The difference is nobody actually knew they were going to owe Rambus a ton of royalties. Their IP was essentially "hidden in plain sight", and they waited until it had achieved critical mass before litigating the hell out of everyone to collect.
It's kind of like the W3C coming out of the clockwork and saying "Hey! I invented the internet! Remember all those RFCs ? Mine. CSS ? Mine. Now give me all your money before I smack you with this patent portfolio."
It's kind of like being retroactively billed for all the times you've slept with your ex-wife. IRL we call that divorce, but in business it's called fraud.
I'm going to stick my neck out and say that SSL is a false security. Any twit with $29.95 can buy an SSL cert. The mere fact that a page is encrypted via SSL seems to convince people that they are dealing with a reputable site.
I'm much less worried about packet sniffing, and more about fake sites like I see every day in the steady flow of spam. There are many ways to steal someone's private data, all much easier than being on the right network, at the right time, sifting through gbits/sec of garbage for a vulnerable SSL connection.
Say you have an account at the First Bank of Fnarg, and the real web site is "www.firstbankoffnarg.com", what's to prevent an amateur from setting up "www.firstbankofnarg.com", copying the templates, and buying an SSL cert from any registrar ? Send out a legit-looking email with the link, a this will fool a staggering number of people.
It doesn't matter how often you tell them "Don't click on email links", people will do it anyway. They do it because they are lazy, inattentive and hurried. There is no technological cure against human nature.
Well, thank you Captain Obvious for saving us from things we all figured out ten years ago. We were all waiting for a real shit disturber to come slap us out of our complacent torpor.
It is not a matter of "if" or "when" but "who". Which dirty media cartel will be the first to shake off their old-world vestiges and take a real step into the world of post-internet media ? Right now, they don't get it. We're waiting for a revolution, but the bigwigs aren't thinking outside the box. Their current strategy of taking an old-world product, slathering it in DRM goo, and then trying to sell it ten times to the same person, is clearly not working. Something else will work, but they need to start looking for a solution if they ever hope to find it.
You seem to blindly believe that Adobe is even remotely competent at writing code. If you've ever used Acrobat, you would realize it is a barely-usable resource-thrashing mess.
Does Ghostview need 150mb of libraries to render a PDF ? No.
Just because a company is a market leader, does not necessarily mean they know what they're doing. They just know how to sell.
I worked very briefly at Dell, doing corporate tech support (hardware), and well not to brag but I was still #1 in the stats ranking a month after I quit until my averages rolled off... anyway I spent much of my off-call time trying to figure out a way to condense my smarts and experience into easy-to-follow instructions for my neighbours, who were often struggling with what I considered very basic problems.
To put things into perspective, my average call time was 5 minutes. That includes the occasional hour-long clusterfuck, which means the great majority of my calls were under 5 minutes. The top 10 techs had averages in the 15-20 minute range, and most everyone else was 45 minutes and up. Well now what was I doing differently, besides being the guy with the most hands-on PC experience ? I was being lazy, that's what! And I was committed to sharing my lazy ways with the rest of the crew.
During the exercise. I learned a few things:
1. It is damned hard to put into words things that are trivial (to you)
2. Logic, much like common sense, is a rarity these days
3. Most people fail to factor in the true cost of support time
So for #1, I had a non-guru friend take instruction, helping me dumb things down and bridge the gaps until we both agreed he had mastered the situation. He would express his frustration at my poor instructions, and ask a zillion questions until I had a grasp of my own internal thought process, of things that I did automagically.
For #2, I ran through a large number of scenarios and wrote down my own inner thoughts at each decision point. At the end, I trimmed these down to a rather large, multiple-entry flowchart. The neat thing is it covered both specific problems like "my hard drive is dead" and fuzzy symptoms like "my screen is blank". You would start at the edge, identifying the main symptoms and then you followed the paths until they crossed. At the very middle was the final solution "Replace entire system", the catch-all in case no other endpoint was satisfactory.
For #3, I dug up details on the approximate cost of support time. This included salary, utilities, and amortized equipment cost. Then I made a list of common support resolutions and their total cost (parts, labour, shipping). This allowed me to show how a long call can actually be more costly than replacing the computer in its entirety, especially if the extensive troubleshooting still leads to component replacement.
So in the end, we had verbose instructions, a troubleshooting cheat-sheet, and a cost guide. It may have enabled incompetent techs to perform tolerably, but more importantly it gave everyone the tools to learn very quickly. After a week or two with these troubleshooting aids, many people had the common issues memorized and had developed strategies of their own.
