While this issue is certainly a bone of contention in the midst of mega-conglomerations, it is only a temprary issue that will be reolved quickly. The main point on the agenda is profitability.
If the Sony corporate heads can't find a resolution to deal with DRM within the company in such a manner as to remain profitable, it will remove the un-profitable segment.
While the music industry (RIAA, MPAA, etc..) is attempting to bring the cross to bear against IP infringments onto tech comapnies, evryone knows that DRM is ultimatly impossible. Not in that you cant make it hard for copiers to copy and distribute them, but in that if someone can hear/see what you have to show them, they can ultimatly record it, or re-create it.
Given that fact, most mega-conglomerates with.02 cents of knowledge will tell their music arm to re-adjust it's buisness model and become profitable, mainly because the fault does not lie with the technological arm.
It's highly unlikely any major company is going to tell it's profitable tech arm "stop making computers consumers like and buy" because they dont support their less profitable media arm.
something has got to go, the inherent un-balence between arming consumers with weapons that will hurt your own sales of other items has placed the mega-corps into a situation in which whey WILL have to choose what to drop.
DRM is not gonna cut it, file-sharering software will just incorporate DRM crackers or other such means to turn Copy Protected media files into standard media files (that seem to be non-commercialy owned).
Consumers will rebel against measures that are any more intrusive than behind the scenes protection, so you can forget about selling completely crippled systems..
As such, you can choose between forcing your tech arm to stop making computers that ultimatly can hurt sales in your media arm. Or you can tell your media arm to shape up or ship out.
Lastly, when you look at the nature of music and video, in that the average home user is now able to make their own easily distributed movies and music with relative high quality, you can see that the RIAA and MPAA are under attack from more than just piraters, but by home users making music themselves. The average joe (like me) can record his band for under a grand. If im not a "aucoustic" band, or musician, then my expenses vs. quality improve ten fold.
producing high quality music (without Microphones and other analog/acoustic gear) is CHEAP, and even live sounding music isnt too much more
As such i think we may be going full circle back into an era that resembles the times when local acts were the biggest shabangs, And THIS is what is ultimatly the killer of the music industry.
the film industry may not be too far behind. Although the average Joe is NOT gonna leatn maya or other film and 3d software at the drop of a hat, nor have those fields improved Enough to make their use quick and easy, they are on the road to becoming quick and easy. I dont see holo-deck style easy of creation in our near futures... but it isnt THAT far off (im talking about the ability to make chracters and render them interactivly with chracteristics almost on the fly, not about creating a full 3d environment around you)
once people can start making their own stories &or imaginations take shape with ease... the film industry will be having some serious problems.
ultimatly the buisness aspect to selling OTHER peoples content creations will suffer... and it should... the only reason these industries are so enormous and powerfull is due to the in-accesibility of the equipment they use to the average joe. I've been in several LOW-budget films and the expense for high-quality is greatly reduced from what it was due to tech. and this is only going to continue. As smaller firms (even individuals) become increasingly capable of creating competing quality products, the big guns will find themselves being shredded by hosts of little pirhanna's.
It's gonna take a while before these changes sweep through, and the old fuckers will fight it to the end, but ultimatly tech HAS been bringing increasing power to the end user. Go pick up ProTools Free from www.protools.com , or iMovie from apple to see the beginings.
now if you were a mega-corp... what would you choose?
This kid would have to lack any sort of life. Even an internet life. That is such an obscene amount of coding, its not even funny.
Yes ive pulled all nighters and have written a couple thousand lines before passing out at my seat. And the majority of that code was decent, but still needed major cleaning up.
now if you take into account this kid is supposed to have done this for 18 months for a science project no less, that means he basicly didnt do anything else, didnt o to school, didnt shower, didnt scratch his nuts unless they REALLY itched.
i mean he sure as hell didnt have apart-time job AND school, not with having to debug those 1400 lines... and i dont care WHAT kind of prodigy you are, your gonna have to debug 1400 lines, and your gonna have to design where the hell those 1400 lines are going.
to say its "impossible" is unfair, but dude come on. really.
it's more likely the kid went out into the OS world and put his hands onto any piece of code he could find and tied all the elements he wanted to gether in one big hunking nasty mess, and then ran through everything looking for speed optimizations only.
A:how long before your certification is out-of-date? we have new hardware, specs, and standards comming out every few months, all of which can be dangerous if you lack the know-how and skill to use them correctly
B: In addition to the above, how much is it going to cost to make sure YOUR re-certified with each renewal in specs, standards, hardware and software? who's going to charge you? and how much? how much time will you have to spend in totla keeping up with certification? automotive licenses,a dn medical ones have re-exmaninations over the span of YEARS, which is obseletion in our field.
C: although not a strong argument, it IS true that a great portion of the most skilled techs have NO formal training, or are to young to be certified... etc... Meaning certification would really eliminate a great portion of the best techs from being "allowed" to be available to consumers.
