Or rather, the product will be crippled to hell by DRM systems to be nearly impossible to use properly.
This has been done before with the NetMD minidisc players, which don't allow to extract the pieces recorded with the microphone.
I wouldn't be surprices, if those burned DVD can only be played back on the same unit, that DVD commercial DVD can't be copied or some other copyright protection idiocy.
The only thing is that someone would have to do it anonymously - or from outside the US to avoid violating the DMCA
Most people outside of the US have a very limited use for a software that handles the US IRS forms. So please explain again, why someone outside of the US should spend his time on TurboTax?
Now here's one of the things I've never been able to figure out. How can it make sense to build good, solid, complex software that's supposed to be free (beer, speech, whatever) and then say "here it is, it's free. But if you want to figure out how to use it, pay up".
Usally with any software development, the first challenge is to create something that does what it should. This can take a lot of time and resources, usually at the beginning of a project.
Once the the product is more or less done, users (for commercial software: customers) start trying to use it and the second after it start complaining and crying for changes, manuals, training materials etc.
Most developers like part one, but hate part two.
For commercial software, the developer has a contract with the customer, which he needs to fullfill. This entail usually listening to whiny users, providing detailed guides on how to wipe the backside to inept users etc.
With free software, the user gets the stuff as it is. If the user's happy, fine - if not it's fine too - if the user breaks it, he owns both halves of it. There's no obligation at all from the developer to the user. This is the big luxury free software developer have by not charging for their software.
If some user want more help than provided by the develppers generosity, he should go out and pay someone to care, a consultant or an independent software developer.
Robust usually means, not using the flimsiest components anywhere, it assumes some over-engineering. This would lead again to not so small (and light) phones again. The current crop of robust phones (that are somewhat waterproof too) are about as big as the phones from 3 or 4 years ago.
And then, durability is totally against the interest of any phone manufactuere, who want to sell as many phones as possible. The ideal woul dbe, that they phone survives just long enough until the next model comes out.
2) Increase battery life.
Part of the reduction in size and weight came from smaller batteries, that hold a shorter time. To be honest, I prefer my small phone that comfortably fits into a pocket, even if I have to recharge it every other day.
3) Less gimmicks, make them cheaper
I agree with you: Camera, mp-3 player, color display and stereo ring-tones are just useless gimmicks.
But I don't see the need to make phones cheaper. If you sign up with any mobile phone operator here in Austria, you usually get a basic phone for 1 Euro. And if it doesn't have to be the latest model, on the second hand market phones are dirt cheap too.
What lead here in Austria to a big mobile phone boom was the fact, that people calling a mobile pay a long distance, but for the owner of the phone getting called is always free. Add to that pre-paid card phones, without any monthly fees and we had here drowes of grannies and kids getting a phone, just in case when they needed it.
The operators make their cash from the interconnect fees and the high rates for outgoing calls.
They can at least reduce the chance a lot with redundency.
If you have a team of sys-admins, you have a good chance that the other might catch the bad one before it's too late. And if they feel treated well by the company and don't share the sentiment of the saboteur, the damage is usually contained.
Another policy I've seen in some banks is that all employees have to take 2 continuous weeks paid vacation each year (the rest of the paid vacation time can be distributed at will). This promotes cross-training and redundancy.
In the past years, technocrats, maketroids and burocrats of all kinds have had their wet dreams about the global database and total information about their victims.
In the beginning, those databases will probably work and be a menace to our privacy, but as they're fed on a constant stream of uncaring data input, random garbage, errors, the quality of the data will deteriorate quickly. Just have a look at the Times registration database (are there really that many Mr. Goatse?) or the mailing list from the wonderful Real-Media Player download page.
Once this stage is reached, the conclusions of those databases will get discounted more and more, and transparent anonymity will be reached. People will simple learn how to feed the system on the crap it likes best. We have that already today in accounting (just keep below the radar of the IRS) and other offical reporting duties. The trend will just continue.
