And it would probably be subject to termination or revocation at any time just like the APSL. Kind of a raw deal for anybody who downloaded or contributed to it, isn't it?
Sounds a little like the Microsoft Hailstorm privacy policy: This policy guarantees you absolute privacy. At least until we decide to change it, which we can do at any time.
Re:Take this with a grain of salt.
on
Pentium IV study
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I think his point was that Intel's using some really misleading marketing, especially when they list their power requirements. That's all. Hopefully your average vendor will be able to read between the lines, and will adequately cool their boxes, because they realize that with this chip an inadequately cooled box == money wasted.
Athlon, on the other hand, simply stated their power requirements straight out, and (one assumes) published the necessary cooling requirements. To sum up, the only outcome of this that I can see is either a) Poorly cooled Intel boxes running abnormally slow or b) Improperly cooled Athlon boxes bursting into flames or c) all of the above. But I'm willing to bet you see a lot more of (a) than (b) and (c).
the problem with privacy is that many people are so arrogant that they believe they matter
That's an amazingly old-fashioned view of things. Of course you don't matter-- to Michael Eisner. But you do matter just a little bit to everybody you do business with, and the government when they want money/think you might be a criminal. The wonderful thing about these databases is that the information just accumulates, being completely unimportant, until you go to apply for a job, or a mortgage.
Then your own unimportance bites you on the ass. The bank simply calls up the last seven+ years of your life, runs it through an algorithm they don't understand, and makes a decision that affects your whole life. You're absolutely right that these people could probably give a shit about you personally, which is actually much worse for you.
Throw the FBI into the mix, and you've got the potential for mass screenings of individuals that might be a potential crime-risk. Apply for too many credit cards this month or buy too much beer? If you're asking how this stuff could possibly matter, then ask the FBI, they're the ones paying millions for it.
What would be the simple cost of upgrading all simple household appliances to run a heavyweight Operating System such as Windows or Linux, and why would there be any benefits to doing this?
Let's say your microwave is going to support 8000 different ways to cook, which it will display on an oversize 4"x6" LCD display along with recipes and potentially the status of your washing machine and dishwasher (admittedly, this is absurd, but not terribly far from what appliance manufacturers might want.) At the same time, your TV and fridge are going to be running their own software.
This is a nightmare for manufacturers and developers. You might have a half dozen different chipsets, each potentially running a different OS with slightly different networking code and some/all of the code written in assembler. All of your software is different, and in two years everything might have to be redeveloped.
Or... You could write all of your software for Linux/WinCE. Chip prices are always dropping, so it's not inconceivable that even the dumbest devices in your house will have relatively powerful chips in them (which will at very least be used to drive fancier interfaces.) Then you can reuse a lot of the code between your devices, and you're relatively secure than Linux code is going to be pretty portable. This saves you a ton of money as you can reuse your code and hire from a much larger pool of developers. You've also got tried and true file systems, networking and multitasking.
I'm not saying that any of this is necessary, except perhaps in your TV and cable boxes. But even if devices don't get that sophisticated, I believe that with the availability of sophisticated chips, manufacturers will eventually realize that they can save money by consolidating their development and using common operating systems.
Linux is competing against other closed source embedded systems, most of which most of you have never heard of. Why? Because they go along and they work fine.
Yes, but it's fairly likely that the next generation of embedded devices are going to have new capabilities that current machines don't have to think about. Like networking, storage, multitasking, for instance. Some of the embedded systems you're talking about may have provisions to do these things in current or future versions, but those features can hardly be considered as robust and reliable as the rest of the system (how well have they been tested in the real world?)
A lot of developers don't necessarily like to deal with the requirements of writing for these dedicated systems, they just do it because the systems are optimal for the hardware they're using. Future systems are going to be running on much more capable hardware than the existing stuff, and as the current embedded OSen become more sophisticated to take advantage of this, they risk becoming at least as unreliable as WinCE or Linux might be.
