I really don't think that this is much of anything new. There's no reason why this couldn't have been done 20 years ago, or probably 50 years ago, had someone been sufficently motivated. You could do it with the same sort of PCM systems that are used in radio-controlled models, if all you wanted was controls.
But there's a reason why nobody has done this, and I think that's because it just seems like a really bad idea. There's no safe failure mode for a system like this. If the controls stop working, bad things happen. The only safe way to work around the interference issues would be to have wired backup controls, and at that point you've made the wireless system redundant anyway, because it's only advantageous if you can eliminate the wires.
A plane is always going to have some sort of mechanical connection between all of its parts (otherwise it wouldn't be a "plane," it would just be a collection of stuff moving in the same direction through the air), so I can't imagine that routing wires is really that difficult a proposition.
The only interesting application that I can think of this is perhaps a "semi-wireless" system. If your plane has a lot of metallic parts, maybe you could use the body as a single control wire to tie everything together. You use RF modulators, but rather than transmitting through the air, you just couple the transmitting and receiving antennas directly to contiguous metallic parts on the plane. I think that most of the metal parts on planes are bonded together anyway, to prevent static buildup, to this might be practical. In this case, the signal from the transmitter also attached to the same piece of metal elsewhere in the plane would be so much stronger than the signal from an external transmitter, interference might not be quite so much of a problem.
Still, I'm not sure I'd want to trust my life to it. I guess people probably said that about fly-by-wire originally, or by fly-by-hydraulic when it replaced steel cables, but there are generally good reasons why those transitions are made. I don't see a compelling reason for this.
Interesting. Does the phone (your USB one) do anything besides the audio I/O? Can you use it to dial, for example?
The problem I foresee is that most of the generic USB profiles (like USB sound device) don't include any control channels that would allow the handset to communicate with the VoIP software in order to ring, do hold/transfer/mute, or dial. Maybe you could do them through audio signals on the line, just like DTMF dialing is done on POTS, but I don't think that's how the Windows-based USB phones work. I'm pretty sure they're using some sort of proprietary device profile and driver in order to interface the hardware to Skype.
On my Mac, I have a Griffin iMic, which is a generic USB audio interface, to give me an extra analog audio I/O channel. Right now I have a headset plugged into it, but I've often thought about making a balun and attaching it to a regular phone. It's not particularly hard, and there are quite a few plans around for converting line-level audio to telephone audio (make your own hold music system, etc.), but the problem for me is generating the ring tone. I really want something that I can plug into an analog phone and will make it function like a phone, including ring, so it would need to be able to put out 75VAC 20Hz into at least a 1 REN load. There are circuits that do this, but controlling it would probably take a serial port (via a USB to serial on a Mac, probably) in addition to the audio interface. Things start to get complicated there pretty quickly.
There are boxes that do this as their sole purpose in life, I think just generically called "VOIP Gateways," but the ones I've seen are all SIP (or tied to a particular provider like Vonage) and don't work with Skype (or else the ones that do work with Skype are Windows-only). I have no interest in paying for VoIP, I'd just like to use a regular POTS handset to make Skype calls on my Mac. Guess I'll have to keep my Western Electric Model 500 in the closet for now.
I understand about VoIP, I was talking about POTS lines. The GP (or GGP, or somewhere up there) was saying that he retained a regular analog phone line and paid a few bucks a month in order to have it for 911. What I was saying is that you can keep your POTS phone hooked up for 911 purposes, without paying a thing. And then use VoIP for your regular (non-emergency) calls.
The downside is that if the power or internet goes out, you won't have any service except for the ability to call 911, but if you can live with that, it might be a viable option that doesn't cost anything nor precludes your ability to call 911.
Actually this theory sounds more plausible to me than anything else so far (except perhaps the simplest explanation -- that somebody just wanted to be a dick, and decided that people's porn collections are their greatest assets). Suppose you were an up-and-coming black hat virus writer. Suppose you wanted to show off your 1337 skillz; writing a virus that deleted particular types of files from particular locations, that's a marketable skill. Think of what you could do if you could deliver it to particular corporate computers: have it wipe all the Excel files from My Documents, or something.
But assuming you didn't have a buyer for said virus, you wouldn't want to just release it anyway, but you might want to get yourself some PR. So you have it delete some stuff that most people aren't going to complain too loudly about losing, and which really isn't going to hit the radar screens of a lot of corporate MIS types. That way you still have the benefit of surprise (and perserve the market value of) your eventual virus release, but you might get more recognition for it.
Anyway, it's pure conjecture on my part (as is most of this whole discussion) but I thought it was one theory.
People are treating this virus as something that's motivated by a desire to delete people's porn and MP3s, but should realize that ".jpg" and ".mp3" are arbitrarily-chosen extensions. A future virus could just as easily be set to delete ".xls" and ".doc".
Huh? That doesn't make any sense, even in the way you're trying to use it.
If I copy your file, you have a copy, I have a copy. Nobody has lost anything. Therefore, it can't possibly be called stealing by most people's definitions.
If I copy your file and then delete the original, then I have it and you don't, that I think we can all agree, is stealing. Likewise, if it's on physical media which only one of us can possess at a time, and I take the physical media, then it's also stealing.
If I delete something without taking a copy, then it's not stealing, it's just vandalism or destruction of your stuff.
You are mis-stating the argument you're trying to make fun of (the "it's not physical so therefore not stealing") and so your parody falls flat. The fact that data isn't physical isn't the important part, it's the fact that nobody loses their copy in a typical "pirate" transaction. That's what differentiates it from "theft" in the minds of many people.
Personally, I think that unauthorized copying is not theft, but might meet the qualifications for wrongful conversion of property, if you take a wide enough definition of 'property.' (So as not to limit it to real property and chattels, but include the value of data as well.) See this page. Normally it applies only to physical goods. At any rate, there are existing sections of law which are more appropriately applied to the reduction-in-value that occurs when data is unlawfully copied than theft and larceny.
