I think that's pretty much true; within OSS projects, there are the projects that were designed because somebody needed to "do something" in particular, and then there are those projects which were designed and built because somebody thought it would be "cool to do." The subtle difference in motivation produces very different products in the end. "Do something" products are inherently limited in scope, and tend to focus inwards after a time, refining and refining a core idea. "Cool to do" projects tend to expand outwards; once they've done one thing, they expand outwards to do more things. In a completely FOSS environment, you need both -- the former to provide little bits of well-done functionality and the latter to connect them all together into something larger.
Overall I'm going to second others and say that I've always been impressed at the 'fit and finish' of Mac OS X. It's not perfect (in particular I wish they made it easier to run X apps on top of Aqua) but despite some people's claims to the contrary, in my experience it's far easier to configure, mostly because of its consistency. Linux will always have an Achilles' heel because its flexibility also breeds complexity. For example, configuring wireless on a Mac is a no-brainer, because there is basically only one option for the cards: Apple.
While your mileage may of course vary, as the saying goes, Stereophile Magazine has done at least one review of the iPod, and regardless of what you think of Stereophile and that segment of the audio market, one has to give them credit for being pretty thorough in reviews. They hooked it up to some very high end listening gear, plus a battery of electronic test equipment, and seemed very impressed by the quality when it wasn't being compressed. If anyone is getting mediocre audio quality out of theirs, then I would seriously look into the encoding they were using. I know that for playing straight AIFFs and Apple Lossless files, my 3G iPod sounds better (ever so slightly) than the headphone output of my Mac. I'm not sure whether it's just the lack of electronic noise or what, but it's there. And it's better than any other portable music device I've heard.
Personally, I have a 3G, and I listen to it almost exclusively through a set of Grado SR80s (32-ohm cans, which some people will tell you are less than optimal for iPod use) and have been nothing but impressed with it. I've never A/Bed it versus a 4G or 5G though, so I can't say that Apple didn't cut some corners in the new ones. It's no secret that the general public doesn't give a damn about audio quality past the point where you can identify what's playing, so it wouldn't be totally surprising (although sad) if they did.
Except I don't think that's true. The feature description says that it's based on the currently playing song (assumedly plus ones you've purchased at iTMS), there's nothing mentioned about the contents of your Library, and I've seen no verifiable information that supports that conclusion.
Even if it were pared down to just Artist, Title, Playcount, and Rating, and compressed with Gzip, that would still be a sizable chunk of data going up the wire if you have a big library of songs. I've used the new iTunes a few times and it never seemed to saturate my upstream bandwidth even for a short amount of time like it was sending back my Library's metadata.
I'm sure somebody who's on a Mac could give a conclusive answer to this question pretty quickly by using ettercap or Ethereal and analyzing the packets that are being directed from the client to phobos.apple.com (or whatever server they're using). I think the "fact" that it's uploading the whole Library is just unsubstantiated conjecture.
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
It seems to be sending them the currently playing song. So to disable it, you could launch the program, and then turn it off in the Edit menu before playing anything.
To the best of my knowledge (and I haven't dissected what it's sending with Ethereal, but maybe if someone wants a project for the weekend, there you go) it doesn't send any song data until you start playing something.
It doesn't seem to factor in static songs in your library (i.e. ones that are not being played / have been played) into its recommendations. At least based on my experience, because if it did have records of my whole library I think its recommendations would be very different.
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
if Barnes and Noble kept track of every book you picked up in their store, then made suggestions at the counter of stuff you may be interested in
Which is exactly what Amazon.com does -- except that it's a virtual store, not a B&M one. It knows the last items you've looked at and factors them into its recommendations for other items.
As I said in another post higher up in the thread, I don't find this behavior obnoxious. I may turn it off because I want the screen area back, but in an abstract sense I don't mind what it's doing. In fact at one point I had a program specifically to do something similar (I think it was iRATE radio); track what I listened to and what I thought of it, and make recommendations based on that. I thought it was a good concept, but my main problem with iRATE was that it wasn't built into iTunes. I didn't want to open a separate program to get music recommendations, and iRATE's interface sucked. (Not that I'm a huge fan of brushed metal, but iRATE's was worse. Hopefully it's improved.)
I'll agree, it wouldn't have cost Apple much to put in a checkbox, or pop up a dialog box at first startup asking people if they wanted the feature enabled. You could call it the 'Tinfoil Hat Switch' or whatever. But I just can't come up with any righteous indignation for it here.
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
If you keep your eyes open when you're walking into a supermarket or drug store that uses one of those value cards, especially around the exits, you'll probably find an extra card lying on the ground pretty quickly. They give them out usually in packs of 2 or 4 (I think Giant may give you two wallet cards and 2 keychain ones), and many people throw away (or just drop) the cards they don't want. Pick one up, and there you go. This is what I do for CVS, which is the only place that 1) I am uncomfortable having my purchases tracked, and 2) frequently has items on sale and requires you to have a card to get the price. At most other stores if you say you're from out of town or don't have a card, the cashiers will just scan theirs instead and get you the discount. I've never had that happen at CVS -- maybe the place that I go to just has humorless employees.
