With my midrange cable connection I can usually get about 400K/sec download (these are rough numbers, let's make them rougher)
1,500,000,000 / 400,000 Kb/sec = 3750 seconds or
62.5 minutes
So, we take the ratio of the download vs run time 62.5/100 =.625 and subtract from 100% to get the percentage of buffer needed before watching avoiding any skips (37.5%)
so for a 100 minute movie, you'd need to wait about 37 minutes before you could watch the whole thing without stopping, assuming ideal transfer rates.
That's not too bad. Running to Blockbuster is about a 5 minute drive from my house. But of course, I'm naked, shoes aren't on, lack of motivation, etc. So, maybe 10 minutes to get dressed, get shoes on, etc. Then get in the car. If it's cold the car has to warm up. So figure 12 minutes just to get on the way, then 5 minutes there. Then you have to pick out the movie, which probably isn't in if your Blockbuster is like the one I go to (5 minutes) Then you wait in line for the checkout, which might take 2-3 minutes. Then you drive home (5 minutes)
10 + 2 + 5 + 5 + 3 + 5 = 30 minutes. AND you have to return them of course, sometime.
Versus the current speed of 37 minutes to stay naked, comfortable and not to mention save fuel...... I'd say the thing is marketable with today's technology. And now there's a 6Mbps cable modem service available for a little more which will speed the time up a lot.
Plus, with a 30 GB drive, you can queue up a bunch of movies you want to watch over night (15-20) and then watch them at your leisure. If the hard drive fills up, you have to watch the movies to remove them, or "refund" them without watching and delete them and the next movie in the queue would be downloaded.
I think it's a GREAT idea. I'd gladly pay 3-4 bucks a movie to just rent it and watch it once or twice and not ever have to go to Blockbuster again. I think it's totally reasonable.
3. The current G4 eMac is $800, and their margin on it is thin (by Apple standards.) This rumored system is pretty much a G4 with the $100 monitor removed. No way Apple sells it for $500.
Unless you know the cost of the hardware for each of these machines, it's pretty hard to go by the price of the eMac.
That's not to mention the fact that Apple has around 8 billion in cash lying around and if Jobs was willing to burn some of that to get market share they could lose money on the machines for a while (in favor of future iTunes revenue, possible "iVideos" store in the future, etc, etc.)
Anyhoo, snipers aside, just using it (or the next-gen version) as a short-range pistol is pretty nasty. No chemical residue on the gunman after firing. No ballistics tests possible -- no bullets. Pretty useful for all sorts of bad.
PFT! It would take an hour to kill someone with this thing. They would be able to run over and punch you in the face in a few seconds.. The worst would be a tiny burn or maybe some minor eye damage, inside of 15 feet... this is no more dangerous than a regular BB gun.
There's also something about being able to see the waveform of the thing being spoken that really helps out with the accenting. I think Sony made a system that did that, matched it up with the printed words/letters and of course played audio also. And while the audio was playing, you could record yourself speaking it, and then see both your recorded waveform and the correct waveform. It's good stuff.
There's no substitute for practice, but computers can cram a lot in really quick.
See this site for information on "Tactical Markers" present on the road signs in the US. The idea is that they could shut off all navigation equipment and still traverse the country easily. Whatever they =..
It's a bird! It's a plane! No! It's an Or-ni-thop-ter!
Doesn't make for much good comedy. They should get Paul McCarthney as a test pilot and call it "Wings". Ha. Sorry.
I don't think it will work. I think that the human power to weight ratio is too small to move enough air at sea level to lift a body. Regardless of any magical gearing or lever action..
It's pretty easy to bypass. Get yourself a custom IRC client that logs into 3 or 8 or 100 servers at a time. Then your contact logs into the same servers and into randomly selected channels. You send a message which is scrambled up and is sent in pieces to each server. So say your message is "Let's meet at the tower at midnight." it would be split up on as many channels as you have servers connected on both sides. So say you are using three servers on each side, then only every third character would be sent, with an offset of which server it is:
So like channel #random19a9x on server 1 would get a message from you:
L'mtt w dh
and channel #random19a9x on server 2 would get:
ese BLAH BLAH etc
rinse and repeat for as many channels as you like. of course, while all this is happening, you could be continually logging off and on, changing nicks or channels or sending to other servers in a predefined fashion. Perhaps the control connection could be over a DCC connection while the actual secure messages travel thru the IRC never to be found again. (Outband signaling).
