Completely off topic I know, but a couple of years ago my 11 year old son was banned for a week from the school computer lab after being found using DOS.
Apparently the school authorities had decided that any type of command line smelt of hacking and subversive tendencies.
Even if the remark is out of context it is still pretty nauseating.
A few years ago people used to complain that the Internet of their youth was being subverted by commercial interests and was no longer the same free and easy experience. At the time I told them to just ignore the commerce because the "good" Internet had not gone away and was even improving.
However, the commercial side is threatening to get out of hand when a major player can set an objective to get in the face of every Internet user. If Ballmer had said the objective was to make sure every user would WANT to have some Microsoft interaction during every session then fine because that suggests making the experience valuable and attractive. What Ballmer actually says is that the user should get no choice in the matter and that is bad IMHO.
OK I'll be flamed for technical illiteracy, but there are a number of archival systems which go into the Petabyte (1000 Terabyte) range but are still relational databases with row level access.
One I worked on stored the output of Cray supercomputers running modelling programs 24x7. The data was output to a bank of Teradata boxes and then archived to tape. The system had a robot tape librarian at the back end but could still operate as a relational database.
The historical data should all be in there by now which would make around 1.5Pb.
The vendor of the software that managed it all was talking about telephone companies planning similar systems to put up to 5Pb in a system.
There are many different areas of maths and a range of books to cater for all levels.
You need to understand which topics you want to get a feel for. The options range from very pure maths ie Logic and Set Theory, through Algebra, Geometry and Calculus and on into Applied Maths, Mechanics, Dynamics, Numerical Analysis, Statistics.
There are many common features in understanding each area.
First off, the motivation for the material in each subject is to solve problems. The questions mathematicians address tend to come from the real world, and then later people come along and rationalise / rigorise the area. This leads to the second common point:
Maths is about abstraction. Solve a set of problems then step up a level and work out what is going on at a more general level. In fact this is why all the text books use a ton of practice problems. Until you understand the examples you can't see the common thread.
Thirdly the topic you are looking at has been chewed over for decades. People have worked out the ways to explain the topic so as to hide the rough edges and at the same time point up the links to other areas of maths. This can leave new readers puzzled as to why something is emphasised, or even worse to give the impression that you have to master every damn topic before you can move forward.
I'll mention a couple of books that I used way back when, others will doubtless have their own views:
Mathematics for the Million: Lancelot Hogben Lots of stuff about numbers and series here.
Statistical Inference: Silvey still one of the cleanest texts on stats I know.
Companies can't resist the temptation to seek out money for no effort.
I can understand the logic of buying things. I give you money, you give me product or service, I get value.
However, the logic of subscriptions for software is beyond me.
I give you money, you give me product. I use product and get value. Then I give you more money for telephone support, and you give me telephone support. I get value. So far so good. But now suddenly you ask me for more money or else I can't keep on using what I have already bought. You don't have to do any more work, I don't get any more value but yet money changes hands.
And this is not just payment by instalments. If I can't pay the price up front, then by all means do me a deal where I borrow the money and pay quarterly.
These business models cannot survive where the users have a choice.
Many years ago people sat down and realised that the powerful in the clan were oppressing the minorities. And in fact since everyone was in a minority of some type, everyone agreed the oppression had to stop.
After much wrangling, they evolved a code of laws and a newfangled idea of democracy. That way, if anyone started oppressing, a vote was held and laws were passed limiting the oppression.
It didn't take long for powerful groups to work out how to pull the levers, but by and large the system worked. Every now and then some group started feeling oppressed and taking direct action with boycotts and sometimes much much more. Some things got changed some not. A cause for concern perhaps but the truth was, most of the time the oppression went away when powerful group collapsed of its own accord. Times passed, interests shifted and the focus moved on.
Right now, the focus is on individual rights to enjoy copyrighted material, and benefit from patented work. Don't imagine that the way it is now will be set in concrete forever. If you think that the mega corps and political groups will last your life out, just turn the clock back 50 years and see who the big names were. Some familiar names, but lots of the old dinosaurs died out.