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
Based on it's behavior I'd have to agree with this, too. The music I've bought from the iTunes Music Store is of a very different genre than the stuff that mostly comprises my library (iTMS is pop songs, library is a lot of classical, oldies, jazz, electronica) and I've never seen a recommendation yet that didn't seem like it was based on my Library. I.e., it keeps recommending pop songs in similar genres to the ones I've bought.
If it is "scanning my hard drive" and making predictions based on that, it's not doing a very good job. It sure seems like all it has access to is my order history from the iTMS -- and I know they have that already. I've seen in the feature description that it supposedly considers songs as you play them, which seems more believable than it scanning your hard drive.
After all given the volume of music that most people have on their hard drives, unless you uploaded the songs, genres, and play counts, you wouldn't have a basis for very good recommendations -- how much music that's in their Library do most people actually like or listen to often? Sometimes I think it's not very much. But looking at the currently playing song would make sense if you're hoping for the impulse-buy. Also, it wouldn't require such a massive dataset be uploaded to the server. A few thousand songs per used times thousands of users is a LOT of data to index and use for predictive marketing.
If I actually thought that the software was scanning my hard drive and uploading stuff, then I might start to wonder if it's getting towads a privacy violation. But "currently playing" doesn't bother me, and obviously iTMS already knows what I bought from them, so I have no problem if they use that in conjunction with other data to market me stuff.
To be honest, I actually like the feature. I don't buy a lot of music from iTMS and don't plan to (it's too expensive), but I'm always on the lookout for music that I like; if this feature actually did produce good recommendations of things that I hadn't heard before but actually liked, I could probably become fond of it. In fact, if they had a button that told it specifically to scan my hard drive and send it data on titles, genres, ratings, and playcounts, I might do it if it resulted in customization that actually fit my tastes, and the information wasn't being sold to outside parties along with any personally identifiable information (I don't care if it's sold in aggregate form, e.g. "People who like Foghat are 62% less likely to like band x").
I have much more of a problem with the 'Value Cards' at CVS than I do with this -- with the records assumedly kept by whatever backend system is running CVS, someone could concievably tell if someone was sick, and various other very personal details. I cannot find that same problem with people's music tastes.
I agree completely with your point about the unclear punctuation and grammar. While one would think I'd be used to that from reading Slashdot by now, the overuse of commas was especially distracting.
I'm not sure what's wrong with his statement about the public key, though. If the malware encrypts your data using the malware-author's public key, it can only be decrypted using the author's private key, which -- one assumes -- he keeps private until you've coughed up the dough. If it was encrypted using his private key, then of course anyone would be able to decrypt it using his public key.
There are a lot of issues with TFA, but that didn't strike me as one of them. Maybe I'm missing something?
Re:What if we sandbox major apps like browsers?
on
Future Trends of Malware
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well put -- I like the analogy.
Actually I think what people are doing today, is practically building another guest house out back for the foreman and the rest of his work crew to live in while they're patching up your house. Remember the discussion a few months ago here on Slashdot about why the average joe needed a dual-core or multiprocessor Windows box? It was so one processor could run his actual application, and the other one could run all the anti-virus/spyware/adware/intrusion programs.
The situation has really become ridiculous, but because it's happened so slowly and because so many people are highly invested in it, nobody with any authority wants to take a step back and call it for what it is.
I think the real answer to this is because Apple is both a hardware and software company, while HP and Dell (with some minor exceptions) are basically hardware-only outfits. That is, they need to go out and find software to include on their machines. This makes them much more receptive to an outside company's offer to give them a few hundred grand if they include a trial offer of their software. Apple, with minor exceptions, loads computers up with their own software, and thus there isn't the 'foot in the door' that a crapware vendor has with HP or Dell.
Plus, and I will admit this is controversial, I think there is a higher percentage of crapware and crippware for the PC than there is for the Mac. If you were looking to make a quick buck in software, you wouldn't write for the Mac, you'd go for the PC. That's why there isn't nearly the shareware market on the Mac that there is for Windows (not that all Win shareware is crappy, but quite a bit of it is, or is stuff that you can get for other platforms for free).
The Macintosh platform is basically a vertical monopoly controlled by Apple -- it's a one-stop shop, a "solution" if you will. You buy it, and it comes with primarily Apple-branded software: Apple's DVD Player, Apple iTunes, Apple iMovie, Apple iWork, etc. And obviously Apple's OS. With HP or Dell you'd be getting a computer with a Windows OS and somebody else's MP3 player, DVD Player (although I guess that's been pretty much taken over by WMP now), antivirus, digital photo viewer, etc. By developing all the software themselves, Apple regulates the quality. And by subsidizing the development costs of their software with hardware dollars, they can include full versions on new computers without resorting to demos.
