[[ full disclosure: I work for an @home company ]]
I don't think that the subscribers are going to get hurt here. @home is controlled by AT&T Broadband, which itself is "on the market", being wooed by many companies. Many of these companies are particularly interested in @home's 3.6 million subscribers.
Even if @home tanks, (which, I have no reason to think it will not) AT&T, and whomever buys it (which is pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point, just a matter of who, for what price) has great reason to keep the current subscribers very happy in the near and long-term future.
[[ further disclosure: This shouldn't in any way constitute as "insider information". All of this is my speculation, gathered from multiple internet sources, all of which being available to the general public. @home does not keep its employees informed. ]]
That is because IBM doesn't do anything until it has a solid business case. They didn't get involved in Linux until it becase viable for business and there was a proven track record.
IBM doesn't do anything "half-assed". They try very hard not to waste their money, and sometimes that means that they wait until others have blazed the trail before they follow it.
what we need is a testing algrythem that all processors use. then we can rate chips as "it completed the Moffitt algorithem in 1.5 minutes!".
That is what the newer benchmarks try to do: run real-world programs and time them. I guess the problem with that is the real-world programs are always going to be moving targets, so you can only usually compare current-generation chips/systems (as the chip doesn't tell the whole story in cases like this, so it even more of a pain).
The problem with picking "the Moffitt algorthim", is that it will always be skewed to current chip implementations, thus, big new ideas will perform poorly, until we think of better algorithms.
668 neighbor of the beast
Funny. We have server farms where I work, so we give each server a number and a name. We actually have a test box with server # 667, and name "NeighborOfTheBeast".
The real question is, is this all FUD, will the real-world performance be part of The Megahertz Myth, or is this thing for real?"
It doesn't matter if it is real or vapour, it will still fall prey to the "Megahertz Myth". Maybe someday, people will understand: non-similar architectures can't be compared by MHz alone. And even most similar arch's can't be compared via MHz, as the Intel v. AMD war will tell you.
It is even worse than that! no single metric will ever give you the whole story.
I found it funny that on their homepage (www.rhythms.com), they still have "GET DSL NOW!!!" in big bold letters, they have links to click on to see if you can get DSL in your area, A link to see their fake demo of how much better DSL is than a 9600Baud modem, and right below, there is a tiny link about "chaper 11 update".
Think they are hedging, hoping for a buy-out or extra funding? That's my guess.
The "slippery slope" isn't something to believe in or not, it is a logical falicy. Consult any logic textbook.
It has been proven many times that the "slippery slope" is merely a confusion of cause-and-effect. People confuse other variables that enter into the situation.
Yes there are some precendents for a company nixing a mod that contains their IP.
id shutdown a mod for q2 called "generations" that featured BJ blowkosky (sp?)(wolf3d), the Doom! marine, the Q1 dude, and Q2 players. Some game where they all played together. id didn't want it because they had q3 coming out and a "return to castle wolf" in the works. Whatever.
Also, 3drelms (makers of duke nukem) shut down many sites that had maps for q2 that were remakes of the classic duke nukem 3 maps. Even bigger whatever.
Hey, buddy! You didn't buy the rights to that book, you only licensed the right to read it.
You should count yourself lucky that the paperback doesn't self destruct after you read the last page. (that will teach you to not read the last page before reading it!)
One thing to keep in mind is that decent office chairs are expensive. They cost hundreds of dollars. Yes the Aeron chairs are more expensive, but if you consider how much a "lower-end" chair costs, it really doesn't cost that much more.
BTW, I love my Aeron chair, never had a problem with ruining my pants or anything like that. I guess different people like different things....
They may not have liked it, but the movie never mentioned the company Microsoft. I don't see what the Supreme Court will do for them at this point, I mean, it's already in rental anyway.
Katz is correct. Who cares that a few teenagers post crap on the internet? I never buy a book based on some anonymous review on amazon.com. Anyone who asks legal advise on something like AskMe (or/. for that matter) is just asking for trouble.
