Well, here's the problem as I see it. There just isn't going to be the kind of demand that there were for CD-Rs and RWs, and later DVD-R/Ws, for a long time.
Back when CD-Rs first came out, they were huge compared to a hard drive at the time. I remember hooking up my first CD-R, a SCSI job made by Panasonic, when the next biggest storage device I had was a 100MB Zip drive. (And my computer at the time had an 80MB hard drive, but I was at the very end of an upgrade cycle.) The adoption rate of CD-Rs was very fast, and that drove the cost of the drives and media down quickly. If you wanted to move 500+MB of data around cheaply, they were pretty much your only option; that much removable storage in any other format (Zip, Jaz, MO, SyQuest) would have cost you in some cases an order of magnitude more.
Same with DVDs; the size wasn't quite as impressive relative to hard drives when they first came out, but it was still pretty big. As a way of moving large files around they were great, and a lot of people bought them because (for good for for ill) they wanted to copy DVD movies, the software for which came along pretty quickly (in rough form at least; the early transcoders were a PITA). The price dropped more slowly than CD-R drives and media did, and there was the "minus" versus "plus" format war that was eventually settled by hybrid drives, but it eventually came down.
But with BluRay and HDDVD, I think it's going to take much, much longer for there to be the kind of volume that made DVD and CD recorders affordable -- particularly for the blank media. Hard drives are so big that a 15 or 25GB (single layer) discs can't offer one-disc backups for most people's drives, and you'd have to do a lot of backups and need to archive them all, to not make it cheaper to just use a 300GB drive.
In short, I just don't think there's the demand for optical data storage this time around that there was in previous generations of the technology. BD and HDDVD drives are going to remain "premium" addons, and demand a very high pricetag, both for the drives and for the media, for quite a while longer. This is a big problem, because media formats need to get that "snowball effect" going in order to succeed -- a format is only really useful if you can count on everyone else having one; this what killed a lot of early MO formats. I don't think that BD or HDDVD are going to fail, exactly, I just think that it's going to take a lot longer for them to succeed and become ubiquitous. (And in the meantime, the hard drive and flash memory manufacturers aren't going to be sitting still.)
For both CD and DVD, the markets were dying for them by the time they arrived. This time around, I think 99% of potential buyers are ambivalent or distracted by other technologies.
I posted an article about this a few days ago but it got rejected -- the company that's actually doing the manufacturing says that they're considering selling a few on the side to private individuals.
Since the specifications are all open, there's nothing to stop them from just running off a few thousand on speculation when they're done with the ones they're making on contract for OLPC, if they think there's a demand.
Since they're an OEM (a real OEM, not "we buy stuff and stamp our name on it" OEM) the big thing for them is finding a good retail channel and seeing if there's a demand in the West for a computer that doesn't run Windows.
Anyway, the focus of the article that I read was how badly OLPC may be missing the boat. Negroponte has pretty much insisted from Day 1 that they wouldn't sell it in the West, even at an inflated price to subsidize cheaper ones for students -- the way it's looking, if they don't, and there really is a market, the OEM is just going to end run them and sell it direct.
So anyway, long story short -- be patient, and you may be able to buy one, and you might not even have to pay 2 or 3x the BOM cost for it, like you would in some of the OLPC subsidization proposals.
If the price difference between Kodak and the remanufacturers isn't that big, who is going to risk f'ing up their printer prints with garbage remanufactured crap when for a very small bit more they could get guaranteed good OEM ink? I know I wouldn't. It's the huge disparity in pricing right now that drives people to take the risk.
Exactly. Particularly when the printer is $150, and not some $20 piece of garbage that's just a holder for the $40 or $50 cartridge. Nobody cares really about messing up their printer, when you can just get a new one practically for free -- but when the printer is a significant investment, and the replacement cartridges are cheap, who's going to do that? It's penny-wise and pound-foolish at that point to cut corners.
It's the correct historical pronunciation of "gigawatts," but in 1985, people had already moved to pronouncing the "giga" prefix with the hard 'g' sound; I always thought that it was probably intended by some writer as a way of showing Doc's eccentricity, because he was using an effectively obsolete pronunciation, but that it got left in the script because it just sounds like a really, really big value.
With the election of President Bill Clinton in 1992, and the appointment of Hazel O'Leary as the Secretary of Energy, there was pressure from the top to cancel the IFR. Sen. John Kerry (D, MA) and O'Leary led the opposition to the reactor, arguing that it would be a threat to non-proliferation efforts, and that it was a continuation of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project that had been cancelled by Congress. Despite support for the reactor by then-Rep. Richard Durbin (D, IL) and U.S. Senators Carol Mosley Braun (D, IL) and Paul Simon (D, IL), funding for the reactor was slashed, and it was ultimately cancelled in 1994.
Although Republicans have a reputation for being in the pockets of the petroleum and mining industries, in truth both parties are almost equally opposed to any change in the status quo.
Fuck "in God we Trust," we should just print "don't rock the boat" on our money.
So, this means that he supports a removal of the onerous, no-Fair-Use, anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA?
What's that, Mr Glickman? That's not what you meant at all?
