Exactly! Some of the most "notorious" hackers used "social engineering" more than anything else to hack into computer systems. Just like in this Twitter example, people are usually the weakest and simplest point of access...
True, and the cost was probably fairly minor, as they are not advertising based... so only the cost of any people so pissed off with the downtime that they refuse to donate:)
I think you underestimate just how much storage video can eat. I can easily see applications like PVR's that basically records all channels all the time and lets you simply pick what you wanted to watch post-broadcast.
No, I know how much it can use. 1080p H.264 is 5-10GB per hour these days. A cheap 2TB HDD can record 200-400 hours.
Maybe "all channels all the time" could be recorded in a cable headend, but not likely in the home, as with any current system you'd either need a tuner/demod for each channel/frequency (cable/satellite) or an absolutely enormous amount of bandwidth (IPTV). And that doesn't even consider the disk transfer rates, which would make individual huge storage devices useless for this task. It would be FAR easier and more cost-efficient to keep that massive amount of information in one place at the headend rather than in everyone's home, and then just send the single stream to be watched to the consumer. Which is what services like Comcast OnDemand are already starting to do...
And I'm not talking about crazy hobbyist projects, but mass-market applications for HDDs for the consumer. And in the corporate sense, I'm also not talking about thousands of desktop HDDs in a large corporate environment, but centralized storage where you basically want the most storage in the least rack space.
So, I still stand by my statement... for the average consumer, data usage has not kept up with HDD sizes. After it doubles a couple more times, there just won't be much of a consumer mass market for high-end HDDs. In the data center, it might go a bit further (but again big, slow HDDs start losing some of their usefulness when you can't get the data off them in a reasonable amount of time...)
I agree, and it's an even wider gap than you suggest!
HDDs are *already* fairly affordable at 2TB - you can get a 2TB HDD for $150-170. A ~200GB (256GB, actually) SSD is closer to $750. For the price of a 2TB HDD, you're only going to get a 32-64GB SSD.
Then again, data sizes have not kept up with storage increases... once you can store more 12MP photos, lossless music, and 1080p high quality video than you need, there really isn't much point for the average consumer to keep upgrading. Clearly it will be a different story for servers, though. Our total HDD storage at work passed the petabyte level a while ago. That storage cost in SSDs would be pushing 7 figures...
Yeah, that's the funniest thing about all of this... in the end it's going to result in a crappy FPS based on obsolete technology that no one will ever play.
If it ever comes out, maybe I'll pick up a copy in the bargain bin at Gamestop as a piece of Internet flame-war history...
Actually, I think this trend was clear way back in Ultima Online days.
Wander by a "mountainside" and there would be dozens of players just standing there "mining" ore, which they would haul back and smelt to iron, which they would use it to make some crappy item, which they would sell to a shopkeeper for some and then wander off to the mines for another day of hard work...
Not that I really disagree with you, but to be accurate Comcast isn't a Tier 1...
Still, they do own their own fiber backbone, so any traffic staying on Comcast's network is definitely very cheap for them. And in any case, as you said, the current bottleneck in most cases is their obsolete or oversubscribed headends, not their backbone or peering points.
First of all, that argument doesn't fly here in the U.S. (no, not every pirated copy is a lost sale), so why should it be any different in a country where the average citizen has even less disposable income than here?
Bullshit. Have you ever been to a market in China?
Piracy there is not people downloading DVD rips in their home - there are a lot of large, professional piracy rings mass producing near-perfect duplicates.
A couple year ago when my girlfriend was in China she bought me 3 Simpsons DVD sets (ie seasons) for about US$10 total (probably would have been ~$90 online legally). They were in professionally printed cardboard boxed cases. The first thing that made me realize they were counterfeit? Two of the seasons weren't even released yet!
And guess what? They weren't making them all for the extremely rare American tourist that happened to wander by. They were mass produced in a real factory by the tens or hundreds of thousands by organized criminals, and are purchased by Chinese citizens (who are not all dirt poor like you seem to imagine). Are they cheaper than what the studios would charge? Sure, but that was one of my earlier points - it's so systemic that there isn't really even a chance to compete with the pirates on price right now!
The international (mostly Asian) piracy situation is nothing like that in the US, and to try to equate it means you really have no clue...