Submitting motions for summary judgment is practically SOP in any trial. I'd be surprised if SCO's lawyers didn't also try to file for summary judgement against IBM. It's all part of making your case look 'overwhelming.' Or at least making it look to your client like you're making their case look overwhelming. Either way works.
You see it all the time in regular civil and criminal law. The defense's counsel will ask the judge for the case to be thrown out summarily, the judge will say no, the lawyer will go back to their client, shrug, and sit down. It's all part of the little kabuki dance that is courtroom law.
Here's my best stab at a commercial analogy for the ODF debacle.
Imagine you're the procurement guy for a mid-sized company. Not huge, but not insigificant either. You use some product from an outside vendor, which everyone pretty much agrees sucks, but uses anyway. You recommend to your boss one day that the company try to negotiate with the vendor to make it suck less, and if they won't do this, dump the vendor for some alternative.
So the vendor, which is a company bigger than yours, gets wind of your idea. They don't want to change their product for you, saying your company is too small for it to be worthwhile. But they also realize that other companies are watching what happens to yours. So instead they have one of their higher-ups call up your company's CEO and try to get you fired.
That's pretty much the whole deal as I've watched it; when you compare it to an equivalent situation occuring the private sector it seems pretty ridiculous.
While on the surface that might seem like a good solution, in the long run it's totally unacceptable.
First of all, the primary users of Linux (and arguably the most important, financially) have been corporations -- running webservers, scientific projects, etc. A patent problem could easily scare them away. There's already enough FUD spreading about FOSS -- do you really want to give Microsoft more ammunition? I can just see the letter's from Microsoft's legal department already. "We have received information that you may be using software that is in violation of Microsoft's software patents. If you do not cease and desist from using this software, we will be forced to seek an injunction against your business. By the way, here's a coupon for 20% off of Microsoft SQL Server!"
Also, a patent-violating project could spread 'virally' because of the nature of open source code and contaminate other projects, as well as producing derivative projects, which would then not be usable in the U.S. except for personal use.
Effectively, such a strategy would create a branch of code that would not be GPL-compatible if used in the U.S.
It's a really terrible idea. Linux as an O.S. and FOSS in general would be better off dumping support for Mono entirely, than risk a patent war with Microsoft that would essentially hand them the American commercial market for the next 20 years.
Well, you got this part right: saying that there's a motivation behind DRM, and that motivation is to make more money.
The second part, about "unauthorized" copying, is really just secondary to the first part. In fact I think it's a pretty small part; the studios see DRM as part of a whole future of centrally-controlled, pay-per-view entertainment. You will watch what they want you to watch ("Yes, you will watch these previews, No, you will not fast-forward through these ads,"), when they want you to watch it ("No, you cannot time-shift this broadcast,") and you'll pay for it ("The cost of this show is only $0.99!").
The studios and the MPAA excuse the imposition of DRM as necessary in order to prevent piracy. This is a big lie, because if you look at most of the recent proposed DRM systems, dating back to even the by-todays-standards DVD system, they do far more than just copying-restriction. They are part of a end-to-end "viewing experience," if you will.
Saying that DRM is just about copy protection would be acceptable, if the technology were actually limited to that. But it's not, and so that excuse doesn't wash.
Furthermore, even if it just was for legitimate copy protection, it would be relatively easy to design a system that still allowed a small number of copies for backups, personal use, and time/format shifting -- the accepted 'Fair Uses' enjoyed by users of analog media. Instead those are treated as anathema by the studios as well.
The studios have been unsubtle from the very beginning that they don't give a damn about consumers ability to use media, and their only interest in the public is as a cash cow that they can continue to milk for decades to come. To excuse their behavior is shortsighted, because it fails to step back and take a look at the future they obviously have in mind for all of us.
On top of that, consumers should expect punishment for tinkering with their Blu-ray players, as many have done with current DVD players by, in some instances, removing regional coding. The new, Internet-connected and secure players will report any "hack" and the device can be disabled remotely.
I've also heard it mentioned that there will be ways for discs to update the firmware on players automatically -- so let's say a new release comes out, and you stick it in your player. The player senses that the disc has a version of the firmware on it that's newer than what's loaded, and installs it. Thus the manufacturers could change the functionality of the device even if you didn't connect it to the internet, theoretically.
When you consider what the satellite providers did a few years back, where they changed the firmware on pirated players remotely, byte by byte, over the course of a few weeks, until they permanently 'remote killed' them, I don't think it's safe to assume that any capability like this wouldn't be aggressively used in a DVD player system.
