Personally I'm not sure what my opinion is on the free-trade vs. job-protection continuum, but since you seem to have an opinion, perhaps you can give you thoughts on a question that's been bugging me for a while.
What, exactly, is the long-term, steady-state outcome of globalization going to look like for the U.S.? I mean, it doesn't seem like what we're doing right now is really sustainable. Massive current-account deficit (trade deficit), loss of manufacturing capacity and jobs in exchange for service-sector jobs, etc. I keep hearing people say that "the future is the service sector," but forgive me if I'm econometrically challenged, but I'm not quite sure how that's supposed to work, long term.
If all we have left is service sector jobs, and we're basically paying each other to do stuff, while at the same time importing all our manufactured goods from abroad and exporting little to nothing (or at least less than we're importing), how do we keep going? It seems like that's a ticket to economic collapse. There's no way that people here can compete on wages with folks in Asia and other parts of the Third World, just because of the cost of living, so eventually all the jobs that can be exported and offshored, will be. The only jobs left are ones that have to be done in person: doctors, lawyers, truck drivers, waiters, etc. But they're all selling their services to other people in this country, so in the long run, you're still hemorrhaging cash.
The line I keep hearing from politicans is that, somehow, "American innovation" is going to keep us so far ahead of the rest of the world technologically (apparently forever) that we'll be able to sustain this lifestyle. But I don't see that happening. And frankly, the basis for it seems suspiciously ethnocentric/racist. Now, I don't particularly care about ethnocentrism or racism per se, but in this case I think it's leading to a fallacious assumption, namely that Americans are somehow naturally superior to the rest of the world, and that we'll naturally figure out a way to stay on top, even when we're driving cars made in Japan using gasoline from Saudi Arabia and watching DVDs made in Malaysia on players produced in the PRC. I just don't buy it. Our educational system isn't that good, and a country filled with unemployed people isn't exactly going to roll out the welcome mat to immigrants, no matter how skilled they are (particularly if they're skilled, in fact). That we've managed to maintain the lead in technological development over the past 100 years is remarkable, but there were also two World Wars in there to spur development (not to mention razing much of Europe), plus waves of economic expansion and immigration, and a whole lot of luck. It's enough to make a nation dangerously cocky, and as an American, that worries the hell out of me.
So what exactly does a first-world country that's gotten accustomed to a very high standard of living do, in the brave new world of free trade? I'm just not sure I see a way out through that, which doesn't involve either a sinking average quality of life, or hyperinflation followed by economic collapse.
No, but U.S. workers, and more importantly voters, don't really care. The purpose of the U.S. government is to do what's best for its citizens; if that also helps other people abroad, then that's great -- bonus! If not, they can complain to their own government. Countries exist for the mutual benefit of the governed; if a government is doing something that's fundamentally disadvantageous for its own people, something is wrong.
Sacrificing jobs in the United States in order to employ the rest of the world isn't something most people here are prepared to do, nor should they.
You might want to check your VPN (unless you set it up, of course). I know that mine doesn't actually encrypt and tunnel traffic that's not destined for my company's servers.
E.g., everything going to $COMPANY gets pushed through to the VPN interface, but everything else just goes to eth0/wlan0. So when I'm sitting in Starbucks on the wifi, my corporate email would be encrypted but my personal mail wouldn't. (And for the record I'm not bitching here; I think this is a fine setup and I don't think that my company has any reason to tunnel all the traffic, and I don't really want them to.)
It's pretty easy to tell what's happening: start up your VPN and ping a computer in your home LAN (or something else that's nearby in the network). Then disable it and repeat the ping. If the pingtime drops substantially, then it was being tunneled; if it doesn't change then it's not. Alternately you can also just ping a server in your home LAN and then one on your corporate network, if the home server's ping is the corporate one's, then you're not tunneling, while if it's the same or longer than it is.
Just wondering here, wouldn't you also need to run Privoxy or something similar (an HTTP proxy) on the remote server?
My thought would be that you'd need to have a remote server (say at home, on your broadband connection), hopefully with a dyndns name, running sshd and Privoxy. Then from your laptop, you'd establish an SSH tunnel that would go from port 80 on the local machine, over the SSH pipe, and exit into Privoxy's input port on the server. Then it would go through Privoxy, to the web, and return the same way.
This avoids having to actually set up a SOCKS5 proxy that accepts external connections; you can set Privoxy to accept only connections from the localhost, and do the local-remote machine connections via SSH. Although it's probably more complicated than just a proxy, it seems like setup would be easier.
I think this would be possible to set up, even on a Windows machine.
