"Moreover, the Dell that was pointed out as being equivalent to the Apple laptop in the comparison is already 400$ cheaper."
They don't say that the Dell is equivalent, but that they're roughly equivalent for comparison purposes. They also, if you bothered to read, list the price difference as 300 dollars.
What are the "roughly equivalent" differences? The Dell actually has a 20% slower system bus, 33% lower cache. It has more RAM, but of the much slower, older DDR2 standard. It does have a bigger HDD, but they are all small enough that they should be swapped out immediately. The Dell has no graphics card of which to speak, which is a large performance and cost hit. The Dell has a little bit worse screen, a little bit older networking standard, and about a pound heavier after the cards, etc.
Let's break that down a little bit. (Full disclosure, I own a Dell and generally recommend them to friends.)
Graphics Card: This is probably the biggest single difference. The discrete graphics card that I ordered with my Dell XPS M1210 was approximately 200 dollars, and worth every penny. The difference between a real graphics solution and the integrated stuff we've been putting up with for years is stunning. It's fair to reduce the price difference by that much.
RAM: DDR2 vs DDR3 RAM is another significant hurdle, as DDR3 is twice as fast and twice as expensive. Dell is losing about 50$ retail difference there on the price of the RAM alone, not accounting for motherboard or future expandability differences.
FSB: Eeking out that last 20% FSB speed is probably helpful for the DDR3 RAM, and depending on where it falls along the performance curve could cost nothing or double the price. Without data it is hard to price that, so let's be generous to Dell and call it 25$.
HDD: The difference between a 250 and a 160 GB HDD on Pricewatch is currently 10 dollars. So let's give that 10 back to Dell. Also, let's push on these bastards to spend the extra few dollars and start putting in 400 or 500GB drives. Really, this is embarassing across the board.
Networking: The difference between GB and 10/100 ethernet for desktop computers on Amazon.com is hovering around 20 dollars. I don't know how that might scale up to notebooks, so let's ding Dell that 20 dollars and move on.
Display: What's the price of a cool edge-to-edge display with an LED- based backlight? It couldn't be less than 25$, so let's go with that.
Weight: As configured with a real battery (not the ones Dell traditionally uses for their weigh-ins) and the extra cards required for 802.11N and Bluetooth, the Dell is coming out to about 25% heavier than the macbook. In the obsessive world of subnotebookeyultraportables, that's a lot. Let's tack a 50$ premium on for that pound, and I personally think Dell is getting off easy here. You should see the premium Sony commands to shave off 1/2 of a pound.
Dimensions: The Dell is 1.5" tall, 12.5" wide, and 9.3" deep, for a total volume of 175 cubic inches. The Mac is 1" tall, 12.8" wide, 8.9" deep, for a total volume of 114 cubic inches. The Dell is a full 33% larger than the MacBook Air. Again, we're comparing these as obsessive ultraportables, and that 33% size increase carries *at least* a 75 dollar premium for most users in this class. And Dell is getting off easy there.
Miscellaneous: Let's trade Firewire for the advanced power brick, A PCI Express card slot for digital audio performance, The Macbook's touch pad for Dell's Memory card reader.... Let's call the rest even, and do some accounting.
So where do we come out after all this accounting? Dell = 994 + 200 + 25 - 10 + 20 + 25 + 50 + 75. The back of my napkin calculations on the spec differences push a truly equivalent machine up to $1379. Assuming Dell's "instant savings" of 175 continue to hold, that pushes the theoretical price to $1204. That puts the Dell at either 80 dollars more expensive, or 95 dollars less expensive than the Mac.
If you had 40+ applicants with little or no skills, then there is a problem with transitioning that interest into ability. I.E., our underfunded education system keeps returning undereducated workers. Big surprise there.
At some point, educational institutions are going to get enough out of the mess they're in that they're going to re-discover the concept of guided internships and work shadowing. That will be a lovely day.
