OTOH ESR's arguments are irrelevant. Any company can pay for licenses for these codecs and put out closed-source Linux binaries and sink or swim in the market. It's not up to Linus, RMS or ESR. It's up to the market.
This is true, but I wonder... couldn't people pay for a company to license them a codec/technology under the GPL?
There are lots of companies who have dual-licensed stuff, where you have a GPL version and a commercial version. They do this because they think the GPL version won't be as useful commercially as the closed-source version to other companies.
So if you had the resources and really wanted a particular codec in Linux, maybe the solution is to go with a fat wad of cash to some company, and pay them to dual-license a particular part of their code. I'm sure if you threw enough money at companies, to offset the perceived dilution of their IP's value, they'd be amenable.
Licensing doesn't necessarily imply 'binary blobs.' If you have enough money, you can negotiate the licensing terms...it's all about how much money you think the Linux community is capable of coughing up for any particular technology.
I think that day will come when you can get a consumer PC from a major manufacturer pre-installed with a Linux distro. That will take care of a lot of the hardware issues, and might cause more 3rd party manufacturers to list Linux compatibility. The problem isn't the amount of hardware that's compatible with Linux, it's determining if "Widget X" is going to work or not. Mac users probably have a similar or less amount of compatible hardware, but it's not a problem because you can go into most stores and immediately tell which stuff is going to work with your Mac or not.
They sell shredders that will destroy CDs. I have a small one for home-office use, it cost me about $40 from OfficeMax a while back. Couldn't even tell you what brand it is. The pieces that come out are about 1/4" by 1/2", plus before actually going into the cutters, there's a knurled roller that mashes up the surface of the disc both front and back, so even if you could reassemble the pieces, I think you'd have a tough time getting any data back. It will also destroy credit cards and 3.5" floppies (metal pieces and all). It's rather loud and scary when it's running, but damned if it doesn't do the job. Only complaint I have with it, is that in order to put paper in there, you need to fold it in half lengthwise -- the shredder opening is only about 5-1/4" wide.
I'm sure there are lots of commercial shredders that will eat CDs; frankly any office shredder that wouldn't destroy a CD is of limited usefulness these days. I'm also confident that most large-scale "data destruction" services, like the ones used by hospitals, law offices, and the like, will get rid of CDs if you toss them in your normal 'burn bin.'
If you were really paranoid, you could take your CD, microwave it, then shred the result, and then incinerate the shreddings. That ought to take care of it pretty thoroughly. Personally, I just trash the plastic shreddings and recycle the paper ones.
I meant cylindrical as in 'uses one of those little round keys,' not cylinder as in has a cylinder in the lock which rotates.
After doing some searching, it would seem that they are more correctly called "Tubular pin tumbler locks," "Ace locks," or "radial locks." Wikipedia page (with picture) is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tubular_pin_tumbler_l ock
This is the style of lock that my old Kryptonite U-lock uses, and which was vulnerable to the Bic pen trick; the diameter of the key is about the same as a plastic pen shaft if the end-cap is removed, and the pen can be inserted in the lock and jiggled to effectively "pick" the lock.
Based on what you're saying, if I understand you correctly, they've now moved to standard linear linear pin-tumbler lock? That would make sense, as these wouldn't be vulnerable to the pen trick anymore, but would seemingly be vulnerable to more conventional picking or bumping.
That was my bad; I meant to write "bulls" or "bull calves" I think. Although if you look at the timestamp on that post, it might explain part of the problem.:)
I really doubt that there is anything keeping the cable providers from putting down broadband similar to Birmingham's in Philadelphia, except for cost. They're not going to do it, unless they think there's a market for it.
Let's say that a cable provider did put out a high-speed network like that: they started offering 10MB/s service or something. They'd have to recoup the cost of their infrastructure rollout somehow, so the new HS service would have to cost more than existing service.
There is a perceived risk there: if people don't value the increased speed, they might just refuse to pay the higher rates, and instead switch to come competing service which offers lower speed and is cheaper.
That's why you don't see higher-speed stuff in the U.S.; it's because too few people are asking for it. Most cable companies have several speed tiers, and the majority of people use the lowest ones. I think that it's widely held here that the first 1 to 3 Mb/s are really what sells, and then beyond that, the "average user" doesn't care a whole lot (unless they're heavy downloaders, which the networks don't like anyway).
It's impossible to blame on any one factor; obviously deregulation and the attitudes of the telco and cable companies are one thing, the vast size of the U.S. and "mass" are another, but I definitely think that you have to factor in that the demand for such services may be lower here (or are at least thought to be lower) than in other places, like Europe and Asia.
I'm aware that they were two separate issues, but the story submitter did definitely say "Personally I'd love to see us progress to the point where it was possible to grow just the meat itself without the animal," hence this whole discussion. It doesn't really relate to TFA's topic, but when does the discussion ever?
Cloning at the organism level would just result in herds of cows that were genetically identical, so that instead of trying to selectively breed for particular traits, you could just take that prize bull, and run off 50,000 of them without worrying about individual variations.
It would also allow you to only have male or female cattle, since cloning would obviously dictate gender: if you're farming for dairy, you only produce females (heifers), for meat you only produce calves. Heck, you could have entire strains of animals where one sex was never seen, because the breed would be optimized for either meat or dairy, and then only one sex ever produced. Make them sterile, so that there's no fertilization outside of the lab, and you'd really never see them. (Actually, I suspect that these cloned animals would almost certainly be rendered sterile, similar to Monsanto's bioengineered corn; both for preservation of existing non-geneered lines and to force farmers who use it to continually buy new zygotes from the manufacturer for implantation.)
This is all totally separate and basically unrelated from the growing-meat-in-tanks discussion, which would require a much different, probably greater, degree of technological control. Instead of cloning at the individual level, you'd need to be able to do it on the cellular level; controlling how a zygote differentiates into various structures, and figuring out how to grow only certain desired parts (muscle tissue) without growing the rest of the animal. I think that's more along the lines of stem cell research (similar to the experiments with human lines to grow organs or regenerate nerves) than it is "cloning."
I've heard this a lot, and was in agreement until recently.
Some friends of mine have a DLP projector that we use for watching movies and TV. With DVDs (that's 480p), I thought it looked pretty darn good.
A week or so ago I walked in when they were watching some HD content on ESPN; I think this was 720p stuff. Anyway, I was blown away by the difference. It was quite immediately noticeable. There's just a lot of detail in the frame that you can't see -- and aren't used to seeing -- in normal television quality. People's faces in the crowd were actually identifiable as faces, and not just blobs of color, etc. Little details on the players were there. It's hard to describe; it was still TV, but it was different than watching standard-def. Not quite the "window in your wall" that people sometimes describe, or like seeing color after being used to black-and-white, but significant nonetheless.
