If they shipped computers with multi-button mouse, the complaints would just focus on how the Apple multi-button mouse doesn't have 3 buttons, or a scroll wheel, or that the scroll wheel feels icky, or that it should be optical, or that optical mice are too expensive and they should have shipped an optomechanical one and lowered the price by $10, or that it should be wireless or white or aluminum or clear or blue or rounder or more square... or better yet, they should ship it with NO mice so that novice customers would take it home and not be able to use it. Awesome.
My heart bleeds for the intense agony that Apple customers feel when being forced to buy exactly the mouse they wanted at commodity prices from whomever they want (those monopolistic BASTARDS!), because Apple didn't include that particular product in the box.
The comparison with Windows is pretty funny - something that is very difficult and time consuming to install, and precludes manufacturers from shipping other operating systems, and probably costs about 10x what a mouse does, which you just plug in and It Just Works.
Next I suppose we'll hear about what a travesty it is that Apple includes white phone cords with their computers, when every right-thinking person knows that only gray phone cords are acceptable. Thus Apple computers must not be bought because they obviously only work with white phone cords!
You know, those things that can't possibly be regular contrails, because this guy I know said that they don't look right. It's obviously a government plot to spray us all with secret chemicals.
...and then when you actually try to use it you'll find that ripping DVDs to 3" size takes a half hour per movie, and that the reason the portable movie player only costs $50 more is that it maxes out at 8 fps because it has the same embedded CPU as the audio-only player, and that the battery only lasts 15 minutes because the audio player could power down the drive during songs but the video player can't, plus the color LCD takes lots more power than than the B/W one.
In reality, that $50 more color AV player with crappy battery life would never be put on the market, and instead it would cost $300 more and have a much better CPU and battery and would also be a PDA (since that costs almost nothing extra once you have all that hardware), and it's already for sale today from PalmOne and Sony and HPaq and Dell etc. etc.
No, they struggle because everything they have sucks. Haven't you even been in one? It's not a matter of merchandise that lacks famous logos... it's just crap.
>If you truly felt that way then what research would there be left to do?
Wow, that's a pretty ignorant question, as if the only thing anthropologists did in your opinion was to try to prove that evolution was a law instead of a theory, or something like that.
> It is my opinion that evolution is not dis-provable
Fair enough...
>regardless of what evidence is discovered.
Oh dear. So, if (for the sake of argument) one day a crashed alien mothership is found buried in Africa that has schematics and equipment required to manufacture all creatures living or dead, and many many scientific studies are done that demonstrate that this is not a hoax... you would still believe in evolution?
I'm not suggesting that this is the real origin of man, but I'm trying to point out that you've basically said that you are 100% fanatically devoted to evolution regardless of actual data, which is kinda messed up.
> However it kills me to see the so called scientist that say that evolution is fact. I wouldn't mind so much if they at least said "To the best of our knowledge now..." this is what we believe.
Anyone who says that anything is absolute fact is not a scientist, by definition, unless that absolute fact is "I think, therefore I am."
Science is about using reality to test hypotheses. As such, nothing can be 100% unwaveringly always absolutely incontravertibly true to a scientist. Any scientist with any sort of education is well aware of how every scientific discipline has had models of the universe that seemed to fit, but were proven not to be accurate after a while.
Creationists looooove to say that evolution is "just a theory", but so are relativity and gravity. I doubt many creationists would be willing to jump off a cliff or subjected to a nuclear explosion with only prayer to protect them.
Creationists also looooove to point out that scientists, over the course of human history, have been wrong. Firstly, religious folks have been incredibly wrong and changed their dogma many times as well (witchcraft, heresy, crusades, genocide, etc.) so it's not as though creationists have any moral high ground here. Secondly, that's the nature of science: new data, if reproducible and not explainable by existing models, can at times invalidate those existing models. Over time, as more data is gathered, the models that we have for the universe become increasingly accurate.