Oh, okay -- you support Fair Use, sort of, but only in some theoretical sense, because it's illegal to actually do, because of the laws you've purchased from those politicians who are perennially deep-throating the entertainment industry's collective cock?
I would be more interested in a SuperDrive that supports both HDDVD and BR
And I'd be more interested if OS 10.5 came with a real, live, spotted leopard in the box, but I guess we're both just going to have to learn to live with disappointment, won't we?
True. However, there are some behaviors that ought to be immediately detectable -- sending out hundreds or thousands of nearly-identical emails, for instance, or DDoSing a server with repeated identical requests in patterns that are too fast to be a human being.
But you're right; technological solutions would probably only further the cat-and-mouse game between bot authors and the authorities; it would probably be fairly easy to write a DDoS bot that mimicked human browsing -- it wouldn't be as effective as sending out a few thousand requests per second, but if you had enough bots you could melt a server in the same way that a large number of bona fide humans do when a page gets mentioned on Slashdot. That would be nearly impossible to reliably detect. So in the long run I'm not sure that's effective; what's needed is a way of making sure more people follow the recommended guidelines given by their OS manufacturer, in terms of security updates and best practices.
In that way, I think that to be effective, you would need to have both a legal solution and a technological one. If you really went after people whose computers were compromised because they weren't keeping them patched and were leaving them on the Internet, in a very public way, you might encourage people to either patch their machines or disconnect them.
I'm not sure that such a tactic would be politically feasible -- as other people have pointed out, it is exactly the same tactic used by the RIAA to scare people into not file sharing, and the effect of that is questionable at best (however, in the case of discouraging people from leaving their PC unpatched, you're really not working against something they want to do, in the same way that the anti-file-sharing people are; very few people want to have an unpatched machine, they're just too lazy to do anything about it -- you're not really being punitive as much as you're giving them some very pointed encouragement to do something about a problem they're today comfortably ignoring).
The problem isn't that the general public isn't supporting it.
The problem is that nobody takes Kucinich seriously, even within his own party. He's maybe not quite as ridiculous as Ralph Nader or Jesse Jackson on the list of "hopeless ideologues who continually run for President," but he's definitely on that list. Hell, he gets regularly ridiculed by Jon Stewart, who is practically the mainstream Democratic party's mouthpiece on national television. He is, in general, a loose cannon, and I doubt that earns him many friends on either side of the aisle. (Well, some Republicans might secretly like him just because of his entertainment value, and because he creates things they can point at and use to condemn Democrats in general with; e.g. his proposals to ban handguns make for great NRA campaign fodder.)
None of the real players in Congress are going to touch this, because they don't want to be associated with him. He's practically famous for introducing feel-good bills with no cosponsors, that get him a little media attention and then get tossed in the circular file in committee.
Why are Libertarians insane? Because they willfully disregard any evidence that their simplistic theories will not and do not work in the real world. The free market is not magic and infallible. It is a complex system of feedback loops that does not posses any sort of true homeostasis and therefore needs external management in order to maintain its state of freedom.
Not all Libertarians are as "bug-fuck insane" as you're making them out to be; there is a clear line between Libertarianism and economic anarchism -- Libertarians generally advocate a form of government which creates as level a playing field as possible, and then lets individual actors do the rest; this is generally summed up by saying that it is OK for government to create a framework where individuals can make decisions on their own, but not to act redistributively. Although this would not allow for conventional anti-trust regulation in the conventional sense, their stance is -- and I think they have a very good point here -- much of the danger of monopolies and trusts isn't inherent in the monopoly itself, but in the accrual of power in a single organization which is then used to influence government and suppress competition; if you removed all the corporate welfare and protective legislation that large corporations have bought themselves, they would tend to be lumbering behemoths and, excepting some special cases which tend towards natural monopolies, generally aren't as competitive as they appear to be today.
There is a lot of debate within Libertarian organizations as to how those special cases should be treated, and setting aside orthodoxy, I think the vast majority of self-identified Libertarians would support some form of minimalist interventionism in order to counterbalance the distortive effects that some monopolies have had on the government, while the laws and welfare that they have purchased are repealed or dismantled.
In short, I think you're getting dangerously close to creating a straw man when you attempt to pigeonhole Libertarians so narrowly; like it or not, they're the closest thing that the United States has to a third political party, and their views are not nearly as simplistic as you seem to think they are.
Maybe the solution to the botnet problem isn't to go after the botnet operators, but to go after the people who are leaving unpatched machines connected to the net? Or, perhaps more to the point, their ISPs?
I understand this wouldn't be an exactly popular solution -- it's sort of the equivalent of a "scorched earth" tactic towards spammers -- but what if you implemented strict liability on all computers under your control? You get rootkitted or botnetted, sorry pal, it's your problem. Don't want to deal with it? Keep your machines up-to-date or keep them unplugged.
Unpatched machines that are connected to the internet are a public nuisance, in the same way that an abandoned house in an otherwise good neighborhood is. It's nearly impossible, and probably a losing battle, to try and go after the individual criminals who are using the abandoned house for nefarious purposes (which isn't to say that we shouldn't try); sometimes the best solution is just to go after the person who owns the house and make them either fix it or raze it.