I think the impact this will have on movies is frankly minimal; when you're only looking at someone's face, close-up, there's a limit to how much information you need to convey. As you said, we really don't need to see how much pancake base the actors are wearing, or whether their wigs are taped on. In most cases, the director has already framed the material taking into account the resolution of a standard output device, so that you can see all the detail you're supposed to, under normal definition conditions.
But for sporting events or (I'd imagine) news, or anything else where more information and more realism is inherently a good thing, I think people are going to want HD once they really see it a few times.
I think one of the major reasons why I was turned off to HD for so long, is because most stores you go to where they're demoing HD displays (Worst Buy in particular) aren't actually running HD content on them. And there's also the possibility that a projector is really the ideal way to see it instead of a traditional television (I'm a huge PJ convert now, BTW; nothing under 100" will ever do again). Overall, I think the demand for HD is going to build slowly but steadily; it's not something that you really care about until you see it and watch it for a while in person, so I think the growth will be mostly linear. But with a properly done demo, I think almost anyone ought to be able to clearly see the difference.
Keeping the HD hardware from running on the machines that most people have, would really be the nail in the coffin of legitimate HD distribution.
It's like they want to guarantee that people find illicit ways of obtaining HD content. First, they're going to make the players incompatible and obnoxiously expensive, by failing to agree on a single format for physical distribution. Then, they decide that the only kosher way to play back legitimately acquired (which implies DRMed) HD content, is with new hardware and software.
Excuse me if I'm not impressed. What does this leave the average person who wants HD to do? Well, you just download it illegally. It's pirated content, distributed in un-DRMed formats, that's going to be most people's first taste of HD on their computer.
The DRM will always be broken: somewhere inside that cable box or LCD monitor, is an unencrypted digital signal. With the right test equipment, somebody will figure out how to get it back into a computer and record it. From there, they need only to compress it with one of the many HD-capable codecs and video formats available and playable right now (H.264 inside an AVI or Quicktime container), and dump it onto the P2P networks.
This smacks of what we saw happen with MP3 music a few years ago. The music companies feared it, and hoped that they could kill MP3 by using proprietary formats instead (anyone remember ATRAC3?). Instead of buying the legitimate, overpriced garbage that the recording industry tried to foist on them, consumers ignored it and got their MP3s illegally instead. By ignoring demand, the music companies gave up billions of dollars in revenue and created a generation of buyers who got used to getting music for free.
The movie and video companies, together with electronics manufacturers, have an opportunity now to not repeat history. If they give the market what it wants -- HD movies without onerous restrictions, playable on the hardware they already have (which by-and-large is technically capable of the task), sold at a reasonable price -- they could start making money immediately. Instead, I think they'll probably resist the inevitable outcome as long as possible, and waste millions (or billions) of dollars in misplaced technological development and make criminals out of their would-be customers in the mean time.
Wow. This seems amazingly retarded. All we have to do is modify kqemu, which does support 64-bit, to allow kernel patches. Also, what is preventing people from patching the kernel on-disk, then rebooting?
Yeah I wondered this as well; my guess is that there'll be multiple layers of boobytraps and security-through-obscurity to try to keep anyone from figuring out enough about the kernel to make a stable patch for it, or from loading a non-standard kernel at all. I think the latter thing you could do in part by having various other parts of the system checksum and verify the kernel during the boot process and barf if it doesn't seem kosher, meaning that in order to change the kernel, you would also have to disable or modify the signature/checksum checks, which could even include various pieces of userland software ("You are running a DAMAGED version of Windows! Microsoft Office will now Quit") in order to keep Joe User from running with a modified kernel; in short, they could easily make changing the kernel into a monumental task that would require someone to modify or patch huge swaths of the system.
And that's without really getting into TPM-based schemes, which I admit to not really understanding all that well.
When a single company controls the source to not only your computer's entire system, but also to many/most of the applications that you depend on every day, and only gives you source code -- and particularly when they can roll out updates to it at any time they want, remotely -- there's really no limit to the sort of nastiness they can do. Sure, it's all fundamentally flawed (as all DRM and security-through-obscurity is), but that doesn't mean that they can't make life really miserable for anyone with an urge to tinker.
Although I believe that the "average person" is basically lazy, he's not entirely stupid.
When getting something that normally costs money for free is on the line, never doubt the ingenuity of the Average American. (Or average person from many other countries, I suspect.) I know lots of people who can open a new port in their firewall, because they need to do that in order to download pirated movies off of Kazaa/Bittorrent/Gnutella/whatever. Or who can install Divx, because they need it to watch the AVIs they download.
I could keep going. The point is, the average person has the bare minimum computer skills they need to do what they want. They might seem like complete morons when it comes to doing something that we geeks think is important but they don't give a damn about (e.g. security, encryption), but when free shit is up for grabs, suddenly everyone and their brother wants to be an expert.
The real question here is "Will the average user care about watching HD?" if the answer is yes, and VLC or some other non-MS tool provides that ability (preferably for free), people will download and install it. They might not have the foggiest clue what they're downloading and installing, or how it works, and they probably won't care, but they'll do it if that's what's required to save a buck.
Based on the Wikipedia page for "Kryptonite lock," it seems that they switched from using the vulnerable cylindrical lock design in the U-locks in 2004, although it's not clear what they moved to. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptonite_lock
I have a pre-2004 Kryptonite U-lock that I use occasionally (I don't live in a particularly high-crime area, and don't lock my bike up for long periods of time anyway; I use it more to keep someone from just hopping on it and riding off) and it definitely uses a cylindrical lock and key. I've never tested it against the Bic pen trick, although maybe sometime I will.
I'm curious what they're using now; if it's still a cylindrical lock, how is it less prone to the pen trick? I also wonder what kind of lock mechanism they use on their more "upscale" locks -- the New York Lock, as I recall, is their most secure design and is basically a ridiculously large chain and padlock.
I think what might have inspired the GP's comment was a few high-profile cases recently of auto insurers denying theft claims to people who've had cars stolen, because the cars were equipped with supposedly "un-stealable" anti-theft systems.
So there is some basis for wondering if the insurance companies (generally) put too much faith in mechanical systems to deter criminal activity. However, as you pointed out, most residential homeowners and renters policies are written a bit differently than auto-theft policies.