This seems like a feature that they're planning on selling to parents. Otherwise, if you can't remember to turn off your phone before getting in a car, what are the chances that you'll remember to turn off the cell lock when getting on a train, bus, or plane? This sounds exactly like the kind of Won't-Somebody-Please-Think-of-the-children that will lead to some expensive new gadget that simply annoys teenagers. It also, of course, gives them an all-new reason why they're not answering you when you call.
If you're an adult and you actually need this... LEARN TO IGNORE YOUR CALLS. Trust me, it's possible. People in Los Angeles have been masters of this for 40 years.
I really wish they'd create something that would turn Cellphones back on at the end of movies. I can't tell you how often I've gone for a day or two without being reachable simply because I was trying to scrub the memory of The Santa Clause 3 out of my brain.
The name of something helps ensure that the usage is intuitive, or throws up an unnecessary speed bump in the process. Naming your child "The Frying Pan," would make it very difficult to get through your normal days. "Honey, can you check on the frying pan in the kitchen?" "The frying pan fell on the cat again." "The frying pan got burned, and is soaking in the tub."
Under Ubuntu Linux, using DPM to update Gimp in Gnome is easy, but that's five different nonsense words which are completely non-descriptive that an end-user would need to look up.
Windows is at least moderately descriptive as to what it does, and "7" is a big enough number that they must have gotten it right by now (cough). Also, it's about as far away from "Windows Vista" as you can get from a branding standpoint.
Just to make the absurdity a little clearer, how would this rule effect interactive dinner theater? Say you pay to access dinner theater, and from the painful sweat of your brow within the night you have hammered out a nice little role for yourself as owner of a jukebox joint in Chicago and ruler of most of the Chicago maffia. Maybe one of the other guests offered you 20 real dollars for you to abandon the post so that they could take it. You were having fun, so you turned them down.
And suddenly, the dinner theater is over. Everyone thinks it was a great game, and you all go home.
Nobody in their right mind would argue that at that point the dinner theater company is liable and must pay you back for the 20 dollar position of power and authority that you earned in the game. Why is it that when the rules are migrated to a server suddenly people lose their sense of perspective?
1. Virtual property doesn't exist: that's why it is called virtual. Saying that you own a sword in World of Warcraft is as non-sensical as saying that James Earl Jones owns the death star.
2. You never buy a "thing," and you never get a copyright. You're paying for the potential for access to copyrighted material on a server somewhere. That you have to further play a game to get access has no bearing on the fact that you were never actually transferred a copyright.
3. Game makers have structured the interaction carefully to allow themselves freedom to maintain a healthy game experience. If the value of all items within a game needed to remain fixed for sake of a stable economy, no positive balance changes would be possible and the game experience would crumble.
4. If you did "own" virtual propery, you would need to pay american dollar taxes on virtual transactions. If you happened to fight and slave and earn an Amani Warbear, for example, you'd be owe an additional 45 dollars in capital gains taxes.
I'm sick and tired of sequel entitlement. If you don't blow the roof off with your first 50 dollar event, you don't deserve to make more. Everyone references Star Wars in this respect. Sure, there was a trilogy there, but they blew up the Death Star in the first one.
Be as amazing as you possibly can in your first iteration! Otherwise you don't deserve the 50 bucks, let alone 100 more for sequels. Hopefully Blizzard will prove me wrong, but my hopes are low.
Additionally, I can easily see this fracturing the multiplayer as well into multiple camps depending on which versions of the game they have.
You realize that "IBM PC" went out of style when people forgot who IBM was.
Poll people on the street. They're just about as likely to have real experience with Amiga OS or BSD OS as we are to know how to create a fold-up double hem in silk. It's all about their computer or their Windows machine.
Most of the dangerous driving I remember my friends in highschool (long ago) doing involved going 60 in populated residential zones, turning way too quickly, driving drunk, and driving cars that are mechanically way behind their prime.
While it is a good idea, I don't really see this addressing those conditions. In general, if your kids shouldn't do it on the road, why should you?
