Nintendo couldn't keep up with demand for the Wii... and it was like that for more than 9 months! Take a look at this article from Wired, but still there are few answers as to why it was so bad for so long. I'd like to vote for better supply chain management in 2008.
Pick one: DRM or copyright infringement lawsuits
on
Sony BMG Dropping DRM
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
They want to protect their intellectual property, which is understandable (although I'm sure some slashdotters will argue this point). But I think fundamentally we're going to have to accept one of two mechanisms by which they can do that. The first is DRM, and the problem is that it undermines lots of legitimate (fair, free) uses of the content. The second is lawsuits for civil or criminal copyright infringement, which have significant statuatory damages.
So I'm happy that people are waking up to the problems with DRM, and that companies are realizing it too. But realistically this means that more enforcement burden will be on legal action, which tends to be economically burdensome on individuals, although it is more likely to produce a socially acceptable result (allowing certain cases of fair use).
Any system that does a thermal -> mechanical conversion is limited by the Carnot efficiency. This system would be limited by the temperatures of the hot side (sun's heating of the salt, balanced with losses from the pipes) and the cold side (presumably atmosphere or a cold river). In contrast, a solar cell directly rectifies electromagnetic field energy (light), so it doesn't obey the Carnot limit. That's why for a system like the one in this article, there's a need to push the operating hot-side temperature up as much as possible.
What would really spur development is if we could get a software simulation environment (ala VMware, Bochs, etc) so that developers who don't have the hardware could play with stuff. Also the keyboard on the actual OLPC is tiny, which adds an extra challenge for (adult) developers.
I think the word "corporation" is making everyone think of the big mega-corps (Warner, Sony, etc), but you have to understand that there are millions of small businesses in the USA today. And these are also "corporations". This is the legal name for the business entity, and it itself shouldn't carry the kind of negative connotation that many seem to assign it. Corporations essentially are an agreement between a group of people and the state government, which allows those individuals to work together toward a certain end while guaranteeing certain group property rights (i.e. a corporate bank account, or corporate ownership of a building).
When you increase the fees for corporations, don't forget that you are increasingly punishing the small companies where those fees really hurt, while barely scratching the surface of large companies. This has happened in the field of patents, where it can routinely cost $15,000 or more to obtain a patent. This fee is "trivial" to a big billion-dollar company, but is a huge burden for an individual inventor or small group.
Anyway, I let out a big groan when someone suggests increasing fees as a way to disincentivize copyrights or patents.
Ginko's exchange rates only made sense if inflation was high too. The economy was being manipulated and Linden Labs was "printing" more money. But given Wikipedia's description of what happened, it appears exactly like what happened in the US not too long ago. The "government" changed a law about the legality of internet gambling, and this instantly caused the deaths of several companies. It's actually kind of interesting to watch how a virtual currency behaves and how to create an economic system even within a game like this.
Correct. The big design concerns (and eventual failure points) in pumps, and even fans, are bearings and rotating seals. But there are already implantable heart pumps which rely on the principles of active magnetic levitation to remove the need for contact bearings. See this article for an example.
If you read the knowledge base article, you'll see that the default allowed old-version goes back to before even Word 95. PowerPoint 95, but not 97, is blocked. It's very likely that few documents exist in such old formats at this point.
However, I really have to question whether the enhanced security is worth it, since those old versions didn't allow too much of embedded scripting anyway. Are we just worried about buffer overflows, because those are still a symptom of their parser, not the format itself.
The software nanny continues to keep us from hurting ourselves... gee, thanks. (Hmm, anyone smell a similar trend in government lately?)
We did it ourselves and saved >$100/month for a small business. Just use Asterisk (free and open source), buy some inexpensive but full-featured phones like the Grandstream GXP-2000 (about $80 each), and get a termination provider like VoicePulse Connect for Asterisk ($11/month for four simultaneous channels, free incoming, and below $0.01/min for most outgoing). It took some work to get it all set up and working properly, but now is actually more reliable than the analog phones ever were. (We had phone company issues every few months... just awful.)
The NASDAQ exchange, which has always focused more on technology, is totally a Microsoft fanboy. Maybe that's because MSFT is the largest stock on the NASDAQ exchange.
