Thanks for the detailed posting. By the last paragraph, I found myself splitting between agreeing that it is a serious hypothesis, but disagreeing that it explains things as well as the alternatives. This'll sound disrespectful, but the monty-python quote that comes bubbling up is "Watery tarts throwing swords..."
150 million square km of earth as a petri dish, things like volcanic/tidal activity and 100 lightning strikes per second causing all sorts of wierd compounds to be created in varying quantities. Thermal spectrums from damn-cold to boiling. This genesis scenario just seems more likely than the rare chance of innoculation by space-rocks.
I accept the mars-rock is possible. Just damned unlikely compared to the alternatives.
Take an example out of this thread: 500k population, all snarfing voip and on-demand A/V for several hours per day... 500K times 100KBps, let's say.
Does anyone know Shannon-Hartley well enough to see how large populations and high bandwidth numbers like these work out? If literally hundreds of thousands of devices are all running at a few gigahertz, even with promises of directional/positional streams via software defined radios, it seems the 'noise' they've generated raises the background threshold enough to degrade performance.
(I can do the Shannon math, but I'm such a RF-newbie that I'd rather hear from a real expert).
Crap... elephants all the way down, not monkeys. Various claimed origins to the phrase, but I first heard it was a 19th-century exchange between a western theologian and a hindu/sikh/? priest describing their cosmos as one that has the earth riding atop a giant sea turtle standing atop an elephant that is on an elephant that is on an elephant etc. Says the priest: "You don't seem to understand, Doctor: it's elephants all the way down."
Had the probability stuff I mentioned (and the infinite number of monkeys) on the brain and that garbled things, I guess.
A better (and open) question is whether all life on Earth is descended from (primitive) life that originated on Mars and was carried here by meteorites before Mars became uninhabitable.
A better question? An open question? Really!?
Not meaning to troll, but how exactly would a meteor jump or ricochet off mars and impact Earth? The idea just seems damned far-fetched. And wouldn't the atmospheric burn leaving mars and impacting earth and months or years of hard vacuum time do a nice job of sterilizing most things? And if this idea you posit says earth's organisms needed to come from Mars, where'd Mars get 'em?! After all, any creation story that posits that it is 'monkeys all the way down' loses my confidence pretty damn fast.
Given the huge range of temperatures, minerals, electrostatic activity, etc. here on earth, seems easier to imagine various 'crawled out of primordial soup' origin theories to space debris carrying lucky spores or enzymes. I mean, I like my infinite-improbabilities when they come packaged in a world that rolls the dice a millions of times per second for a few billion years.
Again, I don't mean to troll. We can't prove or disprove what you're suggesting, but your suggestion starts with 3 or 4 soon-to-be-tested requirements (residue of life-supporting ecology on mars, evidence of life on mars, that life's genetic resemblance to earth life, matching timelines). I even like seeing scientific trial-ballons like yours. But your idea seems astronomically unlikely given the alternatives.
Between gaim encryption and gaim-otr plugins, I think you're mistaken on just how many people use gaim on windows. Heck, we've standardized on it in our consultancy and we recommend all of our clients to use it.
The moment I find myself needing to communicate anything even slightly confidential to another IM user, I call 'em on the phone for that info, and while I've got them on the phone I guide them through setting up gaim and an encryption plugin so we can talk securely.
Oh, and gaim-encryption is the closest I've seen to idiot-proof encryption: it negotiates keys transparently and has plain-language warnings. OTR's not as elegant, but some of the security aspects it has (deniability) are useful to a customer, so that's what I use now...
Incidentally, I've never used Yahoo's IM or MSN Messenger protocols *except* because of their support within gaim. And someone tells me that Trillian is just as good as gaim, but couldn't give a single compelling reason to try it when I asked: why bother when gaim is FOSS?!
Standard disclaimer: I'm nothin but a happy user of great code. Luuuv gaim.
And as much as I dislike 'em both, Walmart and Microsoft aren't really cartel's. They're cutthroat capitalists that game one aspect of the system or another.
Put another way, there's a lot that happens without money. Time, enthusiasm and money often seem tied to some inflexible constant: lots of just one or two of 'em can accomplish things, but usually it is easier if you blend a fair quantity of all 3. In the case of coding, having enthusiasm usually saves a lot of time and money.