I went over to the FAQ and read Taco's words. He seems to sum things up just fine.
So keep up the steady pressure, don't bust a gut over this.
A company is bound to invest where it thinks its future revenues will lie.
In this case the future revenues will come from legislation protecting Intellectual Property monopolies. Sad but true. Every million dollars spent protecting interests in DC will return manyfold millions of dollars in terms of higher prices for product.
Maybe there is a ray of hope though. The so-called robber barons of the railroads, steel, shipping and oil back at the end of the 19th Century were eventually reined in. I wonder why they didn't lobby the hell out of government at the time, and if they did, why did they lose the battle against anti-trust legislation?
Well other forms of entertainment existed before films and nobody argued for restrictions on public behaviour to guarantee their profits.
Music Hall and the like were incredibly popular before television and there were some pretty talented performers. Today, there are still live shows and live comedians, but the economics are different.
Music Hall couldn't compete with TV any more than portrait painters could compete with the camera, but such painters still exist and the public gets along just as well.
If economics change the ground rules and Hollywood can no longer justify spending $20mn on some kind of block buster will we all be poorer? Somehow I doubt it.
I don't know if Meucci versus Bell is still controversial, but what I am sure is that a wave of technological development was pushing forward in their area. If it hadn't been Bell or Meucci it would have been someone like them because they were all building on similar technical understanding and looking to solve the same problem of long distance communication.
Give some encouragement to inventors and creators by all means, but don't think for a moment that their progress is the unique fruit of a single brain. There have been some very specially talented people in the past, but to quote just one of them:
"If I have seen further than other men it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants"
Isaac Newton didn't get much money out of patent or copyright and would probably have been outraged if his University had tried to deny others access to his work.
I see that Taiwan is opposing the extension of copyright to 70 years. More power to their elbows if they want to be on the side of Newton rather than Mickey Mouse!
Brother Raster? Well it took me 43 hours in 5 sessions and I did hear of people doing 40 hours straight.
Ragefire? Well he is supposed to spawn within 72 hours of a server reboot, so maybe the guy was a cleric waiting for the Ragefire that never came. That would be enough to break anyones health.
Seriously though, I don't know the guy or anyone connected with him, but wherever his spirit rests, let it rest in peace.
The business models for the BBC in the UK and the commercial channels in the States both rely on the fact that virtually everyone has no choice in the matter. In either system, if it was easy to opt out, then people would do so en masse and the revenue stream would collapse.
SO what if commercial TV does collapse in a mass opt-out? Is that so bad? There is a difference between people working in TV "just to make a living" and people who really want to be part of the entertainment business. I don't want to part with my cash simply to keep people in employment, but if they offer me entertainment I want, then fine if the price is right.
There may well be some good things in the current system for some people, ie local and specialist content that would be unlikely to find airtime without commercials or subsidies, but there may well be no business model that keeps these folk alive.
In the UK, the railway boom of the 19th century was largely funded by the increase in property prices around the stations that were built. The railway companies could buy up land knowing it would shoot up in value later. In fact lots of smaller branch lines were built on the expectation of such profits, and lots of them went bust. Roll forward 50 years and the big profits were gone just at the time that large scale maintenance was required. There was no certainly no business model that could squeeze profits out of the local lines, no matter how important they were to local communities. Eventually the government stepped in but even the government couldn't stomach the cost and in the 1960s there were wholesale line closures.
People complained bitterly, but in the end just had to change their expectations and lifestyle.
Advertisers will certainly find new ways to get product publicity, local and specialist content will probably find a market. Live performance will ALWAYS be popular.
In the end it always comes down to selling what people want at the right price, anything on top is a temporary bonus.
I wouldn't expect too much from statistics and economics. The problem with these studies is the poor quality of the numbers that are available.
In the case of music sales, the industry has a long history of manipulation of sales figures to support various ends. With the recent focus on bogus corporate accounts, I think its gong to be very difficult to get a clear picture.
