If Skype, or even Flash, brought down your OS, you need a new OS (and more than likely a new computer). Seriously.
It's an application, and it doesn't even try to do anything fancy or to do with drivers (even the webcam interface is the most programmatically basic they can muster). It crashing your OS is your OS's fault. If you'd said "hung program" or "disk thrashing" or something else, I'd be on your side. But NOTHING should cause your machine to crash, no matter what it does with webcams, codecs and accelerated video windows.
No wonder you got a "nofix". I'd seriously go away and check your disk, RAM, OS install, OS updates and software updates.
(For the record: Skype installed for last 5 years, video chat used almost daily, updated whenever I feel but usually within a week or two of updates being released, on a 5-year old XP SP2 image. Used every day for 8 hours in work, 8 hours at home, sits in suspend overnight. Yes, I've had crashes, and yes Skype has stopped responding or crashed. But NEVER would I tolerate Skype if it did that to my machine.)
I could show you a box that ran for 3 hours producing 3+ kW over that time (hell, I could probably do 3+ kW for the entirety of the time). It's called a large UPS. Or a stoked and fuelled wood fire. Or even just some compact fuel and oxygen in a small box.
Everyone focuses on the input/output power, which means nothing. The reason this is news is because he's claiming cold-fusion, not that he could extract 9KWh from X amount of kgs of matter. We *KNOW* a million different ways to do that, but he's claiming cold fusion and THAT'S the part that the scientists are doubting and the only thing worthy of investigation (which he has, almost completely, blocked being investigated). What fuel exactly is it burning, how, and how much does that fuel cost/weigh?
What determines the result is not what energy he gets out but the process by which that energy arises. If you can prove even 100W of actual cold-fusion, people will beat a path to your door. New experiments are immediately suspicious by ramping up the number that only the ignorant care about but still without any way to explain what's going on.
A scientist doesn't rave about the next great upgrade of a commercial device. They rave about the great discovery of a currently-impractical but scientifically-interesting quirk of physics. This guy, by that definition, is nowhere NEAR a scientist, so what he's doing is almost certainly NOT science and thus, almost certainly NOT cold fusion. And that's all that matters. Whether it's not 1MW of cold fusion or not 10GW of cold fusion makes no difference whatsoever.
If you have exponential growths in available energy, that leads to exponential growths in:
- Spaceflight potential (hell, it suddenly becomes a cinch to take a entire power station to the Moon or Mars and back - and while you're there look for fuel, etc.).
- Food, water, heat, light, etc. for humans, which leads to many more productive, educated, "worryless" humans (i.e. we have 7bn productive people learning science instead of most of them trying to scrape a living to earn enough to eat for most of their day).
- Particle physics (which can only help us throw more energy at more subatomic matter and find more possible fusion fuels - this is ignoring the fact that fusion is a quite efficient way of using a fuel, much more so than the stuff we use at the moment - e=MC^2 provides a lot of energy from a little bit of matter if you do it right).
- Computing power. You can now just throw billions of simulations and refinery analysis etc. at a supercomputer that consumes whatever it needs and cools itself to whatever temperature you want. Farms of the damn things, limited only by space.
I don't see that we would have major problems even if we assume that humans are inherently dumb and will just consume whatever they can (and everyone ends up pulling MWh's for themselves all day long).
We really need an "Energy Age" where we solve that problem first, in order to prove that it won't spoil us. But of course, the next week the paper's will be begging us to cutdown because of shortage of X or environmental impact Y.
You cannot predict, to any reasonable level of accuracy, a binary value of "Sunny / Not Sunny" for anything past 3-5 days.
That's despite the fact that we have centuries/millennia of data, hugely complex models, thousands of amateurs and scientists in the field, that there are huge benefits to even the common man in doing so (let alone things like fisheries, farming, etc.), that the question is simple to define and simple to answer once the date draws nearer, etc.
What on earth makes anyone think that ANY mathematical formulae will reasonably predict the actions of millions of individual, self-managing, inter-connected entities that consider themselves to have free-will, can act impulsively and without reason, and interact in a billion times more complex ways than we can ever model?
Economics and forecasts are NOT about predicting the future. That's stupid and impossible. They are about determining what the most likely outcome is and "hedging your bets" that way. Sometimes (in fact, quite often) that will be wrong because you have insufficient data and are only projecting a "most likely" outcome from all of the statistics. That's why we don't let banks "run on empty" and they have to have some insurance, backup, funds, procedures etc. (even if they *aren't* perfect).
Economical models are not mathematical precise. They contain mathematics. They use mathematics. They rely on mathematics. But their inputs and results are chaotic and random and the best we can do to that sort of data is statistics (i.e. making arbitrary things equal to numbers, then guessing what that means based on those numbers).
I think you're over-egging the situation a little.
Even back in the early Pentium / DOS days, UAE was a perfectly capable emulation, able to play just about any mainstream game you threw at it. Hell, they sold it on disks with thousands of commercial ADF's and even Gremlin used it on their CD releases of their Amiga games for PC.
WinUAE took some time to get to the same state, mainly because of system requirements, but it was there. Sure there are a million and one arcane configurations of the top-end Amiga's and a handful of games where the emulation isn't accurate enough to run them but we're really talking niche usage and extremely powerful PC's required (even DosBox can only approach a 486 and that's running on the same damn instruction set as it's emulating!). You've been able to buy commercial-quality emulators for Atari and Amiga for over a decade.
I think your experience is tarnished somehow. If newer emulators are really that bad, I have a ten-year-old copy of WinUAE that'll run almost anything you throw at it, like every other emulator for every other platform on the planet (Hell, technically, even ZX Spectrum emulation isn't "complete" in any emulator at all).
Now I don't know the Linux situation but that has no bearing on how emulatable the Amiga is.
Can't get the programme you want, the music you want, the film you want, the software you want? Can't get it in the right format, the right quality, without DRM?
Then DON'T buy it. Don't consume it. If the producers of Lost want to play those sorts of games (and they are hardly innocent here - they sign the deals that say who can distribute their product how), then stop watching the damn thing. The reason these companies continue is that people STILL buy that crap and still desire product from people that are crapping on them. Don't be one of them.
Personally, when something comes up like that, I not only don't BUY it, but I do everything in my power to stop requiring it too, including seeking out alternatives that are completely legal and legitimate.
I've witnessed businesses go from MS Office to LibreOffice for just that reason - you cannot get what you want, for a price you want to pay, and use it the way you want, so you go elsewhere even if it's an inconvenience. Some people would turn to piracy but as a business you can turn to other, more enticing, offers like free Office suites that have MOST or ALL of the functionality you require.