However, that doesn't mean that any time some dork says that they have some data that proves that an extremely well-tested hypothesis is false, they are correct. Cold Fusion is a good example of a scientific claim that someone made that would have been very beneficial to mankind, and would have made a lot of people a lot of money, and people really tried to reproduce it, but it didn't work. Some people choose to believe in it even though it doesn't actually work, and cry "cover-up", but that's science at work - the proof just wasn't there. As much as people wanted it to be true, it wasn't, or at least nobody could prove that it was, so it was discarded as a fluke.
In addition to pointing out the obvious and not at all shocking nature of scientific knowledge as improving over time, you also make a tremendous leap in lumping nutritionists and meteorologists in with anthropologists as "these same people". I seriously doubt that the experts debating the safety and efficacy of the Atkins diet are also experts on global warming and anthropology.
You also make a foolish mistake in assuming that any report that you're aware of on any issue represents the professional and official opinion all scientists everywhere. So you read something somewhere that was written by someone claiming to follow a scientific method, and then read something else written by someone else that (possibly) also claimed to follow a scientific method, and who disagreed with the first one. Do you want a cookie?
Oh no, two people disagreed! You've proven that science is a sham!
Fair enough. I'll believe creationists when they can pull God down from the sky and show him/her to me, and get him/her to answer questions like "how can all those different translations and editions of your holy book be equally correct, when any linguist can demonstrate that the translations say totally different things?".
>I'm sorry, but anyone here who believes that they came from an ape....come on now.
It's hardly ridiculous. They look like us, act like us, have extremely similar internal body structure, have 98% of the same DNA... in fact, they're so similar to us that diseases that affect them can affect us. Ebola and HIV are examples of diseases that are believed to have come to humans from apes.
I guess if you've just seen a picture of a monkey once, or seen once sitting around in a zoo, you ould be ignorant of all that.
>I came from a creator God with infinite wisdom, infinite knowledge, and an infinite understanding of everything possible.
I see - your theory of the origin of mankind is based on personal pride. How do you know that you weren't created, for example, by aliens as a joke, or a high school science project? Nope, couldn't be - that wouldn't satisfy your sense of pride.
>To say I came from a pool of goo "millions of years ago" is just ludicrous.
You didn't. You came from your mother's womb. A pool of goo BILLIONS of years ago produced some chemicals. Those took BILLIONS of years to arrange themselves into structures that replicated themselves. Those took an extremely long time to arrange themselves into single celled organisms. Those took an extremely long time to arrange themselves into colonies, and then multicelled organisms, and so on. It's possible with the fossil record and living animals to see a gradual change from simple organisms to ones that look almost exactly like us.
To say that there's some magic invisible man in the sky who spontaneously created a person out of thin air 6000 years ago is far more ridiculous, and has exactly zero evidence to back it up, and massive amounts of human experience and material evidence that disagrees with that account of the origin of mankind.
However, creationism does come bundled with a big pat on the back for being the very favorite organisms of the most perfect wonderful being in the universe, and with some handy rider clauses such as that the rest of the creatures belong to men, including women and children but also all animals, whether or not they appear to suffer when you kill them, and even men who believe in other gods. It's very convenient.
Lately, as human ethics have matured, religious apologists have backpedaled on some of those items, trying to reinterpret a literal reading of their holy books into something that is more suitable to contemporary attitudes toward women and children, foreigners, people of other races, etc. Isn't it interesting how malleable those absolutely true holy words are to the requirements of the moment? But they're still precisely and completely true *now*, regardless of how they used to be interpreted, or (in some cases) how they were worded in the language they were originally written in. The best that creationists can do is to have someone else tell them what their holy books mean, and then believe in that without question and in the face of evidence to the contrary.
> why does the number of years it took us to "evolve" keep getting longer
Where did you get this idea?
> newer things about the human body that can't possibly be "evolved" even in their stupid Big Bang timeframe
Please provide a specific example of a structure in the human body that scientists say could not possibly have been evolved in the amount of time that has elapsed since the Big Bang. A link or a bibliographic reference counts; "I heard that there was something like that" doesn't.
Creationists somehow overlook the fact that there are many other organisms on this planet other than humans. There are many examples of other animals that have very similar structures to ours (not limited just to primates). Eyes and red blood cells and brains and sexual reproduction and DNA are really fascinating and complex, but they're not unique traits to humans by any stretch of the imagination.
