why they put the SPDIF Out on the front and the In on the back.
I second the above. I knew there was a reason I didn't buy one of these the last time around, and you just brought it back to me. I couldn't bring myself to shell out that much dough for something with such a bizarre design flaw. And it's such a small thing, I was hoping they'd fixed it by now.
they barely could get the doctor's recommendations and instructions for a biopsy over the satellite, since it only worked every few hours at best and the transfer rate was something akin (no exaggeration!) to 300Bps.
I'm surprised they can't get better access over the Iridium network (or whatever it's calling itself this week.) Don't those satellites converge on the poles?
The word is that Kamen has a stirling engine-based generator that purifies water and generates electricity (here's one recent article. More on the stirling engine can be found here.
I'm not convinced that this is an earth-shaking development, either. And it doesn't sound anything like what was hyped as Ginger, that is, if Ginger isn't the Segway... But who cares. This guy really shot his wad on the Segway-- if he comes up with something truly amazing, I'll be impressed when I see it running.
Also you won't get one or two customized channels, What the hell would 1 or 2 be for??? You can only watch one thing at once.
Many households have more than one TV.
But don't worry their not about to run out of bandwidth, I don't have the specs next to me but they still have at least 1/4 of the avalible bandwidth unused
That's because they still have miniscule adoption rates. When this service becomes popular, it'll be trickier, because cable companies aren't thrilled about devoting precious bandwidth to on-demand services rather than new channels.
But it'll get really interesting when they go from offering movies-on-demand to the next step, which is offering TV-on-demand. By this, I mean being able to watch any TV show you want off of a server in your cable company's head-end (like a Tivo, but without the requirement that you specify which shows to record.) You'll be able to pause/ff/rewind streams, and if you suddenly get the urge to watch last Wednesday's "Law and Order", it'll be streamed to your cable box).
At that point, even using multicast for some channels, it'll require a big chunk of the spectrum to satisfy the needs of a large neighborhood.
One of the sad ironies here is that poindexter was a convicted felon. (later pardoned I believe)
In testimony before Congress, Poindexter took full responsibility for arranging the arms-for-hostages-and-funding-of-Rebels transactions that made up the core of the Iran Contra Affair. He also admitted that he had withheld information and outright lied to Congress in the past, and displayed no particular remorse for his actions.
He's free today because he was granted immunity for his testimony. Prosecutors tried and convicted him anyway, but he managed to have the conviction reversed upon appeal based on this immunity agreement.
I don't wish to libel the distinguished gentelman, so I'll phrase this delicately. Many people are of the opinion that Mr. Poindexter occupies a government office today solely because he demonstrated intense loyalty to President Reagan, essentially falling on his sword and lying to protect the President from being implicated. Although other individuals involved in the Scandal testified that they had notified the President of their activities, Poindexter contradicted them all. In his testimony, Poindexter claimed that he'd initiated those actions to give the President deniability (although why the President would need deniability for actions he didn't authorize struck many as unusual.) That such an extremely disciplined military man would take it upon himself to arrange these actions without the President's approval is almost beyond belief. But with noone to counter Poindexter's testimony, the President avoided impeachment, a fact that most certainly wasn't forgotten in certain circles.
So this is the man who now occupies this extremely sensitive position, and is essentially building the most sophisticated surveillance network ever unleashed upon the people of the United States.
Just think how much fun this would have been had it been possible during the commie hunting McCarthy era? I'm wondering if the US is about to enter another one, except with "terrorists" instead of "commies".
It doesn't matter if we're about to enter such an era. The next round of government paranoia an abuse could even be decades off. But once we have systems like this in place and accepted as a legitimate tool of government, the key ingredients will be ready and waiting for the proper catalyst.
I'd think that cable companies would love something like this, where they could stream you televison instead of constantly broadcasting it. It would probably save them gazillions of dollars to only send people the programs they want to watch because they would have to spend so much less on getting enough bandwidth
Currently the cable companies have the simplest technological solution possible. They just dump a whole wad of RF signal out to all of their customers-- no routing, no really complex hardware sitting out in the field waiting to break down. Almost all of the interesting equipment is in the head-end; once they've put together they're broadcast and sent it out, all of the distribution equipment is relatively dumb; stuff like amps and frequency converters.
It works fine for now, and they're loath to change it. Imagine how much less reliable the cable system would be if there were thousands of unmanned routers/switches scattered throughout your city?
