No, that doesn't explain it. At 3.6MB/min one hour of footage ought to be about 13GB, without overhead, regardless of whether it's on tape or on a hard drive.
Assuming that the guy didn't actually transcode it from DV to MJPEG, then there's no reason why it should have ballooned in size like that. AVI is just a container format, it can easily have the DV data inside of it, without re-compressing each frame to MJPEG. Unless AVI adds a huge amount of overhead to the DV data, as compared to Quicktime or some of the other container formats.
But because MPEG-2 is interframe compression, not intraframe as is DV and MJPEG, it's not suitable for editing. Those camcorders will never be good for anyone who wants to do anything with their video except watch and archive it in raw, recorded form.
It's a big pain to make a cut when the frame you're cutting in on depends on information located in the preceding frames. In fact, I think it ought to be impossible, without transcoding to an intermediate format and back. (And since we're dealing with lossy compression, the associated loss of quality in doing so.)
While I'm not sure that carrying a Mac Mini around is exactly the solution this guy is going to be looking for, it would be possible.
The data rate of Firewire is indeed 25 megabits per second, which turns out to be around 3.6 MB/s, well within the capability of the Mini. And he never said anything about wanting to transcode on the fly...and given that to people doing professional video, DV's quality is considered pretty minimal anyway, I'm not sure it's safe to assume that anything less would be acceptable.
What I think he should consider is a DV camera to hard drive 'direct box,' like this one. It allows you to connect a camera's digital output directly to a portable Firewire hard drive. Since the box doesn't contain the disks itself, you can just swap the drives for each project. At $1k, they're not cheap, but neither is anything that's designed for professional video production.
Just because a laptop is missing or stolen doesn't mean the data on it is instantly compromised. You can easily use transparent encryption for everything on the hard drive and unless it's stolen while turned on and unlocked, the data is most likely safe.
Most people who steal computers take them for the hardware, not the data. If they can't get into the HD to take a look around in a few minutes, they're just going to reformat it and sell it on eBay.
Also, why would encrypting the data and putting it on a thumbdrive be any more secure than encrypting it and putting it on a laptop? The thumb drive, being small and cheap, is just that much more likely to get lost. Sure, people lose laptops, but they lose small things like keys a lot more. If you want someone to be careful about something, make it big, heavy (or at least heavy enough so you can tell whether it's in your briefcase or not when you pick it up), and expensive. Not tiny, lightweight, and practically disposable.
OT: I've always wanted a laptop with some sort of remote self-destruct feature. Something impressive but not overly destructive, like a thermite charge strapped to the motherboard and hard drive. That way if it got stolen, the next time it got connected to a network...(hiss...fizzle). No compromised data. I suppose you'd probably have a hard time getting that on a plane, though.
I was going to say the same thing as the other respondent did; CAD stations for years have used mouse-like pointing devices called 'pucks' that have tons of buttons, and interface with particular software packages. I don't know whether they're still in wide use (they were pretty slick, I'm not sure why they wouldn't be) but back in the early 90s I saw rooms of people slaving over them.
Some of them struck me as being particularly cool because they had a flat piece of plexiglas mounted to them, parallel to the mousing surface, which had a cross-hairs on it and could be used to precisely position the mouse on paper blueprints. The speed at which a draftsman could digitize paper plans with one of these pucks was staggering.
What began as a useful feature for business users, has become the height of obnoxiousness when used by individuals. It's unfortunate that it wasn't kept just to the expensive ruggedized Motorola-Nextel commercial handsets. You don't see regular people walking around using business two-way radios in public, and you shouldn't use a PTT cellphone either.
The only thing more expensive, IMO, are polyphonic ringtones. Whoever thought that it was a cool idea to allow every idiot with a cellphone to subject everyone around them to their favorite rap song or cartoon jingle, needs to be shot.
The fact that it's a couple hundred miles up is what makes it different. Sure, getting a signal from Pensacola to Key West wouldn't be a big deal today, because you can retransmit the signal via repeaters located up and down the peninsula. (Or use HF, which is a completely different technical challenge, but is pretty well understood.)
Imagine trying to get a signal from Key West to a point equally far away, but without any repeaters or being able to use longer frequencies for the HF advantage -- that's more like what space communications are like. It's a whole new ball game.