If that was really their conclusion, then I seriously question their methodology. I have personally seen solid jacketed ("ball") rounds of 9mm Parabellum and.223 Remington penetrate more than 18 inches of water. I could buy that maybe if you were really close to the water that some rifle bullets would still be going at a high enough velocity that they'd break apart under the deceleration (.223/5.56mm steel-core "green tip" rounds tend to break at the cannelure when fired into ballistic gelatin at high velocity, so I could believe they might do it in water if the water was close enough), and hollowpoints might expand prematurely on contact with the water and go off-course, but I don't think saying 'bullets won't penetrate more than 18 inches of water' is true as a general statement.
Plus, the rate at which a projectile decelerates is going to be highly dependent on its ratio of mass to cross-sectional area (well, mass to drag coefficent, and the drag coefficient in modern bullets is governed principally by the cross-section), and modern rifle bullets are going to be far superior to a round ball (or Minie-type ball). Perhaps the angle of incidence has an effect: maybe if a long modern bullet strikes the water at an angle, it begins to tumble and then disintegrates. I've never tried that, but I've definitely fired them straight-on into containers of water and they don't disintegrate.
If Mythbusters said that, I'm a little disappointed. There must be some implicit caveats about the bullets and velocities.
It would be interesting if they did, because I think Apple could probably still find ways to litigate against another player that prominently featured a large circular wheel, on the basis of trademark and probably some design patents. I haven't checked recently what sort of design patents they have filed, but I wouldn't be surprised if "Portable music player featuring a selection wheel centrally located on the front face..." or something like that. I think something like this might even have some merit: when you see a player that has a big circular wheel on it like that, most people assume iPod.
You know, it's great that I find out when I spend money on Skype, doesn't benefit me, but rather, a nation far away...
I think the same thing every time I go to Wal-Mart. It's called globalization, you might as well learn to love it, because it ain't going away.
Besides, a whole lot more money flows OUT of the U.S. than in, so as a country, we're not exactly making money here. The way things are going right now, it won't be too long before debt is our biggest export. (Pity there's no export market for lawyers...)
I've never tried it, but I know some people who have attempted to use fax machines on other VoIP systems with mixed results. I believe the problem stems from the psychoacoustic compression (e.g.: G.729) that's used to reduce the bandwidth requirements of calls: it's very low bitrate and designed for speech only, and doesn't have anywhere near the data-carrying capacity of a standard POTS line.
I think some VoIP systems (Vonage) are smart enough to increase the bandwidth so as to not block fax and data calls completely, but how well it works I don't know. I'm not sure what codec Skype uses (and I suspect nobody outside of Skype does, either), but judging from the audio quality I think it's compressing pretty hard. And if the artifacts are that audible in speech, I can't help but think that a data transmission is probably going to do poorly. YMMV based on network conditions, though.
For outgoing faxes, especially if you only send them occasionally, it might be worthwhile to give it a shot. The cost savings might be worth having to try it a few times to get it to go through, or for it to transmit very slowly. If you receive a lot of faxes though it might be a bad idea, since you can't ever be sure how many times the person on the far end will retransmit if the call fails the first time. Having a fax machine that only works some of the time, to me, is worse than not having one at all since you wouldn't be able to trust it.
Given the way techology and politics have been going lately, perhaps we should all be thankful for the fact that all the big telcos are doing is ignoring ENID and hoping it will go away.
I wouldn't be surprised if they were to campaign to make it illegal if it ever starts to make significant inroads on their cartel--excuse me, business model.
Let's see, what excuse would they use for outlawing it? Child pornography is always a guaranteed sell, but hard to work in this case. Maybe they could roll it into the next anti-terrorism bill: bypassing the POTS switching system might make the calls harder to intercept, therefore it'll only be used by terrorists, drug dealers, and MySpace users.
I'm only half-joking here. The POTS "namespace" is going to be the big telco's Alamo: it's a gigantic source of revenue and not one they're going to let go without a fight. They'll probably lose in the long run, but it'll be long and unpleasant in the meantime.
Personally, I'd stay away from the really cheap analog headsets. If you want to use your computer for anything except a dedicated VoIP terminal, they're obnoxious in a major way.
Unless your computer has multiple analog audio outs, and you can set it up so that Skype uses one and your regular audio uses the other, every time you want to make or answer a call you'll have to swap cables. Not cool.
My feeling is that to use Skype, most people are going to want a USB headset or phone, so they can leave it attached all the time.
On another note, does anyone know if there is a USB-to-POTS adaptor (that would allow you to use a real telephone) which is compatible with Skype for Mac OS X? I've been browsing through the list of VoIP stuff at NewEgg and it's very Windows-centric. I'm curious as to whether there's some sort of a standard USB device that they appear as, or whether every device and dongle requires special proprietary drivers.
I remember Dialpad... actually my introduction to them was from the floor of one of the computer shows, it might have been Macworld Boston or NYC; I remember calling some friends from their booth and asking about the audio quality.
Unfortunately by the time I got around to getting broadband, they had already stopped the unlimited free service, and it was all downhill from there.
I hope whenever people get around to writing the history of VoIP that there's more than a footnote there about Dialpad, because boy were those guys just a few years ahead of their time. I think broadband penetration was just a little too light, and wireless internet hadn't hit it big enough for people to think of computers as something around their house that could be as ubiquitous as telephones ("why would I want to go into the computer room to make a phone call?"); if they had held out for a year or two longer... well, they would have been Skype.
Doesn't every phone have to be able to dial 911 anyway?
I was under the impression that they couldn't cut that off, by law; similarly, you can turn on any cell phone and even if it isn't registered with the network, you can use it to dial 911. That was at least my understanding of how things worked, I admit I've never tried either.
