I'm very pissed at Kos for writing this today because for the last several weeks I've been intending to write in my dKos Diary about how the blogging of the Left has open sourced politics.
It's no where near exactly like right-wing radio in the 90s if you ask me, because right-wing radio still required a huge (and expensive) infrastructure that is no longer needed.
The real news behind the Gannon story isn't that bloggers blogged about it, but that it was mainly the work of blog READERS. It wasn't Kos or Atrios that really broke the story, it was the people who post comments and diaries at their sites. Those comments and diaries can be posted by anyone, so journalism is becoming much more open source. Regular people post comments, the best of those comments filter through to the site admins, the best of the stuff from the various sites filters through to the mainstream media.
I'm hoping that Dean realizes this is the OTHER legacy of his "sleepless summer", not only has he taken the Democrats back to real grass-roots fund raising, but he has also inadvertantly created the setup needed for open sourcing the message of the Democratic party. Instead of needing one brilliant campaign advisor with all the best ideas in the world, the Democrats now have thousands of relatively mediocre campaign advisors who each may have only one great idea. But if you can skim the Great Ideas from those people who otherwise have mediocre ideas the rest of the time, you end up with a deluge of Great Ideas, much more than any one brilliant campaign advisor will ever be able to give you. It's exactly the Cathedral and the Bazaar, but taken from the arena of computers and moved into politics.
I recommend checking out www.vcdhelp.com. They have tons of links and guides and howtos on various tools. Here is a link to their authoring page.
I use DVDLab to author dvd's myself, which you can find here. It works in most cases, but sometimes I use ifoedit to do really advanced things. However, Ifoedit is not for the feint of heart.
I don't see how watching Evercrack is going to be any different than watching any other coordinated information system.
Because the point isn't that they are watching a coordinated system, but they are watching to see how the system is coordinated on a shoe-string budget by a group of amatuers with no training in how to do the effort and with nothing to gain from the effort. If you can't see the difference between an EQ guild coordinating a weekend raid, and the Alaskan Pipeline, then you lack forsight..
But on a MMOG, the typical player has some desire to communicate (even when outside of the game) while still remaining relatively anonymous (I know I don't like my real identy to go out over the net). Quite a bit different that family reunions, but quite similar to terrorist organizations.
So is the Trans-Alaska Pipeline system.
Uhh, oil != people.
So is FedEx's tracking system. Etc.
Interestingly enough, terrorists and MMOG players have to do all of their communication outside of a network designed for that task. The FedEx tracking system is a closed system that generates massive ammounts of revenue to support itself. It's quite a bit different than an Everquest guild organizing for a raid or a group of terrorists communicating plans for blowing up a building. I can see where a group of losely connected amatuers trying to communicate with anonymity while not spending money is much more analogous to terrorist networks than FedEx's tracking system.
I've had pretty good luck by politely requesting: "Add this number to your no-call list"; so far, every telemarketer has understood this request. Some of them have read me a warning that it will take X weeks to propagate.
I had a call a few months ago, supposedly from one of those "Radio Market Survey" companies, where they ask you about the songs that you like and you don't like. Well this guy calls, I sit patiently while he expalins why he is calling and asks if I'll take his survey. After his initial diatribe I respond that I don't listen to the radio and I would like for him to add my name to his companies "no-call list".
The guy literally went insane. Started yelling that he doesn't know what "no-call" list I'm talking about and that he doesn't have to add my name to any lists and was quite verbally abusive. I have never had anyone react so negatively to me asking to be removed from their list.
One other bad telemarketing experience I've had is the "hang-up" call things, or whatever they are called. Starting at 8 in the morning, and lasting until 8 at night, I would get a hang up call every hour (12 a day). This lasted for weeks. It got to the point that I called the police to see if there was anything that could be done (they told me to change my number, which I was close to doing). Apparently the new thing in the telemarketting biz is to call 5 or 6 numbers all at once, the first one that answers gets the telemarketer, the rest get silence.
Finally, after dealing with this for weeks, I guess I was the lucky guy who picked up first because I finally got a telemarketer on the other end. I asked to be added to their "no-call" list and I never got another call from that company again. If this is the direction that telemarketing is moving in, then something MUST be done to stop it. It's quite scary to get an "out of area" silence call every hour for days at a time.
Actually, I was just discussing an idea like this with friends over the weekend. It's sad that the RIAA and the MPAA are so resistant to change, because the technology is out there to make a much better system for the consumers, which equates to more profit for the buisnesses. It is sad that the cable networks, the music industry, etc, are so frozen by fear of piracy, that they are unwilling to work with the consumers to make a better service (like TV on demand, buying subscriptions to just the shows you want to see, etc).
The really strange part is that these industries are really fairly new, you would think they would be much less resistant to change. I could understand an industry that had been operating the same way for hundreds of years trying to stay static, but these are new industries built on relatively new technologies, and they are trying hard to keep themselves way to static to be effective.
Altough I agree with you when you say ``listen to full-disc bands'' or something, there ARE great one-musics band of course. Say Steppenwolf. I listened to their record but the only one I really like is Born to be Wild.
But it's very personal. I dig Jethro Tull, but many friends only enjoy Aqualung, or lets say King Crimson: Red is the only thing some people want to hear.