A compromise, which would avoid true strict liability, would be making it a positive defense that you took reasonable steps to secure a system; i.e. it was kept up-to-date with the latest vendor patches and was behind a firewall. But if you can't take those reasonable steps, or are too incompetent/lazy/ignorant to do it, maybe you shouldn't be on the net at all.
Erh... wouldn't an online update make this whole project kinda pointless?
The GP was joking, but actually I think it would be neat if you could create a local copy of WP, maybe not on optical disc, but rather on a hard drive or something, that you could continually update on an as-needed basis from the online copy, via rsync or some other smart protocol that only downloaded the differences between the existing and new files. It would be even better if you could make copies to the local copy and then re-sync it to the remote copy, applying your local changes to the remote pages (maybe only putting them up as 'suggestions' or something, to avoid mass-clobbering a lot of new material).
You could create kiosks, or just checkout copies of the DB and work on them for other projects, but then re-integrate them back upstream with all the changes. Given the number of projects that use WP as a basis, I think it could have a lot of possibilities.
Right now, if you create a WP spinoff project, you might start off with a DB dump and then improve on it, but chances are most of the changes are never going to flow back upstream; it's just too hard to apply them. If they took a cue from SVN or any of the other projects designed for change-tracking and management, they might be able to do a lot more while staying true to the goals of a wiki.
This would be consistent with Europe's history, and it seems they have not learned a thing from the history of their past 200 years.
I agree with you up until right there.
I think they have learned from the last 200 years -- but remember, the people currently in power are, indirectly at least, the winners of the past armed conflicts, in most cases. So on some deep level, they may not be that afraid of producing conflict, because mentally they'll always position themselves on the winning side.
I'm not sure that's the whole of the explanation (actually I'm sure it's not) but it's something to keep in mind whenever you see a government or group of people within a government that's gone through a lot of violent conflict, provoke more violent conflict -- since they see themselves as already having survived a lot of it, they commit a sort of reverse-gambler's-fallacy and assume they'll definitely win the next round.
What keeps people at the table, doing the democratic thing, is the fear that if push came to shove, they might lose.
Bell Canada today - April 13th - pulled all of its advertising from Digital Home citing our refusal to take down an article which informed readers about a new generation of satellite receivers expected to arrive in July.
In the article , Digital Home stated that the information was from Bell ExpressVu dealers and that the company had yet to publicly announce the receiver specifications.
Yesterday, I was contacted by a press relations representative from Bell Canada and was informed that Bell Canada "might" pull its advertising from Digital Home Canada if the article was not removed from the Digital Home site.
The PR representative explained the request came from Pat Button, the Vice President of Marketing at ExpressVu. The representative said Mr. Button had seen the article and demanded it be taken down from the site because it was having a negative impact on dealer sales. The representative also said that it was impossible for Bell to be releasing new HD receivers this year because a Request for Proposal (RFP) for the receivers had not even been issued by ExpressVu.
Basically, ExpressVu wanted to keep a lid on the fact that all the MPEG-2 receivers that are being sold today will soon be totally obsolete because they're transitioning to MPEG-4. What a bunch of slimebags.
For that matter, I'm not sure that Apple's machine is really all that groundbreaking, either, which makes this after-the-fact, DIY article (which is nothing more than parts assembly; please, stop calling it "building" a computer) even less interesting.
I have a dual G5 (Early 2005, PCI) and the Xeon's just don't have me reaching for my wallet yet. So far, they're only advertising them as being 2x or 4x as fast as the G5s were, and I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that's on whatever benchmark favors them, and only for highly parallizable tasks.
All interesting stuff, but I think there are a lot of Mac owners that just aren't ready for another upgrade cycle, either because we caught the last of the big IBM space heaters or the first of the Intel machines, and I think they'll have to do a lot of talking to convince average users that they can benefit from the parallelism of an eight-way architecture.
But from their perspective, I think you're absolutely right -- the more "domestic" content they have on their network (traffic that doesn't have to go through a peering/transit point to the U.S. or Asia), the less they have to pay in connection fees to other networks.
So for them, distributed P2P is great, at least compared to browsing MySpace or Slashdot or something else based in the U.S., Asia, or Europe.
I would think that they'd probably also do a lot of caching...set up a really massive transparent Squid system to keep people from pulling the same Google headline image down a million times a day through a transit point where they have to pay for the traffic. Heck, it's probably worth it to them to pay a company like Akamai to set up a presence on their network just to cut down on long-distance traffic.
I agree. I like the idea, but the article selection process is downright bizarre. I particularly like their selection under "Military Units" in the "History and War" section: the Lord's Resistance Army and the Japanese Imperial Navy. Okay... not arguing that either are exactly unimportant... but why those two?
I think they need to use some sort of better, more objective metric for inclusion. How about the most popular / most-often-viewed articles on WP? Or the ones created in the database first, back when WP was new? (Do they still have that data anymore?)