If this is the case, then I'll recant part of my statement, but I've never seen that feature (the auto-codec-finder thingy) actually work. If someone could reliably make movies that, when launched on a stock Windows machine would provide a method of downloading the codec that a jellyfish could click through, then that would take care of a large part of my objection.
But anything that requires users to go to a separate site and download something is right out. The only reason Quicktime gets away with it, is because so many Windows users already have QT by way of iTunes. And even then, in many places they don't use Quicktime as the sole format (Apple's Trailers site excepted) but have WMV alongside MOV. If Quicktime were a brand-new format, just coming out today, it would probably suffer just the same fate as Theora, if not more -- it's only by tying downloads of the Quicktime framework and Player to iTunes that it has such a large installed base. Also, it's been around forever, and so it snuck onto many Windows users' machines (not perhaps their current machines, but onto a previous one, giving them the idea that it's something they ought to have) back when Windows' video lagged far behind Apple's, and there was a lot more content around in MOV than other formats.
Yeah I think they're seriously underestimating what a brand-new remote code execution flaw would be worth to the Russian mob. I'm pretty sure $8,000 is a lowball estimate.
Although I suppose you could play both ends against each other, if you were ballsy enough; sell it to Verisign and the mob. Too bad I have this silly fear of death.
Yep, the customize links work for me, but none of the other ones seem to.
I've tried using Firefox on WinXP, and Firefox on Mac OS X, the former from work and the latter via Comcast broadband, both on the East Coast. Neither one would bring up the page.
Here's the problem with Theora, and in a similar vein, Vorbis: while they're by far the most convenient encoding to put your content in for Linux users, they create more work for mainstream Windows users, who won't have the codecs installed by default.
Now it's arguable on a site like Slashdot, that it would be a good choice, but for most other sites that don't have Linux or OSS as a focus, it wouldn't make sense to make more work for 95-99% of viewers in order to make it easy for the other 1-5%.
If the codecs for Ogg Theora and Vorbis came pre-installed on every Windows machine, then it would be a reasonable choice for use as a distribution format. At least for now, the choices for codecs are going to be more or less limited to the ones that either come with most people's computers, or can be downloaded through WMP's one-click install.
One assumes that it can play those files and will just scale them down to 720p on playback, since that's the most that its video circuits apparently support.
This would be the expected behavior if it works like other Quicktime applications do -- if you run Quicktime Player on a 720x480px display (fullscreen) and play a high-definition source, it will just get scaled down and letterboxed.
I would just tend to worry about the datarates of 1080i MPEG2 material; I haven't played much with these 802.11n routers but I have a suspicion that if you have any sort of electrical interference on them at all, you're not going to see advertised speeds. It would make sense to downrez files on the transmitting end and not send the 1080i signal over the air, if the playback device only supported 720p. Of course, that complicates the server end of it.
Unless you have a very strange or old volume license agreement with Microsoft (different than every other volume license I've ever seen), what you are doing isn't legit. You can't install volume or corporate-license Windows on bare hardware; the hardware has to have some sort of Windows license on it first. I don't think Microsoft sells unlimited-install licenses that entitle you to put XP onto totally bare hardware. It's their way of cooperating with the big VARs; this is one of the reasons why you never see a big company with white-box PCs, even though any reasonably-sized organization with its own IT department could go to Taiwan and get their own equipment for half of what Dell charges. Only the gear that comes with a license sticker on it from the factory is eligible to have corporate images put onto it. (Which really makes me question the utility of those corporate licenses, but I guess that's because I'm not in management.)
Dell is pretty clear about this on their n-Series page, as it states in bold type: "It is not a Microsoft operating system and is not qualified for Windows licensing use under any existing Microsoft Volume Licensing Program (OPEN, Enterprise, etc.) Customers interested in a Microsoft® Windows® solution should purchase a Dell desktop pre-loaded with Windows XP Professional."
Seems perfectly within the limits of the GFDL to me.
That's sort of the point of Wikipedia...anyone can use its content. Besides which, the article's author did change the wording; I'm not even sure I'd call it "plagiarism." It looks more like the sort of thing that would happen after someone read the WP page and then sat down and wrote their own article a few minutes later.
I suspect that they just compress the video really, really hard. It's definitely possible to fit video into 128kb/s -- a lot of video-teleconferencing equipment and codecs are designed for this -- but IMO they're terrifically ugly to watch. For portable video (think Verizon's VCAST, or iPod movies), you could probably get away with low resolutions and bitrates, but that's a very different application than a STB receiver where people are going to want to watch the output on a TV and have it look as good as a local signal.
The markets to watch for this technology are the ones where really fast broadband has high penetration. Think some parts of Europe, but more likely South Korea. I think the connections there tend to be more symmetric than ones in the U.S., meaning that services that keep data stored at home and stream them to you while you're on the road are more practical.