Well, I think I've been horribly misunderstood. I came off like I was saying "My bands are superior because I'm superior" but I was really trying to say "Boycott filler bands, they don't deserve any money at all. Instead buy only the CDs of bands that you think are putting out a quality music, if we all do that, the music industry will change and we'll all get to listen to quality music."
Modern music naturally comes in song form, not album.
Incorrect. Modern pop music maybe, but I never said I listen to pop.
Am I to understand that you deliberately ignore songs that you like unless they're accompanied by 10-15 others that are of equal quality?
No, but I rarely like a band that doesn't put out consistant quality music. If I do like a band that has one decent song and an album full of crap, I just don't buy their CD. I take it that if you see a VCR that has one feature that you like, but is otherwise a total peice of crap you buy it and add it to your VCR collection? I personally don't waste money on one feature. I only buy CDs that are quality through and through, just like with any other product I purchase. It's called being a consumer awareness.
Yes, but it's 18 dollars for 18 tracks you WANT, instead of 18 dollars for 2 tracks you want and 17 tracks of filler. Doesn't sound too bad to me.
You could do like me and only listen to bands that make full CDs of good music. I can't imagine only wanting to buy a part of a CD. IMHO a band isn't worth listening to unless they build a decent albumn. In fact, a good deal of the best CDs in my collection are intended to be played from start to finish as one full serving of excellent music, not as a collection of individual songs.
Re:My most anticipated feature
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Linux 3.0
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· Score: 2
As a device driver developer, do you think Linux's interal APIs change too frequently compared to other Unix operating systems? Would there be much value in creating a more stable, possibly cross-platform driver API for Linux? How much cross-platform driver code can be shared across Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux?
Well, I've only supported 2.2 and 2.4, and there were quite a few changes between them, but, for the most part, you can write a 2.2 compatible driver and it will run on a 2.4 kernel. Luckily my company didn't see any benefit to supporting the 2.2 kernel after 2.4 came out (we sell a very costly, like $10k, PCI card that performs a very specialized function, so we work hand in hand with our customers, which means we don't have to have much backwards compatability most of the time). If I were developing a card that was sold to consumers, and I needed to be able to support a wide variety of machines, then I would be much more likely to answer yes to the stable API question!:)
As far as sharing cross platform code, well we originally used streams on Solaris and HP-UX, but we found that the streams support was lacking (at best) on Linux, so we lost a lot of time and code when we originally ported to Linux. Now we basically have 2 sets of Unix drivers. A streams version for Solaris and HP-UX, and a non-streams for Linux. We're hoping to remove all of the streams code and re-merge the drivers at some point, but it's always hard to balance a task like that vs our other time commitments. The differences between our HP-UX and Solaris drivers are a few #ifdef's, whereas the difference between that driver and Linux is probably thousands of lines of code.
Re:My most anticipated feature
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Linux 3.0
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I develop drivers for Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux (for a PCI card that my company makes). I would love to see a Kernel dump for a particular problem I am trying to debug at the moment!:)
Of course, stupid mistakes in Solaris or HP-UX kills their kernel and results in waiting for the machine to reboot. Stupid mistakes in Linux results in a kernel panic with the output sent to the syslog (9 times out of 10 bad code doesn't kill the entire Kernel, so no waiting on the machine to restart), so I definately think that Linux has the upper hand as far as handling poor kernel space code.
I am all for this type of law enforcement. I think this type of sting operation ought to be cheap enough to manage with centralized administration and small teams. Maybe this will be a decent deterrent, as jail time obviously isn't enough.
Well I certainly think I'm all for this type of law enforcement, but when I begin to contemplate the future of these types of stings, I must admit that it scares me. I saw an example of this type of car used for an arrest on the discovery channel. They had two girls pull over to the side of the road and get out of the car and start yelling at one another about how girl 1 is just going to "leave his car here and he can come pick it up himself".. then she makes a big show of throwing the keys into the car and slamming the door (presumably without locking the doors) and then gets into her friend's car and off they drive. It's important to mention that before they did this big show, an undercover police officer drove around and found someone he thought looked like an individual who would steal a car (he scoped out a potential target) then they did the act directly in front of this person.
Now I agree with the fact that stealing a car is stealing a car, but this seems to me to be quite a bit like monitoring for thought crime. Present a situation to an individual that is not likely to ever happen, then see if that individual is willing to break the law under these special circumstances. It is easy to see them bring it a step further. Lets say they decide to start catching muggers by having a guy walk out into the street and shout "Wow, I can't believe the ATM just let me withdraw $10,000!!!".
Okay I still agree, a mugging is a mugging. Maybe now that they're catching all of the muggers and the car thieves, they decide to start trying to catch people who are willing to traffic drugs. They start going door to door with a small brown package and offer $10,000 to a person if he'll just deliver the small brown package to an address downtown. Suddenly the police are presenting hypothetical situations that could never exist in reality, just to see if people are willing to break the law in these extreme circumstances. Suddenly the police can transform ANYONE into a criminal, just by finding the threshold of risk vs. reward for that individual.
I would think leaving one of these cars in a high crime area and waiting for them to get stolen is a noble thing. But it scares me when they begin to make false senario's and they target people who fit the profile of a car thief. It seems to me that they are creating crime with these hypothetical situations, then arresting people for having the potential to do wrong if an impossible situation were to occur. Leaving a locked car to be stolen is perfectly acceptable, but creating a situation that is too good to be true frightens me..
why do they not make an expansion where an item can only be had by such a few number of people....say 10% of the people.........then rather than having slaes, you have wars over who controls the weapons.....you can get clans to ambush the carrier of an item, kill him/her, then take their weapons.