I believe he's thinking of the GP32 or the GP2x Wiz. They have been an open gaming platform since their inception, and have achieved moderate popularity in Asia.
Also, software. I get a lot of work done more quickly by writing quick little AutoHotKey scripts at work. Of course, nobody in IT uses it or would think to approve it for me, but nonetheless it is an effective tool. Similarly, other tools like various text editors, merge tools, and similar are not on any approved list but have evolved into usage because users at my company are free to choose appropriate tools. From this, the best tools have risen up.
If your AV and anti-spyware software *is* locked down and up to date, there should be little risk of infection by users. And for your most important data and systems you should NEVER trust the end users on your network anyway.
A. Are a tool that the user doesn't need to be trained on. B. Are a tool that the company doesn't need to invest in. C. Are customized for that user's needs beyond what IT is capable of delivering.
I've been using a personal laptop at work for months while the corporate overlords try to run that approval up the flagpole. Your sales staff probably knows their networking needs far better than anyone else (IM is a communications medium), and
There seem to be two approaches to IT: 1. Attempt to lock everything down while solving every need and soothing every issue manually. 2. Provide machines and software, and try to be helpful as your staff does what they're going to do. The former seems reminiscent of a time when nobody knew how computers worked. The latter seems fitting to a world where kids who've never thrown a baseball are posting youtube videos.
Luckily, I believe in the market and I think someone will lay the groundwork for serious bandwidth soon, instead of continuing to use copper for everything.
Netflix streams at a maximum of 2.2 mbps DVDs stream at 8 mbps
The difference between MPEG2 and WMV is significant at lower bitrates, but at larger ones they get to be pretty comparable. In this case, a 2.2 mbps WMV stream is definitely below DVD quality.
A free, unregulated economy above a certain size is almost guaranteed to degrade into monopolies. This is not just my assessment, but that of Adam Smith, founder of a lot of the principles of free-market capitalism.
Take for example the privitization of water in Argentina. The capital outlay is heavy enough that nobody else can afford to do it, or if they did they would have little chance of recouping. However, the water company in Argentina is by far one of the most profitable institutions in the country, nearly doubling monthly fees since their tenure. If there wasn't government regulation, that company could then enter into new markets with the hook that "if you sell anything other than our beef, we won't provide water." This is exactly the tactic that Microsoft took in the mid 90's to prevent computer manufacturers from working with the other (many times superior) operating systems on the market at the time.
Taking it a step further, a "Truly Free" economy is indistinguishable from the anarchy that exists in a power vacuum, and which quickly degrades into feudal warlordism.
Oh, but you'd have regulations against use of force, improperly leveraging monopolies, properly labeling items, adhering to contracts, etc, etc, etc. And that of course all requires regulatory bodies, police force, civillian treaties for non-lethan enforcement, additional regulatory bodies to form and enact those civillian treaties, etc. As orasio mentioned, you can't have a "Truly free economy" without a hell of a lot of regulatory institutions. Otherwise, what would prevent me from saying "I'll insure your house against hurricanes," taking all of the money for personal use, and abandoning everyone when the first hurricane came along? Or becoming the head of an established bank, taking everyone's deposits, and heading for the Cayman islands?
As my father liked to say (in more colorful language), we're no longer arguing about if you're a communist, but just haggling over degrees.
It's important to explicitly call out the properties of DRM that make it bad. DRM is out there to prevent the player from willy-nilly installing on everyone's PC's, which can be bad as it prevents you from switching computers or backing up your own games. Steam actually facilitates transferrence, as you can download any purchased games on any computer you log into. You don't need a CD to play, you don't need a CD to install on another computer, you can play your games on all the computers you have available.
Steam only runs with your games, doesn't take up a lot of CPU time, and has been stable for several years now. The one outstanding question is "what happens if Valve shuts down," but they have promised to unlock everything in such a case.
If we shout that DRM in all forms is terrible, none of the companies will or can listen. If we work towards removing the problematic portions of the system, we might get a compromise setup that is better than we started with.
