Just the other day, I was planning a mountain biking excursion with my flatemate. He'd never been mountain biking before, and he somehow got it into his head that bringing his Ipod Mini would be a good idea.
I tried to convince him that he would break it via collision with rocks or maybe a tree. He claimed that it was a very durable piece of hardware.
To demonstrate, he dropped it to the carpeted floor and bopped it with his foot...
The display shattered.
I think I laughed for a good half-hour. I felt bad about it, but there's nothing you can do but laugh when something so perfectly comedically timed happens.
It wasn't all bad. He just used this as an excuse to buy the new Nano.
Ah well... Anyway, this is nothing new. I saw the Family Guy movie months ago. In fact, when I went to the IMDB to post about it, I noticed an exchange to the effect of the following:
Guy 1: Teh Family Guy movie is teh awesomes!! Guy 2: Stupid fanboy, the movie isn't out yet. Don't review something you haven't even SEEN! Guy 3: Umm.. The movie's been out on the net for several weeks, and we've ALL already seen it. stfu
Hell, a friend of mine's office is running a massive DVD piracy ring with their fancy new DVD duplicating machine (officially used to make demo DVDs for clients).
I don't need slashdot to tell me $movie was released early: I just assume all movies are, and I'm most usually right.
Now, what to do about this is another matter entirely...
As a semi-professional anime promoter, I can tell you that the market for anime in North America is as large as if not larger than the one in Japan. Anime is a HUGE moneymaker, and the article is fairly off-base.
Next month, in Baltimore MD, 22 000 anime fans will descend upon Otakon, paying as much as $50 a head, to celebrate anime. There are similar conventions on a regular basis all around the country and in Canada. Media Play makes a large portion of its profits from the sale of anime DVDs and manga. Waldenbooks (a mall bookseller) would likely no longer be in business were it not for its reliance on manga (Japanese comic) sales. (The market is so lucrative, they even sell untranslated Japanese comics).
As for the article, far more than 1% of anime make it to the US. Shows are being licensed at staggering rates by many many companies. Some shows are marketed to/released in the United States BEFORE they're debuted in Japan!
Fansubs are dying, but that has more to do with the fact that shows get licensed for US distribution almost immediately now, leaving little time for the semi-legal phase of the practice. (The industry turns a blind eye to fansubs released for non-licensed shows).
Even despite the shady dealings of many fansubbers, anime is wildly profitable, and its market is growing rapidly.
These ad companies seem to think that, by not viewing their advertisement, you're somehow stealing from them.
What if I don't block them, but I conciously refuse to ever click on one? Is that any different? How about if I make a point of never buying any product I see an ad for online? How about if I just ignore ads?
How is blocking them any different?
I'm not going to get a mortgage from some online bank. I'm not going to buy a car just because I saw an ad for one. No amount of advertising will change that.
I block ads because it's convenient to do so. Were this somehow impossible, no one would get any more revenue out of me than they do currently.
So basically, I don't see what the issue here is. (And don't give my any bullshit about "branding." That's a load of crap.)
So a while ago, Magic Johnson came to give a talk at the Rochester Institute of Technology, my alma mater. He spoke about AIDS and life and generally interesting things.
Now, most of you probably remember that he appeared in an episode of the Super Mario Brothers Super Show. (He was living in their medicine cabinet IIRC).
Magic opened the floor up to questions, and I happened to get the first one. It went something like this:
Schezar: Magic, how did it feel to make an appearance on the Super Mario Brothers Super Show? Magic: What? Oh my god... I forgot what kind of school this was... Schezar: I have this picture of you standing in their medicine cabinet... Magic: Come up here! I'm going to sign that for you.
So now I have this picture, signed by Magic himself, on my wall. Just gotta get the captain to sign it and I'll have quite an artifact of power;^)
"t'll look like crap and will deminish property values.
Diminished property values are a good thing for people who don't plan to move any time in the near future. Lower property values = lower property taxes. Considering that this is a commercial property, he shouldn't give a rat's arse about "property values."
"If you've got neighbors, they'll hate you for it."
These are the same neighbors who also complain that their cell phones get poor reception. NIMBY doesn't quite cut it: these people are BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything). Luckily, they can't tell you what to do, and aren't likely your customers. They're not an issue at all.
