The PS2 already has an extremely fast processor, plenty or RAM, a USB port, a Firewire port, a PCMCIA port, and a DVD-ROM player, and now they're adding a modem and a hard drive? All for ~$300?
Obviously the hard drive is there for you to install Linux!
I say get one for every student! And put them in the classrooms!
Pinkerton: "We hope the WAVE website will be used not only as a tool to aid in preventing school violence, but also as an educational hub where students, teachers and parents can go to collaborate."
Here's a site all about turning in potential malcontents. What kind of 'collaboration' can they possibly be hoping for, outside of McCarthyism? Make it a class project to see which member is the most likely threat, and report them?
Thankfully, defragging happens in O(n) time, meaning that if you triple the hard drive space, you triple the time it takes to defrag. It's not like sorting O(n log(n)), which would get monstorous.
Factoring in access and write speed, it's actually O(n/s) where s is the read/write/access speed.
Basically, if you have a 2Tb drive that's 100 times as fast as your 20Gb drive, it'll take exactly the same amount of time to defrag, though if you wanted to sort it at the same time, it would take 7 times longer (ln 100 ~= 7.5).
Well, of course it's an april fools thing, but just to add a little more stoke to the fire, it doesn't actually take that much energy to change something on a molecular level. Our bodies do it all the time.
Fusion and fission are examples of changing things at the nuclear (atomic) level, which is significantly harder.
Sony and TiVo have announced that they're working together in a similar relationship as Phillips. The rumor mill says in April Sony will be releasing a '30+' hour TiVo at Phillips' 15 hour price point: $399.
Also, regarding subscriptions, here's the screw: The lifetime subscription of $199 is for the lifetime of a single unit. If you upgrade to a new unit, you need a new subscription, though you can sell your old unit with its lifetime sub. It's totally transferable from person to person, but not unit to unit, and you can't share one sub with multiple TiVos.
Finally, for you college kids out there, TiVo and Phillips are having a special, knocking off $50 from the 15 hour version. They're running full page ads at UC Berkeley. I've never felt like such a squarely pegged demographic group in my life: "You can miss a class. You can miss a midterm. But you never, ever have to miss Buffy."
I can't find the URL for the deal right now. does anyone else have it handy?
If you're agonizing over the price of a base station, Apple's AirPort is based on the Lucent WaveLan Silver card, is platform agnostic, and only costs $299. Let Apple's Loss Leader be your gain!
Gotta disagree. While I love most of the things Andy has had a hand in, Magic Cap isn't one of them. TeleScript was brilliant (though underimplemented), but MagicCap took the desktop metaphor and tried to push it too far. People don't actually want something that sits on their desktop that has a desktop inside it. What happens if you have a computer on your magiccap desktop? Ouch.
Metaphors are great, but the most efficient, understandable and useful metaphors are those that are based on cross-cultural structures about the way humans think and perceive things, not saying 'it's a desk, so when we need to figure out how to implement this, we'll look at a desk and extend the metaphor.'
Nevertheless, this is what comes to mind when I hear Appleites, and worse, AOL designers coming together to create an 'even simpler interface.'
The gauntlet here is to make an interface that is intuitive not because it works like a desk, or a calculator, or a piece of paper or a pen, but because it makes coherent sense in and of itself, based on consistant rules that aren't founded off a prototype real-world object which has inheirent problems by simple virtue of being an item in the real world.
I wouldn't be surprised if the nomination was due largely to the tragic suicide of Mary Kay Bergman, the voice of every single woman on that song. It was really a testament to her abilities.
I'd recommend everyone take a look at the work she's done over the past 10 years. I do wonder about the sense of nominating a song as an homage, not that I mind seeing it up there!
Too bad it'll never win. Make space for one more Oscar on a Disney shelf, most likely...
"McGrath responded to this scenario: a student uses a campus Internet connection to decide which political candidates to support. That person is misusing university equipment, she said, just as if she used her legislative office phone to make long-distance personal phone calls. On the other hand, the same student, viewing the same pages for a class assignment, is using the equipment properly, she said."