As soon as the infrastructure is there -- provided this sort of thing hasn't been made basically impossible and/or illegal via a broadcast flag -- I think there's definitely a market for this sort of thing. But I suspect in the future, the devices that are being offered today will be seen as the Apple Newtons of the video world. Good concepts, just too ahead of their time and impractical to use, to catch on.
Are precedents global? I mean will one country follow suit solely because another has seen the light?
What are you talking about? EMI is a large corporation, based out of the Netherlands. Whether other multinational companies follow suit is totally up to them.
Based on previous behavior I doubt Sony will ever publicly renounce DRM in any form, but I think most of the major players will just stop trying to put it on CDs, because it creates more problems for them than it solves.
Naturally, the music companies are all waiting for the day when they can stamp the last CD and move completely to some other format, hopefully one requiring everybody to re-purchase their music. Bonus if it's a format that doesn't cost them anything to manufacture, and double bonus if it's a format that has to be periodically re-purchased, on a rental or pay-per-listen basis.
"For YEARS"? the NSA has helped MS with security issues? The mind reels. A bunch of talented amateurs building Linux do a better effort than the combined efforts of MS and the NSA. The next time the NSA comes to help me with a problem I think I'll politely decline.
Except that some of those "talented amateurs" were in fact NSA employees, working to make Linux more secure, as part of a project called Security-Enhanced Linux...which has been incorporated into the mainline 2.6 kernel tree.
True, but as I recently found out to my chagrin, quite a few big-name (Compaq, I'm looking at you) don't let you install additional video cards. I had an old Celeron system that I wanted to use as a frontend STB, so I picked up an old $20 PCI-based video card with an S-Video out. Unfortunately, I didn't think to check the BIOS: there's no way to disable the onboard video and use an aftermarket card. (With the card in, both outputs just give a black screen.) Apparently this is not uncommon in low-end systems. In my case, it meant that I just had to get a new Socket 370 motherboard that didn't suck so much, which these days is another $20 junk-bin part, but it turned a simple drop-in upgrade into essentially rebuilding a computer.
Sometimes the obvious solutions have unanticipated complications; there's a whole lot of consumer hardware out there that won't "play nice" with anything. For non-technical people, buying a new box may be simpler than upgrading anything they have.
It's not clear to me how much bandwidth is required on both ends, though.
Well, that's not hard to figure out. If you want to watch DVDs via your internet connection, you better be able to put through around 5-6Mb/s, and that's assuming that you have some sort of transcoder that can filter out the unnecessary stuff and pass along only the video and audio stream that you want. The DVD spec allows bitrates up to 10.08Mb/s, if memory serves, including all subs and various audio streams, but a typical commercial one is much lower for the parts you'd actually need to transmit.
Now, if you have a computer on the transmitting/media-server end that's cable of transcoding the video into some more modern format than MPEG-2, then you can probably start talking about live streaming on a 1Mb pipe. You wouldn't get HDTV, but you could easily push passable 720x480 MPEG-4, at say 800Kb/s for the video and 128Kb/s audio, for a total of around 930Kb/s before adding in your protocol's overhead. So basically, a 1MB/s symmetric connection would probably work.
It's certainly possible with today's technology, unfortunately, most U.S. broadband connections aren't up to snuff. A lot of folks are on connections that only give them 128, 256, or 512 Kb/s upstream speeds (e.g. even Comcast's premium cable service only offers a paltry 384 kb/s upstream speed with 6Mb/s down, or 768kb/s up with 8Mb/s down). With buffering you could probably make some of those connections work, but I doubt it would be a hit with consumers -- you wouldn't get the same 'instant start' that you do with locally-stored videos (because of all the buffering).
For the next few years at least, media sharing of the kind you're talking about (where you keep all your content on one system, and dole it out to front-end systems for display), is going to be pretty much a LAN phenomenon.
If that HDTV only has HDMI inputs, and no analog inputs (DVI-I or VGA), that's a pretty lame television set right there. Given the amount of source equipment that produces various flavors of analog video, the world isn't ready for sets that only have digital inputs.
I do wish that I could find the engineer who thought that Y-Pr-Pb was a fair alternative to some sort of actual RGB-based interconnect (like, I don't know, everything else in existence that uses high-quality analog video, e.g. SCART and 5-pin RGBHV), and throttle them.
There's really no good reason why consumer video should be this complicated. It's mostly a result of a lack of widely-accepted standards and mutual incompatibility that doing something as seemingly trivial as getting a computer to display on a HDTV (which is nothing but a computer monitor with delusions of grandeur) becomes so complicated. Unfortunately, because consumers have become accustomed to such things being a PITA, they don't go running to the manufacturers with pitchforks in hand, every time one of them produces shoddy gear, as they should.