Well.. this will never work in EQ because there is little or no player vs player (so players can't kill each other for the items).. but they tried something similar to this in UO and it failed drastically.. basically they said there will be X amount of resources in the world, in order for those resources to replinish they must be used to create something and that something must be used until it wears out.. which makes sense.. but they ran into a major problem.. people would stockpile ANYTHING.. it was crazy.. you'd have people with 10,000 useless woolen shirts stored up in the bank, and that would be the ENTIRE wool supply for the whole world.. sitting there.. collecting dust.. in some guys bank..
So what will happen is, people will start getting items that aren't as good as their current weapon (or armor or whatever), then instead of returning it to the game, they will put it away and never use it.. which will keep access away from the rest of the world.. eventually there will be a clan or guild that owns all the best equipment in the world, AND they will own all of the crappy equipment also, hidden away.. so that no one can ever get an item..;(
It is my understanding that a lot of Asian country citizens are bi-lingual(sp?) They often take english as a second language so I'm not sure how this will stop piracy. If they speak english and you stop selling your software there, then they will just download and burn the english version. Right?
Uhm.. sounds like Adobe has abandoned the goal of stoping or even slowing down piracy in Asia.. all they are saying is "We will no longer fund the development of Asian language applications, because you guys just pirate them anyways".. they could care less if their stuff is pirated after they leave.. it's not their market anymore.. they aren't taking financial hits to make software that doesn't get purchased..
Plus, being able to climb into a superhuman suit (superstrength) would be an EXCELLENT way to steal stuff. Crime would skyrocket, would it be introduced. Please understand that once something is invented, it is nearly impossible to uninvent it. Furthermore, the exoskeleton has no real peaceful benefit. And in today's age, no information is safe. Consider this.
The same could be said of any weapon.. I mean..
being able to climb into a tank would be an EXCELLENT way to steal stuff.
or
being able to fire a rocket propelled grenade would be an EXCELLENT way to steal stuff.
or
being able to command a crack squad of special force units would be an EXCELLENT way to steal stuff.
These are no more dangerous to the general public as any other weapon the military makes.. Crime never skyrocketted at the invention of a military grade weapon before.. what makes you think it will suddenly happen now?.. These things probably cost the taxpayer several million if not billion dollars each.. it's not like we've seen many people steal stealth bombers and go on joyrides lately.. I doubt the military will have less security over one of these things.. and it's not like the average street punk will be able to buy one..
Well, there are two ways this could be handled. First, if they use enough of your bandwidth, you could probably charge them with doing a DOS attack on your site; that's a serious crime in the US now.
Doesn't have to be a DOS attack, just generate real page hits.. it wouldn't take but a few extra thousand page hits a day to take these mom and pop companies down.. just require that every person in your mega-corporation checks the competing web sight or the negative publicity websight three times a day to see if there are any updates.. that will easily create enough hits to drive a small website owner under..;).. or you can just create a script that checks for updates to the page every second.. if you get called into court (HIGHLY unlikely) you can say: "Hey, we were just trying to keep updated on changes to the site, we didn't know that monitoring them that heavily would cost them so much bandwith"
Second, many states have laws against SLAPP suits (nuicence suits brought by large corporations against grass-roots organizations). It's not a lawsuit, but if you're being harassed by a large corporation, it's actionable. There are about a billion lawyers who would love to sue a big company and get the "David vs. Goliath" publicity.
Ohh, and this works ohh so well.. mega-corporations never ever ever use their resources to scare people with litigation into submission(/sarcasm)... Mega-corporations always have more resources than the grass-roots effort, and when it becomes a challenge of who can keep it in court longer (as it always does) the corporation almost always wins...
The other completely moronic dumbass statement you made was:
Yeah, it's good for the consumer when inefficient businesses go under and places that can sell the same item for less money move in.
If being a mega-corporation is the only way to make a deal to get decent prices, why don't mom-and-pops set up an organziation to bulk-buy goods (a couple of mom-and-pops in each town, with a few thousand towns)? I've heard of this new Internet thingie that lets people communicate over long distances...
It's obviously not bulk buying that drives mom and pop companies out of buisness (as much as Wal-Mart wants to say it is). It's having enough cash reserves to sell your products at a loss longer than the mom and pop companies can sell at a loss.
Initially this looks good to the consumer, they are getting products at a rate that is so low that the companies are loosing money to get it to them. However, as soon as the competition is all gone (as it will inevitably happen, when playing this type of last man standing game), then suddenly it becomes very bad for the consumer, as companies no longer have to focus on good prices (so prices skyrocket, as they always do when there is a corporate "You either buy it from me or you don't get it" mentality) and they also loose focus on customer service.
BTW: My name is also Jon.. It's always refreshing to find someone else that spells their name jon (as I'm sure you are aware it's a fairly rare spelling).;)
Re:Is it the price of bandwidth?
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Adcritic Shuts Down
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The primary problem that causes MOST businesses to go under is the costs of something; labor, raw materials, bandwidth, something costs more than what they thought it would. That doesn't mean somebody needs to make it cost less; it often means the folks starting the business need to come up with a better business plan.
