Does anybody really not think wireless will soon be a mandatory feature for all portable media players?
Only if somebody comes up with an implementation of it that doesn't suck.
At the moment, Microsoft doesn't seem to be on-target to delivering that, because Zune's sharing pretty much exemplifies "suck." In some ways it's probably counter-productive, since giving people a crippled version of a feature in their first experience with it, may turn them off to its usefulness later, when it's done right. I think Zune wireless is going to be that kind of non-feature.
It will become mandatory, for all intents and purposes, when Apple puts it into the iPod. And then it will be 'mandatory' for those who want to seriously compete with the iPod, another thing that the Zune doesn't seem poised to do.
I'm not sure about an Usenet or email group, but the Apple support forums aren't all that bad. You don't generally get too many rude "RTFM" responses, and not all the questions are that basic, either. The basic forums can be very basic ("how do I get email?"), but there's some fairly technical questions that get answered from time to time as well. It's more of a question-and-answer format rather than a general reference guide, so I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for, but it might be worth making an account on.
At any rate, if you have a question regarding your mac, it's almost always worth searching there before you start looking elsewhere, because in many cases you'll find other people with the same problem -- oftentimes, other people with the same unresolved problem, but at least you'll know you're not alone.
The MacNN forums are also good reading, although I think you will find it to be a little more rough around the edges -- if you ask a dumb question there, you'll get a lot more "RTFM" than on Apple's official forums. But on the bright side, stuff doesn't get censored by Apple in the same way that it occasionally does on the official ones.
You might also want to consider subscribing to a dead-tree magazine; some people may disagree but I find that MacWorld puts out an interesting article or two most months, and the 'Marketplace' section in the back often turns up interesting products. If you spend a lot of time online, it may be old news to you by the time it reaches your door, but if you aren't, it might be worth it. If you have a friend who subscribes they generally have very low-priced "add a friend" subscription deals.
NTSC may not be high-def, but the whole analog-tv ecosystem and infrastructure has been built up painstakingly through 70-odd years of experience.
The FCC is mandating that it all be thrown away in favor of a few years worth of half-baked digital technology, which in many cases isn't even going to work as well as conventional analog broadcasts. (If you haven't experienced the mass of multipath that is ATSC in a built-up area, it sucks.) And naturally, it won't be the same technology as the rest of the world, so the golden opportunity we had to implement a unified world standard was wasted. Did we learn nothing from the PAL/NTSC/SECAM days? Perhaps future generations will do better; I had thought maybe I'd see it in my lifetime, but apparently not.
The whole digital-TV transition seems, to me, to be nothing but a handout to the cable companies and consumer-electronics producers. There's very little in it for the "average viewer" who's currently watching broadcast. Everyone is either going to have to buy a digital ATSC tuner/converter, or subscribe to cable/satellite service, just to watch what they get for free right now. And with ATSC being the way it is, you're not even guaranteed to get the channels you now watch, using the antenna you now use.
Reading about the introduction of television to the U.S. and the FCC in the 1940s and 50s, paints a picture of an organization that's totally different from the corporate shitbags we're burdened with today.
You joke, but much of the lead in bullets used recreationally is sold as scrap and reused.
I used to clean out the bullet trap in the back of the range I used to go to (and without any sort of safety gear -- OSHA would have a field day with that) and it got sold to a local guy who used to melt and cast new bullets out of it. You just put it in a crucible and heat it, and most of the other metals (mostly copper, from jacketed bullets) either floats or sinks, and you get your lead back. There are all sorts of "recipes" on how much virgin lead/antimony/rose-petals/etc. you need to add back in, to get good quality bullet casting material.
Not sure what the industry is like now, but you used to be able to go to the backs of most of the shooting rags (e.g. Shotgun News) and find people selling blocks of recycled lead that they had obtained by melting down stuff like this. Wheel weights were also a source of raw material, although I've heard that they're considered very "dirty."
The brass cartridge cases have an even more direct recycling path -- most of them (centerfire ones, anyway) are just reused. Leave a bag of spent.45 ACP brass around a range and see how long it lasts -- not long.
The point here is that stuff gets recycled without any deposits or laws, because it's economically advantageous to do so. Reusing bullet lead and brass cartridge cases makes for cheaper ammunition than buying new stuff, and that means that the scrap has a fairly high residual value. It also helps that the remanufacturing necessary to make usable product out of either is fairly simple and low-tech (you can do both in your basement or garage).
The problem is that it's not just a certain range of people who are doing this.