I think the concerns over what will happen when studios or manufacturers go out of business are very serious as well. I have videocassettes that are over 20 years old now, and audio recordings (on vinyl) that are much older than that. While I don't play them every day, I keep them around with the knowledge that I could play them if I wanted to. I think the technology that's being forced on consumers is quickly leading us to a day when you don't buy a video, but only rent it for some period of time ("oh, you only bought the media, we temporarily leased you the Intellectual Property!"); the studios will say that there's no longer an expectation that a movie will be playable forever. When they decide the format is 'obsolete' and should be replaced by the next latest-and-greatest thing, or when it's just no longer cost effective to maintain the external infrastructure that these players are being built to rely on, they'll kill them.
And you know what? As consumers, we'll deserve it, because we let them in.
d:= gap_in_neck if d 0 then "decapitation" else "keep looking"
Checking the spec, we'd see that gap_in_neck refers to any visible distance between vertebrae. So in the case of the head was not found the expected result would be decapitation.
I noticed that some of them have a boiling point that's above room temperature, but below the temperature that a lot of processors run these days.
Bingo. Seymour Cray I think beat you to it, but don't feel too bad.
That's one of the ways the Fluorinert liquids are designed to be used; you can pull away a lot of heat through the state-change. I have heard conflicting reports that some of the Cray supercomputers were cooled this way, and that you could actually get an idea of how "hard" the processor was working by looking at the bubbles coming up off of the boards. I have no idea if that's actually true, and most of the pictures of CIIs out there are glossy promo shots and make it hard to figure out how the cooling system actually works. For all I know, it might have just been a prototype that was cooled that way, or maybe some competing system (I heard IBM had some systems that might have used submerged cooling but I can't find any information on them). It certainly seems like a good way to cool them, though.
But you're right, especially with something as expensive as Fluorinert, you'd want to make sure the system was well-sealed and that you weren't boiling it off into the atmosphere. Depending on the heat load and condensation point and what the container was made of, you might be able to make a closed system just by making the computer's case out of metal, and putting a tight-fitting lid on it that had 'stalactites' on the inside so that the fluid had something to drip back off of. (I have a Lodge cast iron dutch oven that has something like this on the top of the lid, I think it's called 'self basting.') Then you'd want to put a lot of heat sinks on top of the case. The fluid, puddled over the mobo at the bottom, would boil the fluid into a gas which would then rise to the top of the container, condense against the relatively cool top, and rain back down. Obviously the internal pressure would be a significant issue.
I think playing with Fluorinert is out of my budget for right now, but it certainly seems like neat stuff.
No you really don't need that much oil. It's totally excessive, I think.
There is a german guy who has a vegetable oil cooled system, and he submerged the entire power supply (which in Europe means the 220VAC mains) and it seems to run okay. I can't read anything on his site, but it seems legitimate. I would have to be very convinced of the dielectric properties of my mains, and also that there wasn't anything in the PS that was capitance-dependent (wouldn't the oil change the inductance of any air-core transformers?) before I was willing to go that far, though.
Overall I think it's an idea that would be better served for something like blade servers. Most blade designs that I've seen have the blades themselves suspended from a central backplane that's mounted horizontally to them and at the bottom. Now imagine you flipped that upside down, so that the backpane was mounted above the blades, and then you lowered the protruding blades into a vat of transformer oil. There's no power supply being submerged, and you could run a copper tube of chilled water through the oil to cool it. (Make that distilled water if you're paranoid.)
Also I think the concerns about water contaimination are overstated. You'd have to get quite a bit of water into the oil for it to become an issue -- probably enough so that if you dumped it into a conventional air cooled system that it would cause a lot of problems, too. Computers don't like non-distilled water, period. And at least with the oil filled case if you made the bottom slope and put a little divot or cup in the lowest point (like a sump) you could put a conductivity sensor down there to warn you and shut the system down if some water got in and started building up.
As jd mentioned, mineral oil would be superior. And I think the old article he mentions is the one that's linked to in TFA. (It's from 1999.)
You can get mineral oil in fairly large quanties for relatively cheap -- compared to actual electronics coolant anyway. I'm not sure how it stacks up to transformer oil if purchased in bulk or anything. It's slightly more expensive than cooking oil, but it wouldn't go rancid, and it's available in different viscosities. As it's a byproduct of gasoline manufacture there's quite a lot of it to go around.
I did some googling yesterday and turned up a few companies who are willing to sell quantities ranging from a few ounces to 5gal drums to the end consumer. I did it again and got a entirely different but similar seeming range of companies, so there's no shortage of suppliers. The freight costs might be the killer, though, so I'd investigate local sources. If you have any sort of cosmetic industry near you, there's probably a supplier of mineral oil available.
Slashdot Mirror
But I'm already sharing Slashdot with 900,000 virgins.
Hence why 72 would be such an improvement.
I think that's pretty much true; within OSS projects, there are the projects that were designed because somebody needed to "do something" in particular, and then there are those projects which were designed and built because somebody thought it would be "cool to do." The subtle difference in motivation produces very different products in the end. "Do something" products are inherently limited in scope, and tend to focus inwards after a time, refining and refining a core idea. "Cool to do" projects tend to expand outwards; once they've done one thing, they expand outwards to do more things. In a completely FOSS environment, you need both -- the former to provide little bits of well-done functionality and the latter to connect them all together into something larger.
