And let's not forget the possibility of forced re-allocations of class As.
For example, does the Ford Motor Company really need sixteen million IP addresses? Take them back, make Ford go through ARIN. The US military has about 151 million addresses too...
I'd like to say that no single entity should own an entire class A block, and that they should be forced to go through normal allocation channels.
There's a precedent for this. Stanford voluntarily returned their class A to help relieve the IP crunch. Clearly the others need to be forced.
2) No. As a PMP, a tablet will be way too big. Most people I know wouldn't even go with a iPod Touch, but rather with a nano. Size matters, and a PMP shouldn't be noticed, only heard.
Have you tried watching a movie on a nano? It's not exactly a good experience. You're thinking of DAPs (Digital Audio Player), not a PMP (Portable Media Player). PMP would mean video, and a 10" screen does a lot better at that than a 2 or 3" screen on a smartphone.
3) You don't need a tablet for a browser - you can already do that with almost any home appliance that has an ethernet interface. To recreate the tablet as some über-browser is daft. And pricey.
What do you expect an iSlab or whatnot to be used for, then? Any home appliance with an ethernet surface might be able to browse the web, but I wouldn't exactly want to take my refrigerator on the train with me. The advances made in browsing on the most recent crop of smartphones is indeed impressive, but I often find myself trying to browse on my iPhone and thinking "I wish that I had my laptop with me..."
Although, I'm more interested in smartbooks for this purpose. Marvell was showing off a rather impressive product at CES. Thinner and lighter than a Macbook Air, with a 4 hour battery life, 12" screen and full size keyboard, able to play HD video (acceleration), and an expected retail cost of $200.
And a little research wouldn't have hurt. The Dell XT2 XFR starts at $3599. The Lenovo X-series tablet starts at $1879 ($1509 with rebate). The Electrovaya Scribbler slate is at $2049. The Motion Computing J3400 starts at $2299.
So your $1000 mark is way off.
Huh? You're just reinforcing my point. Apple leaked their intended price as $1000, which is far cheaper than all your examples. So... What's your point? Just as I said, $1000 is indeed much lower than what most Tablet PCs sold for.
Microsoft's earlier attempts to push out a tablet PC had a few differences:
1) It relied on a stylus 2) It used a traditional UI (standard windows with some extra apps)
To address the two points:
1) Apple, presumably Microsoft, and various toher companies working on "modern" tablets are clearly going for touchscreen. Just like the stylus has been largely abandoned in the smartphone market, moving to touchscreens for tablets could make them a heck of a lot more accessible; styluses are another layer removing the user from the content, they don't work as well with gestures (flick-to-scroll feels a lot less natural), they don't have any equivalent to multi-touch, etc.
2) Tablet PC was just Windows with some handwriting recognition stuff tossed in. Apple (and I presume Microsoft and others) are going, this time, with completely different UIs. Apple is using the iPhone interface scaled up, which is a touch-screen interface to begin with. I assume Microsoft will also have something similar, although hopefully not based on Windows Mobile (or it will bomb).
I see a few uses for a touch-based tablet:
1) eBook reader. They don't have the power advantage of eInk here, but they do get the advantage of colour. Useless in novels, useful for textbooks, magazines, etc. Apple has tried to pull this off on the iPhone, but it's a decidedly sub-standard experience due to the tiny screen.
2) PMP. A 10" screen at arms length is a lot bigger than the 3.5" screens you get in most PMPs or smartphones.
3) Browser. Browsing on smartphones has made incredible leaps forward in the past few years, starting with Opera's work and continuing with mobile Safari. Smartphone browsing is pretty close to desktop browsing, except for the tiny screens. Scale that up to a high res 10" screen and suddenly you've got something that can dispay websites at full size without having to zoom.
It seems that the current approach to tablets is more about taking the smartphone experience and removing the limitations of screen size, rather than the previous approach which was to take the laptop PC experience and switch the input and form factor. I think that this new approach will be much more successful.