Sure, there are tasks that computers can't do so well at the moment, where giving the work parcels to humans would make the most sense. But can you imagine what micropayments might allow? It would enable a consistent set of trained, motivated workers to be stable over time, and dependable enough to use this kind of network for important activities.
Ultimately, humans get bored and computers don't. But humans can be delayed from boredom quite a bit by financial compensation.
Lots of people seem to welcome AJAX, and it does provide a huge step in the interactivity of web interfaces without sacrificing platform compatibility or development time.
However, one thing that continues to surprise me is how willing most people are to having a third party store all of their data. All AJAX apps essentially require that you do not hold your own data -- it's held by the application provider. A big reason is because Javascript can't touch your local filesystem, but another is that Javascript isn't powerful enough to really be useful for all of the processing, so back to the server-side scripting it goes.
In fact, one of the things that scared me today was how excited a friend was to discover that Google's chat application logged all of their Jabber conversations -- even if they had been made with a 3rd party GUI client (Pidgin). This, to me, would just be scary.
Denmark's Horns Rev wind farm, which I believe is the world's largest offshore wind farm, was built in 2002. They had incredible maintenance issues with the turbines and electronics, due to the harsh environment with salt water. In fact, they cite 75,000 maintenance trips -- each requiring an engineer to be lowered down from a helicopter onto a turbine's nacelle platform -- in the first 1.5 years of operation. That's a lot for 80 wind turbines. And that was very expensive. Hope they get this right in the UK.
Just take a look at this recent opinion piece to MIT's newspaper. Here's a student who believes that "the free flow of information" (as he says twice) is the ultimate good. Lots of students still don't understand why copyright exists. In fact, some will even try to explain that physical property is the only kind that should have value. It's totally mind-boggling, even when these students are the ones who will be going out and making the next generation of intellectual works.
Even the GPL and all copyleft mechanisms rely on copyright laws. If people want their wishes as content creators to be respected (whether that is to allow some forms of redistribution, like CC-NC, or not, like "All rights reserved"), they need to respect copyright law and not subvert it.
Dvorak is shortsighted, thinking that if we can pay for meals for starving kids, that we will stop hunger. That is simply not a sustainable way of thinking about the problem. Take a look at any of the big organizations working on the issue: for example The Hunger Project, or CARE. While it's convenient marketing to associate X dollars with providing Y meals (and they sometimes do this to encourage people to donate), these organizations readily admit that the real path to successfully beating the chronic problem of hunger is to empower locals to be self-sufficient.
There are concrete actions that we can take as members of the "developed" nations, and these include: subsidizing agricultural infrastructure, providing education about health and nutrition, education in general, helping to challenge laws / societal norms that restrict productivity, reducing sexism and racism, etc. But these hunger programs are specifically *not* about providing meals directly.
Chronic world hunger is a real issue (and is different from short-term famine relief, which our military and private organizations do a whole lot of), and there are things we can do to lead to a sustainable solution. Dvorak incorrectly assumes that because we can buy Y meals, we should do that instead of educating the next generation. In fact, the big organizations already tackling hunger know that empowering the locals is the key, and this is entirely consistent with OLPC's goals.
It's not "paying a grand for a one dollar song"... it's paying as a punishment for illegally redistributing it, and as a deterrent to future piracy. While the value of the media does have relevance to the damages, there might have been hundreds of copies distributed illegally. And for each instance, there should be a greater than 1 to 1 fine so that it's actually a punishment and deterrent.
It only seems strange because she's the first one.
They're talking about displacements of hundreds of micrometers... it's not clear that any silicon actually displaces that much under any sort of normal operation. Even in common MEMS parts like accelerometers (like those controlling your car airbag or Wiimote), the displacements are tiny -- typically on the order of one micrometer -- although they do happen hundreds of thousands of times per second.
Ever heard of plastic versus elastic deformation? Elastic is when it's small enough to come back to it's original state (no permanent effect). Plastic is when the material is permanently reorganized. They're at a huge displacement scale, so it's not clear how this applies to modern MEMS systems which are moving two orders of magnitude less. -- if(coder && wantToLearn(electronics)) click(here);
This is a good step, and I wish that more people would use encrypted messaging systems. This includes IM, e-mail, and voice.