It may just be that 2,000 articles is too small to be anything but ridiculous. The Britannica DVD, by contrast, includes over 100,000 articles, and I don't think it's even representative of their entire database.
Overall, I applaud their efforts here, but I think they're just going to tarnish their own reputation by releasing this early. They should have held off and waited until they had a serious product -- one on DVD, that's somewhere comparable to commercial encyclopedia offerings on CD, at least in scope and breadth.
If somebody has 15 minutes of net connection, would he look at live versions of Wikipedia articles for those 15 minutes, or would he spend 15 minutes buying the disc to take home to use on his own computer without an Internet connection?
It's not their methodology that I question, it's their eyesight.
There are some seriously shit pictures in that article. I mean, really bad. They might be acceptable for eBay, but then again, I used to use a 680x480 toy that downloaded over the serial port for taking photos for eBay. It's not exactly a high standard.
With the exception of the Nokia N95, which I do admit is impressive for a camera phone, the natural light photos are terribly yellow. They remark "the colours came out fairly balanced if not a little yellow..." about the top one of these two images. A little yellow? Look, Mr M&M there looks like he needs to get on dialysis, because his kidneys are shot. There's no white balance at all. It's tough to take the rest of their conclusions seriously when that's all they have to say there.
With the flash on, it gets the color right (apparently it's just hardwired for the 5000K flash or whatever it has in there), but all the highlights blow out -- and it's not even that high-contrast a scene. I'd hate to see what would have happened on a black background.
The N95 is, admittedly, impressive with its flash turned off. It's a pretty passable image at that resolution. I don't have much negative to say about it. But the flash image below, which they describe as "vibrant"...? I'm not sure 'oversaturated' covers it; it's bordering on ridiculous. It's not even attractive oversaturation, like you might get on some consumer films designed for that effect (Agfa Ultra, Velvia, etc.), or by playing in photoshop; it's just ugly.
Now, granted, in the 400D's photos (last page), they're doing something wrong in the available-light shot, because although they say they're using the automatic settings, it's obviously not auto-white-balancing, and I know that camera will do that in its automatic modes. Leaving that aside, the flash shot beats anything out of any of those cellphones, by a large margin. The lighting is pretty even (there are a few hot spots on the cat, but given that it was straight front flash, it could be worse), the highlights aren't blown, the colors are realistic, and the shadow detail is good.
The photos tell the tale far better than their narrative does: you get what you pay for.
I can buy a lot of commodity hardware and power it for $100,000. Let's just say a decent Pseries will be an order of magnitude more expensive for the initial purchase, never mind the annual support
True. In my (admittedly limited) experience though, IBM hardware generally gets aimed at organizations whose IT budgets are already fairly big (I won't say "bloated"), and are paying through the nose for support already.
If you're looking at commodity servers and supporting them yourself, you're probably not going to look at IBM; their customers are going to be choosing between IBM pSeries, and maybe Sun's high-end SPARC gear, or maybe HP 9000 series stuff. They're probably migrating up from superminis with atrocious support costs anyway (and they may only be migrating because their superminis are being EOLed -- I've run into lots of organizations who were perfectly okay paying the support for their legacy gear, until it was no longer supported), so a $100k IBM system could easily look like a savings over 5 years when you consolidate a dozen "small iron" Unix boxes onto it.
I'm not exactly sure how they would find a cost savings if you were already just using cheap x86 servers, though. I guess they'd probably say 'consolidation,' but I don't know exactly how many commodity pizza-boxes you'd need to consolidate to pay for the TCO on a pSeries... I guarantee though if you called an IBM sales rep, they'd be able to make the numbers work, somehow.
The IBM System p(TM) server family and the IBM BladeCenter® JS21 blade server are packed with features designed to enable you to achieve lower costs and more flexibility, as well as have the peace of mind that comes from knowing your applications are available when you need them. Our leadership performance saves you money by providing exceptional performance per processor core and including up to 4 cores per socket. Unique IBM virtualization technologies are designed to dramatically increase server utilization by providing innovative capabilities that enable one server to act like many--while giving you the ability to automatically move more processing power to critical applications when needed. You can meet known and unknown processing requirements with fewer servers -- so hardware, software and facility costs go down. Finally, your Linux® applications on these systems will be available when you need them thanks to time-tested IBM reliability features.
I think they're going for PHB appeal here. The idea is that you have one machine, one support contract, to one company, and that's the end of that. (In theory.)
The high-voltage DC systems may be different, but at least with AC, making the conductors thicker doesn't really help that much past a certain point.
I think it's actually a surface-area dependency rather than a cross-section one; that's why you see big high-tension power lines with multiple sets of small conductors rather than one really big one. Multiple small conductors give you more surface area and less weight (and cost in copper). This is due to the skin effect.
However you can't just pack multiple conductors next to each other, because there are other effects which will cancel out the gains if you put the individual conductors too close... so you need to space them out at least a few diameters away from each other (assumedly this depends on the voltage in the wires).
I'm sure they're all basically solved engineering problems; it's basically an economics question how many conductors you hang and what kind of loss you find acceptable. I can only think that there are probably a lot of inefficiencies in the power grid today that were the result of decisions made back decades ago when power was cheaper in certain places.