It's called "Trans-cutaneous Electronic Muscle Stimulation" (TEMS) or "Functional Electronic Stimulation" (FES), and contrary to those late-night infomercials for ab exercisers, they are generally accepted not to do anything to stimulate the development of new muscle tissue. I think TENS refers mostly to high-frequency stimulation sometimes used for pain control, and FES is the lower-frequency muscle stimulation.
I have however heard that they are useful in preventing the atrophy of existing muscle, during periods of inactivity. I knew someone who was doing research with them on comatose patients about 30 years ago, trying to see if they prevented tissue degeneration. Not sure of the results or if they still use them that way, though.
But no, in general you can't just hook you biceps up to a TEMS system and look like Ahnold a few weeks later. So I don't think they'd be particularly useful for conditioning vat-meat...but who knows. I'd imagine if there was anything that could actually 'exercise' meat in a vat, it would probably also be effective on conditioning our sedentary butts; whoever makes it will probably have both the farmers and the weight-loss companies beating a path to their door.
The larger problem is actually meat consumption. It takes 12,000 gallons of water [vegsource.com] to produce a pound of beef... and that's the natural way of growing beef! Imagine doing it in a factory... each pound of beef requires six pounds of corn that could be eaten by us instead. When you look at the numbers for meat, its a depressing story.
Seems to me the problem is that there are just too many people.
So what if it takes six pounds of corn to make one pound of beef? Or 12,000 gallons of water? That's only a problem when the number of people you're trying to feed exceeds the amount of corn you can grow or water you can safely consume. Rather than trying to stretch the resources thinner and thinner, forcing everyone's quality of living down in the process, maybe the solution is to try and educate people as quickly as possible on the many reasons not to have more than one or two children per couple.
Before people drag out the 'human nature' argument, I think that First World countries have shown that it's not at all antithetical to human nature to not reproduce like rabbits, when the technology and education exists to give people the choice.
If it's not corn that you run out of, and it's not water, eventually you're going to run out of something else. Trying to be more and more efficient -- essentially trying to slice the pie up into smaller and smaller slices -- is a losing game in the long run. I think it's far more practical (not to mention comfortable!) to try and reduce the number of people competing for fixed resources than it is to try and "create" more.
This is a good point. For all we know, Apple might have an "iPod killer" on some whiteboard in somebody's office right now. They're not going to do a damn thing with it though, unless it looks like the current cash cow is going to be slaughtered by somebody else.
Right now, Apple doesn't even have any reason to substantially improve on the iPod, except as they're forced to by competition from SanDisk and others. The price point for players is basically fixed, so at any time it makes sense to not give the machine more capacity than you really need to. This is why you're seeing SanDisk outdo Apple in capacity right now; I'm sure that come Christmas, Apple will probably match them. Without competition, they have no reason to eat into their margins.
If somebody comes out with a real threat to the iPod, then you'll see Apple either start to engineer something new, or pull the sheet off of whatever they might have waiting in the wings. But until there's a threat, they have no reason to give us more than the occasional upgrades (to keep people who have iPods that have worn out or become obsolete buying Apple). I wouldn't expect something truly earth-shattering from them, not while they're doing so well.
Of course, Apple-watching is notoriously unreliable. I should couch all this by saying that the best analysis of Apple is always hampered by the fact that it's driven by Mr. Jobs, and he seems to have made a career out of defying expectations.
I'm not much for biology, but if you figured out the way that various stem cells are "programmed" to grow into certain structures, couldn't you do it that way? That wouldn't require removing all the genetic information from the genome besides the "meat" portions, it would just require falsifying the messages that assumedly must be sent to stem cells that tell them what structures to develop into.
Of course, I'm not sure that this would produce meat in the conventional sense that we think of it: a bunch of muscle cells in a jar wouldn't taste much like filet mignon, because they wouldn't be formed into those muscular structures, which are then exercised while the animal is alive, have a certain fat content, etc. In short, meat is more than just muscle tissue, it's a part of a particular animal. I have this feeling that the net result of trying to grow meat in jars would be closer to tofu than beef. Maybe it would be acceptable for foods that end up being processed beyond recognition anyway (hamburgers, sausage), but I doubt it would work for beef.
If anyone who's more schooled in biology wants to fill in my misunderstandings, I'd be interested.
I think the reason that this attitude has come up, is because computers aren't dangerous enough.
Not in the oops-I-shouldn't-have-clicked-that-where-are-my-fi ngers sort of way, I mean in that people assume that anything that's done on a computer doesn't have any connection to the real world. Computers are "virtual," a TIG welder is "real." People don't immediately understand that doing something on their computer can have vast real-world consequences.
Over time I think this will change; it was much worse in years past, when the first thing that came to people's minds when they saw a desktop computer was "ooh, video game!" but it's still there.
People are lazy. They don't learn that much about computers because they don't have to. They don't really comprehend how much they depend on the computer, and how central it is to their lives and job functions, in the same way the torch is to the welder. People don't like to think of themselves as computer operators, they like to think that they have some function that can exist without the computer (e.g., they're a consultant/analyst/secretary/writer) even if their job would not be possible to perform in the way they perform it, without the computer.
I'm an absolutely pro-evolution, agnostic secularist, and I agree with you.
Frankly, I find the idea that people are forced to receive an education in a state-run school to be almost as abhorrent as forcing them to go to a state-run church would be. At least the church would probably only be a few hours per week. Public schools demand years, and the great majority of people in our society don't have any alternative, really. Homeschooling and private schools are too expensive; private schools in direct tuition and home-schooling in opportunity cost and lost income.
If people want to have their kids taught their own silly dogmas of how the universe should/does work, I have no problem with that. Give them back their tax contributions to the public schools, and let them do whatever they want. I think the net result will that they'll end up being the 21st century equivalent of the Amish or the Luddites, eventually fading into irrelevance except as a social curiosity. However, this is a far better outcome than trying to stamp them and their faith-based ideologies out, which only fuels their hatred of science and gives them new opportunities to promulgate their views and recruit new followers.
Anyone who doesn't want to participate in public education, shouldn't have to. Let them take their ball and go home; you can't win an argument with a religious person by using facts.
(Shrug)... While it's not my place to make blanket statements about everyone's personal situations, it's been my experience that in many cases, people first decide that they're not going to move, and then they find reasons why they can't.
