Indeed, I spoke too soon and my apologies for my snippy reply. Thanks for giving a pointer to the Mac-On-Linux project. Frankly, I'm a little amazed that they can get a Mac to emulate on pretty much any PPC platform as I figured there'd be way too many hardware dependencies.
I see no reason to assume the any Linux PPC would be Macintosh compatible any more than any box with an x86 runs Windows. CPU is only one element of machine design.
I don't know of anyone who is running Linux who doesn't keep Windows as a dual boot for running games. That alone will doom the efforts of a "consumer" Linux PPC.
What are the strengths of the PPC? Embedded systems (=cheap/low power). What are the strengths of Linux? Cheap servers.
Why not unite the two strengths? Make super cheap/lower power/tiny foot print racks mounted units with the *embedded* version of the PPC running Linux! You can optimize the server for its purpose while still having the flexibility of Linux.
The use of steganography by the is going to have little impact on the current people vs. corporations. In order for exchange of IP to widespread, there has to be a mechanism for exchange that is widely available and easily used. It doesn't matter if the actual means of exchange is absolutely secure when the weak link is the fact that the IP has to be easily found and decoded.
Still, I kind of like the idea of Napster advertising "We have no music on our site, just a lot of 15MB jpgs of bands playing particular songs."
One thing that seems to have been forgotten is that MS is under no obligation to make the non-subscription software continuously available. All they have to do is stop allowing companies to buy more W2K licenses. This means that any new or replacement machines *must* be purchased with the new version of the OS (and of course, the same with Office). (Remember licenses are no longer transferable between machines.) It does mean MS has to wait, but in about 7-8 years after the switch, no company will have a legal W2K/O2K license.
Besides, I suspect that people *greatly* overestimate the willingness of large companies to switch. I'm convinced that MS could triple the amount it gets from larger companies before those companies would think of switching to other systems.
Wasn't CSS supposed to "protect" the video information found on DVD's? Oh right, I forgot - it was cracked! Is it just me or do the big 5 just/not/ get it?
Well, to take their point of view, that would be like saying, "Sorry, the thieves managed to pick the lock of your safe, so I'm afraid we're not going to arrest them."
A technicalogical solution is only meant to discourage in the same manner as locking the door to your house does. The real enforcement has been, and always will be, the law.
I'm not so certain. I'm fairly certain macrovision stops a lot of casual copying and a lot of older players weren't affected by it.
As for providing the equipment without the hardware, DVD is rather more tightly controlled. I suspect that you won't be licensed to make DVD players *unless* you agree to the hardware. Even if there are a few leaks, a large majority of people won't be able to play pirated DVDs, which is the whole aim.
There are are several major barriers to providing good, fast technical support:
Knowledgeable people are expensive people. You might attract some decent tech support people if you paid them $25/hr. However, just as likely is that once they are reasonable technically proficient, they'll go get a more rewarding job.
Most *real* technical support problems can't be fixed in any reasonable amount of time. We've (almost) all spent 8 hours at a machine trying to coax it back to work because of some minor problem. The odds that a tech support worker, no matter how good, can do that job over the phone is approximately 0 to six decimal places. It's about as practical as doing refrigerator repair over the phone. ("okay, clip the blue wire and tell me what you see...")
Asking users to become technically proficient enough to be useful helpers in diagnosis/repair is like asking most motorists to self-diagnose their cars. And cars are a heck of a lot simpler in terms of what can go wrong. Besides, if they actually spent the *considerable* amount of time to reach that level of technical proficiency, most of them wouldn't be in the jobs they're in.
Almost nobody is willing to pay for tech support. Software prices are (with the exception of monopolies like Microsoft) getting cheaper every year. Try pricing yourself 50% above the competition and promise good tech support and see how long you stay in business. Good tech support is *expensive*. Essentially, once you've spent more than 1hr on the phone to a customer, you'd probably be better off if the customer had never bought the product!
It's also almost impossible to build bug free products that don't require technical support. I'd like to see any other (non-computer) product that comes from dozens of different vendors (the hardware + software on your typical computer) that is so amazingly flexible, highly reliable and costs less than millions of dollars. The fact that computers work as well as they do on the huge array of tasks they are expected to perform when a screw up by any one of the vendors can cause problems with everything else is as close to a miracle of modern progress as you'll find anywhere.