Furthermore, there's just something different when it comes to being in space at all. Even if there weren't the technical challenges involved, it would still be interesting to do, because it's just fascinating to be directly involved with something that's orbiting the earth. I understand that might not ring everyone's bells exactly, but for some of us it's a pretty attractive draw.
Asking 'what's the big deal, it's only a few hundred miles' is kind of like asking someone who's going on a submarine down to the Titanic: 'what's the big deal, it's only three miles...'
They're fair assumptions if you've been watching the progress and goals of media companies recently.
Basically, they want complete control over any interface that outputs copyrighted content. So either you can play your audio out of an analog output, probably with some "subaudible" watermarking and/or degradation, or it goes out some sort of controlled digital interface, which will only cooperate with DRM enabled hardware.
In order to get full resolution sound and video, under the media companies' real wet dream of a future, you'd basically need to replace everything from your computer to your home theater amplifier, with closed boxes that support DRM. I doubt people will do this though, instead they'll just have one DRM-enabled box (the computer) and watch whatever degraded analog output it produces, instead of the high-quality but impaired digital ones.
There are a lot of things I'd pay five bucks for, including a piece of software or game that I just thought was really neat; for me to pay $20 it would have to be something that I really thought I would use regularly. At least for me, $20 puts a product out of the instant-impulse-purchase category, especially when you're buying online and not in a physical store.
Given that Linux users really aren't used to having to pay money for software, I think he'd do much better by setting a lower price point in hopes of more registrations than the other way around. Just my two cents though.
Unless we get to the point where an ISP is liable for all of its customers actions, I don't think that the coffee shop would be liable for anything its customers do.
After all, the coffee shop is acting exactly like an ISP: it's just doing it for a very small group of customers. The likelihood of the shop getting successfully sued is probably about the same as the DSL provider getting sued, and on and on up the chain.
If I was going to run a shop, I think I'd just have the system log connection times and durations versus MAC addresses. They're unique identifiers, and thus reasonably helpful to the police, but not intrusive on individual users. However if the police come asking questions, you at least have something you can turn over and act like you're interested in being helpful.
Yeah but really, what percentage of the potential freeloaders are really going to go to the work of spooking their Wifi card's MAC address? I'm sure there are people out there who would do it, but it's a very small percentage of the problem population.
They have a term for that, it's called a "cover charge."
I'm not certain, but I think you'd probably be taking a big risk instituting something like that in a business where people aren't used to paying upfront for a seat. Personally I don't even like to go to bars that charge cover, much less a coffee shop.
But maybe if you made it a really sweet deal, you could attract people.
If I were the owner of the cafe, I'd just turn on WEP in my router, and then change the password frequently.
That ought to keep the neighbors out -- or at least force them to either 1) come downstairs and hunt around for wherever you post the password daily, or 2) crack the WEP to discover the key daily. Unless you've got some pretty ambitious crack hounds where you come from, option 2 is pretty unlikely. And at least option 1 gives you, the owner, a chance to see/confront/throw them out when they come searching for the password every morning.
The big difference to a business owner, IMO, would be that having free terminals versus Wifi attracts two entirely separate demographic groups of customers.
For a Wifi AP to be of any use, you need to own a laptop and have it with you. This means students, travelers, businesspeople, etc. A kiosk is available to anyone, which means you might attract the sort of people who can't afford a $3 cup of coffee, much less a wireless-enabled laptop.
Go into any public library in a big city and ask the librarians about the people they get using their free internet computers regularly. Where I used to live, they had a significant problem with homeless men coming in and spending hours looking up porn.
I think before it ever "converged on free" to use your term, that he'd run out of bandwidth. I assume he's using 802.11b from his truck to the t-mobile AP...so that's 10Mb/s: how many people can he really have on that before it gets saturated? Maybe quite a few if they're all just doing email or low-bandwidth web browsing, but if a bunch of them at once decided to check out some video, it might get tight in a hurry.
Despite that, I applaud your friend's entrepreneurship.
Certainly a bit more of an initial investment than your basic $100 home AP/router/firewall, but if you're at all concerned that you might destroy your business' ambiance with freeloaders, this is definitely the solution.