I'll stick to my vacuum tubes. Not only is the technology well-tested over the years, you can heat up the entire house if your computer room is in the basement.
Why should I be thanking him? I've never used his software. As far as I'm concerned, it's just another MTA. I do wish him success, and I certainly wouldn't wish him failure, just because I'd hate to see any project that someone with a lot of skill has put a lot of time into.
But what I'm suggesting is that it's not clear where he's going to get any funding from. He could probably pick up some donations from the OSS community, but I doubt anyone is going to send him anything if it appears that he's keeping the option of just deleting the code. Now, maybe he doesn't care, but I think he's passing up a possible funding source. It would effectively cost him nothing to do (save possibly the time it would take to remove code he doesn't own), and could result in some donations. That's his call as a developer.
I'm not going to respond to your other comments, since you don't know me and I think they're unjustified. I always try to contribute to people and projects that have produced software that I've found useful, particularly those projects without major corporate backers. What I'm suggesting in the case of Pegasus is that as closed-source software, although it's had a very good run, it seems to be on the verge of death; perhaps as open source it might have more of a future.
There are lots of reasons why you'd want at least partial serial numbers; wireless cards and routers are two examples. I'd never buy one at least I knew the H/W revision or had the serial number to determine it by. There are totally different devices sold under the same 'model' number; unless you have the version or serial (which is sometimes the only / easiest way to determine hardware version), you don't know what you're buying.
In general you don't need to know the whole serial, only part of it, but I don't think there's any reason for an honest person to care. If someone was refusing to disclose the serial number, I'd start to wonder what was up. That would definitely set off my "hot goods" alarm. That's sorta like picking up an item in a store and finding out that it has the SKU or serial number removed from the packaging.
Well, there's another option; you notify the police, and then go through with the sale, in hopes of getting some information that would let the authorities catch the crook. In the worst case, you've bought back your part, and in the best case you'll get your part, plus restitution, plus you'll have sweet, sweet revenge.
A friend of mine got his cellphone and wallet stolen when his car was burglarized, and by monitoring the numbers that the thief called from it, and then calling up the various numbers and pretending to be different people (which is an amusing social engineering story in itself), got the name and home phone number of the criminal. The police, who weren't very much help otherwise, went out and picked the guy up (he was apparently well known to them). My friend got his phone back, plus restitution for the money in his wallet. If he had just waited for the police to do something, he would have been out a phone and a substantial amount of cash.
Sometimes you just need to do some detective work yourself.
Of all the Renaissance painters that ever painted, only a few became forever famous.
I think this might be taking the art side a little far.
With a painting, the surface appearance is the end product. If it looks good, it is good.
This is distinctly not the case with software. Not only does the application (or whatever) have to look good on casual inspection, but have to be built to work well, including under conditions that might not have been thought of in the beginning.
I think architecture as a metaphor for software development is actually pretty good; architects have to combine artistic judgment and technical skill in order to produce a building that's both aesthetically appealing -- true works of art, in some cases -- but also structurally sound, designed according to accepted standards and principles. It's not enough, in most cases, to just have either one. Nobody wants an ugly building (well, most people don't), and nobody wants a building that's just a facade without substance.
Software "architecture" is where house-building was a few hundred years ago. When you wanted a house built, you just went and got a few people that you thought would be good at building houses, or had good reputations for building them, and told them what you wanted. They might or might not have any formal training, and the only 'standards' were what they knew from past experience would probably work.
I suspect that in a century or two, software will be not unlike house-building is today. While every house today is different, depending on the owner's requirements, there are a set of well-understood and basically accepted standards for putting them together. That doesn't mean that some builders aren't better than others, or that some don't cut corners, or that there's not room for artistry and physical beauty in the final product, but just that in theory, they all meet minimum standards for structural integrity and other key factors. In time, I think software design will probably follow. Every piece of custom software will be different, because they each solve different problems, but getting to that solution will involve a combination of creativity and the application of existing standards, built up from the accepted body of knowledge of what works and what doesn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I'm not sure what my opinion is on the free-trade vs. job-protection continuum, but since you seem to have an opinion, perhaps you can give you thoughts on a question that's been bugging me for a while.
What, exactly, is the long-term, steady-state outcome of globalization going to look like for the U.S.? I mean, it doesn't seem like what we're doing right now is really sustainable. Massive current-account deficit (trade deficit), loss of manufacturing capacity and jobs in exchange for service-sector jobs, etc. I keep hearing people say that "the future is the service sector," but forgive me if I'm econometrically challenged, but I'm not quite sure how that's supposed to work, long term.