I'll take socialism over laissez-faire capitalism any day of the week. How's your heating bill?
A whole lot better than it would be if we were just splitting the bill equally between everyone in my town... or haven't you ever gone out to a big business lunch where it was known that you'd just be splitting the check equally? People are pigs when there's an incentive for them to consume more than the next guy.
If everyone pays the same for water, then there's no reason for me not to just let the tap run when I'm brushing my teeth, or install a more efficient washer, or anything else. I'm not going to bother to install a timed thermostat, and if it's between cranking the heat and putting on a sweater, I'll just crank the heat -- why not? It'll cost virtually the same amount anyway.
Those are the sort of inefficiencies and waste that 'socialist' schemes lead to, and in the end, we're all poorer for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, here's the problem as I see it. There just isn't going to be the kind of demand that there were for CD-Rs and RWs, and later DVD-R/Ws, for a long time.
Back when CD-Rs first came out, they were huge compared to a hard drive at the time. I remember hooking up my first CD-R, a SCSI job made by Panasonic, when the next biggest storage device I had was a 100MB Zip drive. (And my computer at the time had an 80MB hard drive, but I was at the very end of an upgrade cycle.) The adoption rate of CD-Rs was very fast, and that drove the cost of the drives and media down quickly. If you wanted to move 500+MB of data around cheaply, they were pretty much your only option; that much removable storage in any other format (Zip, Jaz, MO, SyQuest) would have cost you in some cases an order of magnitude more.
Same with DVDs; the size wasn't quite as impressive relative to hard drives when they first came out, but it was still pretty big. As a way of moving large files around they were great, and a lot of people bought them because (for good for for ill) they wanted to copy DVD movies, the software for which came along pretty quickly (in rough form at least; the early transcoders were a PITA). The price dropped more slowly than CD-R drives and media did, and there was the "minus" versus "plus" format war that was eventually settled by hybrid drives, but it eventually came down.
But with BluRay and HDDVD, I think it's going to take much, much longer for there to be the kind of volume that made DVD and CD recorders affordable -- particularly for the blank media. Hard drives are so big that a 15 or 25GB (single layer) discs can't offer one-disc backups for most people's drives, and you'd have to do a lot of backups and need to archive them all, to not make it cheaper to just use a 300GB drive.
In short, I just don't think there's the demand for optical data storage this time around that there was in previous generations of the technology. BD and HDDVD drives are going to remain "premium" addons, and demand a very high pricetag, both for the drives and for the media, for quite a while longer. This is a big problem, because media formats need to get that "snowball effect" going in order to succeed -- a format is only really useful if you can count on everyone else having one; this what killed a lot of early MO formats. I don't think that BD or HDDVD are going to fail, exactly, I just think that it's going to take a lot longer for them to succeed and become ubiquitous. (And in the meantime, the hard drive and flash memory manufacturers aren't going to be sitting still.)
For both CD and DVD, the markets were dying for them by the time they arrived. This time around, I think 99% of potential buyers are ambivalent or distracted by other technologies.
I posted an article about this a few days ago but it got rejected -- the company that's actually doing the manufacturing says that they're considering selling a few on the side to private individuals.
Since the specifications are all open, there's nothing to stop them from just running off a few thousand on speculation when they're done with the ones they're making on contract for OLPC, if they think there's a demand.
Since they're an OEM (a real OEM, not "we buy stuff and stamp our name on it" OEM) the big thing for them is finding a good retail channel and seeing if there's a demand in the West for a computer that doesn't run Windows.
Anyway, the focus of the article that I read was how badly OLPC may be missing the boat. Negroponte has pretty much insisted from Day 1 that they wouldn't sell it in the West, even at an inflated price to subsidize cheaper ones for students -- the way it's looking, if they don't, and there really is a market, the OEM is just going to end run them and sell it direct.
So anyway, long story short -- be patient, and you may be able to buy one, and you might not even have to pay 2 or 3x the BOM cost for it, like you would in some of the OLPC subsidization proposals.
If the price difference between Kodak and the remanufacturers isn't that big, who is going to risk f'ing up their printer prints with garbage remanufactured crap when for a very small bit more they could get guaranteed good OEM ink? I know I wouldn't. It's the huge disparity in pricing right now that drives people to take the risk.
Exactly. Particularly when the printer is $150, and not some $20 piece of garbage that's just a holder for the $40 or $50 cartridge. Nobody cares really about messing up their printer, when you can just get a new one practically for free -- but when the printer is a significant investment, and the replacement cartridges are cheap, who's going to do that? It's penny-wise and pound-foolish at that point to cut corners.
It's the correct historical pronunciation of "gigawatts," but in 1985, people had already moved to pronouncing the "giga" prefix with the hard 'g' sound; I always thought that it was probably intended by some writer as a way of showing Doc's eccentricity, because he was using an effectively obsolete pronunciation, but that it got left in the script because it just sounds like a really, really big value.
Fuck "in God we Trust," we should just print "don't rock the boat" on our money.