So much of that crap on the web is useless.
So many times, these teenagers don't have the attention span long enough to see anything through, that is why we rely on adults (with something to lose/gain) to give us info or services that we bet the farm on. You get the best advice/service/product when someone has only their reputation to recommend them. Reputations take lifetimes to build, and a very short time to destory. Teenagers have no such reputation to endager. So you get what you pay for.
Just look at how many projects on freshmeat or sourceforge are abandoned before they even reach 1.0.0. Yes, these teens aren't fully to blame (and big deal, right, we aren't paying for it?) but my experience tells me that this is a big part of it.
This isn't to say that these teens have to redeeming social value, or that they can't contribute to society. But when you learn to ride a bike, you start with training wheels, not the Tour de France. World domination can't come before you learn the rules of how to play the game.
Well, the US Supreme Court ruled that you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater if there isn't a fire, and that the rule doesn't violate free speech.
This is what I was talking about, but I wasn't the clearest in the world. I was just saying that this is okay with me, since yelling that will only cause trouble. If there is a fire, of course, it is okay to yell "fire," it will still cause trouble, but the trouble it would cause would be less than everyone just sitting there getting burned up.;-)
Not that this is particularly a new view point, I will post it to be heard; for what that is worth.
My first point is that the DMCA overrides many of the copyright issues that people have lived with for years, in fact, they take them for granted. Issues like so called "fair use," although tricky, is a major issue that the DMCA throws out the window. Also is the issue of the expiration dates on copyrights. I think this is required, not only because the earlier laws require it, but it is required for an innovative country. Without this, I think America wouldn't be what it is today.
Secondly, the DMCA was passed without the knowledge or consent of the people of the United States. I know that we live in a representative government, where our elected officials speak for the people at large, but this particular law, and alarmingly, many like it, were passed on behalf of the recording industry, movie making industry, etc. This is not the will of the people. In fact, how can someone say that the people are benefited by this law? I say that they are not. Their rights are being trampled by this abomination. In most, if not all states, if a contract is signed that isn't beneficial to both parties, it can be easily contested as invalid. This law is similar, I think it would be over-turned, because it doesn't have the best interests of the American people at heart.
Thirdly, in what way is Adobe hurt by Dmitri Sklyarov's actions that it would have been able to avoid if this didn't contain one of the political buzzwords like "encryption" or "hacker"? In the past, when a company was guilty of lying or committing a crime, it is usually up to a private citizen (American or otherwise) to point it out before the public at large and the Judicial system would take notice? Adobe tried to tie something to a single instance of computer hardware, making it non-copyable. This is shaky legal ground without the DMCA, as it probably violates "fair use." Furthermore, the encryption used is flimsy and easily breakable. If I am betting my company on the quality of this encryption, the low quality of the Adobe product constituted a defective product. Only because it is illegal now (under the DMCA and no other law) to try to break encryption, would this even have the possibility of not being broken and turned into a copyable medium. What Mr. Sklyarov did was to enable people and corporations to understand the risk of using Adobe's defective eBook product. This has never been a crime, and it shouldn't be a crime. Without this type of "expose," we are in the position of the king in the children's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." We know that there are problems, but they are never fixed, because no one is allowed to talk about the problems, thus Adobe--or any other company--has no reason to improve, thus killing the innovation that I mentioned in my first paragraph.
Lastly, it is a crime to talk about encryption subversion under the DMCA. This treads on dangerous territory, that being free speech. Yes, there are instances where we give up free speech for the greater good (the classic yelling "fire" in a crowded theater for example), but this isn't one of them. There is no greater good, only the good of a few wealthy companies, the ones which lobbied this law into existence. In fact, I believe that the criminalization of talking about this if a disservice to America. It is only by talking about things among peers that real scientific advances come.
I still think a run-of-the-mill petition would be in order as well. I think until we actually take action that the "old school" politicians will recognize, we are just shouting to the converted.