Realistically, if a illegal Mexican strawberry-picker can travel 3,000 miles for work, I have serious qualms that many skilled workers in this country would be unable to, given sufficient motivation. A Greyhound bus ticket is something like $88 one-way to anyplace in the country (at least it used to be), and in many major cities you can find bus services that undercut Greyhound substantially (e.g. the "Chinatown buses" on the East Coast).
You're correct that finding transportation in extra-urban areas can be a source of problems for some people, however I've found that the cost of transportation in rural areas (if done cheaply, i.e. a used car and minimal insurance) is less than the gains given by the lower cost of living. Assuming you're paying for your own housing either way -- not freeloading, in other words -- I've found that it's easier to live somewhere rural than someplace urban. (In many temperate places, seasonal communities in particular, you can pretty reliably avoid paying rent for half the year if you find a good caretaking arrangement for somebody's property.) I live an an urban environment right now because that's where the work happens to be, and I dislike it terribly: I pay more in public transportation fees and increased rent than I ever paid for my car in a rural area. I live here though, because I get paid enough to make up for it versus being unemployed in a lower-cost area. (Note that I'm talking mostly about young, post-college-grad skilled workers here; the economics may be different when you're talking about moving a whole family... which is something that I know nothing about. And frankly, having a family is an economic life choice just like anything else.)
Obviously there are people whose circumstances make them less mobile than others. This is just life; at the end of the day some people are always just going to be unlucky. That doesn't mean the system is a failure, or even working poorly. In general, the United States is a very mobile country: people move from one coast to another all the time, and move from one apartment to another with less thought than they might give to a new set of clothes. The real estate market quickly shows you how communities can rise and fall as people move from one area to the next, seeking work or avoiding less-desirable areas. As a society, we're basically mobile; even if there are individual exceptions.
The majority of cases of people I've known who have decided to stay in a particular city, do so not because they can't move elsewhere, but because they want to say there. Implicit in their decision is a tradeoff: staying here in Boston/NYC/wherever is worth more to me than the increase in pay I'd get my moving to an area where the job market was better. This isn't always a bad decision; people who have free housing from the parents are often better-off financially by doing this.
So I guess if you really can't move, you're missing out on one of the biggest benefits of our society. Little consolation to those people, but I think in general, our system creates many more winners than it does losers, and that's what counts.
Although I am a strong supporter of net neutrality in most instances, I do wonder if you guys wouldn't benefit from some type of tiered service in Australia.
If I'm not mistaken, most of the justification for the pay-per-MB service there is because US backbone providers and ISPs charge their Australian counterparts for peering/interconnect privileges. They charge because there's much more traffic flowing from Australia (initiated by Australian customers, to outside servers) than there is in the other direction, thus it's not really a peering of equals (for which there is usually no charge; e.g. the various U.S. telcos don't charge each other most of the time for traffic). It's this inequality that makes things expensive for you; effectively you're paying a tax on all of your 'net usage, because so much of it is foreign.
Maybe the solution would be to make packets originating from Australian servers, which don't have to travel over undersea cables or get entangled in foreign peering arrangements, free-of-charge. If you're connecting and doing remote-mirroring with your neighbor down the street, or elsewhere on the domestic Australian 'net, you wouldn't be subject to the surcharge. It would only be when you started accessing content that had to traverse the long lines, that you'd start to get metered.
Seems like this might cause a lot more intelligent use of caching, and maybe even encourage indigenous content development, which in the long run would help solve the traffic imbalance. (Oh, and submit lots of Aussie websites to Slashdot, that'll help I'm sure.)
Well, since you asked; actually I like the Neuros products as well. (I was going to call them "Neuroses"...) The problem that I have with them, which isn't limited just to them but also to many of the other non-iPod MP3 players, is that they don't have good hardware/software integration.
I had a MP3 player, pre-iPod. It was called a Pontis. For its day, it was pretty innovative, and if they hadn't killed MMC cards in favor of SD, it would probably still be usable. (Okay, the RS-232 interface would be pretty painful, but that's what card readers are for.) However, the reason I never used it much wasn't because of the hardware, but because it didn't have a particularly good or well-integrated software package.
The Neuros is almost clearly better than the iPod as a player, but because it doesn't exist as part of a vertically integrated hardware/software stack, I'm not sure it's a compelling solution. The reason that the iPod blew away a lot of other players initially wasn't solely because if its looks, it was because it offered a workflow: Rip, Mix, Burn. iTunes would rip your CDs, let you mix up playlists and organize your library; then it would let you burn the results to a CD-R, or sync your whole collection to an iPod. This was in pretty dire contrast to other manufacturers at the time, who saw "music player" programs as a separate software niche from synchronization software, which was itself separate from CD burning software. While this component model may appeal conceptually to geeks and other lovers of the "UNIX way," it was obnoxious from a user's perspective: what people want and wanted is a single massive program to do it all.
When the iPod was initially being marketed, it was billed on Apple's website as a hardware and software combination. iTunes was prominently featured. Unfortunately, most of the other manufacturers of MP3 players are doing the all-too-typical hardware-manufacturer failing of making innovative hardware and combining it with crappy software and hoping it will sell. They see software development as a cost to be cut, rather than value to be added, and are thus content shipping their device with nothing but a sync program, and depending on third-parties to provide the rest.
The Neuros player is neat, and perhaps on Linux (where there exists, due to necessity, alternatives to iTunes that users could modify to work with the device), it could be handy. But on other platforms, where people are already committed to using iTunes (or Napster, or WMP), I don't see it having much future, unless Neuros develops their own iTunes alternative.
In short, I think everyone is looking too hard for an 'iPod alternative' (or killer), when really in order to have any chance of doing that, they need to replace the entire integrated "music stack" that Apple has developed: the iPod accessory market, the iPod itself, iTunes itself, and the iTunes Music store. Simply replacing one of these components -- unless it can function as a drop-in replacement for an Apple component within that 'stack' -- is probably doomed to failure for the foreseeable future.
The exception would be Microsoft, since they could potentially develop a competing integrated solution that wouldn't suck (I said could!), but it's really too early to tell. I think they may drive Zune into the ground for other unrelated reasons, more having to do with politics than architecture.
Slashdot Mirror
OTOH ESR's arguments are irrelevant. Any company can pay for licenses for these codecs and put out closed-source Linux binaries and sink or swim in the market. It's not up to Linus, RMS or ESR. It's up to the market.
... couldn't people pay for a company to license them a codec/technology under the GPL?
This is true, but I wonder
There are lots of companies who have dual-licensed stuff, where you have a GPL version and a commercial version. They do this because they think the GPL version won't be as useful commercially as the closed-source version to other companies.
