I'd expect that the reason why energy self-sufficiency is not being promoted is the same reason why renewable energy isn't being honestly promoted: some people are making pretty nice money from supplying it and don't want to have to go looking for another cash cow...
When you said you installed your own solar system, my first reaction was that creating an entire solar system was a pretty extreme - but doubtless effective and environmentally friendly - way of generating energy. Then I read on and things made sense:-)
WMP and MSIE are operating system components - surely you don't expect Microsoft to help Apple write their operating system?;-)
More seriously, it might be possible that they are anticipating the same thing that Cringeley predicted for 2006 (extract from Slashdot discussion here).
It's my opinion that Microsoft are aware that, as more and more devices may effectively be defined to be computers, Windows is in danger of losing its ubiquity. If, in future, they are to make money from a services model, then they need a vehicle to extract this money. They have been talking about the wonderful web services Office will provide for some years now. Better to maintain their customer base in Apple-land now than to try to win it back from competitors in the future.
Anyway, if they don't maintain some contact with Apple, how will they be able to keep track of what they're doing?
We're just out of the Xmas season; how many people gave or received CDs or DVDs as presents? I did - and almost everyone I know did. And whereas I also received gift vouchers for (real 3D) music stores (sorta low on funds, so I didn't give any:-), I enjoyed giving and receiving the real thing. It requires a bit of a personal touch.
It's not so nice to give someone a present that's broken, which is what I did the year before last when I accidentally gave a friend a DRM'd "CD" that wouldn't play in her car (didn't know they'd come out over here yet - I check all music disks for the CD symbol now).
I suppose the music distribution companies could soften the blow to their Xmas income a tiny bit by allowing a customer to explicitly specify what media to transfer to the recipient's computer.
What a lovely scene: Xmas morning; the children wake up early and run downstairs to the computer to see what presents they got...
Hmmm. At risk of sounding apocalyptic, consider a scenario where a country (e.g. the US) is massively in debt and has no chance of recouping that debt via its industrial output because its industries' main rivals in other nations can under-cut them price-wise.
If the government cannot raise revenue from its industries via corporation tax (because industry isn't making enough money) or from its citizens (because unemployment would lead to reductions in income tax and VAT), then its only way of raising money from corporations which operate above and outside national boundaries might be the sale of national resources such as information...
Why not have a.porn domain? That's what the content is anyway. There's a.info domain, so it's not as if they're sticking with the 3-letter format.
I know this doesn't reduce the influence of the Christian fundamentalists. I just hate seeing the symbol of Amsterdam being used to denote all things porn. This is a USA/UK thing; Amsterdam's a lovely city and the smut isn't the thing you'll best remember it for:-)
There's a possibility of word spreading, somehow, that Sony used an Open Source program to compromise its customers' computers. How many people will understand what Lame is for?
Thankfully the makers of Lame have been very careful with their legal position (here's their links page) but it's a pity this is the software that could take the (L)GPL to court.
Don't get me wrong - Lame's a great MP3 encoder. Or not;-)
I'm amazed that so many people are chiming in to insist that the term "HD" means "Hard Disk Drive". One post asserts that "HD in this article meant Hard Disc, not Hi-Definition". I don't think the term "HD" even appears in the article and if you read the sentence before the first use of the term "HD" in the summary you can be in no doubt as to what it means. How little do you need to read in order to make that mistake? I know, this is Slashdot. RTFA isn't even approprate in these cases, tho - more like F***ing Read Something!
Or is this some kind of brain-melting troll style that I'm not familiar with?
To get on-topic, I reckon that Nintendo are on a pretty safe bet in leaving out HDTV support; it's a long way from being standard here in Europe, at least, and still has to overcome some content delivery hurdles (DRM lobbying and implementation and its nett cost to the customer) before it'll be seriously considered by a public that are still paying off their lower-res widescreen TVs. AFAIK there's a sort of countdown to the time everyone must use a digital decoder to view TV (at least, in some countries); people won't like being forced to fork out again for new hardware, especially if they expect it to cost them more to run than their current setup. Of course, if they're given no choice, they'll do it...
Our geographically-challenged AC has left the building in fits of laughter. Generated interesting info on Estonia tho; they're in the EU, like me, and I didn't know anything about them.