Um, I'm more impressed that the GP sent in for the reunion scene and didn't bother to notice what he got back was a page of boilerplate. Or that somehow he and his wife are the only two recipients of the actual reunion scene. All the rest of us got a form letter.
Seriously. Google 'princess-bride reunion-scene', and you'll see the same bit of 'why I can't send you the reunion scene right now' legalese that I got. Funny stuff.
The romantic in me says go with the story either being a bit tarnished by age or with GP *meaning* the form letter.
Oh, and Princess Bride the *book* is now 32 years old, I think. Hardcover came out in 73, so maybe that story's gotten a bit tarnished, too.
Well, maybe we get there with a 60-mile gun and a much-shorter space elevator cable. And some incredible marksmanship/luck. Toss in ramjets and huge helicopters capable of keeping a gun hovering 10 miles up. Rube Goldberg would be proud...
Thanks for your comment. The need to get up to 60 miles (to-near-vacuum) and then 'magically' add the needed radial velocity was the bit was what I was overlooking.
I've just glanced thru the comments and it seems every commenter else took a different tangent than my initial reaction. The ideas do a great job of showing the wealth of topics and issues facing anyone involved in licensing. But are you sure they're not looking for a course that explores various OSS software? Technical, not philosophical/legal/political? Or even some blend of the two?
The nontech aspects of OSS could make for an interesting course, admittedly. But it'd be interesting on a par with philosophy 101: mind expanding but directly applicable to just a few people (people making IP license decisions) and hampered from reaching sure conclusions.
OTOH, the Tech aspects of OSS could:
start with handing out cd's of a few key OSS software bits and introducing key OSS concepts.
assign a feedback paper from students ("What I know about OSS, and where could I use it for my work." -- must be written in OpenOffice.org or another OSS word processor), then
select a few OSS projects (a browser, a database, a blog/CM app),
teach using them... downloading, installing, tweaking, etc.
contributing to them (best if a small feature/bug is assigned to small teams),
research problems via various tech-support methods (usenet, user groups & mailing lists, and prepaid or support-contract vendors).
Shrink your legal/political lecturing down to a day or two early on, plus a steady trickle of ongoing attention.
Talk Creative Commons, warez, OSS business models, patent law and other Intellectual Property issues, too.
At the end of a policy lecture series, all you'll give your class is a deep-seeming understanding of OSS issues (I say 'seeming' because a lack of much case law adds a lot of uncertainty).
For the Tech one, you give students enough understanding to think through OSS issues themselves, and you guided them through the toughest part (for most people, even techies) of the real OSS learning curve: where do I start and what do I do when something goes awry?
Oh, and grow a mailing list based on this... let your gung-ho OSS advocates feed off each other (and off people from previous/subsequent years) whenever they need to talk about some prickly OSS topic. Unlike pointing all them noobs at slashdot, you're giving them a security-blanket they can rely on in *really* becoming OSS users and advocates. The worst moments I've had in using Apache, Debian and a few other prickly OSS apps were times when I couldn't find online help... at times like that, a few OSS-using friends/coworkers helped me more than anything else.
But hey, if the department wants 60 hours of policy and comparative contract law analysis, use one of these outlines above. It'll be animated enough (since the only people that want an in-depth look into OSS are going to know what it is, but will disagree on the details). The idea initially sounds like a fun upper-level course, but ends up sounding like hell to me: YANAL, neither is anyone else in the room, EVERYONE has preexisting opinions, there are a thousand different motivations for loving/hating OSS, and legal precedent or case law is so far close to nonexistent. Might as well babble about Schopenhauer in Swahili.
As interesting as the project sounds, getting imprisoned and/or dying at the hands of assassins probably is not high on most engineers' lists of job perks. I know the idea doesn't appeal to me.
Any idea what the max *actual* altitude reached by his gun designs was? Or are there charts showing velocity vs. elevation for these launches? Seeing mention of 60-miles in one of your links caught my eye... from 60 to 100+ miles, atmospheric issues have dropped off to nearly nothing compared to the first 60 miles of atmospheric drag, so I'm curious.
I had a house burn down once, and the thing that ended up being most useful afterward was a videotape showing inventory and carefully showing irreplaceable stuff like a portrait photo of my great grandfather.
If only Aardman had taken the time to create a video archive of all these props and objects... something like a movie...
erm... nevermind.
(Especially on grim days like today, I really miss Emily Latella. And Nick Park's classy reaction to this personal catastrophe impressed the hell out of me. Thanks, Nick.)