The price for this enormous complexity and low price is, unsuprisingly, a lack of high reliability.
These are the main reasons that hoping or demanding decent technical support is pretty much futile.
> It's a nice gesture to keep the employees happy, but in the end anyone buying an Intel based machine will pay for Intel's goodwill.
Oh come on. It is true, but same can be said for any company that chooses not to use child sweat shop labour. We're also paying for any company that hasn't moved to [insert name of country with lax ecological standards] so it can avoid paying to properly dispose of toxic waste!
No company should take flak for treating its workers decently or behaving responsibly.
I doubt any evidence gained from a search with no warrent, regardless of the computer being in Russia or not, would NOT pass Constitutional muster. If it did, we need to extend the US constitution.
And just which court do you think you would go to to get such a search warrant? AFAIK, courts are only allowed to grant warrants where they have jurisdiction.
Certainly it has been proven in court that foreign nationals on foreign soil are not granted US protections. There are numerous examples of people being kidnapped (albeit usually by bounty hunters) to face US justice.
The natural result of forcing US protections on non-US citizens on foreign soil is that the US would have the right to prosecute foreign nationals who have violated American laws without harming American interests. This sort of extra-territoriality would not be thought of highly.
In this case, the FBI did the right thing. They obtained the files from Russia which had no protection (and to which they had no means of obtaining a warrant). When they files were available on US, they obtained the search warrant. I'm no great fan of the US justice system, but it seems they were following the rules. I'll be really suprised if the courts bounce this one.
Unfortunately, unlike comparisons between credit cards and cash, phone booths are expensive to maintain. If there isn't a critical mass using them and there's no public will to see them maintained, they'll disappear.
This, of course, is unfortunate for those unable to afford a cell phone. However, this is just part of a larger trend. When a significant segment of the population is wealthy enough to afford a service, it is soon no longer considered a "necessary" service.
Sort of like schools. Once a large enough part of the population is sending their children to private schools, there's very little public will to pay for a decent system for the few students remaining.
Once the vast majority of these internet businesses cut their losses (they either do or die), customers will simply have a choice between paying or getting nothing. Neither will customers keep expecting "free" services online, since hardly anyone is going to be providing them in the months and years to come.
True, but you give short shrift to the option that many people consider the most likely: namely that a significant group of users give up on the internet. It's extremely possible that the entire internet as social tool will end up as relevant as the CB radio (still in use, but largely forgotten).
Commercial use will of course, still be with us.
But there's every likelihood of a migration back to the (mall, tv, library, etc.) on the social side.
Unlikely? About as unlikely as the entire dot-com sector coming down with an amazingly resounding crash.
First of all, there's no such thing as "growing too fast." It grows as fast as it grows. When routers stop being able to handle it, it stops growing until technology catches up. It's a standard population cycle.
Actually standard population cycles have huge crashes where the population drops, often precipitously. Let's hope the analogy doesn't quite fit:-).
However, more important is that it's not that more people won't be able to join the internet, it's that performace will degrade to unusable long before that.
A better analogy is probably traffic gridlock. With too many cars, nobody moves. Unfortunately, that can mean financial catastrophe as people start "giving up on the net" because it's just too slow or unreliable. As if e-commerce didn't have enough problems.
Given MS's dominant position in the marketplace, why should MS stockholders support a board of directors that allows the creation of a team that aids companies using MS _competitor's_ products?
At this point, doesn't it make sense to make the competition come to you?
If I understand correctly, the only way that a person who has a computer (with CD-ROM) but not a standalone CD player (the case for a _lot_ of students) is going to be able to listen to the music is to find some pirated MP3's on the net!
Boy, that sounds like a way to increase sales.
"I'm sorry, but the RIAA has specified that buying the CD will not allow you to listen to your music. If you really want to hear that album, I'm afraid you're just going to have to find it on the net. What? No, of course we won't sell it to you over the net. Don't be absurd. That would encourage piracy."
Another case of "If we've eliminated customer shoplifting by shooting all our customers, why are we going out of business?"