That's what I consider a successful transfer of knowledge. Knowledge is much more than just static information, it's also the process to create more information.
Yes, in a perfect world every coder would write proper documentation, and every employer would treat their staff with respect and dignity.
In the real world, employers are often dirty cheap bastards who will deem you redundant once a lesser-paid asshat successfully uses the instructions you wrote to imitate your job.
I still don't see the point of Hulu. From its very inception, it has been little more than Youtube's retarded big-media cousin. Mindless celebrities plug it everywhere they go, pushing their corporate-approved content over the intertubes.
To me, Hulu doesn't "get it". They're like basic cable TV for your web browser, with all the drawbacks of network programming and few of the benefits of internet distribution.
What the kid did was annoying, disorderly and immature; no argument about that.
What the school and police did was irresponsible and a complete waste of public resources.
This was not a police matter. Very few things in a school are police matters. In this case, the teacher failed to properly supervise and discipline a student under their direct responsibility. Suspend/detend the kid, sure, but cops ? Did someone get beat/stabbed/shot/raped ? No ? Then no cops.
Idiot teachers like this are the leading reason why today's kids are such utter failures. They take after the moronic role models they're given.
More like "We have 07 Corvettes, but our contract specifies you need to buy an 08 Corvette, which will stay on our lot, and pay half price for an 07 Corvette which we'll allow you to drive temporarily until you come to your senses."
The dildonic thing is that you don't actually get an XP key when you downgrade, you still have to niggle with the MS rep on the phone to get through manual activation. You don't technically own an XP license even though you paid for one.
But what about those of us who are callous (lazy) enough to run as root 24/7 ? We're just not naive enough to run foreign attachments from people we don't know (or don't trust).
Sure, make things nerf-safe for the common user, but don't go bashing those of us who actually run these machines.
Sadly, I won't bother with Fear 2 because it looks like a half-assed console port. The graphics look worse than the first, I'd say 2004-era polygons and jerky unrefined animation.
Part of what made the original Fear so great is the level of immersion and rather tastefully done "superhero effects". You really could get into character and feel your nerves tense up as you turned the next corner in slo-mo, hoping to catch your enemy by surprise.
This new game looks corny, repetitive and just plain cheap, feels almost like a 3rd party bargain-bin expansion pack for Half Life 2.
The notion of encouraging local artists is a noble one, but in practice it is a pain in the ass. Radio stations have to play a certain ratio of Canadian vs foreign content, which often results in some truly horrid filler programming just to satisfy the CRTC's bean counters. That's great if you're into indie/folk/country, but for the other 99% of us, it means we have to air absolute puke against our will.
Oh, you mean you actually like Deadmau5 ? *SLAP*
I personally think the CRTC should back off and let the best content win. If Canadian content sucks, don't shove it down people's throats, instead give the producers what they need to stop sucking. Frankly, as an amateur producer myself, I consider the CRTC hurtful to the scene. I don't want pity airplay, not for myself nor my peers/competitors/that-snarky-guy-I-punched-at-the-club-last-night. This ain't the special olympics, it's entertainment. I don't know about you, but I'm not interested in half-assed entertainment when better options are out there.
And your advice is what? If the company's HR monkeys are as incompetent as always and solely responsible for the embarrasing lack of skill in U.S. technical positions, then the whole company is fucked in the head, and don't deserve him??
I never really understood the value of OEM branding. I've already bought the damned PC, what more do they want ? Having a stupid Dell logo spin in IE while their site fails to load, is not going to make me want to buy more Dell gear.
People take branding way too seriously, especially when we're talking about major brands that everyone knows.
Prison makes someone go away. If you want them gone away forever, might as well execute them. Depending on their age and life-expectancy, the difference can rack up close to a million in taxpayer dollars, for someone we don't want to ever come out of there anyway.
Yeah, it's borderline sociopathic, but how is that any different from what they've done, and what prisons are ?
You're either young or your memory's shoddy. When cassette decks came out, there was indeed a lot of legal finger-pointing over the copying aspect, same as when VHS and Beta became popular.
Content "owners" will accuse anyone of anything, in order to protect their racket.
In an ideal world, you would be right and a geographical boycott would be effective. In reality, some greedy little prick will come in and bend to the state's will, just to make a sale. There is no room for idealism in capitalism.