D: Although well intended, can you imagine the problems between the goverment and various software / hardware vendors over who gets to certify, how much it costs, what categories, and what should and shouldnt be certified?
between these and many other points, i find the proposal ridiculous and potentialy disasturous to the industry and our econmy.
in other words.... NO NO NO NO NO
--Enter the Sig--
honestly... i think the questions were misinterpreted.... listen closely.... what are the REAL costs associated with internet access / hosting?
i think the bandwidth issue being handed down to us is a big pile of bull... aside from electricity and networks being laid down... what costs are there to justify me paying 700 dollars a year for my 2mbps/356 connection?
i could susteain my end of the net within my own electric bills and with my own purchasing of equipment.... I.e. Ethernet... modem... computers... leaving only the connection to the ISP... its servers and switching and forwarding... etc....
now i know my bandwidth aglomerates with all my neighbers and so by the time it runs through the lines to the local CO becomes much larger..... But even if we were all running at the full 2mbps, a couple thousand connections would amount to lets see.... 4000 mbps.... or 4 gigabit ports on a fast server/switch system.... Yes, yes i know it doesnt work EXACTLY like that... but thats the principle of it... and as expensive as switches, maintenece and serving is.... it just cant be THAT exepensive....
So what this article is searching for is how much the REAL costs are to trade data on the web.
I personaly believe you will find 90% if not more of the REAL-WORLD costs (not the money that goes into corporate pockets) goes into refreshing equipment and the actual creation of networks (laying down cable and such). Problem is often fiber is laid down and isnt even used because of its expesive supposed value.
Maybe its time us geeks start building the internet again on a p2p basis.... that is start connecting our various apartments and houses with cat5's and ieee 802.11. Problem there is a million competing DNS systems and the lack of standards that would inevitably crop up.....
A: however unlikely statisticly or otherwise... there is always the possibility that the key will be the first one tried by the first guy to start his machine on searching for it... yes yes... it is beyind statisticly dim, but it is more likely than YOUR DNA forming through all the realms of possibilty in existence.
B: Just because the task is CURRENTLY staggering hardly means it will remain so... computers, software, chip design and even our math sciences are increasing in power and ability nearly exponently, so whos to say some smart person might not find a supirior algorithm? or a not so smart person might come up with a semi-bright idea and happen to have in's on some new hardware to test it on?
The whole damn point is to push humans and our tech to see if we can beat it through our uniquely human chraterisitic which has gotten us so far, ingenuity people.
damn problem with us techies is we become so awed by our own creations we begin to fail to see that they all have flaws, failures, and discernable patterns.
the potential of such a device for remote medical diagnoses is incredible, depending on the expense per briefcase over time, these things could be placed in busses, homes, boats, cars, ski-lifts, and all sorts of places... even inside hospitols themeselves.
This is a pretty potent invention if used right, and with some slight modifications it could be used to give directions on how to perform first-aid mid-flight... If the device contanined a two-way mechanism for talking with the doctor recieving the medical data, as opposed to calling them seperatly... youd have damn near a doctor on demand... plus.. if the device could make some basic analyzations itself (in case of no access to satelite / doctor)... it could suggest some life-saving first-aid response techniques to the victim or the one helping them.
truly a good device with great potential, i hope it doesnt fall to the wayside.
--Enter The Sig--
cable IS better
on
DSL Rising
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I hate to say it, but i had DSL installed 2 months ago and had continual headaches with it.... between loosing connectivity due to crappy PPOE software, inability to host web services on the line for the same reason, pain in the ass phone filters all over my house and other various odities i became frustrated.
Now add to that the fact that Cable is Faster and works invisibly to my machine (DHCP) gives me an accesable IP and has no additional hardware (phone filters) yada yada yada.... Why WOULD i want DSL...
i opted out of DSL for cable within a month an have never been happier
yea,... we went there acuple times... checked it out.... found out wed just spent a couple billion dollars too see if we could actualy make our way to a big dirt field in the sky.
basicly, there aint shit there.... there's nothing to do there except sit around taking pictures of earth, there aint nothing really worth taking back after the first few 4 billion year old moon-rocks came back.
until we find something worthwhile (read... profitable) in going to other planets, the journeys are gonna be few and far between.
BUT!!!! when money is to be found in space travel yu can garentee humanity will be moving off-earth in droves.... i can see the space trailor park campers now...
that is, it doesnt state that the methods used to fabricate chips must remain in the fields of silicon and such.....
Indeed , moore's law is a simple prediction that is more or less based upon the competitive nature of advancements in science mixed with observations on information processing and storage.
That said, there is a technical limit to moore's law... there is a feasible barrier to storage and processing versus space and consumption.... It's somewhere around the quark.... that is, there is a certain point in which we cant make chips out of units smaller than the components of atoms themselves.
we are FAR from THAT barrier, and i think its safe to say that differing techniques or completly new "radical" methods for data storage and processing will be developed in a fairly comparable time-frame to moore's law.
Remember the law is not about physical techniques but about the evolution of information capacities and processing.
unless you intend to have 63 seperete devices connected to that comp in addition to the next daisy chained computer this wont be an issue as additional comps will not be treated as devices on the chain EXCEPT for those directly connected
while i agree that the root of the problem should be fixed... lesson number one in netowkr management is BACKUP EVERYTHING WITH A DUPLICATE..
While this may be a patch over problems way of handling things it handles one VERY important aspect of doing buisness... FAST EMERGENCY RECOVERY...
truth is if one protocol didnt cause the disaster then maybe a central server would have gone down in a few months causing another like disaster... or maybe a top level switch begins to malfunction causing trickle down netowrk problems, or maybe two hard drives in a RAID unit fail simultaneously... all of these are pretty bad scenarios....