The next upgrade for cable is to start broadcasting video-on-demand over the existing system. Essentially it'll work like your cable modem; you'll be sharing a local loop with a bunch of people, but you'll get one or two customized on-demand channels. This won't save them a dime in bandwidth-- in fact, it'll probably cost them a lot to upgrade their networks to the point where there is enough bandwidth to run this kind of solution (too many houses currently on the local loops.) But they'll do it because people want those services and DSL tech could easily get there first.
Simple: Party doesn't matter in the slightest. You're gonna get screwed by *AA no matter what.
Yup. Sorry I didn't understand your post.
I worry about the naive whippersnappers who believe that the GOP win means no more DMCA/SSCA/etc. in Washington. My bet is that something like the SSCA will be law by the end of '04. There's way too much money in "copyright protection", and effectively no major interest group resisting it. The only issue to be settled is who gets the campaign contributions.
I suspect that it would be trivial to build a formating filter in perl, or another language that would convert BOLD to bold though it would require a bit more work to recognize that it really should be Bold or even that it should be BOLD.
It wouldn't necessarily be trivial to do what you describe (ASCII-to-markup). It would, however, be trivial to go the other way (markup-to-ASCII).
For instance, take your example of entering boldfaced text as BOLDFACED TEXT. You could write a script to turn those all-caps back into boldfaced text, but... what if my original text actually includes words in all-caps as well as boldfaced text? What if those Boldfaced WoRdS had embedded capitalization info? If I ran your proposed script on them, they would be translated into boldfaced text with no capitalization. Or alternatively, what if the original text used both the degrees symbol (that little "o") and the word "degrees" (as in "six degrees of separation")? How does my ASCII-to-markup script know when to use the symbol and when to use the word?
If you start with a markup text that contains all of the necessary info, and then convert to ASCII when necessary, you can reliably perform the translations without losing any of the original meaning of the text.
You're right. It was pretty much unanimous. Which means the party had little to no effect on it passing.
RailGunner: Yay, the GOP-led Congress will stomp all over the SSCA.
Me: GOP-led Congresses have shown no particular desire to get in the way of other copyright-industry-backed legislation in the past, so celebraing SSCA's death is naive and premature.
You: (Something or other, which I didn't quite understand. Could you clarify?)
Incidentally, the GOP is courting a number of Southern Democrats, in the hopes that they'll change teams. Seems to me that Fritz Hollings is an ideal candidate for buttering up... Southern, fairly conservative Senator whose major causes are copyright legislation and Congressional pork. I can't imagine why the Republicans would go out of their way to squash his initiatives, given how useful it is to keep him friendly.
You "Music Sharing" people think your doing the world a favor. I don't care how you state it....sharing music online via Kazaaa or whatever is wrong if it's copyrighted music.
If the music industry can effectively block the transfer of information, than what's to stop countries like China from doing the same. Hell, they already do a pretty good job of it-- file-sharing networks may provide some of the best ways to circumvent those restrictions.
I'm in favor of the work being done on p2p networks because I don't believe anyone should be able to put their boot on information sharing, no matter how noble their intentions.
If piracy is the only way forward, then that's too bad.
And with the GOP running the Senate, Fritz Hollings (aka Senator Disney) has no chance in hell of getting his SCCCCCCCCCCA bill passed.
Sure, you go right on believing that. Never mind that a GOP-led senate passed the DMCA and Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Pretty much unanimously, IIRC.
Only use each key on the pad once. That's why it's a one-time pad. If you use the same key more than once, you remove the randomness, and create a pattern that can help the cryptanalyst
Don't underestimate cryptanalysts ability in this area, either. The Soviet Union made the mistake of reusing some of their One Time Pads a few decades ago; as a result, Project Venona, was able to decode enormous amounts of archived (but still useful) secret traffic.
Don't think traffic that old is useful? Tell it to the spies who were still in place when Venona broke those old communications.
No matter what your party affiliation is, you have to be encouraged by the growing possibility of Republicans taking back control of the Senate.
I've got two words that should fully capture how encouraged I would be by that prospect:
John Ashcroft
The Republicans had the Senate for a few months and it brought us the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act, some of the most frightening abrogrations of basic constitutional protections, gutted antitrust enforcement, and who knows how many other goodies.
Fritz Hollings will be perfectly capable of doing damage whether the Democrats stay on top or not. As I recall, Republican Congresses didn't stop the DMCA or the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension act from sailing through.
I recall a scene in David Fincher's Se7en in which the investigators surreptitiously visit a friend at the FBI in order to obtain library records. The scene sticks out in my mind because I remember how much trouble they had to go to: even the FBI was scared to admit that they had access to such information, and as a result the whole process is conducted on the sly-- the FBI man is clearly terrified that someone'll find out what he's up to.