The house I live in currently has phone wiring, but it's a real mess and I've never used it. Some day I'll have to unscrew one of the jacks (they're all of the old 4-pin variety, and painted over anyway) and see if there's dial tone. We certainly aren't paying for anything, we use cellphones and VoIP via cable internet.
I'm aware that there are a lot of third-party customization tools available for Windows; however I was referring to built-in features of the OS itself. It's possible to change most aspects of the GUI on any platform if you install the right tools (I remember reading articles years ago on how you could make a Mac look enough like a Windows machine to really confuse someone clueless), but that's not much of a commentary on the operating system's design philosophy.
I disagree about the Start menu. It may let someone who's just pointing and clicking around on their desktop launch an application, but what it does is hide and confuse where programs are really stored. As does the Windows directory structure in general. I think OS X does this much better: programs are stored in [Your hard drive]/Applications. Those are the actual executable files, they're what's actually being run. And if you want easy access to something, then you can put it into the Dock.
Until some of Apple's own applications muddied the waters (iCal, I'm looking at you), I also think the Mac's take on close-versus-quit is a lot better thought out. Programs can run with or without a window being open; closing a window normally leaves the program running but windowless. On Windows, sometimes closing a window will quit the application, sometimes it won't (depending, I think, on whether it's the last remaining window open). This sucks: I can't count the number of times I've accidentally quit a big application on my windows machine, when really I just wanted to clear one document's window and open something else. The only time an application should quit on close is when it's a one-window application and doesn't open files, or have any need to run in the background.
The Windows system tray also bugs me; it's just an example of one feature trying to do too many things, and failing at most of them. You've got some widgets down there that are just controls (the volume thing), others which represent backgrounded applications, others which are just notification/status icons...it's a mess. Every time I want to change the volume on my PC, I have to hunt around for where that particular icon went (since the damn things move and disappear and reappear, because even on my gently-used PC there are too many of them to show at once); it's like playing whack-a-mole.
What some kids can do when sat in front of a computer without any training isn't a particularly good metric. I've seen kids that can't talk yet put a cartridge into an NES and start it up, so clearly that's a more intuitive interface than storing programs on a hard drive. I know a kindergarten teacher that still has an Apple IIc in her classroom, because you can teach 20 kids how to use it in five minutes (if computer is not on, put disk in drive, close door, turn computer on. If computer is on, wait for red light on drive to go out, open door, remove disk, insert new disk, press Control-Apple-Reset).
Windows, in general, hides complexity from the user. But the cost of this is confusion, because computers are inherently complicated devices, and eventually those users will run into the limits of the smoke-and-mirrors that was used to protect them at the beginning. An oversimplification designed to make things "easier" for the clueless user, can easily devolve into a morass like the Registry.
I could go on; I think this same philosophy is perpetuated into most of the Office products. They're all simple on the surface -- it's not hard to type a basic memo or report in Word, for example. But that's not a very high bar. But there are a lot of things that just don't make any sense when you move further: when my bulleted outline stopped working with the Tab key (tab to indent, shift-tab to outdent), I had to go through three different menus to figure out how to turn it back on. (Solution: it's an "Auto-Format" option, apparently, even though it doesn't seem like anything that ought to be special or automatic. When making an outline, that seems as though it ought to be the fu
I wonder where they're getting the emails from, originally. I noticed a lot of them are @enron.com email addresses, which makes me wonder if they weren't pulled from some sort of public records somewhere. I assume during an investigation if emails were subpoenaed as part of discovery, and subsequently became part of the court's records, they'd be public domain just like other Government documents. That would at least explain the Enron emails, I'm still wondering about all the other ones.
Well the next biggest OS after Windows is the MacOS; its under-representation in the graphics-card market is somewhat fair, because there aren't that many Macs that you can even install an after-market card into (only Power Macs and XServes, unless you're counting PCMCIA video cards and PowerBooks). However that said, it sure would be nice if some of the 'budget but decent performance' cards had Mac drivers available, or the documentation so that they could be written -- generally if you want a Mac graphics card, you're looking at $200 and up, even for a Radeon 9600 Pro.
Now I don't care that much, it's a small price to pay in my opinion to be able to use a Mac, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't like more alternatives.
I've never been clear though as to what the differences are between the Mac versions of cards and the PC versions, aside from the drivers, if anything. Back in the day there were some really early ATI cards that you had to flash the firmware on, and you could transform them from PC cards to Mac cards, but I've never heard anything about anyone flashing firmware on a graphics board in a while. I'm assuming that all that would be required are the drivers, plus possibly recompiling a kernel from the Darwin sources with it included, although I'm open to being corrected here.
If they only made $80 video cards because they're "good enough" then what is the incentive to spend on R&D for better technology?
To make a better video card than the other companies making $80 video cards.
What you're saying doesn't make sense -- there are lots of products that have basically fixed price-points, but yet still have a lot of competition and R&D going on. It becomes a little different kind of research, perhaps; instead of sending the engineers out with a blank check and telling them to build the most ridiculously fast card they can, instead it becomes a question of "how can we get better performance, while still only costing $80?"
Frankly, I think the latter approach leads to better products in the long run anyway.
The little Windows tinkering I still do always leaves me baffled because I'm not sure there's any logic to the way that thing's been put together.
This was also true of my experience. I was a lifetime Mac user with some early Linux tinkering experience when I got tossed my first corporate Windows laptop.
There's nothing inherently sensible about the way Windows does anything. In fact, in many cases quite the opposite -- the "Windows way" only possibly seems natural to people who have been using it for years and years.
