Could be a solution for Japan, but North America, and in particular the United States, I don't think it will work without massive investment in the infrastructure. The entrenched and inefficient monopolists have little interest in investment that won't guarantee improved profit margins.
As long as Windows exists as a consumer operating system, viruses will run rampant through a media sharing system. Windows simply can't protect itself from privilege escalation attacks. It wasn't designed to be a single user operating system.
Linux users will be ok, as long as someone doesn't get the brilliant idea to make the system Windows only.
This time around, most consumers simply don't see the advantage in Blu-Ray and its ilk. The players are vastly more expensive than a regular DVD player, the movies are vastly more expensive than a regular DVD, the format has built-in limitations aimed at preventing piracy that also end up inconveniencing the consumer, and the sole advantage is that picture quality is better - although at the screen size of the average consumer, the change is far less noticeable than it was when switching from VHS to DVD. Hence, most consumers aren't upgrading to Blu-Ray.
Your supposed premise for this paragraph is that customer's don't see the advantages, and yet you spend most of the time describing the disadvantages.
I agree with you that if Blu-ray prices don't drop to a reasonable level, Blu-ray will fail. However, I don't agree with the rest of your analysis. If Blu-ray players are "close enough" in price, people will buy them. I don't see how the DRM will impact the majority of customers. Frankly the majority of customers don't know what DRM is.
My opinion is that most consumers aren't upgrading to Blu-ray right now mostly because of the price barrier. However, even with the price barrier right now, there are people switching. Barring a new revolutionary technology that obsoletes it, lowering the price barrier will increase the number of people switching.
It's a numbers game, and as long as you can play DVDs on a Blu-ray player there is no practical downside to upgrading your player.
I think that's the wrong attitude for Blu-ray. You're looking at it as if it's an entirely new system, but it's not really, because Blu-Ray players are backwards compatible with DVDs.
For mass market acceptance the following path has to happen:
1) Blu-ray player prices fall to be competitive but slightly higher than DVD players. The premimum will be decided by the market. 2) Once Blu-ray players reach that magic point, the majority of people buying a new DVD player will instead buy a Blu-ray player because it's like a DVD player, only better. 3) As DVD players are replaced by Blu-ray players, it will become less and less desirable to release content on both Blu-ray and DVD. Eventually DVD will be phased out.
The only question is whether something else can come along, get industry acceptance, and content provider acceptance before Blu-ray gradually replaces DVD.
My guess is no. I know of no technology that can, within 5 years, replace Blu-ray.
Digital distribution? Unlikely. Because of the shape of the Internet market in North America (entrenched monopolists) it has some of the worst internet connection speeds in the developed world. Digital distribution would require a major kick in the pants to these monopolists to become feasible. They get little to no benefit from improving service because they don't really have to compete with anyone else. Often you've got 0-2 choices in your area for internet: at most it's usually either the phone company and/or cable company. Sometimes you get a 3rd choice if there's a wireless provider locally, but wireless internet still appears to relatively unreliable especially during inclement weather.
You're forgetting economics. The content producers will keep lowering that profit margin until the majority will buy it as long as they can make the same or better margins on Blu-Ray as DVDs.
The shift only won't happen if it turns out people are only willing to pay less for high definition movies than standard definition movies.
I doubt Blu-ray will end up as the "next lazerdisk", for one good reason: Blu-ray players can play DVDs. So from a consumer point of view, Blu-ray players might as well better DVD players that make their old DVDs look better and play the "new DVDs".
If the price of a Blu-ray player gets anywhere near the price of a DVD player, DVD players will disappear. People will pay a small fee for better quality video. Currently, of course, Blu-ray players are still much too pricey for widespread adoption.
CC Companies to Discovery: If you show that show, we're shutting down your merchant accounts and pulling all of our advertising from your network. It's YOUR decision.
Discovery to Mythbusters: If you make this show we won't air it and we'll cancel you. We'll probably also ruin your reputation and make you unemployable in the industry, but it's really YOUR decision.
Mythbusters to Adam Savage: Apparently this is totally our decision, and we've decided that we like having money.
Am I the only one who thinks this article has absolutely nothing to do with gait analysis?
