I saw something a while ago about a Chinese weapons vendor that has a laser blinding weapon. (Much lower power and it seemed portable by a couple of men).
Yes, there are DMCA restrictions on security testing. I'm a little foggy on the rules, bou have to get an express agreement from the author/manufacturer that you are allowed to perform security testing. An example Of course I'm one of those EFF supporting lefties. Say it's a spam firewall you're reviewing, so you want to run a set of attack scripts against it to see if it actually does it's job, securely. The attack scripts are illegal under the DMCA as well as the act of running them against the firewall.
Well, you _could_ wait until the product has been out long enough for someone (such as Consumer's Union) to have purchased a sample off the shelf, tested it, and published a report. But then you wouldn't be on the leading edge! You'd be buying "obsolete" stuff! Intolerable! Okay, so you read the review in Consumer's Union, or Consumer Reports or whatever. Only the review is 8 months old at that point. Maybe you could get it on eBay, but you will probably find BestBuy doesn't carry it any more. I repeatedly have this problem with Linux and Solaris hardware. By the time it's certified or tested, it's no longer the current, in-stock product. And while I have no problem with a little trial and error on my home machine, clients are much less tolerant of "well, it should work and it should be covered under RedHat support."
Who the f*** carries around CD's any more? Who doesn't burn them to a computer and carry them on frickin' MP3 player along with about a thousand other songs? I have more confidence of what's on that burned CD than I have on the one I bought from the store. iTunes has obvious and simple limits on what it can and can't do, or what it will and won't play on. You buy a $12.99 "Britney Spears" CD and stick it in your computer you're accepting the risk that some jackass at Sony didn't decide that protecting "Ooops I did it again" is worth putting a harder to find torjan on you computer, complete with a keystroke logger, and accidentally bundled a virus for good measure. Which, by the way, conflicts with the copy protection installed when you decided to watch "Harry Pooter 7 and the Testicles of Doom."
I won't disagree with you on that. A Garmin GPS unit is a couple of hundred bucks. A garmin navigational unit for an airplane is several thousand - all because it has to be certified for use in aircraft. You make a valid point that it's expensive. I was trying to make the point that we can make quality stuff.
My gripe is that even "high-end" stuff suffers this phenomena. Even more so in some cases.
I agree - even though I've been very pleased with my Philips TV, I am hesitant to buy another Philips product because of a very shoddy Philips DVD recorder I bought. I'm also won't buy anything made by Sony because they "castrate" their products (and are trying to make everyone else do the same) in a dim-witted effort to combat piracy. I don't buy commercial music CD's any more because of the anti-piracy nonsense that was put on them. I will not buy another computer that uses broadcom wirless ethernet adapters - because of their lack of Linux support.
However, there's an upper limit on my tolerance for pain. For example, I'm not going to give up buying music, I'm just doing it on iTunes.
However, we routinely produce complicated systems that have excellant reliability. For example, glass displays on aircraft - which are quite common in commercial jets. They have to undergo a much more rigorous level of testing before they can be shipped because the liability to the manufacturer is huge. What's the liability if your Sony cam-corder stops working in the middle of your once-in-a-lifetime round-the-world vacaction, all because of a software glitch? The problem is not with the software, the problem rests partially with the people that make and test the systems, but mostly with the people who hire/fire developers, designers and engineers. They do silly things like higher cheaper, but less qualified engineers. They make marketings's brain-fart of the day the top priority. (I realize we're using the world's cheapest 16 bit micro-controller - but could you write the software in Java with a Gui so we can demo at Java One?) And they do things like sacrifice testing to make schedule. And they're also the ones that do things like set budgets and deadlines.
The DVD recorder has some "issues" with recording to DVD. It's very fancy, otherwise, complete with 6 possible recording inputs and can do slide-shows off USB keys with photos. Nifty specs. It seems that the primary solution is to update the firmware. You would think someone at the factory might have attempted to record video prior to shipping it, alas, they apparently did not. (It is an intermittant bug that causes the audio to progressively lag the video). Hey - it compiles, ship it!. Since the process for updating the firmware seems non-trivial, is riddled with warnings, involves a USB key and I'm lazy - I haven't done it.