However, while encryption can protect against "big brother", you can never eliminate the risk from the other end of the line. What happens if the person you are talking to has a rootkit, or prints out the conversation, or otherwise compromises the data? There's no real way to protect your entire conversation.
This makes no sense. What are they going to accomplish by going after college kids, who really don't have that much disposable income? Sometimes it's not about the money. Sometimes, it's about right and wrong. These are kids who should know better, and are committing lots of infringement (and worse than that, think it's OK). It's a self-reinforcing behavior to see lots of people around you pirating, but if instead you see people suffering the consequences for their illegal downloading, that activity will be deterred.
The privacy/security issues involved in the software they are trying to distribute definitely spook me. But I'll tell you what doesn't spook me at all: having the RIAA or MPAA or MediaSentry monitoring P2P networks, looking for their copyrighted material. It's the only way to stop this disturbing trend where a whole generation is growing up believing that the only things with value are physical items. Scarcity is a necessary economic principle even for intellectual items, and without it, you won't see anyone interested in producing intellectual works.
I run a small business VoIP phone system with 5 hardware phones, some small number of software phones, and an Asterisk setup. Sniffing traffic and reassembling conversations could definitely happen. The protocols to secure this are already out there:
encrypted SIP - would make sure the information about who you're calling stays encrypted
secure RTP (SRTP) - would encrypt the actual call audio (and video)
encrypted IAX - would do both, though only between Asterisk endpoints
The current problem for anyone using VoIP is that it's necessary to pay some outside company to do the termination into "real world phone service", aka PSTN, so that you can make and receive calls to the normal phone network. Until the VoIP service providers start letting you do encryption all the way to their end, there's a lot of people who can listen to your phone calls much easier than in the analog days. However, this is going to cost them CPU time. But is this something that people would pay more for? I think the answer might be yes...
In any case, slightly off-topic, I highly recommend Voicepulse Connect as an IAX/SIP termination/originiation provider to anybody who can run their own Asterisk PBX and who wants to punt the local phone company.
DRM doesn't work effectively, because it makes legitimate users feel oppressed, violates their fair use rights, and is always possible to work around. But would you rather have lawsuits for discovery of infringment? Yes, I would. DRM stops people from doing illegal things (like sharing a song with 100 "P2P friends" online) which is good, but also stops people from doing legal fair-use things (like using that data on a different device, or editing it)... In contrast, lawsuits against suspected infringers really takes on only the suspected infringers -- definitely a step in the right direction. I hate making an example of anyone, and I think the justice system also doesn't like the concept of increasing someone's punishment for the sole reason of deterring others, the system-wide punishments could me made high enough that it acts as an effective deterrent.
Suggestion to the music industry: kill DRM, and aggressively pursue individual cases of infringement through the legal system.
While in general I think open-source and closed-source software can coexist, I think this is a pretty good example of why anything related to crypto should be open. All of public key cryptography relies on the secrecy of private keys, not on the secrecy of the algorithm itself. And while they might have faithfully implemented the algorithm, who knows what kinds of arguments/whatever to the crypto functions might cause undesired results -- it's just too hard to test.
In any case, the thing that surprised me most from the article was that Windows 2000 users would be left out in the cold: "Because the company has determined that the PRNG problem is not a security vulnerability, it is unlikely to provide a patch [for Win2K]." Wow. Especially when it's something this easy to fix. This bug also solves any attacker's problem of trying to sort valuable from non-valuable information, since presumably any valuable information (credit cards used online, etc) will use encryption. And while someone suggested that a program should use its own random number generator, there is a problem because, in general, your application (not running as Admin) shouldn't have access to nearly the same amount of entropy sources (like network activity, GUI inputs, etc).
Yeah, lots of addresses are off... but it seems like (for non-urban areas) it wouldn't be too hard to identify where buildings are (as compared to asphalt or grass). Couldn't they write something that moved the points to the nearest building location? Seems like that would work in a whole lot of cases.