So if you had the resources and really wanted a particular codec in Linux, maybe the solution is to go with a fat wad of cash to some company, and pay them to dual-license a particular part of their code. I'm sure if you threw enough money at companies, to offset the perceived dilution of their IP's value, they'd be amenable.
Licensing doesn't necessarily imply 'binary blobs.' If you have enough money, you can negotiate the licensing terms...it's all about how much money you think the Linux community is capable of coughing up for any particular technology.
I think that day will come when you can get a consumer PC from a major manufacturer pre-installed with a Linux distro. That will take care of a lot of the hardware issues, and might cause more 3rd party manufacturers to list Linux compatibility. The problem isn't the amount of hardware that's compatible with Linux, it's determining if "Widget X" is going to work or not. Mac users probably have a similar or less amount of compatible hardware, but it's not a problem because you can go into most stores and immediately tell which stuff is going to work with your Mac or not.
Are you implying that the /. moderators have something against Fox News? I thought everybody on /. was fair and impartial?
I think you meant to say "fair and balanced."
Slashdot: We Dupe, you Decide.
They sell shredders that will destroy CDs. I have a small one for home-office use, it cost me about $40 from OfficeMax a while back. Couldn't even tell you what brand it is. The pieces that come out are about 1/4" by 1/2", plus before actually going into the cutters, there's a knurled roller that mashes up the surface of the disc both front and back, so even if you could reassemble the pieces, I think you'd have a tough time getting any data back. It will also destroy credit cards and 3.5" floppies (metal pieces and all). It's rather loud and scary when it's running, but damned if it doesn't do the job. Only complaint I have with it, is that in order to put paper in there, you need to fold it in half lengthwise -- the shredder opening is only about 5-1/4" wide.
h tm
I'm sure there are lots of commercial shredders that will eat CDs; frankly any office shredder that wouldn't destroy a CD is of limited usefulness these days. I'm also confident that most large-scale "data destruction" services, like the ones used by hospitals, law offices, and the like, will get rid of CDs if you toss them in your normal 'burn bin.'
If you were really paranoid, you could take your CD, microwave it, then shred the result, and then incinerate the shreddings. That ought to take care of it pretty thoroughly. Personally, I just trash the plastic shreddings and recycle the paper ones.
The one I have is similar to this, but not as nice: (But like I said, I only paid about $40-50 for it)
http://www.provantage.com/primera-56400~7PRIT052.
I meant cylindrical as in 'uses one of those little round keys,' not cylinder as in has a cylinder in the lock which rotates.
l ock
After doing some searching, it would seem that they are more correctly called "Tubular pin tumbler locks," "Ace locks," or "radial locks." Wikipedia page (with picture) is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tubular_pin_tumbler_
This is the style of lock that my old Kryptonite U-lock uses, and which was vulnerable to the Bic pen trick; the diameter of the key is about the same as a plastic pen shaft if the end-cap is removed, and the pen can be inserted in the lock and jiggled to effectively "pick" the lock.
Based on what you're saying, if I understand you correctly, they've now moved to standard linear linear pin-tumbler lock? That would make sense, as these wouldn't be vulnerable to the pen trick anymore, but would seemingly be vulnerable to more conventional picking or bumping.
That was my bad; I meant to write "bulls" or "bull calves" I think. Although if you look at the timestamp on that post, it might explain part of the problem. :)
I'd say the problem is perceived demand.
I really doubt that there is anything keeping the cable providers from putting down broadband similar to Birmingham's in Philadelphia, except for cost. They're not going to do it, unless they think there's a market for it.
Let's say that a cable provider did put out a high-speed network like that: they started offering 10MB/s service or something. They'd have to recoup the cost of their infrastructure rollout somehow, so the new HS service would have to cost more than existing service.
There is a perceived risk there: if people don't value the increased speed, they might just refuse to pay the higher rates, and instead switch to come competing service which offers lower speed and is cheaper.
That's why you don't see higher-speed stuff in the U.S.; it's because too few people are asking for it. Most cable companies have several speed tiers, and the majority of people use the lowest ones. I think that it's widely held here that the first 1 to 3 Mb/s are really what sells, and then beyond that, the "average user" doesn't care a whole lot (unless they're heavy downloaders, which the networks don't like anyway).
It's impossible to blame on any one factor; obviously deregulation and the attitudes of the telco and cable companies are one thing, the vast size of the U.S. and "mass" are another, but I definitely think that you have to factor in that the demand for such services may be lower here (or are at least thought to be lower) than in other places, like Europe and Asia.
I'm aware that they were two separate issues, but the story submitter did definitely say "Personally I'd love to see us progress to the point where it was possible to grow just the meat itself without the animal," hence this whole discussion. It doesn't really relate to TFA's topic, but when does the discussion ever?
Cloning at the organism level would just result in herds of cows that were genetically identical, so that instead of trying to selectively breed for particular traits, you could just take that prize bull, and run off 50,000 of them without worrying about individual variations.
It would also allow you to only have male or female cattle, since cloning would obviously dictate gender: if you're farming for dairy, you only produce females (heifers), for meat you only produce calves. Heck, you could have entire strains of animals where one sex was never seen, because the breed would be optimized for either meat or dairy, and then only one sex ever produced. Make them sterile, so that there's no fertilization outside of the lab, and you'd really never see them. (Actually, I suspect that these cloned animals would almost certainly be rendered sterile, similar to Monsanto's bioengineered corn; both for preservation of existing non-geneered lines and to force farmers who use it to continually buy new zygotes from the manufacturer for implantation.)
This is all totally separate and basically unrelated from the growing-meat-in-tanks discussion, which would require a much different, probably greater, degree of technological control. Instead of cloning at the individual level, you'd need to be able to do it on the cellular level; controlling how a zygote differentiates into various structures, and figuring out how to grow only certain desired parts (muscle tissue) without growing the rest of the animal. I think that's more along the lines of stem cell research (similar to the experiments with human lines to grow organs or regenerate nerves) than it is "cloning."
I've heard this a lot, and was in agreement until recently.
Some friends of mine have a DLP projector that we use for watching movies and TV. With DVDs (that's 480p), I thought it looked pretty darn good.
A week or so ago I walked in when they were watching some HD content on ESPN; I think this was 720p stuff. Anyway, I was blown away by the difference. It was quite immediately noticeable. There's just a lot of detail in the frame that you can't see -- and aren't used to seeing -- in normal television quality. People's faces in the crowd were actually identifiable as faces, and not just blobs of color, etc. Little details on the players were there. It's hard to describe; it was still TV, but it was different than watching standard-def. Not quite the "window in your wall" that people sometimes describe, or like seeing color after being used to black-and-white, but significant nonetheless.
