Hinges. There really isn't much you can do about this, but 20 years in we should be able to make a laptop hinge that isn't structurally supported by the plastic casing.
Batteries. Yes, batteries were mentioned above, but they deserve repeating. It would be roughly $400 to replace the battery in my old IBM laptop, a laptop which resells on craigslist for about 100. If laptops are to survive, replacing the powersource (which will die in about 3 years) needs to become a heck of a lot cheaper. Can we just stick some NiMH AA cells in a wrapper? That's all that a lot of phone batteries are.
Fans. The cooling systems in laptops are all custom and fidgety, and when a fan goes you're basically guaranteed to cook the CPU if you don't scramble your eggs first. These should be easy to standardize on, and put in accessible locations.
Disk Drives. For some reason, those little plastic latches that hold disk drives in are just a wee bit too little for their own good. It also seems like a modular connector on the back should be relatively easy to agree upon, and a profile size and arrangement shouldn't be too hard either.
The excuse for $60 games for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 is the higher resolution they display at. Since the Wii "only" does 480p, like the GameCube and the Xbox, the prices will be the same.
Any basic business student will tell you that the price you sell something is proportional to the price the market will bear, not the cost of production. If games are being sold at $60 on the X360, it's because the publisher believes they can sell $60 games on the X360, not because the game cost $10 more to produce.
It's like the CD vs tape transition. CD's cost significantly less to manufacture than tapes, but provided more value to consumers. So the price nearly doubled overnight, because that's what the market was willing to pay. It has stayed there for the life of the medium, even though costs dropped tremendously.
It's not like we couldn't have used 30 million dollar budgets on the PS2.
I'm in the "content creation" business. Some things are "free" for me to use, and some parts of culture are locked off of all commentary and social re-envisioning.
Saying that a particular music video is "free" as in beer is a bit silly. Of course it's free: it's an advertisement. You can download a ton of videos free on MTV.com, apple.com, and a million other sites. It's like saying a toyota commercial is free. Of course it's free, it's an ad.
Envoking the Commons puts it in a different space. Things in the commons are owned by everyone who experiences it. You can take Aristotle's writings and make a game because they're out of copyright and in the public space. Disney made movies out of Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Arabian Nights, and Sleeping Beauty because they were out of copyright and in public space. You cannot, however, remix a Chevy SUV ad to point to the connection between wasteful energy policies and the mess in the middle east because it is not in the public space of the creative commons. The judge might rule in your favor eventually if your commentary is biting enough, but that would be after spending tens of thousands of dollars you probably don't have to defend the inevitable lawsuit and subsequent appeals.
This was the original reason for the creative commons. To create open intellectual areas where ideas, dialog, sounds, etc could be exhanged freely and hopefully create new and interesting forms of culture. And to do so without the constant threat of lawsuits.
It's not that you don't "know" what the difference is that makes Stallman right, it is very much that you don't care about that distinction. Yet it's the very distinction that the Creative Commons was setup in order to make. The Creative Commons is supposed to be about changing people from consumers of culture to editors, commenters, and stewards of culture.
If you don't care about any of that, that's certainly your perogative. But if you agree that the CC was setup to make people care, and you don't, then the CC has failed.
How is this any different than Eschelon? Or the recently uncovered domestic spying program?
This administration needs to get through it's thick skull that anything we do gives our enemies the right to do the same thing to us. That means pre-emptive attacks, indefinite detention without trial, sexual abuse as interrogation methodology, and tapping all communications without warrant. That means strongarming countries who don't agree with us, covering-up all domestic programs, and yes, tapping the hell out of everything.
Oh, give me a break! 99% of the people out there are completely unfamiliar with content licenses and will only know that 'Pearl Jam released the video for free'.
Except that the video isn't "free," it's reproducable. You can't edit the video. You can't remix the video. You can't make cuts of the video. You can't make a video inspired by the video. You can't touch the video creatively in any way at all.
Generally when you're talking about Creative Commons, you're talking about things that people have very nearly put in the public domain. Things that you're free to do with as you want. Things like old folk tales, the national anthem, Mozart, and history. In this case, you don't even have the right to take a screenshot and put that up on your site. I'd hardly call that "free."