So you're arguing that it's good for small buisnesses to go under? It's certainly not good for the consumer when that happens.. and it's not good for the small buisness owner.. In fact the only people that it seems to be good for is their competition (which is increasingly mega-corporations).
It's very bad for the competition to have some pressure point to use to drive smaller buisnesses out of the market. If a larger competitor can drive up the cost of raw materials, or labour, or bandwith and he can weather the storm at a loss then he can easily create a monopoly, and raise his prices to a point that hurts the consumer.
The upward spiraling cost of bandwith coupled with the lowering pay of banner ads and the mom and pop web pages being run out of buisiness because of these costs are definately a bad thing, and something needs to be done to fix it. The internet is the proverbial freeing of the printing press, it's something that humanity has needed for quite some time. Driving the cost of using the internet up is stripping the average person from having a medium to publish his works, and that isn't good. We are quickly returning to a state where mega-corporations (including the government) can destroy any negative speech towards them by driving the average person off the web and stripping their ability to self publish. It's definately bad here on the net, because what's to stop a company from creating fake hits (using a script) to drive the bandwith costs of a small publisher through the roof? If I were to start an anti-phillip morris page (as a random example), what's to stop them from using a script to create so many hits to my page that there is no possible way I can pay it.. they can obviously afford more bandwith than me (so the bandwith they use to create the hits wont affect them).
This is definately a problem that needs to be solved.
The lame lameness filter inserted a space in your url, so I made it into a link so that people can go check out that sweet screenshot.. I can't believe how nice gnome2 looks with AA fonts!!
So/. is recycling news from wired who
recycles it from fuckedcompany.com...sigh.
Uhh.. hello.. welcome to slashdot.org, I can see it's your first time here.. it's a weblog.. not a news reporting agency.. Not sure if you noticed this or not, but slashdot almost never (if ever) 'breaks' a story.. all they do is post links to relevant stories accross the net... you see.. the concept behind slashdot is thousands of people read the crap news that's out there and submit the relevant pieces to the editor's of slashdot, who then sort through them and give us the best of the best (well.. they at least try)..
It works because those of us who read slashdot don't want to read all the millions of stories out there just to get to the few things that interest us.. so instead, we let the editor's sort through the crap to give us the few interesting tidbits..
I hope you enjoy your stay.. ohh.. and *sigh* right back at ya...
As I said, I'm no expert.. but I've played around with devices that create 50-100 (which is about the range I was thinking of with my statement) milliseconds worth of delay.. and playing has a very increased range of difficulty.. with more 100 milliseconds of delay, timing yourself with the rest of a live performance can become difficult..
If you consider that speed of sound is roughly 1 feet per millisecond placing your speakers in the wrong position matters probably more than the latency of any reasonable system.
I'd say I average about 10-20 feet maxiumum from my monitor's when I'm playing live.. and when I'm doing studio work I'm virtually inches from the speaker (pretty much all studio work is done with headphones).. I may be a bit off in my numbers (it may take a bit more latency than 50-100 milliseconds) but I doubt it would take much more than that to really throw you off...
Consider as an example, watching a movie with 100 milliseconds of delay between the screen and the sound.. I'm willing to bet it would be a bit disorienting.. now imagine playing a musical instrument with latency like that..
It's important to realize that the very first thing I did when I read this article is send a link to the bass player in my band, because I'm sure both he and I will be VERY interested in this technology.. I personally can't wait.. I wasn't trying to imply I doubt the technology at all.. Gibson does quality work with anything they do (did I mention I play a Les Paul?:)).. My statement had nothing to do with the article, but I was trying to point out why latency becomes a much bigger issue for technology like this than it would in a normal situation (like say transfering a file)..
One last thing that hasn't been mentioned is processing latency.. an IP packet can be transmitted in 10ms, but you aren't giving any time to process the packet or the data on the recieving end.. which is going to be a big part of the latency..
Again I'll point out, I'm no expert.. I'm just making guesstimates from my real life experiences with playing music..
But in this application latency is the most important aspect (bandwith is most likely not very important at all).. That is why people are making the distinction.. 170 Tb/s is great bandwith, but at a latency of 1 minute that bandwith wont do a bit of good in a time critical situation like music.. in other words, you can transfer a huge file extremely fast and latency won't affect you much at all.. but in the world of music, when you consider that my pick touching the string is transmitted at near light speed (via an analog patch cable) to the amp, there is almost no latency between each note being played and heard (probably speed of sound is the biggest latency factor).. obviously, this is a simplified example...
In order for this technology to be successfull, a throughput of 200 Mb/s doesn't help if the latency is terrible.. the data is real time and needs to be transmitted real time to the recieving device.. even a few dozen milliseconds of latency can hurt the abilities of the person playing the music (and make the timing of the band extremely difficult, near impossible unless everyone in the band has the same latency)..
Uhmm.. all of that should be considered my opinion.. I'm no expert.. hell.. I probably don't even know an expert.. or really know anyone that knows an expert.. so uhh.. that's just my take on things..;) I guess I'm saying YMMV...
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I'm very pissed at Kos for writing this today because for the last several weeks I've been intending to write in my dKos Diary about how the blogging of the Left has open sourced politics.
It's no where near exactly like right-wing radio in the 90s if you ask me, because right-wing radio still required a huge (and expensive) infrastructure that is no longer needed.