The problem I have with piracy is that most of it is unnecessary. There's possibly an argument that some third-world country can't afford first-world licensing and so pirates to make their businesses operate. But TV, DVD, Blu-Ray, iPod's, etc. are luxury items. They are NOT necessary. That's what gets my goat about piracy - you're only ripping off stuff that you don't actually NEED (like the people I've seen who download EVERY episode of EVERYTHING "just in case" they get around to watching it at some point, and then rarely watch 10% of the stuff they've downloaded).
If you NEED it, you'll do whatever you need to do. If you only WANT it, then pay for it. If you can't pay for it, but still want it, find something else to want.
There is a BIG difference between "global warming", "climate change" and "synthetic climate change" (i.e. caused by man and wouldn't have happened if we weren't here). This is a study that on its own proves nothing, and (if confirmed by multiple independent sources and techniques) can only confirm the first term "warming".
At the moment, people want to do the equivalent of walking outside, seeing it's hotter than an hour ago and saying "We're all going to burn to death!" when, actually, they have no idea if it's summer, winter, where on the Earth (or not) they are, what time it is or anything else. In reality, the data we have means nothing and certainly *doesn't* indicate any sort of "climate change" that's out of the ordinary.
If you don't understand that, that's a shame.
I absolutely guarantee you 100% that the planet has been hotter than before, and will be again, and that the planet has been MUCH colder than this before, and will be again. The answer to the questions that people actually WANT to ask ("Are we causing the planet to heat up more than it would naturally?" and, if so, "Will this affect anything?") are hidden somewhere in that data and are not only elusive, but inconclusive and downright disappointing to climate-change-believers.
When I was in a restaurant in Corsica a few years ago, the waiter got talking to my father-in-law (a physicist) about science. In his broken English, he blamed the hot weather on people burning petrol in their cars because, and I quote, "It wasn't this hot last year". Our response and his adamant reaction led us to never eat in that place again.
Data is one thing. But the key to science is in the interpretation.
You'll probably find that by complying the first few times, you've pretty much stymied any chance of defending yourself legally. It's almost an admission: "They deleted it when asked, your honour, which means they must have known it was defamatory and yet they won't delete the other comments we've pointed out to them".
What you should have done is just sent back an email saying "Posters on this forum take responsibility for what they post and even retain copyright of it. If you believe something posted to be infringing a law, please file a court order to require me to identify the poster, or delete specific posts, and I will be happy to do so."
You're basically being held responsible for other people's posts, so offer to identify them so they can be forced to remove the post. And you're under no obligation to NOT mention a company at all. There's nothing in law that stops you saying "X threatened to sue over this post, so I've taken this post off", where X is a private individual or company and not a law enforcement entity, unless you receive a court ORDER about that.
Personally, in the same position, I'd probably have deleted the posts too, but when they start threatening silly things, I'd have just enlarged the "I've been sued" text one point size per email / letter / threat received from them until I received some sort of court order to remove that reference.
Sounds like scaremongering to me. If they want to put a blackbox in your car, they just need to make it law. The technical way they do it is neither here nor there and does *not* require Galileo in any way. Hell, they could do it the same way London runs the Congestion Charge Zone, or the way the DART tag works for the Dartford tunnel, or a myriad European countries manage their motorways charging, or just putting 10p on petrol.
Stop spreading bullshit. Road taxation is a completely separate issue that does NOT require (and never has required) Galileo. Hell, it doesn't even require GPS.
1) You have to buy the name-IP links. This is usually by crunching a certain amount of numbers for either bitcoin or namecoin. To me, this says that he who has the most computing power (i.e. government / banks / spammers) wins all the interesting names.
2) Because they have monetary value (and are created by it), you can potentially run into problems when transferring them to someone, or receiving - unwittingly handling stolen goods, etc.
3) The above = first come, first served. Yes, DNS has this problem too but first-come, first-served on something that is starting from scratch seems stupid. Why is there no thought yet to integration with existing DNS? The value of the DNS system is NOT in the management of it, but in the data included in it. Without that data,.namecoin is just as bad as any other.obscure TLD.
4) The name links are purely one name to one IP. No load-balancing, mailservers, SPF, DNS tricks, etc. This I would consider to be a HUGE disadvantage. If you're going to replace DNS, then you need to replace DNS. Not go back in time to pre-DNS days and implement only the single, simplest job that it does and which would be insufficient for huge swathes of the Internet. Hell, even if they'd just set it so that was the nameserver it linked to (which could then answer more questions about the subdomains, other records etc.), it would have been infinitely more useful, but that's NOT what it appears to do.
5) It's all a bit convoluted. Patches to this and that, here and there.
It seems to me that a P2P DNS alternative should act as nothing more than a P2P lookup of the already-existing and conventional DNS data. If enough people think that www.example.com resolves to 1.2.3.4, that's what it should resolve to under P2P DNS. There's no reason that a trust / reputation system couldn't do this, and still be secure to those people who trust nobody.
Sure, you can have other TLD's of your own choosing for purely P2P services, but what people want is a replica of current DNS under a different backend protocol, not a half-assed replacement.
I still need to look up google.com much more often than I would anything.namecoin and there's no facility to account for that currently. And, what the hell do you do about DNSSEC? If that comes first, you lose.
Your kit is still in use, still being sold, still works, still generally available. It just isn't the latest-greatest thing. It's like saying that last week's NVidia drivers are "obsolete". No, they're not. They're just not the latest version. They are obsolete when you start having problems obtaining or using them.
Also - so what? You bought it knowing what it was, what it could do and what games it runs on etc. That hasn't changed one single iota since you bought it. You still have what you bought.
(*COUGH* My entire professional income comes via supporting MS-based customers.)
The Top 10 has the highest current market share of the music market. Doesn't mean it isn't shit, it just means it's popular. If you don't understand the difference, you probably don't budget for hundreds/thousands of machines on a regular basis. McDonald's has a HUGE market share. Doesn't mean their food wins awards for cuisine, though.
And Slashdot is losing readers because the editorial quality is SHITE lately and there's plenty of non-MS stuff news that passes this site by all the time, not to mention the slashvertisements for absolute shite. Go have a look how many comments the "Kernel.org hacked" etc. stories get - it's nothing to do with the OS / culture, and everything to do with the editorial quality. Check my profile number and see how long I've been here. I guarantee you the decline of Slashdot readership is nothing to do with the Linux or any other free software you can name, but the site turning to unedited, uninteresting (i.e. NOT nerdy enough!), unchecked crap. But well done for turning it into an anti-anti-MS rant.
