Imagine a 6 year old having to do an intellectual property search on the Net every time she was assigned to write a story for school and then try to find the intellectual property owners... if they can be found after 100 years.
Our system here in the US is no better. Every creative work is implicitly copyrighted, even without a copyright notice. Copyright lasts for 70 years after the author dies. So said hypothetical 6-year-old would have to track down an unknown author up to 70 years after his death, perhaps up to 130 years after the creation of the work.
The best answer to that is civil disobedience. Sure, it might be infringement to read a Robert Frost poem in a talent show, or to use Wizard of Oz characters in a story. Do it anyway.
"The industry" there refers to the electronics industry, which, under the bill, would have to pay taxes on recorders and recordable media to cover piracy. My guess is that the electronics industry doesn't care either way about extending copyright; they just don't want to pay taxes to cover trumped-up piracy claims.
It's possible to get APM working with those drivers with a minor source tweak and disabling AGP.
I've tried it and had no luck. Even the people who've made it work say it still crashes occasionally. The closest I've come is that I can close X, remove the NVdriver, and then suspend the machine. That's not much use.
Do you propose that strapping a v6 on a 21 speed would be more efficient?... if people get on bikes, that means they are not driving SUVs.
Efficient, yes: the bike would burn less fuel than an SUV. But clean? No. 2-stroke engines spew far more smog-producing hydrocarbons per unit of work done than even the biggest, ugliest SUVs.
it would be a bitch to bunny hop with a 6 banger between your knees.
V6 bikes are for weenies. Straddle an 8-liter V-10.
Your typical lawn mower produces more pollution mowing your lawn for an hour on Saturday than your car does driving for 5 hours to and from work all week...
You're too generous. The analogy I heard was an hour of chain saw use vs. a cross-country trip in a 2003 Saab. The Saab pollutes less (less hydrocarbon emission), though it does generate a whole lot more CO2. Fit a four-stroke engine within the front fork of my bike, and we'll talk.
Prioritizing ACKs may prevent drops but the main feature is essentially reducing lag time. TCP is self clocking, in that the sender can't send any more packets until it sees an ACK. If you get the ACKs out faster you'll get the replies faster. Thus prioritizing ACKs will make your downloads go faster.
No, no, no. The article showed a 10:1 drop in average throughput, and extreme variability in instantaneous throughput. That cannot be explained away as just a matter of latency.
You can increase the latency of a link, and it will still run at full speed, once TCP's estimate of RTT is properly updated. Except in extreme cases (a T3 to Mars, say), a TCP pipe will be full regardless of its latency, as long as the drop rate is low and the latency is roughly constant.
So what's happening here is that the ACKs are either getting dropped (falling off the end of a queue) or are getting delayed so far past the average RTT that TCP thinks they've been dropped. When an ACK is dropped (or presumed dropped), the sender halves its outgoing bandwidth. Each additional drop, the bandwidth gets halved again.
Prioritizing ACKs here is about keeping them at the head of the queue so that they don't get dropped. It has almost nothing to do with latency.
I was and still am sure, that tcp window is measured in bytes not packets.
Correct, mostly. The congestion window is measured in bytes, but it is incremented by one full packet (by SMSS bytes) whenever a new ACK is received. So the self-clocking behavior I described (get an ACK, send one new packet) and the multiplicative decrease (lose a packet, cut your window in half) are both true. Referring to N=7 packets instead of the equivalent number of bytes was an oversimplification to make the Van Jacobsen paper and RFC-2581 fit in a Slashdot comment.:)
The fact that the congestion window is measured in bytes, but incrementing it is measured in full segments leads to interesting vulnerabilities.
The nVidia cards (the GeForce2Go, anyway) keep APM suspend/hibernate from working under Linux. Pretty and fast, yes. "Running beautifully," perhaps not. I'd trade a few 3-D FPS for the ability to suspend the machine.
By turbocharging the ACKs, you are reducing that lag time
Not quite. TCP streams use pipelining: you send N packets (N is the "window size"), and each time you get an ACK you send one more. So in the ideal case there's no lag, because the ACK for packet 3 lets you go ahead and send packet 10 (if N=7).
