One of the problems with VOIP is that it needs to be higher priority traffic than normal traffic- it pretty much needs guaranteed bandwidth. The problem is that we probably can't have ALL the bandwidth on the internet being high priority.
Therefore having a higher tarrif for higher priority traffic probably is the way to go. (Some scheme like a free number of packets per month might work too...)
I see your point but draw the opposite conclusion. If there is insufficient low latency bandwidth available for this purpose, does that not make it self-regulating? If your international call is getting too lagged and it's important to you, you would pick up a normal phone and pay the fee for a direct connection.
See?
What's wrong with that?
You might argue that it still reduces the use of the phone network. Yeah, it does. But it will cost less to maintain and they can charge more for it. I don't see any reason that won't balance.
Nice, except my ISP isn't a dial-up, and they don't get their bandwidth from a telco. It's not just telcos handling the cables anymore.
In that case, traffic gets from client to ISP by cable or whatever other means so they shouldn't get revenue anyhow since it's not their network. After that, when it does cross their network it is through a link (OC3, T1, whatever) that is being paid for.
I fail to see how this is ripping them off. After all, they set the price for the T3.
If everyone uses their cable-tv connection for their phone type transmissions then the telco no longer needs to have connections to every building. Their main sources of revenue have become obsolete! Oh no! Did anyone levy taxes on computers to reimburse typewriter companies? Is it fair to ask producers of hydroelectric and nuclear power to subsidise coal mining? Should it be law that if you buy a toilet you must also purchase an outhouse so that they outhouse companies can still make a profit? I could make up more analogies but they probably wouldn't help.
communications infrastructure that they never even paid or helped pay for.
Umm... clients pay for local call to ISP, same as any other local call. ISP pays for bandwidth from phone company or other owner of infrastructure. In turn, this provider often pays a chain of upstream providers that are generally phone companies or similar.
Why should it matter if your traffic is voice, text, video, whatever?
This is horrible precedent. Luckily it's not local. Still, not a good sign.
thanks for indemnifying and encouraging theft from one of slashdot's favorite authors.
Um, the author said he wasn't particularly proud of that book and it's been out of print for quite a while. People who have read it weren't terribly impressed. It is not being printed again.
Yes, I know I'm responding to a troll, but if people continue to think that the distribution of out of print stuff that will most likely never be sold again is some sort of evil then we will lose a big, though rather unpopular, chunk of our culture.
I personally like to see companies turn profit and always hiring for all types of jobs.
That's just stupid. Why should anyone, anywhere, have to do any work so trivial that a machine can be made to do it?
Getting the same work done with less people is a good thing! It means that eventualy we won't have to work 40 hours / wk for the better half of our lives. We could work less, get more done, and have more free time. It's good!
Only problem that this creates is that if for 20 hours you get the standard of living that you get working 40 hours now, people are going to want to work 40. So we need to find a fair way of balancing all that.
But really, why not automate as much as possible? Do you really think anyone would actually enjoy doing the work that a DBMS does? Do you like skimming through millions of pages of boring documents looking for some inane thing? What about a car-production robot? Want to make the same weld in the same place on the same car 5000 times a week? But, specific to this, do you think the person that runs your chocolate bar and pasta past the bar code scanner enjoyed doing that? Was it a valuable use of their unique potential as a human being? NO!
If you were offered to be paid the same amount for your current job with half the hours, wouldn't you appreciate the extra time and get more out of life because of it?
It is only a matter of time
before machinema and all the other elements come together and spontaneously create the next Doom2 or even a Final
Fantasy and capture the attention of the gaming public in a #1 hit kinda way.
I thought Counter-strike was the next Doom II?... sure they didn't make the engine (they modified Half-life, which itself was a version of Quake modified by Sierra), but they made the *game*. I don't find Quake or Half-life all that fun, yet they form the basis of my favourite game. It's even open-source-ish, they encourage people to develop patches to Counter-strike, some of which get included in the next releases.
