Auditing source code is all well and good, but when I go to vote, how do I know the machine in front of me is running the code I think it is?
The only real way to solve this is to have a bit of paper produced when I cast my vote, containing a human-readable record which I can personally verify, and then drop it in a ballot box. Electronic reports could then be randomly spot-checked against paper records, and full manual counting procedures could be activated if things failed to match up.
With just a handful of exceptions, all of the content being sold through the iTMS is also available on CD, which means it's already available in unprotected formats on the P2P networks. So I really don't see how this changes anything.
I don't know about other networks, but by default AIM lets you look up someone's screen name based on their e-mail address. I'd imagine they're just going though their address lists and checking for screen names for each.
I never got spim before last week, and then I started getting five or six a day. I've since changed my screen name, and set my preferences so that it can't be looked up by e-mail address. Hopefully they won't be able to find me again.
In actuality, the big three IM companies have the luxury of developing their own protocols and applications, and to have the opportunity to make changes to their own code and specs to stop SPIM.
This will be used as a new excuse to lock third-party clients out of the IM networks. Just wait.
Untying WMP from Windows wouldn't result in PCs shipping with no media player installed -- it would just put the choice in the hands of OEMs, rather than Microsoft.
Sure, but power is a commodity. It's always the same thing. You've probably already decided that you're willing to buy however much of it you need, at the price the electric company is selling it for. With a micropayment-based web, that doesn't happen. Both the value and the price of pages will vary, so you'll have to make determinations on a case-by-case basis. And you'll have to make it without complete information, since you need to pay before you've seen the content.
I really don't think it's just a matter of "too soon". The whole idea of micropayments is probably doomed. This presents the case far better than I could.
The most important point, IMO, is that there are cognitive costs associated with the decision about whether or not to make a purchase that don't go away as dollar amounts decrease.
When you pay Apple $0.99, $0.66 goes right to the record company. The other $0.33 needs to cover all the effort to develop the store software, get all the content on the store (including art, etc.), pay the bandwidth bill (including all that bandwidth used by previewing, on which Apple makes no money directly), keep electricity flowing to the racks of Xserves, process transactions, etc.
I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't anything left over. Apple will get economies of scale on some of these things, and others will get a lot cheaper over time, so eventually the store will probably be profitable. But it's very easy to believe that it currently isn't.
A few tens of dollars each? You haven't priced 1.8" FireWire hard drives, I don't think. I'm sure the profit margins on the iPod are pretty good, but they're probably in the 25-35% range, not the 1000% range.
Jobs said at the analyst meeting that Apple 1) doesn't want to promote a proprietary Microsoft format and 2) doesn't really see much need to support other music services as long as iTunes has 80% of the legal download market.
There's a rumor that Apple might introduce a device next week which would allow the iPod to be hooked up to a TV for video playback. A lot of people have speculated that the iPod was never supposed to be just about music ("pod" suggests something more general), so this wouldn't be too much of a surprise. A built-in color screen would be the next step, I guess.
I seriously doubt that Apple has any great fear of Linux on the desktop. Think about it. What's the difference, in the mind of the average consumer, between an x86 box that comes with Windows, and one that comes with Linux? About $50. That's not going to make any difference in the number of people buying Macs. Apple only has to worry about Linux if it starts providing a better desktop user experience than OS X on Apple hardware, and that doesn't seem too likely at the moment, since most of the desktop efforts of Linux are basically attempting to clone the Windows UI, and nobody in the x86 hardware market has shown much interest in competing with Apple's slick industrial design.
I think it's quite easy to make the case that Linux on the desktop would be a very good thing for Apple. Apple's strategy of late is mostly designed around the idea of building really slick proprietary apps for working with open standards -- iPhoto, iDVD, iTunes, iMovie, iCal, etc. all fall into this category. Doesn't that strategy work better in a market where most people are using standards-based Linux, rather than proprietary Windows?
Another point to consider is that the cost of buying new versions of apps right now presents a major barrier that might be keeping some people from switching to the Mac. If Linux makes it big on the desktop, it will probably do it with the help of many free desktop apps -- apps that will be ported to OS X. People will be able to switch to OS X without spending lots of money on new apps.
No, the reason Apple isn't porting iTunes to Linux is probably just that there isn't all that much money to be made in the Linux desktop market at the moment. The market isn't very big, and its fragmentation (across distros, desktop environments, etc.) leads to higher support costs. In the near-term, Linux's gains on the desktop will mostly be in the enterprise market, which is not the market iTunes is aimed at.
Because Apple appears to be doing the minimum necessary to keep record companies happy, while certain other companies (that shall remain nameless) seem to really like the idea of DRM, and want to implement it as extensively as possible, probably because they view it as another as another way to create vendor lock-in.
That's not really true at the high end. The P4 doesn't support multi-processor configurations, and Intel charges a major price premium for Xeon chips. Dell wants ~$4000 for a dual 3 GHz Xeon with specs similar to the $3000 dual 2 GHz G5.