Oh but a good portion of Slashdot users don't believe in copyrights... How can you copyright numbers, letters, words, sounds, bits, bytes, and math? How can anybody charge for it? Of course, a large portion of Slashdot users have no problem protecting, and charging their employers for, those same items that they feel should not be copyrightable by others... Speak up, AC! There needs to be some balance brought to this debate... people aren't clearly understanding what these cases are about. They're not about free music. They're about the RIAA not pursuing these cases in a legally sound way. That's all.
Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo couldn't keep up with demand for the Wii... and it was like that for more than 9 months! Take a look at this article from Wired, but still there are few answers as to why it was so bad for so long. I'd like to vote for better supply chain management in 2008.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
They want to protect their intellectual property, which is understandable (although I'm sure some slashdotters will argue this point). But I think fundamentally we're going to have to accept one of two mechanisms by which they can do that. The first is DRM, and the problem is that it undermines lots of legitimate (fair, free) uses of the content. The second is lawsuits for civil or criminal copyright infringement, which have significant statuatory damages.
So I'm happy that people are waking up to the problems with DRM, and that companies are realizing it too. But realistically this means that more enforcement burden will be on legal action, which tends to be economically burdensome on individuals, although it is more likely to produce a socially acceptable result (allowing certain cases of fair use).
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Any system that does a thermal -> mechanical conversion is limited by the Carnot efficiency. This system would be limited by the temperatures of the hot side (sun's heating of the salt, balanced with losses from the pipes) and the cold side (presumably atmosphere or a cold river). In contrast, a solar cell directly rectifies electromagnetic field energy (light), so it doesn't obey the Carnot limit. That's why for a system like the one in this article, there's a need to push the operating hot-side temperature up as much as possible.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
What would really spur development is if we could get a software simulation environment (ala VMware, Bochs, etc) so that developers who don't have the hardware could play with stuff. Also the keyboard on the actual OLPC is tiny, which adds an extra challenge for (adult) developers.
--
NerdKits: educational microcontroller kits for a digital generation.
I think the word "corporation" is making everyone think of the big mega-corps (Warner, Sony, etc), but you have to understand that there are millions of small businesses in the USA today. And these are also "corporations". This is the legal name for the business entity, and it itself shouldn't carry the kind of negative connotation that many seem to assign it. Corporations essentially are an agreement between a group of people and the state government, which allows those individuals to work together toward a certain end while guaranteeing certain group property rights (i.e. a corporate bank account, or corporate ownership of a building).
When you increase the fees for corporations, don't forget that you are increasingly punishing the small companies where those fees really hurt, while barely scratching the surface of large companies. This has happened in the field of patents, where it can routinely cost $15,000 or more to obtain a patent. This fee is "trivial" to a big billion-dollar company, but is a huge burden for an individual inventor or small group.
Anyway, I let out a big groan when someone suggests increasing fees as a way to disincentivize copyrights or patents.
--
Microcontroller + LCD + gcc + instructions to help you learn electronics.
Ginko's exchange rates only made sense if inflation was high too. The economy was being manipulated and Linden Labs was "printing" more money. But given Wikipedia's description of what happened, it appears exactly like what happened in the US not too long ago. The "government" changed a law about the legality of internet gambling, and this instantly caused the deaths of several companies. It's actually kind of interesting to watch how a virtual currency behaves and how to create an economic system even within a game like this.
--
Our microcontroller kit. Your gcc compiler. Learn digital electronics.
Correct. The big design concerns (and eventual failure points) in pumps, and even fans, are bearings and rotating seals. But there are already implantable heart pumps which rely on the principles of active magnetic levitation to remove the need for contact bearings. See this article for an example.
--
Coder? Want to learn electronics? Microcontroller kits.
If you read the knowledge base article, you'll see that the default allowed old-version goes back to before even Word 95. PowerPoint 95, but not 97, is blocked. It's very likely that few documents exist in such old formats at this point.
However, I really have to question whether the enhanced security is worth it, since those old versions didn't allow too much of embedded scripting anyway. Are we just worried about buffer overflows, because those are still a symptom of their parser, not the format itself.