Also, anyone who denies that evolution could happen is ignor
Probably because everybody writing open source software, as a rule, assumes that all users of their software are hardcore developer geeks like they are, and don't bother with all that extra code and documentation. Then they complain that some closed-source app is beating them and they can't for the life of them figure out why.
That NAT trick is interesting but it won't make a user's appliance-based firewall (in their DSL modem, etc.) and personal firewalls reconfigure themselves too.
The problem with all this "why can't P2P apps just configure themselves automagically without user intervention" thinking is that it opens you up to all sorts of attack. The easier it is for firewalls to be reconfigured by a no-user-interface program, the more powerful all these internet worms are going to get. "Click here for a really funny game" = "open your firewall up so I can use a remote root exploit that your firewall blocks by default".
Alternatively, folks could just *write documentation* that doesn't use a bunch of obscure acronyms and terms that an average user wouldn't know.
Has no one here ever heard of eMule or its closed-source predecessor, eDonkey2000?
It's really interesting to see all this press and to read all these gushing posts saying "oh Bram, thank you so much for changing p2p forever" when in fact there are other swarming download p2p apps out there that work in a very similar fashion. I'm sure there are a couple more apps like this that I haven't heard of, too. But let's all pretend that BT is unique and write some more articles about how totally new this idea is.
I don't know which came first, and I like both, but I just think that on a site like/. where everybody loves to harp on the Microsoft/Apple/Xerox relationship, nobody says a word about ed2k when praising BT.
>How is this different from a symphony concert? Everyone's playing what's on the stand in front of them, Yes...
>with little to no creative input. Wrong. Music notation is an abstraction of the notes and timing that the composer wants the performer to play, but it isn't complete. The conductor and performers read a lot into it. Some music is written without ornamentation, but with the understanding that the performer will add it themselves. Other music is written with the intention that all the notes are predefined, but with the knowledge that a performer is going to add timing, vibratto, attack, and velocity nuances to the music when it's performed. Just because modern music notation has symbols for all sorts of performance details doesn't mean that the written music actually employs all of that. There's an assumption that the performer can look at the music and know how to bring it to life.
Compare that to a sampler or synth. Those are just going to play the notes exactly as written, and it won't even sound as good as a robot playing the actual instrument because the sound is spliced together from single-note samples. You can sample multiple notes and add performance rules such as when to use rubato, but that's only as good as the person who wrote the software. Maybe someday with enough CPU power, samples will be replaced with acoustical models of real instruments and motion-capture of world-class performers, but we're not there yet (and those top-class performers would be stupid to do that anyway).
Being a performing musician is more than just being able to play the notes as written with no mistakes.
Because there aren't enough ways to figure that out already.
Next we'll hear about someone making an oven that you can ping to see what temperature it is. If the latency is high, it's warm; if the latency is low, it's cold. Hooray!
Besides, who would want to use a battery tester to measure system load when it doesn't even have a themes engine or an IRC client built in?
>WinXP on PPC, one would have to imagine that this is exactly what MS is going to do.
Why? To get that amazing price performance benefit of PPC hardware over x86? Oh wait, there isn't one.
NT was ported to non-x86 processors to punish/intimidate Intel for dabbling in video codecs where Microsoft had forbidden them to go. Nobody actually bought it, and pretty soon MS discontinued it and went back to x86-only, but the point was made: if you mess with MS, they can port to other hardware... "you need us, we don't need you." And look at Intel now, supporting Linux. Surprise!
>Since MS is a Root CA this wouldn't be that difficult for them todo.
The apparent cornerstone of this scheme is that MS's (or whoever's) root CA private key remains private, so that only they could sign their emails. Wouldn't it suck if the next big worm was actually a distributed brute-force crack attempt aimed at a root CA's private key? If they got it, any cert based anti-spam scheme would be subverted. Sign your own spams with the real private key! Woo hoo, spam fest! OK, maybe you revoke the CA's key, but how easily would this be propagated?
I dunno what the capacity is of all hackable machines on the 'net, so it's awfully hard to know how long such a massively distributed crack effort would take. Any guessers out there?