In the end, any query will produce a lot of chaff while missing much important data that they won't be worth the the processing time.
The idea that those databases can be used to combat Terrorism and crime is quite ludicrous. I'm certain Mss. Nasty and Dr. Evil will manage to have completely harmless profiles in all of those databases. At worst, it will just give those criminals with access to power an additional leverage (see current Mafia-trials in Italy).
At the moment we're in atransitional phase, where people still believe in Big Brother, and those poor sods having their data in the wrong place will suffer most. Anybody who got associated with somebody else's credit record can attest that.
But once enough people are made to suffer from the garbage produced by those databases, things will normalise again.
We just need more databases, more agressive datamining, leading to more mistakes. The bigger the mistakes, the merrier. If those reports hit the evening news often enough, the systems will find their rightful destiny:
I was talking about the american incarnation of ebay and getting stuff from there to Europe. In most cases, any possible price benefits are eaten up by shipping costs. Getting stuff from ebay's usually just interesting for items not easily available here.
For domestic auctions, any auction local house will do, no matter if it's called ebay.co.uk or something else with no links to ebay.com.
I find it interesting, that only big american sites are mentioned, that don't really offer anything that can't be done easily with local companies.
You all assume, that indians are interested in ebay. Here in Europe, for an example, getting stuff from ebay is a really big hassle and with shipping costs added not worth most of the time. I guess with india it's even worse. If there happen to be an indian big auctioneer working the local market, it's very likely that ebay isn't of interest only to a very small minority.
But as written before, most likely those site won't care about indian traffic anyway, as most of their advertisers are interested in american consumers only.
In the end, this could promote the devlopment of a strong asian counterpart to the big american sites. It happened before with Lineage in Korea.
I wonder, if they're going to block Doubleclick and their ilk next.
> Terrorists attack civilian populations for the PRIME > reason of sowing (duh) terror.
Well, that description fits quite well the carpet bombings by the allies on German and Japanese cities, a lot of the bombing of indo-china, Korea and Vietnam and most other uses of high altitude bombings.
Going by your definition of terror, the USA are a nation with a terrorist regime.
It's the other way round, at least here in Austria:
If you want a connection with all the bandwith and where you can run all services, yo pay the full price. Usually those accounts are named Business-something.
For home users, who don't need certain features, they also offer accounts that are a lot cheaper. But to use them, you have to agree to some rules, like now servers, fair use, etc.
So why's everybody whining, when a telco or ISP starts to enforce those limitations?
> Your mistake, which is something that apparently happens to > a lot of people, is that when you discarded the hardware > used to read your electronic data, you did not transfer that > data to a new medium.
Zero points.
The whole point of an archive medium is, that you can store data safely for a long time, and to be able to access the data. If you need to copy all your data every 5 years, it defeats the purpose.
Imagine what will happen, when your grandchildren go through through the boxes in your attic, after you've been safely stowed away 6 foot under the earth:
They might keep your letters, photographs etc, giving them some insight into how you spent your youth.
Your 8-track tapes, records, vhs-tapes, cd they might sell to a few collectors if the medium's still ok, but most likely they'll be unusable. CD and magnetic media are aging very badly, the best chance of survival have regular records.
The floppy disks and other digital stuff will go to the bin, simply because there'll be no chance of getting useful data from them.
Art Tatum wrote:
Most people (not Slashdotters, but we're not most people) like Microsoft.
There is a second group of people, who don't like Microsoft: Corporate IT-buyers.
With all those licensing hassles and Microsofts cunning pricing plans, they're just waiting for a chance to tell Microsoft to shove it.
Those corporate buyers will not take risks by trying oddball solutions, but once an alternative to MS-Office is recognised as a valid business-choice, they will kick Microsoft hard. The same happened to IBM.