Oh, and as for where they manufacture processors? Who cares. The top fabless chip companies (Broadcom, Qualcomm, Marvell, Xilinx, Altera, etc - it's a huge list these days) - as well as those who own their own factories outside the US - employ MANY thousands of people in the US, make 60%+ margins and significant profits. While the contract manufacturers (TSMC, UMC, etcc) are much lower margin commodities (but still profitable...) In fact, the economy in Silicon Valley is doing pretty well right now compared to the rest of the country because of this (East Bay housing prices notwithstanding, but that is a completely different issue...)
If anything, that REINFORCES the importance of protecting IP. US companies spend billions of dollars in R&D to design all of the technology, so they better damn well be able to protect it.
. At 35k a piece you are looking at 175,000,000,000. That is 175 billion to give 5 million of your fellow Americans a bottom of the line degree.
Does that sound like a lot of money to you? It is about a year and a half of our military expenses in Iraq. Yes, we could have provided $175B to education rather than blowing up and rebuilding a country that wasn't really responsible for much if any international terrorism in the first place. Throw in another year and we'd be able to pay for everyone's health care for the rest of the decade. That still leaves a few hundred billion left!
The US doesn't have to be isolationist to fix its problems, just get a damn clue about which problems are worth spending money on in the first place.
You're right that other places have a tighter cultural connection, but you can only ignore an elephant in the room for so long. Google may only be a mouse, but that's enough to make the elephant pretty mad.
Nice, you made Bad Analogy Guy's post look stupid AND in a form he can actually understand!;)
Heh. Good point. But on the flip side it does show that artificial scarcity and regulation are pretty key to the modern world economy.
As terrifying as the prospect is, makes me wonder what would happen if the government enforced the same penalties for copying a $20 DVD as a $20 bill...
And to your original post - ideas may be a dime a dozen, but execution can cost millions (or billions!) of dollars and millions of (aggregate) hours of work.
Let's show how little sense that actually makes...
Cash has ZERO value
Which is one way of asserting that simple Economics 101 principle: the value of things is inversely proportional to their relative scarcity. The only way one has to get any payback from cash is by imposing limits on their reproduction. Good luck on enforcing that.
Perhaps not as much as you might think. When you are living on less than $5 per day AND you have to pay $3 just to rent a movie, you are going to do without if you can't get it illicitly.
Well, $5/day is pretty close to the minimum wage these days (not that it's still not way less than the US, but so is the cost of living). There is a rapidly growing "middle class" in China these days that is making plenty of money to afford to pay for movies.
And last time I was in China, *legal* software (say for example, a PC video game) was often about 25-30% of the price in the US. My first thought was a little annoyance at how much we get screwed here, but then I realized it's in everyone's best interest to price soft goods like that at a rate that they might be able to afford rather than buying a pirated version. On the other hand, I don't think I even *saw* any legal CDs or DVDs:)
And note, piracy there is not about people downloading and burning their movies for "free". It's about going to the local market and buying a professionally pirated DVD with a printed case for a couple bucks.
And I don't think is makes sense to go after *any* individual infringers, especially the buyers/consumers of the content. Piracy in Asia is a very profitable business these days, and it's basically condoned or at least completely ignored by the government there. The problem is only going to be solved if the US government gets some backbone and does something at an international trade level, which is what ACTA is for (and will probably be completely useless, sadly - China showed in Copenhagen what they think of international agreements...)
But again, I don't really think I have to - I'd be surprised if you could find a decent HDTV (at least 40"+) that *isn't* running Linux. Especially the latest crop with Internet applications.
First: kudos for the Godwin. I guess this thread just wouldn't be complete without Hitler.
Second: this thread had nothing to do with (not) protecting manufacturing jobs, it had to do with protecting American technology and media. Why do they have to be mutually exclusive?
Third: it really had nothing to do with Americans "consuming IP", it had to do with other countries paying for the IP they already consume.
But to bite on your tangeant... it is ironic that the people complaining the most and voting against large tax increases tend to be those who could use their benefits the most, not those who would pay the bulk of it. Honestly, how do we fix the problem that a growing segment of the population does not have the knowledge or skills to justify the standard of living that they would like to have? (and that's no slight on any "blue collar" worker, just a statement of fact that one can't expect to be paid a huge premium over Chinese workers in the same field and yet shop almost exclusively at Walmart to save a few bucks).