Let me get this straight: - a central body would decide what is spam and what isn't spam - a central body would be somehow accountable for arbitrating disputes over whether a message was spam or not, whether a spamming complaint was valid or not, whether someone stole their cert and spammed with it, etc. - everyone who wanted to send mail would need to pay for a certificate - everyone who wanted to check incoming mail would have to check a certificate revocation list very frequently, to avoid getting mail from spammers who had just gotten a new cert and spammed like crazy
There is a technique very much like this, and it's FREE, and it's called a relay blacklist. The difference is that there is no fancy crypto involved, but the same problems remain: - the third party is fallible when it comes to identifying spammers vs. non-spammers - spammers are happy to keep one step ahead of the blacklist, even if that means using a new identity (domain or cert) every day - the identity (domain or cert) that spammers use is actually one that someone else paid for, so the system punishes everyone EXCEPT the spammer
I wish this would work, but I really don't think it would.
This just punishes the relay, not the spammer. There's no guarantee that the owner of the relay box will notice, or do anything, just because their box is sluggish. Plenty of machines are already infected with worms, and nobody is fixing them; what if those worms were (instead of a pointless exercise in chaos) tools to identify available servers for spammers to use? (In fact one of the recent MyDoom worms is suggested to have this purpose.)
Take all the idle capacity of poorly protected servers on the 'net. That's the amount of processing power that spammers potentially have at their disposal to spend on solving little math problems. And note, it costs them nothing because they're somebody else's hardware on somebody else's bandwidth. As long as they don't completely exhaust the usefulness of each infected server, there will be plenty of folks who won't even notice that anything is wrong with their server, so they won't have any idea that they should try and fix it.
>The concept is simple, the implementation would be a lot of work
Right. The concept of "fix spam" is easy, but the implementation of an unspecified design is really hard. Kind of like "create lasting world peace" and "switch from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources" and "find a cure for cancer" are easy concepts, but implementing them sure is a lot of work. The engineers will have to roll up their sleeves but I'm sure we can get it done if we can all just agree to get on with it!
You forgot the part where you actually offer a suggestion. What you've done is to restate the goal, and get mad when someone points out that you haven't actually proposed anything specific.
>> What's to stop someone from just running their own SMTP server? The software isn't exactly hard to come by. >Filtering port 25, assuming the updated protocol would utilize the same port.
Maybe you don't understand te poster's point. What's to stop someone from just setting up a $NEW_MAIL_PROTOCOL server and spamming from that? How does your completely unspecific new mail service differentiate between good mail and bad mail?
No, no, they're just going to see how fast they can make it go overall! Even a CEO knows that you always optimize for all possible scenarios. That way nobody can accuse them of focusing on just one application. (Benchmarks lie, so the best bet is to just make it go faster and skip the benchmarks.)
The Rio Karma is 46% bigger than the iPod (78% thicker).
20GB Apple iPod: 6.1 cu in 20GB Rio Karma: 8.91 cu in
20GB Karma: 2.7" X 3.0" X 1.1", 5.5oz 20GB iPod: 4.1 by 2.4 by 0.62 inches, 5.6oz
I have a digital camera that's 1.3" thick, and that's pretty thick for a pants pocket - it's really prominent. 1.1" is probably similarly brickish. YMMV. A jacket pocket would probably be fine, though.
My advice for portable audio gizmo shoppers: make sure you actually see the products in person and that you get to handle it & play with the UI (i.e. not some broken demo model that doesn't turn on) before you buy it... don't just buy one based on a feature matrix. It could have a crappy UI, or be flimsy, or have a crappy screen, or weigh a ton, etc. etc.
Slashdot Mirror
If they shipped computers with multi-button mouse, the complaints would just focus on how the Apple multi-button mouse doesn't have 3 buttons, or a scroll wheel, or that the scroll wheel feels icky, or that it should be optical, or that optical mice are too expensive and they should have shipped an optomechanical one and lowered the price by $10, or that it should be wireless or white or aluminum or clear or blue or rounder or more square... or better yet, they should ship it with NO mice so that novice customers would take it home and not be able to use it. Awesome.