They're talking about recognizing the fact that a shadow belongs to a person based on the shadow's movement. Not about identifying a particular person based on his shadow's movement.
You realize that's just an excuse developed by some clever agents so they can get paid to play World of Warcraft.
I'm only raiding Black Temple to make sure no one in this raiding guild is a terrorist. What have I discovered so far? I've vetted group 1 but there's a suspicious individual in group 2. I'm going to keep him under surveillance until after we down Illidan, if he attempts to sabotage the raid, then we'll know for sure and I'm willing to stay here and work over time until I'm fully satisfied one way or the other!
The industry standard acceptable fail rate is 3%-5%. With an estimated 30-40% fail rate the Xbox 360 is failing at about 6 to 8 times the maximum acceptable rate.
I don't think either Sony or Microsoft would want that. On Microsoft's part, they simply want to drive Sony out of the console market like Sega was driven out. Why? Because they see winning the console market once for all as the first step in establishing a monopoly on all home networking.
If you're running Windows on your home computer and Windows on your TV, what are you going to use in the rest of your house? No, this isn't a conspiracy, just the marketing seminar I had to sit through that was essentially run and funded by Microsoft on home networking. Simply stated their goal is out maneuver Linux by taking over home electronics marketplace.
Their goal is ridiculous and they have no idea how to do it, but that's still what they're aiming for.
The AC you responded to was implying that traditionally, Sony's consoles have very weak initial sales. By the time they reach the age that Microsoft kills their consoles, sales have picked up and then continue for more than twice as long. Over the life span they end up selling 4 times as many of each console as Microsoft does (100+ million versus 25 million).
Will the trend hold true a third time? Maybe, maybe not. The PS3 is largely dependent on the HD uptake rate, which is dependent on the world economy. Currently Bush's failed policies are causing the U.S. economy to tank, which may hobble the PS3 sales since upgrading to HD is a generally a big optional purchase (often $3,000-$5,000 total). When the economy is poor, people hold off on making those purchases.
Essentially, the Xbox 360 has more sold to date, however, PS3 sales appear to be trending upwards, while Xbox 360 sales are trending downwards.
He's spinning it as the classic tortoise and hare story.
Actually, I doubt the U.S. is the most corrupt country in the world, according to some sources The U.S. is still (barely) in the top 20 least corrupt countries in the world.
So while the U.S. is 20th, Bangladesh and Chad appear to be tied for last place at 158th.
It should be noted that most Dictators prefer to appear legitimate, so even Dictators tend to be lying politicians. They just tend to kill anyone who points out that they aren't wearing any pants.
You'd think so, but in practical terms it just doesn't work out. On average smokers cost more from cradle to grave than non-smokers, about $17,500 not accounting for health care price inflation.
And that doesn't account for the effects of second hand smoke. In theory you'd have to calculate the difference between the bar and restaurant employee cancer rates and those of the average population and then divide that amongst the smokers and tack that on to each person's bill.
As it turns out, the development team would find 365 bugs on the first day.
...
I used to work for a (10,000 employee+) company that did a bonus for finding bugs. They didn't allow the development team to be part of the program for obvious reasons. People still got around that by collaborating and splitting the bonus money. Some of the developers would write easily found bugs in obscure parts of the program and then tell their QA buddies where to find them, then they'd split the money afterwards. For a while, some the QA people were finding hundreds of bugs a day. It took a while but management eventually caught on...
... When a couple of the QA people burned their developer partner by refused to split some of the money and the developer squealed on the whole system to get revenge.
Frankly, you're pretty much wrong on every single thing you've said.
1) Why not just accept the certificate for your router permanently? Then you're done, sure it's got 3 more steps than ssh but really, does the certificate change that often?
2) The authentication mechanism is to verify that the person is who they say they are the first time you visit the site. If it's your own router, you should be smart enough to know that. If it's not your router, then you can only hope that it's the right site without an authentication mechanism in addition to the encryption.
3) I would be much less secure for the majority of people if you got a CD with their certificate on it to install in your browser. The vast majority of people just aren't going to do that.
4) Any certificate authority that issues false certificates should be dropped swiftly and permanently. Yes, it's not a perfect system, but it's better than having no recourse because you blindly accept self-signed certificates.