Misinformation only comes about if people don't tell the truth. My truth? Every service / product I ever used that was taken over by MS turned to shite or was bundled into the OS in a shite form. From NTBACKUP to DesktopStandard to Sysinternals, hell even Hotmail (of which I was a paying customer for almost a decade). Every time I am using something that MS has taken over, it turns to shite that I don't want to use even if, days before, it was vital networking utilities that had no equal.
Rely on NTBACKUP for backups? Better remember what hotfixes you have installed because you can't always restore without the EXACT same underlying version of Windows (literally, down to the hotfix). And you better check EVERY line of the backup log because it's easy to get errors that will slip by. They bought that from another company and you're supposed to rely on that half-assed cut-down util to backup your Windows servers.
And the Linux vs Windows security thing is an instant way to make yourself look a fool. It assumes, in ALL cases, that an admin of an equal knowledge set up both systems. And in that case, it is more generally true. If you're a dickhead on a Linux system, Linux won't make your administration procedures smart or secure. Which is a shame for yourself.
The kernel.org hack is a MUCH better example but, again, almost all human-error on the part of users (which is equally possible on both systems - no OS in the world can stop you from being a dickhead if you're the admin). MySQL, PHP and Apache are applications (one of which is also sold commercially). You shoot yourself in the foot there by not distinguishing. There are plenty of WAMP stacks out there too but they're just not as popular (Netcraft will confirm this for you if you really want to play the random-statistics-without-context game).
Your problem is in taking piecemeal parts of what "everyone" says, aggregating them, and thinking they are the opinion of everyone in all associated groups. Even edging close to "Linux on desktop" is putting you smack into that category. If someone tells you they think something is "more secure" or "has a better security design", you just hear the "secure" part and when something happens you think coming out and trolling about how Linux isn't "secure" is some marvellous insight that only you have.
When, actually, it just makes you look like a dick.
No problem. We'll charge you for Galileo too, when it comes up - and more because it's a more accurate system - and encrypt it so you can never use it without paying. Because you know what'll happen if you charge for it now? Nobody would touch it with a ten-foot-bargepole (distance measured by the Galileo constellation) and everyone would start giving Europe money instead (if you have to pay, might as well pay for something decent!).
And most of Europe doesn't have TV licences. Only the UK, to my knowledge, and you're sadly mistaken if you think it's a license for the TV instead of a badly-named sponsorship of the BBC (which is *always* referred to, linked to, and respected by other news establishments when something happens - including reporting on their own strikes and scandals pretty fairly and accurately) and associated services.
Humble Bundle Games are bad? World of Goo, Gish, Braid, Osmos, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Frozen Synapse, SpaceChem, Trine? Have you ever played them?
I had bought all of those listed above BEFORE seeing the bundle (in the case of Trine, 8 copies for friends, etc.). They're not top-of-the-range, graphics-card-pushing FPS from a top-name publishers, sure, but they're top-selling, professionally-produced games that were selling enough units on their own without the bundles.
Even this one's main game - Frozen Synapse - was on my computer and my brother's before it got close to the Humble Bundles. Sure, there's some crap in there too, but the majority of the games are extremely good, and already selling well in their own right via Steam normally. That's how they can afford to just let them be sold off, or open-sourced if HB makes enough money (in the case of Gish, etc.). Hell, I bought Gish god-knows-how-long ago - it must have made its costs back before the HB even existed.
The reason these things are popular is because it's a damn good deal - even if you assume the normal prices are way over-inflated (which they aren't), getting those games for even $10 is a bargain - there's HOURS of decent playtime in there for less than a 6th the price of a single full-price game. Redeemable on Steam, too, so no downloading and installing (just automatic double-click-and-wait).
I never mind supporting indie games anyway (hell, I paid way over what the bundle costs for the games inside it before it even existed), and the idea is novel but not unique (honesty boxes - they're even used in car parks in some places in the UK). People are buying it because the perceived value for money is enormous.
I just wish they would stop adding things in after - save that for the next bundle!
You are under absolutely no legal obligation, in the UK, to delete a photo - even on the order of a police officer. This made the news for the last couple of years and the police keep putting out memos to their officers to remind them.
It can be classed as destruction of evidence, actually, and if the police want to confiscate your item on suspicion of the photos being illegal, they have to formally confiscate it, give receipts etc. and then go through long procedures in order to be allowed to delete YOUR property (i.e. photos with your copyright). Otherwise you get situations where they confiscate phones used to take photos of, say, officers roughing up a suspect, and they would be able to delete your "evidence". It's happened before, and the officers were disciplined harshly. They have *no* right to your photographs.
If you're taking photos up girl's skirts, you can be arrested *for that offence*, the phone can be confiscated as part of the arrest / evidence procedures and the photos forcefully deleted only ONCE a crime has been established (but you wouldn't get them back - no more than they'd let you keep child porn, or hand you back your consignment of drugs).
If you're not arrested (and taking an innocent photo, even of other people in a private location, is not illegal - at absolute worst it's a civil matter and one that will be laughed out of court), the very worst they can do is confiscate the phone for "investigation". They would have to give it back. And they would have to leave all photographs on it alone.
That said, there's NO sense in being rude to a police officer at all. But they have no right to delete your photos (or make you delete them) either. If it was illegal, they should be arresting you for taking them. If it's not illegal, they shouldn't be deleting the photos. If it's a civil matter, they aren't involved at all. *Volunteering* to delete the photos (with appropriate disclaimers that you're choosing to do so, only to resolve the dispute, and not because they have any power to make you do so) is probably sensible, but not necessary. And ESPECIALLY because there was NO-ONE else in the photo at all - the security guards should lose their jobs for causing a scene about nothing when they should have been guarding stuff.
But going to the papers is even better - all those shopping centres now allow photo-taking (because it's more hassle than it's worth to ban it) and have probably lost a bit of money because of it (not to mention "wasting police time" for anything in the future that comes up - even if they WANT the police to do something, they now know the police are pretty powerless unless a crime has been committed).
The Windows GUI was from Xerox Parc (Jobs paid to go there, then was convinced it was "the next big thing", which shows only an amount of insight, not ingenuity) - that's the kind of story behind all the things he brought to market. He can sell, I'll give him that. I'm not sure why that makes him a martyr compared to, say, Tim Berners-Lee (who at least *does* invent stuff).
