What about the pimply-faced highschool sophomore that's driving home from school while checking out his sister's hot freshman friend sitting in the back seat, but oops there's a little girl walking home from school who just happens to be in his way? Should there be a ban on highschool sophomores' sisters having hot freshman friends in order to prevent tragedies such as this? Perhaps people of higher than average attractiveness should be required to wear Taliban-style robes and such in public.
Think of the children! Won't somebody please think of the children?!?
However, this would be somewhat ironic considering that the ability to make infinite generations of perfect-quality copies is one of the main things the studios mention when asked why copy protection is more necessary with digital media than with analog media.
However, presumably there are circumstances that would make the issue less clear-cut. What if there are only 2 people in the office? 5? 10? 20? What if there are 25 employees in the kitchen? What if the kitchen has open windows facing a busy bus stop? If I'm watching The Matrix on my 60" widescreen TV, am I obligated to close the windows and drapes if people can see and hear it from the street outside? What if I'm playing the Swahili-language version in a town full of Eskimos?
This would likely be covered under the right of public performance. It's tricky to figure out exactly where to draw the line though. For example, is the guy in the riced-out Civic playing Who Let The Dogs Out at 150 db at a red light giving a public performance? What about the guy who plays the same CD in a restaurant kitchen after closing?
I get heavly offended when some faceless company tracks my spending habits and then trys to get me to buy crap that I would never buy in the first place!
If they're pitching stuff that you are completely uninterested in, then they're either not tracking your spending habits, or they're doing a piss-poor job of it. The whole point of targeted marketing is to offer you things that you are likely to be interested in. For example, if you spend $1000 at furniture.com and $800 at mattresses.com in the same month, you're a prime candidate for a coupon from bedsheets.com. OTOH, if they see that you donated money to Handgun Control, it makes no sense to send you an offer for a free case of ammo if you buy a Glock.
I agree that the [X] button brings more grief than any UI element should; personally, I preferred the pre-Win95 menubar style (min/max buttons only; double-click on upper left icon to close). However, as he pointed out, any reasonably well-written application will prompt for confirmation if there is unsaved work. One could argue about whether application writers should have to account for this, but as long as somebody is handling it, the user is in no jeapordy of losing work to a single-click mistake.
There's an important difference here. Clicking the Start button, hyperlinks, titlebars, etc. don't launch applications, so the consequences of accidentally single-clicking on these items are negligible. If everything was single-click, people would always be kicking off half the programs with desktop shortcuts, not to mention potentially dangerous things like email attachments.
That having been said, I agree that the difference is subtle, and invariably confusing for new users. If I had to guess, I'd imagine some PHB at Microsoft once decreed "You know, if we let the user single-click in places off the desktop, they will be more productive because of the reduced click-count. Besides, we don't want to change the interface at this point - that would just confuse our existing customers."
Well, once Oracle has been written, why not sell an Oracle-Lite to the SOHO market. Would it really cost all that much to do so compared to gaining a foothold in the low level marketplace?
Microsoft is doing this with Access now. The Jet engine is deprecated in favor of the Microsoft Data Engine, which is nothing more than a scaled-down SQL Server engine.
However, Microsoft has always counted the consumer market as the foundation of their customer base, so they already had consumer product groups in place, and have spent two decades building a brand in the consumer marketplace. Oracle OTOH, has always been focused on the enterprise market, so producing a Lite version would require them to form a new development group, add tech support staff, and build a brand in the consumer market. And they'd probably have to bundle it with a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation graphics program in order to have any hope of achieving significant market penetration. Altogether, this is a pretty expensive and risky proposition.
It's not just Slashdot either. Blogs by their very nature link to sites/pages about anything and everything. If they could manage to programatically identify blogs with high accuracy, maybe they could develop a hybrid with Google's algorithm so that focused sites are crawled for links to related sites while blogs and such are used to cast popularity/usefulness votes.