My primary argument to this is: She has another phone she can use at home. A student doesn't. Now if the bill only related to those computers in on-campus computing centers (like the one I'm using to type this), I would still disagree with the bill, but her logic wouldn't be as out of whack.
And all this at the same time Clinton is trying to give out "Internet for the Masses."
Excuse (1) : It rewards the innovators and thus encourages innovation.
Sorry, but this is a valid reason. sure, newton discovered laws of gravity and Kepler the laws of planetary motion without the security of patent law, but most of the patents taken out these days are by large companies who simply would not pay the extraordinary R&D costs that they do to invent something that could be used by their competitors.
Trade Secrecy law in the US is much, much weaker than patent law. If IBM were to create a new way to store billions of bits in a cubic centimeter and called it a trade secret, and someone took it apart and figured out how it worked, poof! Trade secrecy benefits are legally gone. If a disgruntled employee walks and posts it on the net, they could sue the employee, but still, Poof! It's gone. Pharmecutical companies would close their R&D departments, and you're dense if you think universities or GPL groups could pick up the slack.
On another point, your example:
Innovation and inventions like TCP/IP, WWW, HTML, XML would have been far less successful they were patented.
While arguably true (if the patent owner didn't give a public license to use the technologies), this example is flawed, as these are protocols whos very essence is based on the premise that everyone uses them. A cloning process doesn't require that everyone in the world use the same cloning process, or people will explode when they touch each other (which is a loose metaphor for what would happen if someone with an IPX stack tried to talk to someone with a TCP/IP stack).
I just find it incredibly amusing when luddites who want to forgo patent law preach using technology that never would have come about if patent law hadn't offered some protection of development time and costs. After all, what good are HTML, XML, TCP/IP and HTTP if you don't have chips to run them?
Trade Secrecy law is for processes, not inventions. Once something leaves your house, trade secrecy law won't offer a strong enough protection for it to be worthwhile for you to invent anything.
Finally, your comment that the time to reverse-engineer something would give sufficient lead time for an inventor to recoup R&D costs would only serve to stem the flow of progress that you think would be accellerated by forgoing patent law.
First, the billions spent on inventing and testing a new drug can't be recouped in the months it would take a competing pharmecutical company (computer company, biotech lab, etc) to bring an identical product to market.
Second, using Dolly as an example, in those cases where reverse-engineering is much more difficult, without the protection that patent law provides, the Dolly scientists would not have released their process to the public, which means that the 30 or so derivative works based on the technology could not have moved forward.
If company X creates something and patents it, companies A, B, and C can all start creating inventions that build on that new creation, pushing forward the advancement of humanity. If company X makes it a trade secret instead, company A may manage to reverse-engineer it, but certainly wouldn't share the process, once they finished reverse-engineering it, with companies B and C, because it still gives them a competitive advantage to keep their new found knowledge as a trade secret themselves. Company B can't reverse engineer it, because it's a small lab with limited funds, and company C might spend so much time reverse engineering, that out would be cheaper for them to simply purchase a license for use from company X.
Patent's aren't inherently bad things. Patents can be too broad, but that's another issue. TGrade secrecy law inhibits progress more than patent law, especially if companies are good at keeping their secrets. This is far worse.
2) No. CSS doesn't inhibit your rights. There is nothing saying they have to make it POSSIBLE for you to make an archival copy, they simply cannot prosecute you for doing so.
Exactly, and so if they can't prosecute you for doing so, and one archival copy is seen as a legitimate practice, how can they successfully prosecute someone who creates software to empower people to execute this legitimate practice, which they could not do without the new software?
Simply because it can be used for more nefarious purposes than the legitimate one it enables you to perform doesn't mean it's illegal to distribute, unless it's explicitly banned. If this were not the case, guns would already be banned, right?
First, if distributing a program that enables people to recover a an encryption key is tantamount to distributing keys to a department store, then does the analogy follow that Audio CDs, which have no encryption, are in effect sitting in unlocked unmanned stores all the time? If the studios still publish them, then they're admitting that this is an acceptable and profitable way to do business.