Solution? double them all up within reason.... and then back them all up... mirror your raid's... and have several backup servers... have a secondary bank of switches to swap in an emergency so you can fix the first bank...
i wouldnt go so far as to back up the client equipment, but realisticly, if possible, everything in the server room down to your T1-T3 connections/routers should be in at least 2's.
how many serious companies do you know that operate with only 1 T1 in house?
where are the natural gas companies that put mass transportation on the west coast to death 50 years ago?
well BART got through eventualy, so i suppose theyve realized not everyone is goiing to drive a gas burning car in a couple decades, Or is the market for internal combustion engines in the west finaly saturated?
Although the "rated" processor cycle of a human brain may be measured in Hz... the overall number-crunching and algorithm pattern matching power of 4 billion years of refinement utterly out-class any computer well be making for years to come.
Case in point.. A child playing wall ball makes more physics calculations in one minute of game than a whole team of physicists could map out in months.... he calculates his own mass, his own speed, the angles and exact acceleration of his arms, the weight and distribution of balence between his feet, all while tracking the movements and possible movements of a ball with its own mass and porportions and an opponent. We could count layers upon layers of others things this kid is doing without thought, breathing, processing and responding to components inside his body such as adreneline, and a host of other things... but what it really comes down to is a child's Brain subconsciously is far more powerfull than any comp on the planet.
The comparison of raw number crunching super-clusters to a human who is nearly autonomus, learns independantly and can adapt to many situations in the blink of an eye (where a comp would take considerable reprogramming to adjust to new tasks) is falacy at best.
It has been predicted that AI will reach the emotional awareness of a teenager around 2050
look man... its simple
I love Macintoshes... but serving of them isn't the way to go...
Linux $ Unix are great for firewalling and routing... but as far as language consistency and backwards compatibility and flat out ease of setup mixed with profitbility and pervasiveness nothing can touch windows.
ASP (read VB) is probably one of the worst languages to program in, but as far as serving goes, its borderline plug and play for me, and the same system i can code on for MOST Clients is the same system i can play games on, check my email on, and use office on....
Unix cant do that, Linux Can (technicaly), but linux is a serious pain in my assetts to maintain all those functions for (no command line switches needed here).... While macs do all my creative and networking needs (with OSX the music/graphics/unix command line merge).... as far as serving ASP and checking my email while writing a Word document, nothing can touch windows 2000 adv srv...
While this may seem to be MicroSofts big fat wallet smacking us around.... i wont lie... ASP pays more, is more common, is much more likely to be the default host for medium size buisness website hostings, and lastly comes with the combiant of being the only Seving platform that can coexist happily with a gazillion games and office (apache is no fun on windows... im not going to get into it... even if it is better, its TOO much maintenence)...
if i had my way, id have ASP on OSX and just abandon everything else MS.... but as much as i hate MS, i wont knock them when they do something well (and lets not forget IE is hands down the best browser out there....)
I write this from a win 2k adv srv machine running on my laptop.... i have a powerbook sitting behind me... and mandrake silently awaiting a dual-boot.
oh come on.... Nothing is fullproof... every element of computing is an abstraction of something else.... Even assembly code is an abstraction of processor commands...
Not trying to insult the guy, he wrote a great article... but every time you use any command in any language your using an abstraction of many more commands... all we do in coding is build yet more tools not in any way disimilar from the ones were already using... Classes and functions, even straightly scripted programs.
My sense of smell is an abstraction from my nose's ability to respond to chemicals... So when i smell shit i suppose thats a leaky abstraction because i dont want to smell it....
what can anyone do against a guy who can do anything?
i mean anything, if superman needs a solution all he has to do is think of one...
Of course he's too "moral" to turn himself ito a neuclear bomb or go back in time to kill batmans parents BEFORE they had him, but if he wanted too, and if he had enough "justification" he could do anything....
Just imagine Bush with superhero powers, how many immoral things would he do with "just reasons"?
I fear and believe that IT is increasingly becoming blue collar, until one day well be about as usefull as mechanics, and pay'd somewhere near the same, what do you think?
Do you feel to be the victim of being "scapegoated" as an example of what will be done to us lowly pirates if we do not kneel to the US Gov and companies who have intrests in your conviction?
Do you feel as if you HAVE commited a crime?
And if so.. do you believe it to be so heinous as to recieve the sentance you got?
as well do you believe the sentance was too much or to little in respect to your "crimes"?
Whats most important in this discussion is your depth of redistribution... I feel you crossed the line using your company to redistribute. How do you feel about that?
How do you feel the DoJ should treat the masses of "lesser" pirates... As in those who recieve Warez or those who use their own Software and install it on their "friends" computers?
Once again i feel you crossed the line by being a True distributer... akin to a drug dealer (not moraly, but in the supply chain of "illegeal" trades)... you placed yourself at odds with the law and MIT and these various companies by being a "big fish"... do you think that was a mistake?
Did you redistribute to be a rebel? Or to protest unfair copywright laws? To return the "warez karma" (as in giving back to those who gave to you) Or simply because?