When a packet (or its ACK) gets dropped, TCP assumes the network is congested, and cuts N in half, and very slowly increases it back to where it was. So after each dropped packet or ACK you have a while during which you're not using the full link. Several drops in a row can reduce your throughput by a factor of 100 or more.
Prioritizing ACKs doesn't reduce the lag time. It reduces the likelihood that TCP will overreact and reduce its sending rate due to perceived congestion.
Not only that, but the $150 statistic was from launch date.
At the launch date, the retail price of the box was $300, meaning that the wholesale price was probably $250-$275. Then they dropped the retail price to $200, with a wholesale at $175. So, barring a drop in production costs, they should be losing $100 more per console than they were at launch.
Hardware prices have dropped spectacularly since then - I'd be surprised if they're still losing money on the Xbox.
Using off-the-shelf hardware from other vendors means that MS can't reduce production costs as aggressively. And they can't just go to Pricewatch and buy out-of-production CPUs, so their prices don't fall as precipitously as those of an arbitrary PC clone.
MS still has to absorb shipping and (two-year) warranty costs in that $175, as well. They're definitely still losing money on the console, if not on the X-box division as a whole. In fact, the latest quarterly reports confirm that they're still losing money on the division as a whole, too.
Didn't know about the attach rate - nifty.
I didn't either. Maybe it's all MS interns getting those games for $10-$20 apiece. My attach rate was 7, because I got those 7 games for a total of $70. *grin*
If you buy an x-box and run linux (for emulators/surfing the web/whatever), but don't buy 2-3 games, they lose money.
2-3? It's 10, and 5 of them have to be first-party (MS-published) games like Halo. MS loses something like $150 per unit. I got both figures from X-box developers inside MS, so I'm assuming they're real.
If a PSOne + 4" LCD screen without battery or integrated controller costs $150, how much do you think your smaller version with integrated controller, 3" screen, hi-capacity battery (because of all the freaking MOVING PARTS), USB, and mini-DVD drive instead of a regular CD drive cost?
Less, and here's why. A 3" screen is cheaper than a 4" screen, especially if you can get away with lowering the resolution. The controller is not a significant cost. A mini-DVD drive shouldn't cost much more than a CD drive over the long term -- and remember, portable consoles have a lifetime of 8-10 years.
But most importantly, this: Sony can take a loss on them. The mini-DVD format means that users can't just use their existing PSOne games (on CD) -- they'll have to buy them again. Sony can charge $30-$40 each for games that they've already written. Nintendo is already doing this with SNES games on the GBA, and it's got to be hugely profitable. Sony could sell PSOne games on mini-DVDs for $20 and still turn a profit, because the disks are so damn cheap compared to cartridges.
What?? 120 dots on an inch-line is exactly what 120 dpi means. No square inches whatsoever.
A 300dpi laser printer can print 4-point text quite legibly. 4 points = 1/18th of an inch. If 300dpi meant 300 dots per square inch, each letter would get less than one pixel. No, no. In fact, a 300dpi printer devotes more like a 16x8-pixel area to each letter in a 4-point font.
Scanners (up to 1200dpi) and screens (typically 72 to 100dpi) are the same way: dots per linear inch.
Perhaps somebody doesn't quite understand yet - slang originates from exclusivity of communication, not 'ooo, shiney!'. Because you can make up ASCII emoticons on the fly, just as you can with slang, I actually think that the ASCII version is a better tool for the communication purpose.
I disagree. First, people use only about a half dozen emoticons. Second, slang is only useful if your friends understand what you're saying, so it can't be too exclusive or too innovative. And third, "shiny" sells.
Where I entirely agree with you is that there needs to be an easy way for people to create new winks. (It just doesn't need to be instantaneous.) Animated GIFs, Flash, MPEGs, or all of the above -- I want to be able to spend a few minutes finding or crafting a new wink and then use it as easily as I can use the built-in ones.
This "Netscape" you speak of... is it me, or is it just Lynx with pretty pictures and sounds? This "Doom" you speak of... is it me, or is it just Rogue with an unnecessary first-person viewpoint?
Never underestimate the power of a good interface. Leaving out OPs, kicking, and banning goes a long way, too.
Nope, it all just moved to catb.org. Here's the Sex Tips for Geeks document.
Probably the most unintentionally funny thing ESR has ever written.
