I bet that's probably about right. If you exclude the number of them that are destroyed in accidents/fires/floods, etc., most modern cars last a lot longer than many people realize.
You don't see cars at the end of their lifespan in the U.S., generally, because we export them. IIRC, used cars are one of our biggest exports to Mexico and Latin America.
It would be interesting if someone wanted to trace the lifespan of an 'average vehicle' that didn't get offed by a bad driver before its time and was well maintained throughout. I suspect it's something like this: 0 - 100 miles: Test drive at factory, sitting on dealer lot. 100 - 30,000 miles: first owner, maybe on a 2 or 3 year lease. 30,000 - 150,000 miles: Second owner, or maybe multiple owners. Eventually traded in, sold to wholesaler. If still in good condition, exported. 150,000 - 300,000 miles: Mexican taxi. Parts get replaced as they wear out and break. 300,000+ miles: When body finally rusts through, strip for parts. Scrap remainder.
You don't see a ton of quarter-million-mile cars in Suburbia, USA, but in some places they're pretty desirable.
I figured this was just here, because it's been a feature of Mac OS in virtually every version since 10.2, released 2002 IIRC.
It's called "Archive and Install," and it did exactly what's being described. It moved the old system into a folder and then installed a fresh copy on the root level of the HD.
To be honest, I'm rather surprised if this is the first time Windows has offered such a feature. Given the seeming regularity with which Windows seems to like being reinstalled it seems like a no-brainer. How many focus groups did it take them to come up with this?
That's the first real main stream didgital format and it has not yet reached the point where we have to move data off of it for fear of it being unreadable.
Erm... say again?
There are terabytes (quite literally tons) of data sitting around on everything from old 7- and 9-track 1/2" open reel tape, to old 8" and 5-1/4" floppies, and other formats that are basically dead. [I'm not familiar with anything older than that, but I'm sure there are some real greybeards around that could enlighten you as to what came after punchcards but before the vac-column tape drives.] The only saving grace of those formats is that if you can find a reader, there's a chance it might either still work, or could be made to work, if you could find a compatible computer to interface it to (because the machines themselves were built pretty well; they were still viewed as industrial equipment of a sort, rather than consumer electronics). But the expense of doing that would be enormous -- the people who know how to maintain, and increasingly to operate, those things are retiring and becoming hard to find.
And analog formats aren't exactly immune, either. Where I used to work, we had several boxes of old video recordings on 2" quad that we were storing for preservation purposes, but couldn't afford to have transferred to another medium (despite the obvious: that the longer you wait, the more expensive it's going to get if you ever do really want it). That format was used for over 20 years; there's got to be thousands of hours of it sitting around.
Even if you define 'mainstream' to be something that an average person could afford, CDs certainly weren't first; lots of people had PCs with various types of digital storage.
But to only focus on 'mainstream' formats misses the point entirely. Stuff that's been distributed out to millions of people isn't what's at risk of disappearing; it's the original source material (think NASA's Apollo videos), or information that's naturally stored in big 'silos' (think public records) that's really at risk, and those have been stored in a plethora of formats, digital and analog, over the past 50-75 years, which are difficult to work with today.
Wow -- well, that's the coolest thing I've seen today. And what's more, it's been going on since for close to 10 years now (with only five mentions on Slashdot, including one article back in 2000).
My first questions are whether the P2P scheme it uses for replicating and repairing data is centralized (relies on a server somewhere to track all the nodes and make them aware of each other) or decentralized; because that seems like a potential SPOF. But even if it is, it's still a great project. It's obnoxious that it has to go through so many hoops (getting permission from the journal publishers) before it can start archiving journals, since libraries don't need such permission to archive things in non-digital formats, but a hobbled system now is better than a great system never.
I think the same idea could easily be extended and combined with other concepts, like darknets, to make them more robust and survivable; I'm thinking specifically about repositories of information in places where the authorities may be hostile to uncontrolled press. I could imagine a group of people setting up a network of self-replicating servers in the same way that previous resistance organizations might have set up underground newspapers; with storage so cheap, each node could contain all the information (suitably encrypted and obfuscated) in the network to maximize survivability. If you had any idea that you'd been compromised, you'd just hose your node and not worry about actually destroying anything valuable.
Very interesting. I wasn't aware of that, and I'm now glad that I wasn't using VMWare in the NATed configuration (although, IIRC, that is the default!).
I prefer to let the VM's virtual network interface talk to the LAN and get its own DHCP lease and IP address, just to make it easier to determine what traffic is coming from the host and what's from the guest, if I want to analyze traffic at the router or somewhere else downstream. I'm not sure what VMWare's lingo is for this type of setup, but it's pretty trivial to change during the installation/setup process. For some reason they recommend the NATed setup, I suppose because some networks are configured to disallow more than one IP lease per physical Ethernet port, but as long as you control the LAN as well and have internal IPs to spare in your addressing scheme, you might as well not introduce the extra layer of NAT (or, it would seem, the security vulnerability).
I think you could replace "warez" with any number of NSFW porn terms and turn up the same things, and idiot users do troll for porn. And I'd argue that a lot of idiots who don't know what they're doing, end up at cracks/warez sites too ("hey, my friend said I can get expensive games for free..."); you're assuming a lot of intelligence on the part of people who are Googling for and clicking on the top results for obvious terms like "serial number crack" and the like.