If the music industry wants to claim that file sharing is hurting sales, I would expect them to bend the numbers to prove this.
I can see that there are some good applications for this stuff, definitely.
But for me my brain just doesn't seem to work that way. Whenever I am faced with any kind of autocomplete, I find that it puts me off what I really wanted to type.
Normally I form in my mind the words that I want to type and just type them. Right now it seems that my typing is lagging about 3 words behind what I am thinking. With most predictive systems, the precise words that I want are not there at least half the time. This breaks my train of thought and feels like harder work than just typing.
Maybe I should give in and just accept a faster but more limited vocabulary.
Big computer companies have been using this tactic for decades.
You want to enter a marketplace? First problem is you haven't got a reference site so noone will take you seriously.
So you buy yourself a reference site and shower them with goodies to make sure the software, hardware and services all hang together. Now you can go to other related businesses with a credible offer.
For this to work, the vendor has to have deep enough pockets to make the showcase site a success, and time enough to do the job properly. Secondly the marketplace has to be broad enough to replicate the showcase to a goodly number of real paying customers.
Nothing wrong here, quite the reverse, it's good business to invest time and effort on satisfying customer demand.
This sort of strategy is popular in the public sector, with regional governments and the like. They all have broadly similar requirements, and are strapped for cash, so that someone will likely be prepared to take the risk of being the trial site. I have also seen it work in smaller banks, the ones who can't really afford to develop new solutions in house.
The upside for the vendor is that you get a pretty much captive market: the customer can't usually afford to pay for any alternative system. This means that you can sell them related services at a premium rate year after year.
The downside is that the margins are hit initially, after all you had to buy the business. Further, if the target marketplace is not actually as homogeneous as you thought, then there can be expensive customisation required for new clients. They won't take the offering just as a package so the perceived risk and cost goes up, meaning that your expensive reference site is not quite so compelling.
The downside for the customer comes when the vendor's pockets aren't so deep, and they are in a hurry for profit.
There are quite a few spins on this strategy, the worst of which is "break the customer's leg and then sell them a splint". In other words, you get 6 months into the project before revealing that there are significant "special" problems that can be blamed on the customer. These "problems" are outside the scope of the original agreement and the customer has to write some cheques to cover it. 6 months later, new unexpected problems crop up . . ..
Well MS has the deep pockets for this kind of work, but they are in a hurry. Tough call to decide whether it's good business or not.
Its all about communication bandwidth
on
Fragfest
·
· Score: 2
We are all of us pack animals really, and will use all channels we can to communicate with our fellows.
What these people are doing is using voice and vision to interact with each other while playing over a healthy amount of ethernet bandwidth. The real world chat plus the data chat makes for a really fat communication pipe and most people love it.
But you get the same effect even without being on the same LAN.
You can see this on the Internet games people play. On Everquest a couple of years ago, for big raids the group leaders would all be talking on the phone and on ICQ as well as playing in teams online.
You can also run a realtime voice server with Battlecom see (http://www.battlecom.org/ ) from Shadowfactor and this adds a whole new dimension to online play:
"Incoming over the hill on the right! Heal me, Heal me. Evac NOW! Damn I'm dead. Why are all our clerics ****ing retards?"
Try typing that with a pack on gnolls on your tail.
I think voice and video links over ADSL will be the next really big advance in online gaming.
Disruptive innovations have usually won the game by the time incumbents start to take them seriously.
Even though they are avoiding the words Open Source everyone knows that is what is being targetted. I think the only result of this campaign will be to raise the profile of Open Source still higher.
Every innovation over time becomes commoditised. The knowledge of how to exploit the innovation spreads wide and far and is no longer scarce. Prices come down.
Every company has limited window of opportunity to profit from the scarcity value of its product or service. Initially they will want to charge on the basis of the benefit to the user but ultimately they can only charge based on the cost of production.
Vendors of software that is effectively a commodity are trying to extend their window of control using dubious scamming techniques.