By the time you start attributing the web servers and spreadsheets to Apple/Jobs "somehow" - given that he had very very little to do with them other than they were wrote for his machines - you might as well attribute Sage, Doom 3 and nVidia drivers to Microsoft / Gates - they were written for MS operating systems first. And how many businesses have been run on Apple hardware compared to IBM-based historically? Not an awful lot.
The critical question you have is "What is there never was a Steve Jobs?" but the answer's probably not one you'd like - not a lot. The same things would have happened, maybe sooner, maybe later, but you can't say he - or even his company - "invented" half that stuff. He brought it to market, at opportune times, but that's just being a salesman - and I'm not sure why you'd celebrate someone being a good salesman unless he's bringing YOU commission.
I consider most of the early Apple equipment to be design nightmares, personally. I'm not saying they didn't sell, but I could never have used them.
He was more a salesman than anything and the god-like status inferred on him and everything he touches is rather misplaced, in my opinion. He can read the market, sure, but when was the light time you saw his name on an RFC, or a piece of code, or a piece of hardware? His *company*, sure, but that's just because of being able to hire talent. But the guy? We're mourning the death of a salesman - literally.
I don't use folders - what a pointless waste of time except to archive out so your inbox is empty once a year. I tag (actually, it's "label" in Opera but the same thing).
Opera is my main web and email client and all my email comes into my F4-left pane and gets tagged appropriately. You can have it learn from tagged emails, or provide strict rules. When you only want to see, e.g. emails from your online backup provider, you just click the relevant tag. You can also choose to have those show up in a general "unread mail" folder or not - whether or not they are read (i.e. you don't necessarily want to "read" every automated email and don't want to have to "read" them all to stop them hiding an important unread email).
If you only want to see incoming faxes from your fax-to-email system, you just click the relevant tag (I set it up by subject line but it takes seconds to create a tag for anything). If the fax was relevant to a particular project, you can tag it with that (or have it done automatically if your emails have enough content) and then it's under BOTH "fax" and that project name.
Searching? Start typing in the search boxes and it insta-narrows across either the email account you have selected or all accounts for the user (and it's a full text search, so you can just type anybody's name or even a word that you remember being in the email).
It also does the same for all my RSS feeds, too.
Remember what WinFS was promised to be? I pretty much have that for my email at the moment. I always wonder why people struggle along with clunky mail systems that only integrate into their browser by mailto: links. Hell, it even auto-saves any draft I ever make as soon as I start typing it. My mailboxes have followed me for YEARS now through so many versions of Opera. The oldest emails I have saved are from 2002 - and all insta-searchable without even telling how old or new they are.
Am I the only person on here who, despite making a living in IT, has has never owned a single Apple product in my entire life, doesn't want to own one, and probably will never own one (not out of some deep political motive but just because they don't sell things I want to buy)?
I'm much more interested in some tech news, which the "Steve Jobs dying" thing was FOR ONE DAY, and could be summarised in a single brief article. I don't need it front-page of a London paper, slapped across BBC News and then people dredging up any-old-article (not even a particularly interesting one) in order to use the "news" (now "olds") to seem relevant.
I hope we get the same amount of fuss when the creator of the Mario characters dies, or someone similar. Actually, I hope we get the amount of fuss *suitable* for when anyone like that dies, instead - i.e. one-day, one-article, done.
Hell, I once saw a VPN that rewrote its traffic to use ICMP messages and other nefarious means of communication in order to transmit packets.
It'd probably look odd if you KNEW to look at that individual's connection but the chances of finding *every* way that encrypted data can be slipped into another datastream are incredibly minimal.
You want to complain then. Obviously your contract specifies the availability precisely and you'll entitled to something for that kind of outage if you're running a business on it? No? Shocking.
But even so, just complain. My 10Mbps VM home connection slowed to slightly less than 1Mbps for three days until the engineer came out - they refunded the entire month's cost for the broadband and some more BEFORE THE ENGINEER HAD EVEN VISITED.
However, to provide my own useless anecdote, the BT Business ADSL2 connection in work (which is a large school literally METRES away from the town's exchange) has two lines, for which I designed and built a little power circuit for that can remote-cut-off the power to the modems (because that's often the only way to get them to reconnect).
It goes down THAT often that we are always bouncing between the two connections throughout the day (luckily, a couple of kernel patches and our Linux gateway handles it seamlessly for the 150 desktops it serves) and at least 2-3 times a week they BOTH go off and have to be reset (either automatically, or by text message). We know if an off-site backup fails because we get an email from our online backup provider and when it does, we just text the box to reset the modems and the next backup will (probably) succeed. Myself and the bursar both have the number in our speed-dial.
Even then, we carry two 3G stick's in the school (one supplied by BT) for emergency use that the network can run off (albeit slowly) for about a day before we hit the usage limit on one of them.
And that's on their special "educational" service where they provide extra support and greater service.
By that measure, anyone who has a care that goes from A to B should be happy, no matter how much they paid - whether or not the thing jerks like a kangaroo down the road, puffs out black smoke, or consumes twice as much petrol as others.
I believe this experiment is more about getting some numbers that can be used to combat the "Unlimited" downloads, "Up to 10Mbps" etc. advertising. When you have to provide a MINIMUM 10Mbps service, you start having to do things like: fixing your system to provide timely access when all your subscribers are maxing out the connection, not lying about how many people can get your service, having to service lines that are substandard. Although just having a 10Mbps doesn't cure anything directly (because latency could be through the roof etc.), it stops a lot of dirty tricks and if you MUST provide a certain level of service, you can't just go making the latency or other factors unbearable in order to do so because you'll just lose customers. But if you're the only ISP in an area and only advertised "Up to 2MBps", you can pretty much do what you like at the moment.
It's a first step and, more importantly, means that someone wants to check all these ludicrous claims. Access to the Internet just became a "need" that has to be strictly regulated as regards claims because now we know that the EU are watching.
And to be honest, how on Earth do you think you'll ever get a reasonable standard if ANYONE'S opinion on "I can watch YouTube or not stands?" It would just mean they'd make YouTube videos run at 5fps and everyone would be happy? There's truth in numbers, if you collect the right ones and analyse them properly. I would guess that the "black-box" which they want to put into homes not only measures bandwidth but latency, routing issues, etc. too
Slashdot Mirror
If Skype, or even Flash, brought down your OS, you need a new OS (and more than likely a new computer). Seriously.
It's an application, and it doesn't even try to do anything fancy or to do with drivers (even the webcam interface is the most programmatically basic they can muster). It crashing your OS is your OS's fault. If you'd said "hung program" or "disk thrashing" or something else, I'd be on your side. But NOTHING should cause your machine to crash, no matter what it does with webcams, codecs and accelerated video windows.