You could also combine this with email, SMS, web pages, etc to split the message up into as many channels and media as possible. And of course, you have to make the software client script driven so new scripts can be easily generated to stay ahead of any technology Big Brother could use to monitor it.
Possible problems are pretty obvious: everything originally comes from your IP so anything between you and the network can be compromised. It's really pretty safe to assume that the core routers are compromised as well. Well, this is not the case. The order could be randomized and the complexity of putting it back together grows in proportion with the number of channels.
The idea is to make it as much like chat as possible but not have any full packets of clear or encrypted text go out at once, preventing any easy way to view it. And the ability to change the patterns and behavior of the connecting and reconnecting would thwart anyone learning the way it works.
If we're such a drain, we wouldn't be as successful as we are now.
The whole time I was reading your post, I kept thinking to myself, "This sounds like someone who works there." And thus your summation appears, and not without a tone of irony.
Your acceptance of the way things have become is interesting. You keep spouting about a free market but you forget that there is no free market. As long as there is a minimum wage, taxes, import and export duties, etc. there will never be a free market. The government sets rates and it's getting bigger every day friend. I don't think there's a way out.
So, while your utopian Econ 101 appears to make sense, it is simply impossible.
Yeah, some of their practices make Microsoft look like Jesus.
They really are the biggest non-government thing in the world, if not on paper then in terms of land and leases they own, inventory, clout in the marketplace. No one can touch them. And it's still "family" owned and all that cash is getting shipped right to the bible belt.
The conspiracy people are now sayign that the walmart store space will be used as internment camps when the "purges" come. Just do a search for "Walmart Camp" or "Walmart Prison". Good stuff;)
The problem is that this data gives them a lot of POWER to move markets. Knowing what someone is going to buy before they do is one thing, but combined with the way they force their suppliers to cater to their wishes it can reach evil levels. Walmart can break a supplier overnight.
It also hurts small business, collecting and shipping money to the bible belt from every small town in the country. Especially in rural areas, local businesses who've been around for decades are constantly failing because of the global pressure of Walmart. Walmart will lose money in a store just to gain market share, something the small business person will not be able to do and still feed his family.
Walmart is not a good thing. Yes, they've done a good job supplying redneck and poor america with knock offs of luxury items at low prices. But have they really helped us? Hiring illegal workers, paying below market wages, etc. They have really changed the landscape of small town USA and a lot of people have been raped. It's sad but I guess the global attitude is enevitable. It's just sad that the delicate economic balances formed in rural communities over the past 100 years have been shattered by this corporate behemoth. One day the market will readjust I guess, but it's just depressing.
Consumers are just lazy I guess and are obsessed about saving 10 or 15 cents on toilet paper when in reality they are costing themselves a lot more in terms of abandoning their local economy and sending their dollars to Arkansas. Because that money could be given to a local merchant who in turn buys stuff from another local merchant the customer works for, thus a positive feedback loop.
Walmart is the drain. I guess it's time to move to Bentonville except for their near cult-like practices of religious motivation and management techniques. I guess the only solution is to buy Walmart stock at this point.
Speaking of old MP3 stuff, there was once Sonique but it went by the wayside after it was bought by lycos and the original creative team was disbanded.
Sometimes it's better for everyone if some big corporation doesn't buy an application because then the developers and creative people stay together simply for the love of the project and breakthrus can be made rather than pandering to profit margins......
I'm going to shamelessly post the answer to all of your toy shopping needs:
Amazing Toys has all the classic mind toys, tons of games, chess sets, science toys, etc. Probably the coolest internet shopping stop of mine every birthday and Christmas. And they are friendly and knowledgable--a geek toy shop run by geeks. It's cool, seriously.
(I should mention I know the guy as I used to live in Great Falls, MT, where the store is..)
I bet they are going to get into some type of set top box thing, like WebTV only.. worse.
Maybe the browsers have just evolved to a point that they are finally as easy to use as AOL. I mean, you can get a great web based email client for free, with 1GB of storage. You still have all the news and stuff. AIM is free for everyone, along with the other instant messengers.
Really, they should keep everyone on dialup because the only people that use AOL are locked into it because they don't know that other stuff exists.
