How do we know it got paid for? The company making it has profited.
Wow. So you've looked at the books for B5 and know that the total income is in the Black? I didn't know being an anonymous Coward came with such awesome powers.
PS I now see that people who are for over-enthusiastic copyrights are also killers of puppies.
"He used sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes, and satire."
P.S. Send me your name and address, and I'll mail you a burned CD of a copywritten work. 100% legal. See, the important part is permission.
These are old shows that have long since been paid for.
And you KNOW this how? Further, if you bought stock in a company, would you support a regulation that you could only sell it for 150% of what you bought it for, or that after the dividents had brought in 150% of your purchase price you had to give it away? Corporations exist to make money. This money goes into making new things and providing money to the owners.
In fact, most of them should have entered the public domain long ago if our copyright system were not corrupted by dirty politicians being bribed by rich lobbyists.
The shows I saw listed were all created within the past few decades, within copyright protectiong long before there were masses of rich lobbyists extending copyright laws.
People can make good shows for much less than you think
OK, prove it. I speak with over a decade of professional experience in the music industry. I have also dabbled in video, doing costuming, lighting, camera work, audio recording, and editing/post production. My work's appeared on ESPN, PBS, and Australian music video programs. Not a ton of work, but enough to know what even just lighting a scene to look good takes. Your qualifications are?
Take a look some time at the numbers for the production cost of TV shows.
Slashdot favourite, Farscape, cost somewhere around $2 Million per episode, just to make it.
The last time I saw the numbers some people worked it out that to pay for the production, manufacturing, and distribution to give every cable and satellite subscriber every show on cable on DVD, without ads, would cost about eight dollars a month.
OK, let's pretend that there's 2 billion people in the world in this equation, all of whom pay in $8/month. Let's further pretend that there's 150 channels (In fact, there'd be many more than that, because once you go global there's going to have to be channels that provide local/local language programming), with 6 hours/day of unique programming. That works out to:
2,000,000,000*$8= $16,000,000,000 pot. Divided by 150 channels: $106,666,666 per channel. Divided by 30 days in a month: $3,555,555 per day. Divided by 6 hours of unique programming leaves: $592,592 per hour of programming.
And that's supposed to include the cost of distributing the content to the users on DVD too? I think their math is a little suspect. Perhaps they set out with an assumption and looked for "evidence" to prove it?
This is not about rewarding artists so they will make more content.
Actually it is - the artists involved get residuals from old shows.
How many more episodes of "The Prisoner" are going to be made that would not be made is copyrights were cut down to 7 years?
None. But your question is broken because no matter what (within the realm of likely possibility), no more episodes of "The Prisoner" will ever be made. It's about as valid as me asking how many more episodes would be made if I don't shoot two dozen adorable little puppies in the head.
What is more important is whether actors can continue acting in small but interesting shows such as the Prisoner rather than some schlocky sitcom, knowing that the Prisoner audience will be far more likely to subvert payment systems. What is more important is whether anyone would fund making more shows LIKE the Prisoner, based on the behaviour of the fans of existing shows. I can assure you that reducing copyright to 7 years would cause media production of all kinds to fall drastically. Sure, there'd be some amateur stuff that would try to fill in the gaps, but you know, amateur work is called that for a reason. The vast majority of it simply isn't very good and finding the stuff that is can be a major pain. I'd far rather watch The Prisoner than public access cable. How about you?
the content broadcaster gets paid for the ads by the advertisers when I download them, whether I watch them or not, as long as nobody but me knows that I didn't actually watch them. I could make a sandwich or use the restroom during the commercial and it would have the same effect as transcoding the media file without the commercial, just like with real TV.
True, and a certain amount of that is expected, although I'm sure they're considering something like the semi-interactive ads at Salon.com. (If I were in charge of the program, I'd also offer a low cost payment to get rid of the ads entirely, but that's just me.) There's a certain amount of ignoring expected. I imagine that part of what they're going to try to do is use targeted ads ala Google Ads to deliver ads that you might actually be interested.
But back to my original point - it's mostly about the perception of the geek audience. If I were an executive deciding what shows to offer and saw the original poster's immediate desire to remove the ads, and then looked at usage statistics and saw that geeks watched a lot of B5 and very little Wonder Years, I'd stop making things like B5 available. The very vocal part of Slashdot wants their media for free. No matter how the industry tries to accomidate them (iTunes, legal Napster, this), they will never be happy because they "deserve" media without any restriction or payment. This is a completely unworkable business model that will only lead less media that appeals to their segment (which, sadly, tends to overlap with mine) because companies simply can't make money doing it. Of course, most of these techno-utopians tend to not actually give anything back to society while demanding that others provide things to them for free..
My statement has nothing to do with the prissy attitudes of the end users. It has to do with corporations' perception of geeks as a potential target market. A company has decided to offer a product at no cost to users and their first response is to try to slash the only thing that returns value to the company out of it.
The upshot is that the things that appeal to this class of users will no longer be made. Want to know why Firefly got canceled? Want to know why Frascape got canceled? Why it's increasingly hard to find geeky books in bookstores? Make yourself a poor target demographic, suffer a decrease in interest in businesses in catering to you. It's like the punk bands that complain that bars don't want them to play there when they have a small draw, and what audience does show up either drinks before they get to the show or are straight edge.