Tons of companies, including shady ones (spammers, phishers, Microsoft), use email tracking "bugs" to determine whether an email has been read, if an address is 'live,' or determine a user's IP address or location.
Blocking their IPs would be as nontrivial a process as blocking all spam-producing IPs. And we know that's not exactly easy (how's that going, SpamHaus?).
The "solution" in my mind, is just to block all the HTML elements which can trigger loading of resources from remote servers. Basic formatting tags, like italic, bold, and color are fine, as are paragraphs and basic CSS. But remote images are out -- if you want to include images, put them in the email as a MIME attachment where they belong.
Any time you load an image or other element from a remote server, you potentially give away your location, and information about your address (e.g., whether your email address is valid -- useful to a spammer). The only way to stop these sort of attacks is just to not load anything remotely. If it doesn't come in as part of the message, it should be loaded only upon explicit command of the user, and perhaps with the address displayed (in a dialog), item by item.
This sounds like an invitation for some dumbass law "requiring" people to disclose when an email has tracking elements... except that it would be impossible to enforce, and the spammers/malware-writers would just ignore it anyway.
The solution here isn't regulation. It's just for people to decide whether a feature (in this case, HTML mail) is really worth the risk.
Alterately, we could 'neuter' HTML mail so that only the most basic formatting commands worked; use it purely as a style markup language, with no iframes, images, or externally linked text. That seems like it would solve the problem while preserving the reason 90% of idiot users want HTML: so they can use bold/italic/flashing-red-text or whatever.
Enjoy single-purposeness when you can.
on
Microsoft or Google?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Umm.. I like where I work but I do NOT put in anymore work than what I am paid for. Putting in 4,5+ extra hours a week because it is "fun" does not put any more food on the table and keeps you away from family longer.
This assumes you have a family.
I'm not being facetious. Most people right out of college don't have one, and to be honest, going home to an empty house/apartment can be a lot less attractive than putting in a few more hours at the office, if it's fun and interesting work.
When I got out of college and was looking for a first job, I looked for something that was going to be fun, interesting, and expose me to a good community atmosphere (and give me a fat paycheck, that was a major concern at that point, too) -- if that meant I had to work 50 or 60 hours a week, fine. I didn't have any other responsibilities at the time; "work hard, play hard" sounded like a good time. (And it was, actually.)
There aren't a whole lot of times in most people's lives when you can just throw yourself into work, the time right after college and before you get a family is one of them. If you can find work that you find really intellectually simulating and personally fulfulling, by all means, go for it. And if you end up eating copious amounts of chinese food and sleeping under your desk, at least you'll have interesting stories to talk about later.
You have a lifetime of boring 40-hour-a-week-and-come-home-for-dinner to look forward to; at least do something cool while you have the opportunity and lack of responsibilities.
Well, that was dumb (and it even made it through Preview). Here's how it should have read:
If you're NOT Apple, then you're going to be fighting for the 25% that's split among Sandisk/Creative/et al for "everything else," which is mostly sold to people who have made a conscious decision that they don't want an iPod.
In reality it's more like 75% (there's a nice chart on the second page of TFA), but you're right -- there are "iPods" and then there is "everything else."
If you're Apple, then you're going to be fighting for the 25% that's split among Sandisk/Creative/et al for "everything else," which is mostly sold to people who have made a conscious decision that they don't want an iPod.
Except from what I've heard, Zune isn't going to use PlaysForSure, it's going to use some other DRM system that won't be compatible with existing (Sandisk, etc.) PFS players.
So they've basically written PlaysForSure off as a failure, it would seem -- or at least it looks like it. I don't know what you call a DRM system that you refuse to use on your own products, if not a failure.
But if you read TFA, the reasons for Microsoft's predicted failure are not just that it's hawking a more restrictive DRM system than Apple is (which I'm not sure most people care about) but because their experience just doesn't translate over into the new market. With the exception of the xBox, Microsoft really doesn't know anything about consumer electronics, and their major product is maintained through aggressive marketing agreements that don't allow for any consumer choice. In short, they're crappy at actually getting people to buy their stuff, when they have a choice. Apple, on the other hand, has been fighting an uphill battle for years and knows how to woo people, both via their brains and wallets.
The U.S. DOJ settlement against Microsoft did very little. I would argue it basically did nothing of any relevance, certainly nothing that fundamentally changed Microsoft's business practices. If anything, it probably emboldened them, since the end of the settlement made it harder for a new one to be brought against them in the future -- it demonstrated that the U.S. government didn't have the political cojones to actually do anything meaningful.
