I understand all your concerns, but it's amazing how they become a non-issue once you actually have a TiVo and have used it for a while. If you look at TiVo vs. the roll-your-own versions, it's just incomparable how fit and polished TiVo is in every way.
I STRONGLY recommend that if you still have concerns, grab one off of eBay with a lifetime subscription built into it. Try it for a few weeks and see how you like it. If you don't like it, you can sell it on eBay for about what you paid for it, minus shipping and a listing fee.
If you have ever graded problem sets for CS students, you'll realize how easy it is to tell who copied code and who didn't, even in a 200 line assignment. It really depends on what those lines look like. And the lines don't have to absolutely identical in order for it to be obvious.
Everyone keeps focusing on the "10-15 lines" bit without acknowledging the "large sections" part that's in the same sentence. I'm not saying that SCO is right, but they could be. I'm anxious to see what the third party investigators might say about it.
I remember those things... what a great series. I had to keep tabs on where I left off so that I could go back and figure things out later on. I actually received a broken adventure once -- the last 50 pages or so of the book were missing! I wrote to Bantam Books and they sent me a new one, properly bound with all the pages in it.
Why would they do that? That's suicide for them since they lose their revenue stream. Product obsolescence because of upgrades doesn't apply to subscription services, where newer products are the only way to provide upgrades. It is CRUCIAL to subscription services that it's backwards compatiable in every possible way. If newer incompatible services are introduced, Microsoft must a) heavily subsidize the fixed costs for service (perhaps even pay for it) or b) continue to support it until it dies. Instead of looking at a software model, a cell phone service model is much more relevant. People still use old AMPS phones as their primary phones. The cell phone companies must continue to support it until the costs of supporting it outweigh the revenues associated with it. With free phones in upgrade plans, there's no reason to move to a more modern plan.
It doesn't matter -- Slashdot still deserves the blame. By being a part of the media, it has a journalistic responsibility to report things with integrity. It has to do due diligence when reporting things and has to verify that the summary accurately reflects the contents of the article. In this case, the summary clearly does not accurately reflect the article cited. Slashdot has editors who carry this responsibility and ensuring that submissions that are picked and branded as "News for Nerds" is actually news, not just what sounds like news. Otherwise, Slashdot needs to rebrand itself as a rumor mill and let the expectation be set that way. I realize that Slashdot isn't the New York Times, but it simply cannot post inaccurate/inflammatory/biased information and summaries and not expect people to react to it.
Right, and that's a good point, but the purpose of the regenerative braking system is to recover some of the losses associated with braking, not to recharge the car's fuel supply so that it can continue to go. The submitter makes the mistake of thinking that the cell phone could vibrate and allow it to keep going for another hour. That's akin to getting low on fuel, applying the brakes, storing the scrubbed kinetic energy, and then using it to start accelerating again. Even with 100% efficiency, you're no better than where you were before.
Plus, if you're collecting energy from the phone's vibration, you're going to make it vibrate less. The value of the system is to collect energy from unwanted or wasted movement. The vibration of a cell phone is a desired use of energy.
Bad people always spoil it for the rest of us. You're not thinking broadly enough. If people didn't hijack airplanes, we wouldn't have to stand in line for 15 minutes before boarding a plane and being paranoid about security. We wouldn't need passwords or PINs. Or SSH. Or door locks. Or car alarms. Or confidential envelopes. Or armies. If you think about, we spend a HUGE amount of our time and effort EVERY DAY to fend off the people that want to do us harm.
And to counter your argument, anti-piracy measures help ordinary consumers by keeping the company profitable and bring around additional products that benefit the consumer or reducing the cost of a product or service. It, like everything else, goes both ways. Would you have bought the game if it cost $100 instead of $50 but it didn't come with all the copy protection stuff?
Sorry, I'm not familiar with the "desert island" test, but based on the name, I'm guessing that the test asks the question, "can you change the code if you're on a desert island?" I'm not sure why you couldn't. You don't need permission to change the code. When you're done, write your changes on a piece of driftwood, address it to Microsoft, and send it on its way! The changes do not have to have prior permission in order to be made.
I know... after I posted it I realized that I should have gone back and changed it, since I was going to say something about OSI's viewpoint, but I changed my mind midway through and so the title and the beginning is inappropriate for the context by the end. I should have restructured my post differently. Thanks for the link.