If all we have left is service sector jobs, and we're basically paying each other to do stuff, while at the same time importing all our manufactured goods from abroad and exporting little to nothing (or at least less than we're importing), how do we keep going? It seems like that's a ticket to economic collapse. There's no way that people here can compete on wages with folks in Asia and other parts of the Third World, just because of the cost of living, so eventually all the jobs that can be exported and offshored, will be. The only jobs left are ones that have to be done in person: doctors, lawyers, truck drivers, waiters, etc. But they're all selling their services to other people in this country, so in the long run, you're still hemorrhaging cash.
The line I keep hearing from politicans is that, somehow, "American innovation" is going to keep us so far ahead of the rest of the world technologically (apparently forever) that we'll be able to sustain this lifestyle. But I don't see that happening. And frankly, the basis for it seems suspiciously ethnocentric/racist. Now, I don't particularly care about ethnocentrism or racism per se, but in this case I think it's leading to a fallacious assumption, namely that Americans are somehow naturally superior to the rest of the world, and that we'll naturally figure out a way to stay on top, even when we're driving cars made in Japan using gasoline from Saudi Arabia and watching DVDs made in Malaysia on players produced in the PRC. I just don't buy it. Our educational system isn't that good, and a country filled with unemployed people isn't exactly going to roll out the welcome mat to immigrants, no matter how skilled they are (particularly if they're skilled, in fact). That we've managed to maintain the lead in technological development over the past 100 years is remarkable, but there were also two World Wars in there to spur development (not to mention razing much of Europe), plus waves of economic expansion and immigration, and a whole lot of luck. It's enough to make a nation dangerously cocky, and as an American, that worries the hell out of me.
So what exactly does a first-world country that's gotten accustomed to a very high standard of living do, in the brave new world of free trade? I'm just not sure I see a way out through that, which doesn't involve either a sinking average quality of life, or hyperinflation followed by economic collapse.
No, but U.S. workers, and more importantly voters, don't really care. The purpose of the U.S. government is to do what's best for its citizens; if that also helps other people abroad, then that's great -- bonus! If not, they can complain to their own government. Countries exist for the mutual benefit of the governed; if a government is doing something that's fundamentally disadvantageous for its own people, something is wrong.
Sacrificing jobs in the United States in order to employ the rest of the world isn't something most people here are prepared to do, nor should they.
if the home server's ping is much less than the corporate one's
Should have used preview...Slashdot ate my "much less than" sign.
You might want to check your VPN (unless you set it up, of course). I know that mine doesn't actually encrypt and tunnel traffic that's not destined for my company's servers.
E.g., everything going to $COMPANY gets pushed through to the VPN interface, but everything else just goes to eth0/wlan0. So when I'm sitting in Starbucks on the wifi, my corporate email would be encrypted but my personal mail wouldn't. (And for the record I'm not bitching here; I think this is a fine setup and I don't think that my company has any reason to tunnel all the traffic, and I don't really want them to.)
It's pretty easy to tell what's happening: start up your VPN and ping a computer in your home LAN (or something else that's nearby in the network). Then disable it and repeat the ping. If the pingtime drops substantially, then it was being tunneled; if it doesn't change then it's not. Alternately you can also just ping a server in your home LAN and then one on your corporate network, if the home server's ping is the corporate one's, then you're not tunneling, while if it's the same or longer than it is.
Just wondering here, wouldn't you also need to run Privoxy or something similar (an HTTP proxy) on the remote server?
My thought would be that you'd need to have a remote server (say at home, on your broadband connection), hopefully with a dyndns name, running sshd and Privoxy. Then from your laptop, you'd establish an SSH tunnel that would go from port 80 on the local machine, over the SSH pipe, and exit into Privoxy's input port on the server. Then it would go through Privoxy, to the web, and return the same way.
This avoids having to actually set up a SOCKS5 proxy that accepts external connections; you can set Privoxy to accept only connections from the localhost, and do the local-remote machine connections via SSH. Although it's probably more complicated than just a proxy, it seems like setup would be easier.
I think this would be possible to set up, even on a Windows machine.
What is this 'Herf' person thinking, signing onto his laptop while on honeymoon?
Well, maybe he was logging onto Picasa to do some uploading...?
If this is the case, then I'll recant part of my statement, but I've never seen that feature (the auto-codec-finder thingy) actually work. If someone could reliably make movies that, when launched on a stock Windows machine would provide a method of downloading the codec that a jellyfish could click through, then that would take care of a large part of my objection.
