I thought the core idea of IBM on-demand computing was having a box with 12 processors, but you are only paying for 4.
Nearly. IBM is a sevices company. Think of the same principle, only with services. For example, let's say IBM is hosting a web site for you. On Demand means that if your site gets Slashdotted, there's a simple and instant process whereby you can ask them to flick a switch, and another 10 servers suddenly become part of your cluster.
The philosophy is to think of services like hosting as a utility, like mains water. If you need more water today than you did yesterday, just leave the tap on for longer.
OnDemand also has elements of turnaround time. Where before it may have been acceptable to accept orders for a service, then spend a month sourcing the hardware, building the environment, and getting the system up and running, OnDemand means you call up and have your servers ready pretty much instantly.
None of this involves particularly radical new technology, but it does involve a new way of looking at service offerings: a focus on off-the-shelf one-size-fits-all offerings, as opposed to bespoke development; having hardware set up and ready to go, being able to move functionality around to wherever the free cycles are, etc.
That's pretty funny, that's exactly the term people use to justify using tube guitar amps instead of transistor amps.
Indeed. But the purpose of a guitar amp is to distort -- the unprocessed signal from an electric guitar is not all that pleasant to listen to.... and the distortion from tubes makes a nice sound.
What I find strange is hi-fi buffs who insist on tubes in hifi amps. In hi-fi, distortion is bad.
looks like he could pull it off. never seen that movie though.
The Office is a TV series (two 6 parters and two Xmas specials, in fact), not a movie. It's massively popular in the UK, it's been shown on BBC America, and a US remake is in the works which will probably miss the point by a mile.
I can stomach an up-front cost, a known trade of resources, or even a subscription with an opt-in approach to re-subscribing, but there's something about the the leech-like nature of these micro-payment schemes I have a strong urge to stay away from.
An obvious solution is a tiered charging structure.
For example:
Let's say Which? puts up a one-click micropayment based site, where you get charged for viewing product reviews.
Your first 10 reviews cost 10c each. 11-50 cost 2c each. 51-100 cost 1c each. After that, they're free. Items on your credit sheet drop off after some period of time; say a week.
So, you can spend $3.30 maximum, after which you have a week's free access to the site.
If micropayments truly sucked, PayPal would have gone out of business years ago. Period. End of story.
I don't see Paypal as being purely about micropayments. I use paypal for eBay payments (as many people do), and we're certainly talking about sums greater than $10 at a time.
Micropayments to me go as low as a penny at a time, maybe a fraction of a penny.
The reason this is important is that people will spend a penny in a flash without thinking too hard about it, yet if a million people do it, that's $10,000 of revenue. I'm sure you can think of plenty of content-led web sites that could manage very nicely on those kinds of terms if only the infrastructure was available.
If Slashdot points you at an article in the Times, you click through, and it invites you to take out a $5 subscription, you'll probably pass. If it simply tells you that if you continue you'll be debited by a penny, you'd likely shrug and pay the money.
The flipside to this is, you won't spend that penny if it's hassle to do so, so the challenge that micropayment technology has to face up to is to make the payment process incredibly lightweight for the end user, while remaining secure. I need to spend at least $5 before the overhead of authorising a Paypal transaction seems worth the effort.
Lego used to have a policy of no militaristic themes. I don't know whether it still stands... those pirates and spacement sometimes look a bit violent.
This sounds like it was created to stream movies designed for a comptuer screen onto a TV set. Can you imagine trying to play a 640x480 movie on a 60 inch plasma TV? Talk about looking like shit.
NTSC DV is usually 720 x 480: just because Plasmas are big, doesn't mean they're high resolution.
You do know VGA monitors are better than TVs, right?
Devices like this are getting more and more common - the basic functionality is all there, but you can't select audio content without turning on your TV for the UI.
It's not clear from the article whether that's the case with this product, but since it's not bragging about the front panel display, I'm not optimistic.
That's hassle I don't want when putting on music. Picking a CD off the shelf and putting it into a tray is less trouble.
All I want is a player with no disk drive, no built-in flash, just a Compact Flash slot. It doesn't need USB, Firewire, FM transceiver, microphone, or x-ray laser. It could be light and cheap. Why doesn't it exist?
I've got one. It's so generic I can't even remember its name...