That movie came out only a few years ago, and yet the scene would probably be meaningless today. It's funny how things change, and not necessarily for the better.
If companies just want to monitor your bandwidth use, there are simpler solutions that don't require them to shell out $35/employee/year.
The whole point of this system is not to determine whether employees are using lots of IM. It's to insure that employees aren't using IM services for "inappropriate" purposes such as cybersex, or to give away sensitive information. (Or both, as the case my be.)
Incidentally, if I had my employees using IM for intra-company communications I would damn well want them encrypting their communications. Do you really want company data going through some untrusted external server? If I didn't want my employees using IM at all, I'd just block the ports.
When you get down to the nitty-gritty, what is so revolutionary about GNU or Linux. GNU wasn't meant to be revolutionary, just an alternative to propetary systems.
Alternatives are great. As long as they're not specifically designed to wipe out the competition and become the only alternative.
All OSS/FS has done is reimplement everything else and MS's "embrace and extend". Very little "innovations" have come from OSS/FS.
There are a number of innovative OSS projects. If your view of the OSS world begins and ends at GNU/Linux, you're obviously not going to see them.
The faster projects like Linux commodotize existing needs like OSes and basic word-processing, the more cycles there will be for more innovative work-- both in proprietary companies and in the OSS world.
For example, one could easily accuse Adobe of the exact same theft of concept
Every company rips of other ideas to some extent. What makes Microsoft unique is 1) their ability to leverage their monopoly in the process, 2) the general lack of new ideas, which belies 3) their constant claims of "innovation" (as a means to get customers and as a means to justify their unhindered existence.)
Ahhh, and then we move to the PDF format, which ironically was an application meant to provide an alternative to rich text Word documents. Not exactly any innovation there either, in fact, far more bloated and complicated than even Word could ever hope to be.
PDF isn't a bloated RTF document; it's far more than that whether or not you think it's an original idea. PDF allows you to specify the precise layout of a document, down to the locations of the letters and the outline version of the graphics. Try submitting a completed publication to a printers shop in RTF format and when you get the unpredictable-looking results you'll understand why PDF is useful.
Even if you're right, those businesses have NO RIGHT to use PUBLIC SPECTRUM to broadcast their shit, if they choose to merge.
Or, at very least, they can't expect the government to prevent other people from interfering with their signals. (How much does a Ku-band satellite uplink cost these days-- note that it doesn't have to work very well, since I only intend on broadcasting noise.)
I have thought a lot about it.. the US has everything to gain from having a US based software company in a GLOBAL monopoly situation. The GNP is high as ever , like printing money into other countries really. US government isn't going to do anything to stop that , even at the cost of small US business.
If the small businesses being harmed are the real innovators in the software world, this decision could do the US a lot more harm than good.
Think of the big American carmakers during the 60s and 70s. Their monopolies slowed the pace of innovation in the US and made them complacent. This probably seemed perfectly acceptable at the time-- after all, the whole world was buying our cars, right? Until, of course, the Japanese took advantage out our complacency and nearly put us out of the business. US carmakers were forced to literally invent the kind of innovative, small companies they'd put out of business (like Saturn).
Oh bullshit. Two near monopolies are better than one complete monopoly.
I wasn't aware that cable TV companies were allowed to expand into satellite TV. As long as that's the case, your scenario is impossible.
Incidentally, you only get a choice if you're fortunate enough to live in an area with cable TV. Explain to the rest of the country how lucky they are to get the "choice" of a single satellite TV provider.
Your point is a assinine as wanting only Microsoft to produce software. Where would that leave us?
Slashdot Mirror
I second the above. I knew there was a reason I didn't buy one of these the last time around, and you just brought it back to me. I couldn't bring myself to shell out that much dough for something with such a bizarre design flaw. And it's such a small thing, I was hoping they'd fixed it by now.
I'm surprised they can't get better access over the Iridium network (or whatever it's calling itself this week.) Don't those satellites converge on the poles?
I'm not convinced that this is an earth-shaking development, either. And it doesn't sound anything like what was hyped as Ginger, that is, if Ginger isn't the Segway... But who cares. This guy really shot his wad on the Segway-- if he comes up with something truly amazing, I'll be impressed when I see it running.
Many households have more than one TV.
But don't worry their not about to run out of bandwidth, I don't have the specs next to me but they still have at least 1/4 of the avalible bandwidth unused
That's because they still have miniscule adoption rates. When this service becomes popular, it'll be trickier, because cable companies aren't thrilled about devoting precious bandwidth to on-demand services rather than new channels.