I've been to places that do exactly this. Either you pay up front for access, or it's free with a purchase.
A less-severe alternative, which would just keep people from leeching bandwidth outside the coffee shop itself, would be to enable WEP and change the username and password frequently. (Yes, I know WEP can be cracked, but if you change the pass frequently and use a long key, it ought to be OK.) Then post the username and pass up on a chalkboard someplace in the shop. Customers get their wireless, and you still get to seem like the good guy -- which might be important if the shop is playing for a certain bohemian ambiance.
Re:I argued about increased business and royalty
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The Case for Free WiFi?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Someone should mod the parent up.
Everything he said is very true: except in rare cases, just tossing an AP up in your coffee shop isn't going to do anything good for business, assuming the shop already has an established clientele. Especially in an urban area, where people can just sit on the street outside the door and get access, or across the street using a directional antenna, you might not get a single new customer from it.
However, if you are just starting up a business and trying to draw new customers, and especially if you're in an area that's not teeming with people, free Wifi might be a cheap way to attract and establish a customer base. You can always switch to a system that requires a receipt-printed code or something later, if the place starts to resemble an Internet addict's opium den. But if you're just getting started, there's not a whole lot to lose in trying: the investment is fairly minimal, and you might get some good customers out of it, depending on the demographics of the area.
A few years ago when I was in Budapest, I saw that a lot of the fast-food joints had internet kiosks that you could use for free... after you'd bought food. On your receipt was a code that you had to type in, to get access.
It wasn't unlimited, either. I think it was 30 minutes for each meal purchased. Which seemed to me to be pretty fair -- especially when you're talking physical kiosks instead of Wifi, a time limit keeps people moving.
In that vein, wouldn't it be possible to write some code that uses the MAC-type address of each Wifi client to limit the amount of time it can connect for? Say an hour a day or something?
Or maybe something more complex, where you get an hour free, but then can extend for another 30 minutes with each purchase. Thus you can sit there as long as you want, as long as you're buying a cup of coffee every 30 minutes. (For those who don't want the coffee, maybe you could just pay a fee -- 75% of a cup of coffee, perhaps -- for internet alone.)
"(a) In order to induce CNET to enter into this agreement and because of the confidential nature of matters on which Consultant will be working, during the period that Consultant is providing Services under this agreement, neither Consultant shall, directly or indirectly, perform similar services as those provided hereunder (i) for any other firm or entity which competes with CNET, or (ii) for any CNET customer for whom Consultant performed Services during the term of this Agreement." (emphasis mine)
All the restrictions are limited to the time period during which "the Consultant is providing services under this agreement."
If you quit working for them and thus were no longer providing services under that agreement, the restrictions (i) and (ii) would no longer apply.
It may well be that the contract contains a portion which remains in effect for a period of time after you leave the company's employ, but that's not it. That section only applies when you're working for them.
However your general point -- that you should get a good contract lawyer to review anything before you sign it, especially since it might affect your well-being for years down the road -- still certainly stands. I wouldn't want to sign one of those without having someone knowledgeable (and paid by me, not the company) explain exactly what its ramifications are.
Yeah, it's not as if they have a massive database somewhere of every printer in the country (at least, I hope they don't). I think the idea is more so that they can tell if two documents were printed on the same device.
E.g. it might let them tell an 'authentic' ransom note from a copycat, because it wouldn't be on the same printer. Or at least it would give positive verification that two notes were printed on the same machine, rather. I guess having them printed on different machines doesn't really compromise the validity by itself.
Frankly it seems a little like a solution looking for a problem. Someone in the government saw an opportunity to make something anonymous less so, and took it.
Relatedly, I remember reading somewhere a long time ago, about a forensic technique used to identify a specific laser printer from printouts, which used unique patterns produced by small defects and dirt on the drum. It might have been a copy machine, now that I think about it though. Anyway, my point is that even without the microdots, the authorities still have ways of potentially linking printouts to a particular machine: the thing I don't like about the microdots is the per-machine serialization. It makes it too easy to go from there to full 'Printer Registration' where you have to link the printer to a person.
Well the real reason IMO that Linux-on-PPC won't ever be big is because there's no way to buy an Apple box without also buying Mac OS. There's no such thing as a 'bare bones' Apple computer, except maybe for developers and I've never seen one.