However, I'm not sure that people haven't at least realized some of the underlying concepts behind your point before. The complexity of packaging systems is what leads to specialization in distros.
It's possible to take Debian and install packages on it, and make almost anything you want. A PVR machine, a digital audio workstation, a web server, a firewall, whatever. You can do it (and frankly, it probably works well in all of those roles, because they're fairly well-tested).
But rather than doing that, lots of people who want a machine in a particular role, don't just get "Linux" and then install a lot of packages on it, but get a particular, preconfigured distribution that already has a lot of packages installed and tested, and uses that.
The diversity of distros is basically an attempt to take the huge number of possible configurations possible with Linux and its ecosystem of packages, and produce a smaller number of well-tested configurations. So rather than building your own digital audio workstation, you get a digital-audio-workstaion distribution that already has everything rolled together. It's convenient, and it's less likely to have bugs.
So while I think that the diversity of packages is a source of possible conflicts because of the huge number of possible configurations, I don't think it's a totally insurmountable problem.
If they're giving everyone a constant supply of money in their weekly stipend, isn't that just like a country's central bank printing money? How does the price of goods not spiral out of control?
Is it just because they're constantly pulling money out of the economy through land rent, that they can do it?
Seems like, if that's going to be one of the major uses of these laptops -- and in some ways I could see how lighting would be way more useful than a computer, to people living in an environment like that -- maybe we could save a lot of money by making a wind-up luminescent panel, like those quarter-watt green-glow nightlights that you can buy.
I sure hope that the OLPC people did research into their target market and didn't just begin with the assumption that "every child wants/needs/could use a laptop," because that sure seems like a debatable assertion to me.
Seems like it would depend on the application -- some programs, like dvd::rip, are already designed to be clusterable.
But in terms of taking any application, and clustering it automatically -- somehow taking the resources of several computers and abstracting them and presenting them to a regular application, all transparently -- that seems decidedly nontrivial. Does the Linux kernel support that sort of thing?
I wouldn't think there's any reason why apps that need extra capacity couldn't be designed to parallelize themselves over the mesh network, though. It would have to have a good security model; that seems like a recipe for "instant botnet" if it was always-on.
Exactly. The people behind this "discovery" seem to think that the best way to combat security holes is to go after the exploit demonstration code, rather than, say, actually fixing the problem.
That's what's really frightening; that there are exploits that have been in the wild and in the hands of the black hats for three years, which still have not been patched.
Those "exploit sites" are not the enemy here. If anything, they're a powerful tool that lets the 'good guys' be on equal footing, or near equal footing, with the bad guys, who are probably trading exploits around in IRC channels regardless of whether they're on the WWW or cached or not.
It would certainly be interesting if that was the case, particularly seeing as how St. Mary's is apparently so desperate to get "wired," that they give you (and charge you for) a new laptop every two years, whether you want one or not.
Anyone else want to speculate as to whether this is the place?
That's not the only time something like that occured. There are actually some scarier "missing weapon" incidents, and a not-insiginifiant number of nuclear weapons are lying around the world's oceans in various places as a result.
My personal favorite, just because it sounds like it came right out of Goldfinger:
March 10, 1956, Over the Mediterranean Sea
A B-47 bomber carrying two nuclear weapon cores in their carrying cases disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea. The aircraft, on a nonstop flight from MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, to an undisclosed overseas airbase, was lost with its crew. After takeoff the B-47 was scheduled for two in-flight-refuelings before reaching its final destination. The first refueling was successfully completed, but the aircraft never made contact with the second refueling tanker over the Mediterranean Sea. Despite an extensive search, no trace of the aircraft, the nuclear weapon cores, or crew, were ever found.
There are nuclear warheads believed to be in the ocean off the cost of Georgia, another in Puget Sound (unarmed), one somewhere on land near Goldsboro, NC, and that's just the beginning of the list. There are supposedly about 50 unaccounted "irretrievable" weapons scattered around the world, and those don't count Soviet ones that they may not have told anyone about.
As other people have pointed out, though, it's much more believable that you would buy a book like that if your ex-wife had just disappeared and you wanted to understand what was going on around you, than if you had just killed her.
You'd have to be pretty stupid to buy a book like that if you had killed her, and Reiser doesn't seem like he's quite that dumb. Maybe he is, and if he's convicted then I'll be the first to say "wow, what an idiot."