No wonder you got a "nofix". I'd seriously go away and check your disk, RAM, OS install, OS updates and software updates.
(For the record: Skype installed for last 5 years, video chat used almost daily, updated whenever I feel but usually within a week or two of updates being released, on a 5-year old XP SP2 image. Used every day for 8 hours in work, 8 hours at home, sits in suspend overnight. Yes, I've had crashes, and yes Skype has stopped responding or crashed. But NEVER would I tolerate Skype if it did that to my machine.)
I could show you a box that ran for 3 hours producing 3+ kW over that time (hell, I could probably do 3+ kW for the entirety of the time). It's called a large UPS. Or a stoked and fuelled wood fire. Or even just some compact fuel and oxygen in a small box.
Everyone focuses on the input/output power, which means nothing. The reason this is news is because he's claiming cold-fusion, not that he could extract 9KWh from X amount of kgs of matter. We *KNOW* a million different ways to do that, but he's claiming cold fusion and THAT'S the part that the scientists are doubting and the only thing worthy of investigation (which he has, almost completely, blocked being investigated). What fuel exactly is it burning, how, and how much does that fuel cost/weigh?
What determines the result is not what energy he gets out but the process by which that energy arises. If you can prove even 100W of actual cold-fusion, people will beat a path to your door. New experiments are immediately suspicious by ramping up the number that only the ignorant care about but still without any way to explain what's going on.
A scientist doesn't rave about the next great upgrade of a commercial device. They rave about the great discovery of a currently-impractical but scientifically-interesting quirk of physics. This guy, by that definition, is nowhere NEAR a scientist, so what he's doing is almost certainly NOT science and thus, almost certainly NOT cold fusion. And that's all that matters. Whether it's not 1MW of cold fusion or not 10GW of cold fusion makes no difference whatsoever.
If you have exponential growths in available energy, that leads to exponential growths in:
- Spaceflight potential (hell, it suddenly becomes a cinch to take a entire power station to the Moon or Mars and back - and while you're there look for fuel, etc.).
- Food, water, heat, light, etc. for humans, which leads to many more productive, educated, "worryless" humans (i.e. we have 7bn productive people learning science instead of most of them trying to scrape a living to earn enough to eat for most of their day).
- Particle physics (which can only help us throw more energy at more subatomic matter and find more possible fusion fuels - this is ignoring the fact that fusion is a quite efficient way of using a fuel, much more so than the stuff we use at the moment - e=MC^2 provides a lot of energy from a little bit of matter if you do it right).
- Computing power. You can now just throw billions of simulations and refinery analysis etc. at a supercomputer that consumes whatever it needs and cools itself to whatever temperature you want. Farms of the damn things, limited only by space.
I don't see that we would have major problems even if we assume that humans are inherently dumb and will just consume whatever they can (and everyone ends up pulling MWh's for themselves all day long).
We really need an "Energy Age" where we solve that problem first, in order to prove that it won't spoil us. But of course, the next week the paper's will be begging us to cutdown because of shortage of X or environmental impact Y.
You cannot predict, to any reasonable level of accuracy, a binary value of "Sunny / Not Sunny" for anything past 3-5 days.
That's despite the fact that we have centuries/millennia of data, hugely complex models, thousands of amateurs and scientists in the field, that there are huge benefits to even the common man in doing so (let alone things like fisheries, farming, etc.), that the question is simple to define and simple to answer once the date draws nearer, etc.
What on earth makes anyone think that ANY mathematical formulae will reasonably predict the actions of millions of individual, self-managing, inter-connected entities that consider themselves to have free-will, can act impulsively and without reason, and interact in a billion times more complex ways than we can ever model?
Economics and forecasts are NOT about predicting the future. That's stupid and impossible. They are about determining what the most likely outcome is and "hedging your bets" that way. Sometimes (in fact, quite often) that will be wrong because you have insufficient data and are only projecting a "most likely" outcome from all of the statistics. That's why we don't let banks "run on empty" and they have to have some insurance, backup, funds, procedures etc. (even if they *aren't* perfect).
Economical models are not mathematical precise. They contain mathematics. They use mathematics. They rely on mathematics. But their inputs and results are chaotic and random and the best we can do to that sort of data is statistics (i.e. making arbitrary things equal to numbers, then guessing what that means based on those numbers).
I think you're over-egging the situation a little.
Even back in the early Pentium / DOS days, UAE was a perfectly capable emulation, able to play just about any mainstream game you threw at it. Hell, they sold it on disks with thousands of commercial ADF's and even Gremlin used it on their CD releases of their Amiga games for PC.
WinUAE took some time to get to the same state, mainly because of system requirements, but it was there. Sure there are a million and one arcane configurations of the top-end Amiga's and a handful of games where the emulation isn't accurate enough to run them but we're really talking niche usage and extremely powerful PC's required (even DosBox can only approach a 486 and that's running on the same damn instruction set as it's emulating!). You've been able to buy commercial-quality emulators for Atari and Amiga for over a decade.
I think your experience is tarnished somehow. If newer emulators are really that bad, I have a ten-year-old copy of WinUAE that'll run almost anything you throw at it, like every other emulator for every other platform on the planet (Hell, technically, even ZX Spectrum emulation isn't "complete" in any emulator at all).
Now I don't know the Linux situation but that has no bearing on how emulatable the Amiga is.
Can't get the programme you want, the music you want, the film you want, the software you want? Can't get it in the right format, the right quality, without DRM?
Then DON'T buy it. Don't consume it. If the producers of Lost want to play those sorts of games (and they are hardly innocent here - they sign the deals that say who can distribute their product how), then stop watching the damn thing. The reason these companies continue is that people STILL buy that crap and still desire product from people that are crapping on them. Don't be one of them.
Personally, when something comes up like that, I not only don't BUY it, but I do everything in my power to stop requiring it too, including seeking out alternatives that are completely legal and legitimate.
I've witnessed businesses go from MS Office to LibreOffice for just that reason - you cannot get what you want, for a price you want to pay, and use it the way you want, so you go elsewhere even if it's an inconvenience. Some people would turn to piracy but as a business you can turn to other, more enticing, offers like free Office suites that have MOST or ALL of the functionality you require.