If you just want to run Linux, there's no reason to pay the premium for an Apple computer complete with Mac OS, and then throw Mac OS out and pretend it's a commodity box with a PPC chip instead of x86. It just doesn't make any sense.
The only people I've ever seen running Linux on PPC were people who for some reason ended up with an extra Mac sitting around, and wanted to play with Linux. It's not an insignificant market, but on the other hand it's not one with much growth potential.
People don't really understand what an OS is or does, they just know that Mac is not Linux is not Windows, and somebody at some point told them they needed Windows. So they won't change, and god help the person who tries to tell them otherwise.
You can explain that [OpenOffice|Microsoft Office] is available for [Linux|Mac OS] until you're blue in the face, and still get the response "but, I need to run Windows."
Such is the myth that Redmond has created in the minds of average computer users, that as much as they may hate and swear at their Wintel boxes, they keep buying them. It's a little creepy really. Maybe we need some sort of de-brainwashing/rehab clinic for them.
What makes people buy Apple is not their software. It's not their hardware (with the exception of the iPod, perhaps). It's certainly not their price or perceived value.
What Apple survives on is two things: 1) the semi-mythical and nearly impossible to quantify 'coolness' factor, and 2) the user experience. People buy Macs because they're easy to use (or at least they have a wide perception as being easy to use, which in marketing is virtually the same thing) and powerful. It's the whole "it just works" philosophy, as cliched as that might sound.
Apple can maintain it's edge in user experience because they have very tight hardware/software integration. By monopolizing the hardware which their OS will run on, they can limit the number of possible system configurations and then test the hell out of them, build drivers into the OS, etc. A lot of Mac users don't even know what a device driver is! (I'm pretty sure actually if I asked for a device driver to some friends of mine they'd ask whether I wanted the flat kind or the Philips-head kind.)
If Apple sold the Mac OS for distribution on commodity x86 hardware, suddenly a lot of their advantage would disappear. You'd instantly go from a few dozen out-of-the-box configurations to thousands or millions, and have loads of incompatible hardware that people would expect to be able to use.
Also, they'd have to start playing hardball about software licensing, which they've never done and would probably alienate a lot of users, and do a lot of damage to their "nice guy" image. A lot of PC users are surprised to know that there is no serialization during the Mac OS install process. None at all. If you have an Apple computer and an install CD, you can put the system on it. There's obviously quite a bit of piracy that goes on (and always has) but I assume Apple just doesn't bother because they realize even the pirates have paid them some money for the hardware they're installing the stolen system on. And the progress of operating systems requires you to buy new hardware periodically anyway, so you're always going to cough up every few years. They can afford to be nice.
If Apple started selling the software by itself, I have no doubt (given their performance with iTMS) that they would come out with some pretty robust 'activation' scheme. This to me would be obnoxious: it's one of the things I've always enjoyed feeling above, as a Mac and Free Software user.
Apple had their experiment with commodity hardware back in the clone days (anyone remember CHRP?), and Jobs pulled the plug. I don't think they'll go back there again. The question which interests me most today is, when Apple releases their first x86 version of Mac OS X for actual Apple/Intel boxes, how hard will they try to keep hackers from moving it to commodity hardware just for hobby and experimental purposes.
No, but it could have a remote 'killswitch,' instead of a necessarily malicious boobytrap.
It would be seemingly easy enough for them to build a "feature" into Windows Update which could be remotely enabled, which would cause the computer to say erase critical parts of the system files, then attempt to reboot, if a blacklisted serial number was detected.
They could build such a feature into the software, and let it out into the wild without telling anyone. Wait a few months and have somebody comb the warez sites and compile a list of pirated serials.
Then at some point, maybe concurrent with a big security update or something, turn on the blacklist-serial-number-checking. All the machines that have bad serials suddenly just fail to boot up.
This would be, I think, completely legal on Microsoft's part. The justice system has taken a pretty lassiez-faire attitude to 'consumer rights' where piracy is concerned: read up on some of the satellite TV smartcard stings if you want. There, the satellite companies actually plotted over months, rewriting the pirated cards bit by bit, until one day they threw a switch and rendered them useless.