Never spent a dime on Linux. I download the ISOs from the websites at work, then take my old harddrive and copy them over, then burn them at home (cheap portable storage, don't care if it gets broken really). I get all of my info from the web. (maybe that is why I keep breaking it?)
Before I had a burner, I downloaded the slackware packages from the web (mid nineties), and installed from my dos partition.
In between, I didn't have linux. I probably wouldn't now if I didn't have the cd burner.
Sorry, but we are going to need to use the bullshit filter here.
OpenGL and DirectX don't compete with each other, the only comparison that you can really draw is between Direct3D (a small component of DirectX) and OpenGL. You can use OpenGL and DirectX in the same project, and many games do. There isn't anything better than DX when it comes to an interface for i/o devices, etc. on the windows platform. But as far as OpenGL and D3D, they are directly comparable, and there are minor trade-offs when you choose between the two.
>OpenGL is written for a UNIX environment, DX is for a Windows environment.
Okay, what is the point here? OpenGL has long ago been ported to the windows env, and it runs fine, even better than on UNIX (for most workstations) because it has direct access to the hardware layer, UNIX (until very recently) had to go thru the X protocol (nice and portable, but slow).
>OpenGL does NOT change very much[....]
True, the core of OpenGL doesn't change very much, but this is very good. With every release of D3D, the API changes drasticly, so you must relearn it every time. OpenGL on the other hand, doesn't change (much), but it has extensions that make it dynamic. The pixel/vertex shading on OpenGL has the same features that the D3D version has (supposedly it is better if you believe opengl.org). So, by design, it doesn't matter if OpenGL "natively" supports shaders, the API was designed to be flexible and extendable.
I am not saying that since OpenGL is "open" and extensible, that it makes the choice of what to use a no-brainer, it is far from that. Some choose on or the other for many reasons, sometimes political/ideology, sometimes monitary (MS paid big bucks to early adopters of D3D), etc. It is by far an easy decsion. The only good part about it: it doesn't really matter; you can do anything in one that you can do in the other, if you know the API well enough. And that includes pixel/vertex shaders, etc.
unless this is taken to the Supreme Court, it seems unlikely the courts could find the jurisdiction to squash the DMCA.
Not true at all. Even the lowest Federal court can kill the DMCA. It will have to go to the Supreme Court to stand (most likely). So since this is a Federal case, we have a chance. I don't think it is a big one in this case. (the dude just wants to go home, he could care less about our rights. If it was an American, he might be more willing.)
Folk, all this talk about this guy wasting his money because he didn't do his research.
I am not convinced he spent any money that was his own. I am quite sure that he expensed the entire thing. How else would they be able to produce such high quality content? You need to spend money to make money.
Even if he didn't expense it, he was absolutely able to write it off on his taxes as job related.
So in summary, he didn't care how much he wasted, it was worth the risk to have HDTV, because it wasn't his money.
that will prove that M$ is only trying to get marketshare from this stupid.net thing. If M$ writes the license such that noone else can serve in a.net enviornment or noone else can use C#, then noone can be at fault but M$, thus they orchestrated that situation, thus proving that this is a big ploy so that "all your base are belong to us".
Now, if anyone (IT managers, etc.) will understand that....
There isn't a general feedback option, but pick something.
Probably isn't the most constructive protest, but it sure is fun. Sorta like writing your congressman, you know he doesn't care what you say (unless you include a few hunderds, or maybe a couple thousand $100 bills), but you get to say something to his staff.
Slashdot Mirror
heh, given the sheer volume of layoffs, I am pretty imune to being afraid for my job, if not, I would have gone insane by now....
Cats on my keyboard have successfully fooled me into thinking that an 18-month old child was at the keyboard.
(maybe I should RTFA to see if it makes sense, but I just couldn't resist.)
[[ full disclosure: I work for an @home company ]]
I don't think that the subscribers are going to get hurt here. @home is controlled by AT&T Broadband, which itself is "on the market", being wooed by many companies. Many of these companies are particularly interested in @home's 3.6 million subscribers.