I'm sorry, I shouldn't have gone off like that. It just makes me angry sometimes. Isn't America stupid enough already without the media furthering the ignorance? Please help us out, help America out, make us stronger by really working hard to give us the truth. I know that there's not much time to keep up with everything but maybe everyone should just slow down and stick to integrity. I can only wish.
Hey, I'm just saying what they want to hear. It's not your fault the magazine has to cater to the masses, the majority of which (including me) are Windows users. I'm glad you're the Linux columnist, and I hope you make a lot of money doing what you do. That said:
The author of the article in question did not research the problem enough to point out the simple fact that it's the Microsoft default user settings that are the problem, NOT the tool itself (something that would be obvious to any slightly educated user of Microsoft Windows).
Microsoft has been relying on hidden folders and stuff to protect sensitive information for too long and frankly Google Desktop should not be blamed for their problems. The article makes NO mention of this fact. The article was written by someone who does not know what they are talking about, and was written just for the money, not for any reason of journalistic integrity.
I imagine a typical day at the PC World Internet News desk to go something like this: The editor AIM's (or more likely, MSN Messengers) everyone about the newest headlines. There's probably a number of departments or columnists, like the security columnist, for instance. So he (security) goes out and says, "What story are a lot of people going to click on and read today?" or (less likely), "What security flaw am I going to inform my poor, unknowledgable users with today so they can compute more safely?"
Boom, he sees a little blurb out on the wire about the new, highly-touted Google Desktop search. It was probably a security advisory, low-priority, which says something like, "Users should know that you can look at other people's profiles due to default Microsoft Windows security policies. The files you believe to be private can often be viewed by other users on the same computer if you haven't encrypted them. The Google Desktop Search (like the Microsoft FIND feature built into Windows) searches all folders on the computer. This makes it a tiny tiny bit easier for another user to look at your files, if they didn't already know what they were doing at all."
Again, the one of the two mindsets of the journalist come into play: A: "Ooh, this thing is going to get a lot of hits because people love Google and I can say there's something WRONG with their product." or B: "My users should know that there's a flaw in Google. I don't really understand this security advisory, but it looks like people might be at some risk, or something, and I can let them know. Plus the boss will like it because I'll get a few more hits today." and C: "Oh my GOD, I JUST INSTALLED THIS AT HOME AND MY WIFE IS PROBABLY READING EMAILS FROM MY OTHER WIFE" (I could have left that out, but...)
So the security columnist drafts his column. But because he doesn't really understand the problem, he says that Google Desktop has a flaw in in that allows them to view other people's files.
You state yourself that you gear your magazine towards people who need more help than a geek would on the computer. Yet the stories you publish are NOT FACTUAL. This author could have VERY EASILY explained that when you use Windows, your Outlook profile and folders, your desktop, your Temp Internet Files are all stored in World Readable folders and then have a simple step by step to fix the problem. If you are in business to HELP, why are you NOT HELPING? "We're here to inform" but you're leaving out a lot of important information. I feel sorry for the poor people who buy your magazine and depend on it as the truth.
I see a tool such as Google Desktop as making a person's computer as easy to browse as the Google internet site. Something more familiar.
The only thing your magazine's article did was to scare the users who don't know anything into NOT using Google Desktop even though it will improve their knowledge and control of the computer without additional learning. It was a USELESS WASTE OF TIME for anyone that read it!
YET SOMEONE WAS PAID TO WRITE IT and your advertisers PAID FOR US TO READ IT!
In fact, sorry about this, you could theoretically buffer 10 seconds ahead on all the channels immediately around the channel you're currently on (if you're on 10, buffer 8,9,10,11,12), then you could flip just like regular TV.
In fact, thinking about it some more, to resolve the sync issue, they'd use NTP to sync the clock in the box with the clock at the main server. Then you could stream ahead like 10 seconds which would be enough to buffer but still allow you to "flip" reasonably well. Really though, the FLIP on digital is much much slower than regular cable and is one thing I HATE about digital. I can check out 100 channels in 30 seconds;)
Gates owns a large portion of Cox Communications if I recall correctly. They are a large cable provider. I've always assumed that "Digital" cable was probably just an IP based network for some time now. I know nothing of this, of course, but I would assume that it would be possible to just constantly stream multicast packets for each channel, each channel being an address. Then the cable box itself is just a router and when you point it at a channel you are only pulling in those packets to be decoded into video frames.