But if you put yourself in the position of someone who just had their ex-wife disappear, presumably killed, and who wants to know what the hell the cops are doing to figure the whole thing out...it's not implausible that you'd buy a book like that.
Seems more plausible to me than Reiser just being so retarded that he'd buy it after the fact and leave it sitting around.
I bet some of the code comments that he'd write would be priceless.
In all seriousness though, I'm all for having people doing life (or other long) sentences do productive work, in whatever way they're capable, as long as it doesn't present a threat to society. I don't like paying my tax dollars so they can sit around and work out at the gym for 12 hours a day.
And hey, maybe he could do some Linux evangelizing from the "inside." Maybe they could even develop a PrisonLinux distro.
Well, the local broadcast digital channels are supposed to be transmitted as part of the lowest-cost cable package, but sometimes you don't get them unless you pay for "digital cable" service (because they'll randomly put a broadcast channel up on the higher portion of the band, which is blocked unless you pay for digital service or HSI). This is in violation of the FCC rules, but really, when has that stopped the cable companies?
And unlike good 'ol analog NTSC, where the transmissions down the cable line were basically the same as the transmissions going over the air, now that we're in the Brave New Digital World, they decided to use one method of transmission for OTA stuff and another for wireline. Over-the-air is ATSC, and cable is QAM. Wonderful, no?
So even if you do get the standard broadcast lineup in digital on your basic cable, as you're supposed to, it requires a QAM tuner rather than an ATSC one. There are some hybrid tuners (I know of at least two which are designed to decode all three: NTSC, ATSC, and QAM) but they're not very mature.
I think you hit the nail on the head: copyright has been a political issue for a while, but it's only recently that it's started to affect normal people. Thus they care, where they didn't give a damn before.
Most people don't care about things in the political realm, outside of the small sphere which they perceive as actually having a direct effect on their lives.
E.g., one of the reasons the gun lobby is so big in the U.S., is that there are a lot of people who own guns, and realize that changes in gun laws could directly affect their lives, and thus take an interest in it, one way or the other.
If you had as many bittorrent users as there are gun owners, and if those bittorrent users found their bittorrenting to be as important to them as gun owners find their gun ownership and its associated activities, then there's no reason why the "BitTorrent Lobby" wouldn't be equally powerful.
You bring up a good point, and it's not brought up very often.
The success of these measures in passing both Congress and the American public in general, lie in that they're perceived as only being applicable to non-citizens.
The Administration tried for a while to assert that it had the authority to detain citizens as "enemy combatants," as in the case of Jose Padilla, but it pretty much has given up this angle. (They more or less threw in the towel and transferred him to Federal prison on conventional charges on the eve of when the USSC might have ruled against it.) They could certainly try doing it again, since no precendent was really set as a result of Padilla, but I suspect that there would be significant public outcry and the opinion of the courts would be rather dim.
Although you make fun of the "strange contradiction" of applying the Constitution only to citizens, I think that's a more popular interpretation than you think. In fact, I'm not entirely convinced that it's not the correct one; I think the Constitution is pretty clear in outlining a relationship between citizens of the United States and their government. The relationship between foreigners and the USG should be goverened by the relationship between the foreign government and the U.S. government, hopefully in some sort of friendly, reciprocal fashion (e.g. 'protect our citizens when on your soil, and we'll protect your citizens while they're here'). If the foreign government doesn't like it, they can always bar their citizens from traveling to the United States, or declare war, or do any of the other things that soverign states do for relief against each other. At any rate, that interpretation of the Constitution isn't quite as outlandish as you make it seem -- it wouldn't surprise me if there were at least some Federal judges who espouse it, however quietly or academically.
Understanding this and taking it into account, I think helps make the response of the American public to the jurisprudential wranglings of the Bush administration more understandable. (Whether you agree with them or not is none of my business, but even if you disagree, understanding can be constructive.) So long as the new rules don't apply to U.S. citizens, the public outcry is limited. The electorate, while not particularly bright, is not quite so stupid as pundits on both the right and the left often make it out to be; they are basically self-interested, more than a trifle xenophobic, and there have been precious few arguments so far showing exactly how the new rules will negatively impact a basic white, middle-class, English-speaking, law-abiding, Christian family. Therefore, why should they care?
Talking about the Constitutional rights of foreigners -- or even making moral appeals about not torturing foreigners -- is not going to and has not impressed a great many Americans, and this is why I think there is not more widespread opposition to the policies of the Bush administration. Show, clearly and unequivocally, how these policies could be used against a typical red-state ethnic and religious majority, and you'd probably spark a change in government overnight.