Second, hasn't it ben established that we're all allowed to make one archival copy of any digital media we purchase, be it software, CD, or DVD? Isn't the CSS encryption inhibiting us from exercising that right?
What I took away from today's keynote was that Jobs is taking advantage of the fact that they basically control a platform from hardware to software to website, to renew a focus on proprietary tools.
Several times in the speech Jobs commented on how Apple was one of two proprietary widespread desktop OS solutions (I forget the euphemism he used for it) and that Apple will be leveraging off of that with iTools: programs and webapps from apple.com that will only work on Macs. He didn't stop there either. He used this proprietary dominance to justify the overhaul of the UI (oh my GOD, a blinking button to indicate a default response?!?) while at the same time trying to convince the audience that this was one of 4 key building blocks establishing Apple as one of the top 10 internet companies.
It amazed me that Jobs, who is doing such a great job of rebuilding Apple, would be so forthright about this strategy. It's almost as if he actually said "Microsoft is being sued for incorporating the browser, but since we're obviously not a monopoly, we'll incorporate everything else and make it proprietary."
They're doing exactly the things that Microsoft would like to, but can't because of the DOJ, and as much as Apple tries to appease the open source movement by open-sourcing the aspects of the OS that are furthest removed from the actual user experience, there is no way is an open-sourced kernel is going to make any difference to Joe User. They're open-sourcing Darwin because all that can be done is add API functionality and increase efficiency and security. And while they're doing this they build new, closed source layers on top of it, so that any features added can only be used in this locked-up, proprietary OS, unless you plan on building or porting all of the implemenation layers above the kernel, at which point there's little reason not to just enhance FreeBSD or Linux instead.
Jobs is quite the marketeer, but as far as today's keynote goes, the i in iCEO stood for illusion.
netscape on solaris, irix or linux displays PNGs fine you dimwit.
I didn't say it did. However, you seem to have missed my comment both on my original post, and the follow-up, that a lossless copy should be put up, and no matter how much flamebait is set, it won't change the fact that PNG is not the most widely accessible lossless format available, regardless of how hard you yell.
I beg your pardon? My browser (Netscape navigator 4.6) can display 24bit PNG images (lossless compression, you know) just fine.
That's great, but despite the demographic of the slashdot crowd, not everyone has NS 4.6 or IE 5 on a PC. It doesn't change my statement that your browser doesn't support JPEG2000, which was the point I was making: that it had to be translated to another format. If you read my entire post you'd see that I suggested they translate to a lossless format.
Well, naturally they had to convert all three results (including the 3 meg original) into 256 gif (or better yet, jpeg uncompressed) because I doubt your browser can show JPEG2000 files. They had to put the results into a framework you could see.
What disturbs me is that the '19K jpeg' example on the bottom is in no way or form what would happen if you tried to compress the top file down to 19K in jpeg. It's like what you would get if you reduced the original file to 25%, shoved it down to about 16K in GIF compression, then blew it back up 400%.
With that and degrading the original source image down (by converting it to 8bit GIF) far more than (presumably) JPEG2000 compression degraded the second image, before it too was degraded into 8-bit GIF, this demonstration is useless...
They need to give us two 3 meg files: one souce file, and one file that has been JPEG2000 compressed, then saved as a full-size source file (in BMP, PICT or some other lossless mode) so we can do our own comparisons...
Slashdot Mirror
The PS2 already has an extremely fast processor, plenty or RAM, a USB port, a Firewire port, a PCMCIA port, and a DVD-ROM player, and now they're adding a modem and a hard drive? All for ~$300?
Obviously the hard drive is there for you to install Linux!
I say get one for every student! And put them in the classrooms!
Kevin Fox
Pinkerton: "We hope the WAVE website will be used not only as a tool to aid in preventing school violence, but also as an educational hub where students, teachers and parents can go to collaborate."