Finally, the applications on these devices are likely to become much more complicated. It makes sense to use a more robust OS with a core of experienced developers and development software, if you're looking at writing big complex apps for a bunch of different embedded devices. Not to mention the advantages inherent in being able to reuse code...
... that little project working its way through MS that would require every media player and audio component to be licensed and authorized by MS in order to function with Windows.
Lazy people who just want to use what is built-in might want to start using the Windows Audio format, but there's not much preventing you from keeping your MP3 around.
Is copy-protection automatically applied to Windows Audio files created using the built-in encoder? Or is MS simply trying to get people hooked on WinAudio for CD ripping and sharing, so they can lock out 'unauthorized' ripped content later down the road?
It would be pertinent to point out that MP3 is a pretty lousy format altogether. Fraunhofer et al. have already come up with better things (such as AAC), but having learned their 'lesson' from MP3s, they're keeping the encoder source pretty tight (except for the near-useless reference implementation.) It's a shame that patents and copyright law allow companies to sit on inventions to keep them away from the public (quite the opposite of the intent of these laws.) But that's another subject.
My question is: why do people generally rip CDs in the first place? Some do it to transfer them onto portable devices, although integrated encoding software is generally bundled with the devices. But most people rip CDs to share with their friends. If WinMedia files won't play on your friends' machines, then the software is useless to you. Essentially MS isn't making users lives too much worse than they are now-- they simply aren't improving things.
Please correct me if I'm wrong about any of this stuff, my knowledge comes from a handful of newspaper articles:
My understanding of the new bankruptcy reforms are that they force people away from Chapter 7 and into Chapter 11. Chapter 7 lets you keep essential items, like your house and your car (so you can continue to work), while your paycheck is heavily garnished to pay back your creditors. Things like child-support payments are considered before the repayments, however.
Chapter 11 takes all of your assets, sells them off (at the usual gov't rock-bottom rates, I'm sure) and uses the proceeds to give your creditors instant gratification. If you have no place to live, and have no car (ie, you're probably going to have a hard time holding down a job) then you're outa luck. There was also the issue of child-support payments being considered after credit card bills. I'm not sure if that made it into the final legislation, but I remember it was a sticking point in Congress. It's not surprising that this was in the bill, as large portions of it were apparently drafted by MBNA and other credit card companies.
The real question is, how much of the responsibility do the credit-card companies bear for continuing to offer thousands of dollars in credit to people who are already way in debt? Should they be allowed to peddle enormously risky credit lines, then use the gov't as an enormous no-holds-barred collection agent? I was always under the impression that the justification for the huge (20%+) interest rates charged by credit card companies was partly to cover their risk in offering unsecured credit to strangers-- it seems that those huge charges weren't enough of an insurance plan for them (although their profits have been enormous in the past), and they'd rather turn that money into pure profit.
A friend of mine is several thousands of dollars in debt (a significant portion of his yearly income) from student credit cards. This is basically his fault. But Providian/CapitalOne et al. continue to offer him enormous credit lines. Fortunately he's learned his lesson and is paying the bills down somewhat ahead of the interest accumulating. A lot of people aren't as lucky, and are in serious danger of losing everything they have because of the credit cards they used in a moment of stupidity or weakness.
Nor do I see this as "wrong", as it's just an experiment.
It's wrong if he performs the experiment repeatedly (look, we did it again!) The only possible outcome of this experiment is the inevitable death of both animals. It's worth doing once or twice, but without the ability to reattach the spine, repeating it is pretty much just a form of torture.
This, if left unchecked, will mean the absolute end of the internet as a way to get all sides of the issues, all means of research and all ability to have honest and open discussion of any topic.
No, you're thinking very narrowly. What this will mean is the absolute end of the current single-site model of news/content distribution, and that's probably a good thing. It's entirely too expensive and difficult to maintain high-traffic sites, not to mention constant wrangling with the DMCA (think Slashdot over the past few months.) If this sort of attack becomes common, over the next decade or so content will simply move to distributed storage networks like Freenet, as primitive as it is at the moment.