"You'd have to give me a boat load of cash to even consider it"
Lots of land owners, even residential ones, lease plots of land to cell towers. They pay you a large monthly sum for the privilage, and usually throw in free cell phones. I'd say it's quite reasonable.
As long as your employees have access to your IP, there is absolutely no way to prevent them from "stealing" it if they are determined to do so. Period.
No amount of security will make your data safe. Data is easy to move, easy to duplicate, and easy to store. During the industrial revolution, American industrial spies stole factory plans from British firms by memorizing them. Unless you know how to erase a person's brain, there will always be a hole.
Technology is making this issue ever-more pressing.
You have two options:
1) Hire only trusted people, and trust them.
2) Don't rely on IP as a business model.
Option 2 may sound stupid, but it's really the only way in the long run. Sell a service, sell a product, but don't try to sell information. If the sole thing your company provides is data, someone will endeavor to get that data for themselves, and then you'll be boned.
A business that relies on the scarcity of information it holds internally can not survive. Even if your employees are all 100% trustworthy, outsiders will still vie for your data.
The very concept was never spoken of at university (Rochester Institute of Technology), nor has it ever come up in work (IBM).
Those three "layers" are abstractions, nothing more. The "distribution" layer is simply a term for traffic shaping and optimization. It's very useful in eliminating excess resource use on beleagured routers. Eliminating the layer is nothing more than simplifying your backbone architecture. There is no "layer" to eliminate except the theoretical one.
It always amazes me how Cisco-certified (not making any acusations here) network techs speak an entirely different language from university-educated ones. They talk about Cisco-specific concepts like they're set in stone universally, and use Cisco jargon for common and/or basic concepts.
There are other options besides Cisco, and not every network fits within the nomenclature of Cisco Jargon. You'd do yourself an immense favour to lean more about generic architecture concepts.
I don't want to sound mean, but a Cisco cert is about as useful as an MSCE.
This is why I love Google. They approach problems in an intelligent manner.
Problem: Spammers are very obviously trying to muck with our results.
Solution: Block said spammers.
The only problem is that it's hard to notice all but the most egregious offenders.
I've love Google to add a link to the standard search results. Something like "Report Spam." If enough (100k, a million, whatever) unique people/IPs reported a site or result, it would be flagged for human review.
I would definitly want to know. That way, I could either get the best help as early as possible in order to extend my enjoyable life or, were the time left found to be short, quit my job and go on a bender.
But...
I would want strict legislation preventing corporations/insurance providers/employers from getting the results of said tests. You can't tell me with a straight face they wouldn't use such information in hiring/coverage decisions.
" To be honest, I haven't seen other cables perform as well."
In what context? Did you engage in double-blind testing? Was there a control? What do you mean by "perform?"
"We are ordered by Corporate to not use the demo on ANY other brand of protector besides 'Monster'"
The reason for that rule is simple. Any other protector will give the exact same results as the Monster one. Monster is not a cable company, it is a marketing company. They take components that are no better than standard ones (often manufactured in the same factories and then branded) and market them at a higher price-point.
Insecure and gullible people assume that the high price is justified, when in fact their products provide zero benefit.
Not to sound cruel or flamebait-ish, but you are either very naive, or else a Radio Shack/Monster shill.
Monster Cables are a giant scam designed to relieve gullible people of their money. Double-blind testing has shown time and time again that you can not physically perceive the difference.
There is a huge industry around selling useless crap to people. Monster cables will give you about the same results as rocks. (Yes, people buy those rocks and yes, they think they make their stereos sound better.)
Frankly, I don't know what scares me more: the fact that someone will honestly claim that a magic rock will make music sound better, or the fact that people will pay good money for one...
I work for IBM, and as such I work with raised floor environments on a daily basis. In fact, I'm sitting in one right now.
They're not worth it.
First, you can't easily clean under there. Dust will accumulate in quantities you can't begin to imagine, followed by dust mites, mold, and other assorted evil.
Second, raised floors don't make cable management any easier, they just hide the mess. Sure, the server room looks spotless and clean, but under that floor is a nightmarish rat's nest of cables. Wait until you have to move a cable from one location to another, pulling up floor tiles one at a time to untangle the various knots that have formed...
Third, you can't mop the floor anymore. This floor I'm sitting over hasn't been mopped in several decades. These tiles used to be white!
Fourth, the secondary function of a raised floor is to distribute cooling. Typically, you'll have a giant air conditioner that pumps cold air under the floor. You then have special tiles with holes in them under your racks, through which your servers draw in fresh cold air. If you're not going to set something like that up, you're losing one of the primary benefits of a raised floor.