But anything that requires users to go to a separate site and download something is right out. The only reason Quicktime gets away with it, is because so many Windows users already have QT by way of iTunes. And even then, in many places they don't use Quicktime as the sole format (Apple's Trailers site excepted) but have WMV alongside MOV. If Quicktime were a brand-new format, just coming out today, it would probably suffer just the same fate as Theora, if not more -- it's only by tying downloads of the Quicktime framework and Player to iTunes that it has such a large installed base. Also, it's been around forever, and so it snuck onto many Windows users' machines (not perhaps their current machines, but onto a previous one, giving them the idea that it's something they ought to have) back when Windows' video lagged far behind Apple's, and there was a lot more content around in MOV than other formats.
Yeah I think they're seriously underestimating what a brand-new remote code execution flaw would be worth to the Russian mob. I'm pretty sure $8,000 is a lowball estimate.
Although I suppose you could play both ends against each other, if you were ballsy enough; sell it to Verisign and the mob. Too bad I have this silly fear of death.
Yep, the customize links work for me, but none of the other ones seem to.
I've tried using Firefox on WinXP, and Firefox on Mac OS X, the former from work and the latter via Comcast broadband, both on the East Coast. Neither one would bring up the page.
Glad I finally got to see them, though. Thanks.
Here's the problem with Theora, and in a similar vein, Vorbis: while they're by far the most convenient encoding to put your content in for Linux users, they create more work for mainstream Windows users, who won't have the codecs installed by default.
Now it's arguable on a site like Slashdot, that it would be a good choice, but for most other sites that don't have Linux or OSS as a focus, it wouldn't make sense to make more work for 95-99% of viewers in order to make it easy for the other 1-5%.
If the codecs for Ogg Theora and Vorbis came pre-installed on every Windows machine, then it would be a reasonable choice for use as a distribution format. At least for now, the choices for codecs are going to be more or less limited to the ones that either come with most people's computers, or can be downloaded through WMP's one-click install.
One assumes that it can play those files and will just scale them down to 720p on playback, since that's the most that its video circuits apparently support.
This would be the expected behavior if it works like other Quicktime applications do -- if you run Quicktime Player on a 720x480px display (fullscreen) and play a high-definition source, it will just get scaled down and letterboxed.
I would just tend to worry about the datarates of 1080i MPEG2 material; I haven't played much with these 802.11n routers but I have a suspicion that if you have any sort of electrical interference on them at all, you're not going to see advertised speeds. It would make sense to downrez files on the transmitting end and not send the 1080i signal over the air, if the playback device only supported 720p. Of course, that complicates the server end of it.
Unless you have a very strange or old volume license agreement with Microsoft (different than every other volume license I've ever seen), what you are doing isn't legit. You can't install volume or corporate-license Windows on bare hardware; the hardware has to have some sort of Windows license on it first. I don't think Microsoft sells unlimited-install licenses that entitle you to put XP onto totally bare hardware. It's their way of cooperating with the big VARs; this is one of the reasons why you never see a big company with white-box PCs, even though any reasonably-sized organization with its own IT department could go to Taiwan and get their own equipment for half of what Dell charges. Only the gear that comes with a license sticker on it from the factory is eligible to have corporate images put onto it. (Which really makes me question the utility of those corporate licenses, but I guess that's because I'm not in management.)
Dell is pretty clear about this on their n-Series page, as it states in bold type: "It is not a Microsoft operating system and is not qualified for Windows licensing use under any existing Microsoft Volume Licensing Program (OPEN, Enterprise, etc.) Customers interested in a Microsoft® Windows® solution should purchase a Dell desktop pre-loaded with Windows XP Professional."
If you get audited, you may be in trouble.
The link is not working for me, either.
x /nseries_nb, linked to from http://linux.dell.com/. The resulting page is just a generic "The page you requested may no longer exist on Dell.com" error.
x /nseries_nb. I would have guessed that the URLs for the two destinations would be similar, but they're not.
Just to confirm, the link I'm trying is http://www.dell.com/content/products/features.asp
What seems odd to me is that the link to "n-Series Desktops" points to http://www.dell.com/nseries, while "n-Series Notebooks" points to http://www.dell.com/content/products/features.asp
Is their server just down, or have they decided to purposely bury their Linux laptops?
Seems perfectly within the limits of the GFDL to me.
That's sort of the point of Wikipedia...anyone can use its content. Besides which, the article's author did change the wording; I'm not even sure I'd call it "plagiarism." It looks more like the sort of thing that would happen after someone read the WP page and then sat down and wrote their own article a few minutes later.