John Markoff is just bitter because it's so "hard" to identify people on the Intenet. He wants a hacker-detector-exploder-button so he can continue claiming to be a security expert despite ranking up there with John C. Dvorak as "Crazy old nutjobs with books to sell". This asshat likes to stir up any ridiculous controversy, as long as it gets him a TV spot on some half-assed tech-for-the-masses weekly where he can plug his latest masturbatory novel.
Yeah, the Internet is full of holes, and that's just how we like it.
You hit the nail on the head. This high-price Intel SSD is just a cheap MLC unit with a big brand name and inflated expectations.
I'm usually quick to adopt new tech, but I'm still not satisfied with SSDs. I can't think of a good reason to use one in a desktop PC right now. They're slow, they die young, and they have perverse design quirks like oversized pages that result in internal fragmentation, and oh yeah, they cost an arm and a leg. Once someone releases an SSD that solves ALL of those sticky points, and ideally delivers enough random-access throughput to saturate the 300MB/s SATA line (or whatever bus is mainstream by then), that's when I'll jump on board.
Right now, my opinion is that anyone even considering an SSD would probably be better served by a VelociRaptor. Same price, same humorously low capacity, less bullshit.
What ever happened to decentralized trackers ? I remember reading something about the TPB guys working on the next big thing, shortly after the dirty cops confiscated their servers a few years back.
I think the bittorrent system has reached a point where enough people are involved that a shared, decentralized system could be made to work reliably. Something like taking the existing setup of web forum, tracker and membership database, and prop it up on top of a P2P overlay network generously supplied by site operators. It doesn't seem like such a huge stretch, especially when you consider that file sharing will never go away. Every time the courts shut down a network, another will rise bigger and stronger than the last.
Slashdot Mirror
Your plugin isn't secure enough. I use mod_devnull.so
The phone traffic obviously gets routed in real-time, so why couldn't they attach the billing info ?
There's a big difference between a limitation caused by technical shortcomings, and one caused by corporate laziness and rampant greed.
The difference is nobody actually knew they were going to owe Rambus a ton of royalties. Their IP was essentially "hidden in plain sight", and they waited until it had achieved critical mass before litigating the hell out of everyone to collect.
It's kind of like the W3C coming out of the clockwork and saying "Hey! I invented the internet! Remember all those RFCs ? Mine. CSS ? Mine. Now give me all your money before I smack you with this patent portfolio."
It's kind of like being retroactively billed for all the times you've slept with your ex-wife. IRL we call that divorce, but in business it's called fraud.
I'm going to stick my neck out and say that SSL is a false security. Any twit with $29.95 can buy an SSL cert. The mere fact that a page is encrypted via SSL seems to convince people that they are dealing with a reputable site.
I'm much less worried about packet sniffing, and more about fake sites like I see every day in the steady flow of spam. There are many ways to steal someone's private data, all much easier than being on the right network, at the right time, sifting through gbits/sec of garbage for a vulnerable SSL connection.
Say you have an account at the First Bank of Fnarg, and the real web site is "www.firstbankoffnarg.com", what's to prevent an amateur from setting up "www.firstbankofnarg.com", copying the templates, and buying an SSL cert from any registrar ? Send out a legit-looking email with the link, a this will fool a staggering number of people.
It doesn't matter how often you tell them "Don't click on email links", people will do it anyway. They do it because they are lazy, inattentive and hurried. There is no technological cure against human nature.
Well, thank you Captain Obvious for saving us from things we all figured out ten years ago. We were all waiting for a real shit disturber to come slap us out of our complacent torpor.
It is not a matter of "if" or "when" but "who". Which dirty media cartel will be the first to shake off their old-world vestiges and take a real step into the world of post-internet media ? Right now, they don't get it. We're waiting for a revolution, but the bigwigs aren't thinking outside the box. Their current strategy of taking an old-world product, slathering it in DRM goo, and then trying to sell it ten times to the same person, is clearly not working. Something else will work, but they need to start looking for a solution if they ever hope to find it.
You seem to blindly believe that Adobe is even remotely competent at writing code. If you've ever used Acrobat, you would realize it is a barely-usable resource-thrashing mess.
Does Ghostview need 150mb of libraries to render a PDF ? No.
Just because a company is a market leader, does not necessarily mean they know what they're doing. They just know how to sell.