Media transfers have been done so many times its hardly a point worth discussing. Do you really think newspapers and photo archives have stuff sitting on 8" disks right now and wondering how they're going to get it off?
Media transfers - and format conversions. Have you ever done them on a bigger scale? Really?
I seriously doubt it, because they're a major pain once it's more than a few diskettes. And from a certain point on, you can't any more, because you're lacking the hardware and getting it may be really expensive.
I still have the diskettes and tapes, whit my first programs and some mail archives of stuff I considered worth keeping. Now imagine my great children finding those 5 1/4" diskettes and tapes when they clean out my house after I'm safely stowed 6 feet under the earth.
With letters or photographs, it's easy: They'll look through them and can easily check if those are worth keeping or not. But with those disks, all they only can throw them away.
You can easily argue, who cares about my abortive tries at poetry or the source code of the first virus for MS-DOS. But exactly the same apply to the data of famous people: We still have the letters Mozart wrote as a kid, but will future generation have such a documentation about our geniuses?
From what I read on librarians and archivars mailing lists, it's highly doubtful.
No, it's not a chicken and egg problem, it's more a check if there is a basic understanding between you and the prospective employer.
With your attire, you offer not to wear suits when working. For most employers, that may be fine, but those who think you have to wear one, you'll be the wrong person for the job.
This is independant on how silly or not it is, to require engineers to wear suits.
That's exactly the point. Your attire would be ok in most places, and it won't pose any problem. But in areas, where suits are considered a must, you won't be happy and your employer wouldn't be happy with you either. So best for all concerned parties is not to hire you.
If a candidate violates my standards of what I consider proper, I won't hire him because I wouldn't want to work with him. That applies to every set of standards, no matter how reasonable or stupid they are. To each his own.
If he's not able to make himself socially presentable for an interview, don't hire him.
Why should I hire a candidate, who doesn't grasp the simple rules by which the hiring-game is played? He gives the impression about himself, that he's either stupid, or that he doesn't care about the rules a business operates. In both cases, he'll be a liability I don't want on my team.
The author spends lot of space discussing, how futile it is to catch up with such a strong leader, and that innovative products and killer apps are needed. He even cites some marketing manuals.
What he totally misses, is the fact, that usuable word processors, spreadsheets etc. are needed as support for any killer application that may appear, even if they aren't as shiny as MS-Word. They just need to be usable, so that people can reasonably consider switching to Linux.
Another point he doesn't make is, that all those wonderful applications he calls innovative, like Word, Excel etc. were pretty bad when they came out . I remember the early versions of MS-Word, and compared to Word Perfect or XyWrite it was pretty bad. And early Excel versions were pieces of garbage, compared to Lotus 1-2-3 or Symphony.
Only after they spent some time catching up, and the leaders in the field got fat and complacent, they became the bright landmarks of office software they're today.
> Virus writer have a lot to teach us about self-maintaining and
> -tuning programs - while despising the destruction they cause, I can't help but
> admire their design prowess.
It seems, you never looked at the code of virus programs. They are not self-maintaining or seld-tuning. Most of the time, they are even written very badly and tend to crash in unknown environments. But for a virus, that doesn't matter, as long as it performs well enough in a commmon environment. The author usually doesn't care it it crashes the current host, ruins it or just doesn't work if the virus gets confused. If a virus happen to find enough friendly computing environments, that offer it the exact condition it needs, we'll hear about it on CNN. If not, it just won't spread.
All in all, calling a virus self-tuning or self-maintaining is utter crap, usually the kind found in many articles about artifical life by Katz.
Slashdot Mirror
Or rather, the product will be crippled to hell by DRM systems to be nearly impossible to use properly.
This has been done before with the NetMD minidisc players, which don't allow to extract the pieces recorded with the microphone.
I wouldn't be surprices, if those burned DVD can only be played back on the same unit, that DVD commercial DVD can't be copied or some other copyright protection idiocy.