I could go on and on.
Instead of making a raised floor, make a drop ceiling and run the cables in racks through there: simpler, easier, faster, and cheaper. If you're worried about the height of the ceiling, don't bother with the tiles and just run metal racks.
Trust me, you don't want a raised floor in your basement.
It's simple. A lot of specialty software is very boring, and there just isn't any interest in the OSS community in developing similar software.
Many businesses, especially real estate, banking, auto repair, fast food, and hotel management, rely on software written for windows many years ago that, for them, functions just fine.
They're not techies: computers are not their business. Their business is their business. They're not going to invest resources in developing what they already have just so it can run on "another kind of computer." WINE is the perfect solution for these applications.
Maybe, years from now, when they're running -ALL- of their software under WINE, they might realize that there's a better way.
Until then, good luck finding good programmers who are psyched to write hotel reservation management software that will interface an archaic database platform for free.
Projects like Open Office and The GIMP don't suffer from this problem largely because they're applications that Linux users need on a regular basis. When was the last time you needed to track your fast food orders?
I find it interesting that, at least in the studies I've read about this, that it affects mostly adults, and younger people are largely immune to it.
The young techno-elite grew (and are growing) up immersed in this sea of information, and are adapting to it. The older generations, having grown up in a much slower-paced environment, have difficulty adapting to the rapid change in the information channels available to them.
Personally, I love having this information available. I crave it. I'm constantly aware of the state of the world around me. When something of note happens to one of my friends, that knowledge circulates throughout our social circle almost immediately.
For anyone who's read Snow Crash, there are people referred to as "Gargoyles." They are connected to the net 100% of the time, interacting with it through wearable computing and visual overlays, streaming and feeding information as fast as possible concurrently with their physical life.
The idea might scare some people, but I find it fascinating.
I suppose it's simply that older people, not being used to this mass of information, are not ready to cope with the fact that most information is useless. Part of the ability to accept the input is the ability to filter the wheat from the chaff.
I read slashdot several times a day, but I don't read every comment or every article. I read the ones that will be useful to me in some way. I'm connected to the net most of the time, but I ignore an incoming IM if I'm busy doing something else.
People who aren't used to this environment have trouble ingoring things. You know the type. People who insist on answering the phone no matter how busy they are at that moment. People who check their email immediately whenever they reveive a "new mail" notification. These people can't cope with the available information, and are overwhelmed by it.
If I can see it, I can copy it. If I can hear it, I can record it.
At some point, no matter how high-tech the DRM gets, the data must be presented in a form humans can perceive. All the encryption in the world won't stop little Mikey from holding a microphone up to the outputs and making a non-DRM copy.
To anyone who says that such a copy will be inferior in quality, I note two points:
1) The loss only occurrs once. The non-DRM copy can then be shared digitally with no further loss of quality.
2) The original work was recorded from the air. The band actually played its song, or the actor actually did his thing. If similar technology is used to create the non-DRM copy, the loss will be negligible. (Imagine a home theatre system set up on a soundstage in someone's basement, with pickups and equipment to record its "performance")
People also seem to have this irrational fear that the old technology will suddenly disappear. My digital camcorder is pretty good, and it will still exist when the world is DRM'd. So will my mp3 player, and so will my non-DRM compliant microphones.
Furthermore, there will be a high demand for DRM-noncompliant technology. Even if it is illegal, I predict a briskly moving black market in such technology. If there's a dollar to be made, someone will make it.
It's a massive, massive, ever-growing collection of remixes of classic video game music. Most of it is very good.
Even better, they have torrents of the entire library available for you compulsive music collectors out there. (Not entirely for altruistic reasons, it just saves them bandwidth).
I'll warn you, however, that there are about, say, infinity remixes of that song from Mega Man II. You know the one...
One of the discussions in the book touches on objective "levels" of civilization and species.
IIRC, it can be broken down something like this:
Level 0: What humans are now. Level 1: Mastery of the entire energy capacity of a single planet Level 2: Mastery of the entire energy capacity of a single solar system Level 3: etc...
He supposed that Level 2 and beyond was the point at which a civilization was effectively permanent, able to survive anything less than the total heat death of the universe.
Diamonds aren't rare. In fact, there are more jewel-grade diamonds of large size and high quality than there are people.