The problem I have with piracy is that most of it is unnecessary. There's possibly an argument that some third-world country can't afford first-world licensing and so pirates to make their businesses operate. But TV, DVD, Blu-Ray, iPod's, etc. are luxury items. They are NOT necessary. That's what gets my goat about piracy - you're only ripping off stuff that you don't actually NEED (like the people I've seen who download EVERY episode of EVERYTHING "just in case" they get around to watching it at some point, and then rarely watch 10% of the stuff they've downloaded).
If you NEED it, you'll do whatever you need to do.
If you only WANT it, then pay for it.
If you can't pay for it, but still want it, find something else to want.
There is a BIG difference between "global warming", "climate change" and "synthetic climate change" (i.e. caused by man and wouldn't have happened if we weren't here). This is a study that on its own proves nothing, and (if confirmed by multiple independent sources and techniques) can only confirm the first term "warming".
At the moment, people want to do the equivalent of walking outside, seeing it's hotter than an hour ago and saying "We're all going to burn to death!" when, actually, they have no idea if it's summer, winter, where on the Earth (or not) they are, what time it is or anything else. In reality, the data we have means nothing and certainly *doesn't* indicate any sort of "climate change" that's out of the ordinary.
If you don't understand that, that's a shame.
I absolutely guarantee you 100% that the planet has been hotter than before, and will be again, and that the planet has been MUCH colder than this before, and will be again. The answer to the questions that people actually WANT to ask ("Are we causing the planet to heat up more than it would naturally?" and, if so, "Will this affect anything?") are hidden somewhere in that data and are not only elusive, but inconclusive and downright disappointing to climate-change-believers.
When I was in a restaurant in Corsica a few years ago, the waiter got talking to my father-in-law (a physicist) about science. In his broken English, he blamed the hot weather on people burning petrol in their cars because, and I quote, "It wasn't this hot last year". Our response and his adamant reaction led us to never eat in that place again.
Data is one thing. But the key to science is in the interpretation.
You'll probably find that by complying the first few times, you've pretty much stymied any chance of defending yourself legally. It's almost an admission: "They deleted it when asked, your honour, which means they must have known it was defamatory and yet they won't delete the other comments we've pointed out to them".
What you should have done is just sent back an email saying "Posters on this forum take responsibility for what they post and even retain copyright of it. If you believe something posted to be infringing a law, please file a court order to require me to identify the poster, or delete specific posts, and I will be happy to do so."
You're basically being held responsible for other people's posts, so offer to identify them so they can be forced to remove the post. And you're under no obligation to NOT mention a company at all. There's nothing in law that stops you saying "X threatened to sue over this post, so I've taken this post off", where X is a private individual or company and not a law enforcement entity, unless you receive a court ORDER about that.
Personally, in the same position, I'd probably have deleted the posts too, but when they start threatening silly things, I'd have just enlarged the "I've been sued" text one point size per email / letter / threat received from them until I received some sort of court order to remove that reference.
It is not libellous or defamatory to post a fact.
And what would this do that GPS wouldn't?
Sounds like scaremongering to me. If they want to put a blackbox in your car, they just need to make it law. The technical way they do it is neither here nor there and does *not* require Galileo in any way. Hell, they could do it the same way London runs the Congestion Charge Zone, or the way the DART tag works for the Dartford tunnel, or a myriad European countries manage their motorways charging, or just putting 10p on petrol.
Stop spreading bullshit. Road taxation is a completely separate issue that does NOT require (and never has required) Galileo. Hell, it doesn't even require GPS.
The problems I see with namecoin appear to be:
1) You have to buy the name-IP links. This is usually by crunching a certain amount of numbers for either bitcoin or namecoin. To me, this says that he who has the most computing power (i.e. government / banks / spammers) wins all the interesting names.
2) Because they have monetary value (and are created by it), you can potentially run into problems when transferring them to someone, or receiving - unwittingly handling stolen goods, etc.
3) The above = first come, first served. Yes, DNS has this problem too but first-come, first-served on something that is starting from scratch seems stupid. Why is there no thought yet to integration with existing DNS? The value of the DNS system is NOT in the management of it, but in the data included in it. Without that data, .namecoin is just as bad as any other .obscure TLD.
4) The name links are purely one name to one IP. No load-balancing, mailservers, SPF, DNS tricks, etc. This I would consider to be a HUGE disadvantage. If you're going to replace DNS, then you need to replace DNS. Not go back in time to pre-DNS days and implement only the single, simplest job that it does and which would be insufficient for huge swathes of the Internet. Hell, even if they'd just set it so that was the nameserver it linked to (which could then answer more questions about the subdomains, other records etc.), it would have been infinitely more useful, but that's NOT what it appears to do.
5) It's all a bit convoluted. Patches to this and that, here and there.
It seems to me that a P2P DNS alternative should act as nothing more than a P2P lookup of the already-existing and conventional DNS data. If enough people think that www.example.com resolves to 1.2.3.4, that's what it should resolve to under P2P DNS. There's no reason that a trust / reputation system couldn't do this, and still be secure to those people who trust nobody.
Sure, you can have other TLD's of your own choosing for purely P2P services, but what people want is a replica of current DNS under a different backend protocol, not a half-assed replacement.
I still need to look up google.com much more often than I would anything.namecoin and there's no facility to account for that currently. And, what the hell do you do about DNSSEC? If that comes first, you lose.
I think you need to look up the word "obsolete".
Your kit is still in use, still being sold, still works, still generally available. It just isn't the latest-greatest thing. It's like saying that last week's NVidia drivers are "obsolete". No, they're not. They're just not the latest version. They are obsolete when you start having problems obtaining or using them.
Also - so what? You bought it knowing what it was, what it could do and what games it runs on etc. That hasn't changed one single iota since you bought it. You still have what you bought.
(*COUGH* My entire professional income comes via supporting MS-based customers.)
The Top 10 has the highest current market share of the music market. Doesn't mean it isn't shit, it just means it's popular. If you don't understand the difference, you probably don't budget for hundreds/thousands of machines on a regular basis. McDonald's has a HUGE market share. Doesn't mean their food wins awards for cuisine, though.
And Slashdot is losing readers because the editorial quality is SHITE lately and there's plenty of non-MS stuff news that passes this site by all the time, not to mention the slashvertisements for absolute shite. Go have a look how many comments the "Kernel.org hacked" etc. stories get - it's nothing to do with the OS / culture, and everything to do with the editorial quality. Check my profile number and see how long I've been here. I guarantee you the decline of Slashdot readership is nothing to do with the Linux or any other free software you can name, but the site turning to unedited, uninteresting (i.e. NOT nerdy enough!), unchecked crap. But well done for turning it into an anti-anti-MS rant.