Sometimes you see like only a square or two of the video show up and the rest of the screen is black. This leads me to believe that there's a mosaic of sorts that gets sent. Probably each packet is at the MTU size with a few bits of timecode, a upper left corner coordinate and then 32x32 pixels of image. Thus you could actually have 10x10 or 100 streams per channel and if most of them got thru you'd have a decent picture (missing a few squares at most), enough to understand what's going on at least. You could even JPG each little square for less bandwidth and you wouldn't have the missing frames and other such crap that you see on internet streaming video. Then your audio could be on one or two streams with timecode as well.
It's good to have control of your network, and the cable company has one big lan that they have ultimate control over. They can do stuff like inefficient multicasting without screwing it up for everyone else like on the internet. I think cable has a pretty big bandwidth, in fact I think they run fiber to the corner in almost every case, with the coax coming off a little distributer router at the curb. So they would have no problem streaming 200 channels of 400-1mbps video and leave room to give most of their customers 5mbps internet connections. If it became a problem, they could just split the network up a bit so fewer people are on one fiber, which is trival.
Of course, I just made all this stuff up but I believe that's how I'd do it if I were the cable company. Leverage inexpensive gigabit cable and fiber routers, good old failsafe IP and you have an all around great solution. And it's already HERE in most cities !
I think IPv6's improved multicasting as well as improved, smarter routers will be able to take advantage of the wonderful multicast and open up free TV to everyone.
I applaud SBC for moving in on the cable companies, but really we need better stuff on the internet to really benefit as consumers.
PC World has long been a Microsoft yellow journalism rag. It's just Microsoft Corp.'s Department of Monopoly Security at work.
Really, the Google tool is simply very powerful and is merely exposing the low default security in Windows profiles to the masses--but it's nothing me and the parent haven't known for 4 or 5 years now..........
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So, to calculate:
.625 and subtract from 100% to get the percentage of buffer needed before watching avoiding any skips (37.5%)
100 minute movie = 6000 seconds
6000 seconds * 2Mbps =~ 12000000000 bits
or 1,500,000,000 bytes.
With my midrange cable connection I can usually get about 400K/sec download (these are rough numbers, let's make them rougher)
1,500,000,000 / 400,000 Kb/sec = 3750 seconds or
62.5 minutes
So, we take the ratio of the download vs run time 62.5/100 =
so for a 100 minute movie, you'd need to wait about 37 minutes before you could watch the whole thing without stopping, assuming ideal transfer rates.
That's not too bad. Running to Blockbuster is about a 5 minute drive from my house. But of course, I'm naked, shoes aren't on, lack of motivation, etc. So, maybe 10 minutes to get dressed, get shoes on, etc. Then get in the car. If it's cold the car has to warm up. So figure 12 minutes just to get on the way, then 5 minutes there. Then you have to pick out the movie, which probably isn't in if your Blockbuster is like the one I go to (5 minutes) Then you wait in line for the checkout, which might take 2-3 minutes. Then you drive home (5 minutes)
10 + 2 + 5 + 5 + 3 + 5 = 30 minutes. AND you have to return them of course, sometime.
Versus the current speed of 37 minutes to stay naked, comfortable and not to mention save fuel...... I'd say the thing is marketable with today's technology. And now there's a 6Mbps cable modem service available for a little more which will speed the time up a lot.
Plus, with a 30 GB drive, you can queue up a bunch of movies you want to watch over night (15-20) and then watch them at your leisure. If the hard drive fills up, you have to watch the movies to remove them, or "refund" them without watching and delete them and the next movie in the queue would be downloaded.
I think it's a GREAT idea. I'd gladly pay 3-4 bucks a movie to just rent it and watch it once or twice and not ever have to go to Blockbuster again. I think it's totally reasonable.
Are they better at teaching useful things than textbooks?
I learned to shoot deer in first grade on the "Oregon Trail". Pft.
So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish.
3. The current G4 eMac is $800, and their margin on it is thin (by Apple standards.) This rumored system is pretty much a G4 with the $100 monitor removed. No way Apple sells it for $500.
Unless you know the cost of the hardware for each of these machines, it's pretty hard to go by the price of the eMac.