The price point is important too. The latest leaks from Apple have them considering a $1000 pricepoint, which I believe is lower than what most Tablet PCs sold for.
Example: Go to "ati.com" and you get redirected to the regular amd.com front page. Go to desktop graphics products and you get a page titled "AMD Graphics for Desktop PCs" inviting you to shop for "AMD Desktop Graphics Cards".
The actual cards themselves have as product name "ATI Radeon", but describing an "ATI Radeon" as an "AMD graphics card" is accurate.
This isn't an alternative to CUDA; it lets CUDA code run on x86, but still doesn't do anything for AMD graphics cards. In other words, your choices as a developer are to use OpenCL and have your code run everywhere (AMD, nVidia, x86 slowly), or use CUDA and have your code run on nVidia or x86 slowly.
What possible reason could you have to want to be locked into one GPU vendor?
In my case, it was simple. I noticed that my modem was listening on the telnet port, so I connected. Once connected, I realized that it ran Linux, and a typo in a command showed that it ran BusyBox. If I type "df -foo", it would report a BusyBox help blurb.
BusyBox wasn't the only thing on the router in violation; the Linux kernel itself also was. There were probably also other libraries being infringed.
A little over two years ago, I discovered that my VersaTek modem was using Linux/BusyBox. I requested the source, and the company refused saying that their Chinese OEM didn't give it to them, so that they couldn't give it to me. This is, of course, still a violation of the GPL in the same way that selling a stolen stereo doesn't change the fact that the stereo is stolen.
I mailed a report of this to the BusyBox author, and this morning the SFLC sent me an e-mail letting me know that VersaTek was being included in this lawsuit. They don't mention the specific VersaTek product that I notified them about, but it's nice that they followed up.
Consider how many zombies out there exist because their users didn't keep their machines up to date (either because they were ignorant or because they weren't and second-guessed updates).
IMO, auto-update should be something that SHOULD be difficult to disable; disabling it makes you a hazard to the rest of the net.
Not to mention all the various 2D ports of Portal.
Heck, there's even a fan project to remake Half-Life for the Source engine, which won't require you to own any actual Half-Life games (just a Source engine game)... and Valve has actually advertised for this project by posting Steam news updates about it.
Analog modems maxed out at 33.6 Kbps. 56K moved to digital.
Acceptable voice quality can be achieved with as little as about 8Kbps, something that almost any dialup connection should be able to achieve. The problem is more in latency...
Bandwidth isn't cheap, but that's besides the point. The problem is that their content distribution service involves seeding content, and it's free.
Seeding requires a significant amount of bandwidth. The initial up-front investment in bandwidth is probably only 2-3x the size of the upload, but the long tail is the killer; when there are no more seeds left, mininova has to keep supplying bandwidth. This adds up.
In the end, they'll end up having to provide hundreds of megabits of bandwidth at least, with almost no revenue.
It won't matter anyhow, Microsoft just ignorantly invoked the Streisand effect.
Note to everyone out there faced with a "leak": The best thing to do is NOTHING. By trying to have something removed, it will only be spread more widely.
If Microsoft had simply ignored the incident, Cryptome would have hosted it and the vast majority of people would have never even heard of COFEE. Now, tons of people are downloading it just BECAUSE of the reports of their takedown campaign.
Most of the success from the CDN service relied on the fact that millions of users visiting Mininova for general torrents would also be exposed to the CDN torrents. With Mininova's general torrent index deep-sixed, traffic will plummet to a tiny fraction of what it was before, and activity on CDN torrents will drop correspondingly.
While this means that users of the CDN won't get any extra exposure, it's still a useful service for pure distribution (they handle the tracking and seeding). Unfortunately, with no revenue stream, mininova won't be able to support that for long.
Yeah, you can. With Flash, or perhaps some sort of HTML5 or SVG-based solution in the future. So if you wanted to benchmark photo editing in a browser, you'd need to benchmark the *browser*, not a discrete application for editing photos.