I suspect that they just compress the video really, really hard. It's definitely possible to fit video into 128kb/s -- a lot of video-teleconferencing equipment and codecs are designed for this -- but IMO they're terrifically ugly to watch. For portable video (think Verizon's VCAST, or iPod movies), you could probably get away with low resolutions and bitrates, but that's a very different application than a STB receiver where people are going to want to watch the output on a TV and have it look as good as a local signal.
The markets to watch for this technology are the ones where really fast broadband has high penetration. Think some parts of Europe, but more likely South Korea. I think the connections there tend to be more symmetric than ones in the U.S., meaning that services that keep data stored at home and stream them to you while you're on the road are more practical.
As soon as the infrastructure is there -- provided this sort of thing hasn't been made basically impossible and/or illegal via a broadcast flag -- I think there's definitely a market for this sort of thing. But I suspect in the future, the devices that are being offered today will be seen as the Apple Newtons of the video world. Good concepts, just too ahead of their time and impractical to use, to catch on.
Are precedents global? I mean will one country follow suit solely because another has seen the light?
What are you talking about? EMI is a large corporation, based out of the Netherlands. Whether other multinational companies follow suit is totally up to them.
Based on previous behavior I doubt Sony will ever publicly renounce DRM in any form, but I think most of the major players will just stop trying to put it on CDs, because it creates more problems for them than it solves.
Naturally, the music companies are all waiting for the day when they can stamp the last CD and move completely to some other format, hopefully one requiring everybody to re-purchase their music. Bonus if it's a format that doesn't cost them anything to manufacture, and double bonus if it's a format that has to be periodically re-purchased, on a rental or pay-per-listen basis.
"For YEARS"? the NSA has helped MS with security issues? The mind reels. A bunch of talented amateurs building Linux do a better effort than the combined efforts of MS and the NSA. The next time the NSA comes to help me with a problem I think I'll politely decline.
Except that some of those "talented amateurs" were in fact NSA employees, working to make Linux more secure, as part of a project called Security-Enhanced Linux...which has been incorporated into the mainline 2.6 kernel tree.
True, but as I recently found out to my chagrin, quite a few big-name (Compaq, I'm looking at you) don't let you install additional video cards. I had an old Celeron system that I wanted to use as a frontend STB, so I picked up an old $20 PCI-based video card with an S-Video out. Unfortunately, I didn't think to check the BIOS: there's no way to disable the onboard video and use an aftermarket card. (With the card in, both outputs just give a black screen.) Apparently this is not uncommon in low-end systems. In my case, it meant that I just had to get a new Socket 370 motherboard that didn't suck so much, which these days is another $20 junk-bin part, but it turned a simple drop-in upgrade into essentially rebuilding a computer.
Sometimes the obvious solutions have unanticipated complications; there's a whole lot of consumer hardware out there that won't "play nice" with anything. For non-technical people, buying a new box may be simpler than upgrading anything they have.
It's not clear to me how much bandwidth is required on both ends, though.
Well, that's not hard to figure out. If you want to watch DVDs via your internet connection, you better be able to put through around 5-6Mb/s, and that's assuming that you have some sort of transcoder that can filter out the unnecessary stuff and pass along only the video and audio stream that you want. The DVD spec allows bitrates up to 10.08Mb/s, if memory serves, including all subs and various audio streams, but a typical commercial one is much lower for the parts you'd actually need to transmit.
Now, if you have a computer on the transmitting/media-server end that's cable of transcoding the video into some more modern format than MPEG-2, then you can probably start talking about live streaming on a 1Mb pipe. You wouldn't get HDTV, but you could easily push passable 720x480 MPEG-4, at say 800Kb/s for the video and 128Kb/s audio, for a total of around 930Kb/s before adding in your protocol's overhead. So basically, a 1MB/s symmetric connection would probably work.
It's certainly possible with today's technology, unfortunately, most U.S. broadband connections aren't up to snuff. A lot of folks are on connections that only give them 128, 256, or 512 Kb/s upstream speeds (e.g. even Comcast's premium cable service only offers a paltry 384 kb/s upstream speed with 6Mb/s down, or 768kb/s up with 8Mb/s down). With buffering you could probably make some of those connections work, but I doubt it would be a hit with consumers -- you wouldn't get the same 'instant start' that you do with locally-stored videos (because of all the buffering).
For the next few years at least, media sharing of the kind you're talking about (where you keep all your content on one system, and dole it out to front-end systems for display), is going to be pretty much a LAN phenomenon.
If that HDTV only has HDMI inputs, and no analog inputs (DVI-I or VGA), that's a pretty lame television set right there. Given the amount of source equipment that produces various flavors of analog video, the world isn't ready for sets that only have digital inputs.