True, it's not the way that most open source licenses work, but much of the value of open source (small o and small s) is that you can see the source. You can see how it works, you can learn how it works, and maybe you can write software to work with it. There's additional value in modifying it and even more value in distributing it, but the value doesn't begin there. While MS's program requirement doesn't meet the strict definition of open source, I would say that it meets the definition in a more loose way. The only requirement is that you email it back to MS and they get to use it, too. That doesn't sound like too strict a requirement, since the only difference is that instead of MS coming to you and downloading your source, you're sending it to them. Call them lazy. In addition, they're allowing you to profit from selling the software commercially, which is also not in the strict open source definition.
Sounds like you're against this only because Microsoft stands to gain from it and would rather see them lose money than see other people gain. That's sad. You're just a MS basher, not an open source promoter. There's a difference.
Opening the source to China is to a single foreign organization. Opening the source to the courts during the MS anti-trust trials makes it a matter of public record and EVERYONE can get it.
If I understand the concept correctly, these watches are only receiving data, not sending. So basically, it's a mini-pager. Is this revolutionary?
Does it have to be? Most new products today are not new concepts but are old products that have more features and are better packaged. Look at the other items featured at CES... you have some great new concepts and designs, but most are just recycled stuff that are taking evolutionary steps forward. However, most significant about this Microsoft watch is that there isn't one now. They're trying to feed the market for wristwatch data devices. There was one before, but MS thinks they can succeed.
You're confusing digital television with HDTV. They just want to get the final broadcast in a digital format which uses a lot less bandwidth and can accomodate some nice features, like station identification and programming information, but is not required. It's the same move as digital radio, which was approved a couple of months ago by the FCC. Expect to be able to see it in stores within a year. It offers the ability of stations to broadcast their signals using digital signals. No change is made to anything except the transmitter, though other things may be upgraded as well. This is a huge boon to AM radio stations who, for a fairly low price of $50k-$100k, can simulcast on digital radio. AM talk radio shows can now enjoy the clarity of their FM counterparts.
For consumers, this means that they'll likely have to purchase a digital TV receiver. By the time it hits, it'll be available for less than $50 and probably less than that. All new TVs will have them built in. Chances are, they won't have all the DRM stuff that most posters here are fearing, but it may arrive in the future at a date later than 2006. HDTV will still be expensive and be considered a premium, high-end piece of electronics and entertainment, but digital TV will not.
The license isn't for a retail version of Windows -- it's for a version of Windows specifically for Compaq/Dell/whatever computers offered at a discount from the retail packaged version, which can be installed on any computer.
Do you *REALLY* need a backup of your.mp3 collection?! Probably not. Do you *REALLY* need a backup of all those ISO CDROM images that you downloaded for fifty versions of Linux and a half dozen versions of FreeBSD? Probably not. But that's the sorts of things that are taking up 80gb plus on my hard drives -- i.e., utterly disposable cruft. Which is true for most personal computers.
Absolutely true. Most of my personal data can fit on a CD or two at the most.
Except for digital photographs. With a 3 MP camera pumping out 2-2.5 MB photographs each (lossless compression; it's the closest thing to a digital negative) and hundreds of photos a month, it's very easy to get a collection of digital media that is not replaceable simply by downloading it again from another source. I'm glad I don't have a DV video camera yet -- otherwise I'd be spending all of my cash on new storage. I don't have a good way of backing up my data reliably, so I'm still scouring this story for good ideas.
I'm very glad to hear about this. This is one area that Microsoft simply excels because they have money. Doing this kind of research takes time and effort -- too many people underestimate what it takes and what a good usability study can bring. Too many times, OSS is just a collection of tools written by and for engineers. This is encouraging, as it's been one of the biggest roadblocks toward Linux desktop sucess.
For internal CYA situations, all that you really need is an email to the boss, copied to yourself and some other people that should be in-the-know, like your supervisor, just stating that what you're doing (and not doing) and why you're doing that. And it doesn't have to sound hostile or anything. Just zip off an email: "Mr. Smith, I just wanted to let you know that the network is all set for you to use. Per your request, I've turned off the encryption and so that you can browse the network at your convenience. As I explained, there is a security hole and compromises can come in thorugh this area, so I advise that a) my department gets money for a hardware based encryption system or b) we rethink this security hole and get it plugged." Documenting decisions is protecting yourself from the future. We once had a server with no backups because it cost a lot of money to backup the hundreds of gigabytes on there. I pushed strongly for a backup solution, but my idea was dismissed. Of course, the server lunched the data. I was able to reproduce the email to show that I pushed strongly for it -- without it, I surely would have lost my job.