My personal attitude is a semi-robin-hood type, in addition i do not feel like its stealing... thats correct no physical object is transferred... which instinctually makes me feel as if these claims should ONLY be civil... I think criminal trials for non-malicous Data theft (theft of Bytes and bits that isnt for the purpose of harming someone directly) should be illegal... its wrong to put someone in prison as such... i believe that those caught with warez should be ticketed, those caught distributing warez should face civil lawsuits... but a criminal act i cannot see in this.
How do you feel?
This venue of discussion is highly important and needs to be resolved... because ultimately id guess most of the US is guilty of software/music theft at some level... if the companies had their way...Should we all go to jail?
3 years for an MP3 collection? (i know thats an exageration, but whats to stop them?)
any human being who honestly prefers the interface designs of most linux systems is probably seriously addled
Consistency consistency consistency... I personaly am a Mandrake Man myself... and they produce a fairly streamlined package, but even with that nicely made desktop there are at least 4 GUI interfaces to get or control or modify information about my system.....
I made my linux desktop look exactly like my Mac OS 9 once.... i installed mandrake on another machine, and am still trying to figure out how the hell i got it too look the way i like on the first machine.
THIS IS A PROBLEM PEOPLE. I understand and support the need and ability to create and design your computer to be exactly as you want it to be.... except when consistency is utterly demolished... There are so many competing widget systems, and theme managers, and desktop environments, and windowing elements, that its hard to even say which one is dominant at the moment... I swear i changed to elements, then undid those two elements, and my system still looked completely different.
As such i support red hats attempt to get some kind of default, some kind of starting page for the UI.
This is the reason MAC OS X is winning so many converts... they offer an environment that can run unix/linux/windows (with VPC or YDL or Mandrake) but all under ONE consistent UI...
ok... so... corporations barely need us to build machines anymore.. due to streamling of manufacturing and the cohesion of peripheral buses... we no longer need to install most programs for users due to streamling of install process's and to massly deployed upgrades and installs....Net seeks to make it no longer our job to even deploy apps as all thats handled remotly... protocols like zeroconf and others seek to make configuration of networks no longer our job...
Already cheaper workers are being found in greater quantities over-seas.
now they are seeking to make configuration, building and deployment of servers and new apps without the need for IT...
how long till were cutting cake at the local deli?
sadly... advancement is advancement... and it sucks to be at the short end... but thats the market were in.... the only jobs that have some amount of garentee is developing and hardware design. Someones gotta create the new perfectly functioning computers
This product IS at last very close to being consumer friendly.
A: Invisible... Needs no extra software/hardware other than a standards compliant video phone on the other end...
B: Backwards compatible.... Works with standard phones... even rotary..
C: Non-complex... Requires no additional parts... nor includes unecasary parts.... such as including a phone as part of the unit would stop home users from being able to use their own phones easily...
D: WYSIWYG.... the device is straight forward and involves no special instructions beyond press button after phone is answered.
On the bad side
A: device reuires you to press buton and confirm if the other person has a video phone before hand... "hey you got video?", "yea, but i dont wanna link"... etc.... The phones should detect if the other has video and have a simple alert on the LCD saying "video link possible, start video?". This eliminates a user anoyance that will slow Sales...
b: the device is not high enough quality for user satisfaction.... plain and simply 15fps in best conditions is not good enough... in NY city the phone lines here are so bad i get a 28.8 connect at home... even with a 56k modem... The makers need to find a very very very high video compression algorithm... anything less just isnt gonna satisfy the user.... plus... if a better algorithm is devised in the future how compatible will these phones be?
c: the last issue is that 30 second delay when commence video... plain and simply this is the largest hurdle... and is probably technicaly required in such a manner that it may never be fixed without a major change in our phone lines. sadly this is the one that will most likely kill this best iteration.
for those saying... "why not just use my webcam".. Web cams suck... are inconsistent as a consumer whole.. require special software and a computer, are far less mobile being tehered to a computer, are complex to set up (comparitivly), are as bad as this product in 90% of homes without the high speed bandwidth... are greatly less likely to be set-up in remote areas... etc.... The bottom line... web cams are not invisible.. and require technical maintenece/know-how....
lastly... Cell phones will probably be the way this video phoning actualy enter consumer hands... everyone buys cell phones... the advent of web services on them has introduced color and pictures to them... and the next step is simply to put small video cameras in them... like in japan...:-D
the whole MAC vs PC debate is about as worthwhile as starting a fire with your powersupply.
A: to those who say Macs are NOW cool because of MAC OS X having unix underpinngs
--Shut up. LOL... MAC OS has always had the tools for power users... and to think it was just some kids computer until X came around is to ignore VPC, LinuxPPC, Terminal apps, Hexediting and the whole kit n kabbodle
B:to those who say PC's have are supirior, or macs arent tweakable.
--i have taken my rev b imac apart installed a scsi/video card... upgraded the processor, added firewire, upgraded the ram/HD/and video ram, and installed my own internal cd-r. AAAll of this in a All in one case.... uhm.... thats a great deal of tweaking in my book. If it wasnt for the fact that linux reads so many disk formats macs would be the only real good IT computer... but no-one in IT realizes that... sigh... misunderstandings will continue till the end of time...
Slashdot Mirror
If the Sony corporate heads can't find a resolution to deal with DRM within the company in such a manner as to remain profitable, it will remove the un-profitable segment.