All consoles since the NES have had DRM. But because they were actually sane DRM, nobody but pirates and developers ever encountered it. Let's work towards that again.
In ten years, not only will this system be a reality, but the civilian market will have figured out how to squeeze even more out of it than the military figured.
Of course, the US military is about 3 million people. The world's population is about 2 thousand times that. Once a technology makes its way into a base that large, of course it will advance more rapidly.
"A top Admiral in the Navy was lamenting how the Navy is having a problem selling itself as a cutting edge tech provider..."
Cutting edge tech frequently doesn't work. iPhones crash, Magellans don't get GPS locks, etc. Computerizing brings instability.
Also, replacing a Blackberry is a lot easier than replacing the comm system on a Burke destroyer. The Blackberry only has to work with ok one or two bluetooth accessory types: the Burke needs to be 100% with all of the custom systems on board.
Advanced EHF is designed to provide 24 hour coverage from 65 North, to 65 South across the K and Ka sub bands, and when combined with the prototyped Extended Data Rate (XDR) terminals and systems, will offer up to 8.2 Mbps data rates for around 4,000 terminals in concurrent use per satellite footprint (whether that scales to 12,000 systems in concurrent use globally isn't clear from source material).
Compared to current satellite rates, this is pretty good. Additionally, this allows them to bounce satellite signals quickly and reliably around the globe before having to incurr the atmosphere penalty.
However, if you're looking for replacement for WiFi, a final 802.11N spec is only about 10 years off.
For the record, Microsoft recently added a tool to transfer licenses between system serial numbers. This was a major issue with their DRM early on (especially with all the system failures), and it is nice to see it being addressed.
Hopefully Sony didn't tie their hands with licensing, and can make some similar improvements of their own.
DRM is an ecosystem, not a file format. Part of most people's DRM systems is that you're not allowed to move content between systems, but the vendor will through downloads and / or rights transferrence.
By not providing re-downloads and by extension transferrence between systems, Sony's DRM ecosystem suddenly becomes a lot more restrictive. The successful digital download DRM systems allow for some method to maintain your content indefinitely. With 5-year modern hard drive lives, this particular DRM system puts an explicit and short end-of-life on your files.
The comparison would be more like you buy a book from a store, who then comes home with you, nails the book to your floor and attaches explosive ink packs. If you ever move, your book will explode. When you do move, the bookstore charges you full price for another copy. In Sony's case, the company's DRM is going out of its way to stop you from moving or backing up your content in reasonable and legal ways, and without additional downloads the service provides no alternative.
People are getting used to the idea that in exchange for giving up some of their traditional rights with digital media (inc resale), they at least get to re-download stuff without being charged for it. Steam is a master of this, allowing you to play anything anywhere so long as you are signed in. In the case of Sony, the user is both prevented from moving paid content between system or hard drive upgrades, and is charged full price for re-downloads. Bandwidth isn't free, but with wholesale prices near 10c per GB for large organizations, it isn't substantial either.
I have to believe that this was an oversight on their part, and that the situation will be rectified. This just doesn't seem sustainable.
How about 480p displayed on a native 480p set vs 1080p displayed on a 1080i set via component cables because an HDMI splitter box didn't support HDCP?
If you have to compare them side-by-side in optimal circumstances, it probably isn't worth the extra money yet. With DVDs years ago, you could just show someone a DVD playing on a TV and watch their eyes bug out at the quality. Lust was immediate. If things are close enough now that a side-by-side comparison is required, DVD's may just be good enough for the price.
Slashdot Mirror
"Moreover, the Dell that was pointed out as being equivalent to the Apple laptop in the comparison is already 400$ cheaper."
They don't say that the Dell is equivalent, but that they're roughly equivalent for comparison purposes. They also, if you bothered to read, list the price difference as 300 dollars.