It's not perfect: no screen, the only controls are stop/play/pause/fwd/back... but if you're happy to make a playlist you can fit an album and a half onto a 128Mb card; that lasts long enough for my bike ride to work (must get back in the saddle one day) and the battery lasts ages.
That's the nature of broadcast. A chunk of spectrum costs a certain amount, they need to attract a large number of listeners to justify that cost, so they target their programming to the lowest common denominator.
In theory, digital will allow more channels in the same range of spectrum, so it may become economically viable to target more niche audiences. Your niche may (or may not) be included.
In the UK, digital radio (using a different technology to that in the article I believe) provides a largeish number of channels: the downside being that audiophile bores believe the bitrate per channel is unacceptably low.
I'm seriously considering buying a DAB radio in order to get XFM outside London.
$.99 is pretty darn cheap.. but $.99 plus a longwinded conversion ritual just to get it onto a non-Windows-non-Mac system is not cheap to anyone who values their time.
My question is, how does the iPod decrypt the file without a key? Or is it simply using the parent boxes key? It seems to me that if that's the case it should be trivial to recover the key from an iPod directly, no PC required (Just a Mac:-)
Hypothesising here, but maybe the transfer from desktop to iPod is not simply a file transfer, but a decrypt-and-transfer: i.e. the music files are not encrypted by the time they reach the iPod.
Luckily not everyone is forced to work with idiots.
Where I work we deliberately aim for C code that is as readable as possible to non C coders.
For example, a simple:
if(x) y();... wouldn't get though a code review, because although we C coders understand that a block containing a single statement is equivalent to a block, a novice might not.
The idea is that in 10 years' time, when everyone involved in the code may well have left the company, and C may well have gone the way of COBOL, an averagely bright person with a C reference will be able to grok the code in an emergency.
Richard, I agree with your pitch on free software to some extent, but how exactly are we in the IT business going to make a living if all (or most) of the software is free in the future?
I don't think RMS gives two figs about how you make a living. Anti-gun campaigners don't stop to worry about "how exactly we in the arms trade are going to make living at all". Animal rights campaigners don't fret about how vivisectionists are going to get paid.
Remember, RMS is a hugely talented programmer. He probably thinks your average code monkey is overpaid as it is.
(On top of that, others have made valid points about ways that commerce can make money while paying Free Software programmers.)
I like my free software, but I like money too. Some things are better free, and some you need to pay for.
I feel I might be feeding a troll, but...
"libre" not "gratis"!
Think of "non-free" more in terms of "caged": a caged lion is robbed of its power. A free lion is a magnificent force. "Caged" software is software whos potential is limited.
Most people have no problem with it. Time for a newer PC perhaps.
iTunes for Windows is sluggish on my 1.8 GHz Thinkpad T30.
Once it's in the foreground it works tolerably, but switching between it and other applications takes an unacceptably long time (this is the hallmark of a memory hog).
Given that a P200 can decode MP3s without breaking a sweat, and that Windows users have to learn a whole new UI just in order to use iTunes (*) I'd argue that iTunes for Windows is not "Gravy".
(*) I know, Winamp also has a non-standard UI, but at least it's fast. I would rather it used standard Windows widgets...
They're treading a fine line between taking the piss, paying tribute, and just playing a style of music they genuinely love.
Fair play to them. I find it hard to begrudge them their success, even if Spinal Tap did the same thing, better, years ago.
Their cover of Radiohead's "Street Spirit" is absolute genius however. I've only heard it live and in radio sessions. If anyone knows how I can buy it, mail me please!
Really, you have to subdivide the pop genre before you can start ignoring sections of it. I have a fondness for "jangly guitar pop" (although that's probably too damn broad a category, too), for instance, but I could do without "Brittany Spears-type pop."
I want to leap to Britney's defence.
It's easy to be a snob about manufactured pop acts, but "Hit Me Baby One More Time" is a straight-up classic pop song the calibre of any Motown or Phil Spector classic. (Po faced "serious music" types might take Travis's guitar version as evidence of the song's inherent quality -- me I'll just revel in the original's incredibly polished production).
"Ooops I Did it Again" is also tinged with genius. Who's genius? Not Britney's, sure. I don't really care: a piece of perfect pop exists and I don't need to know who deserves the credit.
I'm not saying that these singles are anything but confections: they're not meant to appeal to the more complex emotions. They're meant to sound great on a car radio in the summer when you have the windows down. They're meant to make you grin from ear to ear when you sing along to them in a cheesy disco.