5) This is about minimize the damage, the alternative you propose is worse in every way in the general cases, the only advantage is that it's more convenient for you in your special case.
Frankly I don't feel like trading away security because you're either too lazy or stupid to permanently accept your own self-signed certificates.
Maybe I will once you explain to me why the public is connecting to your router.
The whole point is if you know enough to generate your own self-signed certificate, you know enough to accept it when you see it, despite the warnings. The warnings aren't for you and aren't for this situation. They're there for when John Q. Public goes to the Bank of Anerica site which has a self-signed certificate and looks exactly like the Bank of America site, despite the fact that the server's located in Russia and anyone who tries to login has their bank account cleared out within a few minutes.
It's difficult to explain this, but I don't think so.
Science is taken on faith because it's convenient to not have to research and build it yourself. Religion is taken on faith because you're told to do so.
Maybe I misread her proposal. I thought it said that they would anonymize the data in the court records that get published online.
I did not see any indication that journalists, bloggers, busybodies, or the defendant would be barred from publishing the names involved in the case independently.
This is where it gets interesting, you see we have a number of different groups who argue about what the weather is really like on Alpha Centauri 5, because they each say they know exactly what it's like.
Of course, as far as we know Alpha Centauri 5 doesn't even have an atmosphere. So there's a large chance there isn't even any weather. Why should we join one faction or the other in their pointless fight over who is right about something which they, by definition, can't ever know anything about.
Of course, it's possible that one day we'll have a real answer to the question of the weather on Alpha Centauri 5, but for now, we might as well just live our lives as if doesn't exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Could be a solution for Japan, but North America, and in particular the United States, I don't think it will work without massive investment in the infrastructure. The entrenched and inefficient monopolists have little interest in investment that won't guarantee improved profit margins.
Here's a handy graph showing the difference in average broadband speeds:
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/Images/commentarynews/broadbandspeedchart.jpg
In a word: yes.
As long as Windows exists as a consumer operating system, viruses will run rampant through a media sharing system. Windows simply can't protect itself from privilege escalation attacks. It wasn't designed to be a single user operating system.
Linux users will be ok, as long as someone doesn't get the brilliant idea to make the system Windows only.
That's a good point.
Flash drives would be an excellent vector for viruses to spread across.
This time around, most consumers simply don't see the advantage in Blu-Ray and its ilk. The players are vastly more expensive than a regular DVD player, the movies are vastly more expensive than a regular DVD, the format has built-in limitations aimed at preventing piracy that also end up inconveniencing the consumer, and the sole advantage is that picture quality is better - although at the screen size of the average consumer, the change is far less noticeable than it was when switching from VHS to DVD. Hence, most consumers aren't upgrading to Blu-Ray.
Your supposed premise for this paragraph is that customer's don't see the advantages, and yet you spend most of the time describing the disadvantages.
I agree with you that if Blu-ray prices don't drop to a reasonable level, Blu-ray will fail. However, I don't agree with the rest of your analysis. If Blu-ray players are "close enough" in price, people will buy them. I don't see how the DRM will impact the majority of customers. Frankly the majority of customers don't know what DRM is.
My opinion is that most consumers aren't upgrading to Blu-ray right now mostly because of the price barrier. However, even with the price barrier right now, there are people switching. Barring a new revolutionary technology that obsoletes it, lowering the price barrier will increase the number of people switching.
It's a numbers game, and as long as you can play DVDs on a Blu-ray player there is no practical downside to upgrading your player.
I think that's the wrong attitude for Blu-ray. You're looking at it as if it's an entirely new system, but it's not really, because Blu-Ray players are backwards compatible with DVDs.
For mass market acceptance the following path has to happen:
1) Blu-ray player prices fall to be competitive but slightly higher than DVD players. The premimum will be decided by the market.
2) Once Blu-ray players reach that magic point, the majority of people buying a new DVD player will instead buy a Blu-ray player because it's like a DVD player, only better.
3) As DVD players are replaced by Blu-ray players, it will become less and less desirable to release content on both Blu-ray and DVD. Eventually DVD will be phased out.