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Does anybody really not think wireless will soon be a mandatory feature for all portable media players?
Only if somebody comes up with an implementation of it that doesn't suck.
At the moment, Microsoft doesn't seem to be on-target to delivering that, because Zune's sharing pretty much exemplifies "suck." In some ways it's probably counter-productive, since giving people a crippled version of a feature in their first experience with it, may turn them off to its usefulness later, when it's done right. I think Zune wireless is going to be that kind of non-feature.
It will become mandatory, for all intents and purposes, when Apple puts it into the iPod. And then it will be 'mandatory' for those who want to seriously compete with the iPod, another thing that the Zune doesn't seem poised to do.
I'm not sure about an Usenet or email group, but the Apple support forums aren't all that bad. You don't generally get too many rude "RTFM" responses, and not all the questions are that basic, either. The basic forums can be very basic ("how do I get email?"), but there's some fairly technical questions that get answered from time to time as well. It's more of a question-and-answer format rather than a general reference guide, so I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for, but it might be worth making an account on.
At any rate, if you have a question regarding your mac, it's almost always worth searching there before you start looking elsewhere, because in many cases you'll find other people with the same problem -- oftentimes, other people with the same unresolved problem, but at least you'll know you're not alone.
http://discussions.apple.com/index.jspa
The MacNN forums are also good reading, although I think you will find it to be a little more rough around the edges -- if you ask a dumb question there, you'll get a lot more "RTFM" than on Apple's official forums. But on the bright side, stuff doesn't get censored by Apple in the same way that it occasionally does on the official ones.
http://forums.macnn.com/
You might also want to consider subscribing to a dead-tree magazine; some people may disagree but I find that MacWorld puts out an interesting article or two most months, and the 'Marketplace' section in the back often turns up interesting products. If you spend a lot of time online, it may be old news to you by the time it reaches your door, but if you aren't, it might be worth it. If you have a friend who subscribes they generally have very low-priced "add a friend" subscription deals.
Hope this helps.
I agree with you.
NTSC may not be high-def, but the whole analog-tv ecosystem and infrastructure has been built up painstakingly through 70-odd years of experience.
The FCC is mandating that it all be thrown away in favor of a few years worth of half-baked digital technology, which in many cases isn't even going to work as well as conventional analog broadcasts. (If you haven't experienced the mass of multipath that is ATSC in a built-up area, it sucks.) And naturally, it won't be the same technology as the rest of the world, so the golden opportunity we had to implement a unified world standard was wasted. Did we learn nothing from the PAL/NTSC/SECAM days? Perhaps future generations will do better; I had thought maybe I'd see it in my lifetime, but apparently not.
The whole digital-TV transition seems, to me, to be nothing but a handout to the cable companies and consumer-electronics producers. There's very little in it for the "average viewer" who's currently watching broadcast. Everyone is either going to have to buy a digital ATSC tuner/converter, or subscribe to cable/satellite service, just to watch what they get for free right now. And with ATSC being the way it is, you're not even guaranteed to get the channels you now watch, using the antenna you now use.
Reading about the introduction of television to the U.S. and the FCC in the 1940s and 50s, paints a picture of an organization that's totally different from the corporate shitbags we're burdened with today.
You joke, but much of the lead in bullets used recreationally is sold as scrap and reused.
.45 ACP brass around a range and see how long it lasts -- not long.
I used to clean out the bullet trap in the back of the range I used to go to (and without any sort of safety gear -- OSHA would have a field day with that) and it got sold to a local guy who used to melt and cast new bullets out of it. You just put it in a crucible and heat it, and most of the other metals (mostly copper, from jacketed bullets) either floats or sinks, and you get your lead back. There are all sorts of "recipes" on how much virgin lead/antimony/rose-petals/etc. you need to add back in, to get good quality bullet casting material.
Not sure what the industry is like now, but you used to be able to go to the backs of most of the shooting rags (e.g. Shotgun News) and find people selling blocks of recycled lead that they had obtained by melting down stuff like this. Wheel weights were also a source of raw material, although I've heard that they're considered very "dirty."
The brass cartridge cases have an even more direct recycling path -- most of them (centerfire ones, anyway) are just reused. Leave a bag of spent
The point here is that stuff gets recycled without any deposits or laws, because it's economically advantageous to do so. Reusing bullet lead and brass cartridge cases makes for cheaper ammunition than buying new stuff, and that means that the scrap has a fairly high residual value. It also helps that the remanufacturing necessary to make usable product out of either is fairly simple and low-tech (you can do both in your basement or garage).