They also require payment by using your bandwidth to serve this data to other users. So, either get rid of the ads or pay for the bandwidth yourself.
It's not an either or situation. The theoretical users of the service provide a combination payment of their bandwidth and having ads inserted. If it didn't use a P2P engine, there would either be more ads or a per episode charge. Given that TFA states that there will be a maximum of 2 minutes of ads (compared to the 8-10 you'd have in a rerun of a show), using a little bandwidth seems reasonable.
In principle i agree but shouldnt that content be already paid for many times over.
So? First, corporations exist to make money, not break even. The extra money gets funneled into making new things and to paying the owners of the company. Would you do business under the concept that you should make your money back but if a new way to make money came around the corner you should not profit from it? Would you work for a company that did? Farmers don't sell their crops until they get a certain return and then give the rest away.
From the original copyright duration, all programming prior to 1998/1991 (duration dependant) should've been free/public domain:)
OK, what are you bringing to the plate in exchange? It's awful easy to say that others' work should be free when if it doesn't affect you, other than getting free stuff.
why do media companys publish so much bullsh!t content?
A number of reasons. Some of it is because people have different tastes. Most forms of media out the have had a number of people that thought it was worth spending money on making. There's a small amount of stuff that's generated just as a tax writeoff, but mostly it's a combination of bad judgement and the fickleness of the public. You basically create a bunch of stuff that you think is good, throw it out to the public, market it, and see what becomes popular. No one could have predicted the ubiquitous coverage that "Standing outside a broken phonebooth with money in my hand" received. You make a bunch of stuff like that and put it out. If you do it right, you make enough money to cover all of the experements, reward the ones that did well, and stay in business as a company.
Related to that is the fact that influential people will sometimes latch onto a bad project for whatever reason and push it forward. Hence why things like Battlefield Earth get made - a big enough person wants it to happen and the studios decide that placating that person is worth it. If Tom Cruise wants something to happen, it will, because the public will go see things that Tom Cruise is in.
Another part of it is that lowbrow tends to sell well. Insert the usual comments on Bread & Circus, no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American Public, and so on. Horrible sitcoms and reality shows not only attract a larger audience than, say, Firefly, but attracts an audience less likely to Tivo/download shows.
If they cut some 60% of the crap that is out there, they could save billions.
Perhaps. I have thousands of CDs, the vast majority of them are far from the mainstream, and a good chunk of them are prolly things that you'd describe as crap. People have different tastes.
Proprietary file format? (can't edit out commercials in Virtualdub)
And slashdot types wonder why media companies aren't falling all over themselves to cater to them. A company offers you FREE content in exchange for including ads in it. The FIRST thing you want to do is edit out the ads.
Want it without ads? Buy it.
Content costs money to create, particularly movies/TV. If you've never been involved in TV (let alone Movie) quality production, you might be surprise at how hard it can be. Despite the hype, you can't make a decent show with a DV Cam and a Powerbook.
If you want the content you like to be delivered to you in the format you want, you have to provide some kind of economic benefit back to those that produce it.
As the article notes, it seems that the main reason they released this chip is so business oriented writers on the Wall Street Journal will stop complaining about Intel/Dell's lack of dual core CPUs. Those writers aren't all that likely to care that much about the power/heat issues so much as keeping up with the Joneses.
I haven't seen the patent first hand, but often something obvious now, wasn't at that time. If it were then why wasn't someone else doing it already.
I can list many examples of this. The mouse, keyboard, screens, printers, windowing environment, The Internet, an Operating system and even a CPU and the IC chips, were at the time major conceptual steps forward.
As an aside, some of those concepts are really not that hard to conceptualize. The development of the printing press logically leads to the typewriter which leads to the electric typewriter which leads to printers. It's really not that complex. Likewise, a mouse is just an input device that gives an x,y position, which given our two dimensional representation of data is not that hard to conceptualize. It takes a certain cleverness to be the first one to come up with it, but it would inevitably have happened.
But back to the actual point, just because something's non-obvious doesn't mean that it should be patentable. Originally patents protected actual devices, not ideas. The patents in question are business method patents. Imagine where we would be right now if someone had been allowed to patent the IDEA of entering data into a computer via a tactile surface, displaying data visually, or the operating system.
Business method patents do nothing but stiffle innovation. Read one of the the patents in question. They basically admit that they're doing the exact same thing as prepaid phone service, just with wireless. It's like the slew of patents where people took common existing ideas and tacked on "but we're doing it on the internet" and were given patents that were common sense.
The upshot is that a four person company that has not actually developed a product is being allowed to squeeze a several hundred person company that actually created a sucessful product out of business because they [the four person company] filed a patent of the idea of using a unique identifier to look up the number of minutes that a user has left in a database. I severely doubt this was the intent of the founding fathers.