But anyway, I really only included that step to guarantee a quick powning of the box; you could probably -- as you point out -- achieve the same result without clicking "OK," or even going to that many really obviously shady sites, just by browsing for long enough.
And although I've never tried it, I suspect you could also get easily hacked if you just put the VM's IP address in your firewall's DMZ, so that it's exposed to the public network, and then just walk away for a few hours. That's probably a more interesting experiment, but if you just want to see how messed-up you can get a Windows machine in 15 or 20 (or 3) minutes, the hack'n'crack sites are a guaranteed reservoir of nastiness.
I'm really curious -- how hard was it to get the Alesis working? I've been thinking for a while about getting something like that, and although I'd probably use it with a Mac first, I'm no longer buying hardware that's only tied to a proprietary OS. (The Company Formerly Known As Apple Computer is starting to make me a bit nervous with all this consumer-electronics stuff they seem to be concentrating on. But more than that, I don't want to get stuck working on an OS I hate because of peripherals that I stupidly bought without looking at broad compatibility.)
Was there a lot of mucking around involved in getting it working? Or was it plug-and-play? I've heard some mixed reviews on how the multichannel Firewire interfaces and mixers are currently supported, but there seems to be a little more standardization in USB Audio.
Also, have you tested the latency at all? I wonder what it would sound like if you were taking an input from the USB device and routing it out on your internal audio device to your monitors; the Mac is pretty good at this -- there are probably people out there that can tell, but to me it sounded like a straight-through analog connection.
This also is the response to the other big cry-wolf thing, "What happens when the data is in a format that's too old???!!11one" The answer is we just keep copying it to new formats. I have digital copies of papers that I wrote in high school. They were written on an old copy or Works for Windows 3.1 and usually saved to floppy. I don't have a floppy any more but it isn't a problem. I long ago transferred them to a harddrive and I just keep transferring them to new drives when I get them. I also periodically load the old documents in to whatever my current word processor is, convert them, and re-save them as a new format.
I think you're missing an important element here. As you move along in time, the volume of data that must be converted to the format du jour only gets bigger and bigger.
For a single person, it's probably not too bad. I, too, have pretty much everything I ever wrote since I first got a computer, and every few years I've committed to rolling the whole thing onto new media. So I've gone from offline backups on floppies, to Zip disks (in retrospect a mistake), to CDs, to DVD-R, and now to DVD+R (the -R discs were crappy and I've since heard that +R is a superior format anyway). This isn't much trouble, because the amount of data I have to backup hasn't really grown that much faster than the data density of available media. I'm probably up to a couple of DVDs for the stuff I really, really care about, maybe a binder if I include all the photos and video.
But what's a basic Saturday-afternoon copy-and-burn job for an individual is a Sisyphean task for a large government agency or library, particularly one who is constantly generating new content. I've seen places that could barely keep up with archiving the stuff they were producing, much less roll their vast archives forward onto new media. So they'd have vaults of hard drives, sitting next to DLT cassettes, next to IBM 3480, next to racks of old half-inch open-reel tapes. Probably back in some dark corner there were piles of punched cards; it really wouldn't surprise me. The problem of data loss due to unreadable formats isn't some abstract 'maybe,' it's already happened in a lot of places (but nobody really wants to talk about it, so it mostly gets buried and whatever's on the tapes gets written off).
The reason why there's so much interest in preservable formats is because while it may not be strictly impossible to constantly roll old backups and archives forward, it's very hard, and requires vast amounts of effort and expense. If you have a backup that's being written into a format that you know is going to be readable for a long time, even if it's more expensive to write initially, you can save a lot of money and time down the road by not having to copy it forward as often.
People may get a little shrill when they're talking about these issues, but they're quite real.
That's assuming that you have the P2P software installed and running, and moreover that you have the requisite knowledge of how to set up the P2P software, and to find out where you find the links to the actual files that you want to download using the software. Not to mention the cost of the broadband connection that we're assuming is available, and which I bet even the majority of people in the U.S. don't have.
All of that is non-trivial. There is an implied investment of time into the endeavor, that might be a 'sunk cost' to a computer geek, but wouldn't be to someone who wasn't interested in computers as a hobby. To them, just going to a place where they know movies are sold, and buying one, might be a lot easier (particularly if they're only interested in a small number of pirated titles, infrequently).
Now, if you don't live down the street from a Pirate Mart, it's probably easier to fire up Google and start reading about how to install P2P software than to drive to a major city where you might presumably find pirated discs for sale. But the rural equivalent of the 'physical pirate' is to just find a local computer geek and ask him/her to do the downloading for you and put it on a disc, and I think that's what happens pretty frequently in the U.S.
But then, what do I know... from where I stand, capitalism seems to be based on the principle of getting something for nothing as much and as often as you can.
If you really wanted to sum up Capitalism with a one liner, you're fairly close, but really, it's a system where everybody tries to get the best deal for themselves, at every possible opportunity.
AllofMP3 succeeds because it offers individual purchasers a better value than alternatives. It offers a wide selection of tracks, in a variety of formats, with a not-too-shoddy interface, at a very good price. Other services either have less selection of music (eMusic), or have fewer/less-flexible formats (iTunes), crummy interfaces, high prices, or combinations thereof. Sure, they also have the Department of Justice Seal of Approval, but frankly the value added there is pretty low. (And at least last time I checked, the AllofMP3 folks insisted they were legitimate, using the argument that you're 'buying' the tracks in Russia, where they're legit with the Copyright organization, and then importing them into the U.S. electronically. But this is irrelevant, because most people don't care if something as abstract as international copyright infringement is illegal except insofar as it's likely to get them arrested or in trouble.)