Even if @home tanks, (which, I have no reason to think it will not) AT&T, and whomever buys it (which is pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point, just a matter of who, for what price) has great reason to keep the current subscribers very happy in the near and long-term future.
[[ further disclosure: This shouldn't in any way constitute as "insider information". All of this is my speculation, gathered from multiple internet sources, all of which being available to the general public. @home does not keep its employees informed. ]]
I have said it before (yes, an OpenGL troll), and I'll say it again: OpenGL can do anything D3D 8.x does. It just does it in a different way.
OpenGL uses extensions, so you don't have to rev the version number to add funtionality, you only have to have supporting drivers (and/or hardware).
That is why OGL hasn't been rev'ed in so long, it didn't need it, so you can provide a stable API for the developers.
It is just cleaner to have this new stuff "built-in", so they do it every now and then.
That is because IBM doesn't do anything until it has a solid business case. They didn't get involved in Linux until it becase viable for business and there was a proven track record.
IBM doesn't do anything "half-assed". They try very hard not to waste their money, and sometimes that means that they wait until others have blazed the trail before they follow it.
Actually, the motherboard, chipset, and/or memory can be to blame as well. That is my problem.
Intresting.
what we need is a testing algrythem that all processors use. then we can rate chips as "it completed the Moffitt algorithem in 1.5 minutes!".
That is what the newer benchmarks try to do: run real-world programs and time them. I guess the problem with that is the real-world programs are always going to be moving targets, so you can only usually compare current-generation chips/systems (as the chip doesn't tell the whole story in cases like this, so it even more of a pain).
The problem with picking "the Moffitt algorthim", is that it will always be skewed to current chip implementations, thus, big new ideas will perform poorly, until we think of better algorithms.
668 neighbor of the beast
Funny. We have server farms where I work, so we give each server a number and a name. We actually have a test box with server # 667, and name "NeighborOfTheBeast".
The real question is, is this all FUD, will the real-world performance be part of The Megahertz Myth, or is this thing for real?"
It doesn't matter if it is real or vapour, it will still fall prey to the "Megahertz Myth". Maybe someday, people will understand: non-similar architectures can't be compared by MHz alone. And even most similar arch's can't be compared via MHz, as the Intel v. AMD war will tell you.
It is even worse than that! no single metric will ever give you the whole story.
I found it funny that on their homepage (www.rhythms.com), they still have "GET DSL NOW!!!" in big bold letters, they have links to click on to see if you can get DSL in your area, A link to see their fake demo of how much better DSL is than a 9600Baud modem, and right below, there is a tiny link about "chaper 11 update".
Think they are hedging, hoping for a buy-out or extra funding? That's my guess.
The "slippery slope" isn't something to believe in or not, it is a logical falicy. Consult any logic textbook.
It has been proven many times that the "slippery slope" is merely a confusion of cause-and-effect. People confuse other variables that enter into the situation.
Yes there are some precendents for a company nixing a mod that contains their IP.
id shutdown a mod for q2 called "generations" that featured BJ blowkosky (sp?)(wolf3d), the Doom! marine, the Q1 dude, and Q2 players. Some game where they all played together. id didn't want it because they had q3 coming out and a "return to castle wolf" in the works. Whatever.
Also, 3drelms (makers of duke nukem) shut down many sites that had maps for q2 that were remakes of the classic duke nukem 3 maps. Even bigger whatever.
Dude! Front242!! rocks forever!! Old-school-hard-core!
Hey, buddy! You didn't buy the rights to that book, you only licensed the right to read it.
You should count yourself lucky that the paperback doesn't self destruct after you read the last page. (that will teach you to not read the last page before reading it!)
(yes, that is a joke)
One thing to keep in mind is that decent office chairs are expensive. They cost hundreds of dollars. Yes the Aeron chairs are more expensive, but if you consider how much a "lower-end" chair costs, it really doesn't cost that much more.