Stallman may be an eccentric fundamentalist, but the fact that you don't know what the CC license means is further evidence that he's exactly fucking right.
Company A sells a product that is lacking in a certain area. Company B sells product that helps remedy the problem. Company A eventually gets their act together and fixes their product, rendering Company B unnecessary.
It's an age-old equation. If you're fixing someone else's product, make what you can and expect to get out of the market when the product gets fixed. Because it will happen eventually.
MS is just doing what Apple started years ago: looking at ways in which users fix their OS and making those updates standard.
Yet, the best part of "Star Trek" cannot be bought. It is a story about how humankind transcends the suffering and limitations of life in the 20th century and 21st century. The Enterprise's entering warp is a metaphor for our breaking the bonds of our limitations as we soar to a greater, better future.
Also known as "convienient plot devices," "silly overacting," and "not acting human anymore."
I was going to write a humorous response to this, but the fact is that Star Trek is a utopia. There is no need for money, because there are no limited resources. There is no murder, theft, or greed. Territorial battles take place between isolated fringe groups, not real governments. People don't get jealous of other people's power. People don't want more than they need. There is no fashion, no clothing, no showing off. Nobody longs for excitement or thrill. Nobody competes, except for in the occasional intellectual pursuit.
Surprisingly, nothing is morally ambiguous. The crew is either correct in their logic, or incorrect, but never occupying a moral grey area. They always act in what they believe is the most selfless fashion, reducing a complicated universe of choices to "he did the best he could."
People aren't like that. Even intellectuals aren't like that. We have limited resources, and history has shown that no matter how much our resources increase, we will scale our greed until resources are limited again. People often wind up in situations that they take advantage of. Not all diseases can be cured by passing a character through a transporter filter.
Star Trek is not the future. It's an alluring fantasy. But a fantasy with no more ground in reality than Batman Beyond or Atlas Shrugged.
What the person was referring to was probably how the particular creative commons license happens to be the least free one, arguably not a creative commons license at all. You can redistribute the video, but not edit, make modifications of, make derivitave works from, be inspired by, or any of the other things one would expect from a "creative commons."
Basically, this means that anyone can redistribute their advertisement exactly as they framed it, but nothing else.
Re:PSP in general was just a huge mistake
on
Everyone Hates UMD
·
· Score: 1
Basically, the Memory Stick does nothing better than any of the competing formats, yet came out after all of the rest of them.
Compact flash stores a fat lot more than Memory Sticks. And unlike MS, CF has the controller chip onboard, which means that CF devices from 1998 built for 16 MB of memory can happily co-exist with a modern 4 GB card. Yet a Memory Stick device will never be able to accept anything bigger than what it was designed for. CF, by comparison, has been forwards and backwards compatible since the beginning (with the exception of CFII for IBM's microdrives). CF looks like a standard ATA hard drive to the host OS, so it is highly compatible. And yes, it will run Linux.
The SD card was smaller, and the Micro SD is still smaller than the smallest memory stick. SD has similar upgrade path problems that Memory Sticks have, so you can assume when you buy an SD device you're getting memory for that specific device and maybe your next one or two. However, as SD is supported by a much wider range of manufacturers, from Kodak to Olympus, you aren't locking yourself into a Sony world when you buy one. And they're slightly cheaper.
There are also a discouraging prolifiration of "standards" in memory stick.
There are Normal, Pro, Duo, ProDuo, and Micro versions. There are high speed and low speed versions of the above. And magic gate and non-magic gate versions. The standard has been altered basically every year since inception.
As another poster pointed out, Memory Stick solved no problems and had no real reason to be made. It just smells like a cash-in. And Sony puts it in basically all of their products, either ham stringing otherwise good hardware or forcing an unwanted standard on people.
Real photographers shoot in CF. The most convienient standard for point-and-shoot people is Mini/Micro-SD. Some other standards had or have reasons to exist, but Memory Stick is just not one of them.