Europe has already tried dealing with some of these issues - and their solution was "social democracy". But in the US we wouldn't dare even think of something with the name "social" in it, because the Republicans have done such a good job convincing the people most in need of it that it's somehow inherently evil and "un-American"...
I wish that was the case, but unfortunately, it's not. With a few discrete exceptions (Motorola and TI still provide a lot of the digital processing chips, for example), most of it is made overseas as well.... Don't take my word for it, open up that box and look at the chips for yourself.
Actually, I don't need to take your word for it *or* open up any boxes. Why? I have worked on integrating software into dozens of models of TVs, Blu-Ray players, and DVRs in the last few years, spanning almost every major CE company. I'd say over 2/3 of them use Broadcom chips. I have 2 BD players and 2 TVs from 4 different manufacturers on my desk right now, all with BRCM SoCs. Even the companies that fab their own chips in-house often use them as a second source. (As an interesting and mind-boggling aside, almost every major CE company is now using Linux in their TVs, and many of their BD players as well. I bet that's not something Linux expected when he first made it available back in 1991...)
BRCM's market share in the TV/STB business is enormous. Not that it's necessarily a good thing, BRCM can be a real pain in the ass sometimes.
And in general, who are the top 5 fabless semiconductor manufacturers? Qualcomm, Broadcom, STMicro, Marvell, and Conexant. All except STMicro are American companies (and ST is European). Being fabless, yes, most of the chips are made overseas - but that's my point! US innovation has become about IP, not manufacturing. These companies are making huge margins these days by using Taiwanese, Malaysian, Chinese, etc contractors (who are doing well, of course, but no 60% margins there!)
I didn't say US economic successes were due to military successes, I said economic and military successes were due to innovation. I also didn't say all US military conflicts ended in success. Reading comprehension is hard, huh?
Yes, but more likely than not many of the key parts (with the most valuable IP) - the processor/SoC, digital tuners, etc, are made by a US company. The "interesting" software in new Internet-connected TVs (Netflix, VUDU, Cinemanow, Pandora, Youtube) is all made by US companies. And not coincidentally, all of those companies focus on distribution of the higher-margin content that the RIAA and MPAA are trying to protect.
The economic (and military) successes of the United States have almost always been based on technological innovation and entrepreneurship - and those innovations DO need to be protected.
The MPAA/RIAA's methods of "enforcing" their IP are despicable. But without any protection, one of the current major assets of the US - media and entertainment - will be in serious jeopardy. Let's put it this way - if Chinese citizens actually paid for even a small fraction more of the American software, movies, and music they consume, the trade deficit picture would be significantly different. That is what Obama is talking about, not picking on homemakers who shared a few mp3s online. Hopefully the MPAA & RIAA can get a damn clue and start focusing on the real threat to their business - rampant, organized, professional international piracy.
goto's are a bad idea and should not exist in a language
The most basic "language" for almost all CPUs (assembly, or the machine code it generates) uses a basic branching construct that in the end is pretty much a goto of one form or another. So good luck with that...
Exactly. I work mostly on embedded devices these days, where it's either straight C or C++ with exceptions and RTTI disabled.
And the compiler is effectively turning all those fancy high level control flow constructs into gotos (jump, whatever) anyway. If programmers spent more time understanding what happened to their code when they compiled it and less worrying about nitpicky style issues, it would probably be bother more readable AND more efficient.
Not that I'm saying everyone should go make their code look like assembly language - just don't think that "the prettier the C++, the more efficient the program will be!" I guess I'm just amazed by how many new CS grads don't even understand basic memory management any more, let alone compilers...
Absolutely. It was drummed into me (and apparently most coworkers), and I can't believe how liberating it is once you realize, yes, in appropriate contexts "goto" can result in code (especially in error handling cases) that is both more readable and more efficient. Dogma is rarely the answer.
Slashdot Mirror
DVD-quality? Netflix streaming? Not so much :)
But that does make a point - why worry about HD Netflix streaming when their SD has plenty of room for improvement first...
Exactly! Some of the most "notorious" hackers used "social engineering" more than anything else to hack into computer systems. Just like in this Twitter example, people are usually the weakest and simplest point of access...