Combine this disturbing trend with product reviews that are little more than a regurgitation of the back of the box. (Along with some weird DMCA rules about what can and can't be reviewed on a product esp. vis-a-vis security.) Now you have a situation where you can't even get real reviews of products, and no review is ever "not positive." It's just that some are more positive than others. So, here you are, trying to buy a $500 video camera so you can tape the birth of your fist child and you aren't even really sure that any of them work. On top of that you can't even trust the reviews you read on various sites. I agree with you, this is not a good thing.
It was something really neat. What blew me away with BeOS 4.5 (I think that was the first Intel build), was being able to run 3 windows of video simultaneously (same 350Mhz PII running win95 could handle 1 window of video). I could spin multiple GL teapots in different windows with really crisp performance. And it worked really well with my Haupage capture card, no dropped frames. In the modern world of 100 fps, texture mapped, highly accelerated OpenGL/DirectX games that's not much of an accomplishment. On 1997-ish hardware, however, it was an accomplishment.
Compared to Win32 API, MFC and Macintosh Toolbox the API was fairly clean and simple. In fairly short order I wrote a native C++ app (as an exercise for the reader) that read in image files and broke it into R, G and B channels with histogram plots. I could then lower/raise the intensity of each channel. It could read in just about any format (jpg, gif, tiff, and some other odd-balls). In addition the app was safely multi-threaded. It was a piece of cake. Compared to my beloved Mac (on which I learned C), it was completely painless. Version 5.0 and 6.0 were going to have a lot of great, new features that were giving MS a real run for their money.
That was nearly 10 years ago. GUIs have progressed since then. I forked out the dough for Zeta - on a nostalgia kick - six months or so ago. It just didn't have the features I expect from a modern OS. When Be went belly up (remember MS had such a tight lock on OEMs Be literally couldn't give their OS away) time seems to have stopped for the BeOS. I didn't bother installing it on real hardware - just on VMware. I played around with it for a couple of days and then needed the disk space for something else. Haven't touched it since.
Well, I hope the Haiku guys have a lot of fun with their project and other users get a chance to play with what I still think is a really neat operating system.
Horse-hockey. Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams all wrote agains the excess transfer of wealth between generations.
John Adams wrote, "The only possible way, then, of preserving the balance of power on the side of equal liberty and public virtue, is to make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society... If the multitude is possessed of the balance of real estate, the multitude will take care of the liberty, virtue, and interest of the multitude, in all acts of government."
That's because they understood that locking up wealth, at the time they wrote that basically translated to land, in families is anti-democratic.
1) You were always able to dunk your doughnuts in coffee - thus adding both a pleasant flavor and caffine to the doughnuts. (Hence the name Dunkin' Donuts).
2) WTF! Really!?!? What is so totally wrong with our food that we have to add stimulants. We've already f'ed up chicken to the point where almost all of it is covered in a bacteria because it's washed in it's own s**t! Your milk and beef is so full of hormones and anti-biotics we're passing them into the sewage system and it's making mutant fish! WTF! What's next? Prozac bacon? Tylenol bagels? Or how about chocolate cake with appetite suppressants?
Hmm... Why do I seem so upset and uptight about this? Maybe it's because, like most Americans, I drink caffine all friggin' day!
On a side note - I don't think Mormons can eat caffinated foods.
Good point. However, is 2/3 market share really a monopoly? GM used to have 1/2 the US car market when the US government was actually enforcing anti-monopoly laws - and they were worried they were going to get hit. I don't view 2/3 of a market for things you use for your personal entertainment a dangerous monopoly situation, but that's MHO. 95% of the desktop market is more worrisome, and it's dissapointing the Bush administration basically shut down the anti-trust suit against Microsoft.