Vendors of software that is still a scarce item eg a fully integrated dynamic supply chain control system are having few problems.
Performance artists who are skilled and entertaining are in demand. How many good recordings are there of Wagner's Ring cycle? and how many fresh productions are there every year?
Like Schneier says, a good sentry is one of the best additions to the security blanket. Trouble is, where do you find good sentries? Night watchmen are some of the worst paid employees on the payroll, and time and time again have been shown to miss the obvious attacks. It's repetitive, boring work that most people would hate.
The problem lies with the way the human brain operates. We evolved to match patterns as a survival skill. To pick out images from masses of almost random data. Is that a piece of ripe fruit on that tree over there? We are so good at it that we can see patterns in anything: faces in inkblots, or subtle "head and shoulders" movements in stock markets. Generating false positives is also a survival trait when it comes to looking for threats. Is that moving mass of lines the face of a tiger, or a snake? Better to be cautious and check it out.
But monitoring for exceptions is not a thing that humans are good at. Staring at production lines filled with identical chocolates looking for the one that isn't right, human eyes and brains fail at this task. What happens is that your pattern matching circuitry spots the wrong pattern: "these are all the same so there is no problem" each new piece of incoming data confirms this and the brain goes to sleep (try it some time!).
At airport scanners the operators have to take very frequent breaks from studying the X-ray images of suitcases. On top of this, every 10 minutes or so, a bag is fed through that they should react to. Like they say, this keeps them on their toes, or put differently stops pattern matching saying "I already found the pattern, stop bothering me with new data". This approach is better but it is still too labour intensive.
IMHO the way forward lies in a combination of human and automatic scrutiny. The automatic part consists of filtering out the routine, leaving human eyes to sort out the final details. If a security system generates 1,000 alerts an hour it will be ignored. Making a more sophisticated system that cuts down the number of false alerts is usually expensive and as Schneier suggests more likely to weaken things by giving a false sense of security. If however, the system generates 1,000 alerts and flags up the 10 most suspicious for human eyes to look at in detail then you capture the best of both worlds. The smart piece is the algorithm that ranks the alerts as more or less interesting and this is where security experts make the difference.
What Schneier is suggesting is that human+machine monitoring of a smaller range of very specific inputs is better than automatic trawling of masses of nonspecific input.
Mostly I agree with you, but the online sources I was referring to were the vendor sites, the public resources and usenet archives rather than publishers sites.
I'm reading a lot on Cisco routing at the moment and there are a ton of references, including complete University courses online. I'd wouldn't need a ton of dead trees to match this, but it might come close.
Oh and another random thought. The film
Ivan's XTC is on at the moment, and seeing it was based on a Tolstoy short story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" I thought I'd read it.
Amazon will sell you this
here
, but its available online here
Well I'm pro change, although I have to declare an interest as an HDTV owner.
Digital is "better" for the couch potato ie it does offer better quality. And also freeing up the airwaves could be useful.
People slowly replace their receivers over time, and without a shove neither the buyer nor the manufacturer would have any incentive to move fast.
With a deadline way off in the future people will have a reason to look at HDTV for their next purchase.
Mind you the enlightened thing to do would be to make all the old boxes available to poorer countries rather than chucking them in a landfill. I don't expect that the US will be that high minded though.
Slashdot Mirror
Completely off topic I know, but a couple of years ago my 11 year old son was banned for a week from the school computer lab after being found using DOS.
Apparently the school authorities had decided that any type of command line smelt of hacking and subversive tendencies.
No its not just Linux, this format is the same on Windows.
type md5sum --help
to see the options
I downloaded the prerelease version at work and was amazed at the download speed. Basically I clicked the button and it was there.
Then I realised that I must have been getting the file from some local cache.
I don't think this counts against the download counter, so add a couple of dozen (at least) for every big corporate.
Even if the remark is out of context it is still pretty nauseating.