Video Downloader doesn't do any transcoding. You're still just downloading content directly from the the video provider. Chromium allows binary code in extensions, but to get a proper comparison, you'd have to compare the same extension both on Chromium (on other platforms) and Chromium OS. This is my original point.
Local multimedia playback will be dependent on Google's implementation of the various codecs. Comparing, say, mplayer's implementation of h.264 to Google's wouldn't be a meaningful way to compare Chromium OS' performance. You'd have to compare Chromium's playback performance to Chromium OS'.
Google is claiming that Chromium OS will run Chromium better than other platforms. The benchmarks done for this article do absolutely nothing to validate or dispute that claim. It's a bunch of apples to oranges and/or irrelevant comparisons.
Not really; Chromium OS is designed to run one single application. Its performance for video encoding or 7-zip compression is completely meaningless; it will never be running any of those applications. Heck, they did all sorts of I/O benchmarks when Chrome OS doesn't really touch the disk except for caching.
The only meaningful benchmarks they could have run would be to compare various browser benchmarks between Chromium OS and Chrome running on different platforms on the same hardware.
My own opinion is, corporations have no business aiding and abetting censorship.
I'd counter that corporations have no business interfering in government policy. It's not corporations place to involve themselves in any way in policymaking. That's for the citizens to decide.
It's a dangerous world you wish for, where corporations pressure governments into taking certain actions or making certain policies.
Opera did exactly what they should have done; it's not their place to be getting involved in Chinese politics. The censorship policies of China are the business of the Chinese people, not foreign corporations.
I'd say the same thing of any government. For example, I resent the influence that the recording companies and telecom companies have over the Canadian government...
While I can't see what TPB is claiming since I can't access their blog post, DHT bootstrapping is performed by the developer of the client itself (different clients use different bootstrap hosts). So TPB has no connection to the bootstrapping.
What they are still doing is providing the torrent files required to find the content in the DHT swarm. Even that can be replaced with magnet links (essentially, the client asks the swarm to provide the torrent file), although then you're still providing a hash that can be used to find the content in the swarm.
And, at that point, we're dealing with illegal numbers.
I'd have to agree. While some older LCD displays had rather poor scaling, I've had no such concerns with resolution scaling on modern displays. My previous laptop (1400x1050), current laptop (1920x1200), and current desktop LCD (1920x1080) look perfectly fine scaling older games, from 640x480 on up.
The xbox didn't only gouge discs when you tilt them while in operation. A sufficient shock (pushed on the floor, pulled by a cable, etc) could cause them to damage discs too. The point is that they were damaging discs in situations where the discs shouldn't be damaged.
Besides that, Microsoft are the ones who decided to design their console to operate either horizontal or vertical. I've never seen anyone actually operate a 360 vertical; the safest thing to do, ignoring the fact that the issue occurred even when no tilting was involved, would have just been to *not* support vertical operation.
Fine. And the Consumerist OP who hadn't touched or opened the box in the slightest, who had not violated any warranty or agreement, and was still banned?
Is it no surprise that among those 600,000 users banned (nearly 4% of their users!) that there was some collateral damage?
One user, who reported having spent over $5200 on the xbox and XBLA, wrote to Consumerist that Microsoft banned his fiancé's unmodded console, and then treated them like criminals when they tried to get Microsoft to fix the problem:
Linked from there is a story from another user whose xbox suffered a fan-induced RROD. Not wanting to wait nearly a Month for Microsoft to fix it, he took it to the shop to have the fan replaced, apparently tripping some sort of modification flag. Microsoft's response to him? Literally (and I quote) "But this is what you get for tampering the console." (sic).
Slashdot Mirror
And let's not forget the possibility of forced re-allocations of class As.
For example, does the Ford Motor Company really need sixteen million IP addresses? Take them back, make Ford go through ARIN. The US military has about 151 million addresses too...
I'd like to say that no single entity should own an entire class A block, and that they should be forced to go through normal allocation channels.