Other great pop singles include:
Kylie: Hand on your Heart
TaTu: All The Things She Said
Beyonce: Crazy in Love
The Spice Girls: Say You'll be There
New Radicals: Get What you Give
Give these songs a proper listen; I hope you find they stand out. They are manufactured, but they are manufactured to a high quality. People are trying and failing to match that quality, and these are the forgettable wannabees that clutter up the lower end of the singles top 20.
Er, but I guess I'm offtopic, because these are songs whos natural place is as singles, not album tracks -- and this is a topic about albums. Ironically although I love all the above pop songs, when I buy music I buy albums -- there's no way I'm going to buy a Britney album (you just know the rest of the tracks will be fillers) so I'm not sure I even own her classic songs.
Ahh Radiohead.. One of the most overrated bands ever
I've heard "There There" from "Hail to the Thief" dozens of times now, and it still brings a lump to my throat every time.... and you can't take that away from me dammit!
You have a right to your opinions, but so do the millions who love the work Radiohead are doing at the moment. This is why, as others have pointed out in this discussion, it's not valid to label music as being "good" or "bad", only to state "I like it" or "I don't like it".
Having said that, the vast majority of post-Syd Pink Floyd is pedestrian tripe, and all you sheep who think you like it are WRONG;)
I'm willing to bet that part of the problem is that coffee/soda is part of your routine. I'm the same: get to work, grab a coffee, lunchtime, go to the Coke fridge before selecting a meal, afternoon break - another coffee. Get home, brew a coffee.
So try and quit while you're not in a routine. A holiday -- away from home -- is the ideal opportunity. Sure, you don't want to spoil your hard-earned holiday with headaches, but it will pay off in the end, and if it's the right kind of holiday you can fend off those headaches with plenty of sleep.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're interested in music around the house, might I suggest a low-power FM transmitter?
I believe that, low power or not, this is illegal in Britain.
I thought the core idea of IBM on-demand computing was having a box with 12 processors, but you are only paying for 4.
Nearly. IBM is a sevices company. Think of the same principle, only with services. For example, let's say IBM is hosting a web site for you. On Demand means that if your site gets Slashdotted, there's a simple and instant process whereby you can ask them to flick a switch, and another 10 servers suddenly become part of your cluster.
The philosophy is to think of services like hosting as a utility, like mains water. If you need more water today than you did yesterday, just leave the tap on for longer.
OnDemand also has elements of turnaround time. Where before it may have been acceptable to accept orders for a service, then spend a month sourcing the hardware, building the environment, and getting the system up and running, OnDemand means you call up and have your servers ready pretty much instantly.
None of this involves particularly radical new technology, but it does involve a new way of looking at service offerings: a focus on off-the-shelf one-size-fits-all offerings, as opposed to bespoke development; having hardware set up and ready to go, being able to move functionality around to wherever the free cycles are, etc.
That's pretty funny, that's exactly the term people use to justify using tube guitar amps instead of transistor amps.
... and the distortion from tubes makes a nice sound.
Indeed. But the purpose of a guitar amp is to distort -- the unprocessed signal from an electric guitar is not all that pleasant to listen to.
What I find strange is hi-fi buffs who insist on tubes in hifi amps. In hi-fi, distortion is bad.
It's always amusing to compare the people in American soap operas to the people in English ones like, say, EastEnders...
It's also amusing to compare the people in American soaps to the people in American real life.
The Office is funny because it closely resembles real life. In real life, beautiful people are the exception.
looks like he could pull it off. never seen that movie though.
The Office is a TV series (two 6 parters and two Xmas specials, in fact), not a movie. It's massively popular in the UK, it's been shown on BBC America, and a US remake is in the works which will probably miss the point by a mile.
Tim will be a perfect Arthur Dent IMHO.
I can stomach an up-front cost, a known trade of resources, or even a subscription with an opt-in approach to re-subscribing, but there's something about the the leech-like nature of these micro-payment schemes I have a strong urge to stay away from.
An obvious solution is a tiered charging structure.
For example:
Let's say Which? puts up a one-click micropayment based site, where you get charged for viewing product reviews.
Your first 10 reviews cost 10c each.
11-50 cost 2c each.
51-100 cost 1c each.
After that, they're free.
Items on your credit sheet drop off after some period of time; say a week.