The two problems with this is that it is difficult to catch errors and discourages test-based development methods.
I used to do this in high-school, though. I would write applications down in a notebook one line at a time, then type them all in when I got to my calculator. It could be valuable, but there were many programs that had to be scrapped and re-written because there was an error somewhere in the code and it was impossible to figure out where the problem had arisen.
A tight success / failure loop does help teach people to seek out and find problem areas quickly and painlessly, before more and more code gets committed on top of the bugs, burying them in layers if misdirection.
Suppose you were teaching flying. Would you start your students out in an advanced aircraft with an autopilot that could take off and land unassisted, and all sorts of doodads to make flying easy--or would you sit them down with a pad of paper and make them work out things like stall speed and fuel requirement problems until they really understood the issues?
I'd drop them in front of MS flight simulator so that they would get a feel for what they were going to do. "The maths" generally don't teach a pilot how to recover from a downdraft.
He didn't realize it was a comparison. In his words:
On one table Sony execs proudly displayed two ARs playing early Blu-ray content: The House of Flying Daggers (below). They even had the Blu-ray packaging. So exciting...but WAIT! I went ahead and ejected one of the Blu-ray drives to see my first Blu-ray disc. Instead, I found a crummy, old school DVD+R, complete with the Sharpie-written, House of Flying Daggers. Apparently even Sony can't get its hands on Blu-ray content!
Whoops. He didn't realize it was supposed to be a quality comparison.
While admittedly not a good sign for the format, it's not a fake demo. Just a misunderstanding.
I had to explain to a client earlier this week that to backup a windows XP installation. First they had to find the original install medium and install the Microsoft XP backup software from the ValueAdd folder. Then they had to right-click on a drive, get properties, flip to a "tools" tab, and trigger the backup script from there. The full backup requires, of course, a Floppy Disk, because everyone has one of those. But partial backups were possible without one.
XP is by no means well laid-out. Want to hide extensions of known file types? That's in Control Panels -> Folders. Want to change the default folder view style? Nope, different place. That's under Tools -> Folder Options. Want to share a folder? Another different place. Try right click -> Sharing and security. Want to change what launches on startup? That's Start Menu -> Programs -> Startup Folder. Unless it's Start->Control Panels -> Administrative Tools -> Services. Or Run -> Msconfig -> Startup. How intuitive is it to launch the program manager by right-clicking on the taskbar? You even find the occasional command that ONLY exists in the "optional" hot bar to the left of the folders. Want to update your modem's driver? It isn't the modem control panel, it's System -> Device Manager -> Network Adapters -> Your Modem -> Driver. Mail app died and need to access your real profile folder? Try C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data(invisible)\maybe company or app name\maybe profile? or try C:\Documents and Settings\DefaultUser\Application Data(invisible)\Microsoft\ Or AllUsers\Local Settings\Application Data. Or maybe it's in the Program Files\CompanyName\AppName\Profiles. Or the Windows folder.
Want to delete MS Messenger? Want to get the annoying HP software to not crash on reboot every single fricking time?
I'm not saying Linux isn't a sewer for usability. It isn't a desktop OS at heart, or at the core of development. I'm just saying that XP is passably usable to people simply because it's the sewer that they learned the layout of first.
It's quite suprising that the current traffic fits down the wires we have. Billions of Joe Six packs watching video is obviously going to be an issue. Problem though is that internet costs (to the user) are too low, and there's not a lot of money to be made from providing bandwidth so there's very little motivation to improve the situation.
Roads essentially have, or have had, the same issues. These are funded by state/federal taxes and/or toll roads or some other per-use charges. Perhaps a model like this could work for the internet too.
No, it's like saying "we can't provide service at the cost we're charging our customers, so we're going to charge our content providers instead." Like TV set manufacturers charging cable companies to access their sets because they refuse to charge enough for the set itself. Or airliners charging the state for the "priviledge" of having air commerce take place there.
And it doesn't address the biggest bandwidth user on the internet: P2P. You can't squeeze money from the fileserver if there isn't one.