Overall I'm going to second others and say that I've always been impressed at the 'fit and finish' of Mac OS X. It's not perfect (in particular I wish they made it easier to run X apps on top of Aqua) but despite some people's claims to the contrary, in my experience it's far easier to configure, mostly because of its consistency. Linux will always have an Achilles' heel because its flexibility also breeds complexity. For example, configuring wireless on a Mac is a no-brainer, because there is basically only one option for the cards: Apple.
While your mileage may of course vary, as the saying goes, Stereophile Magazine has done at least one review of the iPod, and regardless of what you think of Stereophile and that segment of the audio market, one has to give them credit for being pretty thorough in reviews. They hooked it up to some very high end listening gear, plus a battery of electronic test equipment, and seemed very impressed by the quality when it wasn't being compressed. If anyone is getting mediocre audio quality out of theirs, then I would seriously look into the encoding they were using. I know that for playing straight AIFFs and Apple Lossless files, my 3G iPod sounds better (ever so slightly) than the headphone output of my Mac. I'm not sure whether it's just the lack of electronic noise or what, but it's there. And it's better than any other portable music device I've heard.
Stereophile's review of the 3G iPod 10/2003
More quantitative analysis of the 3G
Personally, I have a 3G, and I listen to it almost exclusively through a set of Grado SR80s (32-ohm cans, which some people will tell you are less than optimal for iPod use) and have been nothing but impressed with it. I've never A/Bed it versus a 4G or 5G though, so I can't say that Apple didn't cut some corners in the new ones. It's no secret that the general public doesn't give a damn about audio quality past the point where you can identify what's playing, so it wouldn't be totally surprising (although sad) if they did.
Except I don't think that's true. The feature description says that it's based on the currently playing song (assumedly plus ones you've purchased at iTMS), there's nothing mentioned about the contents of your Library, and I've seen no verifiable information that supports that conclusion.
Even if it were pared down to just Artist, Title, Playcount, and Rating, and compressed with Gzip, that would still be a sizable chunk of data going up the wire if you have a big library of songs. I've used the new iTunes a few times and it never seemed to saturate my upstream bandwidth even for a short amount of time like it was sending back my Library's metadata.
I'm sure somebody who's on a Mac could give a conclusive answer to this question pretty quickly by using ettercap or Ethereal and analyzing the packets that are being directed from the client to phobos.apple.com (or whatever server they're using). I think the "fact" that it's uploading the whole Library is just unsubstantiated conjecture.
It seems to be sending them the currently playing song. So to disable it, you could launch the program, and then turn it off in the Edit menu before playing anything.
To the best of my knowledge (and I haven't dissected what it's sending with Ethereal, but maybe if someone wants a project for the weekend, there you go) it doesn't send any song data until you start playing something.
It doesn't seem to factor in static songs in your library (i.e. ones that are not being played / have been played) into its recommendations. At least based on my experience, because if it did have records of my whole library I think its recommendations would be very different.
if Barnes and Noble kept track of every book you picked up in their store, then made suggestions at the counter of stuff you may be interested in
Which is exactly what Amazon.com does -- except that it's a virtual store, not a B&M one. It knows the last items you've looked at and factors them into its recommendations for other items.
As I said in another post higher up in the thread, I don't find this behavior obnoxious. I may turn it off because I want the screen area back, but in an abstract sense I don't mind what it's doing. In fact at one point I had a program specifically to do something similar (I think it was iRATE radio); track what I listened to and what I thought of it, and make recommendations based on that. I thought it was a good concept, but my main problem with iRATE was that it wasn't built into iTunes. I didn't want to open a separate program to get music recommendations, and iRATE's interface sucked. (Not that I'm a huge fan of brushed metal, but iRATE's was worse. Hopefully it's improved.)
I'll agree, it wouldn't have cost Apple much to put in a checkbox, or pop up a dialog box at first startup asking people if they wanted the feature enabled. You could call it the 'Tinfoil Hat Switch' or whatever. But I just can't come up with any righteous indignation for it here.
If you keep your eyes open when you're walking into a supermarket or drug store that uses one of those value cards, especially around the exits, you'll probably find an extra card lying on the ground pretty quickly. They give them out usually in packs of 2 or 4 (I think Giant may give you two wallet cards and 2 keychain ones), and many people throw away (or just drop) the cards they don't want. Pick one up, and there you go. This is what I do for CVS, which is the only place that 1) I am uncomfortable having my purchases tracked, and 2) frequently has items on sale and requires you to have a card to get the price. At most other stores if you say you're from out of town or don't have a card, the cashiers will just scan theirs instead and get you the discount. I've never had that happen at CVS -- maybe the place that I go to just has humorless employees.