With so many countries and people involved, you can't rely on laws or goodwill for anything on the net. This is both its greatest advantage and its biggest failing.
If the licenses at issue are put up for competitive bids, Northpoint executives say they will walk away from the market, taking with them the patents that they say protect the only known technology for offering a new alternative to subscription television.
If the licenses at issue are put up for competitive bids, Northpoint executives say they will walk away from the market, taking with them the patents that they say protect the only known technology for offering a new alternative to subscription television.
So these guys want the gov't to give them the frequencies (for the greater good of mankind, of course), and if that doesn't come to pass, Northpoint'll just take its ball and go home. I'm curious what exactly in these patents is so valuable (and who do they 'protect' the technology from, exactly?)
I think they plan on sending people to mars, that's why they are surveying... or atleast I hope they plan on it:)
There's an interesting article in this month's Discover Magazine on the psychological stresses that come about when you stick a bunch of people in a tiny capsule for a year. Looks like this is another of the difficulties we're going to have to overcome before anything happens.
In the days of yore, I remember a very popular program on our mainframe being an ASCII-art representation of a playboy centerfold. This was before cheap scanners and BMP->ASCII conversion programs, so I imagine the author was somewhat talented. Printed out very well on a DECWriter, as I recall.
But back on tangent, one might suppose that there's a little too much wireless hype going on right now. I have an iPaq with Ricochet, which is about as good as far as bandwidth and display, and I certainly wouldn't spend a lot of time squinting at porn on it.
Apple is not a friend, Apple is a bunch of corporate pirates as bad as Sun and worse than Microsoft.
It's pretty stupid to make assertions about a corporation as though it were a person. Corporations are loose groups with constantly changing membership, with a few exceptions (such as Microsoft, which has had roughly the same hands on the tiller since it began.)
This is not to say that Apple has become collection of saints, or that they won't change back to being the same unpleasant types they were in the past the second it will make them a dollar. But at the moment they're doing some of the right things, and I think they deserve some (at least moral) support for not being as ruthless as Mr. Gates. To snipe at them for something an idiot ex-CEO decided to do in 1990 is counterproductive.
Oh, that and the fact that Oxford has stated that they'll be making the results of the research available to anyone who wants it.
As a UD representative, perhaps you could clear this statement up for us. Does this mean that Oxford will be placing any patents/intellectual property recovered into the public domain? As pointed out in other posts, making results available has nothing to do with giving away the rights to produce/sell/distribute any treatments that come from this project.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Tivo's business model anticipates a) their competitors eventually calling it quits and possibly b) being allowed into cable companies' head-ends as a subscription service. At that point, we'll see a lot more onscreen advertising, restrictions, etc. Microsoft may feel it's worth keeping UltimateTV alive (although I don't see it taking off), but I don't see them doing more than delaying Tivo's plans [for world domination?]
If you and 1,000 of your closest tivo-using friends (see below on the tivo forums) were to threaten to leave them due to a similar complaint
Yes, but we all love our guide information too much to let go of it now... Too bad nobody else operates a compatible server to deliver this info. I'm sure there are DMCA issues, though.
Autocorrection jump-back changes (when you hit play after fast-forwarding, the TiVo jumps back a bit to autocorrect for human reactions; personally I'm totally comfortable with the way it is now and am dreading the changes)
They seem to have increased the jump-back interval. I always felt it was too long to begin with. Now it's ridiculous. I guess more old people are starting to buy Tivos?
I am also less than thrilled with the new, smaller typefaces for the onscreen guide. Doesn't seem like a whole lot more information is being displayed, so I'm not sure why it needs to be so much smaller. Small type on a TV is never a very good idea.
I don't see anything to support this statement in the article. Maybe I missed it.
The article said that at least one version of the code said specifically 'this code is not to be used for commercial purposes.' He was pretty explicit about this, as it seemed to be the justification for his ire. You're right, I haven't seen the license. I'm just taking the guy at his word.
But then again I am sure you already "sign" away all your rights (and your soul) in the Windows EULA (sp?).
