These analyses are leaving out an important aspect of the situation: the delivery mechanism really does add value to the data. I am definitely willing to pay more for being able to receive data while I am on the street, with no PC in sight, trying to find a friend, than I am willing to pay to download yet another MP3.
Whether receiving a text message is worth 10 or 20 cents to you is a personal decision. I can tell you for me, if those 20 cents save 10 minutes of wandering, yeah, it's worth it. I would definitely not pay the same amount for ordinary chitchat over IM while sitting at my PC.
I think there's an obvious answer to this: Play First Person Shooters. They offer quick, energetic fun without a lot of complexity. If you don't want to deal with a storyline, you can just play online for half an hour. It's a lot of fun and there's no mental lifting required.
This story has come and gone, so I know no one will see this post, but still..
I wonder why there are so few comments? Some of the puzzles in this game really blow my mind, I wonder why the Slashdot community ignores it so? I agree there's an issue that on the Internet, in any game, there's always one or a few guys who seem to have all the time in the world to devote to that one thing, and you know you'll never catch up with them, because you have a real life to live. E.g. if you visit any of the games on miniclip.com they all have highscores that are in the stratosphere.
The solace for me is that it's fun to try to solve these types puzzles with other people. It's a social experience. I won't get the reward, but I'll have some unique memories (I sure remember Beast).
Also, every article on Slashdot that links to something commercial is a "slashvertisement." I don't know why those comments get modded +5.
The bit rate is unknowable unless ABC says what it is in a press release or elsewhere on the site.
Actually they do say; it's in the "you don't have enough bandwidth" error messages. The small window is 500Kbps, the large window is 850Kbps.
I think when Taco said it's what you'd expect from Flash video, he meant it's similar to Google Video / YouTube quality. I'd agree with that for the 500Kbps stream, but I think the 850Kbps stream is much better.
The difference between this and VHS v. Betamax is that the discs here are the same physical size, so you quickly knock off one of the big problems with making a player that does both. The rest is just electronics, and open markets will realize pretty quickly that consumers would rather pay $300 for one box that plays either format than $200 each for boxes that only do one.
I think the issue here is closer to the debate between DVD-R and DVD+R, which as we all know resulted in everything being "DVD-/+R."
I love this because besides being funny, it's good musically too. I've heard a lot of techie songs where the lyrics are funny but they just don't sound very good. This gets high marks on both.
On the last ep of 24 I saw, they did have PowerBooks, and they just covered over the Apple logo with stickers.
Sometimes I wonder about those racks of Dell servers - that's a fair amount of computing power, I wonder if those are purely prop computers or they do something with them?
If this is really about driver quality, Microsoft will include a way that advanced users can allow unsigned drivers to be used regularly. There's no reason not to unless they want to tax driver makers or block open source drivers (or both).
I like your point, but I think there's a flaw. The Amazon one-click patent is the quintessential bad patent, and Paul picks out the reason why: it fails the non-obvious test. If you were to draw out your argument to a good patent, I don't think it would hold up.
Say, for example, Google has patents on their method of returning search engine results. Then Microsoft comes along, and separately (without looking at Google's code) builds a search engine that returns equally good results. Google would not be able to successfully sue Microsoft for that, because Microsoft built the same end result with different inner workings.
Now if the USPTO granted Google a patent on the basic idea of returning good search results, regardless of how they are calculated, that would be basically the same thing as the Amazon patent, and I agree that shouldn't be allowed.
The problem with movie theaters is that they support a small crowd. It's a little bigger than a group of friends, and smaller than a modest arena. So there's bound to be tension, factions, etc.
Sporting events are supposed to be a little roudy, whether you're watching them in someone's living room or live on a playing field. Politeness, which is required in small public settings like theaters, comes directly in conflict with the atmosphere most people want to watch sports in. I don't see it happening.
IANAL, but as most of the comments here imply, this looks like a heinously bogus legal threat. There's got to be some money out there to defend this guy. He isn't selling products, he isn't selling information, and I bet he'd be willing to take the word "Bluetooth" off his page and describe it as "popular short range wireless technology" or something if it really mattered. I can't imagine it would cost much to defend this: it gets to court, judge throws it out as ridiculous, game over. I don't blame him for being sheepish about fighting lawyers, but when you have the high, high, high ground, we as the F/OSS community should be able to pool our resources and defend this sort of thing. Anyone listening at the EFF?