Let's see: so we'll be paying the content suppliers for the right to download content from our neighbours. This content will presumably be DRM'd, so we won't typically be able to do anything with it except play it a specified way on a specified platform.
The content providers will not be paying us for the bandwidth used in passing that content on to our neighbours, nor for the disk space used in storing it. How much does disk space cost these days?
Maybe they should pay us?
No, I didn't read the article...
Sad to see the emblem of the beautiful sity of Amsterdam being used do symbolise smut to the rest of the world.
I can see why the association would be made by smut peddlers (Amsterdam is a liberal, trade-oriented place) but it's another thing to solidify the association by making it a TLD.
I presume this suggestion was made in the USA? ICANN is based there too, isn't it? Was there any input from Europe on this plan, or is this even possible?
Does anybody know what the X's mean in XXX? I read it at one stage but have forgotten. It's quite ironic, given the current context...
... and so many people have reacted! An article in an op-ed column that demonstrates the author's clear bias yet argues that journalism should be subject to the rigours of science so that facts cannot be distorted. Infinite loop! Really shouldn't have read it...
I was sure it was a dupe too (actually searched this page for the word "dupe" to confirm my suspicions). Turns out I read about it via Fark on Tue 19. So it's not a dupe, nor is it particularly old news. Why is it on Slashdot?;-)
It stands to reason that a company, if behaving responsibly with its shareholders' investements, should avoid paying inflated wages to any member of staff.
I suppose the arguments against this would be:
If we don't pay him x bucks, company B will (a sort of defensive logic, probably more common in "bubble" times when the figures don't make realistic sense:-)
Our guy is so good, we have to pay him x bucks (this tends to be aimed at rival companies and potential investors)
It's a very responsible position (won't argue with that but shouldn't this mean that someone who has wilfully made a decision that unnecessarily damaged the quality of life of another should be held entirely responsible for the decision, rather than given a golden handshake? And how do such people get given the same kind of job again?)
Trade Secrets
The last item may make it very difficult to convince a company to outsource management positions:-)
It's a wonderful idea, though, and until (ever the optimist!) businesses can be comfortable enough with what they are doing to pay an employee what they are worth, it will be difficult to implement...
Something struck me a few weeks ago, when MS said that they were dropping *nix versions of a virus scanner company that they had just bought (where's my rant? Let's see - here. I'll re-state it to see what people think):
I think MS is trying to get into the Internet "backbone" a bit more. They're going to provide filtering on the client side (anti-spyware and anti-virus products) but only MS boxes will be able to provide filtering "in between" and the majority of "heavy lifting" on the Internet is done by *nix boxes.
If MS can claim to be the only entity that can filter out junk between client and server (or peers, or whetever), they might be more likely to be considered for such heavy lifting tasks, since this would free bandwidth for more lucrative payloads...
I posted a comment this morning in response to yesterday's EU story. I was more verbose there!
Basically, I was saying that I don't think that this rejection is really any kind of moral victory. Rather, European politicians are making sure that European business interests are not undermined by a system that would require a proportion of their profit to be sent abroad, particularly since the current state of the USA's economy means that the Dollar may soon fall in value (possibly leading to American businesses trying to extract maximum value from patent holdings in the EU and other areas).
American businesses may have a tougher time in Europe over the next few years than they were expecting.
If so, chances are that it won't be because the EU, through some kind idealism, manages to thwart the evil of software patents.
Nor will it be because some anti-globalisation lobby finally convinces the politicians not to sell out to Big Business.
Nor will it be because of some political falling-out over Iraq or Israel (even though almost all EU governments have dissenting views on some aspect or other of American policy in the Middle East). It's possible that a dispute will be portrayed as such; recent examples of contrived disputes are the current France/Britain farm subsidy vs rebate row and the whole "Freedom Fries" thing a couple of years ago.
Let's be clear on something: statesmen in Europe were corrupt long before there were any statesmen in America to corrupt! There is a long history of state involvement in business ventures, a notable example being the colonisation of America. There is currently a row between the EU and America over state subsidisation of jet manufacturing companies.
Some European politicians may see the value of owning their own IT infrastructure, as China currently does and Russia learned to their cost in the 1980s. Doing this would free the EU from some economic pressures from the USA and reduce opportunities for industrial espionage. This does not mean that software patents will not be introduced, just that American businesses may not get the compatability with the American system that they are lobbying for.