Humm, an article about "e-waste" filed under Enlightenment.
Well, that's not exactly complimentary. Guess kdawson really likes Metacity.
The problem is that it's not just a certain range of people who are doing this.
Tons of companies, including shady ones (spammers, phishers, Microsoft), use email tracking "bugs" to determine whether an email has been read, if an address is 'live,' or determine a user's IP address or location.
Blocking their IPs would be as nontrivial a process as blocking all spam-producing IPs. And we know that's not exactly easy (how's that going, SpamHaus?).
The "solution" in my mind, is just to block all the HTML elements which can trigger loading of resources from remote servers. Basic formatting tags, like italic, bold, and color are fine, as are paragraphs and basic CSS. But remote images are out -- if you want to include images, put them in the email as a MIME attachment where they belong.
Any time you load an image or other element from a remote server, you potentially give away your location, and information about your address (e.g., whether your email address is valid -- useful to a spammer). The only way to stop these sort of attacks is just to not load anything remotely. If it doesn't come in as part of the message, it should be loaded only upon explicit command of the user, and perhaps with the address displayed (in a dialog), item by item.
This sounds like an invitation for some dumbass law "requiring" people to disclose when an email has tracking elements ... except that it would be impossible to enforce, and the spammers/malware-writers would just ignore it anyway.
The solution here isn't regulation. It's just for people to decide whether a feature (in this case, HTML mail) is really worth the risk.
Alterately, we could 'neuter' HTML mail so that only the most basic formatting commands worked; use it purely as a style markup language, with no iframes, images, or externally linked text. That seems like it would solve the problem while preserving the reason 90% of idiot users want HTML: so they can use bold/italic/flashing-red-text or whatever.
A real email client ... surely you mean UNIX mail?
That ought to be good enough for anybody.
Umm.. I like where I work but I do NOT put in anymore work than what I am paid for. Putting in 4,5+ extra hours a week because it is "fun" does not put any more food on the table and keeps you away from family longer.
This assumes you have a family.
I'm not being facetious. Most people right out of college don't have one, and to be honest, going home to an empty house/apartment can be a lot less attractive than putting in a few more hours at the office, if it's fun and interesting work.
When I got out of college and was looking for a first job, I looked for something that was going to be fun, interesting, and expose me to a good community atmosphere (and give me a fat paycheck, that was a major concern at that point, too) -- if that meant I had to work 50 or 60 hours a week, fine. I didn't have any other responsibilities at the time; "work hard, play hard" sounded like a good time. (And it was, actually.)
There aren't a whole lot of times in most people's lives when you can just throw yourself into work, the time right after college and before you get a family is one of them. If you can find work that you find really intellectually simulating and personally fulfulling, by all means, go for it. And if you end up eating copious amounts of chinese food and sleeping under your desk, at least you'll have interesting stories to talk about later.
You have a lifetime of boring 40-hour-a-week-and-come-home-for-dinner to look forward to; at least do something cool while you have the opportunity and lack of responsibilities.
Well, that was dumb (and it even made it through Preview). Here's how it should have read:
If you're NOT Apple, then you're going to be fighting for the 25% that's split among Sandisk/Creative/et al for "everything else," which is mostly sold to people who have made a conscious decision that they don't want an iPod.
Durh.
In reality it's more like 75% (there's a nice chart on the second page of TFA), but you're right -- there are "iPods" and then there is "everything else."
If you're Apple, then you're going to be fighting for the 25% that's split among Sandisk/Creative/et al for "everything else," which is mostly sold to people who have made a conscious decision that they don't want an iPod.
Except from what I've heard, Zune isn't going to use PlaysForSure, it's going to use some other DRM system that won't be compatible with existing (Sandisk, etc.) PFS players.
So they've basically written PlaysForSure off as a failure, it would seem -- or at least it looks like it. I don't know what you call a DRM system that you refuse to use on your own products, if not a failure.
But if you read TFA, the reasons for Microsoft's predicted failure are not just that it's hawking a more restrictive DRM system than Apple is (which I'm not sure most people care about) but because their experience just doesn't translate over into the new market. With the exception of the xBox, Microsoft really doesn't know anything about consumer electronics, and their major product is maintained through aggressive marketing agreements that don't allow for any consumer choice. In short, they're crappy at actually getting people to buy their stuff, when they have a choice. Apple, on the other hand, has been fighting an uphill battle for years and knows how to woo people, both via their brains and wallets.