You're not a good candidate for the subscription model then. But here's a few of the reasons it works for me:
1. I can install the client on any number of computers (I work in several offices plus travel, resulting in quite a few desktops and three laptops). My playlists are synced between all of them and I can click and listen to them without having to copy files over manually. 2. There's lots of music I might want to listen to once a year. It's not worth $1 to buy them for that purpose, but to listen to any of them for $10/month is fine with me. 3. I like to try new music all the time. With the subscription model, I'm free to click on whatever fits my whim as many times as I want without paying a cent more. To me, the short samples that iTunes offers aren't enough to know if I want them or not - I shuffle them into playlists and check them out in full a couple times. If I like them enough to want to own them I buy them on CD after that. 4. Rather importantly, the tracks that I like will always be current. A new remastered version comes out? I can hear it for nothing more than I'd ordinarily pay. You would have to buy it again. A higher bitrate service is offered? I pay nothing, while you have to buy it again. A 5.1 mix comes out? Same thing. If you only buy a couple tracks, it's not that big a deal to buy it again, but if you listen to thousands like I do, it would get massively expensive.
In the end, viva la difference. We both have options that fit our needs.
Most business users don't need bang for the buck performance, nor is bang for the buck the most important metric for many businesses. If you read TFA, it mentions that many businesses feel that laptops improve the work of their staff. If a laptop increases the productivity of a $30K/year worker by 5%, that represents a theoretical increase of $1500/year, much more than the cost of a laptop vs. a desktop. Of course, you can't usually quantify such improvements, but in many cases, it's not hard to see how a laptop rather than a desktop can increase worker productivity and satisfaction. I know that I like the ability to go sit on the deck on a nice day for a while and get some fresh air while I continue working.
This is bad because you... are constantly exposing them to the possibility of being copied... once compromised are a nearly permanent vulnerability
Good biometric identification properly implimented (not necessarily easy to do, mind you) shouldn't be copyable or stealable. A poorly designed fingerprint scanner is bad because a mold can fake them. A poorly implimented fingerprint scanner is bad because the finger can be chopped off. But a good fingerprint scanner properly implimented (say, with a security goon sitting there making sure the user puts their finger on the scanner, not someone else's) is more secure than relying on just "something you have" - a security goon watching people swipe cards can't easily tell if it's me swiping my Sonitrol or someone that mugged me scanning my Sonitrol.
Fingerprints also make a fairly poor biometric measurement. I'm not saying that there are good ones yet, but there is potential in the future.
Re:as usual, blame the users for trying
on
Too Many Passwords
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I'd submit the entire organization would function more effectively were they all allowed access to the various systems sans passwords once they'd entered the building.
Beyond the excellent point that a very large part of computer attacks (including people prying into information they aren't supposed to have) are inside jobs, what you're proposing means that once a trojan/virus penetrated a user's computer, the inside of the network would be ripe for the taking. Just like when Blaster got in behind the firewalls via laptops and hit the unprotected systems.
Not to mention the fact that it's relatively easy to socially engineer yourself past the front door.
The world could function more efficiently in theory if no doors had locks and cars started by pressing a button, in practice it would be a really bad idea.
Requiring a network connection to work won't be a problem in the (hopefully near) future.
As other people have pointed out, there are plenty of countries where just getting power can be a struggle. I could mention rolling blackouts in CA too.
I live in an area with good power - I think I get about 8 second long flickers per year and one or two short outtages. My cable modem goes down at least once per week and is sometime down for time that's best measured in days. Even my work connection, a major university with gobs and gobs of bandwidth, has outtages on its world connections every month or two. That's not including scheduled downtime which occurs periodically when IOS needs to be updated. It's done early in the morning and would be a pain to students doing research, but would be a massive problem is students working on last minute papers suddenly no longer had their word processor.
It's going to be a long time before I trust the network with critical applications, particularly with local storage getting cheaper and more reliable. Running on an intranet, perhaps. Internet, not for a while.
Doing that would require that the locks know the valid credit card numbers as well as having a credit card swipe.
With the current setup, it's a simple pull method - get the data from the card and see if it's the correct room and time. With your proposed system, you have to push updates to the card locks on a frequent basis, which has a number of problems.
You could mitigate the problems of security by having the locks store a hash rather than the actual CC number, but you'd still have to update the locks on a regular basis, which requires an infrastructure that the hotels don't have.
And there'd still be the trust issue with consumers - how can you guarantee that someone hasn't replaced the CC scanner with a logger? I'm certainly not inclined to go around swiping my CC for non-financial reasons and I doubt the banks would be overly happy about it either.
I agree that adding vacation and sick days up to a smaller number of PTO days is wrong.
I'll confess that I have a knee jerk reaction against the idea of a single pool for leave and that's most likely due to the experiences of friends who've worked at companies that have both pooled leave and abusive rules on it. Stuff like not being able to take *any* leave for the first six months of employment, sick or not, only giving 10 days off per year total to junior employees, and so on.
It had been my plan to offer 20 days/year of PTO for all employees and have no adjustments for seniority.
For what it's worth, I consider the amount of leave that I get as a 5 year employee at a state university to be one of the major perks: 12-15 holidays (most of which I work, which become comp time I can take when I wish), 12 days leave (earned at the rate of one per month), 4 personal days, and 8 sick days. Obviously, that convoluted of a system does involve some overhead to keep track of.
Having almost 6 weeks a year off not including sick days is a big plus and significantly more than my friends in the private sector get. I make a little less than they do, but oh well.
If your business plan doesn't require people to stick around long, the no-benefit-for-seniority plan can be OK. If you do want to retain people, you'll have to provide motivation somehow, and leave is a standard and valuable way to do so.