Based on it's behavior I'd have to agree with this, too. The music I've bought from the iTunes Music Store is of a very different genre than the stuff that mostly comprises my library (iTMS is pop songs, library is a lot of classical, oldies, jazz, electronica) and I've never seen a recommendation yet that didn't seem like it was based on my Library. I.e., it keeps recommending pop songs in similar genres to the ones I've bought.
If it is "scanning my hard drive" and making predictions based on that, it's not doing a very good job. It sure seems like all it has access to is my order history from the iTMS -- and I know they have that already. I've seen in the feature description that it supposedly considers songs as you play them, which seems more believable than it scanning your hard drive.
After all given the volume of music that most people have on their hard drives, unless you uploaded the songs, genres, and play counts, you wouldn't have a basis for very good recommendations -- how much music that's in their Library do most people actually like or listen to often? Sometimes I think it's not very much. But looking at the currently playing song would make sense if you're hoping for the impulse-buy. Also, it wouldn't require such a massive dataset be uploaded to the server. A few thousand songs per used times thousands of users is a LOT of data to index and use for predictive marketing.
If I actually thought that the software was scanning my hard drive and uploading stuff, then I might start to wonder if it's getting towads a privacy violation. But "currently playing" doesn't bother me, and obviously iTMS already knows what I bought from them, so I have no problem if they use that in conjunction with other data to market me stuff.
To be honest, I actually like the feature. I don't buy a lot of music from iTMS and don't plan to (it's too expensive), but I'm always on the lookout for music that I like; if this feature actually did produce good recommendations of things that I hadn't heard before but actually liked, I could probably become fond of it. In fact, if they had a button that told it specifically to scan my hard drive and send it data on titles, genres, ratings, and playcounts, I might do it if it resulted in customization that actually fit my tastes, and the information wasn't being sold to outside parties along with any personally identifiable information (I don't care if it's sold in aggregate form, e.g. "People who like Foghat are 62% less likely to like band x").
I have much more of a problem with the 'Value Cards' at CVS than I do with this -- with the records assumedly kept by whatever backend system is running CVS, someone could concievably tell if someone was sick, and various other very personal details. I cannot find that same problem with people's music tastes.
I agree completely with your point about the unclear punctuation and grammar. While one would think I'd be used to that from reading Slashdot by now, the overuse of commas was especially distracting.
I'm not sure what's wrong with his statement about the public key, though. If the malware encrypts your data using the malware-author's public key, it can only be decrypted using the author's private key, which -- one assumes -- he keeps private until you've coughed up the dough. If it was encrypted using his private key, then of course anyone would be able to decrypt it using his public key.
There are a lot of issues with TFA, but that didn't strike me as one of them. Maybe I'm missing something?
Well put -- I like the analogy.
Actually I think what people are doing today, is practically building another guest house out back for the foreman and the rest of his work crew to live in while they're patching up your house. Remember the discussion a few months ago here on Slashdot about why the average joe needed a dual-core or multiprocessor Windows box? It was so one processor could run his actual application, and the other one could run all the anti-virus/spyware/adware/intrusion programs.
The situation has really become ridiculous, but because it's happened so slowly and because so many people are highly invested in it, nobody with any authority wants to take a step back and call it for what it is.
I think the real answer to this is because Apple is both a hardware and software company, while HP and Dell (with some minor exceptions) are basically hardware-only outfits. That is, they need to go out and find software to include on their machines. This makes them much more receptive to an outside company's offer to give them a few hundred grand if they include a trial offer of their software. Apple, with minor exceptions, loads computers up with their own software, and thus there isn't the 'foot in the door' that a crapware vendor has with HP or Dell.
Plus, and I will admit this is controversial, I think there is a higher percentage of crapware and crippware for the PC than there is for the Mac. If you were looking to make a quick buck in software, you wouldn't write for the Mac, you'd go for the PC. That's why there isn't nearly the shareware market on the Mac that there is for Windows (not that all Win shareware is crappy, but quite a bit of it is, or is stuff that you can get for other platforms for free).
The Macintosh platform is basically a vertical monopoly controlled by Apple -- it's a one-stop shop, a "solution" if you will. You buy it, and it comes with primarily Apple-branded software: Apple's DVD Player, Apple iTunes, Apple iMovie, Apple iWork, etc. And obviously Apple's OS. With HP or Dell you'd be getting a computer with a Windows OS and somebody else's MP3 player, DVD Player (although I guess that's been pretty much taken over by WMP now), antivirus, digital photo viewer, etc. By developing all the software themselves, Apple regulates the quality. And by subsidizing the development costs of their software with hardware dollars, they can include full versions on new computers without resorting to demos.
in the private sector the norm is 7 hours a day, 220 days a year
Wow. In the U.S. we have a term for this, we call it a "part-time job."