That's not to mention the fact that Apple has around 8 billion in cash lying around and if Jobs was willing to burn some of that to get market share they could lose money on the machines for a while (in favor of future iTunes revenue, possible "iVideos" store in the future, etc, etc.)
Anyhoo, snipers aside, just using it (or the next-gen version) as a short-range pistol is pretty nasty. No chemical residue on the gunman after firing. No ballistics tests possible -- no bullets. Pretty useful for all sorts of bad.
PFT! It would take an hour to kill someone with this thing. They would be able to run over and punch you in the face in a few seconds.. The worst would be a tiny burn or maybe some minor eye damage, inside of 15 feet... this is no more dangerous than a regular BB gun.
There's also something about being able to see the waveform of the thing being spoken that really helps out with the accenting. I think Sony made a system that did that, matched it up with the printed words/letters and of course played audio also. And while the audio was playing, you could record yourself speaking it, and then see both your recorded waveform and the correct waveform. It's good stuff.
There's no substitute for practice, but computers can cram a lot in really quick.
See this site for information on "Tactical Markers" present on the road signs in the US. The idea is that they could shut off all navigation equipment and still traverse the country easily. Whatever they =..
It's a bird! It's a plane! No! It's an Or-ni-thop-ter!
Doesn't make for much good comedy. They should get Paul McCarthney as a test pilot and call it "Wings". Ha. Sorry.
I don't think it will work. I think that the human power to weight ratio is too small to move enough air at sea level to lift a body. Regardless of any magical gearing or lever action..
It's pretty easy to bypass. Get yourself a custom IRC client that logs into 3 or 8 or 100 servers at a time. Then your contact logs into the same servers and into randomly selected channels. You send a message which is scrambled up and is sent in pieces to each server. So say your message is "Let's meet at the tower at midnight." it would be split up on as many channels as you have servers connected on both sides. So say you are using three servers on each side, then only every third character would be sent, with an offset of which server it is:
So like channel #random19a9x on server 1 would get a message from you:
L'mtt w dh
and channel #random19a9x on server 2 would get:
ese BLAH BLAH etc
rinse and repeat for as many channels as you like. of course, while all this is happening, you could be continually logging off and on, changing nicks or channels or sending to other servers in a predefined fashion. Perhaps the control connection could be over a DCC connection while the actual secure messages travel thru the IRC never to be found again. (Outband signaling).
You could also combine this with email, SMS, web pages, etc to split the message up into as many channels and media as possible. And of course, you have to make the software client script driven so new scripts can be easily generated to stay ahead of any technology Big Brother could use to monitor it.
Possible problems are pretty obvious: everything originally comes from your IP so anything between you and the network can be compromised. It's really pretty safe to assume that the core routers are compromised as well. Well, this is not the case. The order could be randomized and the complexity of putting it back together grows in proportion with the number of channels.
The idea is to make it as much like chat as possible but not have any full packets of clear or encrypted text go out at once, preventing any easy way to view it. And the ability to change the patterns and behavior of the connecting and reconnecting would thwart anyone learning the way it works.
If we're such a drain, we wouldn't be as successful as we are now.
The whole time I was reading your post, I kept thinking to myself, "This sounds like someone who works there." And thus your summation appears, and not without a tone of irony.
Your acceptance of the way things have become is interesting. You keep spouting about a free market but you forget that there is no free market. As long as there is a minimum wage, taxes, import and export duties, etc. there will never be a free market. The government sets rates and it's getting bigger every day friend. I don't think there's a way out.
So, while your utopian Econ 101 appears to make sense, it is simply impossible.
Hopefully they'll mention my air and water addiction in the next Congress.
Yeah, some of their practices make Microsoft look like Jesus.
;)
They really are the biggest non-government thing in the world, if not on paper then in terms of land and leases they own, inventory, clout in the marketplace. No one can touch them. And it's still "family" owned and all that cash is getting shipped right to the bible belt.
The conspiracy people are now sayign that the walmart store space will be used as internment camps when the "purges" come. Just do a search for "Walmart Camp" or "Walmart Prison". Good stuff
The problem is that this data gives them a lot of POWER to move markets. Knowing what someone is going to buy before they do is one thing, but combined with the way they force their suppliers to cater to their wishes it can reach evil levels. Walmart can break a supplier overnight.