Computer science is related to research, finding new and more efficient ways of doing different tasks (new algorithms, data structures), and understanding the underlying concepts behind a computer program (programming paradigms, logic)
Not that I disagree, but out of curiosity, what would you say computer scientists have added to the world in the past decade and change in the above fields? My late 1970s algorithm books are very similar to my mid 1990s algorithm books. Our databases are predominantly based on 1970s/80s relational theory. OOP, the major programming paradigm, is nothing new.
Part of what I suspect is leading to the increase in programmers as compared to computer scientists is the fact that there is so little innovation in the field - we've hit a stage where we're pretty damn efficient when we bother to be and there's little low hanging (or even high hanging) fruit to discover any more.
Then you are stupid for being suspicious of strange boxes showing up at your door.
When I was a teenager, I had the same piano teacher as the daughter of a man who'd been horribly injured and disfigured by a bomb sent by the Unibomber. No law enforcement, military, or government work in his past, just too involved with technology for a madman's taste. During the three years that I knew him, he had to wear a plastic face guard almost 24/7. Good times.
Let's just chalk this one up as another geek analogy bites the dust.
Regardless of bombs, you wouldn't find getting an unexpected package on the wrong date from a person who doesn't usually send you anything out of the ordinary? Right... What's your e-mail address?
It pulls up a window on the machine you're on, and shows your X session... There's no evidence on the host machine of what you were running or what you did.
And this beats keyloggers how? If they want this to be a serious corporate VNC tool, that's a major question that will have to be answered.
Yeah, that advice really helps when I'm trying to pass an 18-wheeler whose driver is nodding off.... Or when I'm minding my business on a one-lane highway, doing somewhere around the speed limit, and some drunk moron comes flying up behind me leaving me nowhere to go but forward in order to avoid being hit.
The other "examples" are nice stretches.
You really don't drive much, do you? I used to average about 800 miles a week on a highly congested interstate (part of our lovely pork filled transportation bill) and frequently drive the backroad highways of WV, and there are many times each week that someone in front of me or behind me would make me feel very uncomfortable, although I'd say that sleepyness was far more common than drunkenness. The point being that within the limits of the road, the vehicle, and my driving ability, I would put a safe distance between myself and then. Note, I have no accidents and no tickets.
With IT workers so commonly producing some of our best work 'after hours'...
Please don't read this as a flame, but what the hell is meant by this?
I'm often hit with inspiration for the solution to a problem or with a new idea that warrants development at random times, many of which fall outside the work day. I will frequently grab a laptop and put those flashes to use - too often they disipate if they're not acted on rapidly. Specifically related to the discussion at hand, those moments are easy to have when sitting around discussing life with friends, some of whom are co-workers. I am more than my job, but a good part of why I have the specific job I do is because I'm interested in the ideas that I work with. Therefore, I talk about them outside of work and often get good suggestions from friends.
Are people so brainwashed by capitalism that they think they have a moral duty to comply with their employers, and no right to stand up and say "Hey, go screw yourself. My personal time is mine and mine alone"?
An ideal employer recognises that some classes of employees put in valuable effort outside of the 8-5 time period and allow them flexibility as a result. That means that parents can spend time with their children in the afternoon and put in some time after the kids are in bed. It means that lunches can be as long as they take (and whenever), that three day weekends can be arranged without using leave, that a nice afternoon can be used for a hike, etc.
Don't assume that there's never a quid pro quo involved.
I own a hp laptop and i cant get some of it's features to work under Linux.... They put on their most expensive hardware an OS that they don't support.
What to make of this?
HP is a massive company with ~150,000 workers (minus those cuts that are about to happen). The team that does the very high end systems discussed in this article have very little to do with the team that designed your laptop, other than getting a paycheck from the same company. They have far different interests and customer needs than the laptop people do. Linux has very limited penetration and market share on laptops but a large and increasing share of the server market.
This is just a report about the general issue that all USB drivers have to be secure or a hardware device can be made to exploit the machine.
There's many specifications (IPV4 springs to mind) that weren't designed with security in mind. It's the responsibility of the OS writers to design their OS to handle such insecurities. There's nothing in the USB specs that say that the OS must run the USB driver at ring 0.
It is in no way about Windows, but actually about any operating system than implements USB.
The article gives two specific cases:
1. The ability to unlock locked systems (say, while the user is at lunch). This gives far more than just owning a system physically. You now have access to all of their network priviledges and everything else that relies on their single-sign on accounts. This is meaningless to Joe home user or most small businesses, but vastly significant to enterprise level situations. With physical access to my work Windows desktop, you could gain access to some e-mail and word processing. With access to my system logged in as me on the Active Directory, you would have access to my AD OU, networked drives, SSO enabled applications, etc. See the difference?
2. A USB drive that automagically copies the last used files onto a flash drive. The ability to subtly plug a drive in and retrieve it later opens all kinds of espionage capabilities.
it is not really worse than just inserting a boot CD that copies the relevant data to a secure server or so.
Beyond the statements I made above, rebooting a system in a secured environment can easily trigger monitoring systems' alerting capability.
It can also of course easily be fixed by disallowing loading of USB drivers without confirmation from the user.
For anyone interested, here's instuctions on how to (theoretically) disable USB entirely under Windows. Note that I've not tried the above process described, so it may or may not work. And another one discussing how to disable USB storage devices, although that may not be enough to prevent the exploit in question from working.