However, I think the primary reason for a lack of cooperation between the EU and the USA in the future will come down to pure economics: the USA has a massive debt and ongoing expenses that are threatening the value of the Dollar. By reducing dependence on American business, Europe can safeguard its own interests. There are plenty of emerging markets in the world and the EU needs to ensure that it can compete aginst the emerging economic forces in Asia without being tied to the fate of the USA. Also, a software patent system that allows US businesses to take a cut of EU profits is not a very sound competitive strategy!
The EU is already in the pocket of Big Business - European Big Business...
Ok, this is gonna split email into MS vs non-MS. I recall yesterday's article about MS buying out an anti-virus company and immediately dropping their non-MS versions (and comments about how this can lead to only MS machines handling MS "content"). I haven't yet read the article about DoubleClick predicting the end of the free (presumably as in "beer") Internet. Not looking forward to reading it, either!
It's looking like MS wants to own the Internet (as people have said before!). Their servers are getting good now but the Internet does not run on Windows (what I mean is the backbone is largely *nix-based). How to get bandwidth providers to switch to a MS product? Explain to them that only an MS node can filter out spam and viruses, eliminating the traffic caused by these nuisances.
So we'll have the MInternet, where everything's tracable, trusted and trustworthy (and for sale) and the real Internet, which will be real slow, since both of the routers will be in N. Korea;-)
I don't believe the Avalanche concept is going to go away, either; BitTorrent accounts for a vast amount of Internet traffic, why shouldn't MS get a cut of that if they could persuade people to switch?
Am I being a bit paranoid? They're not the only ones trying to get some pie (IBM want "big business", for example) but they're the only ones who are really going after ALL of it!
Yeah - it doesn't make sense. Computer processing power is constantly on the increase, while bandwidth is a constant issue (and will be for the foreseeable future). Why trade off one for the other when it's such a bad deal?
I had to read up on distributed real-time systems at one stage and I found that currently the only way of making them tolerably usable was to do as much processing as possible on the local system (hence stuff like VRML), including, if appropriate, a little bit of extrapolation (ever played quake over a network and found yourself suddenly jump back to a position where you were a couple of seconds before? It's cos your local system's interpretation of where you were and that of another player were not the same and the distributed system has had to do a few recalculations when you came into proximity with each other). Even in an ideal world, there is a "ceiling", as you suggest: the speed of light. If a local system had to consult with all its neighbours in everything it had to do, it would be unspeakably inefficient.
I don't have that paper handy now (and I'm too lazy to read it again!) but if I remember correctly, the suggested benefits were:
Corporate: Pop a disk in one machine in one machine and install on your whole network. "Ghost" does a nice job of this already, provided machines are similar. If an administrator doesn't know where to put a server, he shouldn't have the job.
Server: Load balancing across servers (provided that they are all running the OS). Strikes me as more of an application's job than an operating system's job. It's very context-specific (near-real-time data would have to be replicated on proxy servers regularly, "static" data less so). I presume that only the local system would decide whether to start mirroring data out to its neighbours (unless they all know each others' hardware specs, as well as their network addresses!) - how does it know which ones to choose? Will it have to choose all its neighbours (since incoming requests can come form anywhere on the internet)? I can see one way it could work: a machine could nominate a specific proxy and forward packets from certain sources to that proxy. As for the other way around (a machine's neighbours deciding to act as proxies for one that appears to be receiving a lot of requests: I have no ideas as to how that could work. Since these proxy machines would have no control as to what packets are coming to them, and from where, they might have to do an awful lot of communicating between themselves (and, of course, the original intended packet destination) in order to maintain consistency (maintain the "state" of the system across the various machines in order to ensure that one box doesn't do something that contradicts what has another has done). Another source of latency created. Ok, if you're serving HTML pages it's not an issue (you wouldn't have to communicate) but for all other systems I can think of it is (some kind of data integrity would probably need to be maintained. Oh, and streamed data is two-way because a server needs to know how long it takes for packets to reach the client (so that it can adjust transmission rates accordingly), so the client would have to explicitly be told to communicate with the proxy rather than the original server). And that isn't taking into account the effect on available bandwidth of having so many servers on the internet mirroring data to each other and synchronising processes.