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No, that doesn't explain it. At 3.6MB/min one hour of footage ought to be about 13GB, without overhead, regardless of whether it's on tape or on a hard drive.
Assuming that the guy didn't actually transcode it from DV to MJPEG, then there's no reason why it should have ballooned in size like that. AVI is just a container format, it can easily have the DV data inside of it, without re-compressing each frame to MJPEG. Unless AVI adds a huge amount of overhead to the DV data, as compared to Quicktime or some of the other container formats.
But because MPEG-2 is interframe compression, not intraframe as is DV and MJPEG, it's not suitable for editing. Those camcorders will never be good for anyone who wants to do anything with their video except watch and archive it in raw, recorded form.
It's a big pain to make a cut when the frame you're cutting in on depends on information located in the preceding frames. In fact, I think it ought to be impossible, without transcoding to an intermediate format and back. (And since we're dealing with lossy compression, the associated loss of quality in doing so.)
While I'm not sure that carrying a Mac Mini around is exactly the solution this guy is going to be looking for, it would be possible.
The data rate of Firewire is indeed 25 megabits per second, which turns out to be around 3.6 MB/s, well within the capability of the Mini. And he never said anything about wanting to transcode on the fly...and given that to people doing professional video, DV's quality is considered pretty minimal anyway, I'm not sure it's safe to assume that anything less would be acceptable.
What I think he should consider is a DV camera to hard drive 'direct box,' like this one. It allows you to connect a camera's digital output directly to a portable Firewire hard drive. Since the box doesn't contain the disks itself, you can just swap the drives for each project. At $1k, they're not cheap, but neither is anything that's designed for professional video production.
Just because a laptop is missing or stolen doesn't mean the data on it is instantly compromised. You can easily use transparent encryption for everything on the hard drive and unless it's stolen while turned on and unlocked, the data is most likely safe.
Most people who steal computers take them for the hardware, not the data. If they can't get into the HD to take a look around in a few minutes, they're just going to reformat it and sell it on eBay.
Also, why would encrypting the data and putting it on a thumbdrive be any more secure than encrypting it and putting it on a laptop? The thumb drive, being small and cheap, is just that much more likely to get lost. Sure, people lose laptops, but they lose small things like keys a lot more. If you want someone to be careful about something, make it big, heavy (or at least heavy enough so you can tell whether it's in your briefcase or not when you pick it up), and expensive. Not tiny, lightweight, and practically disposable.
OT: I've always wanted a laptop with some sort of remote self-destruct feature. Something impressive but not overly destructive, like a thermite charge strapped to the motherboard and hard drive. That way if it got stolen, the next time it got connected to a network...(hiss...fizzle). No compromised data. I suppose you'd probably have a hard time getting that on a plane, though.
I was going to say the same thing as the other respondent did; CAD stations for years have used mouse-like pointing devices called 'pucks' that have tons of buttons, and interface with particular software packages. I don't know whether they're still in wide use (they were pretty slick, I'm not sure why they wouldn't be) but back in the early 90s I saw rooms of people slaving over them.
Some of them struck me as being particularly cool because they had a flat piece of plexiglas mounted to them, parallel to the mousing surface, which had a cross-hairs on it and could be used to precisely position the mouse on paper blueprints. The speed at which a draftsman could digitize paper plans with one of these pucks was staggering.
This is sadly quite true.
What began as a useful feature for business users, has become the height of obnoxiousness when used by individuals. It's unfortunate that it wasn't kept just to the expensive ruggedized Motorola-Nextel commercial handsets. You don't see regular people walking around using business two-way radios in public, and you shouldn't use a PTT cellphone either.
The only thing more expensive, IMO, are polyphonic ringtones. Whoever thought that it was a cool idea to allow every idiot with a cellphone to subject everyone around them to their favorite rap song or cartoon jingle, needs to be shot.
The fact that it's a couple hundred miles up is what makes it different. Sure, getting a signal from Pensacola to Key West wouldn't be a big deal today, because you can retransmit the signal via repeaters located up and down the peninsula. (Or use HF, which is a completely different technical challenge, but is pretty well understood.)
Imagine trying to get a signal from Key West to a point equally far away, but without any repeaters or being able to use longer frequencies for the HF advantage -- that's more like what space communications are like. It's a whole new ball game.