What are you complaining about? Using Windows doesn't resign yourself to using commercial software. You can find an open source or free version of just about every utility that you require. I use Windows every day but I use tons of open source software: Emacs, Cygwin, gcc, random utilities, etc. Sometimes it's not as well developed as their Linux/Unix counterparts, but most of the time, they work just as well. Finding precompiled binaries is convenient, but they're hard to find sometimes. The market for Windows machines running open source software is even smaller than open source software running on an open source OS.
Regarding the "commercialism," of COURSE it's filled with commercialism -- you haven't paid for the software. They're trying to get you to pay them for it, as you probably agreed to in the license agreement. You can pay for it make it go away or you can discontinue the trial. If you don't like the model or the software, find an alternative -- a packaged piece of commercial software or a free version.
Actually, I don't think that the Tablet PC is going to be a niche product at all. I think the price over a comparable "regular" notebook is going to be about $500 soon. The advantages are obvious: use a keyboard if you want, or if you don't want to take it with you, you don't have to (depending on the specific design). The downsides are the increased cost and the lack of an ultra high resolution screen or a large screen (I think that's going to change over time). I talked to a number of people and basically the response is, "well, if you're going to replace your notebook, why wouldn't you get one of these?" $500 more for a corporate PC isn't much. And these are developers that I'm talking about... code at home with your keyboard, but if you're on the go and don't need to do hardcode coding, you have a lot of flexibility.
That's not true. News doesn't have to be "new." Sometimes, exposing existing information to the public is as important as getting the scoop and delivering new information. Reporting trends isn't really new news because it's obviously been having for a while (hence the term, "trend"), but it's just as important to expose announce the fact that it has been going on for a while. Reporting that something's been happening for years is not redundant: it's obviously different from reporting the first incident years ago. The first child abuduction was notable, but reporting that it's a trend has an entirely different meaning.
I do agree that this isn't particularly interesting news or surprising, but your suggestion that only new things are news is something that I disagree with.
You're right -- technical solutions shouldn't be a substitute for good parenting and supervision. But a little bit of technical wizardry does help. You do keep the cookie jar out of their reach, right?
No time at all. Nickelodeon, Disney, and Fox Kids already have shamelessly self-promotional sites, just like nearly every other commercial site on the Internet. The kids.us domain isn't supposed to create squeaky-clean content for kids and no one's going to be censoring CNN. Instead, you'll see sites that are designed for kids to use and are focused toward kids (CNN will have stories more interesting toward kids, much like childrens magazines today). More importantly, it's what you won't see on the domain: porn and violence.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand all your concerns, but it's amazing how they become a non-issue once you actually have a TiVo and have used it for a while. If you look at TiVo vs. the roll-your-own versions, it's just incomparable how fit and polished TiVo is in every way.
I STRONGLY recommend that if you still have concerns, grab one off of eBay with a lifetime subscription built into it. Try it for a few weeks and see how you like it. If you don't like it, you can sell it on eBay for about what you paid for it, minus shipping and a listing fee.
If you have ever graded problem sets for CS students, you'll realize how easy it is to tell who copied code and who didn't, even in a 200 line assignment. It really depends on what those lines look like. And the lines don't have to absolutely identical in order for it to be obvious.
Everyone keeps focusing on the "10-15 lines" bit without acknowledging the "large sections" part that's in the same sentence. I'm not saying that SCO is right, but they could be. I'm anxious to see what the third party investigators might say about it.
I remember those things ... what a great series. I had to keep tabs on where I left off so that I could go back and figure things out later on. I actually received a broken adventure once -- the last 50 pages or so of the book were missing! I wrote to Bantam Books and they sent me a new one, properly bound with all the pages in it.
Why would they do that? That's suicide for them since they lose their revenue stream. Product obsolescence because of upgrades doesn't apply to subscription services, where newer products are the only way to provide upgrades. It is CRUCIAL to subscription services that it's backwards compatiable in every possible way. If newer incompatible services are introduced, Microsoft must a) heavily subsidize the fixed costs for service (perhaps even pay for it) or b) continue to support it until it dies. Instead of looking at a software model, a cell phone service model is much more relevant. People still use old AMPS phones as their primary phones. The cell phone companies must continue to support it until the costs of supporting it outweigh the revenues associated with it. With free phones in upgrade plans, there's no reason to move to a more modern plan.
It doesn't matter -- Slashdot still deserves the blame. By being a part of the media, it has a journalistic responsibility to report things with integrity. It has to do due diligence when reporting things and has to verify that the summary accurately reflects the contents of the article. In this case, the summary clearly does not accurately reflect the article cited. Slashdot has editors who carry this responsibility and ensuring that submissions that are picked and branded as "News for Nerds" is actually news, not just what sounds like news. Otherwise, Slashdot needs to rebrand itself as a rumor mill and let the expectation be set that way. I realize that Slashdot isn't the New York Times, but it simply cannot post inaccurate/inflammatory/biased information and summaries and not expect people to react to it.