BTW, I love my Aeron chair, never had a problem with ruining my pants or anything like that. I guess different people like different things....
"Microsoft Appeals Anti-Trust to Supreme Court"
They may not have liked it, but the movie never mentioned the company Microsoft. I don't see what the Supreme Court will do for them at this point, I mean, it's already in rental anyway.
Katz is correct. Who cares that a few teenagers post crap on the internet? I never buy a book based on some anonymous review on amazon.com. Anyone who asks legal advise on something like AskMe (or /. for that matter) is just asking for trouble.
So much of that crap on the web is useless.
So many times, these teenagers don't have the attention span long enough to see anything through, that is why we rely on adults (with something to lose/gain) to give us info or services that we bet the farm on. You get the best advice/service/product when someone has only their reputation to recommend them. Reputations take lifetimes to build, and a very short time to destory. Teenagers have no such reputation to endager. So you get what you pay for.
Just look at how many projects on freshmeat or sourceforge are abandoned before they even reach 1.0.0. Yes, these teens aren't fully to blame (and big deal, right, we aren't paying for it?) but my experience tells me that this is a big part of it.
This isn't to say that these teens have to redeeming social value, or that they can't contribute to society. But when you learn to ride a bike, you start with training wheels, not the Tour de France. World domination can't come before you learn the rules of how to play the game.
Well, the US Supreme Court ruled that you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater if there isn't a fire, and that the rule doesn't violate free speech.
;-)
This is what I was talking about, but I wasn't the clearest in the world. I was just saying that this is okay with me, since yelling that will only cause trouble. If there is a fire, of course, it is okay to yell "fire," it will still cause trouble, but the trouble it would cause would be less than everyone just sitting there getting burned up.
Not that this is particularly a new view point, I will post it to be heard; for what that is worth.
My first point is that the DMCA overrides many of the copyright issues that people have lived with for years, in fact, they take them for granted. Issues like so called "fair use," although tricky, is a major issue that the DMCA throws out the window. Also is the issue of the expiration dates on copyrights. I think this is required, not only because the earlier laws require it, but it is required for an innovative country. Without this, I think America wouldn't be what it is today.
Secondly, the DMCA was passed without the knowledge or consent of the people of the United States. I know that we live in a representative government, where our elected officials speak for the people at large, but this particular law, and alarmingly, many like it, were passed on behalf of the recording industry, movie making industry, etc. This is not the will of the people. In fact, how can someone say that the people are benefited by this law? I say that they are not. Their rights are being trampled by this abomination. In most, if not all states, if a contract is signed that isn't beneficial to both parties, it can be easily contested as invalid. This law is similar, I think it would be over-turned, because it doesn't have the best interests of the American people at heart.
Thirdly, in what way is Adobe hurt by Dmitri Sklyarov's actions that it would have been able to avoid if this didn't contain one of the political buzzwords like "encryption" or "hacker"? In the past, when a company was guilty of lying or committing a crime, it is usually up to a private citizen (American or otherwise) to point it out before the public at large and the Judicial system would take notice? Adobe tried to tie something to a single instance of computer hardware, making it non-copyable. This is shaky legal ground without the DMCA, as it probably violates "fair use." Furthermore, the encryption used is flimsy and easily breakable. If I am betting my company on the quality of this encryption, the low quality of the Adobe product constituted a defective product. Only because it is illegal now (under the DMCA and no other law) to try to break encryption, would this even have the possibility of not being broken and turned into a copyable medium. What Mr. Sklyarov did was to enable people and corporations to understand the risk of using Adobe's defective eBook product. This has never been a crime, and it shouldn't be a crime. Without this type of "expose," we are in the position of the king in the children's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." We know that there are problems, but they are never fixed, because no one is allowed to talk about the problems, thus Adobe--or any other company--has no reason to improve, thus killing the innovation that I mentioned in my first paragraph.