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How do we know it got paid for? The company making it has profited.
Wow. So you've looked at the books for B5 and know that the total income is in the Black? I didn't know being an anonymous Coward came with such awesome powers.
PS I now see that people who are for over-enthusiastic copyrights are also killers of puppies.
"He used sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes, and satire."
P.S. Send me your name and address, and I'll mail you a burned CD of a copywritten work. 100% legal. See, the important part is permission.
These are old shows that have long since been paid for.
And you KNOW this how? Further, if you bought stock in a company, would you support a regulation that you could only sell it for 150% of what you bought it for, or that after the dividents had brought in 150% of your purchase price you had to give it away? Corporations exist to make money. This money goes into making new things and providing money to the owners.
In fact, most of them should have entered the public domain long ago if our copyright system were not corrupted by dirty politicians being bribed by rich lobbyists.
The shows I saw listed were all created within the past few decades, within copyright protectiong long before there were masses of rich lobbyists extending copyright laws.
People can make good shows for much less than you think
OK, prove it. I speak with over a decade of professional experience in the music industry. I have also dabbled in video, doing costuming, lighting, camera work, audio recording, and editing/post production. My work's appeared on ESPN, PBS, and Australian music video programs. Not a ton of work, but enough to know what even just lighting a scene to look good takes. Your qualifications are?
Take a look some time at the numbers for the production cost of TV shows.
Slashdot favourite, Farscape, cost somewhere around $2 Million per episode, just to make it.
The last time I saw the numbers some people worked it out that to pay for the production, manufacturing, and distribution to give every cable and satellite subscriber every show on cable on DVD, without ads, would cost about eight dollars a month.
OK, let's pretend that there's 2 billion people in the world in this equation, all of whom pay in $8/month. Let's further pretend that there's 150 channels (In fact, there'd be many more than that, because once you go global there's going to have to be channels that provide local/local language programming), with 6 hours/day of unique programming. That works out to:
2,000,000,000*$8=
$16,000,000,000 pot. Divided by 150 channels:
$106,666,666 per channel. Divided by 30 days in a month:
$3,555,555 per day. Divided by 6 hours of unique programming leaves:
$592,592 per hour of programming.
And that's supposed to include the cost of distributing the content to the users on DVD too? I think their math is a little suspect. Perhaps they set out with an assumption and looked for "evidence" to prove it?
This is not about rewarding artists so they will make more content.
Actually it is - the artists involved get residuals from old shows.
How many more episodes of "The Prisoner" are going to be made that would not be made is copyrights were cut down to 7 years?
None. But your question is broken because no matter what (within the realm of likely possibility), no more episodes of "The Prisoner" will ever be made. It's about as valid as me asking how many more episodes would be made if I don't shoot two dozen adorable little puppies in the head.
What is more important is whether actors can continue acting in small but interesting shows such as the Prisoner rather than some schlocky sitcom, knowing that the Prisoner audience will be far more likely to subvert payment systems. What is more important is whether anyone would fund making more shows LIKE the Prisoner, based on the behaviour of the fans of existing shows. I can assure you that reducing copyright to 7 years would cause media production of all kinds to fall drastically. Sure, there'd be some amateur stuff that would try to fill in the gaps, but you know, amateur work is called that for a reason. The vast majority of it simply isn't very good and finding the stuff that is can be a major pain. I'd far rather watch The Prisoner than public access cable. How about you?
the content broadcaster gets paid for the ads by the advertisers when I download them, whether I watch them or not, as long as nobody but me knows that I didn't actually watch them. I could make a sandwich or use the restroom during the commercial and it would have the same effect as transcoding the media file without the commercial, just like with real TV.
True, and a certain amount of that is expected, although I'm sure they're considering something like the semi-interactive ads at Salon.com. (If I were in charge of the program, I'd also offer a low cost payment to get rid of the ads entirely, but that's just me.) There's a certain amount of ignoring expected. I imagine that part of what they're going to try to do is use targeted ads ala Google Ads to deliver ads that you might actually be interested.
But back to my original point - it's mostly about the perception of the geek audience. If I were an executive deciding what shows to offer and saw the original poster's immediate desire to remove the ads, and then looked at usage statistics and saw that geeks watched a lot of B5 and very little Wonder Years, I'd stop making things like B5 available. The very vocal part of Slashdot wants their media for free. No matter how the industry tries to accomidate them (iTunes, legal Napster, this), they will never be happy because they "deserve" media without any restriction or payment. This is a completely unworkable business model that will only lead less media that appeals to their segment (which, sadly, tends to overlap with mine) because companies simply can't make money doing it. Of course, most of these techno-utopians tend to not actually give anything back to society while demanding that others provide things to them for free..
My statement has nothing to do with the prissy attitudes of the end users. It has to do with corporations' perception of geeks as a potential target market. A company has decided to offer a product at no cost to users and their first response is to try to slash the only thing that returns value to the company out of it.
The upshot is that the things that appeal to this class of users will no longer be made. Want to know why Firefly got canceled? Want to know why Frascape got canceled? Why it's increasingly hard to find geeky books in bookstores? Make yourself a poor target demographic, suffer a decrease in interest in businesses in catering to you. It's like the punk bands that complain that bars don't want them to play there when they have a small draw, and what audience does show up either drinks before they get to the show or are straight edge.