The U.S. DOJ settlement against Microsoft did very little. I would argue it basically did nothing of any relevance, certainly nothing that fundamentally changed Microsoft's business practices. If anything, it probably emboldened them, since the end of the settlement made it harder for a new one to be brought against them in the future -- it demonstrated that the U.S. government didn't have the political cojones to actually do anything meaningful.
Here's the DOJ's lame info site on the settlement:
http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/ms-settle.htm
I agree with you.
However, I'm not sure that people haven't at least realized some of the underlying concepts behind your point before. The complexity of packaging systems is what leads to specialization in distros.
It's possible to take Debian and install packages on it, and make almost anything you want. A PVR machine, a digital audio workstation, a web server, a firewall, whatever. You can do it (and frankly, it probably works well in all of those roles, because they're fairly well-tested).
But rather than doing that, lots of people who want a machine in a particular role, don't just get "Linux" and then install a lot of packages on it, but get a particular, preconfigured distribution that already has a lot of packages installed and tested, and uses that.
The diversity of distros is basically an attempt to take the huge number of possible configurations possible with Linux and its ecosystem of packages, and produce a smaller number of well-tested configurations. So rather than building your own digital audio workstation, you get a digital-audio-workstaion distribution that already has everything rolled together. It's convenient, and it's less likely to have bugs.
So while I think that the diversity of packages is a source of possible conflicts because of the huge number of possible configurations, I don't think it's a totally insurmountable problem.
How do they keep the economy from hyperinflating?
If they're giving everyone a constant supply of money in their weekly stipend, isn't that just like a country's central bank printing money? How does the price of goods not spiral out of control?
Is it just because they're constantly pulling money out of the economy through land rent, that they can do it?
Seems like, if that's going to be one of the major uses of these laptops -- and in some ways I could see how lighting would be way more useful than a computer, to people living in an environment like that -- maybe we could save a lot of money by making a wind-up luminescent panel, like those quarter-watt green-glow nightlights that you can buy.
I sure hope that the OLPC people did research into their target market and didn't just begin with the assumption that "every child wants/needs/could use a laptop," because that sure seems like a debatable assertion to me.
Seems like it would depend on the application -- some programs, like dvd::rip, are already designed to be clusterable.
But in terms of taking any application, and clustering it automatically -- somehow taking the resources of several computers and abstracting them and presenting them to a regular application, all transparently -- that seems decidedly nontrivial. Does the Linux kernel support that sort of thing?
I wouldn't think there's any reason why apps that need extra capacity couldn't be designed to parallelize themselves over the mesh network, though. It would have to have a good security model; that seems like a recipe for "instant botnet" if it was always-on.
Exactly. The people behind this "discovery" seem to think that the best way to combat security holes is to go after the exploit demonstration code, rather than, say, actually fixing the problem.
That's what's really frightening; that there are exploits that have been in the wild and in the hands of the black hats for three years, which still have not been patched.
Those "exploit sites" are not the enemy here. If anything, they're a powerful tool that lets the 'good guys' be on equal footing, or near equal footing, with the bad guys, who are probably trading exploits around in IRC channels regardless of whether they're on the WWW or cached or not.
It would certainly be interesting if that was the case, particularly seeing as how St. Mary's is apparently so desperate to get "wired," that they give you (and charge you for) a new laptop every two years, whether you want one or not.
Anyone else want to speculate as to whether this is the place?
My personal favorite, just because it sounds like it came right out of Goldfinger:
There are nuclear warheads believed to be in the ocean off the cost of Georgia, another in Puget Sound (unarmed), one somewhere on land near Goldsboro, NC, and that's just the beginning of the list. There are supposedly about 50 unaccounted "irretrievable" weapons scattered around the world, and those don't count Soviet ones that they may not have told anyone about.
Interesting reading here:
http://www.cdi.org/Issues/NukeAccidents/accidents
http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa08160
As other people have pointed out, though, it's much more believable that you would buy a book like that if your ex-wife had just disappeared and you wanted to understand what was going on around you, than if you had just killed her.
You'd have to be pretty stupid to buy a book like that if you had killed her, and Reiser doesn't seem like he's quite that dumb. Maybe he is, and if he's convicted then I'll be the first to say "wow, what an idiot."
But if you put yourself in the position of someone who just had their ex-wife disappear, presumably killed, and who wants to know what the hell the cops are doing to figure the whole thing out...it's not implausible that you'd buy a book like that.