My heart bleeds for the intense agony that Apple customers feel when being forced to buy exactly the mouse they wanted at commodity prices from whomever they want (those monopolistic BASTARDS!), because Apple didn't include that particular product in the box.
The comparison with Windows is pretty funny - something that is very difficult and time consuming to install, and precludes manufacturers from shipping other operating systems, and probably costs about 10x what a mouse does, which you just plug in and It Just Works.
Next I suppose we'll hear about what a travesty it is that Apple includes white phone cords with their computers, when every right-thinking person knows that only gray phone cords are acceptable. Thus Apple computers must not be bought because they obviously only work with white phone cords!
>aren't very well documented
1) Select "Mac Help" from the "Help" menu
2) search for "Shortcuts"
You know, those things that can't possibly be regular contrails, because this guy I know said that they don't look right. It's obviously a government plot to spray us all with secret chemicals.
I saw a web site about it so it must be true.
...and then when you actually try to use it you'll find that ripping DVDs to 3" size takes a half hour per movie, and that the reason the portable movie player only costs $50 more is that it maxes out at 8 fps because it has the same embedded CPU as the audio-only player, and that the battery only lasts 15 minutes because the audio player could power down the drive during songs but the video player can't, plus the color LCD takes lots more power than than the B/W one.
In reality, that $50 more color AV player with crappy battery life would never be put on the market, and instead it would cost $300 more and have a much better CPU and battery and would also be a PDA (since that costs almost nothing extra once you have all that hardware), and it's already for sale today from PalmOne and Sony and HPaq and Dell etc. etc.
>"99 cent" stores struggle.
No, they struggle because everything they have sucks. Haven't you even been in one? It's not a matter of merchandise that lacks famous logos... it's just crap.
>Look at the huge sales of the ridiculously overpriced iPod Mini
If sales are huge despite ample competition, is it really overpriced?
>the market wants smaller and sleeker and good looking, not huge, bulky and with too many features.
Oh, so what you're saying is, it's not worth it to you, so the market is wrong.
>If you truly felt that way then what research would there be left to do?
Wow, that's a pretty ignorant question, as if the only thing anthropologists did in your opinion was to try to prove that evolution was a law instead of a theory, or something like that.
Go look up what anthropology is.
> It is my opinion that evolution is not dis-provable
Fair enough...
>regardless of what evidence is discovered.
Oh dear. So, if (for the sake of argument) one day a crashed alien mothership is found buried in Africa that has schematics and equipment required to manufacture all creatures living or dead, and many many scientific studies are done that demonstrate that this is not a hoax... you would still believe in evolution?
I'm not suggesting that this is the real origin of man, but I'm trying to point out that you've basically said that you are 100% fanatically devoted to evolution regardless of actual data, which is kinda messed up.
> However it kills me to see the so called scientist that say that evolution is fact. I wouldn't mind so much if they at least said "To the best of our knowledge now..." this is what we believe.
Anyone who says that anything is absolute fact is not a scientist, by definition, unless that absolute fact is "I think, therefore I am."
Science is about using reality to test hypotheses. As such, nothing can be 100% unwaveringly always absolutely incontravertibly true to a scientist. Any scientist with any sort of education is well aware of how every scientific discipline has had models of the universe that seemed to fit, but were proven not to be accurate after a while.
Creationists looooove to say that evolution is "just a theory", but so are relativity and gravity. I doubt many creationists would be willing to jump off a cliff or subjected to a nuclear explosion with only prayer to protect them.
Creationists also looooove to point out that scientists, over the course of human history, have been wrong. Firstly, religious folks have been incredibly wrong and changed their dogma many times as well (witchcraft, heresy, crusades, genocide, etc.) so it's not as though creationists have any moral high ground here. Secondly, that's the nature of science: new data, if reproducible and not explainable by existing models, can at times invalidate those existing models. Over time, as more data is gathered, the models that we have for the universe become increasingly accurate.