Redundant data storage: Bandwidth. And I presume some people would like to be able to take the gamble of keeping their information to themselves.
I can't see the point in it. (1) above is really talking about a smart installation program, (2) has potential but is entirely shaped by the application, not the operating system and (3) can be done over a local network. I can see the point in shipping processes out to other machines but very few applications are so calculation-intensive as to warrant massively parallel processing (Beowulf Word?).
Oh, I didn't mention the advantage to the "home user": plug your computer into the network and download Windows. It'll set itself up (see (1) above, apply it to a network of size 1, probably).
Slashdot Mirror
I'd expect that the reason why energy self-sufficiency is not being promoted is the same reason why renewable energy isn't being honestly promoted: some people are making pretty nice money from supplying it and don't want to have to go looking for another cash cow...
When you said you installed your own solar system, my first reaction was that creating an entire solar system was a pretty extreme - but doubtless effective and environmentally friendly - way of generating energy. Then I read on and things made sense :-)
WMP and MSIE are operating system components - surely you don't expect Microsoft to help Apple write their operating system? ;-)
More seriously, it might be possible that they are anticipating the same thing that Cringeley predicted for 2006 (extract from Slashdot discussion here).
It's my opinion that Microsoft are aware that, as more and more devices may effectively be defined to be computers, Windows is in danger of losing its ubiquity. If, in future, they are to make money from a services model, then they need a vehicle to extract this money. They have been talking about the wonderful web services Office will provide for some years now. Better to maintain their customer base in Apple-land now than to try to win it back from competitors in the future.
Anyway, if they don't maintain some contact with Apple, how will they be able to keep track of what they're doing?
We're just out of the Xmas season; how many people gave or received CDs or DVDs as presents? I did - and almost everyone I know did. And whereas I also received gift vouchers for (real 3D) music stores (sorta low on funds, so I didn't give any :-), I enjoyed giving and receiving the real thing. It requires a bit of a personal touch.
It's not so nice to give someone a present that's broken, which is what I did the year before last when I accidentally gave a friend a DRM'd "CD" that wouldn't play in her car (didn't know they'd come out over here yet - I check all music disks for the CD symbol now).
I suppose the music distribution companies could soften the blow to their Xmas income a tiny bit by allowing a customer to explicitly specify what media to transfer to the recipient's computer.
What a lovely scene: Xmas morning; the children wake up early and run downstairs to the computer to see what presents they got...
Hmmm. At risk of sounding apocalyptic, consider a scenario where a country (e.g. the US) is massively in debt and has no chance of recouping that debt via its industrial output because its industries' main rivals in other nations can under-cut them price-wise.
If the government cannot raise revenue from its industries via corporation tax (because industry isn't making enough money) or from its citizens (because unemployment would lead to reductions in income tax and VAT), then its only way of raising money from corporations which operate above and outside national boundaries might be the sale of national resources such as information...
Our major telecoms providers have been doing this for years (and the required legislation was passed last February).
Singapore recently introduced the death penalty for copyright infringement? Surely this is worthy of a Slashdot story?
That wasn't even funny
Why not have a .porn domain? That's what the content is anyway. There's a .info domain, so it's not as if they're sticking with the 3-letter format.
:-)
I know this doesn't reduce the influence of the Christian fundamentalists. I just hate seeing the symbol of Amsterdam being used to denote all things porn. This is a USA/UK thing; Amsterdam's a lovely city and the smut isn't the thing you'll best remember it for
Or, at least, it's a pretty tricky situation.
;-)
There's a possibility of word spreading, somehow, that Sony used an Open Source program to compromise its customers' computers. How many people will understand what Lame is for?
In order to counteract the bad press, it may become necessary to pursue a case against Sony. Pity the software product for which the case must be pursued is one whose legal status is dubious when distributed in binary form.
Thankfully the makers of Lame have been very careful with their legal position (here's their links page) but it's a pity this is the software that could take the (L)GPL to court.