I worked very briefly at Dell, doing corporate tech support (hardware), and well not to brag but I was still #1 in the stats ranking a month after I quit until my averages rolled off... anyway I spent much of my off-call time trying to figure out a way to condense my smarts and experience into easy-to-follow instructions for my neighbours, who were often struggling with what I considered very basic problems.
To put things into perspective, my average call time was 5 minutes. That includes the occasional hour-long clusterfuck, which means the great majority of my calls were under 5 minutes. The top 10 techs had averages in the 15-20 minute range, and most everyone else was 45 minutes and up. Well now what was I doing differently, besides being the guy with the most hands-on PC experience ? I was being lazy, that's what! And I was committed to sharing my lazy ways with the rest of the crew.
During the exercise. I learned a few things:
1. It is damned hard to put into words things that are trivial (to you)
2. Logic, much like common sense, is a rarity these days
3. Most people fail to factor in the true cost of support time
So for #1, I had a non-guru friend take instruction, helping me dumb things down and bridge the gaps until we both agreed he had mastered the situation. He would express his frustration at my poor instructions, and ask a zillion questions until I had a grasp of my own internal thought process, of things that I did automagically.
For #2, I ran through a large number of scenarios and wrote down my own inner thoughts at each decision point. At the end, I trimmed these down to a rather large, multiple-entry flowchart. The neat thing is it covered both specific problems like "my hard drive is dead" and fuzzy symptoms like "my screen is blank". You would start at the edge, identifying the main symptoms and then you followed the paths until they crossed. At the very middle was the final solution "Replace entire system", the catch-all in case no other endpoint was satisfactory.
For #3, I dug up details on the approximate cost of support time. This included salary, utilities, and amortized equipment cost. Then I made a list of common support resolutions and their total cost (parts, labour, shipping). This allowed me to show how a long call can actually be more costly than replacing the computer in its entirety, especially if the extensive troubleshooting still leads to component replacement.
So in the end, we had verbose instructions, a troubleshooting cheat-sheet, and a cost guide. It may have enabled incompetent techs to perform tolerably, but more importantly it gave everyone the tools to learn very quickly. After a week or two with these troubleshooting aids, many people had the common issues memorized and had developed strategies of their own.
That's what I consider a successful transfer of knowledge. Knowledge is much more than just static information, it's also the process to create more information.
Your idealism offends my realist sensibilities.
Yes, in a perfect world every coder would write proper documentation, and every employer would treat their staff with respect and dignity.
In the real world, employers are often dirty cheap bastards who will deem you redundant once a lesser-paid asshat successfully uses the instructions you wrote to imitate your job.
Hulu's not trying to teach the studios anything, because Hulu IS the studios. They are owned and controlled by NBC.
I still don't see the point of Hulu. From its very inception, it has been little more than Youtube's retarded big-media cousin. Mindless celebrities plug it everywhere they go, pushing their corporate-approved content over the intertubes.
To me, Hulu doesn't "get it". They're like basic cable TV for your web browser, with all the drawbacks of network programming and few of the benefits of internet distribution.
I will go ahead and state the obvious:
What the kid did was annoying, disorderly and immature; no argument about that.
What the school and police did was irresponsible and a complete waste of public resources.
This was not a police matter. Very few things in a school are police matters. In this case, the teacher failed to properly supervise and discipline a student under their direct responsibility. Suspend/detend the kid, sure, but cops ? Did someone get beat/stabbed/shot/raped ? No ? Then no cops.
Idiot teachers like this are the leading reason why today's kids are such utter failures. They take after the moronic role models they're given.
More like "We have 07 Corvettes, but our contract specifies you need to buy an 08 Corvette, which will stay on our lot, and pay half price for an 07 Corvette which we'll allow you to drive temporarily until you come to your senses."
The dildonic thing is that you don't actually get an XP key when you downgrade, you still have to niggle with the MS rep on the phone to get through manual activation. You don't technically own an XP license even though you paid for one.
But what about those of us who are callous (lazy) enough to run as root 24/7 ? We're just not naive enough to run foreign attachments from people we don't know (or don't trust).
Sure, make things nerf-safe for the common user, but don't go bashing those of us who actually run these machines.
Sadly, I won't bother with Fear 2 because it looks like a half-assed console port. The graphics look worse than the first, I'd say 2004-era polygons and jerky unrefined animation.
Part of what made the original Fear so great is the level of immersion and rather tastefully done "superhero effects". You really could get into character and feel your nerves tense up as you turned the next corner in slo-mo, hoping to catch your enemy by surprise.