The utility companies are natural monopolies because they don't normally run multiple gas, electrical, water and sewer to your house. So, maybe we should look at what is being monopolized and why, and what the real damage. It's also easier for these companies to have a discussion about the music player market, because there are many alternative players and services. However, in the field of operating systems, many lay people aren't sure if there's a real alternative to Microsoft.
Also, keep in mind that if Apple's service stopped tommorrow and you weren't able to buy more music, you could still burn it to CD. You would still be able to get to work, pay your bills, and download pr0n . However, one really wicked virus/worm/trojan and you could take the world down.
I agree, it's laughable that iPod/iTunes has about 2/3 of the market and people are getting bent out of shape that it's a "closed" system when it was never billed as an "open" system. You're more than welcome to buy a Sandisk player and a subscription to Real, or whatever it plays.
There's a big difference between ammending the tax so that the families of people who have high capital businesses (like a farm, ranch or small factory), aren't forced to liquidate because of a family death. However, the push to lift what Republicans frame as the "Death Tax" is to lift it for everyone. That includes people who are literally passing along billions. Combine institutionalizing wealth with a growing income disparity, you wind up institutionalizing poverty as well.
It's a combination of two effects. The first part is the ridiculous over-compensation (even though I've benefited by holding GS stock in the past) of C-level people. The second is making the wealth a matter of family heredity. Over time their position become institutionalized. It's not to say that all people who make money in their life are greedy or evil, and it's perfectly natural to pass on wealth to your heirs. However, in a country that strives (but often fails) to be a meritocracy, placing people in positions of permanent wealth is probably corrosive over time. It's better to have a nation of self-made men and women than people who are rich because because their parents were rich.
The first American transfer tax, enacted in 1797 and later repealed, was designed to help build a navy to counter French aggression on the high seas. Subsequently, Congress passed what would become temporary wartime estate taxes - during the Civil War in 1862, the Spanish-American War in 1898, and World War I in 1916.
In addition a number of the founding fathers considered this kind of generational wealth transfer a potential problem. That does not mean that they didn't engage in it. Like slavery there was a gulf between what they were worried about and what they actually acted on.
The first American transfer tax, enacted in 1797 and later repealed, was designed to help build a navy to counter French aggression on the high seas. Subsequently, Congress passed what would become temporary wartime estate taxes - during the Civil War in 1862, the Spanish-American War in 1898, and World War I in 1916.
There's a growing belief in this country, and it isn't new, that if you are poor you did something to deserve it. You either don't work hard enough, or made bad decisions. Now, there are lots of reasons people face issues like bankruptcy, and the largest reason are medical bills. Since its unlikely that people choose to become realy, realy sick (or in your case badly injured), most cases of bankruptcy are for things that are truly out of peoples' control. However, if you subscribe to the idea that it's a person's fault they're poor, then you have no responsiblity (morally) to help them. I think many people who subscribe to the idea that poverty is choice are looking for a way to be able to face themselves in the mirror each morning.
Bingo - that's it on the nose. It's not that my stack of little green slips of paper is not as tall as you stack. It's that my child dies of leukemia because I don't have enough money to see a doctor, while you child goes to the best hospitals on the planet for a mild thyroid condition. It's about access to health care, education, nutrition, and in some sense luxuries. Imagine how it galls some people in brazil that a group of Porsche driving Yuppie kids spend more money in one night on dinner than they make in a year.
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When can I pick one up at my local sporting goods store? I need it for "deer hunting." (And the simulatenous cooking of the entire animal).
While definitions and yard sticks may differ, Holland. The Dutch seem to enjoy a very broad set of freedoms.
I saw something a while ago about a Chinese weapons vendor that has a laser blinding weapon. (Much lower power and it seemed portable by a couple of men).
Who the f*** carries around CD's any more? Who doesn't burn them to a computer and carry them on frickin' MP3 player along with about a thousand other songs? I have more confidence of what's on that burned CD than I have on the one I bought from the store. iTunes has obvious and simple limits on what it can and can't do, or what it will and won't play on. You buy a $12.99 "Britney Spears" CD and stick it in your computer you're accepting the risk that some jackass at Sony didn't decide that protecting "Ooops I did it again" is worth putting a harder to find torjan on you computer, complete with a keystroke logger, and accidentally bundled a virus for good measure. Which, by the way, conflicts with the copy protection installed when you decided to watch "Harry Pooter 7 and the Testicles of Doom."