It also hurts small business, collecting and shipping money to the bible belt from every small town in the country. Especially in rural areas, local businesses who've been around for decades are constantly failing because of the global pressure of Walmart. Walmart will lose money in a store just to gain market share, something the small business person will not be able to do and still feed his family.
Walmart is not a good thing. Yes, they've done a good job supplying redneck and poor america with knock offs of luxury items at low prices. But have they really helped us? Hiring illegal workers, paying below market wages, etc. They have really changed the landscape of small town USA and a lot of people have been raped. It's sad but I guess the global attitude is enevitable. It's just sad that the delicate economic balances formed in rural communities over the past 100 years have been shattered by this corporate behemoth. One day the market will readjust I guess, but it's just depressing.
Consumers are just lazy I guess and are obsessed about saving 10 or 15 cents on toilet paper when in reality they are costing themselves a lot more in terms of abandoning their local economy and sending their dollars to Arkansas. Because that money could be given to a local merchant who in turn buys stuff from another local merchant the customer works for, thus a positive feedback loop.
Walmart is the drain. I guess it's time to move to Bentonville except for their near cult-like practices of religious motivation and management techniques. I guess the only solution is to buy Walmart stock at this point.
Speaking of old MP3 stuff, there was once Sonique but it went by the wayside after it was bought by lycos and the original creative team was disbanded.
Sometimes it's better for everyone if some big corporation doesn't buy an application because then the developers and creative people stay together simply for the love of the project and breakthrus can be made rather than pandering to profit margins......
I'm going to shamelessly post the answer to all of your toy shopping needs:
Amazing Toys has all the classic mind toys, tons of games, chess sets, science toys, etc. Probably the coolest internet shopping stop of mine every birthday and Christmas. And they are friendly and knowledgable--a geek toy shop run by geeks. It's cool, seriously.
(I should mention I know the guy as I used to live in Great Falls, MT, where the store is..)
I bet they are going to get into some type of set top box thing, like WebTV only.. worse.
Maybe the browsers have just evolved to a point that they are finally as easy to use as AOL. I mean, you can get a great web based email client for free, with 1GB of storage. You still have all the news and stuff. AIM is free for everyone, along with the other instant messengers.
Really, they should keep everyone on dialup because the only people that use AOL are locked into it because they don't know that other stuff exists.
I'm sorry, I shouldn't have gone off like that. It just makes me angry sometimes. Isn't America stupid enough already without the media furthering the ignorance? Please help us out, help America out, make us stronger by really working hard to give us the truth. I know that there's not much time to keep up with everything but maybe everyone should just slow down and stick to integrity. I can only wish.
Hey, I'm just saying what they want to hear. It's not your fault the magazine has to cater to the masses, the majority of which (including me) are Windows users. I'm glad you're the Linux columnist, and I hope you make a lot of money doing what you do. That said:
The author of the article in question did not research the problem enough to point out the simple fact that it's the Microsoft default user settings that are the problem, NOT the tool itself (something that would be obvious to any slightly educated user of Microsoft Windows).
Microsoft has been relying on hidden folders and stuff to protect sensitive information for too long and frankly Google Desktop should not be blamed for their problems. The article makes NO mention of this fact. The article was written by someone who does not know what they are talking about, and was written just for the money, not for any reason of journalistic integrity.
I imagine a typical day at the PC World Internet News desk to go something like this: The editor AIM's (or more likely, MSN Messengers) everyone about the newest headlines. There's probably a number of departments or columnists, like the security columnist, for instance. So he (security) goes out and says, "What story are a lot of people going to click on and read today?" or (less likely), "What security flaw am I going to inform my poor, unknowledgable users with today so they can compute more safely?"
Boom, he sees a little blurb out on the wire about the new, highly-touted Google Desktop search. It was probably a security advisory, low-priority, which says something like, "Users should know that you can look at other people's profiles due to default Microsoft Windows security policies. The files you believe to be private can often be viewed by other users on the same computer if you haven't encrypted them. The Google Desktop Search (like the Microsoft FIND feature built into Windows) searches all folders on the computer. This makes it a tiny tiny bit easier for another user to look at your files, if they didn't already know what they were doing at all."