The article you reference talks about RDRAM performance with the P3. The P4 presents an entirely different picture, as it fully utilizes the bandwidth of the dual-channel RDRAM architecture. See this article for details. A brief quote from the conclusion:
The memory benchmarks from above show that Pentium 4 really requires the 3,200 MB/s of data bandwidth supplied by the two Rambus channels. I doubt that it will perform as well with DDR-SDRAM, unless two channels will be used.
The business practices, of course, are a different story.
Check out Matthew Curland's Advanced Visual Basic 6, specifically chapter 11. It's not true inline ASM, but it's "very close". Sorry for not posting the code, but it relies on copyrighted modules from the companion CD, so it wouldn't be of any use.
Good humor can make otherwise dry books easier to read, while bad humor can make any book a chore. Even good humor shouldn't get in the way of the subject matter though. Personally, I like the way the Llama keeps humor in footnotes - it lightens the subject matter while allowing you to ignore the humor completely if you want.
It was called Cartrivision. However, its demise seems to have been as much a matter of competition and pricing as one of consumer rebellion. Nevertheless, the more recent Divx fiasco seems to indicate that schemes like this aren't likely to gain acceptance.
This however gives a very false sense of security without stiff penalties for violating the security policies.
IMO, this is a key point that was almost completely ignored in the article, but I would apply it at the societal level. Since technological threats are created by humans, an effective defense strategy must include a deterrent (e.g. criminal prosecution) as well as a response. One of the tricky parts is that in order for this to work, the deterrent must be credible - investigation and prosecution must be a matter of course, and this must apply across national boundaries. Given the emerging definition of terrorism, we may well see this happen in the next decade. Of course, then we'll find ourselves faced with another tricky issue - where to draw the line. What constitutes malevolence vs. research, attack vs. investigation, prevention vs. tyranny? These are questions we already are starting to ask, but they will need to be answered before any effective deterrent can be implemented.
Good point. I think most employers look at a degree largely as evidence that an individual is reasonably well rounded, and is capable of committing himself to a goal and learning whatever is necessary to achieve that goal. In most fields, the willingness and ability to learn is much more important than current competency in a specific area.
In my case, I majored in economics with minors in finance and accounting. I currently work as a programmer/web developer for a large insurance company. I also rarely find myself using any specific knowledge from my college days to do my job, but having the background gives me the ability to speak meaningfully with non-IT people about the business, the economy and the strategic direction of the company. IMO, being able to see beyond your specific job description is one of the most important skills in any field.
I think we're talking about two different things here. You are correct that MAC addresses will not propogate past a router, so the ISP will only ever see a single MAC address as long as you don't change your NAT hardware or configuration.
However, I read this part of the original post: The first six octets will id card / firewall / router / NAT box maker, as meaning that the ISP could capture the MAC address being used on their network segment (i.e. the NAT box's WAN interface), and then identify the vendor to whom the OUI is assigned (yes, I realize that the OUI is only 24 bits, but I'm assuming that the original poster got confused). For example, this useful application tells us that Linksys is assigned the OUIs 00-04-5A and 00-06-25, and D-Link is assigned 00-05-5D, 00-80-C8 and 00-50-BA (the last one may or may not be the same D-Link). Presumably, this could be used by the ISP to identify subscribers likely to be running a NATed LAN, as long as the NAT device isn't spoofing another MAC address.
Unfortunately (for the ISP), as has been noted below, a major problem with this method of identification is that at least some Cable router/NAT devices will spoof the MAC address of a device attached to the LAN interface. My NetGear RP114 does this by default, for example.
But what it they rewrite their support pages to require that javascript be enabled? Combined with restricted access by origination network (like the parent mentions), this would allow them to examine everybody who needed to use their online support.
Interestingly though, check out this page, way down near the bottom:
How do I configure my home networking equipment to function on the new Comcast network?
Although Comcast doesn't support Home Networking equipment at this time, we recommend that you review your manufacturer's guide for instructions on setting DHCP, a dynamic hosting configuration protocol, and domain names in the setup of any equipment you have connected to our network.
This seems to imply that running a NATed network is ok, though unsupported. I wonder how long before this item mysteriously disappears...