I won't disagree with you on that. A Garmin GPS unit is a couple of hundred bucks. A garmin navigational unit for an airplane is several thousand - all because it has to be certified for use in aircraft. You make a valid point that it's expensive. I was trying to make the point that we can make quality stuff. My gripe is that even "high-end" stuff suffers this phenomena. Even more so in some cases.
I agree - even though I've been very pleased with my Philips TV, I am hesitant to buy another Philips product because of a very shoddy Philips DVD recorder I bought. I'm also won't buy anything made by Sony because they "castrate" their products (and are trying to make everyone else do the same) in a dim-witted effort to combat piracy. I don't buy commercial music CD's any more because of the anti-piracy nonsense that was put on them. I will not buy another computer that uses broadcom wirless ethernet adapters - because of their lack of Linux support. However, there's an upper limit on my tolerance for pain. For example, I'm not going to give up buying music, I'm just doing it on iTunes.
However, we routinely produce complicated systems that have excellant reliability. For example, glass displays on aircraft - which are quite common in commercial jets. They have to undergo a much more rigorous level of testing before they can be shipped because the liability to the manufacturer is huge. What's the liability if your Sony cam-corder stops working in the middle of your once-in-a-lifetime round-the-world vacaction, all because of a software glitch? The problem is not with the software, the problem rests partially with the people that make and test the systems, but mostly with the people who hire/fire developers, designers and engineers. They do silly things like higher cheaper, but less qualified engineers. They make marketings's brain-fart of the day the top priority. (I realize we're using the world's cheapest 16 bit micro-controller - but could you write the software in Java with a Gui so we can demo at Java One?) And they do things like sacrifice testing to make schedule. And they're also the ones that do things like set budgets and deadlines.
The DVD recorder has some "issues" with recording to DVD. It's very fancy, otherwise, complete with 6 possible recording inputs and can do slide-shows off USB keys with photos. Nifty specs. It seems that the primary solution is to update the firmware. You would think someone at the factory might have attempted to record video prior to shipping it, alas, they apparently did not. (It is an intermittant bug that causes the audio to progressively lag the video). Hey - it compiles, ship it!. Since the process for updating the firmware seems non-trivial, is riddled with warnings, involves a USB key and I'm lazy - I haven't done it.
Combine this disturbing trend with product reviews that are little more than a regurgitation of the back of the box. (Along with some weird DMCA rules about what can and can't be reviewed on a product esp. vis-a-vis security.) Now you have a situation where you can't even get real reviews of products, and no review is ever "not positive." It's just that some are more positive than others. So, here you are, trying to buy a $500 video camera so you can tape the birth of your fist child and you aren't even really sure that any of them work. On top of that you can't even trust the reviews you read on various sites. I agree with you, this is not a good thing.
It was something really neat. What blew me away with BeOS 4.5 (I think that was the first Intel build), was being able to run 3 windows of video simultaneously (same 350Mhz PII running win95 could handle 1 window of video). I could spin multiple GL teapots in different windows with really crisp performance. And it worked really well with my Haupage capture card, no dropped frames. In the modern world of 100 fps, texture mapped, highly accelerated OpenGL/DirectX games that's not much of an accomplishment. On 1997-ish hardware, however, it was an accomplishment.
Compared to Win32 API, MFC and Macintosh Toolbox the API was fairly clean and simple. In fairly short order I wrote a native C++ app (as an exercise for the reader) that read in image files and broke it into R, G and B channels with histogram plots. I could then lower/raise the intensity of each channel. It could read in just about any format (jpg, gif, tiff, and some other odd-balls). In addition the app was safely multi-threaded. It was a piece of cake. Compared to my beloved Mac (on which I learned C), it was completely painless. Version 5.0 and 6.0 were going to have a lot of great, new features that were giving MS a real run for their money.