Get a decent laptop, then! Spending a bit of time selecting a non-crappy laptop would probably save you the cost of a portable DVD player, and get you a better computing experience.
Just deleted a rather lengthy reply in favor giving you some rope...
What laptop has battery power to handle a day with a 1 hr flight, and two 3 hour flights? Presume I'll watch 2 movies, if that helps.
Your choice should also have roughly 2ghz speed.
Narrow the list: Since I do a lot of IDE-based development, I also need dual-head video and greater than 1000x1000 resolution built-in. Since I also do security work in linux, I'd like the machine to be very linux-friendly.
My coding occasionally dictates tests run off a DVD-R of the compiled software. So, narrow by adding a requirement for dvd-burning.
Now, how tall is the screen? Have you tested this in-flight to be sure it fits on a tray-table in coach, esp. if the passenger ahead of you reclines their seat? My impressions are that anything larger than a ultraportable doesn't fit well in coach seating. Keep in mind, I'm 6' tall and 200 lbs, and a reclined seat puts this laptop's screen at about 75 degrees. Meanwhile, a 10" or smaller personal video device works insanely well in this sort of space.
Given the ability for a Ipod to act as portable data storage and a greater degree of ruggedness, I might be able to occasionally shift to just carrying my data and using a 2nd PC for my work, dropping computer/brick/cords/case from my carry-on in favor of a half-pound device. How is a better laptop going to beat that scenario?
How does a single 'better' laptop resolve my conflicts with my kids over who'll choose the intended use?
What exactly are your cost-benefit numbers that show the advantage of buying a $2500 laptop to save $150 (price of a portable DVD player). I'm confused, since you're suggesting I spend a couple grand rather than a few hundred bucks.
For the record, I own a 3-year-old Thinkpad A31. Given my needs and the incredibly good service I get from IBM, I'm quite happy with it. And given our company's experience with Dell, I'd eat glass before I'd own a Dell, so don't suggest that brand. This A31 has been incredibly easy to use for some fairly heavy lifting: I've got multiple hard drives I 'cold-swap' to get different configurations, I recently upgraded to a DVD-burner drive, and etc. So... what specificially is 'crappy' about it, aside from it not working as a personal-entertainment widget during travel?
A quick googling shows:304 thousand troops overseas in over 120 countries worldwide as of 2004. That's enough by itself, but there are other niche's that this fits: travellers, people with jobs that have a lot of waiting (night clerk, security guard, etc), etc.
As for using my laptop to play an in-flight movie: My desktop-replacement doesn't fit comfortably in the space I get in coach (and god help me if the seat in front of me reclines!), the laptop eats batteries too quickly to last thru a 2 or 3 flight day, travelling with kids forces me to choose between their shows and my needs for the laptop, etc.
To be honest, if the PSP had user-burnable UMD's, I'd use that as my portable video box in a heartbeat, and for my kids when they're with me... small, multifunctional, and gorgeous. Too bad Sony hasn't realized that memory sticks are too damn expensive to use for accumulating a personal video library.
There are Bugs? In Halo?... Really?
All I've ever played is deathmatch mode, so this surprised me. Literally. Chalk it up as another thing I learned on slashdot.
That also 'splains the jokes cracked about Starship Troopers, and I agree that we're so VERY not due for another lame bugkillin' space opera in my lifetime. That includes Ender's Game, if crazy uncle Orson is listening in...
Playing a FPS in realtime is fun, but WTF gave anyone the impression that 2 hours of cutscenes would be a blockbuster? I mean, REALLY!?
At last weekend's Serenity opening, we saw the 'Doom' trailer. A roomful of browncoats chuckled, cheered the BFG, made snarky remarks about how the first-person POV used in half of the preview would get old DAMN FAST, and then quite literally hooted and groaned at the end because it only took a 2-minute preview to convince a significant TARGET MARKET of a Doom movie that THIS was a movie that should NEVER have been made!!!
And I just hope that writers realize that the publishers might realize that in this case neither google nor yahoo is trying to be their (the publishers') best friend.
Satellite TV and XBox-live both have a means for updating the security, shifting keys, or whatever. This thwarts hacking, makes it a treadmill where each new countermeasure improves on the one before. Also tends to bore or wear out anyone but the most dedicated. You can buy a hacked system capable of accessing DRM content without paying, but what you get may not stay hacked for very long, or may be feature-limited (like mods to xboxes... xbox-live will notice them so my understanding is you get to choose: live, or hacked).