However, that doesn't mean that any time some dork says that they have some data that proves that an extremely well-tested hypothesis is false, they are correct. Cold Fusion is a good example of a scientific claim that someone made that would have been very beneficial to mankind, and would have made a lot of people a lot of money, and people really tried to reproduce it, but it didn't work. Some people choose to believe in it even though it doesn't actually work, and cry "cover-up", but that's science at work - the proof just wasn't there. As much as people wanted it to be true, it wasn't, or at least nobody could prove that it was, so it was discarded as a fluke.
In addition to pointing out the obvious and not at all shocking nature of scientific knowledge as improving over time, you also make a tremendous leap in lumping nutritionists and meteorologists in with anthropologists as "these same people". I seriously doubt that the experts debating the safety and efficacy of the Atkins diet are also experts on global warming and anthropology.
You also make a foolish mistake in assuming that any report that you're aware of on any issue represents the professional and official opinion all scientists everywhere. So you read something somewhere that was written by someone claiming to follow a scientific method, and then read something else written by someone else that (possibly) also claimed to follow a scientific method, and who disagreed with the first one. Do you want a cookie?
Oh no, two people disagreed! You've proven that science is a sham!
Not.
Fair enough. I'll believe creationists when they can pull God down from the sky and show him/her to me, and get him/her to answer questions like "how can all those different translations and editions of your holy book be equally correct, when any linguist can demonstrate that the translations say totally different things?".
>I'm sorry, but anyone here who believes that they came from an ape....come on now.
It's hardly ridiculous. They look like us, act like us, have extremely similar internal body structure, have 98% of the same DNA... in fact, they're so similar to us that diseases that affect them can affect us. Ebola and HIV are examples of diseases that are believed to have come to humans from apes.
I guess if you've just seen a picture of a monkey once, or seen once sitting around in a zoo, you ould be ignorant of all that.
>I came from a creator God with infinite wisdom, infinite knowledge, and an infinite understanding of everything possible.
I see - your theory of the origin of mankind is based on personal pride. How do you know that you weren't created, for example, by aliens as a joke, or a high school science project? Nope, couldn't be - that wouldn't satisfy your sense of pride.
>To say I came from a pool of goo "millions of years ago" is just ludicrous.
You didn't. You came from your mother's womb. A pool of goo BILLIONS of years ago produced some chemicals. Those took BILLIONS of years to arrange themselves into structures that replicated themselves. Those took an extremely long time to arrange themselves into single celled organisms. Those took an extremely long time to arrange themselves into colonies, and then multicelled organisms, and so on. It's possible with the fossil record and living animals to see a gradual change from simple organisms to ones that look almost exactly like us.
To say that there's some magic invisible man in the sky who spontaneously created a person out of thin air 6000 years ago is far more ridiculous, and has exactly zero evidence to back it up, and massive amounts of human experience and material evidence that disagrees with that account of the origin of mankind.
However, creationism does come bundled with a big pat on the back for being the very favorite organisms of the most perfect wonderful being in the universe, and with some handy rider clauses such as that the rest of the creatures belong to men, including women and children but also all animals, whether or not they appear to suffer when you kill them, and even men who believe in other gods. It's very convenient.
Lately, as human ethics have matured, religious apologists have backpedaled on some of those items, trying to reinterpret a literal reading of their holy books into something that is more suitable to contemporary attitudes toward women and children, foreigners, people of other races, etc. Isn't it interesting how malleable those absolutely true holy words are to the requirements of the moment? But they're still precisely and completely true *now*, regardless of how they used to be interpreted, or (in some cases) how they were worded in the language they were originally written in. The best that creationists can do is to have someone else tell them what their holy books mean, and then believe in that without question and in the face of evidence to the contrary.
> why does the number of years it took us to "evolve" keep getting longer
Where did you get this idea?
> newer things about the human body that can't possibly be "evolved" even in their stupid Big Bang timeframe
Please provide a specific example of a structure in the human body that scientists say could not possibly have been evolved in the amount of time that has elapsed since the Big Bang. A link or a bibliographic reference counts; "I heard that there was something like that" doesn't.
Creationists somehow overlook the fact that there are many other organisms on this planet other than humans. There are many examples of other animals that have very similar structures to ours (not limited just to primates). Eyes and red blood cells and brains and sexual reproduction and DNA are really fascinating and complex, but they're not unique traits to humans by any stretch of the imagination.