The way it's set up is just as arbitrary (in my opinion, more arbitrary) than the default install of any Linux desktop, and as unintuitive. Moreso, in many ways, because it just seems to assume that its way is the Right Way, without any consideration of different ways that other people might want to work. It seems to almost actively resist customization.
all those suckers that bought NVidia or ATI video hardware
Just out of curiosity, who are the non-suckers? The people who bought video hardware from... who, exactly?
3Dlabs doesn't make GPUs anymore, 3dfx got bought by NVidia, and XGI is gone. That leaves ATI, NVidia, Matrox, and Intel making GPUs. Does Matrox or Intel release source code to their drivers? (Is Matrox even still in the consumer graphics card business?) Who else is there? ATI and NVidia basically have the market for aftermarket cards cornered, to the best of my knowledge, and in both cases their drivers are closed-source. There really aren't any other options for most people.
Personally I'd say go with NVidia, because they seem markedly less evil and their binary drivers seem to suck less, but that doesn't mean I'm happy about it.
Saying they're trying to add "useful things" to the kernel is a bit of a judgement call. You might think that adding proprietary drivers is useful, but a lot of people would disagree.
The GPL is designed to prohibit this for a reason, and it's not because the FSF people enjoy making people's lives difficult, it's to keep Linux and the kernel from becoming dependent on proprietary binary lumps. If you want to taint your kernel by adding proprietary modules, more power to you, but you can't redistribute the result. Every user has to add the tainted bits in themselves.
If every distro could just use the nvidia binary drivers, maybe the people working on the free "nv" driver just wouldn't bother. And then one day nvidia decides (because they suddenly become evil / get bought by Microsoft / whatever) to pull the rug out and cease development of the drivers. A few well-placed cancelled projects could set an operating system years behind the competition.
The GPL attempts to ensure that a basic Linux system is at least functional without proprietary add-ons, so that it can't become the hostage of someone who controls a lump of code that everyone has gotten used to depending on.
Especially in regards to the Soviet space program, while I do want to give credit where credit's due, I think it's also worth pointing out the number of Soviet failures and accidents; it seems to me that a lot of their progress can be attributed to playing fast-and-loose, and taking chances that NASA wasn't willing to take. Occasionally, these paid off, although even before their economy collapsed, they had fallen behind to the point where I don't think their development methodology was exactly validated.
Not to mention, their space program was jump-started by a lot of German rocket technology that they crated up and took East with them. (The U.S.'s was as well, we got a lot of personnel, although the Russians got some of of the best hardware and facilities.)
Of the examples you cited, Laika was an arguable failure (the dog died after only a few hours, long before it was supposed to and without getting much useful data back), Salyut 1 is notable, although I feel it necessary to point out that the crew never made home alive -- not strictly a problem with Salyut itself, but you have to wonder if the pace they were working at didn't contribute to lack of QC elsewhere.
Sputnik 1 is definitely a landmark and worth of recognition, and in general the Soviet space program had a lot going for it, but it also had a rather alarming rate of failures. So in considering their progress, one has to consider the cost it was earned at. (I'd say the exact same thing about some other areas of technological development, for instance, their submarines.)
If media companies want to broadcast something -- throwing it out into what out to be a public resource (the managed EM spectrum) -- then they should have come up with a business model that didn't require a legislative solution that reduced citizens' rights to use their equipment as they see fit, in a non-interfering manner.
What the satellite providers did is took the public's airwaves and decided to apply the business model of a privately-owned medium (cable television) to them. Only unlike cable television, which has an argument for controlling access, satellite broadcasters do not, any more than your local VHF or UHF broadcaster should be able to say that you can only watch their channel if you own a particular brand of TV.
The satellite TV laws made something that you can do with nothing but a receiver and a box of circuits -- equipment that can't possibly interfere with or adversely affect others reception -- illegal. People talk about drug and vice laws as creating criminals out of basically harmless people: with the laws the broadcasters have managed to get passed, you can commit a host of federal offenses just by opening up a piece of equipment (which you own) and working on it in the right way with some basic tools.
Your post is indicative of how deeply ingrained their way of thinking has become: if a content provider wants to only deliver content to certain people, then they should only deliver it to those people. Buy the wires, buy the rights-of-way, and deliver the content. I don't particularly like the cable and telephone companies, but they at least have a solid argument for going after you when you climb up their pole and tap into their line.
But by allowing the satellite companies to do what they've done -- basically apply a legislative solution to a technological problem, and privatize a large swath of public resources to do so -- we've opened the door to a host of laws that create crimes where there were not crimes before ("anti-circumvention," even in some cases the dissemination of information that has to do with circumvention), and we've basically ensured that the future will be filled with more locked-down content, because it's so much more profitable. Why worry about selling advertising when you can sell subscriptions (or subscriptions AND ads)? You can make money from both ends that way.
In many cases we only allow the pay-per-use services to exist (or get started in the first place) because there are free alternatives. People shrug and tolerate pay-to-listen TV and radio, because they think they'll always have the free sources available. This is shortsighted: the business model of pay-to-listen is far more lucrative from a broadcaster's perspective, and we've seen it demonstrated that our laws gets changed to suit their whims. Free-to-air TV and radio: your days are numbered.
That we've been brainwashed in this country (and in most of the world, apparently) into thinking that it's right for companies to broadcast signals out into the ether, via the public airwaves, and pick and choose what people on the receiving end can do with them in a non-interfering fashion. Now that to me seems illogical.
Actually I foresee that a channel like this (or channels) will generate its own programming.
You'll have people basically seeking out street cameras in order to do their own little versions of "Stupid Human Tricks," or "Jackass." Then people will record and share the best bits, clips shows will ensue, and the great majority of people will watch the predigested, narrated clips shows.
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I really don't think that this is much of anything new. There's no reason why this couldn't have been done 20 years ago, or probably 50 years ago, had someone been sufficently motivated. You could do it with the same sort of PCM systems that are used in radio-controlled models, if all you wanted was controls.