A few years ago people used to complain that the Internet of their youth was being subverted by commercial interests and was no longer the same free and easy experience. At the time I told them to just ignore the commerce because the "good" Internet had not gone away and was even improving.
However, the commercial side is threatening to get out of hand when a major player can set an objective to get in the face of every Internet user. If Ballmer had said the objective was to make sure every user would WANT to have some Microsoft interaction during every session then fine because that suggests making the experience valuable and attractive. What Ballmer actually says is that the user should get no choice in the matter and that is bad IMHO.
Rant over!!
OK I'll be flamed for technical illiteracy, but there are a number of archival systems which go into the Petabyte (1000 Terabyte) range but are still relational databases with row level access.
One I worked on stored the output of Cray supercomputers running modelling programs 24x7. The data was output to a bank of Teradata boxes and then archived to tape. The system had a robot tape librarian at the back end but could still operate as a relational database.
The historical data should all be in there by now which would make around 1.5Pb.
The vendor of the software that managed it all was talking about telephone companies planning similar systems to put up to 5Pb in a system.
Anyone top that?
There are many different areas of maths and a range of books to cater for all levels.
You need to understand which topics you want to get a feel for. The options range from very pure maths ie Logic and Set Theory, through Algebra, Geometry and Calculus and on into Applied Maths, Mechanics, Dynamics, Numerical Analysis, Statistics.
There are many common features in understanding each area.
First off, the motivation for the material in each subject is to solve problems. The questions mathematicians address tend to come from the real world, and then later people come along and rationalise / rigorise the area. This leads to the second common point:
Maths is about abstraction. Solve a set of problems then step up a level and work out what is going on at a more general level. In fact this is why all the text books use a ton of practice problems. Until you understand the examples you can't see the common thread.
Thirdly the topic you are looking at has been chewed over for decades. People have worked out the ways to explain the topic so as to hide the rough edges and at the same time point up the links to other areas of maths. This can leave new readers puzzled as to why something is emphasised, or even worse to give the impression that you have to master every damn topic before you can move forward.
I'll mention a couple of books that I used way back when, others will doubtless have their own views:
Mathematics for the Million: Lancelot Hogben Lots of stuff about numbers and series here.
Statistical Inference: Silvey still one of the cleanest texts on stats I know.
Anything by Feinman on Physics
Sigh,
Companies can't resist the temptation to seek out money for no effort.
I can understand the logic of buying things. I give you money, you give me product or service, I get value.
However, the logic of subscriptions for software is beyond me.
I give you money, you give me product. I use product and get value. Then I give you more money for telephone support, and you give me telephone support. I get value. So far so good. But now suddenly you ask me for more money or else I can't keep on using what I have already bought. You don't have to do any more work, I don't get any more value but yet money changes hands.
And this is not just payment by instalments. If I can't pay the price up front, then by all means do me a deal where I borrow the money and pay quarterly.
These business models cannot survive where the users have a choice.
Many years ago people sat down and realised that the powerful in the clan were oppressing the minorities. And in fact since everyone was in a minority of some type, everyone agreed the oppression had to stop.
After much wrangling, they evolved a code of laws and a newfangled idea of democracy. That way, if anyone started oppressing, a vote was held and laws were passed limiting the oppression.
It didn't take long for powerful groups to work out how to pull the levers, but by and large the system worked. Every now and then some group started feeling oppressed and taking direct action with boycotts and sometimes much much more. Some things got changed some not. A cause for concern perhaps but the truth was, most of the time the oppression went away when powerful group collapsed of its own accord. Times passed, interests shifted and the focus moved on.
Right now, the focus is on individual rights to enjoy copyrighted material, and benefit from patented work. Don't imagine that the way it is now will be set in concrete forever. If you think that the mega corps and political groups will last your life out, just turn the clock back 50 years and see who the big names were. Some familiar names, but lots of the old dinosaurs died out.
I went over to the FAQ and read Taco's words. He seems to sum things up just fine.
So keep up the steady pressure, don't bust a gut over this.