The software nanny continues to keep us from hurting ourselves... gee, thanks. (Hmm, anyone smell a similar trend in government lately?)
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
We did it ourselves and saved >$100/month for a small business. Just use Asterisk (free and open source), buy some inexpensive but full-featured phones like the Grandstream GXP-2000 (about $80 each), and get a termination provider like VoicePulse Connect for Asterisk ($11/month for four simultaneous channels, free incoming, and below $0.01/min for most outgoing). It took some work to get it all set up and working properly, but now is actually more reliable than the analog phones ever were. (We had phone company issues every few months... just awful.)
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
This new Windows XP should make a great gift!
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
The NASDAQ exchange, which has always focused more on technology, is totally a Microsoft fanboy. Maybe that's because MSFT is the largest stock on the NASDAQ exchange.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Sure, there are tasks that computers can't do so well at the moment, where giving the work parcels to humans would make the most sense. But can you imagine what micropayments might allow? It would enable a consistent set of trained, motivated workers to be stable over time, and dependable enough to use this kind of network for important activities.
Ultimately, humans get bored and computers don't. But humans can be delayed from boredom quite a bit by financial compensation.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Lots of people seem to welcome AJAX, and it does provide a huge step in the interactivity of web interfaces without sacrificing platform compatibility or development time.
However, one thing that continues to surprise me is how willing most people are to having a third party store all of their data. All AJAX apps essentially require that you do not hold your own data -- it's held by the application provider. A big reason is because Javascript can't touch your local filesystem, but another is that Javascript isn't powerful enough to really be useful for all of the processing, so back to the server-side scripting it goes.
In fact, one of the things that scared me today was how excited a friend was to discover that Google's chat application logged all of their Jabber conversations -- even if they had been made with a 3rd party GUI client (Pidgin). This, to me, would just be scary.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Denmark's Horns Rev wind farm, which I believe is the world's largest offshore wind farm, was built in 2002. They had incredible maintenance issues with the turbines and electronics, due to the harsh environment with salt water. In fact, they cite 75,000 maintenance trips -- each requiring an engineer to be lowered down from a helicopter onto a turbine's nacelle platform -- in the first 1.5 years of operation. That's a lot for 80 wind turbines. And that was very expensive. Hope they get this right in the UK.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Just take a look at this recent opinion piece to MIT's newspaper. Here's a student who believes that "the free flow of information" (as he says twice) is the ultimate good. Lots of students still don't understand why copyright exists. In fact, some will even try to explain that physical property is the only kind that should have value. It's totally mind-boggling, even when these students are the ones who will be going out and making the next generation of intellectual works.
Even the GPL and all copyleft mechanisms rely on copyright laws. If people want their wishes as content creators to be respected (whether that is to allow some forms of redistribution, like CC-NC, or not, like "All rights reserved"), they need to respect copyright law and not subvert it.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Dvorak is shortsighted, thinking that if we can pay for meals for starving kids, that we will stop hunger. That is simply not a sustainable way of thinking about the problem. Take a look at any of the big organizations working on the issue: for example The Hunger Project, or CARE. While it's convenient marketing to associate X dollars with providing Y meals (and they sometimes do this to encourage people to donate), these organizations readily admit that the real path to successfully beating the chronic problem of hunger is to empower locals to be self-sufficient.
There are concrete actions that we can take as members of the "developed" nations, and these include: subsidizing agricultural infrastructure, providing education about health and nutrition, education in general, helping to challenge laws / societal norms that restrict productivity, reducing sexism and racism, etc. But these hunger programs are specifically *not* about providing meals directly.
Chronic world hunger is a real issue (and is different from short-term famine relief, which our military and private organizations do a whole lot of), and there are things we can do to lead to a sustainable solution. Dvorak incorrectly assumes that because we can buy Y meals, we should do that instead of educating the next generation. In fact, the big organizations already tackling hunger know that empowering the locals is the key, and this is entirely consistent with OLPC's goals.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
It's not "paying a grand for a one dollar song"... it's paying as a punishment for illegally redistributing it, and as a deterrent to future piracy. While the value of the media does have relevance to the damages, there might have been hundreds of copies distributed illegally. And for each instance, there should be a greater than 1 to 1 fine so that it's actually a punishment and deterrent.