There's a precedent for this. Stanford voluntarily returned their class A to help relieve the IP crunch. Clearly the others need to be forced.
2) No. As a PMP, a tablet will be way too big. Most people I know wouldn't even go with a iPod Touch, but rather with a nano. Size matters, and a PMP shouldn't be noticed, only heard.
Have you tried watching a movie on a nano? It's not exactly a good experience. You're thinking of DAPs (Digital Audio Player), not a PMP (Portable Media Player). PMP would mean video, and a 10" screen does a lot better at that than a 2 or 3" screen on a smartphone.
3) You don't need a tablet for a browser - you can already do that with almost any home appliance that has an ethernet interface. To recreate the tablet as some über-browser is daft. And pricey.
What do you expect an iSlab or whatnot to be used for, then? Any home appliance with an ethernet surface might be able to browse the web, but I wouldn't exactly want to take my refrigerator on the train with me. The advances made in browsing on the most recent crop of smartphones is indeed impressive, but I often find myself trying to browse on my iPhone and thinking "I wish that I had my laptop with me..."
Although, I'm more interested in smartbooks for this purpose. Marvell was showing off a rather impressive product at CES. Thinner and lighter than a Macbook Air, with a 4 hour battery life, 12" screen and full size keyboard, able to play HD video (acceleration), and an expected retail cost of $200.
And a little research wouldn't have hurt. The Dell XT2 XFR starts at $3599. The Lenovo X-series tablet starts at $1879 ($1509 with rebate). The Electrovaya Scribbler slate is at $2049. The Motion Computing J3400 starts at $2299.
So your $1000 mark is way off.
Huh? You're just reinforcing my point. Apple leaked their intended price as $1000, which is far cheaper than all your examples. So... What's your point? Just as I said, $1000 is indeed much lower than what most Tablet PCs sold for.
Microsoft's earlier attempts to push out a tablet PC had a few differences:
1) It relied on a stylus
2) It used a traditional UI (standard windows with some extra apps)
To address the two points:
1) Apple, presumably Microsoft, and various toher companies working on "modern" tablets are clearly going for touchscreen. Just like the stylus has been largely abandoned in the smartphone market, moving to touchscreens for tablets could make them a heck of a lot more accessible; styluses are another layer removing the user from the content, they don't work as well with gestures (flick-to-scroll feels a lot less natural), they don't have any equivalent to multi-touch, etc.
2) Tablet PC was just Windows with some handwriting recognition stuff tossed in. Apple (and I presume Microsoft and others) are going, this time, with completely different UIs. Apple is using the iPhone interface scaled up, which is a touch-screen interface to begin with. I assume Microsoft will also have something similar, although hopefully not based on Windows Mobile (or it will bomb).
I see a few uses for a touch-based tablet:
1) eBook reader. They don't have the power advantage of eInk here, but they do get the advantage of colour. Useless in novels, useful for textbooks, magazines, etc. Apple has tried to pull this off on the iPhone, but it's a decidedly sub-standard experience due to the tiny screen.
2) PMP. A 10" screen at arms length is a lot bigger than the 3.5" screens you get in most PMPs or smartphones.
3) Browser. Browsing on smartphones has made incredible leaps forward in the past few years, starting with Opera's work and continuing with mobile Safari. Smartphone browsing is pretty close to desktop browsing, except for the tiny screens. Scale that up to a high res 10" screen and suddenly you've got something that can dispay websites at full size without having to zoom.
It seems that the current approach to tablets is more about taking the smartphone experience and removing the limitations of screen size, rather than the previous approach which was to take the laptop PC experience and switch the input and form factor. I think that this new approach will be much more successful.
The price point is important too. The latest leaks from Apple have them considering a $1000 pricepoint, which I believe is lower than what most Tablet PCs sold for.
Actually, you can just hit CTRL-SHIFT-T, the same shortcut as other browsers like Firefox that have a re-open-closed-tab feature.