The only question is whether something else can come along, get industry acceptance, and content provider acceptance before Blu-ray gradually replaces DVD.
My guess is no. I know of no technology that can, within 5 years, replace Blu-ray.
Digital distribution? Unlikely. Because of the shape of the Internet market in North America (entrenched monopolists) it has some of the worst internet connection speeds in the developed world. Digital distribution would require a major kick in the pants to these monopolists to become feasible. They get little to no benefit from improving service because they don't really have to compete with anyone else. Often you've got 0-2 choices in your area for internet: at most it's usually either the phone company and/or cable company. Sometimes you get a 3rd choice if there's a wireless provider locally, but wireless internet still appears to relatively unreliable especially during inclement weather.
You're forgetting economics. The content producers will keep lowering that profit margin until the majority will buy it as long as they can make the same or better margins on Blu-Ray as DVDs.
The shift only won't happen if it turns out people are only willing to pay less for high definition movies than standard definition movies.
That's a situation that I don't see happening.
I doubt Blu-ray will end up as the "next lazerdisk", for one good reason: Blu-ray players can play DVDs. So from a consumer point of view, Blu-ray players might as well better DVD players that make their old DVDs look better and play the "new DVDs".
If the price of a Blu-ray player gets anywhere near the price of a DVD player, DVD players will disappear. People will pay a small fee for better quality video. Currently, of course, Blu-ray players are still much too pricey for widespread adoption.
No, no, no.
It was:
CC Companies to Discovery: If you show that show, we're shutting down your merchant accounts and pulling all of our advertising from your network. It's YOUR decision.
Discovery to Mythbusters: If you make this show we won't air it and we'll cancel you. We'll probably also ruin your reputation and make you unemployable in the industry, but it's really YOUR decision.
Mythbusters to Adam Savage: Apparently this is totally our decision, and we've decided that we like having money.
...
Am I the only one who thinks this article has absolutely nothing to do with gait analysis?
They're talking about recognizing the fact that a shadow belongs to a person based on the shadow's movement. Not about identifying a particular person based on his shadow's movement.
You realize that's just an excuse developed by some clever agents so they can get paid to play World of Warcraft.
I'm only raiding Black Temple to make sure no one in this raiding guild is a terrorist. What have I discovered so far? I've vetted group 1 but there's a suspicious individual in group 2. I'm going to keep him under surveillance until after we down Illidan, if he attempts to sabotage the raid, then we'll know for sure and I'm willing to stay here and work over time until I'm fully satisfied one way or the other!
The industry standard acceptable fail rate is 3%-5%. With an estimated 30-40% fail rate the Xbox 360 is failing at about 6 to 8 times the maximum acceptable rate.
I don't think either Sony or Microsoft would want that. On Microsoft's part, they simply want to drive Sony out of the console market like Sega was driven out. Why? Because they see winning the console market once for all as the first step in establishing a monopoly on all home networking.
If you're running Windows on your home computer and Windows on your TV, what are you going to use in the rest of your house? No, this isn't a conspiracy, just the marketing seminar I had to sit through that was essentially run and funded by Microsoft on home networking. Simply stated their goal is out maneuver Linux by taking over home electronics marketplace.
Their goal is ridiculous and they have no idea how to do it, but that's still what they're aiming for.
... because your anecdotes are so much more scientific than other peoples?
I don't own a 360, but everyone I know who has one is on their second or third 360. Talked to the guy at the local game shop, he's on his 5th.
I hear the real number is about 1 in 3 consoles will red ring of death during the first year.
The AC you responded to was implying that traditionally, Sony's consoles have very weak initial sales. By the time they reach the age that Microsoft kills their consoles, sales have picked up and then continue for more than twice as long. Over the life span they end up selling 4 times as many of each console as Microsoft does (100+ million versus 25 million).
Will the trend hold true a third time? Maybe, maybe not. The PS3 is largely dependent on the HD uptake rate, which is dependent on the world economy. Currently Bush's failed policies are causing the U.S. economy to tank, which may hobble the PS3 sales since upgrading to HD is a generally a big optional purchase (often $3,000-$5,000 total). When the economy is poor, people hold off on making those purchases.