PSP: you can hack the system, you can play movies off memory sticks. You can't burn your own UMD. Shame, since I *love* the small disc form factor and would shift to it instead of dvd's, would use one as a music and podcast player and personal video toy, emulator, etc.
Divx: think we're misunderstanding each other. Divx the elder was a Circuit City plus ??? scheme where you bought a (cheaper) movie disc that played a few times and died unless renewed. Divx the younger is a movie compression protocol that is alive and healthy, named in part as a parody of the first one.
Standard disclaimers: IANAE, may be wrong on minor details above, not going to waste time carefully fact-checking.
Nice post. I utterly agree with A. Maybe I'd cross out 'limited' and change inevitable to 'viable'. And b and c are also quite close to my opinion. That said,
b: bypassing is the key weakness here, since hard crypto can create a mechanism that isn't easily broken. XBox discs and satellite TV are two examples that come to mind. A crypto arms race goes until the crypto becomes unwieldy enough to deter all but the most-dedicated hacker. A side thought: the UMD drives for Sony PSP are an interesting/common wrinkle: they add physical (media) robustness: if nobody else has burners or media, engineering costs can run high enough to be a part of the DRM scheme. Wide success is needed before someone makes a competitive/compatible drive or media.
c: trying to restrict behavior isn't always death to a product. A well-designed product with enough flexibility to be interesting to joe consumer can thrive under DRM. DivX failed, but macrovision in both VHS and DVD formats has kept movie-copying lower than it might have been.
Um, if it translates/parses even fairly well (after all, if anyone less than a latin scholar creates a latin easter-egg, they're gonna trash the grammar), why would you think it was gibberish by design? Occam's razor leaves one choosing between the proverbial infinite number of monkeys and an easter egg.
Seems to me to be a no-brainer. That is, *if* you survive the part where in one sentence I use up my entire geek-speak allotment for the day.
Security on a car: a lock on the door. Security on windows 98, 2000, xp: varies. User management controls shift which interface screen they're in, the user/group hierarchy shifts, the network config screens (and what to highlight-then-hit-properties) instructions shift steadily.
Yeah, the keyboard screen and mouse are largely unchanged. But the above is critical, yet keeps getting shifted around. Likewise, hardware config varies. Likewise, application UI's shift steadily. Users scream about this, if you ask 'em and make the comparison to a car so they'll break their preconceptions enough to *really* analyze what computers force them to do in terms of perpetually relearning... but if you don't, most users have resigned themselves to it. They expect each new app to be an experience on a par with root canal. They expect to get hacked. They expect to be duped by spyware and trojans. And part of that is due to external factors and rapid change in the industry. But the part we control, the UI... we bust on purpose because we aren't paying attention or we want to try something new and different or it'd be extra/lame effort to focus on maintaining similarities between versions. Meanwhile, the systems are obsessively-made backward-compatible.
Lets ignore the obvious (to capitalize on Adobe's or Microsoft's research in user-interaction and UI design), and focus on something obvious but almost-alwlays neglected by primadonna developers:
Because user-acceptance and training are the toughest barrier to adoption any new system faces.
It always baffles me that we obsess about preserving backward-compatibility, but nobody thinks twice about how much end-user trauma it causes to rearrange, regroup and rename the control panel elements in windows).
Geeks willingly puzzle thru the app using an 'I *know* there has to be a way to do X' mindset. Everyone else cusses a lot, then goes back what is easy and familiar.
An analogy: imagine how unpleasant it would be if critical controls on cars varied from car to car. I mean, relocating the headlights is annoying enough, but what if each car shifted driver's position, steering, windshield and seating, and what order the pedals were in on the floor. Gas on left on Chevy's, on the right on cars made in Europe. Safety and user experience would plummet. Next, rename things throughout and use inconsistent unit schemes (speedometers in feet or miles or meters or yards or leagues per second or minute or hour, random and ambiguous words for controls, etc).
I swear, if cars were done like OS's (with stuff shuffled around and renamed and inexplicably redesigned between brands and between versions) people would have given 'em up and gone back to walking.
(Incidentally, that's why user-centric apps should really obsess about matching the industry leader, and why non-user-centric (server) apps like Apache are given a bit more leeway.)