I thought the tea party movement was just a bunch of morons. Then I read this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-borowitz/teabaggers-new-cry-mrs-ob_b_508683.html
Now I think calling them that has just been an insult to morons.
True, and the cost was probably fairly minor, as they are not advertising based... so only the cost of any people so pissed off with the downtime that they refuse to donate :)
I think you underestimate just how much storage video can eat. I can easily see applications like PVR's that basically records all channels all the time and lets you simply pick what you wanted to watch post-broadcast.
No, I know how much it can use. 1080p H.264 is 5-10GB per hour these days. A cheap 2TB HDD can record 200-400 hours.
Maybe "all channels all the time" could be recorded in a cable headend, but not likely in the home, as with any current system you'd either need a tuner/demod for each channel/frequency (cable/satellite) or an absolutely enormous amount of bandwidth (IPTV). And that doesn't even consider the disk transfer rates, which would make individual huge storage devices useless for this task. It would be FAR easier and more cost-efficient to keep that massive amount of information in one place at the headend rather than in everyone's home, and then just send the single stream to be watched to the consumer. Which is what services like Comcast OnDemand are already starting to do...
And I'm not talking about crazy hobbyist projects, but mass-market applications for HDDs for the consumer. And in the corporate sense, I'm also not talking about thousands of desktop HDDs in a large corporate environment, but centralized storage where you basically want the most storage in the least rack space.
So, I still stand by my statement... for the average consumer, data usage has not kept up with HDD sizes. After it doubles a couple more times, there just won't be much of a consumer mass market for high-end HDDs. In the data center, it might go a bit further (but again big, slow HDDs start losing some of their usefulness when you can't get the data off them in a reasonable amount of time...)
I agree, and it's an even wider gap than you suggest!
HDDs are *already* fairly affordable at 2TB - you can get a 2TB HDD for $150-170. A ~200GB (256GB, actually) SSD is closer to $750. For the price of a 2TB HDD, you're only going to get a 32-64GB SSD.
Then again, data sizes have not kept up with storage increases... once you can store more 12MP photos, lossless music, and 1080p high quality video than you need, there really isn't much point for the average consumer to keep upgrading. Clearly it will be a different story for servers, though. Our total HDD storage at work passed the petabyte level a while ago. That storage cost in SSDs would be pushing 7 figures...
Yeah, that's the funniest thing about all of this... in the end it's going to result in a crappy FPS based on obsolete technology that no one will ever play.
If it ever comes out, maybe I'll pick up a copy in the bargain bin at Gamestop as a piece of Internet flame-war history...
I've had a $400 wine before (obtained at a decent price and then aged).
Well, that's your problem. It tastes much better when you pay $400 for it upfront!
So has Monty Python, and it's probably still in the top 10 references on slashdot...
Actually, I think this trend was clear way back in Ultima Online days.
Wander by a "mountainside" and there would be dozens of players just standing there "mining" ore, which they would haul back and smelt to iron, which they would use it to make some crappy item, which they would sell to a shopkeeper for some and then wander off to the mines for another day of hard work...
Not that I really disagree with you, but to be accurate Comcast isn't a Tier 1...
Still, they do own their own fiber backbone, so any traffic staying on Comcast's network is definitely very cheap for them. And in any case, as you said, the current bottleneck in most cases is their obsolete or oversubscribed headends, not their backbone or peering points.
First of all, that argument doesn't fly here in the U.S. (no, not every pirated copy is a lost sale), so why should it be any different in a country where the average citizen has even less disposable income than here?
Bullshit. Have you ever been to a market in China?
Piracy there is not people downloading DVD rips in their home - there are a lot of large, professional piracy rings mass producing near-perfect duplicates.
A couple year ago when my girlfriend was in China she bought me 3 Simpsons DVD sets (ie seasons) for about US$10 total (probably would have been ~$90 online legally). They were in professionally printed cardboard boxed cases. The first thing that made me realize they were counterfeit? Two of the seasons weren't even released yet!
And guess what? They weren't making them all for the extremely rare American tourist that happened to wander by. They were mass produced in a real factory by the tens or hundreds of thousands by organized criminals, and are purchased by Chinese citizens (who are not all dirt poor like you seem to imagine). Are they cheaper than what the studios would charge? Sure, but that was one of my earlier points - it's so systemic that there isn't really even a chance to compete with the pirates on price right now!