Here's a site all about turning in potential malcontents. What kind of 'collaboration' can they possibly be hoping for, outside of McCarthyism? Make it a class project to see which member is the most likely threat, and report them?
Kevin Fox
Thankfully, defragging happens in O(n) time, meaning that if you triple the hard drive space, you triple the time it takes to defrag. It's not like sorting O(n log(n)), which would get monstorous.
Factoring in access and write speed, it's actually O(n/s) where s is the read/write/access speed.
Basically, if you have a 2Tb drive that's 100 times as fast as your 20Gb drive, it'll take exactly the same amount of time to defrag, though if you wanted to sort it at the same time, it would take 7 times longer (ln 100 ~= 7.5).
Kevin Fox
class Soapbox {
public String[] enemy;
public Soapbox() {
enemy = new String['MPAA','RIAA','Microsoft','NSA'];
public static void Main() {
for (int i=0; i<enemy.length; i++) {
System.out.println("Fuck the evil " + enemy[i] + "!");
}
}
}
Kevin Fox
Well, of course it's an april fools thing, but just to add a little more stoke to the fire, it doesn't actually take that much energy to change something on a molecular level. Our bodies do it all the time.
Fusion and fission are examples of changing things at the nuclear (atomic) level, which is significantly harder.
Kevin Fox
Everyone unplug your replicators!
Kevin Fox
Sony and TiVo have announced that they're working together in a similar relationship as Phillips. The rumor mill says in April Sony will be releasing a '30+' hour TiVo at Phillips' 15 hour price point: $399.
Also, regarding subscriptions, here's the screw: The lifetime subscription of $199 is for the lifetime of a single unit. If you upgrade to a new unit, you need a new subscription, though you can sell your old unit with its lifetime sub. It's totally transferable from person to person, but not unit to unit, and you can't share one sub with multiple TiVos.
Finally, for you college kids out there, TiVo and Phillips are having a special, knocking off $50 from the 15 hour version. They're running full page ads at UC Berkeley. I've never felt like such a squarely pegged demographic group in my life: "You can miss a class. You can miss a midterm. But you never, ever have to miss Buffy."
I can't find the URL for the deal right now. does anyone else have it handy?
Kevin Fox
...and yet, Quake is still jumpy...
And believe you me; there's a huge difference between 99.9% (just reboot and get back to work ) and 99.999%
Yep, it's the difference between 9 hours downtime and 5 minutes downtime per year.
Wish my ISP was like that...
True.
If you're agonizing over the price of a base station, Apple's AirPort is based on the Lucent WaveLan Silver card, is platform agnostic, and only costs $299. Let Apple's Loss Leader be your gain!
Gotta disagree. While I love most of the things Andy has had a hand in, Magic Cap isn't one of them. TeleScript was brilliant (though underimplemented), but MagicCap took the desktop metaphor and tried to push it too far. People don't actually want something that sits on their desktop that has a desktop inside it. What happens if you have a computer on your magiccap desktop? Ouch.
Metaphors are great, but the most efficient, understandable and useful metaphors are those that are based on cross-cultural structures about the way humans think and perceive things, not saying 'it's a desk, so when we need to figure out how to implement this, we'll look at a desk and extend the metaphor.'
Nevertheless, this is what comes to mind when I hear Appleites, and worse, AOL designers coming together to create an 'even simpler interface.'
The gauntlet here is to make an interface that is intuitive not because it works like a desk, or a calculator, or a piece of paper or a pen, but because it makes coherent sense in and of itself, based on consistant rules that aren't founded off a prototype real-world object which has inheirent problems by simple virtue of being an item in the real world.
I wouldn't be surprised if the nomination was due largely to the tragic suicide of Mary Kay Bergman, the voice of every single woman on that song. It was really a testament to her abilities.
I'd recommend everyone take a look at the work she's done over the past 10 years. I do wonder about the sense of nominating a song as an homage, not that I mind seeing it up there!
Too bad it'll never win. Make space for one more Oscar on a Disney shelf, most likely...
