply not a market worth reaching.
I do think it'd be an issue if it became default, and there might be a basis for a lawsuit if that happened in IE because it is the default browser for most people. Mozilla and Opera could probably get away with it if they wanted to. Frankly though I don't think it's worth it to them to do it. If people are hell bent on not seeing ads they'll have on problem finding a checkbox and turning it on.
You could spend $3.4 million on the batman shtick, or you could spend that money on hiring a vigilante army.
Think about it, what are they paying contractors in Iraq to do protection and security jobs where they are getting hsot at constantly. So pay for them, and then the equipment to arm them, and you'd have a wrecking crew far superior to you on your own.
Figure $250K/vigilante/year for salary and benefits and you could hire 10 of these guys for $2.5 million. Then you'd have about $1 million/year to spend on equipment for them. Body armor, assault rifles, etc.
Then whenever you want justice to be done, you give them a call and they crack some skulls for you. If you want, you can even give them bat ears to put on their helmet so they can keep with the theme.
The best part is, you don't have to worry about getting bruised or scarred. You can go to your rich parties, party it up and know that you've kept the streets safe without personally lifting a finger.
This could be really fascinating to see. Ultimately Dell and the like don't want to be selling commodity hardware. It takes a lot of resources for very little margin. They'd much rather focus on selling fashionable high end machines like their XPS systems.
So, OS X, could be sort of the bridge to getting the PC makers away from the commodity market. If you want a cheap bare bones PC, you get your wintel XP box. If you want something that's going to be high quality and last you a few years, you get yourself a macintel box.
The question that remains is whether Apple is willing to sacrifice some hardware sales to broaden the base of their OS support. I kinda doubt they will because their bread and butter really is making nice hardware. It's beneficial to them to have an exclusive lock on the apple faithful as far as that goes.
In the end, what I really hope for is being able to buy an Apple computer with OS X and be able to run my Windows games under that environment rather seamlessly. Then I can run OS X all the time, play my windows games when I want to, and then down the road hopefully mac games will come out and I can drop Windows all together.