Essentially, the Xbox 360 has more sold to date, however, PS3 sales appear to be trending upwards, while Xbox 360 sales are trending downwards.
He's spinning it as the classic tortoise and hare story.
Actually, I doubt the U.S. is the most corrupt country in the world, according to some sources The U.S. is still (barely) in the top 20 least corrupt countries in the world.
So while the U.S. is 20th, Bangladesh and Chad appear to be tied for last place at 158th.
It should be noted that most Dictators prefer to appear legitimate, so even Dictators tend to be lying politicians. They just tend to kill anyone who points out that they aren't wearing any pants.
You'd think so, but in practical terms it just doesn't work out. On average smokers cost more from cradle to grave than non-smokers, about $17,500 not accounting for health care price inflation.
And that doesn't account for the effects of second hand smoke. In theory you'd have to calculate the difference between the bar and restaurant employee cancer rates and those of the average population and then divide that amongst the smokers and tack that on to each person's bill.
As it turns out, the development team would find 365 bugs on the first day.
...
I used to work for a (10,000 employee+) company that did a bonus for finding bugs. They didn't allow the development team to be part of the program for obvious reasons. People still got around that by collaborating and splitting the bonus money. Some of the developers would write easily found bugs in obscure parts of the program and then tell their QA buddies where to find them, then they'd split the money afterwards. For a while, some the QA people were finding hundreds of bugs a day. It took a while but management eventually caught on...
... When a couple of the QA people burned their developer partner by refused to split some of the money and the developer squealed on the whole system to get revenge.
There is a Windows GUI for MySql, there might be one for Unix, but I've never seen it, mostly I like to use phpMyAdmin for remote administration.
Frankly, you're pretty much wrong on every single thing you've said.
1) Why not just accept the certificate for your router permanently? Then you're done, sure it's got 3 more steps than ssh but really, does the certificate change that often?
2) The authentication mechanism is to verify that the person is who they say they are the first time you visit the site. If it's your own router, you should be smart enough to know that. If it's not your router, then you can only hope that it's the right site without an authentication mechanism in addition to the encryption.
3) I would be much less secure for the majority of people if you got a CD with their certificate on it to install in your browser. The vast majority of people just aren't going to do that.
4) Any certificate authority that issues false certificates should be dropped swiftly and permanently. Yes, it's not a perfect system, but it's better than having no recourse because you blindly accept self-signed certificates.
5) This is about minimize the damage, the alternative you propose is worse in every way in the general cases, the only advantage is that it's more convenient for you in your special case.
Frankly I don't feel like trading away security because you're either too lazy or stupid to permanently accept your own self-signed certificates.
...
Maybe I will once you explain to me why the public is connecting to your router.
The whole point is if you know enough to generate your own self-signed certificate, you know enough to accept it when you see it, despite the warnings. The warnings aren't for you and aren't for this situation. They're there for when John Q. Public goes to the Bank of Anerica site which has a self-signed certificate and looks exactly like the Bank of America site, despite the fact that the server's located in Russia and anyone who tries to login has their bank account cleared out within a few minutes.
It's difficult to explain this, but I don't think so.
Science is taken on faith because it's convenient to not have to research and build it yourself. Religion is taken on faith because you're told to do so.
Maybe I misread her proposal. I thought it said that they would anonymize the data in the court records that get published online.
I did not see any indication that journalists, bloggers, busybodies, or the defendant would be barred from publishing the names involved in the case independently.
Is religion any different?
Quite, actually. One huge difference being that science is verifiable while religion is not.
It's difference between the weather here and the weather on Alpha Centauri 5.
One matters, one does not.
Would it make a difference to you if it were only the names of private individuals that were anonimized and not those of corporations?
This is where it gets interesting, you see we have a number of different groups who argue about what the weather is really like on Alpha Centauri 5, because they each say they know exactly what it's like.
Of course, as far as we know Alpha Centauri 5 doesn't even have an atmosphere. So there's a large chance there isn't even any weather. Why should we join one faction or the other in their pointless fight over who is right about something which they, by definition, can't ever know anything about.
Of course, it's possible that one day we'll have a real answer to the question of the weather on Alpha Centauri 5, but for now, we might as well just live our lives as if doesn't exist.