They also require payment by using your bandwidth to serve this data to other users. So, either get rid of the ads or pay for the bandwidth yourself.
It's not an either or situation. The theoretical users of the service provide a combination payment of their bandwidth and having ads inserted. If it didn't use a P2P engine, there would either be more ads or a per episode charge. Given that TFA states that there will be a maximum of 2 minutes of ads (compared to the 8-10 you'd have in a rerun of a show), using a little bandwidth seems reasonable.
In principle i agree but shouldnt that content be already paid for many times over.
/1991 (duration dependant) should've been free/public domain :)
So? First, corporations exist to make money, not break even. The extra money gets funneled into making new things and to paying the owners of the company. Would you do business under the concept that you should make your money back but if a new way to make money came around the corner you should not profit from it? Would you work for a company that did? Farmers don't sell their crops until they get a certain return and then give the rest away.
From the original copyright duration, all programming prior to 1998
OK, what are you bringing to the plate in exchange? It's awful easy to say that others' work should be free when if it doesn't affect you, other than getting free stuff.
why do media companys publish so much bullsh!t content?
A number of reasons. Some of it is because people have different tastes. Most forms of media out the have had a number of people that thought it was worth spending money on making. There's a small amount of stuff that's generated just as a tax writeoff, but mostly it's a combination of bad judgement and the fickleness of the public. You basically create a bunch of stuff that you think is good, throw it out to the public, market it, and see what becomes popular. No one could have predicted the ubiquitous coverage that "Standing outside a broken phonebooth with money in my hand" received. You make a bunch of stuff like that and put it out. If you do it right, you make enough money to cover all of the experements, reward the ones that did well, and stay in business as a company.
Related to that is the fact that influential people will sometimes latch onto a bad project for whatever reason and push it forward. Hence why things like Battlefield Earth get made - a big enough person wants it to happen and the studios decide that placating that person is worth it. If Tom Cruise wants something to happen, it will, because the public will go see things that Tom Cruise is in.
Another part of it is that lowbrow tends to sell well. Insert the usual comments on Bread & Circus, no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American Public, and so on. Horrible sitcoms and reality shows not only attract a larger audience than, say, Firefly, but attracts an audience less likely to Tivo/download shows.
If they cut some 60% of the crap that is out there, they could save billions.
Perhaps. I have thousands of CDs, the vast majority of them are far from the mainstream, and a good chunk of them are prolly things that you'd describe as crap. People have different tastes.
Proprietary file format? (can't edit out commercials in Virtualdub)
And slashdot types wonder why media companies aren't falling all over themselves to cater to them. A company offers you FREE content in exchange for including ads in it. The FIRST thing you want to do is edit out the ads.
Want it without ads? Buy it.
Content costs money to create, particularly movies/TV. If you've never been involved in TV (let alone Movie) quality production, you might be surprise at how hard it can be. Despite the hype, you can't make a decent show with a DV Cam and a Powerbook.
If you want the content you like to be delivered to you in the format you want, you have to provide some kind of economic benefit back to those that produce it.
As the article notes, it seems that the main reason they released this chip is so business oriented writers on the Wall Street Journal will stop complaining about Intel/Dell's lack of dual core CPUs. Those writers aren't all that likely to care that much about the power/heat issues so much as keeping up with the Joneses.
I haven't seen the patent first hand, but often something obvious now, wasn't at that time. If it were then why wasn't someone else doing it already.
I can list many examples of this. The mouse, keyboard, screens, printers, windowing environment, The Internet, an Operating system and even a CPU and the IC chips, were at the time major conceptual steps forward.
As an aside, some of those concepts are really not that hard to conceptualize. The development of the printing press logically leads to the typewriter which leads to the electric typewriter which leads to printers. It's really not that complex. Likewise, a mouse is just an input device that gives an x,y position, which given our two dimensional representation of data is not that hard to conceptualize. It takes a certain cleverness to be the first one to come up with it, but it would inevitably have happened.
But back to the actual point, just because something's non-obvious doesn't mean that it should be patentable. Originally patents protected actual devices, not ideas. The patents in question are business method patents. Imagine where we would be right now if someone had been allowed to patent the IDEA of entering data into a computer via a tactile surface, displaying data visually, or the operating system.
Business method patents do nothing but stiffle innovation. Read one of the the patents in question. They basically admit that they're doing the exact same thing as prepaid phone service, just with wireless. It's like the slew of patents where people took common existing ideas and tacked on "but we're doing it on the internet" and were given patents that were common sense.
The upshot is that a four person company that has not actually developed a product is being allowed to squeeze a several hundred person company that actually created a sucessful product out of business because they [the four person company] filed a patent of the idea of using a unique identifier to look up the number of minutes that a user has left in a database. I severely doubt this was the intent of the founding fathers.
You're not a good candidate for the subscription model then. But here's a few of the reasons it works for me:
1. I can install the client on any number of computers (I work in several offices plus travel, resulting in quite a few desktops and three laptops). My playlists are synced between all of them and I can click and listen to them without having to copy files over manually.