While the music industry (RIAA, MPAA, etc..) is attempting to bring the cross to bear against IP infringments onto tech comapnies, evryone knows that DRM is ultimatly impossible. Not in that you cant make it hard for copiers to copy and distribute them, but in that if someone can hear/see what you have to show them, they can ultimatly record it, or re-create it.
Given that fact, most mega-conglomerates with .02 cents of knowledge will tell their music arm to re-adjust it's buisness model and become profitable, mainly because the fault does not lie with the technological arm.
It's highly unlikely any major company is going to tell it's profitable tech arm "stop making computers consumers like and buy" because they dont support their less profitable media arm.
something has got to go, the inherent un-balence between arming consumers with weapons that will hurt your own sales of other items has placed the mega-corps into a situation in which whey WILL have to choose what to drop.
DRM is not gonna cut it, file-sharering software will just incorporate DRM crackers or other such means to turn Copy Protected media files into standard media files (that seem to be non-commercialy owned).
Consumers will rebel against measures that are any more intrusive than behind the scenes protection, so you can forget about selling completely crippled systems..
As such, you can choose between forcing your tech arm to stop making computers that ultimatly can hurt sales in your media arm. Or you can tell your media arm to shape up or ship out.
Lastly, when you look at the nature of music and video, in that the average home user is now able to make their own easily distributed movies and music with relative high quality, you can see that the RIAA and MPAA are under attack from more than just piraters, but by home users making music themselves. The average joe (like me) can record his band for under a grand. If im not a "aucoustic" band, or musician, then my expenses vs. quality improve ten fold.
producing high quality music (without Microphones and other analog/acoustic gear) is CHEAP, and even live sounding music isnt too much more
As such i think we may be going full circle back into an era that resembles the times when local acts were the biggest shabangs, And THIS is what is ultimatly the killer of the music industry.
the film industry may not be too far behind. Although the average Joe is NOT gonna leatn maya or other film and 3d software at the drop of a hat, nor have those fields improved Enough to make their use quick and easy, they are on the road to becoming quick and easy. I dont see holo-deck style easy of creation in our near futures... but it isnt THAT far off (im talking about the ability to make chracters and render them interactivly with chracteristics almost on the fly, not about creating a full 3d environment around you)
once people can start making their own stories &or imaginations take shape with ease... the film industry will be having some serious problems.
ultimatly the buisness aspect to selling OTHER peoples content creations will suffer... and it should... the only reason these industries are so enormous and powerfull is due to the in-accesibility of the equipment they use to the average joe. I've been in several LOW-budget films and the expense for high-quality is greatly reduced from what it was due to tech. and this is only going to continue. As smaller firms (even individuals) become increasingly capable of creating competing quality products, the big guns will find themselves being shredded by hosts of little pirhanna's.
It's gonna take a while before these changes sweep through, and the old fuckers will fight it to the end, but ultimatly tech HAS been bringing increasing power to the end user. Go pick up ProTools Free from www.protools.com , or iMovie from apple to see the beginings.
now if you were a mega-corp... what would you choose?
--Enter the sig--
This kid would have to lack any sort of life. Even an internet life. That is such an obscene amount of coding, its not even funny.
Yes ive pulled all nighters and have written a couple thousand lines before passing out at my seat. And the majority of that code was decent, but still needed major cleaning up.
now if you take into account this kid is supposed to have done this for 18 months for a science project no less, that means he basicly didnt do anything else, didnt o to school, didnt shower, didnt scratch his nuts unless they REALLY itched.
i mean he sure as hell didnt have apart-time job AND school, not with having to debug those 1400 lines... and i dont care WHAT kind of prodigy you are, your gonna have to debug 1400 lines, and your gonna have to design where the hell those 1400 lines are going.
to say its "impossible" is unfair, but dude come on. really.
it's more likely the kid went out into the OS world and put his hands onto any piece of code he could find and tied all the elements he wanted to gether in one big hunking nasty mess, and then ran through everything looking for speed optimizations only.
--enter the sig--
B: In addition to the above, how much is it going to cost to make sure YOUR re-certified with each renewal in specs, standards, hardware and software? who's going to charge you? and how much? how much time will you have to spend in totla keeping up with certification? automotive licenses,a dn medical ones have re-exmaninations over the span of YEARS, which is obseletion in our field.
C: although not a strong argument, it IS true that a great portion of the most skilled techs have NO formal training, or are to young to be certified... etc... Meaning certification would really eliminate a great portion of the best techs from being "allowed" to be available to consumers.
D: Although well intended, can you imagine the problems between the goverment and various software / hardware vendors over who gets to certify, how much it costs, what categories, and what should and shouldnt be certified?
between these and many other points, i find the proposal ridiculous and potentialy disasturous to the industry and our econmy.
in other words.... NO NO NO NO NO
--Enter the Sig--
honestly... i think the questions were misinterpreted.... listen closely.... what are the REAL costs associated with internet access / hosting?
i think the bandwidth issue being handed down to us is a big pile of bull... aside from electricity and networks being laid down... what costs are there to justify me paying 700 dollars a year for my 2mbps/356 connection?
i could susteain my end of the net within my own electric bills and with my own purchasing of equipment.... I.e. Ethernet... modem... computers... leaving only the connection to the ISP... its servers and switching and forwarding... etc....
now i know my bandwidth aglomerates with all my neighbers and so by the time it runs through the lines to the local CO becomes much larger..... But even if we were all running at the full 2mbps, a couple thousand connections would amount to lets see.... 4000 mbps .... or 4 gigabit ports on a fast server/switch system.... Yes, yes i know it doesnt work EXACTLY like that... but thats the principle of it... and as expensive as switches, maintenece and serving is.... it just cant be THAT exepensive....