...all the sponsor links in the top and bottom frames? It seems to me that the main reason for the frameset is to ensure that this advertising is always onscreen, along the same lines as the Geocities logo. Notice how all the navigation elements are on the content pages (center frame), except for the token Home, Site Map and French translation links that are barely noticeable above the Office Depot banner. Also note that they always dump you into a frameset, even if you open a link in its own window.
The idiotic javascript and other design issues, I can't explain.
You know, I think they're actually serious this time. I just sat in on a 3-day.Net developer workshop, and the trainer told us that the current directive in Redmond is for all product groups to sweep the entire code base for security-related bugs. Supposedly, new development has been halted during this process, and product groups will be held accountable for all future exploits of their products.
Quite honestly, I don't think they have much choice in the matter, and it's not just a question of liability. Security concerns are one of the top reasons firms decide not to use Microsoft software for enterprise applications, and this is obviously a market they covet. Products like Datacenter Server and SQL Server don't sell well if the customers keep hearing about Microsoft products being exploited.
One of the reasons these companies have to make their products cost so much is so they actually make a profit. Every illegal copy takes away from that.
Let's not forget production costs, which I seem to recall reading were in the range of $1 million/episode for TNG. Also, I think the actual monetary loss to the studios as a result of personal copying is a lot less than the industry would have you believe. The people who d/l ripped copies generally do so for one of three reasons: (1) they can't afford to buy the commercial product; (2) they refuse to buy the commercial product, but wouldn't mind having a copy lying around; (3) they want to check out the product before deciding whether to buy it. Generally, people who want the product and can afford it will buy it. Granted, there are people who will decide not to buy the product if they can get a reasonable copy for free, but with TNN running two episodes of TNG a day, most of those people will just set their VCRs and be done with it.
With a behemoth like AOL/Time Warner making noise about pushing into this territory (see this Steve Case speech, about halfway down), I think it's a good thing to have a company with Microsoft's resources give them some competition. Odds are we'll end up not with a monopoly, but an oligopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
What about the pimply-faced highschool sophomore that's driving home from school while checking out his sister's hot freshman friend sitting in the back seat, but oops there's a little girl walking home from school who just happens to be in his way? Should there be a ban on highschool sophomores' sisters having hot freshman friends in order to prevent tragedies such as this? Perhaps people of higher than average attractiveness should be required to wear Taliban-style robes and such in public.
Think of the children! Won't somebody please think of the children?!?
Not any more. IBM mainframes went to air-cooled CMOS CPUs several years ago.
Actually, the article says "the Internal Revenue Service's 1040 EZ form was simpler to read"
The 1040 EZ isn't exactly college-level reading material. It's one fscking page for Chrissake!
However, this would be somewhat ironic considering that the ability to make infinite generations of perfect-quality copies is one of the main things the studios mention when asked why copy protection is more necessary with digital media than with analog media.
You can even write your WSH scripts in Perl if you want.
However, presumably there are circumstances that would make the issue less clear-cut. What if there are only 2 people in the office? 5? 10? 20? What if there are 25 employees in the kitchen? What if the kitchen has open windows facing a busy bus stop? If I'm watching The Matrix on my 60" widescreen TV, am I obligated to close the windows and drapes if people can see and hear it from the street outside? What if I'm playing the Swahili-language version in a town full of Eskimos?
This would likely be covered under the right of public performance. It's tricky to figure out exactly where to draw the line though. For example, is the guy in the riced-out Civic playing Who Let The Dogs Out at 150 db at a red light giving a public performance? What about the guy who plays the same CD in a restaurant kitchen after closing?
I get heavly offended when some faceless company tracks my spending habits and then trys to get me to buy crap that I would never buy in the first place!
If they're pitching stuff that you are completely uninterested in, then they're either not tracking your spending habits, or they're doing a piss-poor job of it. The whole point of targeted marketing is to offer you things that you are likely to be interested in. For example, if you spend $1000 at furniture.com and $800 at mattresses.com in the same month, you're a prime candidate for a coupon from bedsheets.com. OTOH, if they see that you donated money to Handgun Control, it makes no sense to send you an offer for a free case of ammo if you buy a Glock.