The diamond industry works entirely off of the perception in most people that diamonds are rare. They strictly limit the supply, and spend more money advertising than they do mining.
If you don't believe me, take a piece of diamond jewelry to several jewelers and have it appraised. They'll all quote a fairly large sum. Now try to sell it to them. They'll offer you maybe 5-10% of what they quoted.
If you shop around, you'll find that you can't actually sell a diamond for anywhere near what it's "worth."
That said, synthetic diamonds scare the living hell out of the diamond industry, since they're cheap to manufacture and indistinguishable physically from a "real" diamond (which itself isn't rare, but I digress).
These displays will drive more research and capital into the diamond manufacturing market, which will drive diamond prices down.
So a major news outlet does a story on the most popular webcomic in the world, and fails to mention that said web comic also runs a massive charity for children?
I'm unsure how I feel about this. On one hand, I value my privacy, and I dislike such intrusions.
On the other hand, I value the freedom of public places, and the freedom to take pictures of whatever you wish.
It boils down to an argument I had with a friend of mine a while back. We were in a public place, and a third party took a picture of him. He became furious, and demanded that the person take no more picture, nor distribute the one he had already taken. (The third party was not known to either of us; he wasn't just some stranger)
Now, I calmly explained to my friend that, since he was in a public place, he had no reasonable expectation of privacy, and that the other person could indeed take his picture whether he liked it or not. I cited prior cases and current laws regarding such things. (I'd recently done research for a class on just that topic.)
He became even more angry. "I don't care about his rights. He has a right to be an asshole, but that doesn't mean he should be! I don't want my picture taken!"
The guy took his picture again for good measure (nice shot of an angry face), and we all walked away chuckling.
To further muddy the waters, consider that digital photography, like p2p applications and globalization, is fast-growing and un-stoppable. There's no magical way to prevent someone from taking your picture. In the end, your picture can be taken whether you like it or not, and there's nothing you can do about it.
I don't believe that people have a right to privacy, but I do believe that people have a right to protect their privacy as best they can within the confines of reasonable law.
My friend, for example, could avoid public places and close his curtains, but he could not assault photographers.
Public places are just that: public. Whether you like it or not, people can see and record your actions.
Then again, this isn't just a person: it's a government entity. Should corporations/governments have the same rights as individual people? What if this were a private company, instead of the USPS? Would that make the issue any different?
What if it was just some guy standing near USPS boxes taking pictures of people?
He basically says: "Hollywood wouldn't let me make the good Doom movie you want, and forced me to make a crappy movie that they think will sell well enough to make a profit. I'm trying real hard not to sound bitter."
The movie is called "Doom" solely to raise press awareness of what otherwise would be a non-event. Like "Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest," which had nothing at all to do with "Final Fantasy," but used the name as market leverage.
(Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest was the second worst game ever, aside from ET)
Considering the ramifications of this article, I urge any of you with spare cash/games to check out Child's Play. It's a huge charity that collects video games and systems for children in hospitals, run by the folks at Penny Arcade
I normally don't plug things, but this is too relevant to the article to ignore, and it can help out a lot of kids.
I never delete an mp3, save when replacing it with an otherwise identical mp3 of higher quality. I never delete a movie. Gaim logs every conversation I have, and before that ICQ did the same. I have every essay, paper, poem, or song I've written since my introduction to computers. I archive my email.
I used to delete games back in the DOS days, but that was only in order to install new games, and I still kept the originals.
Storage space gets cheaper and more reliable with every passing day, and the marginal costs of keeping all of those data are negligible compared to their usefulness, or moreso compared to the effort it would take to re-acquire the data.
I submit the following situations:
Idiot: "You never told me that!" Me: "Refer to the following 3 emails I sent over two years ago"
Asshole: "I never said that!" Me: "Refer to the following AIM and IRC logs dated last week"
Moron: "Hey! wassup? want2chat?" Me: AIM bot scans through my years of chatting to make inane chatter with said moron, freeing me to do other things with him none the wiser.
So yes, cheap storage made me a digital packrat, and I won't turn back.
Slashdot Mirror
Just the other day, I was planning a mountain biking excursion with my flatemate. He'd never been mountain biking before, and he somehow got it into his head that bringing his Ipod Mini would be a good idea.
I tried to convince him that he would break it via collision with rocks or maybe a tree. He claimed that it was a very durable piece of hardware.