So, you can spend $3.30 maximum, after which you have a week's free access to the site.
Would that keep you happy?
If micropayments truly sucked, PayPal would have gone out of business years ago. Period. End of story.
I don't see Paypal as being purely about micropayments. I use paypal for eBay payments (as many people do), and we're certainly talking about sums greater than $10 at a time.
Micropayments to me go as low as a penny at a time, maybe a fraction of a penny.
The reason this is important is that people will spend a penny in a flash without thinking too hard about it, yet if a million people do it, that's $10,000 of revenue. I'm sure you can think of plenty of content-led web sites that could manage very nicely on those kinds of terms if only the infrastructure was available.
If Slashdot points you at an article in the Times, you click through, and it invites you to take out a $5 subscription, you'll probably pass. If it simply tells you that if you continue you'll be debited by a penny, you'd likely shrug and pay the money.
The flipside to this is, you won't spend that penny if it's hassle to do so, so the challenge that micropayment technology has to face up to is to make the payment process incredibly lightweight for the end user, while remaining secure. I need to spend at least $5 before the overhead of authorising a Paypal transaction seems worth the effort.
DOSEmu relies on a real x86 processor.
You could instead use Bochs to emulate an x86.
Call it "Lego gun set"
Lego used to have a policy of no militaristic themes. I don't know whether it still stands... those pirates and spacement sometimes look a bit violent.
same goes for tivo in my book.
I've been unable to spec up a PC for that price that's good enough to run MythTV.
Yeah, you can cobble together basic PC, but to replace TiVo it needs to be
This sounds like it was created to stream movies designed for a comptuer screen onto a TV set. Can you imagine trying to play a 640x480 movie on a 60 inch plasma TV? Talk about looking like shit.
NTSC DV is usually 720 x 480: just because Plasmas are big, doesn't mean they're high resolution.
You do know VGA monitors are better than TVs, right?
Devices like this are getting more and more common - the basic functionality is all there, but you can't select audio content without turning on your TV for the UI.
It's not clear from the article whether that's the case with this product, but since it's not bragging about the front panel display, I'm not optimistic.
That's hassle I don't want when putting on music. Picking a CD off the shelf and putting it into a tray is less trouble.
Me, I'm saving up for a Squeezebox.
All I want is a player with no disk drive, no built-in flash, just a Compact Flash slot. It doesn't need USB, Firewire, FM transceiver, microphone, or x-ray laser. It could be light and cheap. Why doesn't it exist?
... but if you're happy to make a playlist you can fit an album and a half onto a 128Mb card; that lasts long enough for my bike ride to work (must get back in the saddle one day) and the battery lasts ages.
I've got one. It's so generic I can't even remember its name...
It's not perfect: no screen, the only controls are stop/play/pause/fwd/back
That's the nature of broadcast. A chunk of spectrum costs a certain amount, they need to attract a large number of listeners to justify that cost, so they target their programming to the lowest common denominator.
In theory, digital will allow more channels in the same range of spectrum, so it may become economically viable to target more niche audiences. Your niche may (or may not) be included.
In the UK, digital radio (using a different technology to that in the article I believe) provides a largeish number of channels: the downside being that audiophile bores believe the bitrate per channel is unacceptably low.
I'm seriously considering buying a DAB radio in order to get XFM outside London.
$.99 is pretty darn cheap .. but $.99 plus a longwinded conversion ritual just to get it onto a non-Windows-non-Mac system is not cheap to anyone who values their time.
My question is, how does the iPod decrypt the file without a key? Or is it simply using the parent boxes key? It seems to me that if that's the case it should be trivial to recover the key from an iPod directly, no PC required (Just a Mac :-)
Hypothesising here, but maybe the transfer from desktop to iPod is not simply a file transfer, but a decrypt-and-transfer: i.e. the music files are not encrypted by the time they reach the iPod.
Luckily not everyone is forced to work with idiots.
... wouldn't get though a code review, because although we C coders understand that a block containing a single statement is equivalent to a block, a novice might not.
Where I work we deliberately aim for C code that is as readable as possible to non C coders.
For example, a simple:
if(x) y();
The idea is that in 10 years' time, when everyone involved in the code may well have left the company, and C may well have gone the way of COBOL, an averagely bright person with a C reference will be able to grok the code in an emergency.