The real news behind the Gannon story isn't that bloggers blogged about it, but that it was mainly the work of blog READERS. It wasn't Kos or Atrios that really broke the story, it was the people who post comments and diaries at their sites. Those comments and diaries can be posted by anyone, so journalism is becoming much more open source. Regular people post comments, the best of those comments filter through to the site admins, the best of the stuff from the various sites filters through to the mainstream media.
I'm hoping that Dean realizes this is the OTHER legacy of his "sleepless summer", not only has he taken the Democrats back to real grass-roots fund raising, but he has also inadvertantly created the setup needed for open sourcing the message of the Democratic party. Instead of needing one brilliant campaign advisor with all the best ideas in the world, the Democrats now have thousands of relatively mediocre campaign advisors who each may have only one great idea. But if you can skim the Great Ideas from those people who otherwise have mediocre ideas the rest of the time, you end up with a deluge of Great Ideas, much more than any one brilliant campaign advisor will ever be able to give you. It's exactly the Cathedral and the Bazaar, but taken from the arena of computers and moved into politics.
I recommend checking out www.vcdhelp.com. They have tons of links and guides and howtos on various tools. Here is a link to their authoring page.
I use DVDLab to author dvd's myself, which you can find here. It works in most cases, but sometimes I use ifoedit to do really advanced things. However, Ifoedit is not for the feint of heart.
I don't see how watching Evercrack is going to be any different than watching any other coordinated information system.
Because the point isn't that they are watching a coordinated system, but they are watching to see how the system is coordinated on a shoe-string budget by a group of amatuers with no training in how to do the effort and with nothing to gain from the effort. If you can't see the difference between an EQ guild coordinating a weekend raid, and the Alaskan Pipeline, then you lack forsight..
So are family reunions.
But on a MMOG, the typical player has some desire to communicate (even when outside of the game) while still remaining relatively anonymous (I know I don't like my real identy to go out over the net). Quite a bit different that family reunions, but quite similar to terrorist organizations.
So is the Trans-Alaska Pipeline system.
Uhh, oil != people.
So is FedEx's tracking system. Etc.
Interestingly enough, terrorists and MMOG players have to do all of their communication outside of a network designed for that task. The FedEx tracking system is a closed system that generates massive ammounts of revenue to support itself. It's quite a bit different than an Everquest guild organizing for a raid or a group of terrorists communicating plans for blowing up a building. I can see where a group of losely connected amatuers trying to communicate with anonymity while not spending money is much more analogous to terrorist networks than FedEx's tracking system.
They don't care about what stupid comment Joe Sixpack might say about fearless leader GWB.
Sure they don't, keep telling yourself that. They also don't care if you make a joke about "Burning Bushes".
Freedom of speech? What's that?
I've had pretty good luck by politely requesting: "Add this number to your no-call list"; so far, every telemarketer has understood this request. Some of them have read me a warning that it will take X weeks to propagate.
I had a call a few months ago, supposedly from one of those "Radio Market Survey" companies, where they ask you about the songs that you like and you don't like. Well this guy calls, I sit patiently while he expalins why he is calling and asks if I'll take his survey. After his initial diatribe I respond that I don't listen to the radio and I would like for him to add my name to his companies "no-call list".
The guy literally went insane. Started yelling that he doesn't know what "no-call" list I'm talking about and that he doesn't have to add my name to any lists and was quite verbally abusive. I have never had anyone react so negatively to me asking to be removed from their list.
One other bad telemarketing experience I've had is the "hang-up" call things, or whatever they are called. Starting at 8 in the morning, and lasting until 8 at night, I would get a hang up call every hour (12 a day). This lasted for weeks. It got to the point that I called the police to see if there was anything that could be done (they told me to change my number, which I was close to doing). Apparently the new thing in the telemarketting biz is to call 5 or 6 numbers all at once, the first one that answers gets the telemarketer, the rest get silence.
Finally, after dealing with this for weeks, I guess I was the lucky guy who picked up first because I finally got a telemarketer on the other end. I asked to be added to their "no-call" list and I never got another call from that company again. If this is the direction that telemarketing is moving in, then something MUST be done to stop it. It's quite scary to get an "out of area" silence call every hour for days at a time.
Actually, I was just discussing an idea like this with friends over the weekend. It's sad that the RIAA and the MPAA are so resistant to change, because the technology is out there to make a much better system for the consumers, which equates to more profit for the buisnesses. It is sad that the cable networks, the music industry, etc, are so frozen by fear of piracy, that they are unwilling to work with the consumers to make a better service (like TV on demand, buying subscriptions to just the shows you want to see, etc).
The really strange part is that these industries are really fairly new, you would think they would be much less resistant to change. I could understand an industry that had been operating the same way for hundreds of years trying to stay static, but these are new industries built on relatively new technologies, and they are trying hard to keep themselves way to static to be effective.
Altough I agree with you when you say ``listen to full-disc bands'' or something, there ARE great one-musics band of course. Say Steppenwolf. I listened to their record but the only one I really like is Born to be Wild.
But it's very personal. I dig Jethro Tull, but many friends only enjoy Aqualung, or lets say King Crimson: Red is the only thing some people want to hear.