It only seems strange because she's the first one.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
They're talking about displacements of hundreds of micrometers... it's not clear that any silicon actually displaces that much under any sort of normal operation. Even in common MEMS parts like accelerometers (like those controlling your car airbag or Wiimote), the displacements are tiny -- typically on the order of one micrometer -- although they do happen hundreds of thousands of times per second.
Ever heard of plastic versus elastic deformation? Elastic is when it's small enough to come back to it's original state (no permanent effect). Plastic is when the material is permanently reorganized. They're at a huge displacement scale, so it's not clear how this applies to modern MEMS systems which are moving two orders of magnitude less.
--
if(coder && wantToLearn(electronics)) click(here);
This is a good step, and I wish that more people would use encrypted messaging systems. This includes IM, e-mail, and voice.
However, while encryption can protect against "big brother", you can never eliminate the risk from the other end of the line. What happens if the person you are talking to has a rootkit, or prints out the conversation, or otherwise compromises the data? There's no real way to protect your entire conversation.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation -- great gift!
The privacy/security issues involved in the software they are trying to distribute definitely spook me. But I'll tell you what doesn't spook me at all: having the RIAA or MPAA or MediaSentry monitoring P2P networks, looking for their copyrighted material. It's the only way to stop this disturbing trend where a whole generation is growing up believing that the only things with value are physical items. Scarcity is a necessary economic principle even for intellectual items, and without it, you won't see anyone interested in producing intellectual works.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation -- great gift!
The current problem for anyone using VoIP is that it's necessary to pay some outside company to do the termination into "real world phone service", aka PSTN, so that you can make and receive calls to the normal phone network. Until the VoIP service providers start letting you do encryption all the way to their end, there's a lot of people who can listen to your phone calls much easier than in the analog days. However, this is going to cost them CPU time. But is this something that people would pay more for? I think the answer might be yes...
In any case, slightly off-topic, I highly recommend Voicepulse Connect as an IAX/SIP termination/originiation provider to anybody who can run their own Asterisk PBX and who wants to punt the local phone company.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation -- a great gift!
DRM doesn't work effectively, because it makes legitimate users feel oppressed, violates their fair use rights, and is always possible to work around. But would you rather have lawsuits for discovery of infringment? Yes, I would. DRM stops people from doing illegal things (like sharing a song with 100 "P2P friends" online) which is good, but also stops people from doing legal fair-use things (like using that data on a different device, or editing it)... In contrast, lawsuits against suspected infringers really takes on only the suspected infringers -- definitely a step in the right direction. I hate making an example of anyone, and I think the justice system also doesn't like the concept of increasing someone's punishment for the sole reason of deterring others, the system-wide punishments could me made high enough that it acts as an effective deterrent.
Suggestion to the music industry: kill DRM, and aggressively pursue individual cases of infringement through the legal system.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation. Great gift!
While in general I think open-source and closed-source software can coexist, I think this is a pretty good example of why anything related to crypto should be open. All of public key cryptography relies on the secrecy of private keys, not on the secrecy of the algorithm itself. And while they might have faithfully implemented the algorithm, who knows what kinds of arguments/whatever to the crypto functions might cause undesired results -- it's just too hard to test.
In any case, the thing that surprised me most from the article was that Windows 2000 users would be left out in the cold: "Because the company has determined that the PRNG problem is not a security vulnerability, it is unlikely to provide a patch [for Win2K]." Wow. Especially when it's something this easy to fix. This bug also solves any attacker's problem of trying to sort valuable from non-valuable information, since presumably any valuable information (credit cards used online, etc) will use encryption. And while someone suggested that a program should use its own random number generator, there is a problem because, in general, your application (not running as Admin) shouldn't have access to nearly the same amount of entropy sources (like network activity, GUI inputs, etc).
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation -- great gift!
Yeah, lots of addresses are off... but it seems like (for non-urban areas) it wouldn't be too hard to identify where buildings are (as compared to asphalt or grass). Couldn't they write something that moved the points to the nearest building location? Seems like that would work in a whole lot of cases.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.