But anyway, you are chiefly correct: one major assumption in the capitalist system is that all actors will approach each transaction with the goal of getting the best deal for themselves. FWIW, I think this is a pretty solid assumption. (Even in economies that aren't generally regarded as 'capitalist' if you go down to 'street level' and actually look at what individual people are doing, it's mostly the same.)
Sometime when you're looking for an evening's entertainment (and not in the company of others, unless they also find this sort of thing terribly interesting), fire up a VMWare VM and load it up with Windows XP SP1, then fire up Internet Explorer and browse around. For fastest results, be sure to hit up some of the seedier side of the internet -- a quick Google for "serial numbers" will get you malware-ridden sites within the first few results. Then, just hit yourself on the head or otherwise simulate a stupid/ignorant user, and click "OK" to anything the computer prompts at you for a few minutes.
In short order, you will probably have so much adware, malware, Trojans, and keyloggers on the VM, it's nearly impossible to ever clean it out (AFAIK you really can't with any reliability say that a machine once rooted is 'clean' until you zero the drive and reinstall from media). Monitoring the network connections and traffic that the VM makes is also pretty interesting. (Its easiest if you set up the VM's virtual interface with a different IP than the host machine's physical interface.)
If you want to go for a second round, Google "adware removal" and download or run the first half-dozen or so tools that you see; chances are at least some of them will make the problem worse.
The benefit of doing this in a VM is you can trivially roll the system back to an uncorrupted state, and just banish the thing altogether when you're done entertaining yourself. It really caused me to appreciate two things: one, reminding me why I don't use that OS at home, and two, the absolutely ridiculous amount of effort that must be spent (patching, updating, firewalling, antivirusing, user training) to keep the billions of Windows machines that people depend on from succumbing to the same fate in a matter of minutes.
Anyone who doesn't use Windows on a regular basis should do that every year or so, if only for the "there, but for the grace of God..." value.
I'm not in favor of censoring video games or anything. You don't really know what activities are going to do for people. Maybe playing football would make one guy feel accustomed to violence and more likely to hit someone, while it might give another guy some sort of an outlet which prevents him from being violent. The government shouldn't take over responsibility for deciding which experiences are appropriate for people to have.
And that, of course, is the key issue. Jack Thompson, et al, want to regulate what everyone can do, based on the small percentage of people who apparently can't handle the fine distinction between fantasy and reality.
It's all part of the increasing tend towards nanny-stateism, and in my opinion a direct product of many people's lack of faith in the ability of other people around them. If you think that everyone around you is an idiot unfit to make decisions for themselves, it's easier to rationalize giving control over everyone's lives up to some jackbooted Authority Figure.
Could have been I was looking in the wrong stores, but back in the mid 90s I definitely remember going into Suncoast / Sam Goody / similar places (which is where I used to buy videos, prior to the internet and the construction of the local Walmart and similar discount stores) and seeing prices for DVDs that were definitely over $20, and a significant premium above VHS for the same titles. They were probably fairly recent releases, but there wasn't much in the way of a back catalog at that point on DVD.
Maybe they were cheaper before then, and spiked up at about the time I bought my first player (I skipped the first generation of machines), but I ignored the whole business early on.
This is a valid point. Although, allofmp3.com is in a fairly unique situation -- they offer not an inferior product to legitimate versions, but an actually superior one, at a better price, with an interface that's arguably as easy if not easier to use, than most legitimate services. The black/grey market rarely has the white beat on so many fronts at once. Usually, in order to get the cheap price, you need to compromise on quality or convenience (need to go to sketchy part of town / flea market, etc.), so that it's only a certain segment of consumers (usually, those who place a low value on their time) who get the pirated version. But allofmp3.com has the legitimate outlets so thoroughly beaten -- or rather, the legitimate outlets suck just that damn badly, and cost so much -- that it can draw consumers from all across demographics, and not just the downmarket (cheap) segment.
I think they still do sell burned CDs down in Chinatown. Not sure what the selection is like (if your taste doesn't run to Japanese pop or Bollywood showtunes, may be out of luck), but I'm pretty sure they're there, if you know where to look.
Heck, the last time I was in NYC, there were still people down in Chinatown selling bootlegged cassette tapes, and this was only a few years ago. Their stock looked a bit... dusty, but it was still out there.
Bingo. I think this is a big part of it. Physical piracy was a bigger industry back when DVDs were more expensive. Anyone remember when those things first came out? They were downright extortionate. When a legit copy ran $25 at Suncoast, a $5 pirate copy looked pretty attractive. But when you can get a wide selection of movies at Walmart for under $10, there's not a whole lot of room for pirates.
Black markets thrive on high markups. When the whitemarket's profit margins collapse, the blackmarket gets squeezed out (well, not hardly -- they move on to other things where the markups are still high).
I suspect that DVD videos would be a tough sell in the First World (probably less so in other parts of the world, where the cost of a movie relative to other goods, like food, is much higher), however, higher-margin information products like expensive software (Photoshop, Logic, etc.) will still be widely pirated and counterfeited, in both electronic/P2P and physical forms.