Well, I think I've been horribly misunderstood. I came off like I was saying "My bands are superior because I'm superior" but I was really trying to say "Boycott filler bands, they don't deserve any money at all. Instead buy only the CDs of bands that you think are putting out a quality music, if we all do that, the music industry will change and we'll all get to listen to quality music."
Modern music naturally comes in song form, not album.
Incorrect. Modern pop music maybe, but I never said I listen to pop.
Am I to understand that you deliberately ignore songs that you like unless they're accompanied by 10-15 others that are of equal quality?
No, but I rarely like a band that doesn't put out consistant quality music. If I do like a band that has one decent song and an album full of crap, I just don't buy their CD. I take it that if you see a VCR that has one feature that you like, but is otherwise a total peice of crap you buy it and add it to your VCR collection? I personally don't waste money on one feature. I only buy CDs that are quality through and through, just like with any other product I purchase. It's called being a consumer awareness.
Yes, but it's 18 dollars for 18 tracks you WANT, instead of 18 dollars for 2 tracks you want and 17 tracks of filler. Doesn't sound too bad to me.
You could do like me and only listen to bands that make full CDs of good music. I can't imagine only wanting to buy a part of a CD. IMHO a band isn't worth listening to unless they build a decent albumn. In fact, a good deal of the best CDs in my collection are intended to be played from start to finish as one full serving of excellent music, not as a collection of individual songs.
As a device driver developer, do you think Linux's interal APIs change too frequently compared to other Unix operating systems? Would there be much value in creating a more stable, possibly cross-platform driver API for Linux? How much cross-platform driver code can be shared across Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux?
:)
Well, I've only supported 2.2 and 2.4, and there were quite a few changes between them, but, for the most part, you can write a 2.2 compatible driver and it will run on a 2.4 kernel. Luckily my company didn't see any benefit to supporting the 2.2 kernel after 2.4 came out (we sell a very costly, like $10k, PCI card that performs a very specialized function, so we work hand in hand with our customers, which means we don't have to have much backwards compatability most of the time). If I were developing a card that was sold to consumers, and I needed to be able to support a wide variety of machines, then I would be much more likely to answer yes to the stable API question!
As far as sharing cross platform code, well we originally used streams on Solaris and HP-UX, but we found that the streams support was lacking (at best) on Linux, so we lost a lot of time and code when we originally ported to Linux. Now we basically have 2 sets of Unix drivers. A streams version for Solaris and HP-UX, and a non-streams for Linux. We're hoping to remove all of the streams code and re-merge the drivers at some point, but it's always hard to balance a task like that vs our other time commitments. The differences between our HP-UX and Solaris drivers are a few #ifdef's, whereas the difference between that driver and Linux is probably thousands of lines of code.
I develop drivers for Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux (for a PCI card that my company makes). I would love to see a Kernel dump for a particular problem I am trying to debug at the moment! :)
Of course, stupid mistakes in Solaris or HP-UX kills their kernel and results in waiting for the machine to reboot. Stupid mistakes in Linux results in a kernel panic with the output sent to the syslog (9 times out of 10 bad code doesn't kill the entire Kernel, so no waiting on the machine to restart), so I definately think that Linux has the upper hand as far as handling poor kernel space code.
I am all for this type of law enforcement. I think this type of sting operation ought to be cheap enough to manage with centralized administration and small teams. Maybe this will be a decent deterrent, as jail time obviously isn't enough.
Well I certainly think I'm all for this type of law enforcement, but when I begin to contemplate the future of these types of stings, I must admit that it scares me. I saw an example of this type of car used for an arrest on the discovery channel. They had two girls pull over to the side of the road and get out of the car and start yelling at one another about how girl 1 is just going to "leave his car here and he can come pick it up himself".. then she makes a big show of throwing the keys into the car and slamming the door (presumably without locking the doors) and then gets into her friend's car and off they drive. It's important to mention that before they did this big show, an undercover police officer drove around and found someone he thought looked like an individual who would steal a car (he scoped out a potential target) then they did the act directly in front of this person.
Now I agree with the fact that stealing a car is stealing a car, but this seems to me to be quite a bit like monitoring for thought crime. Present a situation to an individual that is not likely to ever happen, then see if that individual is willing to break the law under these special circumstances. It is easy to see them bring it a step further. Lets say they decide to start catching muggers by having a guy walk out into the street and shout "Wow, I can't believe the ATM just let me withdraw $10,000!!!".
Okay I still agree, a mugging is a mugging. Maybe now that they're catching all of the muggers and the car thieves, they decide to start trying to catch people who are willing to traffic drugs. They start going door to door with a small brown package and offer $10,000 to a person if he'll just deliver the small brown package to an address downtown. Suddenly the police are presenting hypothetical situations that could never exist in reality, just to see if people are willing to break the law in these extreme circumstances. Suddenly the police can transform ANYONE into a criminal, just by finding the threshold of risk vs. reward for that individual.
I would think leaving one of these cars in a high crime area and waiting for them to get stolen is a noble thing. But it scares me when they begin to make false senario's and they target people who fit the profile of a car thief. It seems to me that they are creating crime with these hypothetical situations, then arresting people for having the potential to do wrong if an impossible situation were to occur. Leaving a locked car to be stolen is perfectly acceptable, but creating a situation that is too good to be true frightens me..
why do they not make an expansion where an item can only be had by such a few number of people....say 10% of the people.........then rather than having slaes, you have wars over who controls the weapons.....you can get clans to ambush the carrier of an item, kill him/her, then take their weapons.