So what this article is searching for is how much the REAL costs are to trade data on the web.
I personaly believe you will find 90% if not more of the REAL-WORLD costs (not the money that goes into corporate pockets) goes into refreshing equipment and the actual creation of networks (laying down cable and such). Problem is often fiber is laid down and isnt even used because of its expesive supposed value.
Maybe its time us geeks start building the internet again on a p2p basis.... that is start connecting our various apartments and houses with cat5's and ieee 802.11. Problem there is a million competing DNS systems and the lack of standards that would inevitably crop up.....
sigh
A: however unlikely statisticly or otherwise... there is always the possibility that the key will be the first one tried by the first guy to start his machine on searching for it... yes yes... it is beyind statisticly dim, but it is more likely than YOUR DNA forming through all the realms of possibilty in existence.
B: Just because the task is CURRENTLY staggering hardly means it will remain so... computers, software, chip design and even our math sciences are increasing in power and ability nearly exponently, so whos to say some smart person might not find a supirior algorithm? or a not so smart person might come up with a semi-bright idea and happen to have in's on some new hardware to test it on?
The whole damn point is to push humans and our tech to see if we can beat it through our uniquely human chraterisitic which has gotten us so far, ingenuity people.
damn problem with us techies is we become so awed by our own creations we begin to fail to see that they all have flaws, failures, and discernable patterns.
or have you forgotten HAL 9000 already?
the potential of such a device for remote medical diagnoses is incredible, depending on the expense per briefcase over time, these things could be placed in busses, homes, boats, cars, ski-lifts, and all sorts of places ... even inside hospitols themeselves.
This is a pretty potent invention if used right, and with some slight modifications it could be used to give directions on how to perform first-aid mid-flight... If the device contanined a two-way mechanism for talking with the doctor recieving the medical data, as opposed to calling them seperatly... youd have damn near a doctor on demand... plus.. if the device could make some basic analyzations itself (in case of no access to satelite / doctor)... it could suggest some life-saving first-aid response techniques to the victim or the one helping them.
truly a good device with great potential, i hope it doesnt fall to the wayside.
--Enter The Sig--
I hate to say it, but i had DSL installed 2 months ago and had continual headaches with it.... between loosing connectivity due to crappy PPOE software, inability to host web services on the line for the same reason, pain in the ass phone filters all over my house and other various odities i became frustrated.
Now add to that the fact that Cable is Faster and works invisibly to my machine (DHCP) gives me an accesable IP and has no additional hardware (phone filters) yada yada yada.... Why WOULD i want DSL...
i opted out of DSL for cable within a month an have never been happier
yea, ... we went there acuple times... checked it out.... found out wed just spent a couple billion dollars too see if we could actualy make our way to a big dirt field in the sky.
basicly, there aint shit there.... there's nothing to do there except sit around taking pictures of earth, there aint nothing really worth taking back after the first few 4 billion year old moon-rocks came back.
until we find something worthwhile (read... profitable) in going to other planets, the journeys are gonna be few and far between.
BUT!!!! when money is to be found in space travel yu can garentee humanity will be moving off-earth in droves.... i can see the space trailor park campers now...
--Enter the sig--
that is, it doesnt state that the methods used to fabricate chips must remain in the fields of silicon and such.....
Indeed , moore's law is a simple prediction that is more or less based upon the competitive nature of advancements in science mixed with observations on information processing and storage.
That said, there is a technical limit to moore's law... there is a feasible barrier to storage and processing versus space and consumption.... It's somewhere around the quark.... that is, there is a certain point in which we cant make chips out of units smaller than the components of atoms themselves.
we are FAR from THAT barrier, and i think its safe to say that differing techniques or completly new "radical" methods for data storage and processing will be developed in a fairly comparable time-frame to moore's law.
Remember the law is not about physical techniques but about the evolution of information capacities and processing.
--ENTER THE SIG--
unless you intend to have 63 seperete devices connected to that comp in addition to the next daisy chained computer this wont be an issue as additional comps will not be treated as devices on the chain EXCEPT for those directly connected
SCORE: -1, Redundant
*WARNING* Karma Whore *WARNING*
--Enter The sig--
while i agree that the root of the problem should be fixed... lesson number one in netowkr management is BACKUP EVERYTHING WITH A DUPLICATE..
/routers should be in at least 2's.
While this may be a patch over problems way of handling things it handles one VERY important aspect of doing buisness... FAST EMERGENCY RECOVERY...
truth is if one protocol didnt cause the disaster then maybe a central server would have gone down in a few months causing another like disaster... or maybe a top level switch begins to malfunction causing trickle down netowrk problems, or maybe two hard drives in a RAID unit fail simultaneously... all of these are pretty bad scenarios....
Solution? double them all up within reason.... and then back them all up... mirror your raid's... and have several backup servers... have a secondary bank of switches to swap in an emergency so you can fix the first bank...
i wouldnt go so far as to back up the client equipment, but realisticly, if possible, everything in the server room down to your T1-T3 connections
how many serious companies do you know that operate with only 1 T1 in house?