To demonstrate, he dropped it to the carpeted floor and bopped it with his foot...
The display shattered.
I think I laughed for a good half-hour. I felt bad about it, but there's nothing you can do but laugh when something so perfectly comedically timed happens.
It wasn't all bad. He just used this as an excuse to buy the new Nano.
Bien means "well"
Bon means "good"
Ah well... Anyway, this is nothing new. I saw the Family Guy movie months ago. In fact, when I went to the IMDB to post about it, I noticed an exchange to the effect of the following:
Guy 1: Teh Family Guy movie is teh awesomes!!
Guy 2: Stupid fanboy, the movie isn't out yet. Don't review something you haven't even SEEN!
Guy 3: Umm.. The movie's been out on the net for several weeks, and we've ALL already seen it. stfu
Hell, a friend of mine's office is running a massive DVD piracy ring with their fancy new DVD duplicating machine (officially used to make demo DVDs for clients).
I don't need slashdot to tell me $movie was released early: I just assume all movies are, and I'm most usually right.
Now, what to do about this is another matter entirely...
As a semi-professional anime promoter, I can tell you that the market for anime in North America is as large as if not larger than the one in Japan. Anime is a HUGE moneymaker, and the article is fairly off-base.
Next month, in Baltimore MD, 22 000 anime fans will descend upon Otakon, paying as much as $50 a head, to celebrate anime. There are similar conventions on a regular basis all around the country and in Canada. Media Play makes a large portion of its profits from the sale of anime DVDs and manga. Waldenbooks (a mall bookseller) would likely no longer be in business were it not for its reliance on manga (Japanese comic) sales. (The market is so lucrative, they even sell untranslated Japanese comics).
As for the article, far more than 1% of anime make it to the US. Shows are being licensed at staggering rates by many many companies. Some shows are marketed to/released in the United States BEFORE they're debuted in Japan!
Fansubs are dying, but that has more to do with the fact that shows get licensed for US distribution almost immediately now, leaving little time for the semi-legal phase of the practice. (The industry turns a blind eye to fansubs released for non-licensed shows).
Even despite the shady dealings of many fansubbers, anime is wildly profitable, and its market is growing rapidly.
Your failed business model is not my problem.
If ads don't work, or aren't viable, then you have to change or die.
These ad companies seem to think that, by not viewing their advertisement, you're somehow stealing from them.
What if I don't block them, but I conciously refuse to ever click on one? Is that any different? How about if I make a point of never buying any product I see an ad for online? How about if I just ignore ads?
How is blocking them any different?
I'm not going to get a mortgage from some online bank. I'm not going to buy a car just because I saw an ad for one. No amount of advertising will change that.
I block ads because it's convenient to do so. Were this somehow impossible, no one would get any more revenue out of me than they do currently.
So basically, I don't see what the issue here is. (And don't give my any bullshit about "branding." That's a load of crap.)
So a while ago, Magic Johnson came to give a talk at the Rochester Institute of Technology, my alma mater. He spoke about AIDS and life and generally interesting things.
;^)
Now, most of you probably remember that he appeared in an episode of the Super Mario Brothers Super Show. (He was living in their medicine cabinet IIRC).
Magic opened the floor up to questions, and I happened to get the first one. It went something like this:
Schezar: Magic, how did it feel to make an appearance on the Super Mario Brothers Super Show?
Magic: What? Oh my god... I forgot what kind of school this was...
Schezar: I have this picture of you standing in their medicine cabinet...
Magic: Come up here! I'm going to sign that for you.
So now I have this picture, signed by Magic himself, on my wall. Just gotta get the captain to sign it and I'll have quite an artifact of power
"t'll look like crap and will deminish property values.
Diminished property values are a good thing for people who don't plan to move any time in the near future. Lower property values = lower property taxes. Considering that this is a commercial property, he shouldn't give a rat's arse about "property values."
"If you've got neighbors, they'll hate you for it."
These are the same neighbors who also complain that their cell phones get poor reception. NIMBY doesn't quite cut it: these people are BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything). Luckily, they can't tell you what to do, and aren't likely your customers. They're not an issue at all.
"You'd have to give me a boat load of cash to even consider it"
Lots of land owners, even residential ones, lease plots of land to cell towers. They pay you a large monthly sum for the privilage, and usually throw in free cell phones. I'd say it's quite reasonable.