Found myself seated next to a LPGA pro a few weeks ago. Afterward, I looked her statistics up: In 12 years as a pro, she made a bit over $100k from tournaments, and she's rated just below 100th in lifetime earnings. I don't know what her endorsements made her, but they'd have to have been insanely high to get her beyond $25k a year from that low of a start.
There's money enough for a top-ten player in lesser sports, but (outside of men's baseball, football, basketball and soccer) nearly every "real" sport has thousands of people that consider themselves lucky if they break even financially. We're already there for video gamers, from what I'm hearing.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the detailed posting. By the last paragraph, I found myself splitting between agreeing that it is a serious hypothesis, but disagreeing that it explains things as well as the alternatives. This'll sound disrespectful, but the monty-python quote that comes bubbling up is "Watery tarts throwing swords..."
150 million square km of earth as a petri dish, things like volcanic/tidal activity and 100 lightning strikes per second causing all sorts of wierd compounds to be created in varying quantities. Thermal spectrums from damn-cold to boiling. This genesis scenario just seems more likely than the rare chance of innoculation by space-rocks.
I accept the mars-rock is possible. Just damned unlikely compared to the alternatives.
1 rock. Might have had evidence of life. No mention of *how* stuff jumps off mars and hits earth, which was pretty much my request.
Again, compared to the 100 lightning strikes per second earth gets.
Occam's razor, anyone?
Unimaginably high bandwidth? Really?
Take an example out of this thread: 500k population, all snarfing voip and on-demand A/V for several hours per day... 500K times 100KBps, let's say.
Does anyone know Shannon-Hartley well enough to see how large populations and high bandwidth numbers like these work out? If literally hundreds of thousands of devices are all running at a few gigahertz, even with promises of directional/positional streams via software defined radios, it seems the 'noise' they've generated raises the background threshold enough to degrade performance.
(I can do the Shannon math, but I'm such a RF-newbie that I'd rather hear from a real expert).
Crap... elephants all the way down, not monkeys. Various claimed origins to the phrase, but I first heard it was a 19th-century exchange between a western theologian and a hindu/sikh/? priest describing their cosmos as one that has the earth riding atop a giant sea turtle standing atop an elephant that is on an elephant that is on an elephant etc. Says the priest: "You don't seem to understand, Doctor: it's elephants all the way down."
Had the probability stuff I mentioned (and the infinite number of monkeys) on the brain and that garbled things, I guess.
A better question? An open question? Really!?
Not meaning to troll, but how exactly would a meteor jump or ricochet off mars and impact Earth? The idea just seems damned far-fetched. And wouldn't the atmospheric burn leaving mars and impacting earth and months or years of hard vacuum time do a nice job of sterilizing most things? And if this idea you posit says earth's organisms needed to come from Mars, where'd Mars get 'em?! After all, any creation story that posits that it is 'monkeys all the way down' loses my confidence pretty damn fast.
Given the huge range of temperatures, minerals, electrostatic activity, etc. here on earth, seems easier to imagine various 'crawled out of primordial soup' origin theories to space debris carrying lucky spores or enzymes. I mean, I like my infinite-improbabilities when they come packaged in a world that rolls the dice a millions of times per second for a few billion years.
Again, I don't mean to troll. We can't prove or disprove what you're suggesting, but your suggestion starts with 3 or 4 soon-to-be-tested requirements (residue of life-supporting ecology on mars, evidence of life on mars, that life's genetic resemblance to earth life, matching timelines). I even like seeing scientific trial-ballons like yours. But your idea seems astronomically unlikely given the alternatives.
Between gaim encryption and gaim-otr plugins, I think you're mistaken on just how many people use gaim on windows. Heck, we've standardized on it in our consultancy and we recommend all of our clients to use it.
The moment I find myself needing to communicate anything even slightly confidential to another IM user, I call 'em on the phone for that info, and while I've got them on the phone I guide them through setting up gaim and an encryption plugin so we can talk securely.
Oh, and gaim-encryption is the closest I've seen to idiot-proof encryption: it negotiates keys transparently and has plain-language warnings. OTR's not as elegant, but some of the security aspects it has (deniability) are useful to a customer, so that's what I use now...
Incidentally, I've never used Yahoo's IM or MSN Messenger protocols *except* because of their support within gaim. And someone tells me that Trillian is just as good as gaim, but couldn't give a single compelling reason to try it when I asked: why bother when gaim is FOSS?!