Don't get me wrong - Lame's a great MP3 encoder. Or not
I'm amazed that so many people are chiming in to insist that the term "HD" means "Hard Disk Drive". One post asserts that "HD in this article meant Hard Disc, not Hi-Definition". I don't think the term "HD" even appears in the article and if you read the sentence before the first use of the term "HD" in the summary you can be in no doubt as to what it means. How little do you need to read in order to make that mistake? I know, this is Slashdot. RTFA isn't even approprate in these cases, tho - more like F***ing Read Something!
:-)
Or is this some kind of brain-melting troll style that I'm not familiar with?
To get on-topic, I reckon that Nintendo are on a pretty safe bet in leaving out HDTV support; it's a long way from being standard here in Europe, at least, and still has to overcome some content delivery hurdles (DRM lobbying and implementation and its nett cost to the customer) before it'll be seriously considered by a public that are still paying off their lower-res widescreen TVs. AFAIK there's a sort of countdown to the time everyone must use a digital decoder to view TV (at least, in some countries); people won't like being forced to fork out again for new hardware, especially if they expect it to cost them more to run than their current setup. Of course, if they're given no choice, they'll do it...
Sorry, drifting off-topic again
Our geographically-challenged AC has left the building in fits of laughter. Generated interesting info on Estonia tho; they're in the EU, like me, and I didn't know anything about them.
Let's see: so we'll be paying the content suppliers for the right to download content from our neighbours. This content will presumably be DRM'd, so we won't typically be able to do anything with it except play it a specified way on a specified platform.
The content providers will not be paying us for the bandwidth used in passing that content on to our neighbours, nor for the disk space used in storing it. How much does disk space cost these days?
Maybe they should pay us?
No, I didn't read the article...
Sad to see the emblem of the beautiful sity of Amsterdam being used do symbolise smut to the rest of the world.
I can see why the association would be made by smut peddlers (Amsterdam is a liberal, trade-oriented place) but it's another thing to solidify the association by making it a TLD.
I presume this suggestion was made in the USA? ICANN is based there too, isn't it? Was there any input from Europe on this plan, or is this even possible?
Does anybody know what the X's mean in XXX? I read it at one stage but have forgotten. It's quite ironic, given the current context...
... and so many people have reacted! An article in an op-ed column that demonstrates the author's clear bias yet argues that journalism should be subject to the rigours of science so that facts cannot be distorted. Infinite loop! Really shouldn't have read it...
I was sure it was a dupe too (actually searched this page for the word "dupe" to confirm my suspicions). Turns out I read about it via Fark on Tue 19. So it's not a dupe, nor is it particularly old news. Why is it on Slashdot? ;-)
I suppose the arguments against this would be:
- If we don't pay him x bucks, company B will (a sort of defensive logic, probably more common in "bubble" times when the figures don't make realistic sense
:-)
- Our guy is so good, we have to pay him x bucks (this tends to be aimed at rival companies and potential investors)
- It's a very responsible position (won't argue with that but shouldn't this mean that someone who has wilfully made a decision that unnecessarily damaged the quality of life of another should be held entirely responsible for the decision, rather than given a golden handshake? And how do such people get given the same kind of job again?)
- Trade Secrets
The last item may make it very difficult to convince a company to outsource management positionsIt's a wonderful idea, though, and until (ever the optimist!) businesses can be comfortable enough with what they are doing to pay an employee what they are worth, it will be difficult to implement...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/storyv
Something struck me a few weeks ago, when MS said that they were dropping *nix versions of a virus scanner company that they had just bought (where's my rant? Let's see - here. I'll re-state it to see what people think):
I think MS is trying to get into the Internet "backbone" a bit more. They're going to provide filtering on the client side (anti-spyware and anti-virus products) but only MS boxes will be able to provide filtering "in between" and the majority of "heavy lifting" on the Internet is done by *nix boxes.
If MS can claim to be the only entity that can filter out junk between client and server (or peers, or whetever), they might be more likely to be considered for such heavy lifting tasks, since this would free bandwidth for more lucrative payloads...
I posted a comment this morning in response to yesterday's EU story. I was more verbose there!
Basically, I was saying that I don't think that this rejection is really any kind of moral victory. Rather, European politicians are making sure that European business interests are not undermined by a system that would require a proportion of their profit to be sent abroad, particularly since the current state of the USA's economy means that the Dollar may soon fall in value (possibly leading to American businesses trying to extract maximum value from patent holdings in the EU and other areas).