The situation outlined in TFA is interesting precisely because it runs contrary to what you might expect, namely that people would be too lazy to actually download multi-GB files themselves. But the story shows that this indeed is the case; at least the people who are cheap enough to buy pirated software at flea markets put a low enough value on their time to download the stuff themselves in order to avoid even the minimal cost of pirated discs.
I'm not sure what the lesson is here. There's a big question in my mind whether lessons from the 'grey (or black) market' can be taken as indicative of movements in the regular 'white market' -- online distribution probably is a lot more attractive to the kind of low-rent geeks who are buying hot software at flea markets than to very busy middle-classers with little time to spare or technical expertise.
Ignorance is rarely bliss, at least in my opinion. A very large percentage of my, and I'd wager most people's, life, involves doing things that aren't precisely enjoyable for some future gain.
If I knew I was only going to live another six months, you can damn well bet that I wouldn't be showing up for work on Monday. It's not that I dislike my job, precisely, but I don't go there for entertainment. There are a whole lot of other things I'd like to do that would by far take priority.
It's not a question of just going out and buying an expensive car, it's going out and doing all the things that I had planned on doing over the course of a lifetime, without the financial or logistical burden of actually feeding, clothing, and housing myself for the next 50-odd years.
If you are literally living your life as if you might die in a handful of months, congratulations.
I know I'm not. If I knew that I wasn't going to live to be 40, I'd be living quite differently. I sure wouldn't be squirreling money away into my IRA with quite the gusto I'm now doing it, for starters.
It's because the manufacturers figured out that people don't really care about pixel resolution; they only look at the size of the screen.
I.e., most people will look at a 17" screen and assume that it must be better than a 15" screen, because it's bigger. The size is the only metric that they'll use.
So, manufacturers have responded by building absurdly large screens into notebooks, and dropping the resolutions further and further down in order to cut costs.
I suspect they went with GSM because it's the system that the rest of the world uses, meaning that you could go out and buy handsets on the domestic market when you run short (assuming you have the SIM cards to plug into them). Also makes it easier to cooperate with locals, who probably already have GSM phones.
It's the same reason the military switched to using 5.56 and 9mm ammunition; it makes sense to have everyone using equipment, at least, that speaks the same language, and not drag some national standard halfway around the world, so that you're dependent on a parts chain that's tens of thousands of miles long, without any way to help yourself out of a bind.
And the GSM standard specifies encryption; I'm not sure how robust it is (IIRC there's some problem with its implementation -- weak IVs maybe?), and it sounds like the system supports some form of real end-to-end encryption if you're using supported equipment.
Plus, the protection provided by CDMA sounds awfully like obfuscation; I suspect that it's not enough to swing the balance of features away from a global standard.
My impression from the article is that it is about using commercial networks. This is fine for FEMA, but not something I see the military using. It looks like a solution chasing a problem to me.
Not at all. A vast portion of the military isn't in the "spearhead," the people who are actually in contact with the enemy, it's in the shaft driving it: all the logistics / supply chain / transportation / etc.
That's where something like this would be really good for. You don't need everyone back in the rear using tactical, encrypted, frequency-hopping radios to call back to the mess tent to find out whether they're out of canned beans, or other stuff like that. First, because it's godawful expensive to provision everyone back there with expensive field gear, and second, because it creates interference and frequency-allocation problems with people who do have a legitimate use for the more advanced stuff.
A friend of mine just got back from a tour with the USMC in Iraq, and they had honest-to-god wire-line field phones (ones like this, although they were slightly more modern, probably Vietnam or Korea-era, not WWII) running between different positions within their FOB, because nobody wanted "housekeeping" traffic and banter on the tactical radios, and they were short on them and wanted to save them for patrols.
So there's definitely a need for this. Plus, in any modern (U.S.) war zone, you have tons and tons of non-military support personnel, contractors and DA civilians and USG employees and the rest, and it's a lot easier for them if they can just use regular cellphones to communicate with each other, than if they have to be given radios (and training on how to use them, or for high-ranking/value people, their own RTO to follow them around).
Being able to rapidly deploy a cell-phone network behind an army as it moves forwards, so that everyone behind the lines can just use regular consumer cell gear, would be a big step forward.
There are a lot of generally dumb, wasteful, and/or stupid ideas that get put forward by people looking to score a buck from the government, but I think this is one that could really have a lot of promise.
Yeah, you're right... the last time I was in Germany, it seemed like you couldn't go ten feet without tripping over a Döner stand/shop. Actually, I've always been surprised that it's not more popular here in the 'States. I mean, it's got some vegetables in it, you could pass it off as "healthy" (*snort*...but there's a sucker born every minute, right?).
Man, I could go for a Döner right now, actually. I'd probably just lose interest somewhere over the Atlantic, though.
Tens of millions of pages, perhaps, but every one that I've ever seen is ugly as sin.
A while back there was a band I was interested in, but instead of having a real web page, they just liked to their myspace profile. I gave it a good five-minute try, which is far longer than I'd normally give a poorly-designed page, and I couldn't figure out how to extract any usable information from it.
You call it a stereotype, but I say the truth is an absolute defense. As far as I've seen, Myspace is a pit.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet that's probably about right. If you exclude the number of them that are destroyed in accidents/fires/floods, etc., most modern cars last a lot longer than many people realize.