As long as your employees have access to your IP, there is absolutely no way to prevent them from "stealing" it if they are determined to do so. Period.
No amount of security will make your data safe. Data is easy to move, easy to duplicate, and easy to store. During the industrial revolution, American industrial spies stole factory plans from British firms by memorizing them. Unless you know how to erase a person's brain, there will always be a hole.
Technology is making this issue ever-more pressing.
You have two options:
1) Hire only trusted people, and trust them.
2) Don't rely on IP as a business model.
Option 2 may sound stupid, but it's really the only way in the long run. Sell a service, sell a product, but don't try to sell information. If the sole thing your company provides is data, someone will endeavor to get that data for themselves, and then you'll be boned.
A business that relies on the scarcity of information it holds internally can not survive. Even if your employees are all 100% trustworthy, outsiders will still vie for your data.
It may sound pessimistic, but it's the truth.
The very concept was never spoken of at university (Rochester Institute of Technology), nor has it ever come up in work (IBM).
Those three "layers" are abstractions, nothing more. The "distribution" layer is simply a term for traffic shaping and optimization. It's very useful in eliminating excess resource use on beleagured routers. Eliminating the layer is nothing more than simplifying your backbone architecture. There is no "layer" to eliminate except the theoretical one.
It always amazes me how Cisco-certified (not making any acusations here) network techs speak an entirely different language from university-educated ones. They talk about Cisco-specific concepts like they're set in stone universally, and use Cisco jargon for common and/or basic concepts.
There are other options besides Cisco, and not every network fits within the nomenclature of Cisco Jargon. You'd do yourself an immense favour to lean more about generic architecture concepts.
I don't want to sound mean, but a Cisco cert is about as useful as an MSCE.
This is why I love Google. They approach problems in an intelligent manner.
Problem: Spammers are very obviously trying to muck with our results.
Solution: Block said spammers.
The only problem is that it's hard to notice all but the most egregious offenders.
I've love Google to add a link to the standard search results. Something like "Report Spam." If enough (100k, a million, whatever) unique people/IPs reported a site or result, it would be flagged for human review.
I would definitly want to know. That way, I could either get the best help as early as possible in order to extend my enjoyable life or, were the time left found to be short, quit my job and go on a bender.
But...
I would want strict legislation preventing corporations/insurance providers/employers from getting the results of said tests. You can't tell me with a straight face they wouldn't use such information in hiring/coverage decisions.
" To be honest, I haven't seen other cables perform as well."
In what context? Did you engage in double-blind testing? Was there a control? What do you mean by "perform?"
"We are ordered by Corporate to not use the demo on ANY other brand of protector besides 'Monster'"
The reason for that rule is simple. Any other protector will give the exact same results as the Monster one. Monster is not a cable company, it is a marketing company. They take components that are no better than standard ones (often manufactured in the same factories and then branded) and market them at a higher price-point.
Insecure and gullible people assume that the high price is justified, when in fact their products provide zero benefit.
Not to sound cruel or flamebait-ish, but you are either very naive, or else a Radio Shack/Monster shill.
Monster Cables are a giant scam designed to relieve gullible people of their money. Double-blind testing has shown time and time again that you can not physically perceive the difference.
There is a huge industry around selling useless crap to people. Monster cables will give you about the same results as rocks. (Yes, people buy those rocks and yes, they think they make their stereos sound better.)
I highly recommend that you check out the James Randi Educational Foundation, and do a site search for "audiophile" or the like.
Frankly, I don't know what scares me more: the fact that someone will honestly claim that a magic rock will make music sound better, or the fact that people will pay good money for one...
I work for IBM, and as such I work with raised floor environments on a daily basis. In fact, I'm sitting in one right now.
They're not worth it.
First, you can't easily clean under there. Dust will accumulate in quantities you can't begin to imagine, followed by dust mites, mold, and other assorted evil.
Second, raised floors don't make cable management any easier, they just hide the mess. Sure, the server room looks spotless and clean, but under that floor is a nightmarish rat's nest of cables. Wait until you have to move a cable from one location to another, pulling up floor tiles one at a time to untangle the various knots that have formed...
Third, you can't mop the floor anymore. This floor I'm sitting over hasn't been mopped in several decades. These tiles used to be white!