You could probably do a bit better building your own dual Xeon system, but it still wouldn't be cheap. You're looking at probably $1300-1500 just for the motherboard and the chips -- then add a case, RAM, a hard drive, a DVD burner, a video card, etc. and, for most potential buyers, a copy of Windows XP Pro.
Of course, but they're not in the applicable frequencies (in fact, they're in the opposite direction), and the Sun is rather more powerful than a Bluetooth transmitter.
Last time I checked, there still wasn't any sold evidence of EM radiation being dangerous. The only measurable effect when it hits flesh is a small localized temperature increase.
Re:Start with Lion's Unix Source Code commentary
on
Do You Know UNIX Secrets?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
That's true, but SCO isn't just claiming its copyrights were violated. SCO is claiming its *trade secrets* were stolen. If you want to claim that something is a trade secret, you have to make some reasonable effort to actually keep it secret.
Those old CRT iMacs can take a beating. I know of one that fell off of a computer desk onto a hardwood floor. Twice. While turned on. You can't even tell. It still works perfectly and there's not a scratch on it.
It's not as if they're suing a rumors site or going after someone saying bad things about them. This guy signed an NDA -- a real live legal contract, you'll note, not some click-though thing of arguable validity, or something that can only be enforced by twisting the DMCA in strange ways. He then proceeded to blatantly violate that NDA. This lawsuit is completely legitimate -- any company in Apple's position would do the same.
And this isn't just a one-way thing. Apple (well, NeXT, but it's the same people) is largely responsible for GCC's Objective-C support, and continues to contribute code to the project.
No, application reliability is definitely a very important part of the mainframe's continued success. It's true, obviously, that the hardware can't make the software work correctly. But many of the applications being used on mainframes have been around for decades -- they're known to be reliable. As the article points out, vendors go to huge lengths to maintain backwards compatibility. So a business looking to replace an aging mainframe basically has two options: port or rewrite its software for another platform (possibly introducing a lot of bugs), or simply swap an old mainframe out for a new one that's essentially guaranteed to be perfectly compatible software that's proven its reliability over the course of many years.
Intel is playing some serious games with the USB 2.0 specs. Real world tests show FireWire is significantly faster. There's enough of a difference to matter even with the relatively slow hard drives in MP3 players. FireWire also offers latency and bandwidth guarantees for time-sensitive transfers, has less CPU overhead, performs better with multiple simultaneous transfers, supports peer-to-peer connections, and provides much more power over the bus, allowing many more devices to be bus-powered. Basically, it's a vastly superior standard in just about every way. And a card costs under $20.
Slashdot Mirror
"What makes a man turn neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?" --Zapp Branigan
Auditing source code is all well and good, but when I go to vote, how do I know the machine in front of me is running the code I think it is?
The only real way to solve this is to have a bit of paper produced when I cast my vote, containing a human-readable record which I can personally verify, and then drop it in a ballot box. Electronic reports could then be randomly spot-checked against paper records, and full manual counting procedures could be activated if things failed to match up.
With just a handful of exceptions, all of the content being sold through the iTMS is also available on CD, which means it's already available in unprotected formats on the P2P networks. So I really don't see how this changes anything.
I don't know about other networks, but by default AIM lets you look up someone's screen name based on their e-mail address. I'd imagine they're just going though their address lists and checking for screen names for each.
I never got spim before last week, and then I started getting five or six a day. I've since changed my screen name, and set my preferences so that it can't be looked up by e-mail address. Hopefully they won't be able to find me again.
In actuality, the big three IM companies have the luxury of developing their own protocols and applications, and to have the opportunity to make changes to their own code and specs to stop SPIM.
This will be used as a new excuse to lock third-party clients out of the IM networks. Just wait.
Untying WMP from Windows wouldn't result in PCs shipping with no media player installed -- it would just put the choice in the hands of OEMs, rather than Microsoft.
Sure, but power is a commodity. It's always the same thing. You've probably already decided that you're willing to buy however much of it you need, at the price the electric company is selling it for. With a micropayment-based web, that doesn't happen. Both the value and the price of pages will vary, so you'll have to make determinations on a case-by-case basis. And you'll have to make it without complete information, since you need to pay before you've seen the content.
I really don't think it's just a matter of "too soon". The whole idea of micropayments is probably doomed. This presents the case far better than I could.
The most important point, IMO, is that there are cognitive costs associated with the decision about whether or not to make a purchase that don't go away as dollar amounts decrease.
MP3 and OGG are non-starters for online music sales -- the major labels will never allow their stuff to be distributed in unprotected formats.
When you pay Apple $0.99, $0.66 goes right to the record company. The other $0.33 needs to cover all the effort to develop the store software, get all the content on the store (including art, etc.), pay the bandwidth bill (including all that bandwidth used by previewing, on which Apple makes no money directly), keep electricity flowing to the racks of Xserves, process transactions, etc.
I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't anything left over. Apple will get economies of scale on some of these things, and others will get a lot cheaper over time, so eventually the store will probably be profitable. But it's very easy to believe that it currently isn't.
A few tens of dollars each? You haven't priced 1.8" FireWire hard drives, I don't think. I'm sure the profit margins on the iPod are pretty good, but they're probably in the 25-35% range, not the 1000% range.