It's one of the more popular games, yet it has no single-player and no cut-scenes.
If this is to be used to allow the public to get information, then you have to tell people which blocks they need to grab to construct the message. And if you tell them that, then anyone who wishes to suppress the message need only have one of the blocks removed. This only seems to rely on the fact that no one could be forced to remove a block of random, useless data under most laws.
Ok, so they could point at the site posting instructions and say "this block makes this bad thing available, therefore you must make it go away, regardless of the other things that may depend on it". If that's not possible, then they could just censor the site with the instructions. Sure the message is still there, technically, but if you don't know which blocks it needs, it'd be rather much effort to test all the combinations, especially if you don't even know what message you're looking for.
And if you say "well they could just put the instructions on another site", they could have just moved the content too, so how exactly does this make it harder to censor things? Did I miss some valuable point here?
Web sites do not cost much. You are given space from your ISP, you can set up a server on your Cablemodem or DSL connection.
If your site is so popular that you find the traffic is too much for your connection but cannot afford better, doubltess many people wouldn't mind mirroring your content.
Now, if you think about it, the amount of bandwidth available to home users has increased a fair amount. What's to say it won't continue to do so? By the time internet advertising ceases to be able to sustain the huge bandwidth requirements of something like Slashdot, that amount of bandwidth might be the norm, as it would be required to start doing proper video and all that.
Just because many sites waste that bandwidth doesn't mean that a site with just useful information and a bit of formatting can't still exist, and it could exist for near-free regardless of traffic since the bandwidth is there.
I mean, if they have this many cases where the drive goes physically missing, how many cases where information is merely copied go unreported, or even unnoticed?
No, encrypted filesystems would not help in that case - they'll just get you to open it for them.
What you would want for that is to put your mail on a layer of StegFS, the steganographic filesystem. It'll split it across little parts of all sorts of files in such a way that you would have plausible deniability. 'course if you delete the wrong files you'll eventually corrupt your mail, so it makes many copies. Or you could just have a huge directory of something you don't plan to delete and use that...
Is there some reason that this has to be a video? Could they not also put up a transcript in ASCII, enabling it to be searchable and also read from Lynx?
2 things needed: good cd rippers and a good extension. Please tell me these files a "musicfile".OGG
The same group has written a good ripper, it's called "cdparanoia" and is available from the same place as Vorbis.
I'm fairly sure that if they can come up with "Ogg Vorbis" and Xiphorous (sp?) that they'll have a sufficiently nifty extension also. Why three characters though?.vorbis works, so does.og...
..is it we need another format for audio? Is it so certain desperately boring people can claim "early adopter" status?
That wouldn't be worth the effort of switching over. The reason is that there are currently no completely open formats - bits of them always require some sort of licensing or other snags like that. These types of things contribute to the likelyhood of a format being unreadable in 70 years. MP3 is sufficiently open that I don't see a problem with playing those, but there are still some sort of licensing fees involved to do stuff commercially with it, and something else involved with encoding them. It presents legal hurdles at the very least.
This format seems to have aspirations of being better quality than MP3, perhaps placing it up with formats like VQF for which encoders/decoders tend to only exist in binary form. It's good to have this because if people go looking for an alternative, one would prefer that the alternative be at least as portable, right?
The question is not "if" but "when". All the info should be available in due course.
Exactly! Every trial, no matter how famous/infamous/mundane the victim/accused is, should be shrouded in complete and utter secrecy. No one should know *anything* about it, perhaps not even that it is taking place.
Once a ruling is made, then it should become public, along with all the evidence, reasoning, and arguments that brought about that ruling. Perhaps a complete court transcript being made online would be a bit much, but perhaps not.
As many people here have said, this protects those who are accused, yet innocent, from suffering damage to their careers and lives. It also makes it enormously easier to find a jury that can actually be impartial since they didn't even know the crime had happened.