Whoop, wrong again. Sex Tips is the most repulsive thing he's ever written (worse, even, than Fetchmail and C-Intercal combined!), but the most unintentionally funny thing has got to be Dancing with the Gods. ESR channels the Sex God Pan. Wheee!
---All of the home's basic functionality is available in a pocket
PC-turned-light-switch...
Yeah, and we can trust the wireless protocols? We cant even trust the 802.11
encryption people, let alone MS for security. Who's to know that you could walk
near and hijack a house computer system?
That's not wireless, actually. The PDA-turned-switch is mounted to the wall. It gives residents control over lights, locks, music choices, and phone messages from something roughly twice the size of a normal light switch.
I wouldnt expect any computer can give
reasonable instructions on how to cook. Cooking's an art, mastered by those with
experience.
Bah. Ever heard of a cookbook? Even good cooks use cookbooks occasionally. The nifty ceiling-mounted-projector, RFID-tag-reader auto-cooking system in the MS Home is just a glorified interactive cookbook. I wouldn't mind being able to ask a cookbook to show recipes that don't require eggs (I'm out of eggs) or that are low in sodium, for example.
And
the last thing I want is a transaction log that some law enforcement agency can
download
Who says the house is logging all activity? Turning on the lights and the music when I come home is stateless. The system doesn't have to remember a month from now what time I came home, whether I brought anyone with me, which RFID-tagged groceries I was carrying, and so on. It's just turning on the lights, after all.
I agree that MS's model home is a little over the top, but I think that's the point. It's a hodge-podge of technologies that people might opt to buy three to ten years down the line.
Fantasia (in a new artwork for old music kind of way)
The only cartoon in Fantasia with much of a story is The Sorcerer's Apprentice, in which Mickey tries to make a broom do his work for him and ends up overwhelmed. That story is... borrowed from the public domain. Goethe, to be exact.
Another Disney more-or-less original is "The Emperor's New Groove." Whee.
Great, now I can stop scanning in those 21Mpixel images from film, and get a 10Mpixel digital camera. Since it uses 3 layers, those pixels must count for more than twice as many from the 35mm film.
First, scanners are quite probably using mosaic CCDs, which means that 2/3 of the information they produce is interpolated. And second, even the world's finest scanner cannot increase the resolution of 35mm film. A 3x5 print of a 35mm negative simply doesn't have 1200dpi information on it. Maybe a medium-format or large-format film, but not 35mm.
Sorry, I looked at the site, where it said 10M. And assumed 8bpp. Looks like the Sigma camera that is available is 3.2Mpixel, 12bpp.
Still wrong, actually. The camera has 3.4Mpixels, each of which captures red, green, and blue at 12bpp. So it's roughly 10M 12bpp sensors, or 3.4M 36bpp sensors.
Specialized software or hardware needs to take these individual Red, Green or Blue pixels and recreate a single RGB pixel, this technique is known as demosaicing.
Wrong. Said software or hardware takes two green pixels, a red pixel, and a blue pixel and recreates four RGB pixels. It conjures two thirds of its information out of thin air. (I've written software to do this for the Color Quickcam.)
The worst two effects of this hack are color moire and blurring. Color moire is when detailed B&W objects (detail above the Nyquist frequency) gets colorful edges. Blurring is the loss of detail that occurs when cameras use an anti-alias filter to reduce color moire.
dpreview.com has
an excellent review of the Sigma SD9 in which they examine the pros and cons of the Foveon image sensor. It really does eliminate both color moire and blurring, but there new artifacts to be fixed.
Why is it that people create these virtual worlds that contain the same limitations as the real world. The idea of money only makes sense when you have scarcity. Guess what, this is cyberspace: there is no scarcity necessary here. And yet people build it into their worlds as a "feature".
The scarcity in There seems to be a voluntary tax. Especially if There doesn't charge for the software or charge a monthly fee (IMHO they shouldn't), they need some way to pay for the service. Letting people choose to pay $.60 for a dune buggy or a jacket or $2 for a dog seems like a reasonable way to pay for the service. And it's voluntary: if you don't want jackets or vehicles or dogs, you can free-ride.
It gives rise to an alternative business model: pay $20/mo to be a "high roller" and have unlimited Therebucks. Both models could exist at once: people can choose whether or not to buy there way into an existence free from scarcity.