;(
Well.. this will never work in EQ because there is little or no player vs player (so players can't kill each other for the items).. but they tried something similar to this in UO and it failed drastically.. basically they said there will be X amount of resources in the world, in order for those resources to replinish they must be used to create something and that something must be used until it wears out.. which makes sense.. but they ran into a major problem.. people would stockpile ANYTHING.. it was crazy.. you'd have people with 10,000 useless woolen shirts stored up in the bank, and that would be the ENTIRE wool supply for the whole world.. sitting there.. collecting dust.. in some guys bank..
So what will happen is, people will start getting items that aren't as good as their current weapon (or armor or whatever), then instead of returning it to the game, they will put it away and never use it.. which will keep access away from the rest of the world.. eventually there will be a clan or guild that owns all the best equipment in the world, AND they will own all of the crappy equipment also, hidden away.. so that no one can ever get an item..
It is my understanding that a lot of Asian country citizens are bi-lingual(sp?) They often take english as a second language so I'm not sure how this will stop piracy. If they speak english and you stop selling your software there, then they will just download and burn the english version. Right?
Uhm.. sounds like Adobe has abandoned the goal of stoping or even slowing down piracy in Asia.. all they are saying is "We will no longer fund the development of Asian language applications, because you guys just pirate them anyways".. they could care less if their stuff is pirated after they leave.. it's not their market anymore.. they aren't taking financial hits to make software that doesn't get purchased..
Plus, being able to climb into a superhuman suit (superstrength) would be an EXCELLENT way to steal stuff. Crime would skyrocket, would it be introduced. Please understand that once something is invented, it is nearly impossible to uninvent it. Furthermore, the exoskeleton has no real peaceful benefit. And in today's age, no information is safe. Consider this.
The same could be said of any weapon.. I mean..
being able to climb into a tank would be an EXCELLENT way to steal stuff.
or
being able to fire a rocket propelled grenade would be an EXCELLENT way to steal stuff.
or
being able to command a crack squad of special force units would be an EXCELLENT way to steal stuff.
These are no more dangerous to the general public as any other weapon the military makes.. Crime never skyrocketted at the invention of a military grade weapon before.. what makes you think it will suddenly happen now?.. These things probably cost the taxpayer several million if not billion dollars each.. it's not like we've seen many people steal stealth bombers and go on joyrides lately.. I doubt the military will have less security over one of these things.. and it's not like the average street punk will be able to buy one..
Well, there are two ways this could be handled. First, if they use enough of your bandwidth, you could probably charge them with doing a DOS attack on your site; that's a serious crime in the US now.
;).. or you can just create a script that checks for updates to the page every second.. if you get called into court (HIGHLY unlikely) you can say: "Hey, we were just trying to keep updated on changes to the site, we didn't know that monitoring them that heavily would cost them so much bandwith"
;)
Doesn't have to be a DOS attack, just generate real page hits.. it wouldn't take but a few extra thousand page hits a day to take these mom and pop companies down.. just require that every person in your mega-corporation checks the competing web sight or the negative publicity websight three times a day to see if there are any updates.. that will easily create enough hits to drive a small website owner under..
Second, many states have laws against SLAPP suits (nuicence suits brought by large corporations against grass-roots organizations). It's not a lawsuit, but if you're being harassed by a large corporation, it's actionable. There are about a billion lawyers who would love to sue a big company and get the "David vs. Goliath" publicity.
Ohh, and this works ohh so well.. mega-corporations never ever ever use their resources to scare people with litigation into submission(/sarcasm)... Mega-corporations always have more resources than the grass-roots effort, and when it becomes a challenge of who can keep it in court longer (as it always does) the corporation almost always wins...
The other completely moronic dumbass statement you made was:
Yeah, it's good for the consumer when inefficient businesses go under and places that can sell the same item for less money move in.
If being a mega-corporation is the only way to make a deal to get decent prices, why don't mom-and-pops set up an organziation to bulk-buy goods (a couple of mom-and-pops in each town, with a few thousand towns)? I've heard of this new Internet thingie that lets people communicate over long distances...
It's obviously not bulk buying that drives mom and pop companies out of buisness (as much as Wal-Mart wants to say it is). It's having enough cash reserves to sell your products at a loss longer than the mom and pop companies can sell at a loss.
Initially this looks good to the consumer, they are getting products at a rate that is so low that the companies are loosing money to get it to them. However, as soon as the competition is all gone (as it will inevitably happen, when playing this type of last man standing game), then suddenly it becomes very bad for the consumer, as companies no longer have to focus on good prices (so prices skyrocket, as they always do when there is a corporate "You either buy it from me or you don't get it" mentality) and they also loose focus on customer service.
Today's lesson: mega-corporations and monopolies are bad for the consumer
BTW: My name is also Jon.. It's always refreshing to find someone else that spells their name jon (as I'm sure you are aware it's a fairly rare spelling).
The primary problem that causes MOST businesses to go under is the costs of something; labor, raw materials, bandwidth, something costs more than what they thought it would. That doesn't mean somebody needs to make it cost less; it often means the folks starting the business need to come up with a better business plan.
So you're arguing that it's good for small buisnesses to go under? It's certainly not good for the consumer when that happens.. and it's not good for the small buisness owner.. In fact the only people that it seems to be good for is their competition (which is increasingly mega-corporations).