Furthermore, there's just something different when it comes to being in space at all. Even if there weren't the technical challenges involved, it would still be interesting to do, because it's just fascinating to be directly involved with something that's orbiting the earth. I understand that might not ring everyone's bells exactly, but for some of us it's a pretty attractive draw.
Asking 'what's the big deal, it's only a few hundred miles' is kind of like asking someone who's going on a submarine down to the Titanic: 'what's the big deal, it's only three miles...'
They're fair assumptions if you've been watching the progress and goals of media companies recently.
Basically, they want complete control over any interface that outputs copyrighted content. So either you can play your audio out of an analog output, probably with some "subaudible" watermarking and/or degradation, or it goes out some sort of controlled digital interface, which will only cooperate with DRM enabled hardware.
In order to get full resolution sound and video, under the media companies' real wet dream of a future, you'd basically need to replace everything from your computer to your home theater amplifier, with closed boxes that support DRM. I doubt people will do this though, instead they'll just have one DRM-enabled box (the computer) and watch whatever degraded analog output it produces, instead of the high-quality but impaired digital ones.
So...don't sell it for $20, sell it for $5.
There are a lot of things I'd pay five bucks for, including a piece of software or game that I just thought was really neat; for me to pay $20 it would have to be something that I really thought I would use regularly. At least for me, $20 puts a product out of the instant-impulse-purchase category, especially when you're buying online and not in a physical store.
Given that Linux users really aren't used to having to pay money for software, I think he'd do much better by setting a lower price point in hopes of more registrations than the other way around. Just my two cents though.
Unless we get to the point where an ISP is liable for all of its customers actions, I don't think that the coffee shop would be liable for anything its customers do.
After all, the coffee shop is acting exactly like an ISP: it's just doing it for a very small group of customers. The likelihood of the shop getting successfully sued is probably about the same as the DSL provider getting sued, and on and on up the chain.
If I was going to run a shop, I think I'd just have the system log connection times and durations versus MAC addresses. They're unique identifiers, and thus reasonably helpful to the police, but not intrusive on individual users. However if the police come asking questions, you at least have something you can turn over and act like you're interested in being helpful.
Yeah but really, what percentage of the potential freeloaders are really going to go to the work of spooking their Wifi card's MAC address? I'm sure there are people out there who would do it, but it's a very small percentage of the problem population.
They have a term for that, it's called a "cover charge."
I'm not certain, but I think you'd probably be taking a big risk instituting something like that in a business where people aren't used to paying upfront for a seat. Personally I don't even like to go to bars that charge cover, much less a coffee shop.
But maybe if you made it a really sweet deal, you could attract people.
If I were the owner of the cafe, I'd just turn on WEP in my router, and then change the password frequently.
That ought to keep the neighbors out -- or at least force them to either 1) come downstairs and hunt around for wherever you post the password daily, or 2) crack the WEP to discover the key daily. Unless you've got some pretty ambitious crack hounds where you come from, option 2 is pretty unlikely. And at least option 1 gives you, the owner, a chance to see/confront/throw them out when they come searching for the password every morning.
The big difference to a business owner, IMO, would be that having free terminals versus Wifi attracts two entirely separate demographic groups of customers.
For a Wifi AP to be of any use, you need to own a laptop and have it with you. This means students, travelers, businesspeople, etc. A kiosk is available to anyone, which means you might attract the sort of people who can't afford a $3 cup of coffee, much less a wireless-enabled laptop.
Go into any public library in a big city and ask the librarians about the people they get using their free internet computers regularly. Where I used to live, they had a significant problem with homeless men coming in and spending hours looking up porn.
I think before it ever "converged on free" to use your term, that he'd run out of bandwidth. I assume he's using 802.11b from his truck to the t-mobile AP...so that's 10Mb/s: how many people can he really have on that before it gets saturated? Maybe quite a few if they're all just doing email or low-bandwidth web browsing, but if a bunch of them at once decided to check out some video, it might get tight in a hurry.
Despite that, I applaud your friend's entrepreneurship.
That's very cool.
Certainly a bit more of an initial investment than your basic $100 home AP/router/firewall, but if you're at all concerned that you might destroy your business' ambiance with freeloaders, this is definitely the solution.