Charities most surely would not, if you eliminate them as a source of individual and business deductions.
33% of gross income, -15% of non-executive payroll, -100% business expenses, -100% operating costs
The devil is, as they say, in the details. What does and doesn't qualify as a "business expense" or an "operating cost" is where much of the complexity in the tax code is hidden today. Is a $10 paperweight deductable? What about a $10,000 paperweight? Company cars? Is a self-employed person taxed at 18% or 33%? Can he deduct his home office?
A flat tax simplifies the wrong thing: the multiplication step. It leaves most of the complexity about what's deductable, deferrable, and so on. Its backers (Steve Forbes et al.) don't care at all about simplicity; it's a ruse to pass a tax that shifts most of the tax burden to the lower and middle classes.
As far as simplifying my tax preparation, I'd much rather pay $20/yr for tax software than pay extra $ thousands per year so that Steve Forbes gets a lower tax rate.
Slashdot Mirror
Our system here in the US is no better. Every creative work is implicitly copyrighted, even without a copyright notice. Copyright lasts for 70 years after the author dies. So said hypothetical 6-year-old would have to track down an unknown author up to 70 years after his death, perhaps up to 130 years after the creation of the work.
The best answer to that is civil disobedience. Sure, it might be infringement to read a Robert Frost poem in a talent show, or to use Wizard of Oz characters in a story. Do it anyway.
Really?
"The industry" there refers to the electronics industry, which, under the bill, would have to pay taxes on recorders and recordable media to cover piracy. My guess is that the electronics industry doesn't care either way about extending copyright; they just don't want to pay taxes to cover trumped-up piracy claims.
I've tried it and had no luck. Even the people who've made it work say it still crashes occasionally. The closest I've come is that I can close X, remove the NVdriver, and then suspend the machine. That's not much use.
Efficient, yes: the bike would burn less fuel than an SUV. But clean? No. 2-stroke engines spew far more smog-producing hydrocarbons per unit of work done than even the biggest, ugliest SUVs.
it would be a bitch to bunny hop with a 6 banger between your knees.
V6 bikes are for weenies. Straddle an 8-liter V-10.
You're too generous. The analogy I heard was an hour of chain saw use vs. a cross-country trip in a 2003 Saab. The Saab pollutes less (less hydrocarbon emission), though it does generate a whole lot more CO2. Fit a four-stroke engine within the front fork of my bike, and we'll talk.
No, no, no. The article showed a 10:1 drop in average throughput, and extreme variability in instantaneous throughput. That cannot be explained away as just a matter of latency.
You can increase the latency of a link, and it will still run at full speed, once TCP's estimate of RTT is properly updated. Except in extreme cases (a T3 to Mars, say), a TCP pipe will be full regardless of its latency, as long as the drop rate is low and the latency is roughly constant.
So what's happening here is that the ACKs are either getting dropped (falling off the end of a queue) or are getting delayed so far past the average RTT that TCP thinks they've been dropped. When an ACK is dropped (or presumed dropped), the sender halves its outgoing bandwidth. Each additional drop, the bandwidth gets halved again.
Prioritizing ACKs here is about keeping them at the head of the queue so that they don't get dropped. It has almost nothing to do with latency.
Correct, mostly. The congestion window is measured in bytes, but it is incremented by one full packet (by SMSS bytes) whenever a new ACK is received. So the self-clocking behavior I described (get an ACK, send one new packet) and the multiplicative decrease (lose a packet, cut your window in half) are both true. Referring to N=7 packets instead of the equivalent number of bytes was an oversimplification to make the Van Jacobsen paper and RFC-2581 fit in a Slashdot comment. :)
The fact that the congestion window is measured in bytes, but incrementing it is measured in full segments leads to interesting vulnerabilities.
The nVidia cards (the GeForce2Go, anyway) keep APM suspend/hibernate from working under Linux. Pretty and fast, yes. "Running beautifully," perhaps not. I'd trade a few 3-D FPS for the ability to suspend the machine.
When you get the ACK, send some more.