The basic no frills standalone HTML editor the world needs is vi.
And if people would stay away from Frontpage and the like, the world would be a better place too.
I'd really love to see the iraqi commando dressed up as a 5 year old girl in yellow dress.
Considering that Carsten Standfuß is a maritime engineer by training, the insurance shouldn't be too worried.
Most people outside of the US have a very limited use for a software that handles the US IRS forms. So please explain again, why someone outside of the US should spend his time on TurboTax?
Usally with any software development, the first challenge is to create something that does what it should. This can take a lot of time and resources, usually at the beginning of a project.
Once the the product is more or less done, users (for commercial software: customers) start trying to use it and the second after it start complaining and crying for changes, manuals, training materials etc.
Most developers like part one, but hate part two.
For commercial software, the developer has a contract with the customer, which he needs to fullfill. This entail usually listening to whiny users, providing detailed guides on how to wipe the backside to inept users etc.
With free software, the user gets the stuff as it is. If the user's happy, fine - if not it's fine too - if the user breaks it, he owns both halves of it. There's no obligation at all from the developer to the user. This is the big luxury free software developer have by not charging for their software.
If some user want more help than provided by the develppers generosity, he should go out and pay someone to care, a consultant or an independent software developer.
Those Underwood keyboards appeared in Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil.
I don't think they appeared in the Max Headroom series too.
1) Increase durability:
Robust usually means, not using the flimsiest components anywhere, it assumes some over-engineering. This would lead again to not so small (and light) phones again. The current crop of robust phones (that are somewhat waterproof too) are about as big as the phones from 3 or 4 years ago.
And then, durability is totally against the interest of any phone manufactuere, who want to sell as many phones as possible. The ideal woul dbe, that they phone survives just long enough until the next model comes out.
2) Increase battery life.
Part of the reduction in size and weight came from smaller batteries, that hold a shorter time. To be honest, I prefer my small phone that comfortably fits into a pocket, even if I have to recharge it every other day.
3) Less gimmicks, make them cheaper
I agree with you: Camera, mp-3 player, color display and stereo ring-tones are just useless gimmicks.
But I don't see the need to make phones cheaper. If you sign up with any mobile phone operator here in Austria, you usually get a basic phone for 1 Euro. And if it doesn't have to be the latest model, on the second hand market phones are dirt cheap too.
What lead here in Austria to a big mobile phone boom was the fact, that people calling a mobile pay a long distance, but for the owner of the phone getting called is always free. Add to that pre-paid card phones, without any monthly fees and we had here drowes of grannies and kids getting a phone, just in case when they needed it.
The operators make their cash from the interconnect fees and the high rates for outgoing calls.
>> How can they prevent it?
> They can't.
They can at least reduce the chance a lot with redundency.
If you have a team of sys-admins, you have a good chance that the other might catch the bad one before it's too late. And if they feel treated well by the company and don't share the sentiment of the saboteur, the damage is usually contained.
Another policy I've seen in some banks is that all employees have to take 2 continuous weeks paid vacation each year (the rest of the paid vacation time can be distributed at will). This promotes cross-training and redundancy.
In the past years, technocrats, maketroids and burocrats of all kinds have had their wet dreams about the global database and total information about their victims.
In the beginning, those databases will probably work and be a menace to our privacy, but as they're fed on a constant stream of uncaring data input, random garbage, errors, the quality of the data will deteriorate quickly. Just have a look at the Times registration database (are there really that many Mr. Goatse?) or the mailing list from the wonderful Real-Media Player download page.
Once this stage is reached, the conclusions of those databases will get discounted more and more, and transparent anonymity will be reached. People will simple learn how to feed the system on the crap it likes best. We have that already today in accounting (just keep below the radar of the IRS) and other offical reporting duties. The trend will just continue.
In the end, any query will produce a lot of chaff while missing much important data that they won't be worth the the processing time.