Jobs said at the analyst meeting that Apple 1) doesn't want to promote a proprietary Microsoft format and 2) doesn't really see much need to support other music services as long as iTunes has 80% of the legal download market.
There's a rumor that Apple might introduce a device next week which would allow the iPod to be hooked up to a TV for video playback. A lot of people have speculated that the iPod was never supposed to be just about music ("pod" suggests something more general), so this wouldn't be too much of a surprise. A built-in color screen would be the next step, I guess.
I seriously doubt that Apple has any great fear of Linux on the desktop. Think about it. What's the difference, in the mind of the average consumer, between an x86 box that comes with Windows, and one that comes with Linux? About $50. That's not going to make any difference in the number of people buying Macs. Apple only has to worry about Linux if it starts providing a better desktop user experience than OS X on Apple hardware, and that doesn't seem too likely at the moment, since most of the desktop efforts of Linux are basically attempting to clone the Windows UI, and nobody in the x86 hardware market has shown much interest in competing with Apple's slick industrial design.
I think it's quite easy to make the case that Linux on the desktop would be a very good thing for Apple. Apple's strategy of late is mostly designed around the idea of building really slick proprietary apps for working with open standards -- iPhoto, iDVD, iTunes, iMovie, iCal, etc. all fall into this category. Doesn't that strategy work better in a market where most people are using standards-based Linux, rather than proprietary Windows?
Another point to consider is that the cost of buying new versions of apps right now presents a major barrier that might be keeping some people from switching to the Mac. If Linux makes it big on the desktop, it will probably do it with the help of many free desktop apps -- apps that will be ported to OS X. People will be able to switch to OS X without spending lots of money on new apps.
No, the reason Apple isn't porting iTunes to Linux is probably just that there isn't all that much money to be made in the Linux desktop market at the moment. The market isn't very big, and its fragmentation (across distros, desktop environments, etc.) leads to higher support costs. In the near-term, Linux's gains on the desktop will mostly be in the enterprise market, which is not the market iTunes is aimed at.
Because Apple appears to be doing the minimum necessary to keep record companies happy, while certain other companies (that shall remain nameless) seem to really like the idea of DRM, and want to implement it as extensively as possible, probably because they view it as another as another way to create vendor lock-in.
Which bus? Have a block diagram
That's not really true at the high end. The P4 doesn't support multi-processor configurations, and Intel charges a major price premium for Xeon chips. Dell wants ~$4000 for a dual 3 GHz Xeon with specs similar to the $3000 dual 2 GHz G5.
You could probably do a bit better building your own dual Xeon system, but it still wouldn't be cheap. You're looking at probably $1300-1500 just for the motherboard and the chips -- then add a case, RAM, a hard drive, a DVD burner, a video card, etc. and, for most potential buyers, a copy of Windows XP Pro.
Of course, but they're not in the applicable frequencies (in fact, they're in the opposite direction), and the Sun is rather more powerful than a Bluetooth transmitter.
Last time I checked, there still wasn't any sold evidence of EM radiation being dangerous. The only measurable effect when it hits flesh is a small localized temperature increase.
That's true, but SCO isn't just claiming its copyrights were violated. SCO is claiming its *trade secrets* were stolen. If you want to claim that something is a trade secret, you have to make some reasonable effort to actually keep it secret.
Those old CRT iMacs can take a beating. I know of one that fell off of a computer desk onto a hardwood floor. Twice. While turned on. You can't even tell. It still works perfectly and there's not a scratch on it.
It's not as if they're suing a rumors site or going after someone saying bad things about them. This guy signed an NDA -- a real live legal contract, you'll note, not some click-though thing of arguable validity, or something that can only be enforced by twisting the DMCA in strange ways. He then proceeded to blatantly violate that NDA. This lawsuit is completely legitimate -- any company in Apple's position would do the same.
And this isn't just a one-way thing. Apple (well, NeXT, but it's the same people) is largely responsible for GCC's Objective-C support, and continues to contribute code to the project.
No, application reliability is definitely a very important part of the mainframe's continued success. It's true, obviously, that the hardware can't make the software work correctly. But many of the applications being used on mainframes have been around for decades -- they're known to be reliable. As the article points out, vendors go to huge lengths to maintain backwards compatibility. So a business looking to replace an aging mainframe basically has two options: port or rewrite its software for another platform (possibly introducing a lot of bugs), or simply swap an old mainframe out for a new one that's essentially guaranteed to be perfectly compatible software that's proven its reliability over the course of many years.
Intel is playing some serious games with the USB 2.0 specs. Real world tests show FireWire is significantly faster. There's enough of a difference to matter even with the relatively slow hard drives in MP3 players. FireWire also offers latency and bandwidth guarantees for time-sensitive transfers, has less CPU overhead, performs better with multiple simultaneous transfers, supports peer-to-peer connections, and provides much more power over the bus, allowing many more devices to be bus-powered. Basically, it's a vastly superior standard in just about every way. And a card costs under $20.