By turbocharging the ACKs, you are reducing that lag time
Not quite. TCP streams use pipelining: you send N packets (N is the "window size"), and each time you get an ACK you send one more. So in the ideal case there's no lag, because the ACK for packet 3 lets you go ahead and send packet 10 (if N=7).
When a packet (or its ACK) gets dropped, TCP assumes the network is congested, and cuts N in half, and very slowly increases it back to where it was. So after each dropped packet or ACK you have a while during which you're not using the full link. Several drops in a row can reduce your throughput by a factor of 100 or more.
Prioritizing ACKs doesn't reduce the lag time. It reduces the likelihood that TCP will overreact and reduce its sending rate due to perceived congestion.
The technique you suggest is one of several proposed by Stefan Savage in TCP Congestion Control with a Misbehaving Receiver. He called it TCP Daytona. :)
s/privacy/piracy/, I assume. A delightful Freudian slip, though.
At the launch date, the retail price of the box was $300, meaning that the wholesale price was probably $250-$275. Then they dropped the retail price to $200, with a wholesale at $175. So, barring a drop in production costs, they should be losing $100 more per console than they were at launch.
Hardware prices have dropped spectacularly since then - I'd be surprised if they're still losing money on the Xbox.
Using off-the-shelf hardware from other vendors means that MS can't reduce production costs as aggressively. And they can't just go to Pricewatch and buy out-of-production CPUs, so their prices don't fall as precipitously as those of an arbitrary PC clone.
MS still has to absorb shipping and (two-year) warranty costs in that $175, as well. They're definitely still losing money on the console, if not on the X-box division as a whole. In fact, the latest quarterly reports confirm that they're still losing money on the division as a whole, too.
Didn't know about the attach rate - nifty.
I didn't either. Maybe it's all MS interns getting those games for $10-$20 apiece. My attach rate was 7, because I got those 7 games for a total of $70. *grin*
2-3? It's 10, and 5 of them have to be first-party (MS-published) games like Halo. MS loses something like $150 per unit. I got both figures from X-box developers inside MS, so I'm assuming they're real.
Less, and here's why. A 3" screen is cheaper than a 4" screen, especially if you can get away with lowering the resolution. The controller is not a significant cost. A mini-DVD drive shouldn't cost much more than a CD drive over the long term -- and remember, portable consoles have a lifetime of 8-10 years.
But most importantly, this: Sony can take a loss on them. The mini-DVD format means that users can't just use their existing PSOne games (on CD) -- they'll have to buy them again. Sony can charge $30-$40 each for games that they've already written. Nintendo is already doing this with SNES games on the GBA, and it's got to be hugely profitable. Sony could sell PSOne games on mini-DVDs for $20 and still turn a profit, because the disks are so damn cheap compared to cartridges.
16000 dots per square inch = 16000 dpi.
What?? 120 dots on an inch-line is exactly what 120 dpi means. No square inches whatsoever.
A 300dpi laser printer can print 4-point text quite legibly. 4 points = 1/18th of an inch. If 300dpi meant 300 dots per square inch, each letter would get less than one pixel. No, no. In fact, a 300dpi printer devotes more like a 16x8-pixel area to each letter in a 4-point font.
Scanners (up to 1200dpi) and screens (typically 72 to 100dpi) are the same way: dots per linear inch.
I disagree. First, people use only about a half dozen emoticons. Second, slang is only useful if your friends understand what you're saying, so it can't be too exclusive or too innovative. And third, "shiny" sells.
Where I entirely agree with you is that there needs to be an easy way for people to create new winks. (It just doesn't need to be instantaneous.) Animated GIFs, Flash, MPEGs, or all of the above -- I want to be able to spend a few minutes finding or crafting a new wink and then use it as easily as I can use the built-in ones.
This "Netscape" you speak of... is it me, or is it just Lynx with pretty pictures and sounds? This "Doom" you speak of... is it me, or is it just Rogue with an unnecessary first-person viewpoint?
Never underestimate the power of a good interface. Leaving out OPs, kicking, and banning goes a long way, too.
Nope, it all just moved to catb.org. Here's the Sex Tips for Geeks document.
Probably the most unintentionally funny thing ESR has ever written.
Whoop, wrong again. Sex Tips is the most repulsive thing he's ever written (worse, even, than Fetchmail and C-Intercal combined!), but the most unintentionally funny thing has got to be Dancing with the Gods. ESR channels the Sex God Pan. Wheee!