I'd just as soon see less "fluff" portal sites and see more meat-and-potato content-filled sites anyway. Portals are getting old.
What makes you think that the "meat-and-potato content-filled sites" are any less likely to go under? Given the death of banner income, if they're that good, they'll end up with enough traffic that bandwidth related costs will sink them, never mind the cost to create the content.
Isn't this just part of the death of online advertiser supported content? The disappearance of such web sites is occurring in every field from gaming to writer's resources and beyond.
Given nobody has made subscription based content work, it looks like the web is going back to its roots with hobbyist-only content. The only problem with that is, if a site is any good, there'll be tens of thousands reading it, in which case the hobbyist goes bankrupt supplying bandwidth. At least in the old days, there just weren't that many people to serve.
Of course, we'll always have corporate sites, but it kind of diminishes the joy of the web. After all, not that many people are fascinated by the world's largest shopping mall.
We all know about the "superbowl" ads. And some of may remember when ads first appeared on pay-tv channels and movie theaters. The ads were "different". They had a little more creativity and were a little more "out there".
The problem is that if all your ads are like that, then soon enough they lose effectiveness. Likewise, seeing the ad day in and day out eliminates the effectiveness of the ad. I rarely laugh at an ad the third time I've seen it. Familiarity really does breed contempt in the ad world.
Perhaps a "reward" for ad karma (or even just repeated viewing) might be the occasional exposure to the "higher class" ad. The ads that actually produce a chuckle the first time one sees them. The ads that one mentions to a colleague the next day for one reason or another.
Of course, there's tremendous pressure to release a "good" ad absolutely everywhere, but in doing so, you diminish not just the power of the "good" ad, but also the ad's ability to draw people into reading other ads, just in case they too might be worth seeing. As it is now, if I skip an ad banner, I can be reasonably assured that I'll see it another 40 or 50 times (until even if it was "good", it's lost all impact).
Obviously, being able to specify one's interests in ads is a no brainer. Targeting of ads is better, with (possibly) higher click-throughs and the users don't have to put up with ads for products they'll never use (good-bye low interest credit cards!)
However, there is one downside, if you specify only a few areas, you are likely to see the same ad again and again. This encourages one to ignore the ad and even the "branding" is less effective. (Instead of taking 1 second to scan the ad, you take.3 seconds to recognize the same ad).
Personally, I think a big step would be to get advertisers to spend the money to come up with the many more different ads for the same product. I suspect you could fairly easily double the effectiveness of individual ads. Banner ads can't be that much work can they?
Admittedly, clever ads are not easy to put together, but most banner ads, especially at the web sites you are dealing with, are more information conveyance devices than entertainment. Given most people are going to see ads from the same place repeatedly, you can afford to put a different snippet of information in each ad (for example, advertise a different config of Linux workstation in each ad).
But they're not advertising based on "average use" (at least not where I live). They are advertising a full 640k or whatever connection. If a DSL company advertises to me that I can get a 640k downstream and 384k upstream (just pulling numbers out of my bum) for $49.95 a month, then I should be entitled to use every last drop of that bandwidth in any way that I see fit.
Um, reality check here. If we take this to its logical extreme, then all airplanes should fly half empty with double the airline ticket price to avoid the possibility of overbooking.
In fact, we could go further and say that any form of sale should be prohibited, because if everyone took advantage of it, the company would be unable to meet the demand.
In order for our world to function, it is sometimes necessary to conflate the "advertised" figure with the "what can be reasonably sustained under most circumstances". This requires some element of judgement (horrors!), but generally allows society to actually function at something close to peak efficiency. After all, if everything we built/advertised had to survive every possible contingency, we'd be in big trouble.
In this situation, if the assumptions are going out of whack because too many people are sharing bandwith driving up the bandwidth usage per account, one of two things can happen: The company can (1) make policy to force the market to conform to their assumptions or (2) they can change their assumptions about the nature of the market.
Competitive pressures (either financial, or the government pressuring for lower rates) can force a company to option (1). Option (2), while fairer for the minority who want maximum use of bandwidth, is often met with resistance. ("Hi, we're raising your rates 50% because your neighbours are sharing their line.")