I think the impact this will have on movies is frankly minimal; when you're only looking at someone's face, close-up, there's a limit to how much information you need to convey. As you said, we really don't need to see how much pancake base the actors are wearing, or whether their wigs are taped on. In most cases, the director has already framed the material taking into account the resolution of a standard output device, so that you can see all the detail you're supposed to, under normal definition conditions.
But for sporting events or (I'd imagine) news, or anything else where more information and more realism is inherently a good thing, I think people are going to want HD once they really see it a few times.
I think one of the major reasons why I was turned off to HD for so long, is because most stores you go to where they're demoing HD displays (Worst Buy in particular) aren't actually running HD content on them. And there's also the possibility that a projector is really the ideal way to see it instead of a traditional television (I'm a huge PJ convert now, BTW; nothing under 100" will ever do again). Overall, I think the demand for HD is going to build slowly but steadily; it's not something that you really care about until you see it and watch it for a while in person, so I think the growth will be mostly linear. But with a properly done demo, I think almost anyone ought to be able to clearly see the difference.
I would really laugh if that's the route they go.
Keeping the HD hardware from running on the machines that most people have, would really be the nail in the coffin of legitimate HD distribution.
It's like they want to guarantee that people find illicit ways of obtaining HD content. First, they're going to make the players incompatible and obnoxiously expensive, by failing to agree on a single format for physical distribution. Then, they decide that the only kosher way to play back legitimately acquired (which implies DRMed) HD content, is with new hardware and software.
Excuse me if I'm not impressed. What does this leave the average person who wants HD to do? Well, you just download it illegally. It's pirated content, distributed in un-DRMed formats, that's going to be most people's first taste of HD on their computer.
The DRM will always be broken: somewhere inside that cable box or LCD monitor, is an unencrypted digital signal. With the right test equipment, somebody will figure out how to get it back into a computer and record it. From there, they need only to compress it with one of the many HD-capable codecs and video formats available and playable right now (H.264 inside an AVI or Quicktime container), and dump it onto the P2P networks.
This smacks of what we saw happen with MP3 music a few years ago. The music companies feared it, and hoped that they could kill MP3 by using proprietary formats instead (anyone remember ATRAC3?). Instead of buying the legitimate, overpriced garbage that the recording industry tried to foist on them, consumers ignored it and got their MP3s illegally instead. By ignoring demand, the music companies gave up billions of dollars in revenue and created a generation of buyers who got used to getting music for free.
The movie and video companies, together with electronics manufacturers, have an opportunity now to not repeat history. If they give the market what it wants -- HD movies without onerous restrictions, playable on the hardware they already have (which by-and-large is technically capable of the task), sold at a reasonable price -- they could start making money immediately. Instead, I think they'll probably resist the inevitable outcome as long as possible, and waste millions (or billions) of dollars in misplaced technological development and make criminals out of their would-be customers in the mean time.
Wow. This seems amazingly retarded. All we have to do is modify kqemu, which does support 64-bit, to allow kernel patches. Also, what is preventing people from patching the kernel on-disk, then rebooting?
Yeah I wondered this as well; my guess is that there'll be multiple layers of boobytraps and security-through-obscurity to try to keep anyone from figuring out enough about the kernel to make a stable patch for it, or from loading a non-standard kernel at all. I think the latter thing you could do in part by having various other parts of the system checksum and verify the kernel during the boot process and barf if it doesn't seem kosher, meaning that in order to change the kernel, you would also have to disable or modify the signature/checksum checks, which could even include various pieces of userland software ("You are running a DAMAGED version of Windows! Microsoft Office will now Quit") in order to keep Joe User from running with a modified kernel; in short, they could easily make changing the kernel into a monumental task that would require someone to modify or patch huge swaths of the system.
And that's without really getting into TPM-based schemes, which I admit to not really understanding all that well.
When a single company controls the source to not only your computer's entire system, but also to many/most of the applications that you depend on every day, and only gives you source code -- and particularly when they can roll out updates to it at any time they want, remotely -- there's really no limit to the sort of nastiness they can do. Sure, it's all fundamentally flawed (as all DRM and security-through-obscurity is), but that doesn't mean that they can't make life really miserable for anyone with an urge to tinker.
Although I believe that the "average person" is basically lazy, he's not entirely stupid.
When getting something that normally costs money for free is on the line, never doubt the ingenuity of the Average American. (Or average person from many other countries, I suspect.) I know lots of people who can open a new port in their firewall, because they need to do that in order to download pirated movies off of Kazaa/Bittorrent/Gnutella/whatever. Or who can install Divx, because they need it to watch the AVIs they download.
I could keep going. The point is, the average person has the bare minimum computer skills they need to do what they want. They might seem like complete morons when it comes to doing something that we geeks think is important but they don't give a damn about (e.g. security, encryption), but when free shit is up for grabs, suddenly everyone and their brother wants to be an expert.
The real question here is "Will the average user care about watching HD?" if the answer is yes, and VLC or some other non-MS tool provides that ability (preferably for free), people will download and install it. They might not have the foggiest clue what they're downloading and installing, or how it works, and they probably won't care, but they'll do it if that's what's required to save a buck.
IBM Mainframe Contest Instructions:
...
1) Build a time machine.
2)
Based on the Wikipedia page for "Kryptonite lock," it seems that they switched from using the vulnerable cylindrical lock design in the U-locks in 2004, although it's not clear what they moved to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptonite_lock
I have a pre-2004 Kryptonite U-lock that I use occasionally (I don't live in a particularly high-crime area, and don't lock my bike up for long periods of time anyway; I use it more to keep someone from just hopping on it and riding off) and it definitely uses a cylindrical lock and key. I've never tested it against the Bic pen trick, although maybe sometime I will.
I'm curious what they're using now; if it's still a cylindrical lock, how is it less prone to the pen trick? I also wonder what kind of lock mechanism they use on their more "upscale" locks -- the New York Lock, as I recall, is their most secure design and is basically a ridiculously large chain and padlock.
I think what might have inspired the GP's comment was a few high-profile cases recently of auto insurers denying theft claims to people who've had cars stolen, because the cars were equipped with supposedly "un-stealable" anti-theft systems.
So there is some basis for wondering if the insurance companies (generally) put too much faith in mechanical systems to deter criminal activity. However, as you pointed out, most residential homeowners and renters policies are written a bit differently than auto-theft policies.