The solution is that some ISP's are going out of business, some are going to raise prices on their customers, and some are going to adapt new business plans and procedures and thrive. Attempting to charge content providers (The things people are actually paying you to access) is foolish. Fix your business, don't shoot it in the foot.
So it's apparently legal to shoot polar bears in Canada, despite the fact that they're considered one of the animals facing increasing threats in the future from withdrawing sea ice?
It's only illegal to kill something pointlessly if you're not rich enough to waste 45,000 dollars to do it.
That's your lesson for the day boys and girls. Everything is moral if you have enough money.
I'm not entirely opposed to hunting, but he'd better eat that fucking bear.
Use a more secure OS. Win CE is not an OS designed to protect the system from the behavior of its users. Linux / Unix / Solaris would be.
Use a thin client. Why allow the user to touch the hardware system they're interacting with? That's always asking for trouble.
Open Source your software. Diebold doesn't sell the software anyway, they sell the system and the support. If they used a somewhat restrictive open source license (no commercial redistribution, etc) they could get some great debugging for very little cost.
Multiple points of data transmission. Send signed partial updates throughout the day, then one big batch in the middle of the night. If anything is different, if any sigs change, you know there has been tampering going on.
The best part of FPS games on the PC are not the keyboard and mouse, but the.cab files and editors. If you buy a PC FPS, you're getting that game, plus the inevitable "superweapon" mods, the "instadeath knife" mods, the low gravity mods, and the occasional flying-pirates-with-cannons mods.
Buy a console FPS, and you get that FPS, sans headaches and compatibility problems. But also without upgradability.
Slashdot Mirror
Hinges. There really isn't much you can do about this, but 20 years in we should be able to make a laptop hinge that isn't structurally supported by the plastic casing.
Batteries. Yes, batteries were mentioned above, but they deserve repeating. It would be roughly $400 to replace the battery in my old IBM laptop, a laptop which resells on craigslist for about 100. If laptops are to survive, replacing the powersource (which will die in about 3 years) needs to become a heck of a lot cheaper. Can we just stick some NiMH AA cells in a wrapper? That's all that a lot of phone batteries are.
Fans. The cooling systems in laptops are all custom and fidgety, and when a fan goes you're basically guaranteed to cook the CPU if you don't scramble your eggs first. These should be easy to standardize on, and put in accessible locations.
Disk Drives. For some reason, those little plastic latches that hold disk drives in are just a wee bit too little for their own good. It also seems like a modular connector on the back should be relatively easy to agree upon, and a profile size and arrangement shouldn't be too hard either.
$50, same as now.
The excuse for $60 games for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 is the higher resolution they display at. Since the Wii "only" does 480p, like the GameCube and the Xbox, the prices will be the same.
Any basic business student will tell you that the price you sell something is proportional to the price the market will bear, not the cost of production. If games are being sold at $60 on the X360, it's because the publisher believes they can sell $60 games on the X360, not because the game cost $10 more to produce.
It's like the CD vs tape transition. CD's cost significantly less to manufacture than tapes, but provided more value to consumers. So the price nearly doubled overnight, because that's what the market was willing to pay. It has stayed there for the life of the medium, even though costs dropped tremendously.
It's not like we couldn't have used 30 million dollar budgets on the PS2.
I'm in the "content creation" business. Some things are "free" for me to use, and some parts of culture are locked off of all commentary and social re-envisioning.
Saying that a particular music video is "free" as in beer is a bit silly. Of course it's free: it's an advertisement. You can download a ton of videos free on MTV.com, apple.com, and a million other sites. It's like saying a toyota commercial is free. Of course it's free, it's an ad.
Envoking the Commons puts it in a different space. Things in the commons are owned by everyone who experiences it. You can take Aristotle's writings and make a game because they're out of copyright and in the public space. Disney made movies out of Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Arabian Nights, and Sleeping Beauty because they were out of copyright and in public space. You cannot, however, remix a Chevy SUV ad to point to the connection between wasteful energy policies and the mess in the middle east because it is not in the public space of the creative commons. The judge might rule in your favor eventually if your commentary is biting enough, but that would be after spending tens of thousands of dollars you probably don't have to defend the inevitable lawsuit and subsequent appeals.