A company is bound to invest where it thinks its future revenues will lie.
In this case the future revenues will come from legislation protecting Intellectual Property monopolies. Sad but true. Every million dollars spent protecting interests in DC will return manyfold millions of dollars in terms of higher prices for product.
Maybe there is a ray of hope though. The so-called robber barons of the railroads, steel, shipping and oil back at the end of the 19th Century were eventually reined in. I wonder why they didn't lobby the hell out of government at the time, and if they did, why did they lose the battle against anti-trust legislation?
Well other forms of entertainment existed before films and nobody argued for restrictions on public behaviour to guarantee their profits.
Music Hall and the like were incredibly popular before television and there were some pretty talented performers. Today, there are still live shows and live comedians, but the economics are different.
Music Hall couldn't compete with TV any more than portrait painters could compete with the camera, but such painters still exist and the public gets along just as well.
If economics change the ground rules and Hollywood can no longer justify spending $20mn on some kind of block buster will we all be poorer? Somehow I doubt it.
Bell and the telephone is a good example, given the following link:
e ll .html
http://www.popular-science.net/history/meucci_b
I don't know if Meucci versus Bell is still controversial, but what I am sure is that a wave of technological development was pushing forward in their area. If it hadn't been Bell or Meucci it would have been someone like them because they were all building on similar technical understanding and looking to solve the same problem of long distance communication.
Give some encouragement to inventors and creators by all means, but don't think for a moment that their progress is the unique fruit of a single brain.
There have been some very specially talented people in the past, but to quote just one of them:
"If I have seen further than other men it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants"
Isaac Newton didn't get much money out of patent or copyright and would probably have been outraged if his University had tried to deny others access to his work.
I see that Taiwan is opposing the extension of copyright to 70 years. More power to their elbows if they want to be on the side of Newton rather than Mickey Mouse!
Hmm, now which camp would it be in Everquest?
Brother Raster? Well it took me 43 hours in 5 sessions and I did hear of people doing 40 hours straight.
Ragefire? Well he is supposed to spawn within 72 hours of a server reboot, so maybe the guy was a cleric waiting for the Ragefire that never came. That would be enough to break anyones health.
Seriously though, I don't know the guy or anyone connected with him, but wherever his spirit rests, let it rest in peace.
The business models for the BBC in the UK and the commercial channels in the States both rely on the fact that virtually everyone has no choice in the matter. In either system, if it was easy to opt out, then people would do so en masse and the revenue stream would collapse.
SO what if commercial TV does collapse in a mass opt-out? Is that so bad? There is a difference between people working in TV "just to make a living" and people who really want to be part of the entertainment business. I don't want to part with my cash simply to keep people in employment, but if they offer me entertainment I want, then fine if the price is right.
There may well be some good things in the current system for some people, ie local and specialist content that would be unlikely to find airtime without commercials or subsidies, but there may well be no business model that keeps these folk alive.
In the UK, the railway boom of the 19th century was largely funded by the increase in property prices around the stations that were built. The railway companies could buy up land knowing it would shoot up in value later. In fact lots of smaller branch lines were built on the expectation of such profits, and lots of them went bust. Roll forward 50 years and the big profits were gone just at the time that large scale maintenance was required. There was no certainly no business model that could squeeze profits out of the local lines, no matter how important they were to local communities. Eventually the government stepped in but even the government couldn't stomach the cost and in the 1960s there were wholesale line closures.
People complained bitterly, but in the end just had to change their expectations and lifestyle.
Advertisers will certainly find new ways to get product publicity, local and specialist content will probably find a market. Live performance will ALWAYS be popular.
In the end it always comes down to selling what people want at the right price, anything on top is a temporary bonus.
Stuff like that makes my hair stand on end.
In fact everyone in the immediate vicinity would have their hair standing on end when they charge up the capacitors!
I wouldn't expect too much from statistics and economics. The problem with these studies is the poor quality of the numbers that are available.