My primary argument to this is: She has another phone she can use at home. A student doesn't. Now if the bill only related to those computers in on-campus computing centers (like the one I'm using to type this), I would still disagree with the bill, but her logic wouldn't be as out of whack.
And all this at the same time Clinton is trying to give out "Internet for the Masses."
Guys, this was Wired's cover story two months ago... If you're interested, there's a very informative interview there.
Excuse (1) : It rewards the innovators and thus encourages innovation.
Sorry, but this is a valid reason. sure, newton discovered laws of gravity and Kepler the laws of planetary motion without the security of patent law, but most of the patents taken out these days are by large companies who simply would not pay the extraordinary R&D costs that they do to invent something that could be used by their competitors.
Trade Secrecy law in the US is much, much weaker than patent law. If IBM were to create a new way to store billions of bits in a cubic centimeter and called it a trade secret, and someone took it apart and figured out how it worked, poof! Trade secrecy benefits are legally gone. If a disgruntled employee walks and posts it on the net, they could sue the employee, but still, Poof! It's gone. Pharmecutical companies would close their R&D departments, and you're dense if you think universities or GPL groups could pick up the slack.
On another point, your example:
Innovation and inventions like TCP/IP, WWW, HTML, XML would have been
far less successful they were patented.
While arguably true (if the patent owner didn't give a public license to use the technologies), this example is flawed, as these are protocols whos very essence is based on the premise that everyone uses them. A cloning process doesn't require that everyone in the world use the same cloning process, or people will explode when they touch each other (which is a loose metaphor for what would happen if someone with an IPX stack tried to talk to someone with a TCP/IP stack).
I just find it incredibly amusing when luddites who want to forgo patent law preach using technology that never would have come about if patent law hadn't offered some protection of development time and costs. After all, what good are HTML, XML, TCP/IP and HTTP if you don't have chips to run them?
Trade Secrecy law is for processes, not inventions. Once something leaves your house, trade secrecy law won't offer a strong enough protection for it to be worthwhile for you to invent anything.
Finally, your comment that the time to reverse-engineer something would give sufficient lead time for an inventor to recoup R&D costs would only serve to stem the flow of progress that you think would be accellerated by forgoing patent law.
First, the billions spent on inventing and testing a new drug can't be recouped in the months it would take a competing pharmecutical company (computer company, biotech lab, etc) to bring an identical product to market.
Second, using Dolly as an example, in those cases where reverse-engineering is much more difficult, without the protection that patent law provides, the Dolly scientists would not have released their process to the public, which means that the 30 or so derivative works based on the technology could not have moved forward.
If company X creates something and patents it, companies A, B, and C can all start creating inventions that build on that new creation, pushing forward the advancement of humanity. If company X makes it a trade secret instead, company A may manage to reverse-engineer it, but certainly wouldn't share the process, once they finished reverse-engineering it, with companies B and C, because it still gives them a competitive advantage to keep their new found knowledge as a trade secret themselves. Company B can't reverse engineer it, because it's a small lab with limited funds, and company C might spend so much time reverse engineering, that out would be cheaper for them to simply purchase a license for use from company X.
Patent's aren't inherently bad things. Patents can be too broad, but that's another issue. TGrade secrecy law inhibits progress more than patent law, especially if companies are good at keeping their secrets. This is far worse.
2) No. CSS doesn't inhibit your rights. There is nothing saying they have to make it POSSIBLE for you to make an archival copy, they simply cannot prosecute you for doing so.
Exactly, and so if they can't prosecute you for doing so, and one archival copy is seen as a legitimate practice, how can they successfully prosecute someone who creates software to empower people to execute this legitimate practice, which they could not do without the new software?
Simply because it can be used for more nefarious purposes than the legitimate one it enables you to perform doesn't mean it's illegal to distribute, unless it's explicitly banned. If this were not the case, guns would already be banned, right?
First, if distributing a program that enables people to recover a an encryption key is tantamount to distributing keys to a department store, then does the analogy follow that Audio CDs, which have no encryption, are in effect sitting in unlocked unmanned stores all the time? If the studios still publish them, then they're admitting that this is an acceptable and profitable way to do business.