So, this means that he supports a removal of the onerous, no-Fair-Use, anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA?
What's that, Mr Glickman? That's not what you meant at all?
Oh, okay -- you support Fair Use, sort of, but only in some theoretical sense, because it's illegal to actually do, because of the laws you've purchased from those politicians who are perennially deep-throating the entertainment industry's collective cock?
Talk is cheap; I'm not buying.
I would be more interested in a SuperDrive that supports both HDDVD and BR
And I'd be more interested if OS 10.5 came with a real, live, spotted leopard in the box, but I guess we're both just going to have to learn to live with disappointment, won't we?
True. However, there are some behaviors that ought to be immediately detectable -- sending out hundreds or thousands of nearly-identical emails, for instance, or DDoSing a server with repeated identical requests in patterns that are too fast to be a human being.
But you're right; technological solutions would probably only further the cat-and-mouse game between bot authors and the authorities; it would probably be fairly easy to write a DDoS bot that mimicked human browsing -- it wouldn't be as effective as sending out a few thousand requests per second, but if you had enough bots you could melt a server in the same way that a large number of bona fide humans do when a page gets mentioned on Slashdot. That would be nearly impossible to reliably detect. So in the long run I'm not sure that's effective; what's needed is a way of making sure more people follow the recommended guidelines given by their OS manufacturer, in terms of security updates and best practices.
In that way, I think that to be effective, you would need to have both a legal solution and a technological one. If you really went after people whose computers were compromised because they weren't keeping them patched and were leaving them on the Internet, in a very public way, you might encourage people to either patch their machines or disconnect them.
I'm not sure that such a tactic would be politically feasible -- as other people have pointed out, it is exactly the same tactic used by the RIAA to scare people into not file sharing, and the effect of that is questionable at best (however, in the case of discouraging people from leaving their PC unpatched, you're really not working against something they want to do, in the same way that the anti-file-sharing people are; very few people want to have an unpatched machine, they're just too lazy to do anything about it -- you're not really being punitive as much as you're giving them some very pointed encouragement to do something about a problem they're today comfortably ignoring).
The problem isn't that the general public isn't supporting it.
The problem is that nobody takes Kucinich seriously, even within his own party. He's maybe not quite as ridiculous as Ralph Nader or Jesse Jackson on the list of "hopeless ideologues who continually run for President," but he's definitely on that list. Hell, he gets regularly ridiculed by Jon Stewart, who is practically the mainstream Democratic party's mouthpiece on national television. He is, in general, a loose cannon, and I doubt that earns him many friends on either side of the aisle. (Well, some Republicans might secretly like him just because of his entertainment value, and because he creates things they can point at and use to condemn Democrats in general with; e.g. his proposals to ban handguns make for great NRA campaign fodder.)
None of the real players in Congress are going to touch this, because they don't want to be associated with him. He's practically famous for introducing feel-good bills with no cosponsors, that get him a little media attention and then get tossed in the circular file in committee.
Why are Libertarians insane? Because they willfully disregard any evidence that their simplistic theories will not and do not work in the real world. The free market is not magic and infallible. It is a complex system of feedback loops that does not posses any sort of true homeostasis and therefore needs external management in order to maintain its state of freedom.
Not all Libertarians are as "bug-fuck insane" as you're making them out to be; there is a clear line between Libertarianism and economic anarchism -- Libertarians generally advocate a form of government which creates as level a playing field as possible, and then lets individual actors do the rest; this is generally summed up by saying that it is OK for government to create a framework where individuals can make decisions on their own, but not to act redistributively. Although this would not allow for conventional anti-trust regulation in the conventional sense, their stance is -- and I think they have a very good point here -- much of the danger of monopolies and trusts isn't inherent in the monopoly itself, but in the accrual of power in a single organization which is then used to influence government and suppress competition; if you removed all the corporate welfare and protective legislation that large corporations have bought themselves, they would tend to be lumbering behemoths and, excepting some special cases which tend towards natural monopolies, generally aren't as competitive as they appear to be today.
There is a lot of debate within Libertarian organizations as to how those special cases should be treated, and setting aside orthodoxy, I think the vast majority of self-identified Libertarians would support some form of minimalist interventionism in order to counterbalance the distortive effects that some monopolies have had on the government, while the laws and welfare that they have purchased are repealed or dismantled.
In short, I think you're getting dangerously close to creating a straw man when you attempt to pigeonhole Libertarians so narrowly; like it or not, they're the closest thing that the United States has to a third political party, and their views are not nearly as simplistic as you seem to think they are.
Maybe the solution to the botnet problem isn't to go after the botnet operators, but to go after the people who are leaving unpatched machines connected to the net? Or, perhaps more to the point, their ISPs?
I understand this wouldn't be an exactly popular solution -- it's sort of the equivalent of a "scorched earth" tactic towards spammers -- but what if you implemented strict liability on all computers under your control? You get rootkitted or botnetted, sorry pal, it's your problem. Don't want to deal with it? Keep your machines up-to-date or keep them unplugged.