What are the "roughly equivalent" differences? The Dell actually has a 20% slower system bus, 33% lower cache. It has more RAM, but of the much slower, older DDR2 standard. It does have a bigger HDD, but they are all small enough that they should be swapped out immediately. The Dell has no graphics card of which to speak, which is a large performance and cost hit. The Dell has a little bit worse screen, a little bit older networking standard, and about a pound heavier after the cards, etc.
Let's break that down a little bit. (Full disclosure, I own a Dell and generally recommend them to friends.)
Graphics Card:
This is probably the biggest single difference. The discrete graphics card that I ordered with my Dell XPS M1210 was approximately 200 dollars, and worth every penny. The difference between a real graphics solution and the integrated stuff we've been putting up with for years is stunning. It's fair to reduce the price difference by that much.
RAM:
DDR2 vs DDR3 RAM is another significant hurdle, as DDR3 is twice as fast and twice as expensive. Dell is losing about 50$ retail difference there on the price of the RAM alone, not accounting for motherboard or future expandability differences.
FSB:
Eeking out that last 20% FSB speed is probably helpful for the DDR3 RAM, and depending on where it falls along the performance curve could cost nothing or double the price. Without data it is hard to price that, so let's be generous to Dell and call it 25$.
HDD:
The difference between a 250 and a 160 GB HDD on Pricewatch is currently 10 dollars. So let's give that 10 back to Dell. Also, let's push on these bastards to spend the extra few dollars and start putting in 400 or 500GB drives. Really, this is embarassing across the board.
Networking:
The difference between GB and 10/100 ethernet for desktop computers on Amazon.com is hovering around 20 dollars. I don't know how that might scale up to notebooks, so let's ding Dell that 20 dollars and move on.
Display:
What's the price of a cool edge-to-edge display with an LED- based backlight? It couldn't be less than 25$, so let's go with that.
Weight:
As configured with a real battery (not the ones Dell traditionally uses for their weigh-ins) and the extra cards required for 802.11N and Bluetooth, the Dell is coming out to about 25% heavier than the macbook. In the obsessive world of subnotebookeyultraportables, that's a lot. Let's tack a 50$ premium on for that pound, and I personally think Dell is getting off easy here. You should see the premium Sony commands to shave off 1/2 of a pound.
Dimensions:
The Dell is 1.5" tall, 12.5" wide, and 9.3" deep, for a total volume of 175 cubic inches. The Mac is 1" tall, 12.8" wide, 8.9" deep, for a total volume of 114 cubic inches. The Dell is a full 33% larger than the MacBook Air. Again, we're comparing these as obsessive ultraportables, and that 33% size increase carries *at least* a 75 dollar premium for most users in this class. And Dell is getting off easy there.
Miscellaneous:
Let's trade Firewire for the advanced power brick, A PCI Express card slot for digital audio performance, The Macbook's touch pad for Dell's Memory card reader.... Let's call the rest even, and do some accounting.
So where do we come out after all this accounting? Dell = 994 + 200 + 25 - 10 + 20 + 25 + 50 + 75. The back of my napkin calculations on the spec differences push a truly equivalent machine up to $1379. Assuming Dell's "instant savings" of 175 continue to hold, that pushes the theoretical price to $1204. That puts the Dell at either 80 dollars more expensive, or 95 dollars less expensive than the Mac.
If you had 40+ applicants with little or no skills, then there is a problem with transitioning that interest into ability. I.E., our underfunded education system keeps returning undereducated workers. Big surprise there.
At some point, educational institutions are going to get enough out of the mess they're in that they're going to re-discover the concept of guided internships and work shadowing. That will be a lovely day.
This seems like a feature that they're planning on selling to parents. Otherwise, if you can't remember to turn off your phone before getting in a car, what are the chances that you'll remember to turn off the cell lock when getting on a train, bus, or plane? This sounds exactly like the kind of Won't-Somebody-Please-Think-of-the-children that will lead to some expensive new gadget that simply annoys teenagers. It also, of course, gives them an all-new reason why they're not answering you when you call.