The idea that those databases can be used to combat Terrorism and crime is quite ludicrous. I'm certain Mss. Nasty and Dr. Evil will manage to have completely harmless profiles in all of those databases. At worst, it will just give those criminals with access to power an additional leverage (see current Mafia-trials in Italy).
At the moment we're in atransitional phase, where people still believe in Big Brother, and those poor sods having their data in the wrong place will suffer most. Anybody who got associated with somebody else's credit record can attest that.
But once enough people are made to suffer from the garbage produced by those databases, things will normalise again.
We just need more databases, more agressive datamining, leading to more mistakes. The bigger the mistakes, the merrier. If those reports hit the evening news often enough, the systems will find their rightful destiny:
A big garbage dump for burocraties to wank over.
I was talking about the american incarnation of ebay and getting stuff from there to Europe. In most cases, any possible price benefits are eaten up by shipping costs. Getting stuff from ebay's usually just interesting for items not easily available here.
For domestic auctions, any auction local house will do, no matter if it's called ebay.co.uk or something else with no links to ebay.com.
I find it interesting, that only big american sites are mentioned, that don't really offer anything that can't be done easily with local companies.
You all assume, that indians are interested in ebay. Here in Europe, for an example, getting stuff from ebay is a really big hassle and with shipping costs added not worth most of the time. I guess with india it's even worse. If there happen to be an indian big auctioneer working the local market, it's very likely that ebay isn't of interest only to a very small minority.
But as written before, most likely those site won't care about indian traffic anyway, as most of their advertisers are interested in american consumers only.
In the end, this could promote the devlopment of a strong asian counterpart to the big american sites. It happened before with Lineage in Korea.
I wonder, if they're going to block Doubleclick and their ilk next.
> Terrorists attack civilian populations for the PRIME
> reason of sowing (duh) terror.
Well, that description fits quite well the carpet bombings by the allies on German and Japanese cities, a lot of the bombing of indo-china, Korea and Vietnam and most other uses of high altitude bombings.
Going by your definition of terror, the USA are a nation with a terrorist regime.
Interesting. And maybe, you're even right.
It's the other way round, at least here in Austria:
If you want a connection with all the bandwith and where you can run all services, yo pay the full price. Usually those accounts are named Business-something.
For home users, who don't need certain features, they also offer accounts that are a lot cheaper. But to use them, you have to agree to some rules, like now servers, fair use, etc.
So why's everybody whining, when a telco or ISP starts to enforce those limitations?
There ain't no Such thing as a free lunch!
It was despair.com, who trademarked the :-(. There were no patents involved.
More details on this page.
LordNimon wrote:
> Your mistake, which is something that apparently happens to
> a lot of people, is that when you discarded the hardware
> used to read your electronic data, you did not transfer that
> data to a new medium.
Zero points.
The whole point of an archive medium is, that you can store data safely for a long time, and to be able to access the data. If you need to copy all your data every 5 years, it defeats the purpose.
Imagine what will happen, when your grandchildren go through through the boxes in your attic, after you've been safely stowed away 6 foot under the earth:
They might keep your letters, photographs etc, giving them some insight into how you spent your youth.
Your 8-track tapes, records, vhs-tapes, cd they might sell to a few collectors if the medium's still ok, but most likely they'll be unusable. CD and magnetic media are aging very badly, the best chance of survival have regular records.
The floppy disks and other digital stuff will go to the bin, simply because there'll be no chance of getting useful data from them.
That's what long-time storage is all about.
Pizza delivery and junk food.
The social interaction is there, even if it doesn't include girlfriends and BBQ. More often than not, it also includes some game like Quake.
Geeks just have a different common ground between each other than fire fighters or policemen, but the pecking order still is established somehow.
Art Tatum wrote:
Most people (not Slashdotters, but we're not most people) like Microsoft.
There is a second group of people, who don't like Microsoft: Corporate IT-buyers.