Standard disclaimer: I'm nothin but a happy user of great code. Luuuv gaim.
Wow, you left out the Oil and Diamond industries.
And as much as I dislike 'em both, Walmart and Microsoft aren't really cartel's. They're cutthroat capitalists that game one aspect of the system or another.
You must not have sired any kids yet.
Put another way, there's a lot that happens without money. Time, enthusiasm and money often seem tied to some inflexible constant: lots of just one or two of 'em can accomplish things, but usually it is easier if you blend a fair quantity of all 3. In the case of coding, having enthusiasm usually saves a lot of time and money.
Um, I'm more impressed that the GP sent in for the reunion scene and didn't bother to notice what he got back was a page of boilerplate. Or that somehow he and his wife are the only two recipients of the actual reunion scene. All the rest of us got a form letter.
Seriously. Google 'princess-bride reunion-scene', and you'll see the same bit of 'why I can't send you the reunion scene right now' legalese that I got. Funny stuff.
The romantic in me says go with the story either being a bit tarnished by age or with GP *meaning* the form letter.
Oh, and Princess Bride the *book* is now 32 years old, I think. Hardcover came out in 73, so maybe that story's gotten a bit tarnished, too.
Well, maybe we get there with a 60-mile gun and a much-shorter space elevator cable. And some incredible marksmanship/luck. Toss in ramjets and huge helicopters capable of keeping a gun hovering 10 miles up. Rube Goldberg would be proud...
Thanks for your comment. The need to get up to 60 miles (to-near-vacuum) and then 'magically' add the needed radial velocity was the bit was what I was overlooking.
TANSTAFL.
The nontech aspects of OSS could make for an interesting course, admittedly. But it'd be interesting on a par with philosophy 101: mind expanding but directly applicable to just a few people (people making IP license decisions) and hampered from reaching sure conclusions.
OTOH, the Tech aspects of OSS could:
At the end of a policy lecture series, all you'll give your class is a deep-seeming understanding of OSS issues (I say 'seeming' because a lack of much case law adds a lot of uncertainty).
For the Tech one, you give students enough understanding to think through OSS issues themselves, and you guided them through the toughest part (for most people, even techies) of the real OSS learning curve: where do I start and what do I do when something goes awry?
Oh, and grow a mailing list based on this... let your gung-ho OSS advocates feed off each other (and off people from previous/subsequent years) whenever they need to talk about some prickly OSS topic. Unlike pointing all them noobs at slashdot, you're giving them a security-blanket they can rely on in *really* becoming OSS users and advocates. The worst moments I've had in using Apache, Debian and a few other prickly OSS apps were times when I couldn't find online help... at times like that, a few OSS-using friends/coworkers helped me more than anything else.
But hey, if the department wants 60 hours of policy and comparative contract law analysis, use one of these outlines above. It'll be animated enough (since the only people that want an in-depth look into OSS are going to know what it is, but will disagree on the details). The idea initially sounds like a fun upper-level course, but ends up sounding like hell to me: YANAL, neither is anyone else in the room, EVERYONE has preexisting opinions, there are a thousand different motivations for loving/hating OSS, and legal precedent or case law is so far close to nonexistent. Might as well babble about Schopenhauer in Swahili.
As interesting as the project sounds, getting imprisoned and/or dying at the hands of assassins probably is not high on most engineers' lists of job perks. I know the idea doesn't appeal to me.
Any idea what the max *actual* altitude reached by his gun designs was? Or are there charts showing velocity vs. elevation for these launches? Seeing mention of 60-miles in one of your links caught my eye... from 60 to 100+ miles, atmospheric issues have dropped off to nearly nothing compared to the first 60 miles of atmospheric drag, so I'm curious.
I had a house burn down once, and the thing that ended up being most useful afterward was a videotape showing inventory and carefully showing irreplaceable stuff like a portrait photo of my great grandfather.
If only Aardman had taken the time to create a video archive of all these props and objects... something like a movie...
erm... nevermind.
(Especially on grim days like today, I really miss Emily Latella. And Nick Park's classy reaction to this personal catastrophe impressed the hell out of me. Thanks, Nick.)
Just deleted a rather lengthy reply in favor giving you some rope...
What laptop has battery power to handle a day with a 1 hr flight, and two 3 hour flights? Presume I'll watch 2 movies, if that helps.