--Enter the sig--
where are the natural gas companies that put mass transportation on the west coast to death 50 years ago?
well BART got through eventualy, so i suppose theyve realized not everyone is goiing to drive a gas burning car in a couple decades, Or is the market for internal combustion engines in the west finaly saturated?
LOL...
... what are they gonna say... yea go ahead and buy, er use that free software instead of ours? ...
i like how microsoft has representatives
That'll be the day.
its called the child playing wall ball syndome
Although the "rated" processor cycle of a human brain may be measured in Hz... the overall number-crunching and algorithm pattern matching power of 4 billion years of refinement utterly out-class any computer well be making for years to come.
Case in point.. A child playing wall ball makes more physics calculations in one minute of game than a whole team of physicists could map out in months.... he calculates his own mass, his own speed, the angles and exact acceleration of his arms, the weight and distribution of balence between his feet, all while tracking the movements and possible movements of a ball with its own mass and porportions and an opponent. We could count layers upon layers of others things this kid is doing without thought, breathing, processing and responding to components inside his body such as adreneline, and a host of other things... but what it really comes down to is a child's Brain subconsciously is far more powerfull than any comp on the planet.
The comparison of raw number crunching super-clusters to a human who is nearly autonomus, learns independantly and can adapt to many situations in the blink of an eye (where a comp would take considerable reprogramming to adjust to new tasks) is falacy at best.
It has been predicted that AI will reach the emotional awareness of a teenager around 2050
--Enter The Sig
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Im a Comp Science major and ive used C, C++, ObjC, Pasca;, COBOL (ugh), and others....
.NET, but that doesnt change anything... i use VB cause it's A microsoft language with a microsoft technology.
Yes VB has all the great features of a OO language, but its language is horrible compared to C....
Yes i can use Javascript or others with
look man... its simple
I love Macintoshes... but serving of them isn't the way to go...
Linux $ Unix are great for firewalling and routing... but as far as language consistency and backwards compatibility and flat out ease of setup mixed with profitbility and pervasiveness nothing can touch windows.
ASP (read VB) is probably one of the worst languages to program in, but as far as serving goes, its borderline plug and play for me, and the same system i can code on for MOST Clients is the same system i can play games on, check my email on, and use office on....
Unix cant do that, Linux Can (technicaly), but linux is a serious pain in my assetts to maintain all those functions for (no command line switches needed here).... While macs do all my creative and networking needs (with OSX the music/graphics/unix command line merge).... as far as serving ASP and checking my email while writing a Word document, nothing can touch windows 2000 adv srv...
While this may seem to be MicroSofts big fat wallet smacking us around.... i wont lie... ASP pays more, is more common, is much more likely to be the default host for medium size buisness website hostings, and lastly comes with the combiant of being the only Seving platform that can coexist happily with a gazillion games and office (apache is no fun on windows... im not going to get into it... even if it is better, its TOO much maintenence)...
if i had my way, id have ASP on OSX and just abandon everything else MS.... but as much as i hate MS, i wont knock them when they do something well (and lets not forget IE is hands down the best browser out there....)
I write this from a win 2k adv srv machine running on my laptop.... i have a powerbook sitting behind me... and mandrake silently awaiting a dual-boot.
Leaky abstractions....?
oh come on.... Nothing is fullproof... every element of computing is an abstraction of something else.... Even assembly code is an abstraction of processor commands...
Not trying to insult the guy, he wrote a great article... but every time you use any command in any language your using an abstraction of many more commands... all we do in coding is build yet more tools not in any way disimilar from the ones were already using... Classes and functions, even straightly scripted programs.
My sense of smell is an abstraction from my nose's ability to respond to chemicals... So when i smell shit i suppose thats a leaky abstraction because i dont want to smell it....
what can anyone do against a guy who can do anything?
i mean anything, if superman needs a solution all he has to do is think of one...
Of course he's too "moral" to turn himself ito a neuclear bomb or go back in time to kill batmans parents BEFORE they had him, but if he wanted too, and if he had enough "justification" he could do anything....
Just imagine Bush with superhero powers, how many immoral things would he do with "just reasons"?
thank god superman is smarter.
I fear and believe that IT is increasingly becoming blue collar, until one day well be about as usefull as mechanics, and pay'd somewhere near the same, what do you think?
Do you feel to be the victim of being "scapegoated" as an example of what will be done to us lowly pirates if we do not kneel to the US Gov and companies who have intrests in your conviction?
Do you feel as if you HAVE commited a crime? And if so.. do you believe it to be so heinous as to recieve the sentance you got?
as well do you believe the sentance was too much or to little in respect to your "crimes"?
Whats most important in this discussion is your depth of redistribution... I feel you crossed the line using your company to redistribute. How do you feel about that?
How do you feel the DoJ should treat the masses of "lesser" pirates... As in those who recieve Warez or those who use their own Software and install it on their "friends" computers?
Once again i feel you crossed the line by being a True distributer... akin to a drug dealer (not moraly, but in the supply chain of "illegeal" trades)... you placed yourself at odds with the law and MIT and these various companies by being a "big fish"... do you think that was a mistake?
Did you redistribute to be a rebel?
Or to protest unfair copywright laws?