With all those licensing hassles and Microsofts cunning pricing plans, they're just waiting for a chance to tell Microsoft to shove it.
Those corporate buyers will not take risks by trying oddball solutions, but once an alternative to MS-Office is recognised as a valid business-choice, they will kick Microsoft hard. The same happened to IBM.
Gad Zuki wrote:
Media transfers have been done so many times its hardly a point worth discussing. Do you really think newspapers and photo archives have stuff sitting on 8" disks right now and wondering how they're going to get it off?
Media transfers - and format conversions. Have you ever done them on a bigger scale? Really?
I seriously doubt it, because they're a major pain once it's more than a few diskettes. And from a certain point on, you can't any more, because you're lacking the hardware and getting it may be really expensive.
I still have the diskettes and tapes, whit my first programs and some mail archives of stuff I considered worth keeping. Now imagine my great children finding those 5 1/4" diskettes and tapes when they clean out my house after I'm safely stowed 6 feet under the earth.
With letters or photographs, it's easy: They'll look through them and can easily check if those are worth keeping or not. But with those disks, all they only can throw them away.
You can easily argue, who cares about my abortive tries at poetry or the source code of the first virus for MS-DOS. But exactly the same apply to the data of famous people: We still have the letters Mozart wrote as a kid, but will future generation have such a documentation about our geniuses?
From what I read on librarians and archivars mailing lists, it's highly doubtful.
No, it's not a chicken and egg problem, it's more a check if there is a basic understanding between you and the prospective employer.
With your attire, you offer not to wear suits when working. For most employers, that may be fine, but those who think you have to wear one, you'll be the wrong person for the job.
This is independant on how silly or not it is, to require engineers to wear suits.
That's exactly the point. Your attire would be ok in most places, and it won't pose any problem. But in areas, where suits are considered a must, you won't be happy and your employer wouldn't be happy with you either. So best for all concerned parties is not to hire you.
If a candidate violates my standards of what I consider proper, I won't hire him because I wouldn't want to work with him. That applies to every set of standards, no matter how reasonable or stupid they are. To each his own.
Very easy check:
If he's not able to make himself socially presentable for an interview, don't hire him.
Why should I hire a candidate, who doesn't grasp the simple rules by which the hiring-game is played? He gives the impression about himself, that he's either stupid, or that he doesn't care about the rules a business operates. In both cases, he'll be a liability I don't want on my team.
The author spends lot of space discussing, how futile it is to catch up with such a strong leader, and that innovative products and killer apps are needed. He even cites some marketing manuals.
What he totally misses, is the fact, that usuable word processors, spreadsheets etc. are needed as support for any killer application that may appear, even if they aren't as shiny as MS-Word. They just need to be usable, so that people can reasonably consider switching to Linux.
Another point he doesn't make is, that all those wonderful applications he calls innovative, like Word, Excel etc. were pretty bad when they came out . I remember the early versions of MS-Word, and compared to Word Perfect or XyWrite it was pretty bad. And early Excel versions were pieces of garbage, compared to Lotus 1-2-3 or Symphony.
Only after they spent some time catching up, and the leaders in the field got fat and complacent, they became the bright landmarks of office software they're today.
> Virus writer have a lot to teach us about self-maintaining and
> -tuning programs - while despising the destruction they cause, I can't help but
> admire their design prowess.
It seems, you never looked at the code of virus programs. They are not self-maintaining or seld-tuning. Most of the time, they are even written very badly and tend to crash in unknown environments. But for a virus, that doesn't matter, as long as it performs well enough in a commmon environment. The author usually doesn't care it it crashes the current host, ruins it or just doesn't work if the virus gets confused. If a virus happen to find enough friendly computing environments, that offer it the exact condition it needs, we'll hear about it on CNN. If not, it just won't spread.
All in all, calling a virus self-tuning or self-maintaining is utter crap, usually the kind found in many articles about artifical life by Katz.