But there's a reason why nobody has done this, and I think that's because it just seems like a really bad idea. There's no safe failure mode for a system like this. If the controls stop working, bad things happen. The only safe way to work around the interference issues would be to have wired backup controls, and at that point you've made the wireless system redundant anyway, because it's only advantageous if you can eliminate the wires.
A plane is always going to have some sort of mechanical connection between all of its parts (otherwise it wouldn't be a "plane," it would just be a collection of stuff moving in the same direction through the air), so I can't imagine that routing wires is really that difficult a proposition.
The only interesting application that I can think of this is perhaps a "semi-wireless" system. If your plane has a lot of metallic parts, maybe you could use the body as a single control wire to tie everything together. You use RF modulators, but rather than transmitting through the air, you just couple the transmitting and receiving antennas directly to contiguous metallic parts on the plane. I think that most of the metal parts on planes are bonded together anyway, to prevent static buildup, to this might be practical. In this case, the signal from the transmitter also attached to the same piece of metal elsewhere in the plane would be so much stronger than the signal from an external transmitter, interference might not be quite so much of a problem.
Still, I'm not sure I'd want to trust my life to it. I guess people probably said that about fly-by-wire originally, or by fly-by-hydraulic when it replaced steel cables, but there are generally good reasons why those transitions are made. I don't see a compelling reason for this.
Interesting. Does the phone (your USB one) do anything besides the audio I/O? Can you use it to dial, for example?
The problem I foresee is that most of the generic USB profiles (like USB sound device) don't include any control channels that would allow the handset to communicate with the VoIP software in order to ring, do hold/transfer/mute, or dial. Maybe you could do them through audio signals on the line, just like DTMF dialing is done on POTS, but I don't think that's how the Windows-based USB phones work. I'm pretty sure they're using some sort of proprietary device profile and driver in order to interface the hardware to Skype.
On my Mac, I have a Griffin iMic, which is a generic USB audio interface, to give me an extra analog audio I/O channel. Right now I have a headset plugged into it, but I've often thought about making a balun and attaching it to a regular phone. It's not particularly hard, and there are quite a few plans around for converting line-level audio to telephone audio (make your own hold music system, etc.), but the problem for me is generating the ring tone. I really want something that I can plug into an analog phone and will make it function like a phone, including ring, so it would need to be able to put out 75VAC 20Hz into at least a 1 REN load. There are circuits that do this, but controlling it would probably take a serial port (via a USB to serial on a Mac, probably) in addition to the audio interface. Things start to get complicated there pretty quickly.
There are boxes that do this as their sole purpose in life, I think just generically called "VOIP Gateways," but the ones I've seen are all SIP (or tied to a particular provider like Vonage) and don't work with Skype (or else the ones that do work with Skype are Windows-only). I have no interest in paying for VoIP, I'd just like to use a regular POTS handset to make Skype calls on my Mac. Guess I'll have to keep my Western Electric Model 500 in the closet for now.
I understand about VoIP, I was talking about POTS lines. The GP (or GGP, or somewhere up there) was saying that he retained a regular analog phone line and paid a few bucks a month in order to have it for 911. What I was saying is that you can keep your POTS phone hooked up for 911 purposes, without paying a thing. And then use VoIP for your regular (non-emergency) calls.
The downside is that if the power or internet goes out, you won't have any service except for the ability to call 911, but if you can live with that, it might be a viable option that doesn't cost anything nor precludes your ability to call 911.
Actually this theory sounds more plausible to me than anything else so far (except perhaps the simplest explanation -- that somebody just wanted to be a dick, and decided that people's porn collections are their greatest assets). Suppose you were an up-and-coming black hat virus writer. Suppose you wanted to show off your 1337 skillz; writing a virus that deleted particular types of files from particular locations, that's a marketable skill. Think of what you could do if you could deliver it to particular corporate computers: have it wipe all the Excel files from My Documents, or something.
But assuming you didn't have a buyer for said virus, you wouldn't want to just release it anyway, but you might want to get yourself some PR. So you have it delete some stuff that most people aren't going to complain too loudly about losing, and which really isn't going to hit the radar screens of a lot of corporate MIS types. That way you still have the benefit of surprise (and perserve the market value of) your eventual virus release, but you might get more recognition for it.
Anyway, it's pure conjecture on my part (as is most of this whole discussion) but I thought it was one theory.
People are treating this virus as something that's motivated by a desire to delete people's porn and MP3s, but should realize that ".jpg" and ".mp3" are arbitrarily-chosen extensions. A future virus could just as easily be set to delete ".xls" and ".doc".
Huh? That doesn't make any sense, even in the way you're trying to use it.
If I copy your file, you have a copy, I have a copy. Nobody has lost anything. Therefore, it can't possibly be called stealing by most people's definitions.
If I copy your file and then delete the original, then I have it and you don't, that I think we can all agree, is stealing. Likewise, if it's on physical media which only one of us can possess at a time, and I take the physical media, then it's also stealing.
If I delete something without taking a copy, then it's not stealing, it's just vandalism or destruction of your stuff.
You are mis-stating the argument you're trying to make fun of (the "it's not physical so therefore not stealing") and so your parody falls flat. The fact that data isn't physical isn't the important part, it's the fact that nobody loses their copy in a typical "pirate" transaction. That's what differentiates it from "theft" in the minds of many people.
Personally, I think that unauthorized copying is not theft, but might meet the qualifications for wrongful conversion of property, if you take a wide enough definition of 'property.' (So as not to limit it to real property and chattels, but include the value of data as well.) See this page. Normally it applies only to physical goods. At any rate, there are existing sections of law which are more appropriately applied to the reduction-in-value that occurs when data is unlawfully copied than theft and larceny.