I've been to places that do exactly this. Either you pay up front for access, or it's free with a purchase.
A less-severe alternative, which would just keep people from leeching bandwidth outside the coffee shop itself, would be to enable WEP and change the username and password frequently. (Yes, I know WEP can be cracked, but if you change the pass frequently and use a long key, it ought to be OK.) Then post the username and pass up on a chalkboard someplace in the shop. Customers get their wireless, and you still get to seem like the good guy -- which might be important if the shop is playing for a certain bohemian ambiance.
Someone should mod the parent up.
Everything he said is very true: except in rare cases, just tossing an AP up in your coffee shop isn't going to do anything good for business, assuming the shop already has an established clientele. Especially in an urban area, where people can just sit on the street outside the door and get access, or across the street using a directional antenna, you might not get a single new customer from it.
However, if you are just starting up a business and trying to draw new customers, and especially if you're in an area that's not teeming with people, free Wifi might be a cheap way to attract and establish a customer base. You can always switch to a system that requires a receipt-printed code or something later, if the place starts to resemble an Internet addict's opium den. But if you're just getting started, there's not a whole lot to lose in trying: the investment is fairly minimal, and you might get some good customers out of it, depending on the demographics of the area.
A few years ago when I was in Budapest, I saw that a lot of the fast-food joints had internet kiosks that you could use for free ... after you'd bought food. On your receipt was a code that you had to type in, to get access.
It wasn't unlimited, either. I think it was 30 minutes for each meal purchased. Which seemed to me to be pretty fair -- especially when you're talking physical kiosks instead of Wifi, a time limit keeps people moving.
In that vein, wouldn't it be possible to write some code that uses the MAC-type address of each Wifi client to limit the amount of time it can connect for? Say an hour a day or something?
Or maybe something more complex, where you get an hour free, but then can extend for another 30 minutes with each purchase. Thus you can sit there as long as you want, as long as you're buying a cup of coffee every 30 minutes. (For those who don't want the coffee, maybe you could just pay a fee -- 75% of a cup of coffee, perhaps -- for internet alone.)
No I think you're misreading:
"(a) In order to induce CNET to enter into this agreement and because of the confidential nature of matters on which Consultant will be working, during the period that Consultant is providing Services under this agreement, neither Consultant shall, directly or indirectly, perform similar services as those provided hereunder (i) for any other firm or entity which competes with CNET, or (ii) for any CNET customer for whom Consultant performed Services during the term of this Agreement."
(emphasis mine)
All the restrictions are limited to the time period during which "the Consultant is providing services under this agreement."
If you quit working for them and thus were no longer providing services under that agreement, the restrictions (i) and (ii) would no longer apply.
It may well be that the contract contains a portion which remains in effect for a period of time after you leave the company's employ, but that's not it. That section only applies when you're working for them.
However your general point -- that you should get a good contract lawyer to review anything before you sign it, especially since it might affect your well-being for years down the road -- still certainly stands. I wouldn't want to sign one of those without having someone knowledgeable (and paid by me, not the company) explain exactly what its ramifications are.
Yeah, it's not as if they have a massive database somewhere of every printer in the country (at least, I hope they don't). I think the idea is more so that they can tell if two documents were printed on the same device.
E.g. it might let them tell an 'authentic' ransom note from a copycat, because it wouldn't be on the same printer. Or at least it would give positive verification that two notes were printed on the same machine, rather. I guess having them printed on different machines doesn't really compromise the validity by itself.
Frankly it seems a little like a solution looking for a problem. Someone in the government saw an opportunity to make something anonymous less so, and took it.
Relatedly, I remember reading somewhere a long time ago, about a forensic technique used to identify a specific laser printer from printouts, which used unique patterns produced by small defects and dirt on the drum. It might have been a copy machine, now that I think about it though. Anyway, my point is that even without the microdots, the authorities still have ways of potentially linking printouts to a particular machine: the thing I don't like about the microdots is the per-machine serialization. It makes it too easy to go from there to full 'Printer Registration' where you have to link the printer to a person.
Well the real reason IMO that Linux-on-PPC won't ever be big is because there's no way to buy an Apple box without also buying Mac OS. There's no such thing as a 'bare bones' Apple computer, except maybe for developers and I've never seen one.