2. There's lots of music I might want to listen to once a year. It's not worth $1 to buy them for that purpose, but to listen to any of them for $10/month is fine with me.
3. I like to try new music all the time. With the subscription model, I'm free to click on whatever fits my whim as many times as I want without paying a cent more. To me, the short samples that iTunes offers aren't enough to know if I want them or not - I shuffle them into playlists and check them out in full a couple times. If I like them enough to want to own them I buy them on CD after that.
4. Rather importantly, the tracks that I like will always be current. A new remastered version comes out? I can hear it for nothing more than I'd ordinarily pay. You would have to buy it again. A higher bitrate service is offered? I pay nothing, while you have to buy it again. A 5.1 mix comes out? Same thing. If you only buy a couple tracks, it's not that big a deal to buy it again, but if you listen to thousands like I do, it would get massively expensive.
In the end, viva la difference. We both have options that fit our needs.
To say nothing of more resilient balls.
Psst. You misspelled sterile.
the best bang for the buck performance
Most business users don't need bang for the buck performance, nor is bang for the buck the most important metric for many businesses. If you read TFA, it mentions that many businesses feel that laptops improve the work of their staff. If a laptop increases the productivity of a $30K/year worker by 5%, that represents a theoretical increase of $1500/year, much more than the cost of a laptop vs. a desktop. Of course, you can't usually quantify such improvements, but in many cases, it's not hard to see how a laptop rather than a desktop can increase worker productivity and satisfaction. I know that I like the ability to go sit on the deck on a nice day for a while and get some fresh air while I continue working.
This is bad because you ... are constantly exposing them to the possibility of being copied ... once compromised are a nearly permanent vulnerability
Good biometric identification properly implimented (not necessarily easy to do, mind you) shouldn't be copyable or stealable. A poorly designed fingerprint scanner is bad because a mold can fake them. A poorly implimented fingerprint scanner is bad because the finger can be chopped off. But a good fingerprint scanner properly implimented (say, with a security goon sitting there making sure the user puts their finger on the scanner, not someone else's) is more secure than relying on just "something you have" - a security goon watching people swipe cards can't easily tell if it's me swiping my Sonitrol or someone that mugged me scanning my Sonitrol.
Fingerprints also make a fairly poor biometric measurement. I'm not saying that there are good ones yet, but there is potential in the future.
I'd submit the entire organization would function more effectively were they all allowed access to the various systems sans passwords once they'd entered the building.
Beyond the excellent point that a very large part of computer attacks (including people prying into information they aren't supposed to have) are inside jobs, what you're proposing means that once a trojan/virus penetrated a user's computer, the inside of the network would be ripe for the taking. Just like when Blaster got in behind the firewalls via laptops and hit the unprotected systems.
Not to mention the fact that it's relatively easy to socially engineer yourself past the front door.
The world could function more efficiently in theory if no doors had locks and cars started by pressing a button, in practice it would be a really bad idea.
Requiring a network connection to work won't be a problem in the (hopefully near) future.
As other people have pointed out, there are plenty of countries where just getting power can be a struggle. I could mention rolling blackouts in CA too.
I live in an area with good power - I think I get about 8 second long flickers per year and one or two short outtages. My cable modem goes down at least once per week and is sometime down for time that's best measured in days. Even my work connection, a major university with gobs and gobs of bandwidth, has outtages on its world connections every month or two. That's not including scheduled downtime which occurs periodically when IOS needs to be updated. It's done early in the morning and would be a pain to students doing research, but would be a massive problem is students working on last minute papers suddenly no longer had their word processor.
It's going to be a long time before I trust the network with critical applications, particularly with local storage getting cheaper and more reliable. Running on an intranet, perhaps. Internet, not for a while.
Doing that would require that the locks know the valid credit card numbers as well as having a credit card swipe.
With the current setup, it's a simple pull method - get the data from the card and see if it's the correct room and time. With your proposed system, you have to push updates to the card locks on a frequent basis, which has a number of problems.
You could mitigate the problems of security by having the locks store a hash rather than the actual CC number, but you'd still have to update the locks on a regular basis, which requires an infrastructure that the hotels don't have.
And there'd still be the trust issue with consumers - how can you guarantee that someone hasn't replaced the CC scanner with a logger? I'm certainly not inclined to go around swiping my CC for non-financial reasons and I doubt the banks would be overly happy about it either.
I agree that adding vacation and sick days up to a smaller number of PTO days is wrong.
I'll confess that I have a knee jerk reaction against the idea of a single pool for leave and that's most likely due to the experiences of friends who've worked at companies that have both pooled leave and abusive rules on it. Stuff like not being able to take *any* leave for the first six months of employment, sick or not, only giving 10 days off per year total to junior employees, and so on.
It had been my plan to offer 20 days/year of PTO for all employees and have no adjustments for seniority.
For what it's worth, I consider the amount of leave that I get as a 5 year employee at a state university to be one of the major perks: 12-15 holidays (most of which I work, which become comp time I can take when I wish), 12 days leave (earned at the rate of one per month), 4 personal days, and 8 sick days. Obviously, that convoluted of a system does involve some overhead to keep track of.
Having almost 6 weeks a year off not including sick days is a big plus and significantly more than my friends in the private sector get. I make a little less than they do, but oh well.