There are various Chrome extensions that change the behaviour of tabs. Have you tried any of them?
Progressively more and more.
Example: Go to "ati.com" and you get redirected to the regular amd.com front page. Go to desktop graphics products and you get a page titled "AMD Graphics for Desktop PCs" inviting you to shop for "AMD Desktop Graphics Cards".
The actual cards themselves have as product name "ATI Radeon", but describing an "ATI Radeon" as an "AMD graphics card" is accurate.
This isn't an alternative to CUDA; it lets CUDA code run on x86, but still doesn't do anything for AMD graphics cards. In other words, your choices as a developer are to use OpenCL and have your code run everywhere (AMD, nVidia, x86 slowly), or use CUDA and have your code run on nVidia or x86 slowly.
What possible reason could you have to want to be locked into one GPU vendor?
I realize that it's a common mistake, but Canada is not, in fact, in Europe.
Spain, the Czech Republic, and Finland are all members of the European Union. And in Europe.
In my case, it was simple. I noticed that my modem was listening on the telnet port, so I connected. Once connected, I realized that it ran Linux, and a typo in a command showed that it ran BusyBox. If I type "df -foo", it would report a BusyBox help blurb.
BusyBox wasn't the only thing on the router in violation; the Linux kernel itself also was. There were probably also other libraries being infringed.
A little over two years ago, I discovered that my VersaTek modem was using Linux/BusyBox. I requested the source, and the company refused saying that their Chinese OEM didn't give it to them, so that they couldn't give it to me. This is, of course, still a violation of the GPL in the same way that selling a stolen stereo doesn't change the fact that the stereo is stolen.
I mailed a report of this to the BusyBox author, and this morning the SFLC sent me an e-mail letting me know that VersaTek was being included in this lawsuit. They don't mention the specific VersaTek product that I notified them about, but it's nice that they followed up.
Consider how many zombies out there exist because their users didn't keep their machines up to date (either because they were ignorant or because they weren't and second-guessed updates).
IMO, auto-update should be something that SHOULD be difficult to disable; disabling it makes you a hazard to the rest of the net.
Not to mention all the various 2D ports of Portal.
Heck, there's even a fan project to remake Half-Life for the Source engine, which won't require you to own any actual Half-Life games (just a Source engine game)... and Valve has actually advertised for this project by posting Steam news updates about it.
Analog modems maxed out at 33.6 Kbps. 56K moved to digital.
Acceptable voice quality can be achieved with as little as about 8Kbps, something that almost any dialup connection should be able to achieve. The problem is more in latency...
Bandwidth isn't cheap, but that's besides the point. The problem is that their content distribution service involves seeding content, and it's free.
Seeding requires a significant amount of bandwidth. The initial up-front investment in bandwidth is probably only 2-3x the size of the upload, but the long tail is the killer; when there are no more seeds left, mininova has to keep supplying bandwidth. This adds up.
In the end, they'll end up having to provide hundreds of megabits of bandwidth at least, with almost no revenue.
It won't matter anyhow, Microsoft just ignorantly invoked the Streisand effect.
Note to everyone out there faced with a "leak": The best thing to do is NOTHING. By trying to have something removed, it will only be spread more widely.
If Microsoft had simply ignored the incident, Cryptome would have hosted it and the vast majority of people would have never even heard of COFEE. Now, tons of people are downloading it just BECAUSE of the reports of their takedown campaign.
Most of the success from the CDN service relied on the fact that millions of users visiting Mininova for general torrents would also be exposed to the CDN torrents. With Mininova's general torrent index deep-sixed, traffic will plummet to a tiny fraction of what it was before, and activity on CDN torrents will drop correspondingly.
While this means that users of the CDN won't get any extra exposure, it's still a useful service for pure distribution (they handle the tracking and seeding). Unfortunately, with no revenue stream, mininova won't be able to support that for long.