Right, and that's a good point, but the purpose of the regenerative braking system is to recover some of the losses associated with braking, not to recharge the car's fuel supply so that it can continue to go. The submitter makes the mistake of thinking that the cell phone could vibrate and allow it to keep going for another hour. That's akin to getting low on fuel, applying the brakes, storing the scrubbed kinetic energy, and then using it to start accelerating again. Even with 100% efficiency, you're no better than where you were before.
Plus, if you're collecting energy from the phone's vibration, you're going to make it vibrate less. The value of the system is to collect energy from unwanted or wasted movement. The vibration of a cell phone is a desired use of energy.
Bad people always spoil it for the rest of us. You're not thinking broadly enough. If people didn't hijack airplanes, we wouldn't have to stand in line for 15 minutes before boarding a plane and being paranoid about security. We wouldn't need passwords or PINs. Or SSH. Or door locks. Or car alarms. Or confidential envelopes. Or armies. If you think about, we spend a HUGE amount of our time and effort EVERY DAY to fend off the people that want to do us harm.
And to counter your argument, anti-piracy measures help ordinary consumers by keeping the company profitable and bring around additional products that benefit the consumer or reducing the cost of a product or service. It, like everything else, goes both ways. Would you have bought the game if it cost $100 instead of $50 but it didn't come with all the copy protection stuff?
Sorry, I'm not familiar with the "desert island" test, but based on the name, I'm guessing that the test asks the question, "can you change the code if you're on a desert island?" I'm not sure why you couldn't. You don't need permission to change the code. When you're done, write your changes on a piece of driftwood, address it to Microsoft, and send it on its way! The changes do not have to have prior permission in order to be made.
I know ... after I posted it I realized that I should have gone back and changed it, since I was going to say something about OSI's viewpoint, but I changed my mind midway through and so the title and the beginning is inappropriate for the context by the end. I should have restructured my post differently. Thanks for the link.
True, it's not the way that most open source licenses work, but much of the value of open source (small o and small s) is that you can see the source. You can see how it works, you can learn how it works, and maybe you can write software to work with it. There's additional value in modifying it and even more value in distributing it, but the value doesn't begin there. While MS's program requirement doesn't meet the strict definition of open source, I would say that it meets the definition in a more loose way. The only requirement is that you email it back to MS and they get to use it, too. That doesn't sound like too strict a requirement, since the only difference is that instead of MS coming to you and downloading your source, you're sending it to them. Call them lazy. In addition, they're allowing you to profit from selling the software commercially, which is also not in the strict open source definition.
Sounds like you're against this only because Microsoft stands to gain from it and would rather see them lose money than see other people gain. That's sad. You're just a MS basher, not an open source promoter. There's a difference.
Opening the source to China is to a single foreign organization. Opening the source to the courts during the MS anti-trust trials makes it a matter of public record and EVERYONE can get it.
Does it have to be? Most new products today are not new concepts but are old products that have more features and are better packaged. Look at the other items featured at CES ... you have some great new concepts and designs, but most are just recycled stuff that are taking evolutionary steps forward. However, most significant about this Microsoft watch is that there isn't one now. They're trying to feed the market for wristwatch data devices. There was one before, but MS thinks they can succeed.
Please explain why you think it's illegal.
You're confusing digital television with HDTV. They just want to get the final broadcast in a digital format which uses a lot less bandwidth and can accomodate some nice features, like station identification and programming information, but is not required. It's the same move as digital radio, which was approved a couple of months ago by the FCC. Expect to be able to see it in stores within a year. It offers the ability of stations to broadcast their signals using digital signals. No change is made to anything except the transmitter, though other things may be upgraded as well. This is a huge boon to AM radio stations who, for a fairly low price of $50k-$100k, can simulcast on digital radio. AM talk radio shows can now enjoy the clarity of their FM counterparts.
For consumers, this means that they'll likely have to purchase a digital TV receiver. By the time it hits, it'll be available for less than $50 and probably less than that. All new TVs will have them built in. Chances are, they won't have all the DRM stuff that most posters here are fearing, but it may arrive in the future at a date later than 2006. HDTV will still be expensive and be considered a premium, high-end piece of electronics and entertainment, but digital TV will not.