Your choice should also have roughly 2ghz speed.
Narrow the list: Since I do a lot of IDE-based development, I also need dual-head video and greater than 1000x1000 resolution built-in. Since I also do security work in linux, I'd like the machine to be very linux-friendly.
My coding occasionally dictates tests run off a DVD-R of the compiled software. So, narrow by adding a requirement for dvd-burning.
Now, how tall is the screen? Have you tested this in-flight to be sure it fits on a tray-table in coach, esp. if the passenger ahead of you reclines their seat? My impressions are that anything larger than a ultraportable doesn't fit well in coach seating. Keep in mind, I'm 6' tall and 200 lbs, and a reclined seat puts this laptop's screen at about 75 degrees. Meanwhile, a 10" or smaller personal video device works insanely well in this sort of space.
Given the ability for a Ipod to act as portable data storage and a greater degree of ruggedness, I might be able to occasionally shift to just carrying my data and using a 2nd PC for my work, dropping computer/brick/cords/case from my carry-on in favor of a half-pound device. How is a better laptop going to beat that scenario?
How does a single 'better' laptop resolve my conflicts with my kids over who'll choose the intended use?
What exactly are your cost-benefit numbers that show the advantage of buying a $2500 laptop to save $150 (price of a portable DVD player). I'm confused, since you're suggesting I spend a couple grand rather than a few hundred bucks.
For the record, I own a 3-year-old Thinkpad A31. Given my needs and the incredibly good service I get from IBM, I'm quite happy with it. And given our company's experience with Dell, I'd eat glass before I'd own a Dell, so don't suggest that brand. This A31 has been incredibly easy to use for some fairly heavy lifting: I've got multiple hard drives I 'cold-swap' to get different configurations, I recently upgraded to a DVD-burner drive, and etc. So... what specificially is 'crappy' about it, aside from it not working as a personal-entertainment widget during travel?
I won't hold my breath waiting for an answer...
A quick googling shows:304 thousand troops overseas in over 120 countries worldwide as of 2004. That's enough by itself, but there are other niche's that this fits: travellers, people with jobs that have a lot of waiting (night clerk, security guard, etc), etc.
As for using my laptop to play an in-flight movie: My desktop-replacement doesn't fit comfortably in the space I get in coach (and god help me if the seat in front of me reclines!), the laptop eats batteries too quickly to last thru a 2 or 3 flight day, travelling with kids forces me to choose between their shows and my needs for the laptop, etc.
To be honest, if the PSP had user-burnable UMD's, I'd use that as my portable video box in a heartbeat, and for my kids when they're with me... small, multifunctional, and gorgeous. Too bad Sony hasn't realized that memory sticks are too damn expensive to use for accumulating a personal video library.
That also 'splains the jokes cracked about Starship Troopers, and I agree that we're so VERY not due for another lame bugkillin' space opera in my lifetime. That includes Ender's Game, if crazy uncle Orson is listening in...
Playing a FPS in realtime is fun, but WTF gave anyone the impression that 2 hours of cutscenes would be a blockbuster? I mean, REALLY!?
At last weekend's Serenity opening, we saw the 'Doom' trailer. A roomful of browncoats chuckled, cheered the BFG, made snarky remarks about how the first-person POV used in half of the preview would get old DAMN FAST, and then quite literally hooted and groaned at the end because it only took a 2-minute preview to convince a significant TARGET MARKET of a Doom movie that THIS was a movie that should NEVER have been made!!!
And I just hope that writers realize that the publishers might realize that in this case neither google nor yahoo is trying to be their (the publishers') best friend.
Satellite TV and XBox-live both have a means for updating the security, shifting keys, or whatever. This thwarts hacking, makes it a treadmill where each new countermeasure improves on the one before. Also tends to bore or wear out anyone but the most dedicated. You can buy a hacked system capable of accessing DRM content without paying, but what you get may not stay hacked for very long, or may be feature-limited (like mods to xboxes... xbox-live will notice them so my understanding is you get to choose: live, or hacked).
PSP: you can hack the system, you can play movies off memory sticks. You can't burn your own UMD. Shame, since I *love* the small disc form factor and would shift to it instead of dvd's, would use one as a music and podcast player and personal video toy, emulator, etc.