The author, really, enjoys using the comma, in strange places. Personally I, find it very hard to, read.
The background doesn't help much either. However some of the links were informative; I was unaware of the cell-phone worms (or is that a trojan?).
I consider myself fairly well read (as a layman) about IP law, and I was totally unaware that this ruling existed. It's fairly interesting stuff.
. html
Here's the full text if anyone is interested (normally I pull stuff from the Cornell Law site but it doesn't seem to have it):
http://www.bowie-jensen.com/computerlaw/lasercomb
Submitting motions for summary judgment is practically SOP in any trial. I'd be surprised if SCO's lawyers didn't also try to file for summary judgement against IBM. It's all part of making your case look 'overwhelming.' Or at least making it look to your client like you're making their case look overwhelming. Either way works.
You see it all the time in regular civil and criminal law. The defense's counsel will ask the judge for the case to be thrown out summarily, the judge will say no, the lawyer will go back to their client, shrug, and sit down. It's all part of the little kabuki dance that is courtroom law.
Here's my best stab at a commercial analogy for the ODF debacle.
Imagine you're the procurement guy for a mid-sized company. Not huge, but not insigificant either. You use some product from an outside vendor, which everyone pretty much agrees sucks, but uses anyway. You recommend to your boss one day that the company try to negotiate with the vendor to make it suck less, and if they won't do this, dump the vendor for some alternative.
So the vendor, which is a company bigger than yours, gets wind of your idea. They don't want to change their product for you, saying your company is too small for it to be worthwhile. But they also realize that other companies are watching what happens to yours. So instead they have one of their higher-ups call up your company's CEO and try to get you fired.
That's pretty much the whole deal as I've watched it; when you compare it to an equivalent situation occuring the private sector it seems pretty ridiculous.
For those who haven't figured it out yet ... "C#" is prononuced "See - Sharp."
The joke will be left as an excercise for the reader.
While on the surface that might seem like a good solution, in the long run it's totally unacceptable.
First of all, the primary users of Linux (and arguably the most important, financially) have been corporations -- running webservers, scientific projects, etc. A patent problem could easily scare them away. There's already enough FUD spreading about FOSS -- do you really want to give Microsoft more ammunition? I can just see the letter's from Microsoft's legal department already. "We have received information that you may be using software that is in violation of Microsoft's software patents. If you do not cease and desist from using this software, we will be forced to seek an injunction against your business. By the way, here's a coupon for 20% off of Microsoft SQL Server!"
Also, a patent-violating project could spread 'virally' because of the nature of open source code and contaminate other projects, as well as producing derivative projects, which would then not be usable in the U.S. except for personal use.
Effectively, such a strategy would create a branch of code that would not be GPL-compatible if used in the U.S.
It's a really terrible idea. Linux as an O.S. and FOSS in general would be better off dumping support for Mono entirely, than risk a patent war with Microsoft that would essentially hand them the American commercial market for the next 20 years.
Well, you got this part right: saying that there's a motivation behind DRM, and that motivation is to make more money.
The second part, about "unauthorized" copying, is really just secondary to the first part. In fact I think it's a pretty small part; the studios see DRM as part of a whole future of centrally-controlled, pay-per-view entertainment. You will watch what they want you to watch ("Yes, you will watch these previews, No, you will not fast-forward through these ads,"), when they want you to watch it ("No, you cannot time-shift this broadcast,") and you'll pay for it ("The cost of this show is only $0.99!").
The studios and the MPAA excuse the imposition of DRM as necessary in order to prevent piracy. This is a big lie, because if you look at most of the recent proposed DRM systems, dating back to even the by-todays-standards DVD system, they do far more than just copying-restriction. They are part of a end-to-end "viewing experience," if you will.
Saying that DRM is just about copy protection would be acceptable, if the technology were actually limited to that. But it's not, and so that excuse doesn't wash.
Furthermore, even if it just was for legitimate copy protection, it would be relatively easy to design a system that still allowed a small number of copies for backups, personal use, and time/format shifting -- the accepted 'Fair Uses' enjoyed by users of analog media. Instead those are treated as anathema by the studios as well.
The studios have been unsubtle from the very beginning that they don't give a damn about consumers ability to use media, and their only interest in the public is as a cash cow that they can continue to milk for decades to come. To excuse their behavior is shortsighted, because it fails to step back and take a look at the future they obviously have in mind for all of us.
I've also heard it mentioned that there will be ways for discs to update the firmware on players automatically -- so let's say a new release comes out, and you stick it in your player. The player senses that the disc has a version of the firmware on it that's newer than what's loaded, and installs it. Thus the manufacturers could change the functionality of the device even if you didn't connect it to the internet, theoretically.
When you consider what the satellite providers did a few years back, where they changed the firmware on pirated players remotely, byte by byte, over the course of a few weeks, until they permanently 'remote killed' them, I don't think it's safe to assume that any capability like this wouldn't be aggressively used in a DVD player system.