Metaphor aside, do you know what episode that is?
.223 Remington penetrate more than 18 inches of water. I could buy that maybe if you were really close to the water that some rifle bullets would still be going at a high enough velocity that they'd break apart under the deceleration (.223/5.56mm steel-core "green tip" rounds tend to break at the cannelure when fired into ballistic gelatin at high velocity, so I could believe they might do it in water if the water was close enough), and hollowpoints might expand prematurely on contact with the water and go off-course, but I don't think saying 'bullets won't penetrate more than 18 inches of water' is true as a general statement.
If that was really their conclusion, then I seriously question their methodology. I have personally seen solid jacketed ("ball") rounds of 9mm Parabellum and
Plus, the rate at which a projectile decelerates is going to be highly dependent on its ratio of mass to cross-sectional area (well, mass to drag coefficent, and the drag coefficient in modern bullets is governed principally by the cross-section), and modern rifle bullets are going to be far superior to a round ball (or Minie-type ball). Perhaps the angle of incidence has an effect: maybe if a long modern bullet strikes the water at an angle, it begins to tumble and then disintegrates. I've never tried that, but I've definitely fired them straight-on into containers of water and they don't disintegrate.
If Mythbusters said that, I'm a little disappointed. There must be some implicit caveats about the bullets and velocities.
It would be interesting if they did, because I think Apple could probably still find ways to litigate against another player that prominently featured a large circular wheel, on the basis of trademark and probably some design patents. I haven't checked recently what sort of design patents they have filed, but I wouldn't be surprised if "Portable music player featuring a selection wheel centrally located on the front face..." or something like that. I think something like this might even have some merit: when you see a player that has a big circular wheel on it like that, most people assume iPod.
You know, it's great that I find out when I spend money on Skype, doesn't benefit me, but rather, a nation far away...
I think the same thing every time I go to Wal-Mart. It's called globalization, you might as well learn to love it, because it ain't going away.
Besides, a whole lot more money flows OUT of the U.S. than in, so as a country, we're not exactly making money here. The way things are going right now, it won't be too long before debt is our biggest export. (Pity there's no export market for lawyers...)
I've never tried it, but I know some people who have attempted to use fax machines on other VoIP systems with mixed results. I believe the problem stems from the psychoacoustic compression (e.g.: G.729) that's used to reduce the bandwidth requirements of calls: it's very low bitrate and designed for speech only, and doesn't have anywhere near the data-carrying capacity of a standard POTS line.
I think some VoIP systems (Vonage) are smart enough to increase the bandwidth so as to not block fax and data calls completely, but how well it works I don't know. I'm not sure what codec Skype uses (and I suspect nobody outside of Skype does, either), but judging from the audio quality I think it's compressing pretty hard. And if the artifacts are that audible in speech, I can't help but think that a data transmission is probably going to do poorly. YMMV based on network conditions, though.
For outgoing faxes, especially if you only send them occasionally, it might be worthwhile to give it a shot. The cost savings might be worth having to try it a few times to get it to go through, or for it to transmit very slowly. If you receive a lot of faxes though it might be a bad idea, since you can't ever be sure how many times the person on the far end will retransmit if the call fails the first time. Having a fax machine that only works some of the time, to me, is worse than not having one at all since you wouldn't be able to trust it.
Given the way techology and politics have been going lately, perhaps we should all be thankful for the fact that all the big telcos are doing is ignoring ENID and hoping it will go away.
I wouldn't be surprised if they were to campaign to make it illegal if it ever starts to make significant inroads on their cartel--excuse me, business model.
Let's see, what excuse would they use for outlawing it? Child pornography is always a guaranteed sell, but hard to work in this case. Maybe they could roll it into the next anti-terrorism bill: bypassing the POTS switching system might make the calls harder to intercept, therefore it'll only be used by terrorists, drug dealers, and MySpace users.
I'm only half-joking here. The POTS "namespace" is going to be the big telco's Alamo: it's a gigantic source of revenue and not one they're going to let go without a fight. They'll probably lose in the long run, but it'll be long and unpleasant in the meantime.
Personally, I'd stay away from the really cheap analog headsets. If you want to use your computer for anything except a dedicated VoIP terminal, they're obnoxious in a major way.
Unless your computer has multiple analog audio outs, and you can set it up so that Skype uses one and your regular audio uses the other, every time you want to make or answer a call you'll have to swap cables. Not cool.
My feeling is that to use Skype, most people are going to want a USB headset or phone, so they can leave it attached all the time.
On another note, does anyone know if there is a USB-to-POTS adaptor (that would allow you to use a real telephone) which is compatible with Skype for Mac OS X? I've been browsing through the list of VoIP stuff at NewEgg and it's very Windows-centric. I'm curious as to whether there's some sort of a standard USB device that they appear as, or whether every device and dongle requires special proprietary drivers.
I remember Dialpad ... actually my introduction to them was from the floor of one of the computer shows, it might have been Macworld Boston or NYC; I remember calling some friends from their booth and asking about the audio quality.
... well, they would have been Skype.
Unfortunately by the time I got around to getting broadband, they had already stopped the unlimited free service, and it was all downhill from there.
I hope whenever people get around to writing the history of VoIP that there's more than a footnote there about Dialpad, because boy were those guys just a few years ahead of their time. I think broadband penetration was just a little too light, and wireless internet hadn't hit it big enough for people to think of computers as something around their house that could be as ubiquitous as telephones ("why would I want to go into the computer room to make a phone call?"); if they had held out for a year or two longer
Doesn't every phone have to be able to dial 911 anyway?
I was under the impression that they couldn't cut that off, by law; similarly, you can turn on any cell phone and even if it isn't registered with the network, you can use it to dial 911. That was at least my understanding of how things worked, I admit I've never tried either.