Yeah, you can. With Flash, or perhaps some sort of HTML5 or SVG-based solution in the future. So if you wanted to benchmark photo editing in a browser, you'd need to benchmark the *browser*, not a discrete application for editing photos.
Again, you're only proving my point.
Video Downloader doesn't do any transcoding. You're still just downloading content directly from the the video provider. Chromium allows binary code in extensions, but to get a proper comparison, you'd have to compare the same extension both on Chromium (on other platforms) and Chromium OS. This is my original point.
Local multimedia playback will be dependent on Google's implementation of the various codecs. Comparing, say, mplayer's implementation of h.264 to Google's wouldn't be a meaningful way to compare Chromium OS' performance. You'd have to compare Chromium's playback performance to Chromium OS'.
Google is claiming that Chromium OS will run Chromium better than other platforms. The benchmarks done for this article do absolutely nothing to validate or dispute that claim. It's a bunch of apples to oranges and/or irrelevant comparisons.
Not really; Chromium OS is designed to run one single application. Its performance for video encoding or 7-zip compression is completely meaningless; it will never be running any of those applications. Heck, they did all sorts of I/O benchmarks when Chrome OS doesn't really touch the disk except for caching.
The only meaningful benchmarks they could have run would be to compare various browser benchmarks between Chromium OS and Chrome running on different platforms on the same hardware.
My own opinion is, corporations have no business aiding and abetting censorship.
I'd counter that corporations have no business interfering in government policy. It's not corporations place to involve themselves in any way in policymaking. That's for the citizens to decide.
It's a dangerous world you wish for, where corporations pressure governments into taking certain actions or making certain policies.
Opera did exactly what they should have done; it's not their place to be getting involved in Chinese politics. The censorship policies of China are the business of the Chinese people, not foreign corporations.
I'd say the same thing of any government. For example, I resent the influence that the recording companies and telecom companies have over the Canadian government...
While I can't see what TPB is claiming since I can't access their blog post, DHT bootstrapping is performed by the developer of the client itself (different clients use different bootstrap hosts). So TPB has no connection to the bootstrapping.
What they are still doing is providing the torrent files required to find the content in the DHT swarm. Even that can be replaced with magnet links (essentially, the client asks the swarm to provide the torrent file), although then you're still providing a hash that can be used to find the content in the swarm.
And, at that point, we're dealing with illegal numbers.
I'd have to agree. While some older LCD displays had rather poor scaling, I've had no such concerns with resolution scaling on modern displays. My previous laptop (1400x1050), current laptop (1920x1200), and current desktop LCD (1920x1080) look perfectly fine scaling older games, from 640x480 on up.
The xbox didn't only gouge discs when you tilt them while in operation. A sufficient shock (pushed on the floor, pulled by a cable, etc) could cause them to damage discs too. The point is that they were damaging discs in situations where the discs shouldn't be damaged.
Besides that, Microsoft are the ones who decided to design their console to operate either horizontal or vertical. I've never seen anyone actually operate a 360 vertical; the safest thing to do, ignoring the fact that the issue occurred even when no tilting was involved, would have just been to *not* support vertical operation.
Fine. And the Consumerist OP who hadn't touched or opened the box in the slightest, who had not violated any warranty or agreement, and was still banned?
Is it no surprise that among those 600,000 users banned (nearly 4% of their users!) that there was some collateral damage?
One user, who reported having spent over $5200 on the xbox and XBLA, wrote to Consumerist that Microsoft banned his fiancé's unmodded console, and then treated them like criminals when they tried to get Microsoft to fix the problem:
http://consumerist.com/5402056/xbox-gamer-says-he-was-banned-online-for-no-reason
Linked from there is a story from another user whose xbox suffered a fan-induced RROD. Not wanting to wait nearly a Month for Microsoft to fix it, he took it to the shop to have the fan replaced, apparently tripping some sort of modification flag. Microsoft's response to him? Literally (and I quote) "But this is what you get for tampering the console." (sic).
What a disaster.