But it'll get really interesting when they go from offering movies-on-demand to the next step, which is offering TV-on-demand. By this, I mean being able to watch any TV show you want off of a server in your cable company's head-end (like a Tivo, but without the requirement that you specify which shows to record.) You'll be able to pause/ff/rewind streams, and if you suddenly get the urge to watch last Wednesday's "Law and Order", it'll be streamed to your cable box).
At that point, even using multicast for some channels, it'll require a big chunk of the spectrum to satisfy the needs of a large neighborhood.
In testimony before Congress, Poindexter took full responsibility for arranging the arms-for-hostages-and-funding-of-Rebels transactions that made up the core of the Iran Contra Affair. He also admitted that he had withheld information and outright lied to Congress in the past, and displayed no particular remorse for his actions.
He's free today because he was granted immunity for his testimony. Prosecutors tried and convicted him anyway, but he managed to have the conviction reversed upon appeal based on this immunity agreement.
I don't wish to libel the distinguished gentelman, so I'll phrase this delicately. Many people are of the opinion that Mr. Poindexter occupies a government office today solely because he demonstrated intense loyalty to President Reagan, essentially falling on his sword and lying to protect the President from being implicated. Although other individuals involved in the Scandal testified that they had notified the President of their activities, Poindexter contradicted them all. In his testimony, Poindexter claimed that he'd initiated those actions to give the President deniability (although why the President would need deniability for actions he didn't authorize struck many as unusual.) That such an extremely disciplined military man would take it upon himself to arrange these actions without the President's approval is almost beyond belief. But with noone to counter Poindexter's testimony, the President avoided impeachment, a fact that most certainly wasn't forgotten in certain circles.
So this is the man who now occupies this extremely sensitive position, and is essentially building the most sophisticated surveillance network ever unleashed upon the people of the United States.
It doesn't matter if we're about to enter such an era. The next round of government paranoia an abuse could even be decades off. But once we have systems like this in place and accepted as a legitimate tool of government, the key ingredients will be ready and waiting for the proper catalyst.
Currently the cable companies have the simplest technological solution possible. They just dump a whole wad of RF signal out to all of their customers-- no routing, no really complex hardware sitting out in the field waiting to break down. Almost all of the interesting equipment is in the head-end; once they've put together they're broadcast and sent it out, all of the distribution equipment is relatively dumb; stuff like amps and frequency converters.
It works fine for now, and they're loath to change it. Imagine how much less reliable the cable system would be if there were thousands of unmanned routers/switches scattered throughout your city?
The next upgrade for cable is to start broadcasting video-on-demand over the existing system. Essentially it'll work like your cable modem; you'll be sharing a local loop with a bunch of people, but you'll get one or two customized on-demand channels. This won't save them a dime in bandwidth-- in fact, it'll probably cost them a lot to upgrade their networks to the point where there is enough bandwidth to run this kind of solution (too many houses currently on the local loops.) But they'll do it because people want those services and DSL tech could easily get there first.
Yup. Sorry I didn't understand your post.
I worry about the naive whippersnappers who believe that the GOP win means no more DMCA/SSCA/etc. in Washington. My bet is that something like the SSCA will be law by the end of '04. There's way too much money in "copyright protection", and effectively no major interest group resisting it. The only issue to be settled is who gets the campaign contributions.
It wouldn't necessarily be trivial to do what you describe (ASCII-to-markup). It would, however, be trivial to go the other way (markup-to-ASCII).
For instance, take your example of entering boldfaced text as BOLDFACED TEXT. You could write a script to turn those all-caps back into boldfaced text, but... what if my original text actually includes words in all-caps as well as boldfaced text? What if those Boldfaced WoRdS had embedded capitalization info? If I ran your proposed script on them, they would be translated into boldfaced text with no capitalization. Or alternatively, what if the original text used both the degrees symbol (that little "o") and the word "degrees" (as in "six degrees of separation")? How does my ASCII-to-markup script know when to use the symbol and when to use the word?
If you start with a markup text that contains all of the necessary info, and then convert to ASCII when necessary, you can reliably perform the translations without losing any of the original meaning of the text.
RailGunner: Yay, the GOP-led Congress will stomp all over the SSCA.
Me: GOP-led Congresses have shown no particular desire to get in the way of other copyright-industry-backed legislation in the past, so celebraing SSCA's death is naive and premature.
You: (Something or other, which I didn't quite understand. Could you clarify?)
Incidentally, the GOP is courting a number of Southern Democrats, in the hopes that they'll change teams. Seems to me that Fritz Hollings is an ideal candidate for buttering up... Southern, fairly conservative Senator whose major causes are copyright legislation and Congressional pork. I can't imagine why the Republicans would go out of their way to squash his initiatives, given how useful it is to keep him friendly.