Seems more plausible to me than Reiser just being so retarded that he'd buy it after the fact and leave it sitting around.
I bet some of the code comments that he'd write would be priceless.
In all seriousness though, I'm all for having people doing life (or other long) sentences do productive work, in whatever way they're capable, as long as it doesn't present a threat to society. I don't like paying my tax dollars so they can sit around and work out at the gym for 12 hours a day.
And hey, maybe he could do some Linux evangelizing from the "inside." Maybe they could even develop a PrisonLinux distro.
Well, the local broadcast digital channels are supposed to be transmitted as part of the lowest-cost cable package, but sometimes you don't get them unless you pay for "digital cable" service (because they'll randomly put a broadcast channel up on the higher portion of the band, which is blocked unless you pay for digital service or HSI). This is in violation of the FCC rules, but really, when has that stopped the cable companies?
And unlike good 'ol analog NTSC, where the transmissions down the cable line were basically the same as the transmissions going over the air, now that we're in the Brave New Digital World, they decided to use one method of transmission for OTA stuff and another for wireline. Over-the-air is ATSC, and cable is QAM. Wonderful, no?
So even if you do get the standard broadcast lineup in digital on your basic cable, as you're supposed to, it requires a QAM tuner rather than an ATSC one. There are some hybrid tuners (I know of at least two which are designed to decode all three: NTSC, ATSC, and QAM) but they're not very mature.
I can't believe this hasn't been modded up.
I think you hit the nail on the head: copyright has been a political issue for a while, but it's only recently that it's started to affect normal people. Thus they care, where they didn't give a damn before.
Most people don't care about things in the political realm, outside of the small sphere which they perceive as actually having a direct effect on their lives.
E.g., one of the reasons the gun lobby is so big in the U.S., is that there are a lot of people who own guns, and realize that changes in gun laws could directly affect their lives, and thus take an interest in it, one way or the other.
If you had as many bittorrent users as there are gun owners, and if those bittorrent users found their bittorrenting to be as important to them as gun owners find their gun ownership and its associated activities, then there's no reason why the "BitTorrent Lobby" wouldn't be equally powerful.
It's all about making average people care.
You bring up a good point, and it's not brought up very often.
The success of these measures in passing both Congress and the American public in general, lie in that they're perceived as only being applicable to non-citizens.
The Administration tried for a while to assert that it had the authority to detain citizens as "enemy combatants," as in the case of Jose Padilla, but it pretty much has given up this angle. (They more or less threw in the towel and transferred him to Federal prison on conventional charges on the eve of when the USSC might have ruled against it.) They could certainly try doing it again, since no precendent was really set as a result of Padilla, but I suspect that there would be significant public outcry and the opinion of the courts would be rather dim.
Although you make fun of the "strange contradiction" of applying the Constitution only to citizens, I think that's a more popular interpretation than you think. In fact, I'm not entirely convinced that it's not the correct one; I think the Constitution is pretty clear in outlining a relationship between citizens of the United States and their government. The relationship between foreigners and the USG should be goverened by the relationship between the foreign government and the U.S. government, hopefully in some sort of friendly, reciprocal fashion (e.g. 'protect our citizens when on your soil, and we'll protect your citizens while they're here'). If the foreign government doesn't like it, they can always bar their citizens from traveling to the United States, or declare war, or do any of the other things that soverign states do for relief against each other. At any rate, that interpretation of the Constitution isn't quite as outlandish as you make it seem -- it wouldn't surprise me if there were at least some Federal judges who espouse it, however quietly or academically.
Understanding this and taking it into account, I think helps make the response of the American public to the jurisprudential wranglings of the Bush administration more understandable. (Whether you agree with them or not is none of my business, but even if you disagree, understanding can be constructive.) So long as the new rules don't apply to U.S. citizens, the public outcry is limited. The electorate, while not particularly bright, is not quite so stupid as pundits on both the right and the left often make it out to be; they are basically self-interested, more than a trifle xenophobic, and there have been precious few arguments so far showing exactly how the new rules will negatively impact a basic white, middle-class, English-speaking, law-abiding, Christian family. Therefore, why should they care?
Talking about the Constitutional rights of foreigners -- or even making moral appeals about not torturing foreigners -- is not going to and has not impressed a great many Americans, and this is why I think there is not more widespread opposition to the policies of the Bush administration. Show, clearly and unequivocally, how these policies could be used against a typical red-state ethnic and religious majority, and you'd probably spark a change in government overnight.