Misinformation only comes about if people don't tell the truth. My truth? Every service / product I ever used that was taken over by MS turned to shite or was bundled into the OS in a shite form. From NTBACKUP to DesktopStandard to Sysinternals, hell even Hotmail (of which I was a paying customer for almost a decade). Every time I am using something that MS has taken over, it turns to shite that I don't want to use even if, days before, it was vital networking utilities that had no equal.
Rely on NTBACKUP for backups? Better remember what hotfixes you have installed because you can't always restore without the EXACT same underlying version of Windows (literally, down to the hotfix). And you better check EVERY line of the backup log because it's easy to get errors that will slip by. They bought that from another company and you're supposed to rely on that half-assed cut-down util to backup your Windows servers.
And the Linux vs Windows security thing is an instant way to make yourself look a fool. It assumes, in ALL cases, that an admin of an equal knowledge set up both systems. And in that case, it is more generally true. If you're a dickhead on a Linux system, Linux won't make your administration procedures smart or secure. Which is a shame for yourself.
The kernel.org hack is a MUCH better example but, again, almost all human-error on the part of users (which is equally possible on both systems - no OS in the world can stop you from being a dickhead if you're the admin). MySQL, PHP and Apache are applications (one of which is also sold commercially). You shoot yourself in the foot there by not distinguishing. There are plenty of WAMP stacks out there too but they're just not as popular (Netcraft will confirm this for you if you really want to play the random-statistics-without-context game).
Your problem is in taking piecemeal parts of what "everyone" says, aggregating them, and thinking they are the opinion of everyone in all associated groups. Even edging close to "Linux on desktop" is putting you smack into that category. If someone tells you they think something is "more secure" or "has a better security design", you just hear the "secure" part and when something happens you think coming out and trolling about how Linux isn't "secure" is some marvellous insight that only you have.
When, actually, it just makes you look like a dick.
In England, we're actually encouraging them into our 4G networks:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/10/cornish_lte/
Is anyone else like me and thinking:
"Just FOR ONCE, Microsoft, just ONCE, prove us all wrong with our predictions of doom for a platform you take over / decision you make."
If it happened, JUST ONCE, I'd see Microsoft in a different light.
Wouldn't it be simpler to just switch your phone off?
No problem. We'll charge you for Galileo too, when it comes up - and more because it's a more accurate system - and encrypt it so you can never use it without paying. Because you know what'll happen if you charge for it now? Nobody would touch it with a ten-foot-bargepole (distance measured by the Galileo constellation) and everyone would start giving Europe money instead (if you have to pay, might as well pay for something decent!).
And most of Europe doesn't have TV licences. Only the UK, to my knowledge, and you're sadly mistaken if you think it's a license for the TV instead of a badly-named sponsorship of the BBC (which is *always* referred to, linked to, and respected by other news establishments when something happens - including reporting on their own strikes and scandals pretty fairly and accurately) and associated services.
Humble Bundle Games are bad? World of Goo, Gish, Braid, Osmos, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Frozen Synapse, SpaceChem, Trine? Have you ever played them?
I had bought all of those listed above BEFORE seeing the bundle (in the case of Trine, 8 copies for friends, etc.). They're not top-of-the-range, graphics-card-pushing FPS from a top-name publishers, sure, but they're top-selling, professionally-produced games that were selling enough units on their own without the bundles.
Even this one's main game - Frozen Synapse - was on my computer and my brother's before it got close to the Humble Bundles. Sure, there's some crap in there too, but the majority of the games are extremely good, and already selling well in their own right via Steam normally. That's how they can afford to just let them be sold off, or open-sourced if HB makes enough money (in the case of Gish, etc.). Hell, I bought Gish god-knows-how-long ago - it must have made its costs back before the HB even existed.
The reason these things are popular is because it's a damn good deal - even if you assume the normal prices are way over-inflated (which they aren't), getting those games for even $10 is a bargain - there's HOURS of decent playtime in there for less than a 6th the price of a single full-price game. Redeemable on Steam, too, so no downloading and installing (just automatic double-click-and-wait).
I never mind supporting indie games anyway (hell, I paid way over what the bundle costs for the games inside it before it even existed), and the idea is novel but not unique (honesty boxes - they're even used in car parks in some places in the UK). People are buying it because the perceived value for money is enormous.
I just wish they would stop adding things in after - save that for the next bundle!
Credit Card Transaction Fees: $999,999.99
You are under absolutely no legal obligation, in the UK, to delete a photo - even on the order of a police officer. This made the news for the last couple of years and the police keep putting out memos to their officers to remind them.
It can be classed as destruction of evidence, actually, and if the police want to confiscate your item on suspicion of the photos being illegal, they have to formally confiscate it, give receipts etc. and then go through long procedures in order to be allowed to delete YOUR property (i.e. photos with your copyright). Otherwise you get situations where they confiscate phones used to take photos of, say, officers roughing up a suspect, and they would be able to delete your "evidence". It's happened before, and the officers were disciplined harshly. They have *no* right to your photographs.
If you're taking photos up girl's skirts, you can be arrested *for that offence*, the phone can be confiscated as part of the arrest / evidence procedures and the photos forcefully deleted only ONCE a crime has been established (but you wouldn't get them back - no more than they'd let you keep child porn, or hand you back your consignment of drugs).
If you're not arrested (and taking an innocent photo, even of other people in a private location, is not illegal - at absolute worst it's a civil matter and one that will be laughed out of court), the very worst they can do is confiscate the phone for "investigation". They would have to give it back. And they would have to leave all photographs on it alone.
That said, there's NO sense in being rude to a police officer at all. But they have no right to delete your photos (or make you delete them) either. If it was illegal, they should be arresting you for taking them. If it's not illegal, they shouldn't be deleting the photos. If it's a civil matter, they aren't involved at all. *Volunteering* to delete the photos (with appropriate disclaimers that you're choosing to do so, only to resolve the dispute, and not because they have any power to make you do so) is probably sensible, but not necessary. And ESPECIALLY because there was NO-ONE else in the photo at all - the security guards should lose their jobs for causing a scene about nothing when they should have been guarding stuff.
But going to the papers is even better - all those shopping centres now allow photo-taking (because it's more hassle than it's worth to ban it) and have probably lost a bit of money because of it (not to mention "wasting police time" for anything in the future that comes up - even if they WANT the police to do something, they now know the police are pretty powerless unless a crime has been committed).