Lastly, it is a crime to talk about encryption subversion under the DMCA. This treads on dangerous territory, that being free speech. Yes, there are instances where we give up free speech for the greater good (the classic yelling "fire" in a crowded theater for example), but this isn't one of them. There is no greater good, only the good of a few wealthy companies, the ones which lobbied this law into existence. In fact, I believe that the criminalization of talking about this if a disservice to America. It is only by talking about things among peers that real scientific advances come.
I still think a run-of-the-mill petition would be in order as well. I think until we actually take action that the "old school" politicians will recognize, we are just shouting to the converted.
Never spent a dime on Linux. I download the ISOs from the websites at work, then take my old harddrive and copy them over, then burn them at home (cheap portable storage, don't care if it gets broken really). I get all of my info from the web. (maybe that is why I keep breaking it?)
Before I had a burner, I downloaded the slackware packages from the web (mid nineties), and installed from my dos partition.
In between, I didn't have linux. I probably wouldn't now if I didn't have the cd burner.
Sorry, but we are going to need to use the bullshit filter here.
OpenGL and DirectX don't compete with each other, the only comparison that you can really draw is between Direct3D (a small component of DirectX) and OpenGL. You can use OpenGL and DirectX in the same project, and many games do. There isn't anything better than DX when it comes to an interface for i/o devices, etc. on the windows platform. But as far as OpenGL and D3D, they are directly comparable, and there are minor trade-offs when you choose between the two.
>OpenGL is written for a UNIX environment, DX is for a Windows environment.
Okay, what is the point here? OpenGL has long ago been ported to the windows env, and it runs fine, even better than on UNIX (for most workstations) because it has direct access to the hardware layer, UNIX (until very recently) had to go thru the X protocol (nice and portable, but slow).
>OpenGL does NOT change very much[....]
True, the core of OpenGL doesn't change very much, but this is very good. With every release of D3D, the API changes drasticly, so you must relearn it every time. OpenGL on the other hand, doesn't change (much), but it has extensions that make it dynamic. The pixel/vertex shading on OpenGL has the same features that the D3D version has (supposedly it is better if you believe opengl.org). So, by design, it doesn't matter if OpenGL "natively" supports shaders, the API was designed to be flexible and extendable.
I am not saying that since OpenGL is "open" and extensible, that it makes the choice of what to use a no-brainer, it is far from that. Some choose on or the other for many reasons, sometimes political/ideology, sometimes monitary (MS paid big bucks to early adopters of D3D), etc. It is by far an easy decsion. The only good part about it: it doesn't really matter; you can do anything in one that you can do in the other, if you know the API well enough. And that includes pixel/vertex shaders, etc.
Not true at all. Even the lowest Federal court can kill the DMCA. It will have to go to the Supreme Court to stand (most likely). So since this is a Federal case, we have a chance. I don't think it is a big one in this case. (the dude just wants to go home, he could care less about our rights. If it was an American, he might be more willing.)
which in itself, IS illegal, according to the DMCA.
Folk, all this talk about this guy wasting his money because he didn't do his research.
I am not convinced he spent any money that was his own. I am quite sure that he expensed the entire thing. How else would they be able to produce such high quality content? You need to spend money to make money.
Even if he didn't expense it, he was absolutely able to write it off on his taxes as job related.
So in summary, he didn't care how much he wasted, it was worth the risk to have HDTV, because it wasn't his money.
Now why aren't other people buying HDTV....
that will prove that M$ is only trying to get marketshare from this stupid .net thing. If M$ writes the license such that noone else can serve in a .net enviornment or noone else can use C#, then noone can be at fault but M$, thus they orchestrated that situation, thus proving that this is a big ploy so that "all your base are belong to us".
Now, if anyone (IT managers, etc.) will understand that....
There isn't a general feedback option, but pick something.
Probably isn't the most constructive protest, but it sure is fun. Sorta like writing your congressman, you know he doesn't care what you say (unless you include a few hunderds, or maybe a couple thousand $100 bills), but you get to say something to his staff.