This was the original reason for the creative commons. To create open intellectual areas where ideas, dialog, sounds, etc could be exhanged freely and hopefully create new and interesting forms of culture. And to do so without the constant threat of lawsuits.
It's not that you don't "know" what the difference is that makes Stallman right, it is very much that you don't care about that distinction. Yet it's the very distinction that the Creative Commons was setup in order to make. The Creative Commons is supposed to be about changing people from consumers of culture to editors, commenters, and stewards of culture.
If you don't care about any of that, that's certainly your perogative. But if you agree that the CC was setup to make people care, and you don't, then the CC has failed.
How is this any different than Eschelon? Or the recently uncovered domestic spying program?
This administration needs to get through it's thick skull that anything we do gives our enemies the right to do the same thing to us. That means pre-emptive attacks, indefinite detention without trial, sexual abuse as interrogation methodology, and tapping all communications without warrant. That means strongarming countries who don't agree with us, covering-up all domestic programs, and yes, tapping the hell out of everything.
It's all on the table, thanks to our actions.
Oh, give me a break! 99% of the people out there are completely unfamiliar with content licenses and will only know that 'Pearl Jam released the video for free'.
Except that the video isn't "free," it's reproducable. You can't edit the video. You can't remix the video. You can't make cuts of the video. You can't make a video inspired by the video. You can't touch the video creatively in any way at all.
Generally when you're talking about Creative Commons, you're talking about things that people have very nearly put in the public domain. Things that you're free to do with as you want. Things like old folk tales, the national anthem, Mozart, and history. In this case, you don't even have the right to take a screenshot and put that up on your site. I'd hardly call that "free."
Stallman may be an eccentric fundamentalist, but the fact that you don't know what the CC license means is further evidence that he's exactly fucking right.
Try Hymm. There are mac and windows variants, as well as Java.
Or you can burn to CD, rip from CD, with no extra software required.
Or buy iTunes music through the Sharp Musique app, an iTunes store interface that simply skips the tawdry part where they encrypt and DRM the file.
Or use the older stuff, like QTFairUse, VLC Media Player, and PlayFair.
Company A sells a product that is lacking in a certain area. Company B sells product that helps remedy the problem. Company A eventually gets their act together and fixes their product, rendering Company B unnecessary.
It's an age-old equation. If you're fixing someone else's product, make what you can and expect to get out of the market when the product gets fixed. Because it will happen eventually.
MS is just doing what Apple started years ago: looking at ways in which users fix their OS and making those updates standard.
Yet, the best part of "Star Trek" cannot be bought. It is a story about how humankind transcends the suffering and limitations of life in the 20th century and 21st century. The Enterprise's entering warp is a metaphor for our breaking the bonds of our limitations as we soar to a greater, better future.
Also known as "convienient plot devices," "silly overacting," and "not acting human anymore."
I was going to write a humorous response to this, but the fact is that Star Trek is a utopia. There is no need for money, because there are no limited resources. There is no murder, theft, or greed. Territorial battles take place between isolated fringe groups, not real governments. People don't get jealous of other people's power. People don't want more than they need. There is no fashion, no clothing, no showing off. Nobody longs for excitement or thrill. Nobody competes, except for in the occasional intellectual pursuit.
Surprisingly, nothing is morally ambiguous. The crew is either correct in their logic, or incorrect, but never occupying a moral grey area. They always act in what they believe is the most selfless fashion, reducing a complicated universe of choices to "he did the best he could."
People aren't like that. Even intellectuals aren't like that. We have limited resources, and history has shown that no matter how much our resources increase, we will scale our greed until resources are limited again. People often wind up in situations that they take advantage of. Not all diseases can be cured by passing a character through a transporter filter.
Star Trek is not the future. It's an alluring fantasy. But a fantasy with no more ground in reality than Batman Beyond or Atlas Shrugged.