Isn't what Sony did exactly what DRM was meant for?? Screw the users, control their lives, and do it legally?
I think Linus is the only person I've ever heard talk about DRM as just a pure technology. Everyone else (e.g. media companies) talks as though it's a means to an end for user control. So how is what Sony did not right in line with that?
Actually they have a lot of good information on their website in the production section. I think they chose not to include it in the movie because they didn't make a documentary for scientists, they made it for everyone. We (er, most people) are emotional creatures who don't need numbers to justify our feelings. That might go against the geek mentality of science & numbers ruling all, but that's just the way it is.
The neat thing about your theory is that we can actually determine when this might be true. The reason is that network speeds don't creep upwards, the way hard disk space does. Networks speeds increase in large jumps when you go from one system to the next. E.g. ISDN was twice as fast as a modem, DSL twice as fast still, then fat DSL a few times that, somewhere you hit T1s and 10MB ethernet, 100MB ethernet and finally fiber to the home.
If you look over here you'll see a nice table of where DVD video falls right in line with networking bandwidth. DVD, it says, is 9.8 MB/s, which is just under 10MB ethernet. Of course, you can't have 98% network saturation, so to be safe we'll say you'd need a T3, 44MB/s to watch a DVD over your network.
So once everyone has T3's, we can do this. Of course, by the time everyone has T3's, we'll also all be able to compress into H.264 on the fly and save a ton of bandwidth, so I would believe that we only need 10MB ethernet. So the question just becomes when we are going to have 10MB ethernet to the home.
I think a neat analogy is how some MP3 services work. Tethered services literally do stream the music over the network, and the user can barely tell the difference. It was just a matter of time before this was possible, and lo and behold we've crossed that line. So in that sense, as long as there is demand, it's only a matter of time before we can stream DVD as well.
Instead of categorizing this as "Intel" could we make a new category for Cringley? That was I can change my/. prefs to remove all his ludicrousness from my sight and I won't be provoked to waste time writing these stupid troll comments.
Regarding your aside, I dug up the material. It's at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html#tth_s Ec6.2.7. Specifically, Intel only wanted 3.0+, not 4.0+, but there was another firm that only hired 3.8+. Excerpt about a great programmer who couldn't get a job:
"A year earlier I had pushed them to hire a UCD grad whose GPA was only 2.9, and the company had subsequently reported to me that he had turned out to be one of their top programmers. Yet even then they decided not to hire my new ``case,'' the one with a GPA of 3.4."
This has been stated by Mossberg and not contradicted in at least the first few Google results.
And the standard delete key on a Mac works like the backspace key, not the delete key, in Windows. Mac desktop keyboards have a second, Windows-type delete key, but Mac laptops lack one.
This is 50% true. If you hold Function and push backspace, you get the desired forward-delete. There are two problems with this: a) it isn't labeled directly on the keyboard and b) it is ugly to describe. But I assure you it becomes habit very quickly.
This is really cool, but, "The WiFi project is a public/private partnership not funded by taxpayers." Although it's great to save money, I really wouldn't mind paying taxes if it went for good stuff like this. It would also let informed citizens have some say in the operation, which (given the traditional trainwreck that happens when government meets technology) would probably be a good idea. You give up your rights of influence if you shirk on contributing.
Don't blame the fact that people aren't using their cell phones for Internet access on the web pages. Blame it on the design of the standards.
I'm a web designer who uses XHTML and CSS, but the truth is that if you are on a cell phone you will not want to download any of my pages. Currently the thinking is, "let's make our pages cell phone friendly", by separating presentation from content, but that's not enough. Cell phone users usually want to access some key feature of your website - not actually browse the web. Even with full XHTML and CSS separation, pages are still huge. What we need is a common, widely accepted standard of how to create a cell-friendly sub site without having to recode everything.
Even if the speed and availability problems were fixed (data via cell is still very slow in the US), think of how much it would mean to download IMDB's homepage to look up an actor. No matter how perfectly you fit today's standards, there's just no way to reasonably display that on a cell phone's screen.
Slashdot Mirror
These analyses are leaving out an important aspect of the situation: the delivery mechanism really does add value to the data. I am definitely willing to pay more for being able to receive data while I am on the street, with no PC in sight, trying to find a friend, than I am willing to pay to download yet another MP3.
Whether receiving a text message is worth 10 or 20 cents to you is a personal decision. I can tell you for me, if those 20 cents save 10 minutes of wandering, yeah, it's worth it. I would definitely not pay the same amount for ordinary chitchat over IM while sitting at my PC.