You don't see cars at the end of their lifespan in the U.S., generally, because we export them. IIRC, used cars are one of our biggest exports to Mexico and Latin America.
It would be interesting if someone wanted to trace the lifespan of an 'average vehicle' that didn't get offed by a bad driver before its time and was well maintained throughout. I suspect it's something like this:
0 - 100 miles: Test drive at factory, sitting on dealer lot.
100 - 30,000 miles: first owner, maybe on a 2 or 3 year lease.
30,000 - 150,000 miles: Second owner, or maybe multiple owners. Eventually traded in, sold to wholesaler. If still in good condition, exported.
150,000 - 300,000 miles: Mexican taxi. Parts get replaced as they wear out and break.
300,000+ miles: When body finally rusts through, strip for parts. Scrap remainder.
You don't see a ton of quarter-million-mile cars in Suburbia, USA, but in some places they're pretty desirable.
I figured this was just here, because it's been a feature of Mac OS in virtually every version since 10.2, released 2002 IIRC.
It's called "Archive and Install," and it did exactly what's being described. It moved the old system into a folder and then installed a fresh copy on the root level of the HD.
To be honest, I'm rather surprised if this is the first time Windows has offered such a feature. Given the seeming regularity with which Windows seems to like being reinstalled it seems like a no-brainer. How many focus groups did it take them to come up with this?
That's the first real main stream didgital format and it has not yet reached the point where we have to move data off of it for fear of it being unreadable.
... say again?
Erm
There are terabytes (quite literally tons) of data sitting around on everything from old 7- and 9-track 1/2" open reel tape, to old 8" and 5-1/4" floppies, and other formats that are basically dead. [I'm not familiar with anything older than that, but I'm sure there are some real greybeards around that could enlighten you as to what came after punchcards but before the vac-column tape drives.] The only saving grace of those formats is that if you can find a reader, there's a chance it might either still work, or could be made to work, if you could find a compatible computer to interface it to (because the machines themselves were built pretty well; they were still viewed as industrial equipment of a sort, rather than consumer electronics). But the expense of doing that would be enormous -- the people who know how to maintain, and increasingly to operate, those things are retiring and becoming hard to find.
And analog formats aren't exactly immune, either. Where I used to work, we had several boxes of old video recordings on 2" quad that we were storing for preservation purposes, but couldn't afford to have transferred to another medium (despite the obvious: that the longer you wait, the more expensive it's going to get if you ever do really want it). That format was used for over 20 years; there's got to be thousands of hours of it sitting around.
Even if you define 'mainstream' to be something that an average person could afford, CDs certainly weren't first; lots of people had PCs with various types of digital storage.
But to only focus on 'mainstream' formats misses the point entirely. Stuff that's been distributed out to millions of people isn't what's at risk of disappearing; it's the original source material (think NASA's Apollo videos), or information that's naturally stored in big 'silos' (think public records) that's really at risk, and those have been stored in a plethora of formats, digital and analog, over the past 50-75 years, which are difficult to work with today.
Wow -- well, that's the coolest thing I've seen today. And what's more, it's been going on since for close to 10 years now (with only five mentions on Slashdot, including one article back in 2000).
My first questions are whether the P2P scheme it uses for replicating and repairing data is centralized (relies on a server somewhere to track all the nodes and make them aware of each other) or decentralized; because that seems like a potential SPOF. But even if it is, it's still a great project. It's obnoxious that it has to go through so many hoops (getting permission from the journal publishers) before it can start archiving journals, since libraries don't need such permission to archive things in non-digital formats, but a hobbled system now is better than a great system never.
I think the same idea could easily be extended and combined with other concepts, like darknets, to make them more robust and survivable; I'm thinking specifically about repositories of information in places where the authorities may be hostile to uncontrolled press. I could imagine a group of people setting up a network of self-replicating servers in the same way that previous resistance organizations might have set up underground newspapers; with storage so cheap, each node could contain all the information (suitably encrypted and obfuscated) in the network to maximize survivability. If you had any idea that you'd been compromised, you'd just hose your node and not worry about actually destroying anything valuable.
Very interesting. I wasn't aware of that, and I'm now glad that I wasn't using VMWare in the NATed configuration (although, IIRC, that is the default!).
I prefer to let the VM's virtual network interface talk to the LAN and get its own DHCP lease and IP address, just to make it easier to determine what traffic is coming from the host and what's from the guest, if I want to analyze traffic at the router or somewhere else downstream. I'm not sure what VMWare's lingo is for this type of setup, but it's pretty trivial to change during the installation/setup process. For some reason they recommend the NATed setup, I suppose because some networks are configured to disallow more than one IP lease per physical Ethernet port, but as long as you control the LAN as well and have internal IPs to spare in your addressing scheme, you might as well not introduce the extra layer of NAT (or, it would seem, the security vulnerability).
I think you could replace "warez" with any number of NSFW porn terms and turn up the same things, and idiot users do troll for porn. And I'd argue that a lot of idiots who don't know what they're doing, end up at cracks/warez sites too ("hey, my friend said I can get expensive games for free..."); you're assuming a lot of intelligence on the part of people who are Googling for and clicking on the top results for obvious terms like "serial number crack" and the like.
But anyway, I really only included that step to guarantee a quick powning of the box; you could probably -- as you point out -- achieve the same result without clicking "OK," or even going to that many really obviously shady sites, just by browsing for long enough.