Richard, I agree with your pitch on free software to some extent, but how exactly are we in the IT business going to make a living if all (or most) of the software is free in the future?
I don't think RMS gives two figs about how you make a living. Anti-gun campaigners don't stop to worry about "how exactly we in the arms trade are going to make living at all". Animal rights campaigners don't fret about how vivisectionists are going to get paid.
Remember, RMS is a hugely talented programmer. He probably thinks your average code monkey is overpaid as it is.
(On top of that, others have made valid points about ways that commerce can make money while paying Free Software programmers.)
I like my free software, but I like money too. Some things are better free, and some you need to pay for.
I feel I might be feeding a troll, but...
"libre" not "gratis"!
Think of "non-free" more in terms of "caged": a caged lion is robbed of its power. A free lion is a magnificent force. "Caged" software is software whos potential is limited.
Most people have no problem with it. Time for a newer PC perhaps.
iTunes for Windows is sluggish on my 1.8 GHz Thinkpad T30.
Once it's in the foreground it works tolerably, but switching between it and other applications takes an unacceptably long time (this is the hallmark of a memory hog).
Given that a P200 can decode MP3s without breaking a sweat, and that Windows users have to learn a whole new UI just in order to use iTunes (*) I'd argue that iTunes for Windows is not "Gravy".
(*) I know, Winamp also has a non-standard UI, but at least it's fast. I would rather it used standard Windows widgets...
The Darkness are taking the piss.
They're treading a fine line between taking the piss, paying tribute, and just playing a style of music they genuinely love.
Fair play to them. I find it hard to begrudge them their success, even if Spinal Tap did the same thing, better, years ago.
Their cover of Radiohead's "Street Spirit" is absolute genius however. I've only heard it live and in radio sessions. If anyone knows how I can buy it, mail me please!
I want to leap to Britney's defence.
It's easy to be a snob about manufactured pop acts, but "Hit Me Baby One More Time" is a straight-up classic pop song the calibre of any Motown or Phil Spector classic. (Po faced "serious music" types might take Travis's guitar version as evidence of the song's inherent quality -- me I'll just revel in the original's incredibly polished production).
"Ooops I Did it Again" is also tinged with genius. Who's genius? Not Britney's, sure. I don't really care: a piece of perfect pop exists and I don't need to know who deserves the credit.
I'm not saying that these singles are anything but confections: they're not meant to appeal to the more complex emotions. They're meant to sound great on a car radio in the summer when you have the windows down. They're meant to make you grin from ear to ear when you sing along to them in a cheesy disco.
Other great pop singles include:
Give these songs a proper listen; I hope you find they stand out. They are manufactured, but they are manufactured to a high quality. People are trying and failing to match that quality, and these are the forgettable wannabees that clutter up the lower end of the singles top 20.
Er, but I guess I'm offtopic, because these are songs whos natural place is as singles, not album tracks -- and this is a topic about albums. Ironically although I love all the above pop songs, when I buy music I buy albums -- there's no way I'm going to buy a Britney album (you just know the rest of the tracks will be fillers) so I'm not sure I even own her classic songs.
Ahh Radiohead.. One of the most overrated bands ever
... and you can't take that away from me dammit!
;)
I've heard "There There" from "Hail to the Thief" dozens of times now, and it still brings a lump to my throat every time.
You have a right to your opinions, but so do the millions who love the work Radiohead are doing at the moment. This is why, as others have pointed out in this discussion, it's not valid to label music as being "good" or "bad", only to state "I like it" or "I don't like it".
Having said that, the vast majority of post-Syd Pink Floyd is pedestrian tripe, and all you sheep who think you like it are WRONG
White Stripes are the most overrated band EVER!!!
I would have agreed with you shortly after I bought White Blood Cells around the time the hype started.
But then I was lucky enough to see them play live. It's *astonishing* how entertaining a show they give, with just a drum kit, a mic and a guitar.
I'm willing to bet that part of the problem is that coffee/soda is part of your routine. I'm the same: get to work, grab a coffee, lunchtime, go to the Coke fridge before selecting a meal, afternoon break - another coffee. Get home, brew a coffee.
So try and quit while you're not in a routine. A holiday -- away from home -- is the ideal opportunity. Sure, you don't want to spoil your hard-earned holiday with headaches, but it will pay off in the end, and if it's the right kind of holiday you can fend off those headaches with plenty of sleep.