The test, password: apple.
The instructions, password: grail.
I think there's an obvious answer to this: Play First Person Shooters. They offer quick, energetic fun without a lot of complexity. If you don't want to deal with a storyline, you can just play online for half an hour. It's a lot of fun and there's no mental lifting required.
I wonder why there are so few comments? Some of the puzzles in this game really blow my mind, I wonder why the Slashdot community ignores it so? I agree there's an issue that on the Internet, in any game, there's always one or a few guys who seem to have all the time in the world to devote to that one thing, and you know you'll never catch up with them, because you have a real life to live. E.g. if you visit any of the games on miniclip.com they all have highscores that are in the stratosphere.
The solace for me is that it's fun to try to solve these types puzzles with other people. It's a social experience. I won't get the reward, but I'll have some unique memories (I sure remember Beast).
Also, every article on Slashdot that links to something commercial is a "slashvertisement." I don't know why those comments get modded +5.
Actually they do say; it's in the "you don't have enough bandwidth" error messages. The small window is 500Kbps, the large window is 850Kbps.
I think when Taco said it's what you'd expect from Flash video, he meant it's similar to Google Video / YouTube quality. I'd agree with that for the 500Kbps stream, but I think the 850Kbps stream is much better.
The difference between this and VHS v. Betamax is that the discs here are the same physical size, so you quickly knock off one of the big problems with making a player that does both. The rest is just electronics, and open markets will realize pretty quickly that consumers would rather pay $300 for one box that plays either format than $200 each for boxes that only do one.
I think the issue here is closer to the debate between DVD-R and DVD+R, which as we all know resulted in everything being "DVD-/+R."
See also the "Healthy Forests Initiative."
I love this because besides being funny, it's good musically too. I've heard a lot of techie songs where the lyrics are funny but they just don't sound very good. This gets high marks on both.
On the last ep of 24 I saw, they did have PowerBooks, and they just covered over the Apple logo with stickers.
Sometimes I wonder about those racks of Dell servers - that's a fair amount of computing power, I wonder if those are purely prop computers or they do something with them?
If this is really about driver quality, Microsoft will include a way that advanced users can allow unsigned drivers to be used regularly. There's no reason not to unless they want to tax driver makers or block open source drivers (or both).
Google has a bundle of Windows software called Google Pack that's a good place to start. For example it includes:
* Firefox
* Ad-Aware
* Adobe Reader
* Google Desktop
and some other good stuff.
I like your point, but I think there's a flaw. The Amazon one-click patent is the quintessential bad patent, and Paul picks out the reason why: it fails the non-obvious test. If you were to draw out your argument to a good patent, I don't think it would hold up.
Say, for example, Google has patents on their method of returning search engine results. Then Microsoft comes along, and separately (without looking at Google's code) builds a search engine that returns equally good results. Google would not be able to successfully sue Microsoft for that, because Microsoft built the same end result with different inner workings.
Now if the USPTO granted Google a patent on the basic idea of returning good search results, regardless of how they are calculated, that would be basically the same thing as the Amazon patent, and I agree that shouldn't be allowed.
The problem with movie theaters is that they support a small crowd. It's a little bigger than a group of friends, and smaller than a modest arena. So there's bound to be tension, factions, etc.
Sporting events are supposed to be a little roudy, whether you're watching them in someone's living room or live on a playing field. Politeness, which is required in small public settings like theaters, comes directly in conflict with the atmosphere most people want to watch sports in. I don't see it happening.
Seems like this is perfect for car PCs. No moving parts, adequate storage for those nav systems and MP3 collections.
IANAL, but as most of the comments here imply, this looks like a heinously bogus legal threat. There's got to be some money out there to defend this guy. He isn't selling products, he isn't selling information, and I bet he'd be willing to take the word "Bluetooth" off his page and describe it as "popular short range wireless technology" or something if it really mattered. I can't imagine it would cost much to defend this: it gets to court, judge throws it out as ridiculous, game over. I don't blame him for being sheepish about fighting lawyers, but when you have the high, high, high ground, we as the F/OSS community should be able to pool our resources and defend this sort of thing. Anyone listening at the EFF?
Isn't what Sony did exactly what DRM was meant for?? Screw the users, control their lives, and do it legally?
I think Linus is the only person I've ever heard talk about DRM as just a pure technology. Everyone else (e.g. media companies) talks as though it's a means to an end for user control. So how is what Sony did not right in line with that?