If your business plan doesn't require people to stick around long, the no-benefit-for-seniority plan can be OK. If you do want to retain people, you'll have to provide motivation somehow, and leave is a standard and valuable way to do so.
Computer science is related to research, finding new and more efficient ways of doing different tasks (new algorithms, data structures), and understanding the underlying concepts behind a computer program (programming paradigms, logic)
Not that I disagree, but out of curiosity, what would you say computer scientists have added to the world in the past decade and change in the above fields? My late 1970s algorithm books are very similar to my mid 1990s algorithm books. Our databases are predominantly based on 1970s/80s relational theory. OOP, the major programming paradigm, is nothing new.
Part of what I suspect is leading to the increase in programmers as compared to computer scientists is the fact that there is so little innovation in the field - we've hit a stage where we're pretty damn efficient when we bother to be and there's little low hanging (or even high hanging) fruit to discover any more.
Then you are stupid for being suspicious of strange boxes showing up at your door.
When I was a teenager, I had the same piano teacher as the daughter of a man who'd been horribly injured and disfigured by a bomb sent by the Unibomber. No law enforcement, military, or government work in his past, just too involved with technology for a madman's taste. During the three years that I knew him, he had to wear a plastic face guard almost 24/7. Good times.
Let's just chalk this one up as another geek analogy bites the dust.
Regardless of bombs, you wouldn't find getting an unexpected package on the wrong date from a person who doesn't usually send you anything out of the ordinary? Right... What's your e-mail address?
It pulls up a window on the machine you're on, and shows your X session ... There's no evidence on the host machine of what you were running or what you did.
And this beats keyloggers how? If they want this to be a serious corporate VNC tool, that's a major question that will have to be answered.
The other "examples" are nice stretches.
You really don't drive much, do you? I used to average about 800 miles a week on a highly congested interstate (part of our lovely pork filled transportation bill) and frequently drive the backroad highways of WV, and there are many times each week that someone in front of me or behind me would make me feel very uncomfortable, although I'd say that sleepyness was far more common than drunkenness. The point being that within the limits of the road, the vehicle, and my driving ability, I would put a safe distance between myself and then. Note, I have no accidents and no tickets.
With IT workers so commonly producing some of our best work 'after hours'...
Please don't read this as a flame, but what the hell is meant by this?
I'm often hit with inspiration for the solution to a problem or with a new idea that warrants development at random times, many of which fall outside the work day. I will frequently grab a laptop and put those flashes to use - too often they disipate if they're not acted on rapidly. Specifically related to the discussion at hand, those moments are easy to have when sitting around discussing life with friends, some of whom are co-workers. I am more than my job, but a good part of why I have the specific job I do is because I'm interested in the ideas that I work with. Therefore, I talk about them outside of work and often get good suggestions from friends.
Are people so brainwashed by capitalism that they think they have a moral duty to comply with their employers, and no right to stand up and say "Hey, go screw yourself. My personal time is mine and mine alone"?
An ideal employer recognises that some classes of employees put in valuable effort outside of the 8-5 time period and allow them flexibility as a result. That means that parents can spend time with their children in the afternoon and put in some time after the kids are in bed. It means that lunches can be as long as they take (and whenever), that three day weekends can be arranged without using leave, that a nice afternoon can be used for a hike, etc.
Don't assume that there's never a quid pro quo involved.
I own a hp laptop and i cant get some of it's features to work under Linux. ...
They put on their most expensive hardware an OS that they don't support.
What to make of this?
HP is a massive company with ~150,000 workers (minus those cuts that are about to happen). The team that does the very high end systems discussed in this article have very little to do with the team that designed your laptop, other than getting a paycheck from the same company. They have far different interests and customer needs than the laptop people do. Linux has very limited penetration and market share on laptops but a large and increasing share of the server market.
This is just a report about the general issue that all USB drivers have to be secure or a hardware device can be made to exploit the machine.
There's many specifications (IPV4 springs to mind) that weren't designed with security in mind. It's the responsibility of the OS writers to design their OS to handle such insecurities. There's nothing in the USB specs that say that the OS must run the USB driver at ring 0.
It is in no way about Windows, but actually about any operating system than implements USB.
The article gives two specific cases:
1. The ability to unlock locked systems (say, while the user is at lunch). This gives far more than just owning a system physically. You now have access to all of their network priviledges and everything else that relies on their single-sign on accounts. This is meaningless to Joe home user or most small businesses, but vastly significant to enterprise level situations. With physical access to my work Windows desktop, you could gain access to some e-mail and word processing. With access to my system logged in as me on the Active Directory, you would have access to my AD OU, networked drives, SSO enabled applications, etc. See the difference?
2. A USB drive that automagically copies the last used files onto a flash drive. The ability to subtly plug a drive in and retrieve it later opens all kinds of espionage capabilities.
it is not really worse than just inserting a boot CD that copies the relevant data to a secure server or so.
Beyond the statements I made above, rebooting a system in a secured environment can easily trigger monitoring systems' alerting capability.
It can also of course easily be fixed by disallowing loading of USB drivers without confirmation from the user.
For anyone interested, here's instuctions on how to (theoretically) disable USB entirely under Windows. Note that I've not tried the above process described, so it may or may not work. And another one discussing how to disable USB storage devices, although that may not be enough to prevent the exploit in question from working.