The license isn't for a retail version of Windows -- it's for a version of Windows specifically for Compaq/Dell/whatever computers offered at a discount from the retail packaged version, which can be installed on any computer.
Absolutely true. Most of my personal data can fit on a CD or two at the most.
Except for digital photographs. With a 3 MP camera pumping out 2-2.5 MB photographs each (lossless compression; it's the closest thing to a digital negative) and hundreds of photos a month, it's very easy to get a collection of digital media that is not replaceable simply by downloading it again from another source. I'm glad I don't have a DV video camera yet -- otherwise I'd be spending all of my cash on new storage. I don't have a good way of backing up my data reliably, so I'm still scouring this story for good ideas.
I'm very glad to hear about this. This is one area that Microsoft simply excels because they have money. Doing this kind of research takes time and effort -- too many people underestimate what it takes and what a good usability study can bring. Too many times, OSS is just a collection of tools written by and for engineers. This is encouraging, as it's been one of the biggest roadblocks toward Linux desktop sucess.
For internal CYA situations, all that you really need is an email to the boss, copied to yourself and some other people that should be in-the-know, like your supervisor, just stating that what you're doing (and not doing) and why you're doing that. And it doesn't have to sound hostile or anything. Just zip off an email: "Mr. Smith, I just wanted to let you know that the network is all set for you to use. Per your request, I've turned off the encryption and so that you can browse the network at your convenience. As I explained, there is a security hole and compromises can come in thorugh this area, so I advise that a) my department gets money for a hardware based encryption system or b) we rethink this security hole and get it plugged." Documenting decisions is protecting yourself from the future. We once had a server with no backups because it cost a lot of money to backup the hundreds of gigabytes on there. I pushed strongly for a backup solution, but my idea was dismissed. Of course, the server lunched the data. I was able to reproduce the email to show that I pushed strongly for it -- without it, I surely would have lost my job.
Do you have a cell phone? Hasn't it changed the way you do your work and keep in touch with friends and family?
What are you complaining about? Using Windows doesn't resign yourself to using commercial software. You can find an open source or free version of just about every utility that you require. I use Windows every day but I use tons of open source software: Emacs, Cygwin, gcc, random utilities, etc. Sometimes it's not as well developed as their Linux/Unix counterparts, but most of the time, they work just as well. Finding precompiled binaries is convenient, but they're hard to find sometimes. The market for Windows machines running open source software is even smaller than open source software running on an open source OS.
Regarding the "commercialism," of COURSE it's filled with commercialism -- you haven't paid for the software. They're trying to get you to pay them for it, as you probably agreed to in the license agreement. You can pay for it make it go away or you can discontinue the trial. If you don't like the model or the software, find an alternative -- a packaged piece of commercial software or a free version.
Actually, I don't think that the Tablet PC is going to be a niche product at all. I think the price over a comparable "regular" notebook is going to be about $500 soon. The advantages are obvious: use a keyboard if you want, or if you don't want to take it with you, you don't have to (depending on the specific design). The downsides are the increased cost and the lack of an ultra high resolution screen or a large screen (I think that's going to change over time). I talked to a number of people and basically the response is, "well, if you're going to replace your notebook, why wouldn't you get one of these?" $500 more for a corporate PC isn't much. And these are developers that I'm talking about ... code at home with your keyboard, but if you're on the go and don't need to do hardcode coding, you have a lot of flexibility.
That's not true. News doesn't have to be "new." Sometimes, exposing existing information to the public is as important as getting the scoop and delivering new information. Reporting trends isn't really new news because it's obviously been having for a while (hence the term, "trend"), but it's just as important to expose announce the fact that it has been going on for a while. Reporting that something's been happening for years is not redundant: it's obviously different from reporting the first incident years ago. The first child abuduction was notable, but reporting that it's a trend has an entirely different meaning.
I do agree that this isn't particularly interesting news or surprising, but your suggestion that only new things are news is something that I disagree with.
You're right -- technical solutions shouldn't be a substitute for good parenting and supervision. But a little bit of technical wizardry does help. You do keep the cookie jar out of their reach, right?
As for how it's going to be enforced, it's the responsibility of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration according to the HR Bill.
No time at all. Nickelodeon, Disney, and Fox Kids already have shamelessly self-promotional sites, just like nearly every other commercial site on the Internet. The kids.us domain isn't supposed to create squeaky-clean content for kids and no one's going to be censoring CNN. Instead, you'll see sites that are designed for kids to use and are focused toward kids (CNN will have stories more interesting toward kids, much like childrens magazines today). More importantly, it's what you won't see on the domain: porn and violence.