In the case of music sales, the industry has a long history of manipulation of sales figures to support various ends. With the recent focus on bogus corporate accounts, I think its gong to be very difficult to get a clear picture.
If the music industry wants to claim that file sharing is hurting sales, I would expect them to bend the numbers to prove this.
I can see that there are some good applications for this stuff, definitely.
But for me my brain just doesn't seem to work that way. Whenever I am faced with any kind of autocomplete, I find that it puts me off what I really wanted to type.
Normally I form in my mind the words that I want to type and just type them. Right now it seems that my typing is lagging about 3 words behind what I am thinking. With most predictive systems, the precise words that I want are not there at least half the time. This breaks my train of thought and feels like harder work than just typing.
Maybe I should give in and just accept a faster but more limited vocabulary.
I can see the court cases now.
Sexual harassment charge: "You were harbouring lewd thoughts about the air hostess, don't try to deny it!"
Air rage charge: "Ok so you claim you were only THINKING about throttling that kid in the row behind you, tough luck, throttling is throttling"
Seditious thoughts charge "So you were delayed at checkin, that doesn't give you the right to think the security controls are crap"
Big computer companies have been using this tactic for decades.
.
You want to enter a marketplace? First problem is you haven't got a reference site so noone will take you seriously.
So you buy yourself a reference site and shower them with goodies to make sure the software, hardware and services all hang together. Now you can go to other related businesses with a credible offer.
For this to work, the vendor has to have deep enough pockets to make the showcase site a success, and time enough to do the job properly. Secondly the marketplace has to be broad enough to replicate the showcase to a goodly number of real paying customers.
Nothing wrong here, quite the reverse, it's good business to invest time and effort on satisfying customer demand.
This sort of strategy is popular in the public sector, with regional governments and the like. They all have broadly similar requirements, and are strapped for cash, so that someone will likely be prepared to take the risk of being the trial site. I have also seen it work in smaller banks, the ones who can't really afford to develop new solutions in house.
The upside for the vendor is that you get a pretty much captive market: the customer can't usually afford to pay for any alternative system. This means that you can sell them related services at a premium rate year after year.
The downside is that the margins are hit initially, after all you had to buy the business. Further, if the target marketplace is not actually as homogeneous as you thought, then there can be expensive customisation required for new clients. They won't take the offering just as a package so the perceived risk and cost goes up, meaning that your expensive reference site is not quite so compelling.
The downside for the customer comes when the vendor's pockets aren't so deep, and they are in a hurry for profit.
There are quite a few spins on this strategy, the worst of which is "break the customer's leg and then sell them a splint". In other words, you get 6 months into the project before revealing that there are significant "special" problems that can be blamed on the customer. These "problems" are outside the scope of the original agreement and the customer has to write some cheques to cover it. 6 months later, new unexpected problems crop up . . .
Well MS has the deep pockets for this kind of work, but they are in a hurry. Tough call to decide whether it's good business or not.
We are all of us pack animals really, and will use all channels we can to communicate with our fellows.
What these people are doing is using voice and vision to interact with each other while playing over a healthy amount of ethernet bandwidth. The real world chat plus the data chat makes for a really fat communication pipe and most people love it.
But you get the same effect even without being on the same LAN.
You can see this on the Internet games people play. On Everquest a couple of years ago, for big raids the group leaders would all be talking on the phone and on ICQ as well as playing in teams online.
You can also run a realtime voice server with Battlecom see (http://www.battlecom.org/ ) from Shadowfactor and this adds a whole new dimension to online play:
"Incoming over the hill on the right! Heal me, Heal me. Evac NOW! Damn I'm dead. Why are all our clerics ****ing retards?"
Try typing that with a pack on gnolls on your tail.
I think voice and video links over ADSL will be the next really big advance in online gaming.
"You are known by the calibre of your enemies"
Disruptive innovations have usually won the game by the time incumbents start to take them seriously.
Even though they are avoiding the words Open Source everyone knows that is what is being targetted. I think the only result of this campaign will be to raise the profile of Open Source still higher.