If you just want to run Linux, there's no reason to pay the premium for an Apple computer complete with Mac OS, and then throw Mac OS out and pretend it's a commodity box with a PPC chip instead of x86. It just doesn't make any sense.
The only people I've ever seen running Linux on PPC were people who for some reason ended up with an extra Mac sitting around, and wanted to play with Linux. It's not an insignificant market, but on the other hand it's not one with much growth potential.
Sadly, this is too true.
People don't really understand what an OS is or does, they just know that Mac is not Linux is not Windows, and somebody at some point told them they needed Windows. So they won't change, and god help the person who tries to tell them otherwise.
You can explain that [OpenOffice|Microsoft Office] is available for [Linux|Mac OS] until you're blue in the face, and still get the response "but, I need to run Windows."
Such is the myth that Redmond has created in the minds of average computer users, that as much as they may hate and swear at their Wintel boxes, they keep buying them. It's a little creepy really. Maybe we need some sort of de-brainwashing/rehab clinic for them.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
What makes people buy Apple is not their software. It's not their hardware (with the exception of the iPod, perhaps). It's certainly not their price or perceived value.
What Apple survives on is two things: 1) the semi-mythical and nearly impossible to quantify 'coolness' factor, and 2) the user experience. People buy Macs because they're easy to use (or at least they have a wide perception as being easy to use, which in marketing is virtually the same thing) and powerful. It's the whole "it just works" philosophy, as cliched as that might sound.
Apple can maintain it's edge in user experience because they have very tight hardware/software integration. By monopolizing the hardware which their OS will run on, they can limit the number of possible system configurations and then test the hell out of them, build drivers into the OS, etc. A lot of Mac users don't even know what a device driver is! (I'm pretty sure actually if I asked for a device driver to some friends of mine they'd ask whether I wanted the flat kind or the Philips-head kind.)
If Apple sold the Mac OS for distribution on commodity x86 hardware, suddenly a lot of their advantage would disappear. You'd instantly go from a few dozen out-of-the-box configurations to thousands or millions, and have loads of incompatible hardware that people would expect to be able to use.
Also, they'd have to start playing hardball about software licensing, which they've never done and would probably alienate a lot of users, and do a lot of damage to their "nice guy" image. A lot of PC users are surprised to know that there is no serialization during the Mac OS install process. None at all. If you have an Apple computer and an install CD, you can put the system on it. There's obviously quite a bit of piracy that goes on (and always has) but I assume Apple just doesn't bother because they realize even the pirates have paid them some money for the hardware they're installing the stolen system on. And the progress of operating systems requires you to buy new hardware periodically anyway, so you're always going to cough up every few years. They can afford to be nice.
If Apple started selling the software by itself, I have no doubt (given their performance with iTMS) that they would come out with some pretty robust 'activation' scheme. This to me would be obnoxious: it's one of the things I've always enjoyed feeling above, as a Mac and Free Software user.
Apple had their experiment with commodity hardware back in the clone days (anyone remember CHRP?), and Jobs pulled the plug. I don't think they'll go back there again. The question which interests me most today is, when Apple releases their first x86 version of Mac OS X for actual Apple/Intel boxes, how hard will they try to keep hackers from moving it to commodity hardware just for hobby and experimental purposes.
No, but it could have a remote 'killswitch,' instead of a necessarily malicious boobytrap.
It would be seemingly easy enough for them to build a "feature" into Windows Update which could be remotely enabled, which would cause the computer to say erase critical parts of the system files, then attempt to reboot, if a blacklisted serial number was detected.
They could build such a feature into the software, and let it out into the wild without telling anyone. Wait a few months and have somebody comb the warez sites and compile a list of pirated serials.
Then at some point, maybe concurrent with a big security update or something, turn on the blacklist-serial-number-checking. All the machines that have bad serials suddenly just fail to boot up.
This would be, I think, completely legal on Microsoft's part. The justice system has taken a pretty lassiez-faire attitude to 'consumer rights' where piracy is concerned: read up on some of the satellite TV smartcard stings if you want. There, the satellite companies actually plotted over months, rewriting the pirated cards bit by bit, until one day they threw a switch and rendered them useless.