Yeah, and we can trust the wireless protocols? We cant even trust the 802.11 encryption people, let alone MS for security. Who's to know that you could walk near and hijack a house computer system?
That's not wireless, actually. The PDA-turned-switch is mounted to the wall. It gives residents control over lights, locks, music choices, and phone messages from something roughly twice the size of a normal light switch.
I wouldnt expect any computer can give reasonable instructions on how to cook. Cooking's an art, mastered by those with experience.
Bah. Ever heard of a cookbook? Even good cooks use cookbooks occasionally. The nifty ceiling-mounted-projector, RFID-tag-reader auto-cooking system in the MS Home is just a glorified interactive cookbook. I wouldn't mind being able to ask a cookbook to show recipes that don't require eggs (I'm out of eggs) or that are low in sodium, for example.
And the last thing I want is a transaction log that some law enforcement agency can download
Who says the house is logging all activity? Turning on the lights and the music when I come home is stateless. The system doesn't have to remember a month from now what time I came home, whether I brought anyone with me, which RFID-tagged groceries I was carrying, and so on. It's just turning on the lights, after all.
I agree that MS's model home is a little over the top, but I think that's the point. It's a hodge-podge of technologies that people might opt to buy three to ten years down the line.
The only cartoon in Fantasia with much of a story is The Sorcerer's Apprentice, in which Mickey tries to make a broom do his work for him and ends up overwhelmed. That story is ... borrowed from the public domain. Goethe, to be exact.
Another Disney more-or-less original is "The Emperor's New Groove." Whee.
First, scanners are quite probably using mosaic CCDs, which means that 2/3 of the information they produce is interpolated. And second, even the world's finest scanner cannot increase the resolution of 35mm film. A 3x5 print of a 35mm negative simply doesn't have 1200dpi information on it. Maybe a medium-format or large-format film, but not 35mm.
Still wrong, actually. The camera has 3.4Mpixels, each of which captures red, green, and blue at 12bpp. So it's roughly 10M 12bpp sensors, or 3.4M 36bpp sensors.
</pedantic>
Wrong. Said software or hardware takes two green pixels, a red pixel, and a blue pixel and recreates four RGB pixels. It conjures two thirds of its information out of thin air. (I've written software to do this for the Color Quickcam.) The worst two effects of this hack are color moire and blurring. Color moire is when detailed B&W objects (detail above the Nyquist frequency) gets colorful edges. Blurring is the loss of detail that occurs when cameras use an anti-alias filter to reduce color moire.
dpreview.com has an excellent review of the Sigma SD9 in which they examine the pros and cons of the Foveon image sensor. It really does eliminate both color moire and blurring, but there new artifacts to be fixed.
The scarcity in There seems to be a voluntary tax. Especially if There doesn't charge for the software or charge a monthly fee (IMHO they shouldn't), they need some way to pay for the service. Letting people choose to pay $.60 for a dune buggy or a jacket or $2 for a dog seems like a reasonable way to pay for the service. And it's voluntary: if you don't want jackets or vehicles or dogs, you can free-ride.
It gives rise to an alternative business model: pay $20/mo to be a "high roller" and have unlimited Therebucks. Both models could exist at once: people can choose whether or not to buy there way into an existence free from scarcity.
Charities most surely would not, if you eliminate them as a source of individual and business deductions.
33% of gross income, -15% of non-executive payroll, -100% business expenses, -100% operating costs
The devil is, as they say, in the details. What does and doesn't qualify as a "business expense" or an "operating cost" is where much of the complexity in the tax code is hidden today. Is a $10 paperweight deductable? What about a $10,000 paperweight? Company cars? Is a self-employed person taxed at 18% or 33%? Can he deduct his home office?
A flat tax simplifies the wrong thing: the multiplication step. It leaves most of the complexity about what's deductable, deferrable, and so on. Its backers (Steve Forbes et al.) don't care at all about simplicity; it's a ruse to pass a tax that shifts most of the tax burden to the lower and middle classes.
As far as simplifying my tax preparation, I'd much rather pay $20/yr for tax software than pay extra $ thousands per year so that Steve Forbes gets a lower tax rate.