Every innovation over time becomes commoditised. The knowledge of how to exploit the innovation spreads wide and far and is no longer scarce. Prices come down.
Every company has limited window of opportunity to profit from the scarcity value of its product or service. Initially they will want to charge on the basis of the benefit to the user but ultimately they can only charge based on the cost of production.
Vendors of software that is effectively a commodity are trying to extend their window of control using dubious scamming techniques.
Vendors of software that is still a scarce item eg a fully integrated dynamic supply chain control system are having few problems.
Performance artists who are skilled and entertaining are in demand. How many good recordings are there of Wagner's Ring cycle? and how many fresh productions are there every year?
Like Schneier says, a good sentry is one of the best additions to the security blanket. Trouble is, where do you find good sentries? Night watchmen are some of the worst paid employees on the payroll, and time and time again have been shown to miss the obvious attacks. It's repetitive, boring work that most people would hate.
The problem lies with the way the human brain operates. We evolved to match patterns as a survival skill. To pick out images from masses of almost random data. Is that a piece of ripe fruit on that tree over there? We are so good at it that we can see patterns in anything: faces in inkblots, or subtle "head and shoulders" movements in stock markets. Generating false positives is also a survival trait when it comes to looking for threats. Is that moving mass of lines the face of a tiger, or a snake? Better to be cautious and check it out.
But monitoring for exceptions is not a thing that humans are good at. Staring at production lines filled with identical chocolates looking for the one that isn't right, human eyes and brains fail at this task. What happens is that your pattern matching circuitry spots the wrong pattern: "these are all the same so there is no problem" each new piece of incoming data confirms this and the brain goes to sleep (try it some time!).
At airport scanners the operators have to take very frequent breaks from studying the X-ray images of suitcases. On top of this, every 10 minutes or so, a bag is fed through that they should react to. Like they say, this keeps them on their toes, or put differently stops pattern matching saying "I already found the pattern, stop bothering me with new data". This approach is better but it is still too labour intensive.
IMHO the way forward lies in a combination of human and automatic scrutiny. The automatic part consists of filtering out the routine, leaving human eyes to sort out the final details. If a security system generates 1,000 alerts an hour it will be ignored. Making a more sophisticated system that cuts down the number of false alerts is usually expensive and as Schneier suggests more likely to weaken things by giving a false sense of security. If however, the system generates 1,000 alerts and flags up the 10 most suspicious for human eyes to look at in detail then you capture the best of both worlds. The smart piece is the algorithm that ranks the alerts as more or less interesting and this is where security experts make the difference.
What Schneier is suggesting is that human+machine monitoring of a smaller range of very specific inputs is better than automatic trawling of masses of nonspecific input.
Good article, well worth the read.
Don't expect we'll see much in Western Europe. There just aren't any wide open spaces any more.
Check out how bad it is on this map at Atlas
Maybe we should have a slashdot appeal to turn out all the lights on Monday night.
Here's wishing dark skies to everyone.
Mostly I agree with you, but the online sources I was referring to were the vendor sites, the public resources and usenet archives rather than publishers sites.
I'm reading a lot on Cisco routing at the moment and there are a ton of references, including complete University courses online. I'd wouldn't need a ton of dead trees to match this, but it might come close.
Oh and another random thought. The film Ivan's XTC is on at the moment, and seeing it was based on a Tolstoy short story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" I thought I'd read it.
Amazon will sell you this here , but its available online here
No waiting, print it off if you like.
Well I'm pro change, although I have to declare an interest as an HDTV owner.
Digital is "better" for the couch potato ie it does offer better quality. And also freeing up the airwaves could be useful.
People slowly replace their receivers over time, and without a shove neither the buyer nor the manufacturer would have any incentive to move fast.
With a deadline way off in the future people will have a reason to look at HDTV for their next purchase.
Mind you the enlightened thing to do would be to make all the old boxes available to poorer countries rather than chucking them in a landfill. I don't expect that the US will be that high minded though.