If you're an adult and you actually need this... LEARN TO IGNORE YOUR CALLS. Trust me, it's possible. People in Los Angeles have been masters of this for 40 years.
I really wish they'd create something that would turn Cellphones back on at the end of movies. I can't tell you how often I've gone for a day or two without being reachable simply because I was trying to scrub the memory of The Santa Clause 3 out of my brain.
The name of something helps ensure that the usage is intuitive, or throws up an unnecessary speed bump in the process. Naming your child "The Frying Pan," would make it very difficult to get through your normal days. "Honey, can you check on the frying pan in the kitchen?" "The frying pan fell on the cat again." "The frying pan got burned, and is soaking in the tub."
Under Ubuntu Linux, using DPM to update Gimp in Gnome is easy, but that's five different nonsense words which are completely non-descriptive that an end-user would need to look up.
Windows is at least moderately descriptive as to what it does, and "7" is a big enough number that they must have gotten it right by now (cough). Also, it's about as far away from "Windows Vista" as you can get from a branding standpoint.
Just to make the absurdity a little clearer, how would this rule effect interactive dinner theater? Say you pay to access dinner theater, and from the painful sweat of your brow within the night you have hammered out a nice little role for yourself as owner of a jukebox joint in Chicago and ruler of most of the Chicago maffia. Maybe one of the other guests offered you 20 real dollars for you to abandon the post so that they could take it. You were having fun, so you turned them down.
And suddenly, the dinner theater is over. Everyone thinks it was a great game, and you all go home.
Nobody in their right mind would argue that at that point the dinner theater company is liable and must pay you back for the 20 dollar position of power and authority that you earned in the game. Why is it that when the rules are migrated to a server suddenly people lose their sense of perspective?
Why virtual game property is never "owned"
1. Virtual property doesn't exist: that's why it is called virtual. Saying that you own a sword in World of Warcraft is as non-sensical as saying that James Earl Jones owns the death star.
2. You never buy a "thing," and you never get a copyright. You're paying for the potential for access to copyrighted material on a server somewhere. That you have to further play a game to get access has no bearing on the fact that you were never actually transferred a copyright.
3. Game makers have structured the interaction carefully to allow themselves freedom to maintain a healthy game experience. If the value of all items within a game needed to remain fixed for sake of a stable economy, no positive balance changes would be possible and the game experience would crumble.
4. If you did "own" virtual propery, you would need to pay american dollar taxes on virtual transactions. If you happened to fight and slave and earn an Amani Warbear, for example, you'd be owe an additional 45 dollars in capital gains taxes.
They're intentionally masking their whois domain information. According to Popular Mechanics, they can make toothpaste.
Very confusing. Why not just tell us what the base energy source is? Otherwise, it's just a perpetual motion machine.
I'm sick and tired of sequel entitlement. If you don't blow the roof off with your first 50 dollar event, you don't deserve to make more. Everyone references Star Wars in this respect. Sure, there was a trilogy there, but they blew up the Death Star in the first one.
Be as amazing as you possibly can in your first iteration! Otherwise you don't deserve the 50 bucks, let alone 100 more for sequels. Hopefully Blizzard will prove me wrong, but my hopes are low.
Additionally, I can easily see this fracturing the multiplayer as well into multiple camps depending on which versions of the game they have.
You realize that "IBM PC" went out of style when people forgot who IBM was.
Poll people on the street. They're just about as likely to have real experience with Amiga OS or BSD OS as we are to know how to create a fold-up double hem in silk. It's all about their computer or their Windows machine.
If voice channels are full more often than the signaling channel, the voice channel is the more scarce resource.
People will charge what the market will bear, pure and simple. The market is willing to pay 10c for a SMS message.
Most of the dangerous driving I remember my friends in highschool (long ago) doing involved going 60 in populated residential zones, turning way too quickly, driving drunk, and driving cars that are mechanically way behind their prime.