The house I live in currently has phone wiring, but it's a real mess and I've never used it. Some day I'll have to unscrew one of the jacks (they're all of the old 4-pin variety, and painted over anyway) and see if there's dial tone. We certainly aren't paying for anything, we use cellphones and VoIP via cable internet.
I'm aware that there are a lot of third-party customization tools available for Windows; however I was referring to built-in features of the OS itself. It's possible to change most aspects of the GUI on any platform if you install the right tools (I remember reading articles years ago on how you could make a Mac look enough like a Windows machine to really confuse someone clueless), but that's not much of a commentary on the operating system's design philosophy.
I disagree about the Start menu. It may let someone who's just pointing and clicking around on their desktop launch an application, but what it does is hide and confuse where programs are really stored. As does the Windows directory structure in general. I think OS X does this much better: programs are stored in [Your hard drive]/Applications. Those are the actual executable files, they're what's actually being run. And if you want easy access to something, then you can put it into the Dock.
Until some of Apple's own applications muddied the waters (iCal, I'm looking at you), I also think the Mac's take on close-versus-quit is a lot better thought out. Programs can run with or without a window being open; closing a window normally leaves the program running but windowless. On Windows, sometimes closing a window will quit the application, sometimes it won't (depending, I think, on whether it's the last remaining window open). This sucks: I can't count the number of times I've accidentally quit a big application on my windows machine, when really I just wanted to clear one document's window and open something else. The only time an application should quit on close is when it's a one-window application and doesn't open files, or have any need to run in the background.
The Windows system tray also bugs me; it's just an example of one feature trying to do too many things, and failing at most of them. You've got some widgets down there that are just controls (the volume thing), others which represent backgrounded applications, others which are just notification/status icons...it's a mess. Every time I want to change the volume on my PC, I have to hunt around for where that particular icon went (since the damn things move and disappear and reappear, because even on my gently-used PC there are too many of them to show at once); it's like playing whack-a-mole.
What some kids can do when sat in front of a computer without any training isn't a particularly good metric. I've seen kids that can't talk yet put a cartridge into an NES and start it up, so clearly that's a more intuitive interface than storing programs on a hard drive. I know a kindergarten teacher that still has an Apple IIc in her classroom, because you can teach 20 kids how to use it in five minutes (if computer is not on, put disk in drive, close door, turn computer on. If computer is on, wait for red light on drive to go out, open door, remove disk, insert new disk, press Control-Apple-Reset).
Windows, in general, hides complexity from the user. But the cost of this is confusion, because computers are inherently complicated devices, and eventually those users will run into the limits of the smoke-and-mirrors that was used to protect them at the beginning. An oversimplification designed to make things "easier" for the clueless user, can easily devolve into a morass like the Registry.
I could go on; I think this same philosophy is perpetuated into most of the Office products. They're all simple on the surface -- it's not hard to type a basic memo or report in Word, for example. But that's not a very high bar. But there are a lot of things that just don't make any sense when you move further: when my bulleted outline stopped working with the Tab key (tab to indent, shift-tab to outdent), I had to go through three different menus to figure out how to turn it back on. (Solution: it's an "Auto-Format" option, apparently, even though it doesn't seem like anything that ought to be special or automatic. When making an outline, that seems as though it ought to be the fu
I wonder where they're getting the emails from, originally. I noticed a lot of them are @enron.com email addresses, which makes me wonder if they weren't pulled from some sort of public records somewhere. I assume during an investigation if emails were subpoenaed as part of discovery, and subsequently became part of the court's records, they'd be public domain just like other Government documents. That would at least explain the Enron emails, I'm still wondering about all the other ones.
Well the next biggest OS after Windows is the MacOS; its under-representation in the graphics-card market is somewhat fair, because there aren't that many Macs that you can even install an after-market card into (only Power Macs and XServes, unless you're counting PCMCIA video cards and PowerBooks). However that said, it sure would be nice if some of the 'budget but decent performance' cards had Mac drivers available, or the documentation so that they could be written -- generally if you want a Mac graphics card, you're looking at $200 and up, even for a Radeon 9600 Pro.
Now I don't care that much, it's a small price to pay in my opinion to be able to use a Mac, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't like more alternatives.
I've never been clear though as to what the differences are between the Mac versions of cards and the PC versions, aside from the drivers, if anything. Back in the day there were some really early ATI cards that you had to flash the firmware on, and you could transform them from PC cards to Mac cards, but I've never heard anything about anyone flashing firmware on a graphics board in a while. I'm assuming that all that would be required are the drivers, plus possibly recompiling a kernel from the Darwin sources with it included, although I'm open to being corrected here.
If they only made $80 video cards because they're "good enough" then what is the incentive to spend on R&D for better technology?
To make a better video card than the other companies making $80 video cards.
What you're saying doesn't make sense -- there are lots of products that have basically fixed price-points, but yet still have a lot of competition and R&D going on. It becomes a little different kind of research, perhaps; instead of sending the engineers out with a blank check and telling them to build the most ridiculously fast card they can, instead it becomes a question of "how can we get better performance, while still only costing $80?"
Frankly, I think the latter approach leads to better products in the long run anyway.
The little Windows tinkering I still do always leaves me baffled because I'm not sure there's any logic to the way that thing's been put together.
This was also true of my experience. I was a lifetime Mac user with some early Linux tinkering experience when I got tossed my first corporate Windows laptop.
There's nothing inherently sensible about the way Windows does anything. In fact, in many cases quite the opposite -- the "Windows way" only possibly seems natural to people who have been using it for years and years.
The way it's set up is just as arbitrary (in my opinion, more arbitrary) than the default install of any Linux desktop, and as unintuitive. Moreso, in many ways, because it just seems to assume that its way is the Right Way, without any consideration of different ways that other people might want to work. It seems to almost actively resist customization.
all those suckers that bought NVidia or ATI video hardware
... who, exactly?