Divx: think we're misunderstanding each other. Divx the elder was a Circuit City plus ??? scheme where you bought a (cheaper) movie disc that played a few times and died unless renewed. Divx the younger is a movie compression protocol that is alive and healthy, named in part as a parody of the first one.
Standard disclaimers: IANAE, may be wrong on minor details above, not going to waste time carefully fact-checking.
Nice post. I utterly agree with A. Maybe I'd cross out 'limited' and change inevitable to 'viable'. And b and c are also quite close to my opinion. That said,
b: bypassing is the key weakness here, since hard crypto can create a mechanism that isn't easily broken. XBox discs and satellite TV are two examples that come to mind. A crypto arms race goes until the crypto becomes unwieldy enough to deter all but the most-dedicated hacker. A side thought: the UMD drives for Sony PSP are an interesting/common wrinkle: they add physical (media) robustness: if nobody else has burners or media, engineering costs can run high enough to be a part of the DRM scheme. Wide success is needed before someone makes a competitive/compatible drive or media.
c: trying to restrict behavior isn't always death to a product. A well-designed product with enough flexibility to be interesting to joe consumer can thrive under DRM. DivX failed, but macrovision in both VHS and DVD formats has kept movie-copying lower than it might have been.
Um, if it translates/parses even fairly well (after all, if anyone less than a latin scholar creates a latin easter-egg, they're gonna trash the grammar), why would you think it was gibberish by design? Occam's razor leaves one choosing between the proverbial infinite number of monkeys and an easter egg.
Seems to me to be a no-brainer. That is, *if* you survive the part where in one sentence I use up my entire geek-speak allotment for the day.
Stupid Slashdot parser completely ignored my URL: Marijuana Tax Stamp law URL, take two...
I'll second this: there are taxes levied against illegal activity. Check this Marijuana Tax Stamp law, for example.
Nope.
Am late to get home, but quick example:
Security on a car: a lock on the door.
Security on windows 98, 2000, xp: varies. User management controls shift which interface screen they're in, the user/group hierarchy shifts, the network config screens (and what to highlight-then-hit-properties) instructions shift steadily.
Yeah, the keyboard screen and mouse are largely unchanged. But the above is critical, yet keeps getting shifted around. Likewise, hardware config varies. Likewise, application UI's shift steadily. Users scream about this, if you ask 'em and make the comparison to a car so they'll break their preconceptions enough to *really* analyze what computers force them to do in terms of perpetually relearning... but if you don't, most users have resigned themselves to it. They expect each new app to be an experience on a par with root canal. They expect to get hacked. They expect to be duped by spyware and trojans. And part of that is due to external factors and rapid change in the industry. But the part we control, the UI... we bust on purpose because we aren't paying attention or we want to try something new and different or it'd be extra/lame effort to focus on maintaining similarities between versions. Meanwhile, the systems are obsessively-made backward-compatible.
How fsckin' tragic is that.
Lets ignore the obvious (to capitalize on Adobe's or Microsoft's research in user-interaction and UI design), and focus on something obvious but almost-alwlays neglected by primadonna developers:
Because user-acceptance and training are the toughest barrier to adoption any new system faces.
It always baffles me that we obsess about preserving backward-compatibility, but nobody thinks twice about how much end-user trauma it causes to rearrange, regroup and rename the control panel elements in windows).
Geeks willingly puzzle thru the app using an 'I *know* there has to be a way to do X' mindset. Everyone else cusses a lot, then goes back what is easy and familiar.
An analogy: imagine how unpleasant it would be if critical controls on cars varied from car to car. I mean, relocating the headlights is annoying enough, but what if each car shifted driver's position, steering, windshield and seating, and what order the pedals were in on the floor. Gas on left on Chevy's, on the right on cars made in Europe. Safety and user experience would plummet. Next, rename things throughout and use inconsistent unit schemes (speedometers in feet or miles or meters or yards or leagues per second or minute or hour, random and ambiguous words for controls, etc).
I swear, if cars were done like OS's (with stuff shuffled around and renamed and inexplicably redesigned between brands and between versions) people would have given 'em up and gone back to walking.
(Incidentally, that's why user-centric apps should really obsess about matching the industry leader, and why non-user-centric (server) apps like Apache are given a bit more leeway.)
There's money enough for a top-ten player in lesser sports, but (outside of men's baseball, football, basketball and soccer) nearly every "real" sport has thousands of people that consider themselves lucky if they break even financially. We're already there for video gamers, from what I'm hearing.