The international (mostly Asian) piracy situation is nothing like that in the US, and to try to equate it means you really have no clue...
Oh, and as for where they manufacture processors? Who cares. The top fabless chip companies (Broadcom, Qualcomm, Marvell, Xilinx, Altera, etc - it's a huge list these days) - as well as those who own their own factories outside the US - employ MANY thousands of people in the US, make 60%+ margins and significant profits. While the contract manufacturers (TSMC, UMC, etcc) are much lower margin commodities (but still profitable...) In fact, the economy in Silicon Valley is doing pretty well right now compared to the rest of the country because of this (East Bay housing prices notwithstanding, but that is a completely different issue...)
If anything, that REINFORCES the importance of protecting IP. US companies spend billions of dollars in R&D to design all of the technology, so they better damn well be able to protect it.
. At 35k a piece you are looking at 175,000,000,000. That is 175 billion to give 5 million of your fellow Americans a bottom of the line degree.
Does that sound like a lot of money to you? It is about a year and a half of our military expenses in Iraq. Yes, we could have provided $175B to education rather than blowing up and rebuilding a country that wasn't really responsible for much if any international terrorism in the first place. Throw in another year and we'd be able to pay for everyone's health care for the rest of the decade. That still leaves a few hundred billion left!
The US doesn't have to be isolationist to fix its problems, just get a damn clue about which problems are worth spending money on in the first place.
You're right that other places have a tighter cultural connection, but you can only ignore an elephant in the room for so long. Google may only be a mouse, but that's enough to make the elephant pretty mad.
Nice, you made Bad Analogy Guy's post look stupid AND in a form he can actually understand! ;)
Heh. Good point. But on the flip side it does show that artificial scarcity and regulation are pretty key to the modern world economy.
As terrifying as the prospect is, makes me wonder what would happen if the government enforced the same penalties for copying a $20 DVD as a $20 bill...
And to your original post - ideas may be a dime a dozen, but execution can cost millions (or billions!) of dollars and millions of (aggregate) hours of work.
Let's show how little sense that actually makes...
Cash has ZERO value
Which is one way of asserting that simple Economics 101 principle: the value of things is inversely proportional to their relative scarcity. The only way one has to get any payback from cash is by imposing limits on their reproduction. Good luck on enforcing that.
Perhaps not as much as you might think. When you are living on less than $5 per day AND you have to pay $3 just to rent a movie, you are going to do without if you can't get it illicitly.
Well, $5/day is pretty close to the minimum wage these days (not that it's still not way less than the US, but so is the cost of living). There is a rapidly growing "middle class" in China these days that is making plenty of money to afford to pay for movies.
And last time I was in China, *legal* software (say for example, a PC video game) was often about 25-30% of the price in the US. My first thought was a little annoyance at how much we get screwed here, but then I realized it's in everyone's best interest to price soft goods like that at a rate that they might be able to afford rather than buying a pirated version. On the other hand, I don't think I even *saw* any legal CDs or DVDs :)
And note, piracy there is not about people downloading and burning their movies for "free". It's about going to the local market and buying a professionally pirated DVD with a printed case for a couple bucks.
And I don't think is makes sense to go after *any* individual infringers, especially the buyers/consumers of the content. Piracy in Asia is a very profitable business these days, and it's basically condoned or at least completely ignored by the government there. The problem is only going to be solved if the US government gets some backbone and does something at an international trade level, which is what ACTA is for (and will probably be completely useless, sadly - China showed in Copenhagen what they think of international agreements...)
Probably shouldn't be getting any more specific ;)
But again, I don't really think I have to - I'd be surprised if you could find a decent HDTV (at least 40"+) that *isn't* running Linux. Especially the latest crop with Internet applications.
First: kudos for the Godwin. I guess this thread just wouldn't be complete without Hitler.
Second: this thread had nothing to do with (not) protecting manufacturing jobs, it had to do with protecting American technology and media. Why do they have to be mutually exclusive?
Third: it really had nothing to do with Americans "consuming IP", it had to do with other countries paying for the IP they already consume.