Actually they have a lot of good information on their website in the production section. I think they chose not to include it in the movie because they didn't make a documentary for scientists, they made it for everyone. We (er, most people) are emotional creatures who don't need numbers to justify our feelings. That might go against the geek mentality of science & numbers ruling all, but that's just the way it is.
Put another way, your emotions aren't nonsense.
The neat thing about your theory is that we can actually determine when this might be true. The reason is that network speeds don't creep upwards, the way hard disk space does. Networks speeds increase in large jumps when you go from one system to the next. E.g. ISDN was twice as fast as a modem, DSL twice as fast still, then fat DSL a few times that, somewhere you hit T1s and 10MB ethernet, 100MB ethernet and finally fiber to the home.
If you look over here you'll see a nice table of where DVD video falls right in line with networking bandwidth. DVD, it says, is 9.8 MB/s, which is just under 10MB ethernet. Of course, you can't have 98% network saturation, so to be safe we'll say you'd need a T3, 44MB/s to watch a DVD over your network.So once everyone has T3's, we can do this. Of course, by the time everyone has T3's, we'll also all be able to compress into H.264 on the fly and save a ton of bandwidth, so I would believe that we only need 10MB ethernet. So the question just becomes when we are going to have 10MB ethernet to the home.
I think a neat analogy is how some MP3 services work. Tethered services literally do stream the music over the network, and the user can barely tell the difference. It was just a matter of time before this was possible, and lo and behold we've crossed that line. So in that sense, as long as there is demand, it's only a matter of time before we can stream DVD as well.
Whenever I hear someone predicts something for ten years in the future, I know they chose that number because
-it's too long to be demonstrably false and
-it's just short enough to seem relevant.
But yeah, this is just nonsense.
Instead of categorizing this as "Intel" could we make a new category for Cringley? That was I can change my /. prefs to remove all his ludicrousness from my sight and I won't be provoked to waste time writing these stupid troll comments.
Regarding your aside, I dug up the material. It's at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html#tth_s Ec6.2.7. Specifically, Intel only wanted 3.0+, not 4.0+, but there was another firm that only hired 3.8+. Excerpt about a great programmer who couldn't get a job:
"A year earlier I had pushed them to hire a UCD grad whose GPA was only 2.9, and the company had subsequently reported to me that he had turned out to be one of their top programmers. Yet even then they decided not to hire my new ``case,'' the one with a GPA of 3.4."
This has been stated by Mossberg and not contradicted in at least the first few Google results.
And the standard delete key on a Mac works like the backspace key, not the delete key, in Windows. Mac desktop keyboards have a second, Windows-type delete key, but Mac laptops lack one.
This is 50% true. If you hold Function and push backspace, you get the desired forward-delete. There are two problems with this: a) it isn't labeled directly on the keyboard and b) it is ugly to describe. But I assure you it becomes habit very quickly.
This is really cool, but, "The WiFi project is a public/private partnership not funded by taxpayers." Although it's great to save money, I really wouldn't mind paying taxes if it went for good stuff like this. It would also let informed citizens have some say in the operation, which (given the traditional trainwreck that happens when government meets technology) would probably be a good idea. You give up your rights of influence if you shirk on contributing.
Don't blame the fact that people aren't using their cell phones for Internet access on the web pages. Blame it on the design of the standards.
I'm a web designer who uses XHTML and CSS, but the truth is that if you are on a cell phone you will not want to download any of my pages. Currently the thinking is, "let's make our pages cell phone friendly", by separating presentation from content, but that's not enough. Cell phone users usually want to access some key feature of your website - not actually browse the web. Even with full XHTML and CSS separation, pages are still huge. What we need is a common, widely accepted standard of how to create a cell-friendly sub site without having to recode everything.
Even if the speed and availability problems were fixed (data via cell is still very slow in the US), think of how much it would mean to download IMDB's homepage to look up an actor. No matter how perfectly you fit today's standards, there's just no way to reasonably display that on a cell phone's screen.
This seems contradictory with comments by Chris Wilson, IE Developer, on the IE web log last week:
"We will continue to improve our compliance under strict mode even when it breaks compatibility"
and
"Microsoft does respond to customer demand; web developers are our customers."
See http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2004/10/15/243074 .aspx.
Even the devs want it to work right... if only they could get these ideas through to execs
(Sorry I think /. is breaking the link, you'll want to copy and paste)