Fourth, the secondary function of a raised floor is to distribute cooling. Typically, you'll have a giant air conditioner that pumps cold air under the floor. You then have special tiles with holes in them under your racks, through which your servers draw in fresh cold air. If you're not going to set something like that up, you're losing one of the primary benefits of a raised floor.
I could go on and on.
Instead of making a raised floor, make a drop ceiling and run the cables in racks through there: simpler, easier, faster, and cheaper. If you're worried about the height of the ceiling, don't bother with the tiles and just run metal racks.
Trust me, you don't want a raised floor in your basement.
It's simple. A lot of specialty software is very boring, and there just isn't any interest in the OSS community in developing similar software.
Many businesses, especially real estate, banking, auto repair, fast food, and hotel management, rely on software written for windows many years ago that, for them, functions just fine.
They're not techies: computers are not their business. Their business is their business. They're not going to invest resources in developing what they already have just so it can run on "another kind of computer." WINE is the perfect solution for these applications.
Maybe, years from now, when they're running -ALL- of their software under WINE, they might realize that there's a better way.
Until then, good luck finding good programmers who are psyched to write hotel reservation management software that will interface an archaic database platform for free.
Projects like Open Office and The GIMP don't suffer from this problem largely because they're applications that Linux users need on a regular basis. When was the last time you needed to track your fast food orders?
I find it interesting that, at least in the studies I've read about this, that it affects mostly adults, and younger people are largely immune to it.
The young techno-elite grew (and are growing) up immersed in this sea of information, and are adapting to it. The older generations, having grown up in a much slower-paced environment, have difficulty adapting to the rapid change in the information channels available to them.
Personally, I love having this information available. I crave it. I'm constantly aware of the state of the world around me. When something of note happens to one of my friends, that knowledge circulates throughout our social circle almost immediately.
For anyone who's read Snow Crash, there are people referred to as "Gargoyles." They are connected to the net 100% of the time, interacting with it through wearable computing and visual overlays, streaming and feeding information as fast as possible concurrently with their physical life.
The idea might scare some people, but I find it fascinating.
I suppose it's simply that older people, not being used to this mass of information, are not ready to cope with the fact that most information is useless. Part of the ability to accept the input is the ability to filter the wheat from the chaff.
I read slashdot several times a day, but I don't read every comment or every article. I read the ones that will be useful to me in some way. I'm connected to the net most of the time, but I ignore an incoming IM if I'm busy doing something else.
People who aren't used to this environment have trouble ingoring things. You know the type. People who insist on answering the phone no matter how busy they are at that moment. People who check their email immediately whenever they reveive a "new mail" notification. These people can't cope with the available information, and are overwhelmed by it.
If I can see it, I can copy it. If I can hear it, I can record it.
At some point, no matter how high-tech the DRM gets, the data must be presented in a form humans can perceive. All the encryption in the world won't stop little Mikey from holding a microphone up to the outputs and making a non-DRM copy.
To anyone who says that such a copy will be inferior in quality, I note two points:
1) The loss only occurrs once. The non-DRM copy can then be shared digitally with no further loss of quality.
2) The original work was recorded from the air. The band actually played its song, or the actor actually did his thing. If similar technology is used to create the non-DRM copy, the loss will be negligible. (Imagine a home theatre system set up on a soundstage in someone's basement, with pickups and equipment to record its "performance")
People also seem to have this irrational fear that the old technology will suddenly disappear. My digital camcorder is pretty good, and it will still exist when the world is DRM'd. So will my mp3 player, and so will my non-DRM compliant microphones.
Furthermore, there will be a high demand for DRM-noncompliant technology. Even if it is illegal, I predict a briskly moving black market in such technology. If there's a dollar to be made, someone will make it.
As for watermarking: pay cash.
How can you forget to mention OC Remixes?
It's a massive, massive, ever-growing collection of remixes of classic video game music. Most of it is very good.
Even better, they have torrents of the entire library available for you compulsive music collectors out there. (Not entirely for altruistic reasons, it just saves them bandwidth).
I'll warn you, however, that there are about, say, infinity remixes of that song from Mega Man II. You know the one...
For anyone interested in this sort of thing, I recommend Hyperspace by Michio Kaku
One of the discussions in the book touches on objective "levels" of civilization and species.
IIRC, it can be broken down something like this:
Level 0: What humans are now.
Level 1: Mastery of the entire energy capacity of a single planet
Level 2: Mastery of the entire energy capacity of a single solar system
Level 3: etc...