I agree that the [X] button brings more grief than any UI element should; personally, I preferred the pre-Win95 menubar style (min/max buttons only; double-click on upper left icon to close). However, as he pointed out, any reasonably well-written application will prompt for confirmation if there is unsaved work. One could argue about whether application writers should have to account for this, but as long as somebody is handling it, the user is in no jeapordy of losing work to a single-click mistake.
There's an important difference here. Clicking the Start button, hyperlinks, titlebars, etc. don't launch applications, so the consequences of accidentally single-clicking on these items are negligible. If everything was single-click, people would always be kicking off half the programs with desktop shortcuts, not to mention potentially dangerous things like email attachments.
That having been said, I agree that the difference is subtle, and invariably confusing for new users. If I had to guess, I'd imagine some PHB at Microsoft once decreed "You know, if we let the user single-click in places off the desktop, they will be more productive because of the reduced click-count. Besides, we don't want to change the interface at this point - that would just confuse our existing customers."
Well, once Oracle has been written, why not sell an Oracle-Lite to the SOHO market. Would it really cost all that much to do so compared to gaining a foothold in the low level marketplace?
Microsoft is doing this with Access now. The Jet engine is deprecated in favor of the Microsoft Data Engine, which is nothing more than a scaled-down SQL Server engine.
However, Microsoft has always counted the consumer market as the foundation of their customer base, so they already had consumer product groups in place, and have spent two decades building a brand in the consumer marketplace. Oracle OTOH, has always been focused on the enterprise market, so producing a Lite version would require them to form a new development group, add tech support staff, and build a brand in the consumer market. And they'd probably have to bundle it with a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation graphics program in order to have any hope of achieving significant market penetration. Altogether, this is a pretty expensive and risky proposition.
It's not just Slashdot either. Blogs by their very nature link to sites/pages about anything and everything. If they could manage to programatically identify blogs with high accuracy, maybe they could develop a hybrid with Google's algorithm so that focused sites are crawled for links to related sites while blogs and such are used to cast popularity/usefulness votes.
The article you reference talks about RDRAM performance with the P3. The P4 presents an entirely different picture, as it fully utilizes the bandwidth of the dual-channel RDRAM architecture. See this article for details. A brief quote from the conclusion:
The memory benchmarks from above show that Pentium 4 really requires the 3,200 MB/s of data bandwidth supplied by the two Rambus channels. I doubt that it will perform as well with DDR-SDRAM, unless two channels will be used.
The business practices, of course, are a different story.
Check out Matthew Curland's Advanced Visual Basic 6, specifically chapter 11. It's not true inline ASM, but it's "very close". Sorry for not posting the code, but it relies on copyrighted modules from the companion CD, so it wouldn't be of any use.
Good humor can make otherwise dry books easier to read, while bad humor can make any book a chore. Even good humor shouldn't get in the way of the subject matter though. Personally, I like the way the Llama keeps humor in footnotes - it lightens the subject matter while allowing you to ignore the humor completely if you want.
It was called Cartrivision. However, its demise seems to have been as much a matter of competition and pricing as one of consumer rebellion. Nevertheless, the more recent Divx fiasco seems to indicate that schemes like this aren't likely to gain acceptance.
This however gives a very false sense of security without stiff penalties for violating the security policies.
IMO, this is a key point that was almost completely ignored in the article, but I would apply it at the societal level. Since technological threats are created by humans, an effective defense strategy must include a deterrent (e.g. criminal prosecution) as well as a response. One of the tricky parts is that in order for this to work, the deterrent must be credible - investigation and prosecution must be a matter of course, and this must apply across national boundaries. Given the emerging definition of terrorism, we may well see this happen in the next decade. Of course, then we'll find ourselves faced with another tricky issue - where to draw the line. What constitutes malevolence vs. research, attack vs. investigation, prevention vs. tyranny? These are questions we already are starting to ask, but they will need to be answered before any effective deterrent can be implemented.