What the person was referring to was probably how the particular creative commons license happens to be the least free one, arguably not a creative commons license at all. You can redistribute the video, but not edit, make modifications of, make derivitave works from, be inspired by, or any of the other things one would expect from a "creative commons."
Basically, this means that anyone can redistribute their advertisement exactly as they framed it, but nothing else.
Basically, the Memory Stick does nothing better than any of the competing formats, yet came out after all of the rest of them.
Compact flash stores a fat lot more than Memory Sticks. And unlike MS, CF has the controller chip onboard, which means that CF devices from 1998 built for 16 MB of memory can happily co-exist with a modern 4 GB card. Yet a Memory Stick device will never be able to accept anything bigger than what it was designed for. CF, by comparison, has been forwards and backwards compatible since the beginning (with the exception of CFII for IBM's microdrives). CF looks like a standard ATA hard drive to the host OS, so it is highly compatible. And yes, it will run Linux.
The SD card was smaller, and the Micro SD is still smaller than the smallest memory stick. SD has similar upgrade path problems that Memory Sticks have, so you can assume when you buy an SD device you're getting memory for that specific device and maybe your next one or two. However, as SD is supported by a much wider range of manufacturers, from Kodak to Olympus, you aren't locking yourself into a Sony world when you buy one. And they're slightly cheaper.
There are also a discouraging prolifiration of "standards" in memory stick.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Stick
There are Normal, Pro, Duo, ProDuo, and Micro versions. There are high speed and low speed versions of the above. And magic gate and non-magic gate versions. The standard has been altered basically every year since inception.
As another poster pointed out, Memory Stick solved no problems and had no real reason to be made. It just smells like a cash-in. And Sony puts it in basically all of their products, either ham stringing otherwise good hardware or forcing an unwanted standard on people.
Real photographers shoot in CF. The most convienient standard for point-and-shoot people is Mini/Micro-SD. Some other standards had or have reasons to exist, but Memory Stick is just not one of them.
Clearly it needs to be run under Palm OS, Win CE, PS2, and on a Furby.
The two problems with this is that it is difficult to catch errors and discourages test-based development methods.
I used to do this in high-school, though. I would write applications down in a notebook one line at a time, then type them all in when I got to my calculator. It could be valuable, but there were many programs that had to be scrapped and re-written because there was an error somewhere in the code and it was impossible to figure out where the problem had arisen.
A tight success / failure loop does help teach people to seek out and find problem areas quickly and painlessly, before more and more code gets committed on top of the bugs, burying them in layers if misdirection.
Suppose you were teaching flying. Would you start your students out in an advanced aircraft with an autopilot that could take off and land unassisted, and all sorts of doodads to make flying easy--or would you sit them down with a pad of paper and make them work out things like stall speed and fuel requirement problems until they really understood the issues?
I'd drop them in front of MS flight simulator so that they would get a feel for what they were going to do. "The maths" generally don't teach a pilot how to recover from a downdraft.
They must have been using metric feet per second.
Buggy whip manufacturers say that buggy whips are essential to the future. Saddle makers disagree.
"...XM subscribers will have little need ever again to buy legitimate copies of plaintiffs' sound recordings,"
With the quality of the Plaintiff's music, I think that's a given.
He didn't realize it was a comparison. In his words:
On one table Sony execs proudly displayed two ARs playing early Blu-ray content: The House of Flying Daggers (below). They even had the Blu-ray packaging. So exciting...but WAIT! I went ahead and ejected one of the Blu-ray drives to see my first Blu-ray disc. Instead, I found a crummy, old school DVD+R, complete with the Sharpie-written, House of Flying Daggers. Apparently even Sony can't get its hands on Blu-ray content!
Whoops. He didn't realize it was supposed to be a quality comparison.
While admittedly not a good sign for the format, it's not a fake demo. Just a misunderstanding.
These postings really undermine the credibility of /..
Hi! You must be new here.
I had to explain to a client earlier this week that to backup a windows XP installation. First they had to find the original install medium and install the Microsoft XP backup software from the ValueAdd folder. Then they had to right-click on a drive, get properties, flip to a "tools" tab, and trigger the backup script from there. The full backup requires, of course, a Floppy Disk, because everyone has one of those. But partial backups were possible without one.