American businesses may have a tougher time in Europe over the next few years than they were expecting.
If so, chances are that it won't be because the EU, through some kind idealism, manages to thwart the evil of software patents.
Nor will it be because some anti-globalisation lobby finally convinces the politicians not to sell out to Big Business.
Nor will it be because of some political falling-out over Iraq or Israel (even though almost all EU governments have dissenting views on some aspect or other of American policy in the Middle East). It's possible that a dispute will be portrayed as such; recent examples of contrived disputes are the current France/Britain farm subsidy vs rebate row and the whole "Freedom Fries" thing a couple of years ago.
Let's be clear on something: statesmen in Europe were corrupt long before there were any statesmen in America to corrupt! There is a long history of state involvement in business ventures, a notable example being the colonisation of America. There is currently a row between the EU and America over state subsidisation of jet manufacturing companies.
Some European politicians may see the value of owning their own IT infrastructure, as China currently does and Russia learned to their cost in the 1980s. Doing this would free the EU from some economic pressures from the USA and reduce opportunities for industrial espionage. This does not mean that software patents will not be introduced, just that American businesses may not get the compatability with the American system that they are lobbying for.
However, I think the primary reason for a lack of cooperation between the EU and the USA in the future will come down to pure economics: the USA has a massive debt and ongoing expenses that are threatening the value of the Dollar. By reducing dependence on American business, Europe can safeguard its own interests. There are plenty of emerging markets in the world and the EU needs to ensure that it can compete aginst the emerging economic forces in Asia without being tied to the fate of the USA. Also, a software patent system that allows US businesses to take a cut of EU profits is not a very sound competitive strategy!
The EU is already in the pocket of Big Business - European Big Business...
Ok, this is gonna split email into MS vs non-MS. I recall yesterday's article about MS buying out an anti-virus company and immediately dropping their non-MS versions (and comments about how this can lead to only MS machines handling MS "content"). I haven't yet read the article about DoubleClick predicting the end of the free (presumably as in "beer") Internet. Not looking forward to reading it, either! ;-)
It's looking like MS wants to own the Internet (as people have said before!). Their servers are getting good now but the Internet does not run on Windows (what I mean is the backbone is largely *nix-based). How to get bandwidth providers to switch to a MS product? Explain to them that only an MS node can filter out spam and viruses, eliminating the traffic caused by these nuisances.
So we'll have the MInternet, where everything's tracable, trusted and trustworthy (and for sale) and the real Internet, which will be real slow, since both of the routers will be in N. Korea
I don't believe the Avalanche concept is going to go away, either; BitTorrent accounts for a vast amount of Internet traffic, why shouldn't MS get a cut of that if they could persuade people to switch?
Am I being a bit paranoid? They're not the only ones trying to get some pie (IBM want "big business", for example) but they're the only ones who are really going after ALL of it!
I liked the idea of them using this as a tool for designing other computers...
Yeah - it doesn't make sense. Computer processing power is constantly on the increase, while bandwidth is a constant issue (and will be for the foreseeable future). Why trade off one for the other when it's such a bad deal?
I had to read up on distributed real-time systems at one stage and I found that currently the only way of making them tolerably usable was to do as much processing as possible on the local system (hence stuff like VRML), including, if appropriate, a little bit of extrapolation (ever played quake over a network and found yourself suddenly jump back to a position where you were a couple of seconds before? It's cos your local system's interpretation of where you were and that of another player were not the same and the distributed system has had to do a few recalculations when you came into proximity with each other). Even in an ideal world, there is a "ceiling", as you suggest: the speed of light. If a local system had to consult with all its neighbours in everything it had to do, it would be unspeakably inefficient.
I don't have that paper handy now (and I'm too lazy to read it again!) but if I remember correctly, the suggested benefits were:
I can't see the point in it. (1) above is really talking about a smart installation program, (2) has potential but is entirely shaped by the application, not the operating system and (3) can be done over a local network. I can see the point in shipping processes out to other machines but very few applications are so calculation-intensive as to warrant massively parallel processing (Beowulf Word?).
Oh, I didn't mention the advantage to the "home user": plug your computer into the network and download Windows. It'll set itself up (see (1) above, apply it to a network of size 1, probably).