Good point. I think most employers look at a degree largely as evidence that an individual is reasonably well rounded, and is capable of committing himself to a goal and learning whatever is necessary to achieve that goal. In most fields, the willingness and ability to learn is much more important than current competency in a specific area.
In my case, I majored in economics with minors in finance and accounting. I currently work as a programmer/web developer for a large insurance company. I also rarely find myself using any specific knowledge from my college days to do my job, but having the background gives me the ability to speak meaningfully with non-IT people about the business, the economy and the strategic direction of the company. IMO, being able to see beyond your specific job description is one of the most important skills in any field.
I think we're talking about two different things here. You are correct that MAC addresses will not propogate past a router, so the ISP will only ever see a single MAC address as long as you don't change your NAT hardware or configuration.
However, I read this part of the original post: The first six octets will id card / firewall / router / NAT box maker, as meaning that the ISP could capture the MAC address being used on their network segment (i.e. the NAT box's WAN interface), and then identify the vendor to whom the OUI is assigned (yes, I realize that the OUI is only 24 bits, but I'm assuming that the original poster got confused). For example, this useful application tells us that Linksys is assigned the OUIs 00-04-5A and 00-06-25, and D-Link is assigned 00-05-5D, 00-80-C8 and 00-50-BA (the last one may or may not be the same D-Link). Presumably, this could be used by the ISP to identify subscribers likely to be running a NATed LAN, as long as the NAT device isn't spoofing another MAC address.
Unfortunately (for the ISP), as has been noted below, a major problem with this method of identification is that at least some Cable router/NAT devices will spoof the MAC address of a device attached to the LAN interface. My NetGear RP114 does this by default, for example.
Can't they just issue an ARP request from a device on the same subnet?
Interestingly though, check out this page, way down near the bottom:
This seems to imply that running a NATed network is ok, though unsupported. I wonder how long before this item mysteriously disappears...
...all the sponsor links in the top and bottom frames? It seems to me that the main reason for the frameset is to ensure that this advertising is always onscreen, along the same lines as the Geocities logo. Notice how all the navigation elements are on the content pages (center frame), except for the token Home, Site Map and French translation links that are barely noticeable above the Office Depot banner. Also note that they always dump you into a frameset, even if you open a link in its own window.
The idiotic javascript and other design issues, I can't explain.
You know, I think they're actually serious this time. I just sat in on a 3-day .Net developer workshop, and the trainer told us that the current directive in Redmond is for all product groups to sweep the entire code base for security-related bugs. Supposedly, new development has been halted during this process, and product groups will be held accountable for all future exploits of their products.
Quite honestly, I don't think they have much choice in the matter, and it's not just a question of liability. Security concerns are one of the top reasons firms decide not to use Microsoft software for enterprise applications, and this is obviously a market they covet. Products like Datacenter Server and SQL Server don't sell well if the customers keep hearing about Microsoft products being exploited.
One of the reasons these companies have to make their products cost so much is so they actually make a profit. Every illegal copy takes away from that.
Let's not forget production costs, which I seem to recall reading were in the range of $1 million/episode for TNG. Also, I think the actual monetary loss to the studios as a result of personal copying is a lot less than the industry would have you believe. The people who d/l ripped copies generally do so for one of three reasons: (1) they can't afford to buy the commercial product; (2) they refuse to buy the commercial product, but wouldn't mind having a copy lying around; (3) they want to check out the product before deciding whether to buy it. Generally, people who want the product and can afford it will buy it. Granted, there are people who will decide not to buy the product if they can get a reasonable copy for free, but with TNN running two episodes of TNG a day, most of those people will just set their VCRs and be done with it.
With a behemoth like AOL/Time Warner making noise about pushing into this territory (see this Steve Case speech, about halfway down), I think it's a good thing to have a company with Microsoft's resources give them some competition. Odds are we'll end up not with a monopoly, but an oligopoly.