Second, hasn't it ben established that we're all allowed to make one archival copy of any digital media we purchase, be it software, CD, or DVD? Isn't the CSS encryption inhibiting us from exercising that right?
Thanks,
Check it out here, and add your own user review!
./ and it'll climb in the popularity rankings.
They gave it 4 out of 5 stars, but use that page to reach
Kevin Fox
www.fury.com
What I took away from today's keynote was that Jobs is taking advantage of the fact that they basically control a platform from hardware to software to website, to renew a focus on proprietary tools.
Several times in the speech Jobs commented on how Apple was one of two proprietary widespread desktop OS solutions (I forget the euphemism he used for it) and that Apple will be leveraging off of that with iTools: programs and webapps from apple.com that will only work on Macs. He didn't stop there either. He used this proprietary dominance to justify the overhaul of the UI (oh my GOD, a blinking button to indicate a default response?!?) while at the same time trying to convince the audience that this was one of 4 key building blocks establishing Apple as one of the top 10 internet companies.
It amazed me that Jobs, who is doing such a great job of rebuilding Apple, would be so forthright about this strategy. It's almost as if he actually said "Microsoft is being sued for incorporating the browser, but since we're obviously not a monopoly, we'll incorporate everything else and make it proprietary."
They're doing exactly the things that Microsoft would like to, but can't because of the DOJ, and as much as Apple tries to appease the open source movement by open-sourcing the aspects of the OS that are furthest removed from the actual user experience, there is no way is an open-sourced kernel is going to make any difference to Joe User. They're open-sourcing Darwin because all that can be done is add API functionality and increase efficiency and security. And while they're doing this they build new, closed source layers on top of it, so that any features added can only be used in this locked-up, proprietary OS, unless you plan on building or porting all of the implemenation layers above the kernel, at which point there's little reason not to just enhance FreeBSD or Linux instead.
Jobs is quite the marketeer, but as far as today's keynote goes, the i in iCEO stood for illusion.
Kevin Fox
www.fury.com
thus the comment "or JPEG uncompressed"
Also keep in mind that just becuase a JPEG is 24-bit doesn't mean it's lossless.
I didn't say it did. However, you seem to have missed my comment both on my original post, and the follow-up, that a lossless copy should be put up, and no matter how much flamebait is set, it won't change the fact that PNG is not the most widely accessible lossless format available, regardless of how hard you yell.
That's great, but despite the demographic of the slashdot crowd, not everyone has NS 4.6 or IE 5 on a PC. It doesn't change my statement that your browser doesn't support JPEG2000, which was the point I was making: that it had to be translated to another format. If you read my entire post you'd see that I suggested they translate to a lossless format.
Well, naturally they had to convert all three results (including the 3 meg original) into 256 gif (or better yet, jpeg uncompressed) because I doubt your browser can show JPEG2000 files. They had to put the results into a framework you could see.
What disturbs me is that the '19K jpeg' example on the bottom is in no way or form what would happen if you tried to compress the top file down to 19K in jpeg. It's like what you would get if you reduced the original file to 25%, shoved it down to about 16K in GIF compression, then blew it back up 400%.
With that and degrading the original source image down (by converting it to 8bit GIF) far more than (presumably) JPEG2000 compression degraded the second image, before it too was degraded into 8-bit GIF, this demonstration is useless...
They need to give us two 3 meg files: one souce file, and one file that has been JPEG2000 compressed, then saved as a full-size source file (in BMP, PICT or some other lossless mode) so we can do our own comparisons...
Kevin Fox
www.fury.com
My favorite example is Lexicon, a top-flight naming companythat in the same 4 month period came up with the ultra-imaginative words:
Triples (for a cereal)
Quadra (the new mac)
Pentium (duh)
They liked numbers used in new and innovative ways. I believe Apple spent over two million for the groundbreaking names "Quadra" and "Centris"
Kevin "I used to work for Dantz, and they named themselves!" Fox
www.fury.com