Just out of curiosity, who are the non-suckers? The people who bought video hardware from
3Dlabs doesn't make GPUs anymore, 3dfx got bought by NVidia, and XGI is gone. That leaves ATI, NVidia, Matrox, and Intel making GPUs. Does Matrox or Intel release source code to their drivers? (Is Matrox even still in the consumer graphics card business?) Who else is there? ATI and NVidia basically have the market for aftermarket cards cornered, to the best of my knowledge, and in both cases their drivers are closed-source. There really aren't any other options for most people.
Personally I'd say go with NVidia, because they seem markedly less evil and their binary drivers seem to suck less, but that doesn't mean I'm happy about it.
Saying they're trying to add "useful things" to the kernel is a bit of a judgement call. You might think that adding proprietary drivers is useful, but a lot of people would disagree.
The GPL is designed to prohibit this for a reason, and it's not because the FSF people enjoy making people's lives difficult, it's to keep Linux and the kernel from becoming dependent on proprietary binary lumps. If you want to taint your kernel by adding proprietary modules, more power to you, but you can't redistribute the result. Every user has to add the tainted bits in themselves.
If every distro could just use the nvidia binary drivers, maybe the people working on the free "nv" driver just wouldn't bother. And then one day nvidia decides (because they suddenly become evil / get bought by Microsoft / whatever) to pull the rug out and cease development of the drivers. A few well-placed cancelled projects could set an operating system years behind the competition.
The GPL attempts to ensure that a basic Linux system is at least functional without proprietary add-ons, so that it can't become the hostage of someone who controls a lump of code that everyone has gotten used to depending on.
Especially in regards to the Soviet space program, while I do want to give credit where credit's due, I think it's also worth pointing out the number of Soviet failures and accidents; it seems to me that a lot of their progress can be attributed to playing fast-and-loose, and taking chances that NASA wasn't willing to take. Occasionally, these paid off, although even before their economy collapsed, they had fallen behind to the point where I don't think their development methodology was exactly validated.
Not to mention, their space program was jump-started by a lot of German rocket technology that they crated up and took East with them. (The U.S.'s was as well, we got a lot of personnel, although the Russians got some of of the best hardware and facilities.)
Of the examples you cited, Laika was an arguable failure (the dog died after only a few hours, long before it was supposed to and without getting much useful data back), Salyut 1 is notable, although I feel it necessary to point out that the crew never made home alive -- not strictly a problem with Salyut itself, but you have to wonder if the pace they were working at didn't contribute to lack of QC elsewhere.
Sputnik 1 is definitely a landmark and worth of recognition, and in general the Soviet space program had a lot going for it, but it also had a rather alarming rate of failures. So in considering their progress, one has to consider the cost it was earned at. (I'd say the exact same thing about some other areas of technological development, for instance, their submarines.)
If f'' is positive, but f' is large and negative, f could be nearing a singularity in the complex plane.
I think in that case, you're pretty much f'ed.
If media companies want to broadcast something -- throwing it out into what out to be a public resource (the managed EM spectrum) -- then they should have come up with a business model that didn't require a legislative solution that reduced citizens' rights to use their equipment as they see fit, in a non-interfering manner.
What the satellite providers did is took the public's airwaves and decided to apply the business model of a privately-owned medium (cable television) to them. Only unlike cable television, which has an argument for controlling access, satellite broadcasters do not, any more than your local VHF or UHF broadcaster should be able to say that you can only watch their channel if you own a particular brand of TV.
The satellite TV laws made something that you can do with nothing but a receiver and a box of circuits -- equipment that can't possibly interfere with or adversely affect others reception -- illegal. People talk about drug and vice laws as creating criminals out of basically harmless people: with the laws the broadcasters have managed to get passed, you can commit a host of federal offenses just by opening up a piece of equipment (which you own) and working on it in the right way with some basic tools.
Your post is indicative of how deeply ingrained their way of thinking has become: if a content provider wants to only deliver content to certain people, then they should only deliver it to those people. Buy the wires, buy the rights-of-way, and deliver the content. I don't particularly like the cable and telephone companies, but they at least have a solid argument for going after you when you climb up their pole and tap into their line.
But by allowing the satellite companies to do what they've done -- basically apply a legislative solution to a technological problem, and privatize a large swath of public resources to do so -- we've opened the door to a host of laws that create crimes where there were not crimes before ("anti-circumvention," even in some cases the dissemination of information that has to do with circumvention), and we've basically ensured that the future will be filled with more locked-down content, because it's so much more profitable. Why worry about selling advertising when you can sell subscriptions (or subscriptions AND ads)? You can make money from both ends that way.
In many cases we only allow the pay-per-use services to exist (or get started in the first place) because there are free alternatives. People shrug and tolerate pay-to-listen TV and radio, because they think they'll always have the free sources available. This is shortsighted: the business model of pay-to-listen is far more lucrative from a broadcaster's perspective, and we've seen it demonstrated that our laws gets changed to suit their whims. Free-to-air TV and radio: your days are numbered.
That we've been brainwashed in this country (and in most of the world, apparently) into thinking that it's right for companies to broadcast signals out into the ether, via the public airwaves, and pick and choose what people on the receiving end can do with them in a non-interfering fashion. Now that to me seems illogical.
Actually I foresee that a channel like this (or channels) will generate its own programming.
You'll have people basically seeking out street cameras in order to do their own little versions of "Stupid Human Tricks," or "Jackass." Then people will record and share the best bits, clips shows will ensue, and the great majority of people will watch the predigested, narrated clips shows.
Preferably when the data center is chock full of people who consider Windows appropriate to run on Servers.
You say this like it's some sort of bad thing?
(Kidding, kidding...)