That depends on the damage. I'm not sure how the EULA would stand up if a bunch of major corporations suffered multi-million dollar losses because of MS's negligence. Being that they essentially have a monopoly on the business OS market, one might be able to argue that the EULA should not apply. Or perhaps somebody not bound by the EULA will find grounds to sue.
If you make something,and then give it away. Well then you gave it away. IF someone sees a way that they can make money from it, well then how is that any of your concern?
Intellectual property is often not 'given' to anybody. In most cases, the author hangs onto ownership of the work, and licenses or grants rights to others.
Instead of giving his work away, this guy was giving away the rights to use it. His license specifically stated what sorts of uses it could be put to, and Ariston's use was a violation of that license. Corporations such as Ariston rely on this protection to control the uses of their product; there's no reason they should get protection and this guy shouldn't, just because he's willing to charge his end users less (a postcard, or $10 for example.)
Not that this would have been possible given the combination of Apple's pigheadedness and Be's non-love for Apple.
But it would have been the best thing for both parties. Rather than OSX, which is a minimally worked-over NextStep, which already throws the existing apps halfway out the door, they should have gone all the way to put an efficient, advanced OS in a mainstream platform.
Yes, there are a million arguments against it. But I remember when I first saw BeOS at MacWorld, they were already running a fast Mac emulator (this was January '96 or 7, I believe.) With a lot of work, I'd bet those folks could have done a better OSX than Apple has with NextStep.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds a little like the Microsoft Hailstorm privacy policy: This policy guarantees you absolute privacy. At least until we decide to change it, which we can do at any time.
Athlon, on the other hand, simply stated their power requirements straight out, and (one assumes) published the necessary cooling requirements. To sum up, the only outcome of this that I can see is either a) Poorly cooled Intel boxes running abnormally slow or b) Improperly cooled Athlon boxes bursting into flames or c) all of the above. But I'm willing to bet you see a lot more of (a) than (b) and (c).
That's an amazingly old-fashioned view of things. Of course you don't matter-- to Michael Eisner. But you do matter just a little bit to everybody you do business with, and the government when they want money/think you might be a criminal. The wonderful thing about these databases is that the information just accumulates, being completely unimportant, until you go to apply for a job, or a mortgage.
Then your own unimportance bites you on the ass. The bank simply calls up the last seven+ years of your life, runs it through an algorithm they don't understand, and makes a decision that affects your whole life. You're absolutely right that these people could probably give a shit about you personally, which is actually much worse for you.
Throw the FBI into the mix, and you've got the potential for mass screenings of individuals that might be a potential crime-risk. Apply for too many credit cards this month or buy too much beer? If you're asking how this stuff could possibly matter, then ask the FBI, they're the ones paying millions for it.
Let's say your microwave is going to support 8000 different ways to cook, which it will display on an oversize 4"x6" LCD display along with recipes and potentially the status of your washing machine and dishwasher (admittedly, this is absurd, but not terribly far from what appliance manufacturers might want.) At the same time, your TV and fridge are going to be running their own software.
This is a nightmare for manufacturers and developers. You might have a half dozen different chipsets, each potentially running a different OS with slightly different networking code and some/all of the code written in assembler. All of your software is different, and in two years everything might have to be redeveloped.
Or... You could write all of your software for Linux/WinCE. Chip prices are always dropping, so it's not inconceivable that even the dumbest devices in your house will have relatively powerful chips in them (which will at very least be used to drive fancier interfaces.) Then you can reuse a lot of the code between your devices, and you're relatively secure than Linux code is going to be pretty portable. This saves you a ton of money as you can reuse your code and hire from a much larger pool of developers. You've also got tried and true file systems, networking and multitasking.
I'm not saying that any of this is necessary, except perhaps in your TV and cable boxes. But even if devices don't get that sophisticated, I believe that with the availability of sophisticated chips, manufacturers will eventually realize that they can save money by consolidating their development and using common operating systems.