He supposed that Level 2 and beyond was the point at which a civilization was effectively permanent, able to survive anything less than the total heat death of the universe.
Neat stuff.
Diamonds aren't rare. In fact, there are more jewel-grade diamonds of large size and high quality than there are people.
The diamond industry works entirely off of the perception in most people that diamonds are rare. They strictly limit the supply, and spend more money advertising than they do mining.
If you don't believe me, take a piece of diamond jewelry to several jewelers and have it appraised. They'll all quote a fairly large sum. Now try to sell it to them. They'll offer you maybe 5-10% of what they quoted.
If you shop around, you'll find that you can't actually sell a diamond for anywhere near what it's "worth."
That said, synthetic diamonds scare the living hell out of the diamond industry, since they're cheap to manufacture and indistinguishable physically from a "real" diamond (which itself isn't rare, but I digress).
These displays will drive more research and capital into the diamond manufacturing market, which will drive diamond prices down.
So a major news outlet does a story on the most popular webcomic in the world, and fails to mention that said web comic also runs a massive charity for children?
I would think it was at least worth mentioning.
I'm unsure how I feel about this. On one hand, I value my privacy, and I dislike such intrusions.
On the other hand, I value the freedom of public places, and the freedom to take pictures of whatever you wish.
It boils down to an argument I had with a friend of mine a while back. We were in a public place, and a third party took a picture of him. He became furious, and demanded that the person take no more picture, nor distribute the one he had already taken. (The third party was not known to either of us; he wasn't just some stranger)
Now, I calmly explained to my friend that, since he was in a public place, he had no reasonable expectation of privacy, and that the other person could indeed take his picture whether he liked it or not. I cited prior cases and current laws regarding such things. (I'd recently done research for a class on just that topic.)
He became even more angry. "I don't care about his rights. He has a right to be an asshole, but that doesn't mean he should be! I don't want my picture taken!"
The guy took his picture again for good measure (nice shot of an angry face), and we all walked away chuckling.
To further muddy the waters, consider that digital photography, like p2p applications and globalization, is fast-growing and un-stoppable. There's no magical way to prevent someone from taking your picture. In the end, your picture can be taken whether you like it or not, and there's nothing you can do about it.
I don't believe that people have a right to privacy, but I do believe that people have a right to protect their privacy as best they can within the confines of reasonable law.
My friend, for example, could avoid public places and close his curtains, but he could not assault photographers.
Public places are just that: public. Whether you like it or not, people can see and record your actions.
Then again, this isn't just a person: it's a government entity. Should corporations/governments have the same rights as individual people? What if this were a private company, instead of the USPS? Would that make the issue any different?
What if it was just some guy standing near USPS boxes taking pictures of people?
It's a complicated issue with no simple answers.
He basically says: "Hollywood wouldn't let me make the good Doom movie you want, and forced me to make a crappy movie that they think will sell well enough to make a profit. I'm trying real hard not to sound bitter."
The movie is called "Doom" solely to raise press awareness of what otherwise would be a non-event. Like "Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest," which had nothing at all to do with "Final Fantasy," but used the name as market leverage.
(Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest was the second worst game ever, aside from ET)
Considering the ramifications of this article, I urge any of you with spare cash/games to check out Child's Play. It's a huge charity that collects video games and systems for children in hospitals, run by the folks at Penny Arcade
I normally don't plug things, but this is too relevant to the article to ignore, and it can help out a lot of kids.
I never delete an mp3, save when replacing it with an otherwise identical mp3 of higher quality. I never delete a movie. Gaim logs every conversation I have, and before that ICQ did the same. I have every essay, paper, poem, or song I've written since my introduction to computers. I archive my email.
I used to delete games back in the DOS days, but that was only in order to install new games, and I still kept the originals.
Storage space gets cheaper and more reliable with every passing day, and the marginal costs of keeping all of those data are negligible compared to their usefulness, or moreso compared to the effort it would take to re-acquire the data.
I submit the following situations:
Idiot: "You never told me that!"
Me: "Refer to the following 3 emails I sent over two years ago"
Asshole: "I never said that!"
Me: "Refer to the following AIM and IRC logs dated last week"
Moron: "Hey! wassup? want2chat?"
Me: AIM bot scans through my years of chatting to make inane chatter with said moron, freeing me to do other things with him none the wiser.
So yes, cheap storage made me a digital packrat, and I won't turn back.