Now, if they never say anything afterwards it becomes entirely different. Then it becomes the situation feared by those posting perceiving a loss of accountability, and a censorship of information that the public has a right to.
Could someone who already has it (preferably many someones) please mirror the handy tarball from that site to ease the load and get us our books faster?
Usually consoles break even or perhaps even lose money on their hardware and the real profits come from licensing the platform to developers. Is that what Microsoft is doing here?
Or... are they going for a slight profit margin on the hardware and letting normal PC games run on it too, giving them an instant software base?
Since many console games are starting to appear on PCs, are they trying to shift all development of games to DirectX? Is it possible? Is it still possible if developers need to licence special X-Box versions of various tools and pay royalties?
.. and where are they going to put Windows? I mean, Win'98 is 200mb or so, they can shave much of that off but it's still bigger than most cheap ROMs isn't it? Would they put something as fragile as a hard drive in a console?
Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisement said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighbourhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches.
-- (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens)
Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: "Learn, guys."
-- Crowley is a demon, in case you don't know (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens)
> quantum computing will never be common, > but one or two quantum computers will be able to > solve a couple of the really tough problems we > never thought we could solve
You remind me of that quote where someone said that there would only ever be a few computers in the world, mostly in specialised research...
What makes you think they won't become mainstream in the same fashion that current technology did?
Slashdot Mirror
Gah, you're so damned altruistic it makes me want to pay you. Where do I send money? I don't see anywhere on Xiph.org for donations....
One of the problems with VOIP is that it needs to be higher priority traffic than normal traffic- it pretty much needs guaranteed bandwidth. The problem is that we probably can't have ALL the bandwidth on the internet being high priority.
Therefore having a higher tarrif for higher priority traffic probably is the way to go. (Some scheme like a free number of packets per month might work too...)
I see your point but draw the opposite conclusion. If there is insufficient low latency bandwidth available for this purpose, does that not make it self-regulating? If your international call is getting too lagged and it's important to you, you would pick up a normal phone and pay the fee for a direct connection.
See?
What's wrong with that?
You might argue that it still reduces the use of the phone network. Yeah, it does. But it will cost less to maintain and they can charge more for it. I don't see any reason that won't balance.
Nice, except my ISP isn't a dial-up, and they don't get their bandwidth from a telco. It's not just telcos handling the cables anymore.
In that case, traffic gets from client to ISP by cable or whatever other means so they shouldn't get revenue anyhow since it's not their network. After that, when it does cross their network it is through a link (OC3, T1, whatever) that is being paid for.
I fail to see how this is ripping them off. After all, they set the price for the T3.
If everyone uses their cable-tv connection for their phone type transmissions then the telco no longer needs to have connections to every building. Their main sources of revenue have become obsolete! Oh no! Did anyone levy taxes on computers to reimburse typewriter companies? Is it fair to ask producers of hydroelectric and nuclear power to subsidise coal mining? Should it be law that if you buy a toilet you must also purchase an outhouse so that they outhouse companies can still make a profit? I could make up more analogies but they probably wouldn't help.
communications infrastructure that they never even paid or helped pay for.
... clients pay for local call to ISP, same as any other local call. ISP pays for bandwidth from phone company or other owner of infrastructure. In turn, this provider often pays a chain of upstream providers that are generally phone companies or similar.
Umm
Why should it matter if your traffic is voice, text, video, whatever?
This is horrible precedent. Luckily it's not local. Still, not a good sign.
Actually, the AMD is risc, internally. It has an emulator for x86 in microcode. I dont think anyone programs it in its native instruction set, though
Is that possible?
thanks for indemnifying and encouraging theft from one of slashdot's favorite authors.
Um, the author said he wasn't particularly proud of that book and it's been out of print for quite a while. People who have read it weren't terribly impressed. It is not being printed again.