XP is by no means well laid-out. Want to hide extensions of known file types? That's in Control Panels -> Folders. Want to change the default folder view style? Nope, different place. That's under Tools -> Folder Options. Want to share a folder? Another different place. Try right click -> Sharing and security. Want to change what launches on startup? That's Start Menu -> Programs -> Startup Folder. Unless it's Start->Control Panels -> Administrative Tools -> Services. Or Run -> Msconfig -> Startup. How intuitive is it to launch the program manager by right-clicking on the taskbar? You even find the occasional command that ONLY exists in the "optional" hot bar to the left of the folders. Want to update your modem's driver? It isn't the modem control panel, it's System -> Device Manager -> Network Adapters -> Your Modem -> Driver. Mail app died and need to access your real profile folder? Try C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data(invisible)\maybe company or app name\maybe profile? or try C:\Documents and Settings\DefaultUser\Application Data(invisible)\Microsoft\ Or AllUsers\Local Settings\Application Data. Or maybe it's in the Program Files\CompanyName\AppName\Profiles. Or the Windows folder.
Want to delete MS Messenger? Want to get the annoying HP software to not crash on reboot every single fricking time?
I'm not saying Linux isn't a sewer for usability. It isn't a desktop OS at heart, or at the core of development. I'm just saying that XP is passably usable to people simply because it's the sewer that they learned the layout of first.
http://www.askaninja.com/news/2006/05/11/ask-a-nin ja-special-delivery-4-net-neutrality
It's quite suprising that the current traffic fits down the wires we have. Billions of Joe Six packs watching video is obviously going to be an issue. Problem though is that internet costs (to the user) are too low, and there's not a lot of money to be made from providing bandwidth so there's very little motivation to improve the situation.
Roads essentially have, or have had, the same issues. These are funded by state/federal taxes and/or toll roads or some other per-use charges. Perhaps a model like this could work for the internet too.
No, it's like saying "we can't provide service at the cost we're charging our customers, so we're going to charge our content providers instead." Like TV set manufacturers charging cable companies to access their sets because they refuse to charge enough for the set itself. Or airliners charging the state for the "priviledge" of having air commerce take place there.
And it doesn't address the biggest bandwidth user on the internet: P2P. You can't squeeze money from the fileserver if there isn't one.
The solution is that some ISP's are going out of business, some are going to raise prices on their customers, and some are going to adapt new business plans and procedures and thrive. Attempting to charge content providers (The things people are actually paying you to access) is foolish. Fix your business, don't shoot it in the foot.
So it's apparently legal to shoot polar bears in Canada, despite the fact that they're considered one of the animals facing increasing threats in the future from withdrawing sea ice?
It's only illegal to kill something pointlessly if you're not rich enough to waste 45,000 dollars to do it.
That's your lesson for the day boys and girls. Everything is moral if you have enough money.
I'm not entirely opposed to hunting, but he'd better eat that fucking bear.
Do we really want blogging to be more accessible to your grandmother? It's bad enough that blogging is accessible to 14 year old girls.
In Texas, those can be the same person.
Government tells government's courts that it didn't break the law. Government agrees. Film at 11.
More Options:
Use a more secure OS. Win CE is not an OS designed to protect the system from the behavior of its users. Linux / Unix / Solaris would be.
Use a thin client. Why allow the user to touch the hardware system they're interacting with? That's always asking for trouble.
Open Source your software. Diebold doesn't sell the software anyway, they sell the system and the support. If they used a somewhat restrictive open source license (no commercial redistribution, etc) they could get some great debugging for very little cost.
Multiple points of data transmission. Send signed partial updates throughout the day, then one big batch in the middle of the night. If anything is different, if any sigs change, you know there has been tampering going on.
Paper trail. Duh.
The best part of FPS games on the PC are not the keyboard and mouse, but the
Buy a console FPS, and you get that FPS, sans headaches and compatibility problems. But also without upgradability.