It's called "Trans-cutaneous Electronic Muscle Stimulation" (TEMS) or "Functional Electronic Stimulation" (FES), and contrary to those late-night infomercials for ab exercisers, they are generally accepted not to do anything to stimulate the development of new muscle tissue. I think TENS refers mostly to high-frequency stimulation sometimes used for pain control, and FES is the lower-frequency muscle stimulation.
I have however heard that they are useful in preventing the atrophy of existing muscle, during periods of inactivity. I knew someone who was doing research with them on comatose patients about 30 years ago, trying to see if they prevented tissue degeneration. Not sure of the results or if they still use them that way, though.
But no, in general you can't just hook you biceps up to a TEMS system and look like Ahnold a few weeks later. So I don't think they'd be particularly useful for conditioning vat-meat...but who knows. I'd imagine if there was anything that could actually 'exercise' meat in a vat, it would probably also be effective on conditioning our sedentary butts; whoever makes it will probably have both the farmers and the weight-loss companies beating a path to their door.
A Google Scholar search turned up some interesting stuff:
Effect of transcutaneous electric muscle stimulation on postoperative muscle mass and protein synthesis
MYOSTIM-FES to Prevent Muscle Atrophy in Microgravity and Bed Rest
I can only read the abstracts, but both seem to suggest that the systems can prevent muscle wasting to some degree.
The larger problem is actually meat consumption. It takes 12,000 gallons of water [vegsource.com] to produce a pound of beef... and that's the natural way of growing beef! Imagine doing it in a factory... each pound of beef requires six pounds of corn that could be eaten by us instead. When you look at the numbers for meat, its a depressing story.
Seems to me the problem is that there are just too many people.
So what if it takes six pounds of corn to make one pound of beef? Or 12,000 gallons of water? That's only a problem when the number of people you're trying to feed exceeds the amount of corn you can grow or water you can safely consume. Rather than trying to stretch the resources thinner and thinner, forcing everyone's quality of living down in the process, maybe the solution is to try and educate people as quickly as possible on the many reasons not to have more than one or two children per couple.
Before people drag out the 'human nature' argument, I think that First World countries have shown that it's not at all antithetical to human nature to not reproduce like rabbits, when the technology and education exists to give people the choice.
If it's not corn that you run out of, and it's not water, eventually you're going to run out of something else. Trying to be more and more efficient -- essentially trying to slice the pie up into smaller and smaller slices -- is a losing game in the long run. I think it's far more practical (not to mention comfortable!) to try and reduce the number of people competing for fixed resources than it is to try and "create" more.
This is a good point. For all we know, Apple might have an "iPod killer" on some whiteboard in somebody's office right now. They're not going to do a damn thing with it though, unless it looks like the current cash cow is going to be slaughtered by somebody else.
Right now, Apple doesn't even have any reason to substantially improve on the iPod, except as they're forced to by competition from SanDisk and others. The price point for players is basically fixed, so at any time it makes sense to not give the machine more capacity than you really need to. This is why you're seeing SanDisk outdo Apple in capacity right now; I'm sure that come Christmas, Apple will probably match them. Without competition, they have no reason to eat into their margins.
If somebody comes out with a real threat to the iPod, then you'll see Apple either start to engineer something new, or pull the sheet off of whatever they might have waiting in the wings. But until there's a threat, they have no reason to give us more than the occasional upgrades (to keep people who have iPods that have worn out or become obsolete buying Apple). I wouldn't expect something truly earth-shattering from them, not while they're doing so well.
Of course, Apple-watching is notoriously unreliable. I should couch all this by saying that the best analysis of Apple is always hampered by the fact that it's driven by Mr. Jobs, and he seems to have made a career out of defying expectations.
I'm not much for biology, but if you figured out the way that various stem cells are "programmed" to grow into certain structures, couldn't you do it that way? That wouldn't require removing all the genetic information from the genome besides the "meat" portions, it would just require falsifying the messages that assumedly must be sent to stem cells that tell them what structures to develop into.
Of course, I'm not sure that this would produce meat in the conventional sense that we think of it: a bunch of muscle cells in a jar wouldn't taste much like filet mignon, because they wouldn't be formed into those muscular structures, which are then exercised while the animal is alive, have a certain fat content, etc. In short, meat is more than just muscle tissue, it's a part of a particular animal. I have this feeling that the net result of trying to grow meat in jars would be closer to tofu than beef. Maybe it would be acceptable for foods that end up being processed beyond recognition anyway (hamburgers, sausage), but I doubt it would work for beef.
If anyone who's more schooled in biology wants to fill in my misunderstandings, I'd be interested.
I agree completely.
i ngers sort of way, I mean in that people assume that anything that's done on a computer doesn't have any connection to the real world. Computers are "virtual," a TIG welder is "real." People don't immediately understand that doing something on their computer can have vast real-world consequences.
I think the reason that this attitude has come up, is because computers aren't dangerous enough.
Not in the oops-I-shouldn't-have-clicked-that-where-are-my-f
Over time I think this will change; it was much worse in years past, when the first thing that came to people's minds when they saw a desktop computer was "ooh, video game!" but it's still there.
People are lazy. They don't learn that much about computers because they don't have to. They don't really comprehend how much they depend on the computer, and how central it is to their lives and job functions, in the same way the torch is to the welder. People don't like to think of themselves as computer operators, they like to think that they have some function that can exist without the computer (e.g., they're a consultant/analyst/secretary/writer) even if their job would not be possible to perform in the way they perform it, without the computer.
We'll keep one server running just for him. Maybe an old 386 with a single 14.4k baud modem.
Oh, and the connection resets every hour.
I'm an absolutely pro-evolution, agnostic secularist, and I agree with you.
Frankly, I find the idea that people are forced to receive an education in a state-run school to be almost as abhorrent as forcing them to go to a state-run church would be. At least the church would probably only be a few hours per week. Public schools demand years, and the great majority of people in our society don't have any alternative, really. Homeschooling and private schools are too expensive; private schools in direct tuition and home-schooling in opportunity cost and lost income.
If people want to have their kids taught their own silly dogmas of how the universe should/does work, I have no problem with that. Give them back their tax contributions to the public schools, and let them do whatever they want. I think the net result will that they'll end up being the 21st century equivalent of the Amish or the Luddites, eventually fading into irrelevance except as a social curiosity. However, this is a far better outcome than trying to stamp them and their faith-based ideologies out, which only fuels their hatred of science and gives them new opportunities to promulgate their views and recruit new followers.