While it is a good idea, I don't really see this addressing those conditions. In general, if your kids shouldn't do it on the road, why should you?
I believe he's thinking of the GP32 or the GP2x Wiz. They have been an open gaming platform since their inception, and have achieved moderate popularity in Asia.
Also, software. I get a lot of work done more quickly by writing quick little AutoHotKey scripts at work. Of course, nobody in IT uses it or would think to approve it for me, but nonetheless it is an effective tool. Similarly, other tools like various text editors, merge tools, and similar are not on any approved list but have evolved into usage because users at my company are free to choose appropriate tools. From this, the best tools have risen up.
If your AV and anti-spyware software *is* locked down and up to date, there should be little risk of infection by users. And for your most important data and systems you should NEVER trust the end users on your network anyway.
Might I add that personal electronics:
A. Are a tool that the user doesn't need to be trained on.
B. Are a tool that the company doesn't need to invest in.
C. Are customized for that user's needs beyond what IT is capable of delivering.
I've been using a personal laptop at work for months while the corporate overlords try to run that approval up the flagpole. Your sales staff probably knows their networking needs far better than anyone else (IM is a communications medium), and
There seem to be two approaches to IT: 1. Attempt to lock everything down while solving every need and soothing every issue manually. 2. Provide machines and software, and try to be helpful as your staff does what they're going to do. The former seems reminiscent of a time when nobody knew how computers worked. The latter seems fitting to a world where kids who've never thrown a baseball are posting youtube videos.
Luckily, I believe in the market and I think someone will lay the groundwork for serious bandwidth soon, instead of continuing to use copper for everything.
You chose this week to believe in the market?
Netflix streams at a maximum of 2.2 mbps
DVDs stream at 8 mbps
The difference between MPEG2 and WMV is significant at lower bitrates, but at larger ones they get to be pretty comparable. In this case, a 2.2 mbps WMV stream is definitely below DVD quality.
A free, unregulated economy above a certain size is almost guaranteed to degrade into monopolies. This is not just my assessment, but that of Adam Smith, founder of a lot of the principles of free-market capitalism.
Take for example the privitization of water in Argentina. The capital outlay is heavy enough that nobody else can afford to do it, or if they did they would have little chance of recouping. However, the water company in Argentina is by far one of the most profitable institutions in the country, nearly doubling monthly fees since their tenure. If there wasn't government regulation, that company could then enter into new markets with the hook that "if you sell anything other
than our beef, we won't provide water." This is exactly the tactic that Microsoft took in the mid 90's to prevent computer manufacturers from working with the other (many times superior) operating systems on the market at the time.
Taking it a step further, a "Truly Free" economy is indistinguishable from the anarchy that exists in a power vacuum, and which quickly degrades into feudal warlordism.
Oh, but you'd have regulations against use of force, improperly leveraging monopolies, properly labeling items, adhering to contracts, etc, etc, etc. And that of course all requires regulatory bodies, police force, civillian treaties for non-lethan enforcement, additional regulatory bodies to form and enact those civillian treaties, etc. As orasio mentioned, you can't have a "Truly free economy" without a hell of a lot of regulatory institutions. Otherwise, what would prevent me from saying "I'll insure your house against hurricanes," taking all of the money for personal use, and abandoning everyone when the first hurricane came along? Or becoming the head of an established bank, taking everyone's deposits, and heading for the Cayman islands?
As my father liked to say (in more colorful language), we're no longer arguing about if you're a communist, but just haggling over degrees.
It's important to explicitly call out the properties of DRM that make it bad. DRM is out there to prevent the player from willy-nilly installing on everyone's PC's, which can be bad as it prevents you from switching computers or backing up your own games. Steam actually facilitates transferrence, as you can download any purchased games on any computer you log into. You don't need a CD to play, you don't need a CD to install on another computer, you can play your games on all the computers you have available.
Steam only runs with your games, doesn't take up a lot of CPU time, and has been stable for several years now. The one outstanding question is "what happens if Valve shuts down," but they have promised to unlock everything in such a case.