The Windows GUI was from Xerox Parc (Jobs paid to go there, then was convinced it was "the next big thing", which shows only an amount of insight, not ingenuity) - that's the kind of story behind all the things he brought to market. He can sell, I'll give him that. I'm not sure why that makes him a martyr compared to, say, Tim Berners-Lee (who at least *does* invent stuff).
By the time you start attributing the web servers and spreadsheets to Apple/Jobs "somehow" - given that he had very very little to do with them other than they were wrote for his machines - you might as well attribute Sage, Doom 3 and nVidia drivers to Microsoft / Gates - they were written for MS operating systems first. And how many businesses have been run on Apple hardware compared to IBM-based historically? Not an awful lot.
The critical question you have is "What is there never was a Steve Jobs?" but the answer's probably not one you'd like - not a lot. The same things would have happened, maybe sooner, maybe later, but you can't say he - or even his company - "invented" half that stuff. He brought it to market, at opportune times, but that's just being a salesman - and I'm not sure why you'd celebrate someone being a good salesman unless he's bringing YOU commission.
I consider most of the early Apple equipment to be design nightmares, personally. I'm not saying they didn't sell, but I could never have used them.
He was more a salesman than anything and the god-like status inferred on him and everything he touches is rather misplaced, in my opinion. He can read the market, sure, but when was the light time you saw his name on an RFC, or a piece of code, or a piece of hardware? His *company*, sure, but that's just because of being able to hire talent. But the guy? We're mourning the death of a salesman - literally.
I don't use folders - what a pointless waste of time except to archive out so your inbox is empty once a year. I tag (actually, it's "label" in Opera but the same thing).
Opera is my main web and email client and all my email comes into my F4-left pane and gets tagged appropriately. You can have it learn from tagged emails, or provide strict rules. When you only want to see, e.g. emails from your online backup provider, you just click the relevant tag. You can also choose to have those show up in a general "unread mail" folder or not - whether or not they are read (i.e. you don't necessarily want to "read" every automated email and don't want to have to "read" them all to stop them hiding an important unread email).
If you only want to see incoming faxes from your fax-to-email system, you just click the relevant tag (I set it up by subject line but it takes seconds to create a tag for anything). If the fax was relevant to a particular project, you can tag it with that (or have it done automatically if your emails have enough content) and then it's under BOTH "fax" and that project name.
Searching? Start typing in the search boxes and it insta-narrows across either the email account you have selected or all accounts for the user (and it's a full text search, so you can just type anybody's name or even a word that you remember being in the email).
It also does the same for all my RSS feeds, too.
Remember what WinFS was promised to be? I pretty much have that for my email at the moment. I always wonder why people struggle along with clunky mail systems that only integrate into their browser by mailto: links. Hell, it even auto-saves any draft I ever make as soon as I start typing it. My mailboxes have followed me for YEARS now through so many versions of Opera. The oldest emails I have saved are from 2002 - and all insta-searchable without even telling how old or new they are.
Am I the only person on here who, despite making a living in IT, has has never owned a single Apple product in my entire life, doesn't want to own one, and probably will never own one (not out of some deep political motive but just because they don't sell things I want to buy)?
I'm much more interested in some tech news, which the "Steve Jobs dying" thing was FOR ONE DAY, and could be summarised in a single brief article. I don't need it front-page of a London paper, slapped across BBC News and then people dredging up any-old-article (not even a particularly interesting one) in order to use the "news" (now "olds") to seem relevant.
I hope we get the same amount of fuss when the creator of the Mario characters dies, or someone similar. Actually, I hope we get the amount of fuss *suitable* for when anyone like that dies, instead - i.e. one-day, one-article, done.
Hell, I once saw a VPN that rewrote its traffic to use ICMP messages and other nefarious means of communication in order to transmit packets.
It'd probably look odd if you KNEW to look at that individual's connection but the chances of finding *every* way that encrypted data can be slipped into another datastream are incredibly minimal.
Hell, VPN-over-HTTP-proxy is very common.
You want to complain then. Obviously your contract specifies the availability precisely and you'll entitled to something for that kind of outage if you're running a business on it? No? Shocking.
But even so, just complain. My 10Mbps VM home connection slowed to slightly less than 1Mbps for three days until the engineer came out - they refunded the entire month's cost for the broadband and some more BEFORE THE ENGINEER HAD EVEN VISITED.
However, to provide my own useless anecdote, the BT Business ADSL2 connection in work (which is a large school literally METRES away from the town's exchange) has two lines, for which I designed and built a little power circuit for that can remote-cut-off the power to the modems (because that's often the only way to get them to reconnect).
It goes down THAT often that we are always bouncing between the two connections throughout the day (luckily, a couple of kernel patches and our Linux gateway handles it seamlessly for the 150 desktops it serves) and at least 2-3 times a week they BOTH go off and have to be reset (either automatically, or by text message). We know if an off-site backup fails because we get an email from our online backup provider and when it does, we just text the box to reset the modems and the next backup will (probably) succeed. Myself and the bursar both have the number in our speed-dial.
Even then, we carry two 3G stick's in the school (one supplied by BT) for emergency use that the network can run off (albeit slowly) for about a day before we hit the usage limit on one of them.
And that's on their special "educational" service where they provide extra support and greater service.
By that measure, anyone who has a care that goes from A to B should be happy, no matter how much they paid - whether or not the thing jerks like a kangaroo down the road, puffs out black smoke, or consumes twice as much petrol as others.
I believe this experiment is more about getting some numbers that can be used to combat the "Unlimited" downloads, "Up to 10Mbps" etc. advertising. When you have to provide a MINIMUM 10Mbps service, you start having to do things like: fixing your system to provide timely access when all your subscribers are maxing out the connection, not lying about how many people can get your service, having to service lines that are substandard. Although just having a 10Mbps doesn't cure anything directly (because latency could be through the roof etc.), it stops a lot of dirty tricks and if you MUST provide a certain level of service, you can't just go making the latency or other factors unbearable in order to do so because you'll just lose customers. But if you're the only ISP in an area and only advertised "Up to 2MBps", you can pretty much do what you like at the moment.
It's a first step and, more importantly, means that someone wants to check all these ludicrous claims. Access to the Internet just became a "need" that has to be strictly regulated as regards claims because now we know that the EU are watching.
And to be honest, how on Earth do you think you'll ever get a reasonable standard if ANYONE'S opinion on "I can watch YouTube or not stands?" It would just mean they'd make YouTube videos run at 5fps and everyone would be happy? There's truth in numbers, if you collect the right ones and analyse them properly. I would guess that the "black-box" which they want to put into homes not only measures bandwidth but latency, routing issues, etc. too