And although I've never tried it, I suspect you could also get easily hacked if you just put the VM's IP address in your firewall's DMZ, so that it's exposed to the public network, and then just walk away for a few hours. That's probably a more interesting experiment, but if you just want to see how messed-up you can get a Windows machine in 15 or 20 (or 3) minutes, the hack'n'crack sites are a guaranteed reservoir of nastiness.
I'm really curious -- how hard was it to get the Alesis working? I've been thinking for a while about getting something like that, and although I'd probably use it with a Mac first, I'm no longer buying hardware that's only tied to a proprietary OS. (The Company Formerly Known As Apple Computer is starting to make me a bit nervous with all this consumer-electronics stuff they seem to be concentrating on. But more than that, I don't want to get stuck working on an OS I hate because of peripherals that I stupidly bought without looking at broad compatibility.)
Was there a lot of mucking around involved in getting it working? Or was it plug-and-play? I've heard some mixed reviews on how the multichannel Firewire interfaces and mixers are currently supported, but there seems to be a little more standardization in USB Audio.
Also, have you tested the latency at all? I wonder what it would sound like if you were taking an input from the USB device and routing it out on your internal audio device to your monitors; the Mac is pretty good at this -- there are probably people out there that can tell, but to me it sounded like a straight-through analog connection.
This also is the response to the other big cry-wolf thing, "What happens when the data is in a format that's too old???!!11one" The answer is we just keep copying it to new formats. I have digital copies of papers that I wrote in high school. They were written on an old copy or Works for Windows 3.1 and usually saved to floppy. I don't have a floppy any more but it isn't a problem. I long ago transferred them to a harddrive and I just keep transferring them to new drives when I get them. I also periodically load the old documents in to whatever my current word processor is, convert them, and re-save them as a new format.
I think you're missing an important element here. As you move along in time, the volume of data that must be converted to the format du jour only gets bigger and bigger.
For a single person, it's probably not too bad. I, too, have pretty much everything I ever wrote since I first got a computer, and every few years I've committed to rolling the whole thing onto new media. So I've gone from offline backups on floppies, to Zip disks (in retrospect a mistake), to CDs, to DVD-R, and now to DVD+R (the -R discs were crappy and I've since heard that +R is a superior format anyway). This isn't much trouble, because the amount of data I have to backup hasn't really grown that much faster than the data density of available media. I'm probably up to a couple of DVDs for the stuff I really, really care about, maybe a binder if I include all the photos and video.
But what's a basic Saturday-afternoon copy-and-burn job for an individual is a Sisyphean task for a large government agency or library, particularly one who is constantly generating new content. I've seen places that could barely keep up with archiving the stuff they were producing, much less roll their vast archives forward onto new media. So they'd have vaults of hard drives, sitting next to DLT cassettes, next to IBM 3480, next to racks of old half-inch open-reel tapes. Probably back in some dark corner there were piles of punched cards; it really wouldn't surprise me. The problem of data loss due to unreadable formats isn't some abstract 'maybe,' it's already happened in a lot of places (but nobody really wants to talk about it, so it mostly gets buried and whatever's on the tapes gets written off).
The reason why there's so much interest in preservable formats is because while it may not be strictly impossible to constantly roll old backups and archives forward, it's very hard, and requires vast amounts of effort and expense. If you have a backup that's being written into a format that you know is going to be readable for a long time, even if it's more expensive to write initially, you can save a lot of money and time down the road by not having to copy it forward as often.
People may get a little shrill when they're talking about these issues, but they're quite real.
That's assuming that you have the P2P software installed and running, and moreover that you have the requisite knowledge of how to set up the P2P software, and to find out where you find the links to the actual files that you want to download using the software. Not to mention the cost of the broadband connection that we're assuming is available, and which I bet even the majority of people in the U.S. don't have.
All of that is non-trivial. There is an implied investment of time into the endeavor, that might be a 'sunk cost' to a computer geek, but wouldn't be to someone who wasn't interested in computers as a hobby. To them, just going to a place where they know movies are sold, and buying one, might be a lot easier (particularly if they're only interested in a small number of pirated titles, infrequently).
Now, if you don't live down the street from a Pirate Mart, it's probably easier to fire up Google and start reading about how to install P2P software than to drive to a major city where you might presumably find pirated discs for sale. But the rural equivalent of the 'physical pirate' is to just find a local computer geek and ask him/her to do the downloading for you and put it on a disc, and I think that's what happens pretty frequently in the U.S.
But then, what do I know... from where I stand, capitalism seems to be based on the principle of getting something for nothing as much and as often as you can.
If you really wanted to sum up Capitalism with a one liner, you're fairly close, but really, it's a system where everybody tries to get the best deal for themselves, at every possible opportunity.
AllofMP3 succeeds because it offers individual purchasers a better value than alternatives. It offers a wide selection of tracks, in a variety of formats, with a not-too-shoddy interface, at a very good price. Other services either have less selection of music (eMusic), or have fewer/less-flexible formats (iTunes), crummy interfaces, high prices, or combinations thereof. Sure, they also have the Department of Justice Seal of Approval, but frankly the value added there is pretty low. (And at least last time I checked, the AllofMP3 folks insisted they were legitimate, using the argument that you're 'buying' the tracks in Russia, where they're legit with the Copyright organization, and then importing them into the U.S. electronically. But this is irrelevant, because most people don't care if something as abstract as international copyright infringement is illegal except insofar as it's likely to get them arrested or in trouble.)