Anyway, do remember that commerce, like life, has to be based in reality, not just theory.
the problem is that kids are being encouraged to inform on kids who may commit a crime
You are sadly wrong. The student informed on another student who _was_ committing a crime (at least in the eyes of the police). To quote: He was immediately charged with making terrorist threats and intimidating a witness. In other words, the police believed he was breaking the law.
People seem to be under the misapprehension that it is legal to threaten, even in passing or jest, other people. Saying "I'm going to blow this place up" is against the law and can result in going to jail for a long, long time. It's not a matter of free speech, it's a matter of uttering a threat.
The whole point of my initial article is that turning a colleague in for committing a crime (which is what happened in this instance) is not a bad thing. In this case, the bad thing is the law itself that made the utterance a crime.
Various organizations that are attempting to get people to report on suspicious behaviour is a very different thing and not the topic of this thread.
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Indeed, I spoke too soon and my apologies for my snippy reply. Thanks for giving a pointer to the Mac-On-Linux project. Frankly, I'm a little amazed that they can get a Mac to emulate on pretty much any PPC platform as I figured there'd be way too many hardware dependencies.
I see no reason to assume the any Linux PPC would be Macintosh compatible any more than any box with an x86 runs Windows. CPU is only one element of machine design.
I don't know of anyone who is running Linux who doesn't keep Windows as a dual boot for running games. That alone will doom the efforts of a "consumer" Linux PPC.
What are the strengths of the PPC? Embedded systems (=cheap/low power). What are the strengths of Linux? Cheap servers.
Why not unite the two strengths? Make super cheap/lower power/tiny foot print racks mounted units with the *embedded* version of the PPC running Linux! You can optimize the server for its purpose while still having the flexibility of Linux.
The use of steganography by the is going to have little impact on the current people vs. corporations. In order for exchange of IP to widespread, there has to be a mechanism for exchange that is widely available and easily used. It doesn't matter if the actual means of exchange is absolutely secure when the weak link is the fact that the IP has to be easily found and decoded.
Still, I kind of like the idea of Napster advertising "We have no music on our site, just a lot of 15MB jpgs of bands playing particular songs."
In other words, users want to use cryptography to defeat IP protection while companies want to use steganography to protect IP.
Boy, guess which of these two disciplines is going to see a several-fold increase in funding in the next few years.
One thing that seems to have been forgotten is that MS is under no obligation to make the non-subscription software continuously available. All they have to do is stop allowing companies to buy more W2K licenses. This means that any new or replacement machines *must* be purchased with the new version of the OS (and of course, the same with Office). (Remember licenses are no longer transferable between machines.) It does mean MS has to wait, but in about 7-8 years after the switch, no company will have a legal W2K/O2K license.
Besides, I suspect that people *greatly* overestimate the willingness of large companies to switch. I'm convinced that MS could triple the amount it gets from larger companies before those companies would think of switching to other systems.
Well, to take their point of view, that would be like saying, "Sorry, the thieves managed to pick the lock of your safe, so I'm afraid we're not going to arrest them."
A technicalogical solution is only meant to discourage in the same manner as locking the door to your house does. The real enforcement has been, and always will be, the law.
I'm not so certain. I'm fairly certain macrovision stops a lot of casual copying and a lot of older players weren't affected by it.
As for providing the equipment without the hardware, DVD is rather more tightly controlled. I suspect that you won't be licensed to make DVD players *unless* you agree to the hardware. Even if there are a few leaks, a large majority of people won't be able to play pirated DVDs, which is the whole aim.
The price for this enormous complexity and low price is, unsuprisingly, a lack of high reliability.
These are the main reasons that hoping or demanding decent technical support is pretty much futile.
> It's a nice gesture to keep the employees happy, but in the end anyone buying an Intel based machine will pay for Intel's goodwill.
Oh come on. It is true, but same can be said for any company that chooses not to use child sweat shop labour. We're also paying for any company that hasn't moved to [insert name of country with lax ecological standards] so it can avoid paying to properly dispose of toxic waste!
No company should take flak for treating its workers decently or behaving responsibly.
Even Intel.
I doubt any evidence gained from a search with no warrent, regardless of the computer being in Russia or not, would NOT pass Constitutional muster. If it did, we need to extend the US constitution.