Also, anyone who denies that evolution could happen is ignor
The script for the "Prejudice" sketch can be found here.
Probably because everybody writing open source software, as a rule, assumes that all users of their software are hardcore developer geeks like they are, and don't bother with all that extra code and documentation. Then they complain that some closed-source app is beating them and they can't for the life of them figure out why.
That NAT trick is interesting but it won't make a user's appliance-based firewall (in their DSL modem, etc.) and personal firewalls reconfigure themselves too.
The problem with all this "why can't P2P apps just configure themselves automagically without user intervention" thinking is that it opens you up to all sorts of attack. The easier it is for firewalls to be reconfigured by a no-user-interface program, the more powerful all these internet worms are going to get. "Click here for a really funny game" = "open your firewall up so I can use a remote root exploit that your firewall blocks by default".
Alternatively, folks could just *write documentation* that doesn't use a bunch of obscure acronyms and terms that an average user wouldn't know.
Has no one here ever heard of eMule or its closed-source predecessor, eDonkey2000?
/. where everybody loves to harp on the Microsoft/Apple/Xerox relationship, nobody says a word about ed2k when praising BT.
It's really interesting to see all this press and to read all these gushing posts saying "oh Bram, thank you so much for changing p2p forever" when in fact there are other swarming download p2p apps out there that work in a very similar fashion. I'm sure there are a couple more apps like this that I haven't heard of, too. But let's all pretend that BT is unique and write some more articles about how totally new this idea is.
I don't know which came first, and I like both, but I just think that on a site like
>If each 1Mb/s/month of bandwidth costs $500
1.5Mbps downstream costs $49/mo. It's called DSL. Cable modems provide even more bandwidth for a similar monthly fee.
Exactly. People go to watch DJs even though they're not musicians at all.
>How is this different from a symphony concert? Everyone's playing what's on the stand in front of them,
Yes...
>with little to no creative input.
Wrong. Music notation is an abstraction of the notes and timing that the composer wants the performer to play, but it isn't complete. The conductor and performers read a lot into it. Some music is written without ornamentation, but with the understanding that the performer will add it themselves. Other music is written with the intention that all the notes are predefined, but with the knowledge that a performer is going to add timing, vibratto, attack, and velocity nuances to the music when it's performed. Just because modern music notation has symbols for all sorts of performance details doesn't mean that the written music actually employs all of that. There's an assumption that the performer can look at the music and know how to bring it to life.
Compare that to a sampler or synth. Those are just going to play the notes exactly as written, and it won't even sound as good as a robot playing the actual instrument because the sound is spliced together from single-note samples. You can sample multiple notes and add performance rules such as when to use rubato, but that's only as good as the person who wrote the software. Maybe someday with enough CPU power, samples will be replaced with acoustical models of real instruments and motion-capture of world-class performers, but we're not there yet (and those top-class performers would be stupid to do that anyway).
Being a performing musician is more than just being able to play the notes as written with no mistakes.
Because there aren't enough ways to figure that out already.
Next we'll hear about someone making an oven that you can ping to see what temperature it is. If the latency is high, it's warm; if the latency is low, it's cold. Hooray!
Besides, who would want to use a battery tester to measure system load when it doesn't even have a themes engine or an IRC client built in?
>WinXP on PPC, one would have to imagine that this is exactly what MS is going to do.
Why? To get that amazing price performance benefit of PPC hardware over x86? Oh wait, there isn't one.
NT was ported to non-x86 processors to punish/intimidate Intel for dabbling in video codecs where Microsoft had forbidden them to go. Nobody actually bought it, and pretty soon MS discontinued it and went back to x86-only, but the point was made: if you mess with MS, they can port to other hardware... "you need us, we don't need you." And look at Intel now, supporting Linux. Surprise!
>Since MS is a Root CA this wouldn't be that difficult for them todo.