This new game looks corny, repetitive and just plain cheap, feels almost like a 3rd party bargain-bin expansion pack for Half Life 2.
And that is why we need to strike all these sexist laws from the books. Justice can't be justice when there's an explicit bias toward one party.
Note: I am a Canadian who dislikes the CRTC.
The notion of encouraging local artists is a noble one, but in practice it is a pain in the ass. Radio stations have to play a certain ratio of Canadian vs foreign content, which often results in some truly horrid filler programming just to satisfy the CRTC's bean counters. That's great if you're into indie/folk/country, but for the other 99% of us, it means we have to air absolute puke against our will.
Oh, you mean you actually like Deadmau5 ? *SLAP*
I personally think the CRTC should back off and let the best content win. If Canadian content sucks, don't shove it down people's throats, instead give the producers what they need to stop sucking. Frankly, as an amateur producer myself, I consider the CRTC hurtful to the scene. I don't want pity airplay, not for myself nor my peers/competitors/that-snarky-guy-I-punched-at-the-club-last-night. This ain't the special olympics, it's entertainment. I don't know about you, but I'm not interested in half-assed entertainment when better options are out there.
And your advice is what? If the company's HR monkeys are as incompetent as always and solely responsible for the embarrasing lack of skill in U.S. technical positions, then the whole company is fucked in the head, and don't deserve him??
There, fixed it for you.
I never really understood the value of OEM branding. I've already bought the damned PC, what more do they want ? Having a stupid Dell logo spin in IE while their site fails to load, is not going to make me want to buy more Dell gear.
People take branding way too seriously, especially when we're talking about major brands that everyone knows.
Prison makes someone go away. If you want them gone away forever, might as well execute them. Depending on their age and life-expectancy, the difference can rack up close to a million in taxpayer dollars, for someone we don't want to ever come out of there anyway.
Yeah, it's borderline sociopathic, but how is that any different from what they've done, and what prisons are ?
You're either young or your memory's shoddy. When cassette decks came out, there was indeed a lot of legal finger-pointing over the copying aspect, same as when VHS and Beta became popular.
Content "owners" will accuse anyone of anything, in order to protect their racket.
In an ideal world, you would be right and a geographical boycott would be effective. In reality, some greedy little prick will come in and bend to the state's will, just to make a sale. There is no room for idealism in capitalism.
John Markoff is just bitter because it's so "hard" to identify people on the Intenet. He wants a hacker-detector-exploder-button so he can continue claiming to be a security expert despite ranking up there with John C. Dvorak as "Crazy old nutjobs with books to sell". This asshat likes to stir up any ridiculous controversy, as long as it gets him a TV spot on some half-assed tech-for-the-masses weekly where he can plug his latest masturbatory novel.
Yeah, the Internet is full of holes, and that's just how we like it.
Many cheap SSDs use MLC for obvious reasons,
You hit the nail on the head. This high-price Intel SSD is just a cheap MLC unit with a big brand name and inflated expectations.
I'm usually quick to adopt new tech, but I'm still not satisfied with SSDs. I can't think of a good reason to use one in a desktop PC right now. They're slow, they die young, and they have perverse design quirks like oversized pages that result in internal fragmentation, and oh yeah, they cost an arm and a leg. Once someone releases an SSD that solves ALL of those sticky points, and ideally delivers enough random-access throughput to saturate the 300MB/s SATA line (or whatever bus is mainstream by then), that's when I'll jump on board.
Right now, my opinion is that anyone even considering an SSD would probably be better served by a VelociRaptor. Same price, same humorously low capacity, less bullshit.
The "fragmentation-proof" SSD suffers performance degradation due to its own internal fragmentation...
So when the hell are the Linux fanboys going to get off their high horse and write a sane defragmenter for Ext2/3/4 ?
What ever happened to decentralized trackers ? I remember reading something about the TPB guys working on the next big thing, shortly after the dirty cops confiscated their servers a few years back.
I think the bittorrent system has reached a point where enough people are involved that a shared, decentralized system could be made to work reliably. Something like taking the existing setup of web forum, tracker and membership database, and prop it up on top of a P2P overlay network generously supplied by site operators. It doesn't seem like such a huge stretch, especially when you consider that file sharing will never go away. Every time the courts shut down a network, another will rise bigger and stronger than the last.