Unpatched machines that are connected to the internet are a public nuisance, in the same way that an abandoned house in an otherwise good neighborhood is. It's nearly impossible, and probably a losing battle, to try and go after the individual criminals who are using the abandoned house for nefarious purposes (which isn't to say that we shouldn't try); sometimes the best solution is just to go after the person who owns the house and make them either fix it or raze it.
A compromise, which would avoid true strict liability, would be making it a positive defense that you took reasonable steps to secure a system; i.e. it was kept up-to-date with the latest vendor patches and was behind a firewall. But if you can't take those reasonable steps, or are too incompetent/lazy/ignorant to do it, maybe you shouldn't be on the net at all.
Erh... wouldn't an online update make this whole project kinda pointless?
The GP was joking, but actually I think it would be neat if you could create a local copy of WP, maybe not on optical disc, but rather on a hard drive or something, that you could continually update on an as-needed basis from the online copy, via rsync or some other smart protocol that only downloaded the differences between the existing and new files. It would be even better if you could make copies to the local copy and then re-sync it to the remote copy, applying your local changes to the remote pages (maybe only putting them up as 'suggestions' or something, to avoid mass-clobbering a lot of new material).
You could create kiosks, or just checkout copies of the DB and work on them for other projects, but then re-integrate them back upstream with all the changes. Given the number of projects that use WP as a basis, I think it could have a lot of possibilities.
Right now, if you create a WP spinoff project, you might start off with a DB dump and then improve on it, but chances are most of the changes are never going to flow back upstream; it's just too hard to apply them. If they took a cue from SVN or any of the other projects designed for change-tracking and management, they might be able to do a lot more while staying true to the goals of a wiki.
This would be consistent with Europe's history, and it seems they have not learned a thing from the history of their past 200 years.
I agree with you up until right there.
I think they have learned from the last 200 years -- but remember, the people currently in power are, indirectly at least, the winners of the past armed conflicts, in most cases. So on some deep level, they may not be that afraid of producing conflict, because mentally they'll always position themselves on the winning side.
I'm not sure that's the whole of the explanation (actually I'm sure it's not) but it's something to keep in mind whenever you see a government or group of people within a government that's gone through a lot of violent conflict, provoke more violent conflict -- since they see themselves as already having survived a lot of it, they commit a sort of reverse-gambler's-fallacy and assume they'll definitely win the next round.
What keeps people at the table, doing the democratic thing, is the fear that if push came to shove, they might lose.
Here's the original: http://www.digitalhome.ca/content/view/1799/1/ Basically, ExpressVu wanted to keep a lid on the fact that all the MPEG-2 receivers that are being sold today will soon be totally obsolete because they're transitioning to MPEG-4. What a bunch of slimebags.
Ironically, it was on Friday the 13th, too.
For that matter, I'm not sure that Apple's machine is really all that groundbreaking, either, which makes this after-the-fact, DIY article (which is nothing more than parts assembly; please, stop calling it "building" a computer) even less interesting.
I have a dual G5 (Early 2005, PCI) and the Xeon's just don't have me reaching for my wallet yet. So far, they're only advertising them as being 2x or 4x as fast as the G5s were, and I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that's on whatever benchmark favors them, and only for highly parallizable tasks.
All interesting stuff, but I think there are a lot of Mac owners that just aren't ready for another upgrade cycle, either because we caught the last of the big IBM space heaters or the first of the Intel machines, and I think they'll have to do a lot of talking to convince average users that they can benefit from the parallelism of an eight-way architecture.
I think that's definitely an Australian thing.
But from their perspective, I think you're absolutely right -- the more "domestic" content they have on their network (traffic that doesn't have to go through a peering/transit point to the U.S. or Asia), the less they have to pay in connection fees to other networks.
So for them, distributed P2P is great, at least compared to browsing MySpace or Slashdot or something else based in the U.S., Asia, or Europe.
I would think that they'd probably also do a lot of caching...set up a really massive transparent Squid system to keep people from pulling the same Google headline image down a million times a day through a transit point where they have to pay for the traffic. Heck, it's probably worth it to them to pay a company like Akamai to set up a presence on their network just to cut down on long-distance traffic.
I agree. I like the idea, but the article selection process is downright bizarre. I particularly like their selection under "Military Units" in the "History and War" section: the Lord's Resistance Army and the Japanese Imperial Navy. Okay ... not arguing that either are exactly unimportant ... but why those two?
I think they need to use some sort of better, more objective metric for inclusion. How about the most popular / most-often-viewed articles on WP? Or the ones created in the database first, back when WP was new? (Do they still have that data anymore?)
It may just be that 2,000 articles is too small to be anything but ridiculous. The Britannica DVD, by contrast, includes over 100,000 articles, and I don't think it's even representative of their entire database.
Overall, I applaud their efforts here, but I think they're just going to tarnish their own reputation by releasing this early. They should have held off and waited until they had a serious product -- one on DVD, that's somewhere comparable to commercial encyclopedia offerings on CD, at least in scope and breadth.
If somebody has 15 minutes of net connection, would he look at live versions of Wikipedia articles for those 15 minutes, or would he spend 15 minutes buying the disc to take home to use on his own computer without an Internet connection?