Yes, I know I'm responding to a troll, but if people continue to think that the distribution of out of print stuff that will most likely never be sold again is some sort of evil then we will lose a big, though rather unpopular, chunk of our culture.
I personally like to see companies turn profit and always hiring for all types of jobs.
That's just stupid. Why should anyone, anywhere, have to do any work so trivial that a machine can be made to do it?
Getting the same work done with less people is a good thing! It means that eventualy we won't have to work 40 hours / wk for the better half of our lives. We could work less, get more done, and have more free time. It's good!
Only problem that this creates is that if for 20 hours you get the standard of living that you get working 40 hours now, people are going to want to work 40. So we need to find a fair way of balancing all that.
But really, why not automate as much as possible? Do you really think anyone would actually enjoy doing the work that a DBMS does? Do you like skimming through millions of pages of boring documents looking for some inane thing? What about a car-production robot? Want to make the same weld in the same place on the same car 5000 times a week? But, specific to this, do you think the person that runs your chocolate bar and pasta past the bar code scanner enjoyed doing that? Was it a valuable use of their unique potential as a human being? NO!
If you were offered to be paid the same amount for your current job with half the hours, wouldn't you appreciate the extra time and get more out of life because of it?
But I too was suddenly hitting ALT-leftarrow hoping to god my screen didn't freeze at that precise moment in time.
Ah, so you found the *other* reflex test site ;-)
It is only a matter of time before machinema and all the other elements come together and spontaneously create the next Doom2 or even a Final Fantasy and capture the attention of the gaming public in a #1 hit kinda way.
I thought Counter-strike was the next Doom II? ... sure they didn't make the engine (they modified Half-life, which itself was a version of Quake modified by Sierra), but they made the *game*. I don't find Quake or Half-life all that fun, yet they form the basis of my favourite game. It's even open-source-ish, they encourage people to develop patches to Counter-strike, some of which get included in the next releases.
It's one of the more popular games, yet it has no single-player and no cut-scenes.
If this is to be used to allow the public to get information, then you have to tell people which blocks they need to grab to construct the message. And if you tell them that, then anyone who wishes to suppress the message need only have one of the blocks removed. This only seems to rely on the fact that no one could be forced to remove a block of random, useless data under most laws.
Ok, so they could point at the site posting instructions and say "this block makes this bad thing available, therefore you must make it go away, regardless of the other things that may depend on it". If that's not possible, then they could just censor the site with the instructions. Sure the message is still there, technically, but if you don't know which blocks it needs, it'd be rather much effort to test all the combinations, especially if you don't even know what message you're looking for.
And if you say "well they could just put the instructions on another site", they could have just moved the content too, so how exactly does this make it harder to censor things? Did I miss some valuable point here?
Web sites do not cost much. You are given space from your ISP, you can set up a server on your Cablemodem or DSL connection.
If your site is so popular that you find the traffic is too much for your connection but cannot afford better, doubltess many people wouldn't mind mirroring your content.
Now, if you think about it, the amount of bandwidth available to home users has increased a fair amount. What's to say it won't continue to do so? By the time internet advertising ceases to be able to sustain the huge bandwidth requirements of something like Slashdot, that amount of bandwidth might be the norm, as it would be required to start doing proper video and all that.
Just because many sites waste that bandwidth doesn't mean that a site with just useful information and a bit of formatting can't still exist, and it could exist for near-free regardless of traffic since the bandwidth is there.
Or am I missing something?
I mean, if they have this many cases where the drive goes physically missing, how many cases where information is merely copied go unreported, or even unnoticed?
No, encrypted filesystems would not help in that case - they'll just get you to open it for them.
...
What you would want for that is to put your mail on a layer of StegFS, the steganographic filesystem. It'll split it across little parts of all sorts of files in such a way that you would have plausible deniability. 'course if you delete the wrong files you'll eventually corrupt your mail, so it makes many copies. Or you could just have a huge directory of something you don't plan to delete and use that
Is there some reason that this has to be a video? Could they not also put up a transcript in ASCII, enabling it to be searchable and also read from Lynx?