It's very bad for the competition to have some pressure point to use to drive smaller buisnesses out of the market. If a larger competitor can drive up the cost of raw materials, or labour, or bandwith and he can weather the storm at a loss then he can easily create a monopoly, and raise his prices to a point that hurts the consumer.
The upward spiraling cost of bandwith coupled with the lowering pay of banner ads and the mom and pop web pages being run out of buisiness because of these costs are definately a bad thing, and something needs to be done to fix it. The internet is the proverbial freeing of the printing press, it's something that humanity has needed for quite some time. Driving the cost of using the internet up is stripping the average person from having a medium to publish his works, and that isn't good. We are quickly returning to a state where mega-corporations (including the government) can destroy any negative speech towards them by driving the average person off the web and stripping their ability to self publish. It's definately bad here on the net, because what's to stop a company from creating fake hits (using a script) to drive the bandwith costs of a small publisher through the roof? If I were to start an anti-phillip morris page (as a random example), what's to stop them from using a script to create so many hits to my page that there is no possible way I can pay it.. they can obviously afford more bandwith than me (so the bandwith they use to create the hits wont affect them).
This is definately a problem that needs to be solved.
http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/images/gnome2-w ith-launchers-1207.png
The lame lameness filter inserted a space in your url, so I made it into a link so that people can go check out that sweet screenshot.. I can't believe how nice gnome2 looks with AA fonts!!
haha, yeah that's called trashing. i used to do that behind phone companies in eighties
:)
Actually when my friends and I used to do this back in the 80's we called it dumpster-diving..
So /. is recycling news from wired who
recycles it from fuckedcompany.com...sigh.
Uhh.. hello.. welcome to slashdot.org, I can see it's your first time here.. it's a weblog.. not a news reporting agency.. Not sure if you noticed this or not, but slashdot almost never (if ever) 'breaks' a story.. all they do is post links to relevant stories accross the net... you see.. the concept behind slashdot is thousands of people read the crap news that's out there and submit the relevant pieces to the editor's of slashdot, who then sort through them and give us the best of the best (well.. they at least try)..
It works because those of us who read slashdot don't want to read all the millions of stories out there just to get to the few things that interest us.. so instead, we let the editor's sort through the crap to give us the few interesting tidbits..
I hope you enjoy your stay.. ohh.. and *sigh* right back at ya...
As I said, I'm no expert.. but I've played around with devices that create 50-100 (which is about the range I was thinking of with my statement) milliseconds worth of delay.. and playing has a very increased range of difficulty.. with more 100 milliseconds of delay, timing yourself with the rest of a live performance can become difficult..
:)).. My statement had nothing to do with the article, but I was trying to point out why latency becomes a much bigger issue for technology like this than it would in a normal situation (like say transfering a file)..
If you consider that speed of sound is roughly 1 feet per millisecond placing your speakers in the wrong position matters probably more than the latency of any reasonable system.
I'd say I average about 10-20 feet maxiumum from my monitor's when I'm playing live.. and when I'm doing studio work I'm virtually inches from the speaker (pretty much all studio work is done with headphones).. I may be a bit off in my numbers (it may take a bit more latency than 50-100 milliseconds) but I doubt it would take much more than that to really throw you off...
Consider as an example, watching a movie with 100 milliseconds of delay between the screen and the sound.. I'm willing to bet it would be a bit disorienting.. now imagine playing a musical instrument with latency like that..
It's important to realize that the very first thing I did when I read this article is send a link to the bass player in my band, because I'm sure both he and I will be VERY interested in this technology.. I personally can't wait.. I wasn't trying to imply I doubt the technology at all.. Gibson does quality work with anything they do (did I mention I play a Les Paul?
One last thing that hasn't been mentioned is processing latency.. an IP packet can be transmitted in 10ms, but you aren't giving any time to process the packet or the data on the recieving end.. which is going to be a big part of the latency..
Again I'll point out, I'm no expert.. I'm just making guesstimates from my real life experiences with playing music..
But in this application latency is the most important aspect (bandwith is most likely not very important at all).. That is why people are making the distinction.. 170 Tb/s is great bandwith, but at a latency of 1 minute that bandwith wont do a bit of good in a time critical situation like music.. in other words, you can transfer a huge file extremely fast and latency won't affect you much at all.. but in the world of music, when you consider that my pick touching the string is transmitted at near light speed (via an analog patch cable) to the amp, there is almost no latency between each note being played and heard (probably speed of sound is the biggest latency factor).. obviously, this is a simplified example...
;) I guess I'm saying YMMV...
In order for this technology to be successfull, a throughput of 200 Mb/s doesn't help if the latency is terrible.. the data is real time and needs to be transmitted real time to the recieving device.. even a few dozen milliseconds of latency can hurt the abilities of the person playing the music (and make the timing of the band extremely difficult, near impossible unless everyone in the band has the same latency)..
Uhmm.. all of that should be considered my opinion.. I'm no expert.. hell.. I probably don't even know an expert.. or really know anyone that knows an expert.. so uhh.. that's just my take on things..
Right click and click on save target as.. ;)
;)
Worked for me..
One way to guarantee tender treatment would be to mark the box "nitroglycerin", but that may cause you some other problems
Your average UPS employee probably would think that was french for fragile and treat it just as harshly.. ^^