But anyway, you are chiefly correct: one major assumption in the capitalist system is that all actors will approach each transaction with the goal of getting the best deal for themselves. FWIW, I think this is a pretty solid assumption. (Even in economies that aren't generally regarded as 'capitalist' if you go down to 'street level' and actually look at what individual people are doing, it's mostly the same.)
Sometime when you're looking for an evening's entertainment (and not in the company of others, unless they also find this sort of thing terribly interesting), fire up a VMWare VM and load it up with Windows XP SP1, then fire up Internet Explorer and browse around. For fastest results, be sure to hit up some of the seedier side of the internet -- a quick Google for "serial numbers" will get you malware-ridden sites within the first few results. Then, just hit yourself on the head or otherwise simulate a stupid/ignorant user, and click "OK" to anything the computer prompts at you for a few minutes.
In short order, you will probably have so much adware, malware, Trojans, and keyloggers on the VM, it's nearly impossible to ever clean it out (AFAIK you really can't with any reliability say that a machine once rooted is 'clean' until you zero the drive and reinstall from media). Monitoring the network connections and traffic that the VM makes is also pretty interesting. (Its easiest if you set up the VM's virtual interface with a different IP than the host machine's physical interface.)
If you want to go for a second round, Google "adware removal" and download or run the first half-dozen or so tools that you see; chances are at least some of them will make the problem worse.
The benefit of doing this in a VM is you can trivially roll the system back to an uncorrupted state, and just banish the thing altogether when you're done entertaining yourself. It really caused me to appreciate two things: one, reminding me why I don't use that OS at home, and two, the absolutely ridiculous amount of effort that must be spent (patching, updating, firewalling, antivirusing, user training) to keep the billions of Windows machines that people depend on from succumbing to the same fate in a matter of minutes.
Anyone who doesn't use Windows on a regular basis should do that every year or so, if only for the "there, but for the grace of God..." value.
I'm not in favor of censoring video games or anything. You don't really know what activities are going to do for people. Maybe playing football would make one guy feel accustomed to violence and more likely to hit someone, while it might give another guy some sort of an outlet which prevents him from being violent. The government shouldn't take over responsibility for deciding which experiences are appropriate for people to have.
And that, of course, is the key issue. Jack Thompson, et al, want to regulate what everyone can do, based on the small percentage of people who apparently can't handle the fine distinction between fantasy and reality.
It's all part of the increasing tend towards nanny-stateism, and in my opinion a direct product of many people's lack of faith in the ability of other people around them. If you think that everyone around you is an idiot unfit to make decisions for themselves, it's easier to rationalize giving control over everyone's lives up to some jackbooted Authority Figure.
Could have been I was looking in the wrong stores, but back in the mid 90s I definitely remember going into Suncoast / Sam Goody / similar places (which is where I used to buy videos, prior to the internet and the construction of the local Walmart and similar discount stores) and seeing prices for DVDs that were definitely over $20, and a significant premium above VHS for the same titles. They were probably fairly recent releases, but there wasn't much in the way of a back catalog at that point on DVD.
Maybe they were cheaper before then, and spiked up at about the time I bought my first player (I skipped the first generation of machines), but I ignored the whole business early on.
This is a valid point. Although, allofmp3.com is in a fairly unique situation -- they offer not an inferior product to legitimate versions, but an actually superior one, at a better price, with an interface that's arguably as easy if not easier to use, than most legitimate services. The black/grey market rarely has the white beat on so many fronts at once. Usually, in order to get the cheap price, you need to compromise on quality or convenience (need to go to sketchy part of town / flea market, etc.), so that it's only a certain segment of consumers (usually, those who place a low value on their time) who get the pirated version. But allofmp3.com has the legitimate outlets so thoroughly beaten -- or rather, the legitimate outlets suck just that damn badly, and cost so much -- that it can draw consumers from all across demographics, and not just the downmarket (cheap) segment.
I think they still do sell burned CDs down in Chinatown. Not sure what the selection is like (if your taste doesn't run to Japanese pop or Bollywood showtunes, may be out of luck), but I'm pretty sure they're there, if you know where to look.
... dusty, but it was still out there.
Heck, the last time I was in NYC, there were still people down in Chinatown selling bootlegged cassette tapes, and this was only a few years ago. Their stock looked a bit
Bingo. I think this is a big part of it. Physical piracy was a bigger industry back when DVDs were more expensive. Anyone remember when those things first came out? They were downright extortionate. When a legit copy ran $25 at Suncoast, a $5 pirate copy looked pretty attractive. But when you can get a wide selection of movies at Walmart for under $10, there's not a whole lot of room for pirates.
Black markets thrive on high markups. When the whitemarket's profit margins collapse, the blackmarket gets squeezed out (well, not hardly -- they move on to other things where the markups are still high).
I suspect that DVD videos would be a tough sell in the First World (probably less so in other parts of the world, where the cost of a movie relative to other goods, like food, is much higher), however, higher-margin information products like expensive software (Photoshop, Logic, etc.) will still be widely pirated and counterfeited, in both electronic/P2P and physical forms.
I have no idea why this is modded 'Redundant.'