Again, the one of the two mindsets of the journalist come into play: A: "Ooh, this thing is going to get a lot of hits because people love Google and I can say there's something WRONG with their product." or B: "My users should know that there's a flaw in Google. I don't really understand this security advisory, but it looks like people might be at some risk, or something, and I can let them know. Plus the boss will like it because I'll get a few more hits today." and C: "Oh my GOD, I JUST INSTALLED THIS AT HOME AND MY WIFE IS PROBABLY READING EMAILS FROM MY OTHER WIFE" (I could have left that out, but...)
So the security columnist drafts his column. But because he doesn't really understand the problem, he says that Google Desktop has a flaw in in that allows them to view other people's files.
You state yourself that you gear your magazine towards people who need more help than a geek would on the computer. Yet the stories you publish are NOT FACTUAL. This author could have VERY EASILY explained that when you use Windows, your Outlook profile and folders, your desktop, your Temp Internet Files are all stored in World Readable folders and then have a simple step by step to fix the problem. If you are in business to HELP, why are you NOT HELPING? "We're here to inform" but you're leaving out a lot of important information. I feel sorry for the poor people who buy your magazine and depend on it as the truth.
I see a tool such as Google Desktop as making a person's computer as easy to browse as the Google internet site. Something more familiar.
The only thing your magazine's article did was to scare the users who don't know anything into NOT using Google Desktop even though it will improve their knowledge and control of the computer without additional learning. It was a USELESS WASTE OF TIME for anyone that read it!
YET SOMEONE WAS PAID TO WRITE IT and your advertisers PAID FOR US TO READ IT!
In fact, sorry about this, you could theoretically buffer 10 seconds ahead on all the channels immediately around the channel you're currently on (if you're on 10, buffer 8,9,10,11,12), then you could flip just like regular TV.
In fact, thinking about it some more, to resolve the sync issue, they'd use NTP to sync the clock in the box with the clock at the main server. Then you could stream ahead like 10 seconds which would be enough to buffer but still allow you to "flip" reasonably well. Really though, the FLIP on digital is much much slower than regular cable and is one thing I HATE about digital. I can check out 100 channels in 30 seconds ;)
Gates owns a large portion of Cox Communications if I recall correctly. They are a large cable provider. I've always assumed that "Digital" cable was probably just an IP based network for some time now. I know nothing of this, of course, but I would assume that it would be possible to just constantly stream multicast packets for each channel, each channel being an address. Then the cable box itself is just a router and when you point it at a channel you are only pulling in those packets to be decoded into video frames.
Sometimes you see like only a square or two of the video show up and the rest of the screen is black. This leads me to believe that there's a mosaic of sorts that gets sent. Probably each packet is at the MTU size with a few bits of timecode, a upper left corner coordinate and then 32x32 pixels of image. Thus you could actually have 10x10 or 100 streams per channel and if most of them got thru you'd have a decent picture (missing a few squares at most), enough to understand what's going on at least. You could even JPG each little square for less bandwidth and you wouldn't have the missing frames and other such crap that you see on internet streaming video. Then your audio could be on one or two streams with timecode as well.
It's good to have control of your network, and the cable company has one big lan that they have ultimate control over. They can do stuff like inefficient multicasting without screwing it up for everyone else like on the internet. I think cable has a pretty big bandwidth, in fact I think they run fiber to the corner in almost every case, with the coax coming off a little distributer router at the curb. So they would have no problem streaming 200 channels of 400-1mbps video and leave room to give most of their customers 5mbps internet connections. If it became a problem, they could just split the network up a bit so fewer people are on one fiber, which is trival.
Of course, I just made all this stuff up but I believe that's how I'd do it if I were the cable company. Leverage inexpensive gigabit cable and fiber routers, good old failsafe IP and you have an all around great solution. And it's already HERE in most cities !
I think IPv6's improved multicasting as well as improved, smarter routers will be able to take advantage of the wonderful multicast and open up free TV to everyone.
I applaud SBC for moving in on the cable companies, but really we need better stuff on the internet to really benefit as consumers.
We learn from history than we can never learn anything from history.
Feynman gave a lecture on this and in good science you don't imply something. Just like you should never assume.
PC World has long been a Microsoft yellow journalism rag. It's just Microsoft Corp.'s Department of Monopoly Security at work.
Really, the Google tool is simply very powerful and is merely exposing the low default security in Windows profiles to the masses--but it's nothing me and the parent haven't known for 4 or 5 years now..........
Nothing to see here.
Sort of remeniscent of the power hierarchy in the US:
Bush, Dick and Colin