If the music industry can effectively block the transfer of information, than what's to stop countries like China from doing the same. Hell, they already do a pretty good job of it-- file-sharing networks may provide some of the best ways to circumvent those restrictions.
I'm in favor of the work being done on p2p networks because I don't believe anyone should be able to put their boot on information sharing, no matter how noble their intentions.
If piracy is the only way forward, then that's too bad.
Sure, you go right on believing that. Never mind that a GOP-led senate passed the DMCA and Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Pretty much unanimously, IIRC.
Don't underestimate cryptanalysts ability in this area, either. The Soviet Union made the mistake of reusing some of their One Time Pads a few decades ago; as a result, Project Venona, was able to decode enormous amounts of archived (but still useful) secret traffic.
Don't think traffic that old is useful? Tell it to the spies who were still in place when Venona broke those old communications.
I also note that Sprint has introduced new, lower pricing plans without bothering to modify my existing plan. Thanks, Sprint.
I've got two words that should fully capture how encouraged I would be by that prospect:
John Ashcroft
The Republicans had the Senate for a few months and it brought us the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act, some of the most frightening abrogrations of basic constitutional protections, gutted antitrust enforcement, and who knows how many other goodies.
Fritz Hollings will be perfectly capable of doing damage whether the Democrats stay on top or not. As I recall, Republican Congresses didn't stop the DMCA or the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension act from sailing through.
That movie came out only a few years ago, and yet the scene would probably be meaningless today. It's funny how things change, and not necessarily for the better.
The whole point of this system is not to determine whether employees are using lots of IM. It's to insure that employees aren't using IM services for "inappropriate" purposes such as cybersex, or to give away sensitive information. (Or both, as the case my be.)
Incidentally, if I had my employees using IM for intra-company communications I would damn well want them encrypting their communications. Do you really want company data going through some untrusted external server? If I didn't want my employees using IM at all, I'd just block the ports.
Alternatives are great. As long as they're not specifically designed to wipe out the competition and become the only alternative.
All OSS/FS has done is reimplement everything else and MS's "embrace and extend". Very little "innovations" have come from OSS/FS.
There are a number of innovative OSS projects. If your view of the OSS world begins and ends at GNU/Linux, you're obviously not going to see them.
The faster projects like Linux commodotize existing needs like OSes and basic word-processing, the more cycles there will be for more innovative work-- both in proprietary companies and in the OSS world.
Every company rips of other ideas to some extent. What makes Microsoft unique is 1) their ability to leverage their monopoly in the process, 2) the general lack of new ideas, which belies 3) their constant claims of "innovation" (as a means to get customers and as a means to justify their unhindered existence.)
Ahhh, and then we move to the PDF format, which ironically was an application meant to provide an alternative to rich text Word documents. Not exactly any innovation there either, in fact, far more bloated and complicated than even Word could ever hope to be.
PDF isn't a bloated RTF document; it's far more than that whether or not you think it's an original idea. PDF allows you to specify the precise layout of a document, down to the locations of the letters and the outline version of the graphics. Try submitting a completed publication to a printers shop in RTF format and when you get the unpredictable-looking results you'll understand why PDF is useful.
And yet you still can't get reception through anything sturdier than a paper bag, let alone an apartment building.
Or, at very least, they can't expect the government to prevent other people from interfering with their signals. (How much does a Ku-band satellite uplink cost these days-- note that it doesn't have to work very well, since I only intend on broadcasting noise.)
If the small businesses being harmed are the real innovators in the software world, this decision could do the US a lot more harm than good.
Think of the big American carmakers during the 60s and 70s. Their monopolies slowed the pace of innovation in the US and made them complacent. This probably seemed perfectly acceptable at the time-- after all, the whole world was buying our cars, right? Until, of course, the Japanese took advantage out our complacency and nearly put us out of the business. US carmakers were forced to literally invent the kind of innovative, small companies they'd put out of business (like Saturn).
Oops, I meant to post this response to someone else, but got confused along the way. Please just ignore...
I wasn't aware that cable TV companies were allowed to expand into satellite TV. As long as that's the case, your scenario is impossible.
Incidentally, you only get a choice if you're fortunate enough to live in an area with cable TV. Explain to the rest of the country how lucky they are to get the "choice" of a single satellite TV provider.
Your point is a assinine as wanting only Microsoft to produce software. Where would that leave us?
What??
Well, sure, but maybe the question is why should you let them do that?