The apparent cornerstone of this scheme is that MS's (or whoever's) root CA private key remains private, so that only they could sign their emails. Wouldn't it suck if the next big worm was actually a distributed brute-force crack attempt aimed at a root CA's private key? If they got it, any cert based anti-spam scheme would be subverted. Sign your own spams with the real private key! Woo hoo, spam fest! OK, maybe you revoke the CA's key, but how easily would this be propagated?
I dunno what the capacity is of all hackable machines on the 'net, so it's awfully hard to know how long such a massively distributed crack effort would take. Any guessers out there?
Let me get this straight:
- a central body would decide what is spam and what isn't spam
- a central body would be somehow accountable for arbitrating disputes over whether a message was spam or not, whether a spamming complaint was valid or not, whether someone stole their cert and spammed with it, etc.
- everyone who wanted to send mail would need to pay for a certificate
- everyone who wanted to check incoming mail would have to check a certificate revocation list very frequently, to avoid getting mail from spammers who had just gotten a new cert and spammed like crazy
There is a technique very much like this, and it's FREE, and it's called a relay blacklist. The difference is that there is no fancy crypto involved, but the same problems remain:
- the third party is fallible when it comes to identifying spammers vs. non-spammers
- spammers are happy to keep one step ahead of the blacklist, even if that means using a new identity (domain or cert) every day
- the identity (domain or cert) that spammers use is actually one that someone else paid for, so the system punishes everyone EXCEPT the spammer
I wish this would work, but I really don't think it would.
This just punishes the relay, not the spammer. There's no guarantee that the owner of the relay box will notice, or do anything, just because their box is sluggish. Plenty of machines are already infected with worms, and nobody is fixing them; what if those worms were (instead of a pointless exercise in chaos) tools to identify available servers for spammers to use? (In fact one of the recent MyDoom worms is suggested to have this purpose.)
Take all the idle capacity of poorly protected servers on the 'net. That's the amount of processing power that spammers potentially have at their disposal to spend on solving little math problems. And note, it costs them nothing because they're somebody else's hardware on somebody else's bandwidth. As long as they don't completely exhaust the usefulness of each infected server, there will be plenty of folks who won't even notice that anything is wrong with their server, so they won't have any idea that they should try and fix it.
Replace SMTP with what? More secure how?
>The concept is simple, the implementation would be a lot of work
Right. The concept of "fix spam" is easy, but the implementation of an unspecified design is really hard. Kind of like "create lasting world peace" and "switch from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources" and "find a cure for cancer" are easy concepts, but implementing them sure is a lot of work. The engineers will have to roll up their sleeves but I'm sure we can get it done if we can all just agree to get on with it!
You forgot the part where you actually offer a suggestion. What you've done is to restate the goal, and get mad when someone points out that you haven't actually proposed anything specific.
>> What's to stop someone from just running their own SMTP server? The software isn't exactly hard to come by.
>Filtering port 25, assuming the updated protocol would utilize the same port.
Maybe you don't understand te poster's point. What's to stop someone from just setting up a $NEW_MAIL_PROTOCOL server and spamming from that? How does your completely unspecific new mail service differentiate between good mail and bad mail?
No, no, they're just going to see how fast they can make it go overall! Even a CEO knows that you always optimize for all possible scenarios. That way nobody can accuse them of focusing on just one application. (Benchmarks lie, so the best bet is to just make it go faster and skip the benchmarks.)
The Rio Karma is 46% bigger than the iPod (78% thicker).
20GB Apple iPod: 6.1 cu in
20GB Rio Karma: 8.91 cu in
20GB Karma: 2.7" X 3.0" X 1.1", 5.5oz
20GB iPod: 4.1 by 2.4 by 0.62 inches, 5.6oz
I have a digital camera that's 1.3" thick, and that's pretty thick for a pants pocket - it's really prominent. 1.1" is probably similarly brickish. YMMV. A jacket pocket would probably be fine, though.
My advice for portable audio gizmo shoppers: make sure you actually see the products in person and that you get to handle it & play with the UI (i.e. not some broken demo model that doesn't turn on) before you buy it... don't just buy one based on a feature matrix. It could have a crappy UI, or be flimsy, or have a crappy screen, or weigh a ton, etc. etc.