But to bite on your tangeant... it is ironic that the people complaining the most and voting against large tax increases tend to be those who could use their benefits the most, not those who would pay the bulk of it. Honestly, how do we fix the problem that a growing segment of the population does not have the knowledge or skills to justify the standard of living that they would like to have? (and that's no slight on any "blue collar" worker, just a statement of fact that one can't expect to be paid a huge premium over Chinese workers in the same field and yet shop almost exclusively at Walmart to save a few bucks).
Europe has already tried dealing with some of these issues - and their solution was "social democracy". But in the US we wouldn't dare even think of something with the name "social" in it, because the Republicans have done such a good job convincing the people most in need of it that it's somehow inherently evil and "un-American"...
I wish that was the case, but unfortunately, it's not. With a few discrete exceptions (Motorola and TI still provide a lot of the digital processing chips, for example), most of it is made overseas as well. ...
Don't take my word for it, open up that box and look at the chips for yourself.
Actually, I don't need to take your word for it *or* open up any boxes. Why? I have worked on integrating software into dozens of models of TVs, Blu-Ray players, and DVRs in the last few years, spanning almost every major CE company. I'd say over 2/3 of them use Broadcom chips. I have 2 BD players and 2 TVs from 4 different manufacturers on my desk right now, all with BRCM SoCs. Even the companies that fab their own chips in-house often use them as a second source. (As an interesting and mind-boggling aside, almost every major CE company is now using Linux in their TVs, and many of their BD players as well. I bet that's not something Linux expected when he first made it available back in 1991...)
BRCM's market share in the TV/STB business is enormous. Not that it's necessarily a good thing, BRCM can be a real pain in the ass sometimes.
And in general, who are the top 5 fabless semiconductor manufacturers? Qualcomm, Broadcom, STMicro, Marvell, and Conexant. All except STMicro are American companies (and ST is European). Being fabless, yes, most of the chips are made overseas - but that's my point! US innovation has become about IP, not manufacturing. These companies are making huge margins these days by using Taiwanese, Malaysian, Chinese, etc contractors (who are doing well, of course, but no 60% margins there!)
I didn't say US economic successes were due to military successes, I said economic and military successes were due to innovation. I also didn't say all US military conflicts ended in success. Reading comprehension is hard, huh?
Yes, but more likely than not many of the key parts (with the most valuable IP) - the processor/SoC, digital tuners, etc, are made by a US company. The "interesting" software in new Internet-connected TVs (Netflix, VUDU, Cinemanow, Pandora, Youtube) is all made by US companies. And not coincidentally, all of those companies focus on distribution of the higher-margin content that the RIAA and MPAA are trying to protect.
The economic (and military) successes of the United States have almost always been based on technological innovation and entrepreneurship - and those innovations DO need to be protected.
The MPAA/RIAA's methods of "enforcing" their IP are despicable. But without any protection, one of the current major assets of the US - media and entertainment - will be in serious jeopardy. Let's put it this way - if Chinese citizens actually paid for even a small fraction more of the American software, movies, and music they consume, the trade deficit picture would be significantly different. That is what Obama is talking about, not picking on homemakers who shared a few mp3s online. Hopefully the MPAA & RIAA can get a damn clue and start focusing on the real threat to their business - rampant, organized, professional international piracy.
goto's are a bad idea and should not exist in a language
The most basic "language" for almost all CPUs (assembly, or the machine code it generates) uses a basic branching construct that in the end is pretty much a goto of one form or another. So good luck with that...
Exactly. I work mostly on embedded devices these days, where it's either straight C or C++ with exceptions and RTTI disabled.
And the compiler is effectively turning all those fancy high level control flow constructs into gotos (jump, whatever) anyway. If programmers spent more time understanding what happened to their code when they compiled it and less worrying about nitpicky style issues, it would probably be bother more readable AND more efficient.
Not that I'm saying everyone should go make their code look like assembly language - just don't think that "the prettier the C++, the more efficient the program will be!" I guess I'm just amazed by how many new CS grads don't even understand basic memory management any more, let alone compilers...
Absolutely. It was drummed into me (and apparently most coworkers), and I can't believe how liberating it is once you realize, yes, in appropriate contexts "goto" can result in code (especially in error handling cases) that is both more readable and more efficient. Dogma is rarely the answer.