I do wish that I could find the engineer who thought that Y-Pr-Pb was a fair alternative to some sort of actual RGB-based interconnect (like, I don't know, everything else in existence that uses high-quality analog video, e.g. SCART and 5-pin RGBHV), and throttle them.
There's really no good reason why consumer video should be this complicated. It's mostly a result of a lack of widely-accepted standards and mutual incompatibility that doing something as seemingly trivial as getting a computer to display on a HDTV (which is nothing but a computer monitor with delusions of grandeur) becomes so complicated. Unfortunately, because consumers have become accustomed to such things being a PITA, they don't go running to the manufacturers with pitchforks in hand, every time one of them produces shoddy gear, as they should.
I'll stick to my vacuum tubes. Not only is the technology well-tested over the years, you can heat up the entire house if your computer room is in the basement.
What you really want are Leyden Jars.
Why should I be thanking him? I've never used his software. As far as I'm concerned, it's just another MTA. I do wish him success, and I certainly wouldn't wish him failure, just because I'd hate to see any project that someone with a lot of skill has put a lot of time into.
But what I'm suggesting is that it's not clear where he's going to get any funding from. He could probably pick up some donations from the OSS community, but I doubt anyone is going to send him anything if it appears that he's keeping the option of just deleting the code. Now, maybe he doesn't care, but I think he's passing up a possible funding source. It would effectively cost him nothing to do (save possibly the time it would take to remove code he doesn't own), and could result in some donations. That's his call as a developer.
I'm not going to respond to your other comments, since you don't know me and I think they're unjustified. I always try to contribute to people and projects that have produced software that I've found useful, particularly those projects without major corporate backers. What I'm suggesting in the case of Pegasus is that as closed-source software, although it's had a very good run, it seems to be on the verge of death; perhaps as open source it might have more of a future.
There are lots of reasons why you'd want at least partial serial numbers; wireless cards and routers are two examples. I'd never buy one at least I knew the H/W revision or had the serial number to determine it by. There are totally different devices sold under the same 'model' number; unless you have the version or serial (which is sometimes the only / easiest way to determine hardware version), you don't know what you're buying.
In general you don't need to know the whole serial, only part of it, but I don't think there's any reason for an honest person to care. If someone was refusing to disclose the serial number, I'd start to wonder what was up. That would definitely set off my "hot goods" alarm. That's sorta like picking up an item in a store and finding out that it has the SKU or serial number removed from the packaging.
Well, there's another option; you notify the police, and then go through with the sale, in hopes of getting some information that would let the authorities catch the crook. In the worst case, you've bought back your part, and in the best case you'll get your part, plus restitution, plus you'll have sweet, sweet revenge.
A friend of mine got his cellphone and wallet stolen when his car was burglarized, and by monitoring the numbers that the thief called from it, and then calling up the various numbers and pretending to be different people (which is an amusing social engineering story in itself), got the name and home phone number of the criminal. The police, who weren't very much help otherwise, went out and picked the guy up (he was apparently well known to them). My friend got his phone back, plus restitution for the money in his wallet. If he had just waited for the police to do something, he would have been out a phone and a substantial amount of cash.
Sometimes you just need to do some detective work yourself.
Of all the Renaissance painters that ever painted, only a few became forever famous.
I think this might be taking the art side a little far.
With a painting, the surface appearance is the end product. If it looks good, it is good.
This is distinctly not the case with software. Not only does the application (or whatever) have to look good on casual inspection, but have to be built to work well, including under conditions that might not have been thought of in the beginning.
I think architecture as a metaphor for software development is actually pretty good; architects have to combine artistic judgment and technical skill in order to produce a building that's both aesthetically appealing -- true works of art, in some cases -- but also structurally sound, designed according to accepted standards and principles. It's not enough, in most cases, to just have either one. Nobody wants an ugly building (well, most people don't), and nobody wants a building that's just a facade without substance.
Software "architecture" is where house-building was a few hundred years ago. When you wanted a house built, you just went and got a few people that you thought would be good at building houses, or had good reputations for building them, and told them what you wanted. They might or might not have any formal training, and the only 'standards' were what they knew from past experience would probably work.
I suspect that in a century or two, software will be not unlike house-building is today. While every house today is different, depending on the owner's requirements, there are a set of well-understood and basically accepted standards for putting them together. That doesn't mean that some builders aren't better than others, or that some don't cut corners, or that there's not room for artistry and physical beauty in the final product, but just that in theory, they all meet minimum standards for structural integrity and other key factors. In time, I think software design will probably follow. Every piece of custom software will be different, because they each solve different problems, but getting to that solution will involve a combination of creativity and the application of existing standards, built up from the accepted body of knowledge of what works and what doesn't.