They'd spend 15 minutes looking at pornography.
Just wanted to say thanks -- this is one of the better summaries of, and responses to the more common objections regarding, GPLv3, that I've seen.
Someone said Moglen is the Thomas Jefferson of the information age, and I'm inclined to agree.
So does that mean Theo de Raadt is the Aaron Burr?
I bet apple could give they systems away for free and you PC Nicks will still find a way to show that macs are more expensive then PCs
It's the TCO, man! The purchase price hardly matter! Everyone knows that....
It's not their methodology that I question, it's their eyesight.
There are some seriously shit pictures in that article. I mean, really bad. They might be acceptable for eBay, but then again, I used to use a 680x480 toy that downloaded over the serial port for taking photos for eBay. It's not exactly a high standard.
With the exception of the Nokia N95, which I do admit is impressive for a camera phone, the natural light photos are terribly yellow. They remark "the colours came out fairly balanced if not a little yellow..." about the top one of these two images. A little yellow? Look, Mr M&M there looks like he needs to get on dialysis, because his kidneys are shot. There's no white balance at all. It's tough to take the rest of their conclusions seriously when that's all they have to say there.
With the flash on, it gets the color right (apparently it's just hardwired for the 5000K flash or whatever it has in there), but all the highlights blow out -- and it's not even that high-contrast a scene. I'd hate to see what would have happened on a black background.
The N95 is, admittedly, impressive with its flash turned off. It's a pretty passable image at that resolution. I don't have much negative to say about it. But the flash image below, which they describe as "vibrant"...? I'm not sure 'oversaturated' covers it; it's bordering on ridiculous. It's not even attractive oversaturation, like you might get on some consumer films designed for that effect (Agfa Ultra, Velvia, etc.), or by playing in photoshop; it's just ugly.
Now, granted, in the 400D's photos (last page), they're doing something wrong in the available-light shot, because although they say they're using the automatic settings, it's obviously not auto-white-balancing, and I know that camera will do that in its automatic modes. Leaving that aside, the flash shot beats anything out of any of those cellphones, by a large margin. The lighting is pretty even (there are a few hot spots on the cat, but given that it was straight front flash, it could be worse), the highlights aren't blown, the colors are realistic, and the shadow detail is good.
The photos tell the tale far better than their narrative does: you get what you pay for.
True. In my (admittedly limited) experience though, IBM hardware generally gets aimed at organizations whose IT budgets are already fairly big (I won't say "bloated"), and are paying through the nose for support already.
If you're looking at commodity servers and supporting them yourself, you're probably not going to look at IBM; their customers are going to be choosing between IBM pSeries, and maybe Sun's high-end SPARC gear, or maybe HP 9000 series stuff. They're probably migrating up from superminis with atrocious support costs anyway (and they may only be migrating because their superminis are being EOLed -- I've run into lots of organizations who were perfectly okay paying the support for their legacy gear, until it was no longer supported), so a $100k IBM system could easily look like a savings over 5 years when you consolidate a dozen "small iron" Unix boxes onto it.
I'm not exactly sure how they would find a cost savings if you were already just using cheap x86 servers, though. I guess they'd probably say 'consolidation,' but I don't know exactly how many commodity pizza-boxes you'd need to consolidate to pay for the TCO on a pSeries... I guarantee though if you called an IBM sales rep, they'd be able to make the numbers work, somehow.
IBM's own page on "Why Linux on the POWER?" is fairly interesting: I think they're going for PHB appeal here. The idea is that you have one machine, one support contract, to one company, and that's the end of that. (In theory.)
The high-voltage DC systems may be different, but at least with AC, making the conductors thicker doesn't really help that much past a certain point.
... so you need to space them out at least a few diameters away from each other (assumedly this depends on the voltage in the wires).
I think it's actually a surface-area dependency rather than a cross-section one; that's why you see big high-tension power lines with multiple sets of small conductors rather than one really big one. Multiple small conductors give you more surface area and less weight (and cost in copper). This is due to the skin effect.
However you can't just pack multiple conductors next to each other, because there are other effects which will cancel out the gains if you put the individual conductors too close
I'm sure they're all basically solved engineering problems; it's basically an economics question how many conductors you hang and what kind of loss you find acceptable. I can only think that there are probably a lot of inefficiencies in the power grid today that were the result of decisions made back decades ago when power was cheaper in certain places.
I'll take socialism over laissez-faire capitalism any day of the week. How's your heating bill?
... or haven't you ever gone out to a big business lunch where it was known that you'd just be splitting the check equally? People are pigs when there's an incentive for them to consume more than the next guy.
A whole lot better than it would be if we were just splitting the bill equally between everyone in my town
If everyone pays the same for water, then there's no reason for me not to just let the tap run when I'm brushing my teeth, or install a more efficient washer, or anything else. I'm not going to bother to install a timed thermostat, and if it's between cranking the heat and putting on a sweater, I'll just crank the heat -- why not? It'll cost virtually the same amount anyway.
Those are the sort of inefficiencies and waste that 'socialist' schemes lead to, and in the end, we're all poorer for it.