Yes, but it's fairly likely that the next generation of embedded devices are going to have new capabilities that current machines don't have to think about. Like networking, storage, multitasking, for instance. Some of the embedded systems you're talking about may have provisions to do these things in current or future versions, but those features can hardly be considered as robust and reliable as the rest of the system (how well have they been tested in the real world?)
A lot of developers don't necessarily like to deal with the requirements of writing for these dedicated systems, they just do it because the systems are optimal for the hardware they're using. Future systems are going to be running on much more capable hardware than the existing stuff, and as the current embedded OSen become more sophisticated to take advantage of this, they risk becoming at least as unreliable as WinCE or Linux might be.
Finally, the applications on these devices are likely to become much more complicated. It makes sense to use a more robust OS with a core of experienced developers and development software, if you're looking at writing big complex apps for a bunch of different embedded devices. Not to mention the advantages inherent in being able to reuse code...
... that little project working its way through MS that would require every media player and audio component to be licensed and authorized by MS in order to function with Windows.
Is copy-protection automatically applied to Windows Audio files created using the built-in encoder? Or is MS simply trying to get people hooked on WinAudio for CD ripping and sharing, so they can lock out 'unauthorized' ripped content later down the road?
My question is: why do people generally rip CDs in the first place? Some do it to transfer them onto portable devices, although integrated encoding software is generally bundled with the devices. But most people rip CDs to share with their friends. If WinMedia files won't play on your friends' machines, then the software is useless to you. Essentially MS isn't making users lives too much worse than they are now-- they simply aren't improving things.
My understanding of the new bankruptcy reforms are that they force people away from Chapter 7 and into Chapter 11. Chapter 7 lets you keep essential items, like your house and your car (so you can continue to work), while your paycheck is heavily garnished to pay back your creditors. Things like child-support payments are considered before the repayments, however.
Chapter 11 takes all of your assets, sells them off (at the usual gov't rock-bottom rates, I'm sure) and uses the proceeds to give your creditors instant gratification. If you have no place to live, and have no car (ie, you're probably going to have a hard time holding down a job) then you're outa luck. There was also the issue of child-support payments being considered after credit card bills. I'm not sure if that made it into the final legislation, but I remember it was a sticking point in Congress. It's not surprising that this was in the bill, as large portions of it were apparently drafted by MBNA and other credit card companies.
The real question is, how much of the responsibility do the credit-card companies bear for continuing to offer thousands of dollars in credit to people who are already way in debt? Should they be allowed to peddle enormously risky credit lines, then use the gov't as an enormous no-holds-barred collection agent? I was always under the impression that the justification for the huge (20%+) interest rates charged by credit card companies was partly to cover their risk in offering unsecured credit to strangers-- it seems that those huge charges weren't enough of an insurance plan for them (although their profits have been enormous in the past), and they'd rather turn that money into pure profit.
A friend of mine is several thousands of dollars in debt (a significant portion of his yearly income) from student credit cards. This is basically his fault. But Providian/CapitalOne et al. continue to offer him enormous credit lines. Fortunately he's learned his lesson and is paying the bills down somewhat ahead of the interest accumulating. A lot of people aren't as lucky, and are in serious danger of losing everything they have because of the credit cards they used in a moment of stupidity or weakness.
It's wrong if he performs the experiment repeatedly (look, we did it again!) The only possible outcome of this experiment is the inevitable death of both animals. It's worth doing once or twice, but without the ability to reattach the spine, repeating it is pretty much just a form of torture.
No, you're thinking very narrowly. What this will mean is the absolute end of the current single-site model of news/content distribution, and that's probably a good thing. It's entirely too expensive and difficult to maintain high-traffic sites, not to mention constant wrangling with the DMCA (think Slashdot over the past few months.) If this sort of attack becomes common, over the next decade or so content will simply move to distributed storage networks like Freenet, as primitive as it is at the moment.
With so many countries and people involved, you can't rely on laws or goodwill for anything on the net. This is both its greatest advantage and its biggest failing.