The situation outlined in TFA is interesting precisely because it runs contrary to what you might expect, namely that people would be too lazy to actually download multi-GB files themselves. But the story shows that this indeed is the case; at least the people who are cheap enough to buy pirated software at flea markets put a low enough value on their time to download the stuff themselves in order to avoid even the minimal cost of pirated discs.
I'm not sure what the lesson is here. There's a big question in my mind whether lessons from the 'grey (or black) market' can be taken as indicative of movements in the regular 'white market' -- online distribution probably is a lot more attractive to the kind of low-rent geeks who are buying hot software at flea markets than to very busy middle-classers with little time to spare or technical expertise.
Ignorance is rarely bliss, at least in my opinion. A very large percentage of my, and I'd wager most people's, life, involves doing things that aren't precisely enjoyable for some future gain.
If I knew I was only going to live another six months, you can damn well bet that I wouldn't be showing up for work on Monday. It's not that I dislike my job, precisely, but I don't go there for entertainment. There are a whole lot of other things I'd like to do that would by far take priority.
It's not a question of just going out and buying an expensive car, it's going out and doing all the things that I had planned on doing over the course of a lifetime, without the financial or logistical burden of actually feeding, clothing, and housing myself for the next 50-odd years.
If you are literally living your life as if you might die in a handful of months, congratulations.
I know I'm not. If I knew that I wasn't going to live to be 40, I'd be living quite differently. I sure wouldn't be squirreling money away into my IRA with quite the gusto I'm now doing it, for starters.
Color me impressed, but IBM took some of the most obtuse and obtrusive things in windows and smoothed them out perfectly!
...
Yes, I think they called it OS/2
Oh, wait, that's not what you were talking about. Nevermind.
It's because the manufacturers figured out that people don't really care about pixel resolution; they only look at the size of the screen.
I.e., most people will look at a 17" screen and assume that it must be better than a 15" screen, because it's bigger. The size is the only metric that they'll use.
So, manufacturers have responded by building absurdly large screens into notebooks, and dropping the resolutions further and further down in order to cut costs.
I suspect they went with GSM because it's the system that the rest of the world uses, meaning that you could go out and buy handsets on the domestic market when you run short (assuming you have the SIM cards to plug into them). Also makes it easier to cooperate with locals, who probably already have GSM phones.
It's the same reason the military switched to using 5.56 and 9mm ammunition; it makes sense to have everyone using equipment, at least, that speaks the same language, and not drag some national standard halfway around the world, so that you're dependent on a parts chain that's tens of thousands of miles long, without any way to help yourself out of a bind.
And the GSM standard specifies encryption; I'm not sure how robust it is (IIRC there's some problem with its implementation -- weak IVs maybe?), and it sounds like the system supports some form of real end-to-end encryption if you're using supported equipment.
Plus, the protection provided by CDMA sounds awfully like obfuscation; I suspect that it's not enough to swing the balance of features away from a global standard.
My impression from the article is that it is about using commercial networks. This is fine for FEMA, but not something I see the military using. It looks like a solution chasing a problem to me.
Not at all. A vast portion of the military isn't in the "spearhead," the people who are actually in contact with the enemy, it's in the shaft driving it: all the logistics / supply chain / transportation / etc.
That's where something like this would be really good for. You don't need everyone back in the rear using tactical, encrypted, frequency-hopping radios to call back to the mess tent to find out whether they're out of canned beans, or other stuff like that. First, because it's godawful expensive to provision everyone back there with expensive field gear, and second, because it creates interference and frequency-allocation problems with people who do have a legitimate use for the more advanced stuff.
A friend of mine just got back from a tour with the USMC in Iraq, and they had honest-to-god wire-line field phones (ones like this, although they were slightly more modern, probably Vietnam or Korea-era, not WWII) running between different positions within their FOB, because nobody wanted "housekeeping" traffic and banter on the tactical radios, and they were short on them and wanted to save them for patrols.
So there's definitely a need for this. Plus, in any modern (U.S.) war zone, you have tons and tons of non-military support personnel, contractors and DA civilians and USG employees and the rest, and it's a lot easier for them if they can just use regular cellphones to communicate with each other, than if they have to be given radios (and training on how to use them, or for high-ranking/value people, their own RTO to follow them around).
Being able to rapidly deploy a cell-phone network behind an army as it moves forwards, so that everyone behind the lines can just use regular consumer cell gear, would be a big step forward.
There are a lot of generally dumb, wasteful, and/or stupid ideas that get put forward by people looking to score a buck from the government, but I think this is one that could really have a lot of promise.
Yeah, you're right ... the last time I was in Germany, it seemed like you couldn't go ten feet without tripping over a Döner stand/shop. Actually, I've always been surprised that it's not more popular here in the 'States. I mean, it's got some vegetables in it, you could pass it off as "healthy" (*snort*...but there's a sucker born every minute, right?).
Man, I could go for a Döner right now, actually. I'd probably just lose interest somewhere over the Atlantic, though.
Tens of millions of pages, perhaps, but every one that I've ever seen is ugly as sin.
A while back there was a band I was interested in, but instead of having a real web page, they just liked to their myspace profile. I gave it a good five-minute try, which is far longer than I'd normally give a poorly-designed page, and I couldn't figure out how to extract any usable information from it.
You call it a stereotype, but I say the truth is an absolute defense. As far as I've seen, Myspace is a pit.