And just which court do you think you would go to to get such a search warrant? AFAIK, courts are only allowed to grant warrants where they have jurisdiction.
Certainly it has been proven in court that foreign nationals on foreign soil are not granted US protections. There are numerous examples of people being kidnapped (albeit usually by bounty hunters) to face US justice.
The natural result of forcing US protections on non-US citizens on foreign soil is that the US would have the right to prosecute foreign nationals who have violated American laws without harming American interests. This sort of extra-territoriality would not be thought of highly.
In this case, the FBI did the right thing. They obtained the files from Russia which had no protection (and to which they had no means of obtaining a warrant). When they files were available on US, they obtained the search warrant. I'm no great fan of the US justice system, but it seems they were following the rules. I'll be really suprised if the courts bounce this one.
Unfortunately, unlike comparisons between credit cards and cash, phone booths are expensive to maintain. If there isn't a critical mass using them and there's no public will to see them maintained, they'll disappear.
This, of course, is unfortunate for those unable to afford a cell phone. However, this is just part of a larger trend. When a significant segment of the population is wealthy enough to afford a service, it is soon no longer considered a "necessary" service.
Sort of like schools. Once a large enough part of the population is sending their children to private schools, there's very little public will to pay for a decent system for the few students remaining.
Once the vast majority of these internet businesses cut their losses (they either do or die), customers will simply have a choice between paying or getting nothing. Neither will customers keep expecting "free" services online, since hardly anyone is going to be providing them in the months and years to come.
True, but you give short shrift to the option that many people consider the most likely: namely that a significant group of users give up on the internet. It's extremely possible that the entire internet as social tool will end up as relevant as the CB radio (still in use, but largely forgotten).
Commercial use will of course, still be with us.
But there's every likelihood of a migration back to the (mall, tv, library, etc.) on the social side.
Unlikely? About as unlikely as the entire dot-com sector coming down with an amazingly resounding crash.
Similarly, I could give a f*ck what some luser microserf has to say.
:-).
Which is why you didn't read the thread or respond to the article
First of all, there's no such thing as "growing too fast." It grows as fast as it grows. When routers stop being able to handle it, it stops growing until technology catches up. It's a standard population cycle.
:-).
Actually standard population cycles have huge crashes where the population drops, often precipitously. Let's hope the analogy doesn't quite fit
However, more important is that it's not that more people won't be able to join the internet, it's that performace will degrade to unusable long before that.
A better analogy is probably traffic gridlock. With too many cars, nobody moves. Unfortunately, that can mean financial catastrophe as people start "giving up on the net" because it's just too slow or unreliable. As if e-commerce didn't have enough problems.
Given MS's dominant position in the marketplace, why should MS stockholders support a board of directors that allows the creation of a team that aids companies using MS _competitor's_ products?
At this point, doesn't it make sense to make the competition come to you?
If I understand correctly, the only way that a person who has a computer (with CD-ROM) but not a standalone CD player (the case for a _lot_ of students) is going to be able to listen to the music is to find some pirated MP3's on the net!
Boy, that sounds like a way to increase sales.
"I'm sorry, but the RIAA has specified that buying the CD will not allow you to listen to your music. If you really want to hear that album, I'm afraid you're just going to have to find it on the net. What? No, of course we won't sell it to you over the net. Don't be absurd. That would encourage piracy."
Another case of "If we've eliminated customer shoplifting by shooting all our customers, why are we going out of business?"
I don't understand why people complain about information overload on the Internet.
...
:-)
Hmmm. Let's get some perspective on the "Palestinian Israeli Confict". Here's the search page and
Results 1-10 of about 94,800
Then again, That perspective stuff is overrated
I'd just as soon see less "fluff" portal sites and see more meat-and-potato content-filled sites anyway. Portals are getting old.
What makes you think that the "meat-and-potato content-filled sites" are any less likely to go under? Given the death of banner income, if they're that good, they'll end up with enough traffic that bandwidth related costs will sink them, never mind the cost to create the content.
Isn't this just part of the death of online advertiser supported content? The disappearance of such web sites is occurring in every field from gaming to writer's resources and beyond.