If the licenses at issue are put up for competitive bids, Northpoint executives say they will walk away from the market, taking with them the patents that they say protect the only known technology for offering a new alternative to subscription television.
If the licenses at issue are put up for competitive bids, Northpoint executives say they will walk away from the market, taking with them the patents that they say protect the only known technology for offering a new alternative to subscription television.
So these guys want the gov't to give them the frequencies (for the greater good of mankind, of course), and if that doesn't come to pass, Northpoint'll just take its ball and go home. I'm curious what exactly in these patents is so valuable (and who do they 'protect' the technology from, exactly?)
There's an interesting article in this month's Discover Magazine on the psychological stresses that come about when you stick a bunch of people in a tiny capsule for a year. Looks like this is another of the difficulties we're going to have to overcome before anything happens.
Sure, but we are one of the only species that can have sex at any point in the female's menstrual cycle (except that really yecchy part.)
But back on tangent, one might suppose that there's a little too much wireless hype going on right now. I have an iPaq with Ricochet, which is about as good as far as bandwidth and display, and I certainly wouldn't spend a lot of time squinting at porn on it.
It's pretty stupid to make assertions about a corporation as though it were a person. Corporations are loose groups with constantly changing membership, with a few exceptions (such as Microsoft, which has had roughly the same hands on the tiller since it began.)
This is not to say that Apple has become collection of saints, or that they won't change back to being the same unpleasant types they were in the past the second it will make them a dollar. But at the moment they're doing some of the right things, and I think they deserve some (at least moral) support for not being as ruthless as Mr. Gates. To snipe at them for something an idiot ex-CEO decided to do in 1990 is counterproductive.
As a UD representative, perhaps you could clear this statement up for us. Does this mean that Oxford will be placing any patents/intellectual property recovered into the public domain? As pointed out in other posts, making results available has nothing to do with giving away the rights to produce/sell/distribute any treatments that come from this project.
So... The FAQ essentially says that they have no business model. They must be either very nice or very very stupid.
If you and 1,000 of your closest tivo-using friends (see below on the tivo forums) were to threaten to leave them due to a similar complaint
Yes, but we all love our guide information too much to let go of it now... Too bad nobody else operates a compatible server to deliver this info. I'm sure there are DMCA issues, though.
They seem to have increased the jump-back interval. I always felt it was too long to begin with. Now it's ridiculous. I guess more old people are starting to buy Tivos?
I am also less than thrilled with the new, smaller typefaces for the onscreen guide. Doesn't seem like a whole lot more information is being displayed, so I'm not sure why it needs to be so much smaller. Small type on a TV is never a very good idea.
The article said that at least one version of the code said specifically 'this code is not to be used for commercial purposes.' He was pretty explicit about this, as it seemed to be the justification for his ire. You're right, I haven't seen the license. I'm just taking the guy at his word.
That depends on the damage. I'm not sure how the EULA would stand up if a bunch of major corporations suffered multi-million dollar losses because of MS's negligence. Being that they essentially have a monopoly on the business OS market, one might be able to argue that the EULA should not apply. Or perhaps somebody not bound by the EULA will find grounds to sue.
Intellectual property is often not 'given' to anybody. In most cases, the author hangs onto ownership of the work, and licenses or grants rights to others.
Instead of giving his work away, this guy was giving away the rights to use it. His license specifically stated what sorts of uses it could be put to, and Ariston's use was a violation of that license. Corporations such as Ariston rely on this protection to control the uses of their product; there's no reason they should get protection and this guy shouldn't, just because he's willing to charge his end users less (a postcard, or $10 for example.)
But it would have been the best thing for both parties. Rather than OSX, which is a minimally worked-over NextStep, which already throws the existing apps halfway out the door, they should have gone all the way to put an efficient, advanced OS in a mainstream platform.
Yes, there are a million arguments against it. But I remember when I first saw BeOS at MacWorld, they were already running a fast Mac emulator (this was January '96 or 7, I believe.) With a lot of work, I'd bet those folks could have done a better OSX than Apple has with NextStep.