2 things needed: good cd rippers and a good extension. Please tell me these files a "musicfile".OGG
.vorbis works, so does .og ...
The same group has written a good ripper, it's called "cdparanoia" and is available from the same place as Vorbis.
I'm fairly sure that if they can come up with "Ogg Vorbis" and Xiphorous (sp?) that they'll have a sufficiently nifty extension also. Why three characters though?
..is it we need another format for audio? Is it so certain desperately boring people can claim "early adopter" status?
That wouldn't be worth the effort of switching over. The reason is that there are currently no completely open formats - bits of them always require some sort of licensing or other snags like that. These types of things contribute to the likelyhood of a format being unreadable in 70 years. MP3 is sufficiently open that I don't see a problem with playing those, but there are still some sort of licensing fees involved to do stuff commercially with it, and something else involved with encoding them. It presents legal hurdles at the very least.
This format seems to have aspirations of being better quality than MP3, perhaps placing it up with formats like VQF for which encoders/decoders tend to only exist in binary form. It's good to have this because if people go looking for an alternative, one would prefer that the alternative be at least as portable, right?
> Could they truly get any sillier sounding?
Of course they're silly, they're from Terry Pratchett novels.
Ogg is the name of a witch and Vorbis a priest.
The question is not "if" but "when". All the info should be available in due course.
Exactly! Every trial, no matter how famous/infamous/mundane the victim/accused is, should be shrouded in complete and utter secrecy. No one should know *anything* about it, perhaps not even that it is taking place.
Once a ruling is made, then it should become public, along with all the evidence, reasoning, and arguments that brought about that ruling. Perhaps a complete court transcript being made online would be a bit much, but perhaps not.
As many people here have said, this protects those who are accused, yet innocent, from suffering damage to their careers and lives. It also makes it enormously easier to find a jury that can actually be impartial since they didn't even know the crime had happened.
Now, if they never say anything afterwards it becomes entirely different. Then it becomes the situation feared by those posting perceiving a loss of accountability, and a censorship of information that the public has a right to.
Could someone who already has it (preferably many someones) please mirror the handy tarball from that site to ease the load and get us our books faster?
Usually consoles break even or perhaps even lose money on their hardware and the real profits come from licensing the platform to developers. Is that what Microsoft is doing here?
... are they going for a slight profit margin on the hardware and letting normal PC games run on it too, giving them an instant software base?
Or
Since many console games are starting to appear on PCs, are they trying to shift all development of games to DirectX? Is it possible? Is it still possible if developers need to licence special X-Box versions of various tools and pay royalties?
.. and where are they going to put Windows? I mean, Win'98 is 200mb or so, they can shave much of that off but it's still bigger than most cheap ROMs isn't it? Would they put something as fragile as a hard drive in a console?
Since the gripe is about the P6 bus and the Athlon uses EV6 and any complaint they had about that would also involve AMD and Compaq-Digital.
> 36GB IDE drives up 'ere in Canada are $500
..
Um. I'm in Canada. Costco has a 40Gb eide for
less than $400Cdn
Also, www.stupidcomputers.com is in Canada
(Alberta actually) and they have better prices also. You're just not looking hard enough.
Here's the quote in question:
Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisement said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighbourhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches.
-- (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens)
Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: "Learn, guys."
-- Crowley is a demon, in case you don't know (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens)
> quantum computing will never be common,
> but one or two quantum computers will be able to
> solve a couple of the really tough problems we
> never thought we could solve
You remind me of that quote where someone said that there would only ever be a few computers in the world, mostly in specialised research...
What makes you think they won't become mainstream in the same fashion that current technology did?
It appears they forgot a table tag on the from.
A functioning copy appears at:
http://hyperion.cc.uregin a.ca/~skomoroj/student-form.html