Given nobody has made subscription based content work, it looks like the web is going back to its roots with hobbyist-only content. The only problem with that is, if a site is any good, there'll be tens of thousands reading it, in which case the hobbyist goes bankrupt supplying bandwidth. At least in the old days, there just weren't that many people to serve.
Of course, we'll always have corporate sites, but it kind of diminishes the joy of the web. After all, not that many people are fascinated by the world's largest shopping mall.
We all know about the "superbowl" ads. And some of may remember when ads first appeared on pay-tv channels and movie theaters. The ads were "different". They had a little more creativity and were a little more "out there".
The problem is that if all your ads are like that, then soon enough they lose effectiveness. Likewise, seeing the ad day in and day out eliminates the effectiveness of the ad. I rarely laugh at an ad the third time I've seen it. Familiarity really does breed contempt in the ad world.
Perhaps a "reward" for ad karma (or even just repeated viewing) might be the occasional exposure to the "higher class" ad. The ads that actually produce a chuckle the first time one sees them. The ads that one mentions to a colleague the next day for one reason or another.
Of course, there's tremendous pressure to release a "good" ad absolutely everywhere, but in doing so, you diminish not just the power of the "good" ad, but also the ad's ability to draw people into reading other ads, just in case they too might be worth seeing. As it is now, if I skip an ad banner, I can be reasonably assured that I'll see it another 40 or 50 times (until even if it was "good", it's lost all impact).
Exclusivity and rarity are powerful incentives...
Obviously, being able to specify one's interests in ads is a no brainer. Targeting of ads is better, with (possibly) higher click-throughs and the users don't have to put up with ads for products they'll never use (good-bye low interest credit cards!)
.3 seconds to recognize the same ad).
However, there is one downside, if you specify only a few areas, you are likely to see the same ad again and again. This encourages one to ignore the ad and even the "branding" is less effective. (Instead of taking 1 second to scan the ad, you take
Personally, I think a big step would be to get advertisers to spend the money to come up with the many more different ads for the same product. I suspect you could fairly easily double the effectiveness of individual ads. Banner ads can't be that much work can they?
Admittedly, clever ads are not easy to put together, but most banner ads, especially at the web sites you are dealing with, are more information conveyance devices than entertainment. Given most people are going to see ads from the same place repeatedly, you can afford to put a different snippet of information in each ad (for example, advertise a different config of Linux workstation in each ad).
Um, reality check here. If we take this to its logical extreme, then all airplanes should fly half empty with double the airline ticket price to avoid the possibility of overbooking.
In fact, we could go further and say that any form of sale should be prohibited, because if everyone took advantage of it, the company would be unable to meet the demand.
In order for our world to function, it is sometimes necessary to conflate the "advertised" figure with the "what can be reasonably sustained under most circumstances". This requires some element of judgement (horrors!), but generally allows society to actually function at something close to peak efficiency. After all, if everything we built/advertised had to survive every possible contingency, we'd be in big trouble.
In this situation, if the assumptions are going out of whack because too many people are sharing bandwith driving up the bandwidth usage per account, one of two things can happen: The company can (1) make policy to force the market to conform to their assumptions or (2) they can change their assumptions about the nature of the market.
Competitive pressures (either financial, or the government pressuring for lower rates) can force a company to option (1). Option (2), while fairer for the minority who want maximum use of bandwidth, is often met with resistance. ("Hi, we're raising your rates 50% because your neighbours are sharing their line.")
Anyway, do remember that commerce, like life, has to be based in reality, not just theory.
the problem is that kids are being encouraged to inform on kids who may commit a crime
You are sadly wrong. The student informed on another student who _was_ committing a crime (at least in the eyes of the police). To quote: He was immediately charged with making terrorist threats and intimidating a witness. In other words, the police believed he was breaking the law.
People seem to be under the misapprehension that it is legal to threaten, even in passing or jest, other people. Saying "I'm going to blow this place up" is against the law and can result in going to jail for a long, long time. It's not a matter of free speech, it's a matter of uttering a threat.
The whole point of my initial article is that turning a colleague in for committing a crime (which is what happened in this instance) is not a bad thing. In this case, the bad thing is the law itself that made the utterance a crime.
Various organizations that are attempting to get people to report on suspicious behaviour is a very different thing and not the topic of this thread.