To return the "warez karma" (as in giving back to those who gave to you)
Or simply because?
My personal attitude is a semi-robin-hood type, in addition i do not feel like its stealing... thats correct no physical object is transferred... which instinctually makes me feel as if these claims should ONLY be civil... I think criminal trials for non-malicous Data theft (theft of Bytes and bits that isnt for the purpose of harming someone directly) should be illegal... its wrong to put someone in prison as such... i believe that those caught with warez should be ticketed, those caught distributing warez should face civil lawsuits... but a criminal act i cannot see in this.
How do you feel?
This venue of discussion is highly important and needs to be resolved... because ultimately id guess most of the US is guilty of software/music theft at some level... if the companies had their way...Should we all go to jail?
3 years for an MP3 collection? (i know thats an exageration, but whats to stop them?)
where do we draw the lines?
any human being who honestly prefers the interface designs of most linux systems is probably seriously addled Consistency consistency consistency... I personaly am a Mandrake Man myself... and they produce a fairly streamlined package, but even with that nicely made desktop there are at least 4 GUI interfaces to get or control or modify information about my system..... I made my linux desktop look exactly like my Mac OS 9 once.... i installed mandrake on another machine, and am still trying to figure out how the hell i got it too look the way i like on the first machine. THIS IS A PROBLEM PEOPLE. I understand and support the need and ability to create and design your computer to be exactly as you want it to be.... except when consistency is utterly demolished... There are so many competing widget systems, and theme managers, and desktop environments, and windowing elements, that its hard to even say which one is dominant at the moment... I swear i changed to elements, then undid those two elements, and my system still looked completely different. As such i support red hats attempt to get some kind of default, some kind of starting page for the UI. This is the reason MAC OS X is winning so many converts... they offer an environment that can run unix/linux/windows (with VPC or YDL or Mandrake) but all under ONE consistent UI...
ok... so... corporations barely need us to build machines anymore.. due to streamling of manufacturing and the cohesion of peripheral buses... we no longer need to install most programs for users due to streamling of install process's and to massly deployed upgrades and installs... .Net seeks to make it no longer our job to even deploy apps as all thats handled remotly... protocols like zeroconf and others seek to make configuration of networks no longer our job...
Already cheaper workers are being found in greater quantities over-seas.
now they are seeking to make configuration, building and deployment of servers and new apps without the need for IT...
how long till were cutting cake at the local deli?
sadly... advancement is advancement... and it sucks to be at the short end... but thats the market were in.... the only jobs that have some amount of garentee is developing and hardware design. Someones gotta create the new perfectly functioning computers
This product IS at last very close to being consumer friendly.
:-D
A: Invisible... Needs no extra software/hardware other than a standards compliant video phone on the other end...
B: Backwards compatible.... Works with standard phones... even rotary..
C: Non-complex... Requires no additional parts... nor includes unecasary parts.... such as including a phone as part of the unit would stop home users from being able to use their own phones easily...
D: WYSIWYG.... the device is straight forward and involves no special instructions beyond press button after phone is answered.
On the bad side
A: device reuires you to press buton and confirm if the other person has a video phone before hand... "hey you got video?", "yea, but i dont wanna link"... etc.... The phones should detect if the other has video and have a simple alert on the LCD saying "video link possible, start video?". This eliminates a user anoyance that will slow Sales...
b: the device is not high enough quality for user satisfaction.... plain and simply 15fps in best conditions is not good enough... in NY city the phone lines here are so bad i get a 28.8 connect at home... even with a 56k modem... The makers need to find a very very very high video compression algorithm... anything less just isnt gonna satisfy the user.... plus... if a better algorithm is devised in the future how compatible will these phones be?
c: the last issue is that 30 second delay when commence video... plain and simply this is the largest hurdle... and is probably technicaly required in such a manner that it may never be fixed without a major change in our phone lines. sadly this is the one that will most likely kill this best iteration.
for those saying... "why not just use my webcam"..
Web cams suck... are inconsistent as a consumer whole.. require special software and a computer, are far less mobile being tehered to a computer, are complex to set up (comparitivly), are as bad as this product in 90% of homes without the high speed bandwidth... are greatly less likely to be set-up in remote areas... etc.... The bottom line... web cams are not invisible.. and require technical maintenece/know-how....
lastly... Cell phones will probably be the way this video phoning actualy enter consumer hands... everyone buys cell phones... the advent of web services on them has introduced color and pictures to them... and the next step is simply to put small video cameras in them... like in japan...
the whole MAC vs PC debate is about as worthwhile as starting a fire with your powersupply.
A: to those who say Macs are NOW cool because of MAC OS X having unix underpinngs
--Shut up. LOL... MAC OS has always had the tools for power users... and to think it was just some kids computer until X came around is to ignore VPC, LinuxPPC, Terminal apps, Hexediting and the whole kit n kabbodle
B:to those who say PC's have are supirior, or macs arent tweakable.
--i have taken my rev b imac apart installed a scsi/video card... upgraded the processor, added firewire, upgraded the ram/HD/and video ram, and installed my own internal cd-r. AAAll of this in a All in one case.... uhm.... thats a great deal of tweaking in my book. If it wasnt for the fact that linux reads so many disk formats macs would be the only real good IT computer... but no-one in IT realizes that... sigh... misunderstandings will continue till the end of time...