I think the concerns over what will happen when studios or manufacturers go out of business are very serious as well. I have videocassettes that are over 20 years old now, and audio recordings (on vinyl) that are much older than that. While I don't play them every day, I keep them around with the knowledge that I could play them if I wanted to. I think the technology that's being forced on consumers is quickly leading us to a day when you don't buy a video, but only rent it for some period of time ("oh, you only bought the media, we temporarily leased you the Intellectual Property!"); the studios will say that there's no longer an expectation that a movie will be playable forever. When they decide the format is 'obsolete' and should be replaced by the next latest-and-greatest thing, or when it's just no longer cost effective to maintain the external infrastructure that these players are being built to rely on, they'll kill them.
And you know what? As consumers, we'll deserve it, because we let them in.
I think it's more like this: (psuedocode)
:= gap_in_neck
d
if d 0 then "decapitation"
else "keep looking"
Checking the spec, we'd see that gap_in_neck refers to any visible distance between vertebrae. So in the case of the head was not found the expected result would be decapitation.
I noticed that some of them have a boiling point that's above room temperature, but below the temperature that a lot of processors run these days.
Bingo. Seymour Cray I think beat you to it, but don't feel too bad.
That's one of the ways the Fluorinert liquids are designed to be used; you can pull away a lot of heat through the state-change. I have heard conflicting reports that some of the Cray supercomputers were cooled this way, and that you could actually get an idea of how "hard" the processor was working by looking at the bubbles coming up off of the boards. I have no idea if that's actually true, and most of the pictures of CIIs out there are glossy promo shots and make it hard to figure out how the cooling system actually works. For all I know, it might have just been a prototype that was cooled that way, or maybe some competing system (I heard IBM had some systems that might have used submerged cooling but I can't find any information on them). It certainly seems like a good way to cool them, though.
But you're right, especially with something as expensive as Fluorinert, you'd want to make sure the system was well-sealed and that you weren't boiling it off into the atmosphere. Depending on the heat load and condensation point and what the container was made of, you might be able to make a closed system just by making the computer's case out of metal, and putting a tight-fitting lid on it that had 'stalactites' on the inside so that the fluid had something to drip back off of. (I have a Lodge cast iron dutch oven that has something like this on the top of the lid, I think it's called 'self basting.') Then you'd want to put a lot of heat sinks on top of the case. The fluid, puddled over the mobo at the bottom, would boil the fluid into a gas which would then rise to the top of the container, condense against the relatively cool top, and rain back down. Obviously the internal pressure would be a significant issue.
I think playing with Fluorinert is out of my budget for right now, but it certainly seems like neat stuff.
Of course not ... that's their special spray-on heatsink grease, of course!
... please don't anyone actually try that)
(jk
No you really don't need that much oil. It's totally excessive, I think.
There is a german guy who has a vegetable oil cooled system, and he submerged the entire power supply (which in Europe means the 220VAC mains) and it seems to run okay. I can't read anything on his site, but it seems legitimate. I would have to be very convinced of the dielectric properties of my mains, and also that there wasn't anything in the PS that was capitance-dependent (wouldn't the oil change the inductance of any air-core transformers?) before I was willing to go that far, though.
Overall I think it's an idea that would be better served for something like blade servers. Most blade designs that I've seen have the blades themselves suspended from a central backplane that's mounted horizontally to them and at the bottom. Now imagine you flipped that upside down, so that the backpane was mounted above the blades, and then you lowered the protruding blades into a vat of transformer oil. There's no power supply being submerged, and you could run a copper tube of chilled water through the oil to cool it. (Make that distilled water if you're paranoid.)
Also I think the concerns about water contaimination are overstated. You'd have to get quite a bit of water into the oil for it to become an issue -- probably enough so that if you dumped it into a conventional air cooled system that it would cause a lot of problems, too. Computers don't like non-distilled water, period. And at least with the oil filled case if you made the bottom slope and put a little divot or cup in the lowest point (like a sump) you could put a conductivity sensor down there to warn you and shut the system down if some water got in and started building up.
As jd mentioned, mineral oil would be superior. And I think the old article he mentions is the one that's linked to in TFA. (It's from 1999.)
You can get mineral oil in fairly large quanties for relatively cheap -- compared to actual electronics coolant anyway. I'm not sure how it stacks up to transformer oil if purchased in bulk or anything. It's slightly more expensive than cooking oil, but it wouldn't go rancid, and it's available in different viscosities. As it's a byproduct of gasoline manufacture there's quite a lot of it to go around.
I did some googling yesterday and turned up a few companies who are willing to sell quantities ranging from a few ounces to 5gal drums to the end consumer. I did it again and got a entirely different but similar seeming range of companies, so there's no shortage of suppliers. The freight costs might be the killer, though, so I'd investigate local sources. If you have any sort of cosmetic industry near you, there's probably a supplier of mineral oil available.