Anyone who doesn't want to participate in public education, shouldn't have to. Let them take their ball and go home; you can't win an argument with a religious person by using facts.
(Shrug) ... While it's not my place to make blanket statements about everyone's personal situations, it's been my experience that in many cases, people first decide that they're not going to move, and then they find reasons why they can't.
... which is something that I know nothing about. And frankly, having a family is an economic life choice just like anything else.)
Realistically, if a illegal Mexican strawberry-picker can travel 3,000 miles for work, I have serious qualms that many skilled workers in this country would be unable to, given sufficient motivation. A Greyhound bus ticket is something like $88 one-way to anyplace in the country (at least it used to be), and in many major cities you can find bus services that undercut Greyhound substantially (e.g. the "Chinatown buses" on the East Coast).
You're correct that finding transportation in extra-urban areas can be a source of problems for some people, however I've found that the cost of transportation in rural areas (if done cheaply, i.e. a used car and minimal insurance) is less than the gains given by the lower cost of living. Assuming you're paying for your own housing either way -- not freeloading, in other words -- I've found that it's easier to live somewhere rural than someplace urban. (In many temperate places, seasonal communities in particular, you can pretty reliably avoid paying rent for half the year if you find a good caretaking arrangement for somebody's property.) I live an an urban environment right now because that's where the work happens to be, and I dislike it terribly: I pay more in public transportation fees and increased rent than I ever paid for my car in a rural area. I live here though, because I get paid enough to make up for it versus being unemployed in a lower-cost area. (Note that I'm talking mostly about young, post-college-grad skilled workers here; the economics may be different when you're talking about moving a whole family
Obviously there are people whose circumstances make them less mobile than others. This is just life; at the end of the day some people are always just going to be unlucky. That doesn't mean the system is a failure, or even working poorly. In general, the United States is a very mobile country: people move from one coast to another all the time, and move from one apartment to another with less thought than they might give to a new set of clothes. The real estate market quickly shows you how communities can rise and fall as people move from one area to the next, seeking work or avoiding less-desirable areas. As a society, we're basically mobile; even if there are individual exceptions.
The majority of cases of people I've known who have decided to stay in a particular city, do so not because they can't move elsewhere, but because they want to say there. Implicit in their decision is a tradeoff: staying here in Boston/NYC/wherever is worth more to me than the increase in pay I'd get my moving to an area where the job market was better. This isn't always a bad decision; people who have free housing from the parents are often better-off financially by doing this.
So I guess if you really can't move, you're missing out on one of the biggest benefits of our society. Little consolation to those people, but I think in general, our system creates many more winners than it does losers, and that's what counts.
Although I am a strong supporter of net neutrality in most instances, I do wonder if you guys wouldn't benefit from some type of tiered service in Australia.
If I'm not mistaken, most of the justification for the pay-per-MB service there is because US backbone providers and ISPs charge their Australian counterparts for peering/interconnect privileges. They charge because there's much more traffic flowing from Australia (initiated by Australian customers, to outside servers) than there is in the other direction, thus it's not really a peering of equals (for which there is usually no charge; e.g. the various U.S. telcos don't charge each other most of the time for traffic). It's this inequality that makes things expensive for you; effectively you're paying a tax on all of your 'net usage, because so much of it is foreign.
Maybe the solution would be to make packets originating from Australian servers, which don't have to travel over undersea cables or get entangled in foreign peering arrangements, free-of-charge. If you're connecting and doing remote-mirroring with your neighbor down the street, or elsewhere on the domestic Australian 'net, you wouldn't be subject to the surcharge. It would only be when you started accessing content that had to traverse the long lines, that you'd start to get metered.
Seems like this might cause a lot more intelligent use of caching, and maybe even encourage indigenous content development, which in the long run would help solve the traffic imbalance. (Oh, and submit lots of Aussie websites to Slashdot, that'll help I'm sure.)
Well, since you asked; actually I like the Neuros products as well. (I was going to call them "Neuroses"...) The problem that I have with them, which isn't limited just to them but also to many of the other non-iPod MP3 players, is that they don't have good hardware/software integration.
I had a MP3 player, pre-iPod. It was called a Pontis. For its day, it was pretty innovative, and if they hadn't killed MMC cards in favor of SD, it would probably still be usable. (Okay, the RS-232 interface would be pretty painful, but that's what card readers are for.) However, the reason I never used it much wasn't because of the hardware, but because it didn't have a particularly good or well-integrated software package.
The Neuros is almost clearly better than the iPod as a player, but because it doesn't exist as part of a vertically integrated hardware/software stack, I'm not sure it's a compelling solution. The reason that the iPod blew away a lot of other players initially wasn't solely because if its looks, it was because it offered a workflow: Rip, Mix, Burn. iTunes would rip your CDs, let you mix up playlists and organize your library; then it would let you burn the results to a CD-R, or sync your whole collection to an iPod. This was in pretty dire contrast to other manufacturers at the time, who saw "music player" programs as a separate software niche from synchronization software, which was itself separate from CD burning software. While this component model may appeal conceptually to geeks and other lovers of the "UNIX way," it was obnoxious from a user's perspective: what people want and wanted is a single massive program to do it all.
When the iPod was initially being marketed, it was billed on Apple's website as a hardware and software combination. iTunes was prominently featured. Unfortunately, most of the other manufacturers of MP3 players are doing the all-too-typical hardware-manufacturer failing of making innovative hardware and combining it with crappy software and hoping it will sell. They see software development as a cost to be cut, rather than value to be added, and are thus content shipping their device with nothing but a sync program, and depending on third-parties to provide the rest.
The Neuros player is neat, and perhaps on Linux (where there exists, due to necessity, alternatives to iTunes that users could modify to work with the device), it could be handy. But on other platforms, where people are already committed to using iTunes (or Napster, or WMP), I don't see it having much future, unless Neuros develops their own iTunes alternative.
In short, I think everyone is looking too hard for an 'iPod alternative' (or killer), when really in order to have any chance of doing that, they need to replace the entire integrated "music stack" that Apple has developed: the iPod accessory market, the iPod itself, iTunes itself, and the iTunes Music store. Simply replacing one of these components -- unless it can function as a drop-in replacement for an Apple component within that 'stack' -- is probably doomed to failure for the foreseeable future.
The exception would be Microsoft, since they could potentially develop a competing integrated solution that wouldn't suck (I said could!), but it's really too early to tell. I think they may drive Zune into the ground for other unrelated reasons, more having to do with politics than architecture.