If we shout that DRM in all forms is terrible, none of the companies will or can listen. If we work towards removing the problematic portions of the system, we might get a compromise setup that is better than we started with.
All consoles since the NES have had DRM. But because they were actually sane DRM, nobody but pirates and developers ever encountered it. Let's work towards that again.
If 99.9% of your "catches" are legitimate people just going home, you're going to waive 100% of people through.
Think of the anti-theft security systems at major stores. Unless they already think you're stealing something, you just get waived through.
In ten years, not only will this system be a reality, but the civilian market will have figured out how to squeeze even more out of it than the military figured.
Of course, the US military is about 3 million people. The world's population is about 2 thousand times that. Once a technology makes its way into a base that large, of course it will advance more rapidly.
"A top Admiral in the Navy was lamenting how the Navy is having a problem selling itself as a cutting edge tech provider..."
Cutting edge tech frequently doesn't work. iPhones crash, Magellans don't get GPS locks, etc. Computerizing brings instability.
Also, replacing a Blackberry is a lot easier than replacing the comm system on a Burke destroyer. The Blackberry only has to work with ok one or two bluetooth accessory types: the Burke needs to be 100% with all of the custom systems on board.
8.2 Mbps to 4k terminals.
Advanced EHF is designed to provide 24 hour coverage from 65 North, to 65 South across the K and Ka sub bands, and when combined with the prototyped Extended Data Rate (XDR) terminals and systems, will offer up to 8.2 Mbps data rates for around 4,000 terminals in concurrent use per satellite footprint (whether that scales to 12,000 systems in concurrent use globally isn't clear from source material).
Compared to current satellite rates, this is pretty good. Additionally, this allows them to bounce satellite signals quickly and reliably around the globe before having to incurr the atmosphere penalty.
However, if you're looking for replacement for WiFi, a final 802.11N spec is only about 10 years off.
For the record, Microsoft recently added a tool to transfer licenses between system serial numbers. This was a major issue with their DRM early on (especially with all the system failures), and it is nice to see it being addressed.
Hopefully Sony didn't tie their hands with licensing, and can make some similar improvements of their own.
DRM is an ecosystem, not a file format. Part of most people's DRM systems is that you're not allowed to move content between systems, but the vendor will through downloads and / or rights transferrence.
By not providing re-downloads and by extension transferrence between systems, Sony's DRM ecosystem suddenly becomes a lot more restrictive. The successful digital download DRM systems allow for some method to maintain your content indefinitely. With 5-year modern hard drive lives, this particular DRM system puts an explicit and short end-of-life on your files.
The comparison would be more like you buy a book from a store, who then comes home with you, nails the book to your floor and attaches explosive ink packs. If you ever move, your book will explode. When you do move, the bookstore charges you full price for another copy. In Sony's case, the company's DRM is going out of its way to stop you from moving or backing up your content in reasonable and legal ways, and without additional downloads the service provides no alternative.
People are getting used to the idea that in exchange for giving up some of their traditional rights with digital media (inc resale), they at least get to re-download stuff without being charged for it. Steam is a master of this, allowing you to play anything anywhere so long as you are signed in. In the case of Sony, the user is both prevented from moving paid content between system or hard drive upgrades, and is charged full price for re-downloads. Bandwidth isn't free, but with wholesale prices near 10c per GB for large organizations, it isn't substantial either.
I have to believe that this was an oversight on their part, and that the situation will be rectified. This just doesn't seem sustainable.
How about 480p displayed on a native 480p set vs 1080p displayed on a 1080i set via component cables because an HDMI splitter box didn't support HDCP?
If you have to compare them side-by-side in optimal circumstances, it probably isn't worth the extra money yet. With DVDs years ago, you could just show someone a DVD playing on a TV and watch their eyes bug out at the quality. Lust was immediate. If things are close enough now that a side-by-side comparison is required, DVD's may just be good enough for the price.