That was nearly 10 years ago. GUIs have progressed since then. I forked out the dough for Zeta - on a nostalgia kick - six months or so ago. It just didn't have the features I expect from a modern OS. When Be went belly up (remember MS had such a tight lock on OEMs Be literally couldn't give their OS away) time seems to have stopped for the BeOS. I didn't bother installing it on real hardware - just on VMware. I played around with it for a couple of days and then needed the disk space for something else. Haven't touched it since.
Well, I hope the Haiku guys have a lot of fun with their project and other users get a chance to play with what I still think is a really neat operating system.
Isn't it a rule that you have to include a crane or a flute?
They have about 2/3 of the media player sales. Second place, I believe, is Sandisk.
Horse-hockey. Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams all wrote agains the excess transfer of wealth between generations.
John Adams wrote, "The only possible way, then, of preserving the balance of power on the side of equal liberty and public virtue, is to make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society... If the multitude is possessed of the balance of real estate, the multitude will take care of the liberty, virtue, and interest of the multitude, in all acts of government."
That's because they understood that locking up wealth, at the time they wrote that basically translated to land, in families is anti-democratic.
Anything Asian gets a pass, 'cause it's like "holistic" and "ancient."
1) You were always able to dunk your doughnuts in coffee - thus adding both a pleasant flavor and caffine to the doughnuts. (Hence the name Dunkin' Donuts).
2) WTF! Really!?!? What is so totally wrong with our food that we have to add stimulants. We've already f'ed up chicken to the point where almost all of it is covered in a bacteria because it's washed in it's own s**t! Your milk and beef is so full of hormones and anti-biotics we're passing them into the sewage system and it's making mutant fish! WTF! What's next? Prozac bacon? Tylenol bagels? Or how about chocolate cake with appetite suppressants?
Hmm... Why do I seem so upset and uptight about this? Maybe it's because, like most Americans, I drink caffine all friggin' day!
On a side note - I don't think Mormons can eat caffinated foods.
Nicely said.
Good point. However, is 2/3 market share really a monopoly? GM used to have 1/2 the US car market when the US government was actually enforcing anti-monopoly laws - and they were worried they were going to get hit. I don't view 2/3 of a market for things you use for your personal entertainment a dangerous monopoly situation, but that's MHO. 95% of the desktop market is more worrisome, and it's dissapointing the Bush administration basically shut down the anti-trust suit against Microsoft.
The utility companies are natural monopolies because they don't normally run multiple gas, electrical, water and sewer to your house. So, maybe we should look at what is being monopolized and why, and what the real damage. It's also easier for these companies to have a discussion about the music player market, because there are many alternative players and services. However, in the field of operating systems, many lay people aren't sure if there's a real alternative to Microsoft.
Also, keep in mind that if Apple's service stopped tommorrow and you weren't able to buy more music, you could still burn it to CD. You would still be able to get to work, pay your bills, and download pr0n . However, one really wicked virus/worm/trojan and you could take the world down.
And BTW - I wrote this on a Mac.
I agree, it's laughable that iPod/iTunes has about 2/3 of the market and people are getting bent out of shape that it's a "closed" system when it was never billed as an "open" system. You're more than welcome to buy a Sandisk player and a subscription to Real, or whatever it plays.
There's a big difference between ammending the tax so that the families of people who have high capital businesses (like a farm, ranch or small factory), aren't forced to liquidate because of a family death. However, the push to lift what Republicans frame as the "Death Tax" is to lift it for everyone. That includes people who are literally passing along billions. Combine institutionalizing wealth with a growing income disparity, you wind up institutionalizing poverty as well.
It's a combination of two effects. The first part is the ridiculous over-compensation (even though I've benefited by holding GS stock in the past) of C-level people. The second is making the wealth a matter of family heredity. Over time their position become institutionalized. It's not to say that all people who make money in their life are greedy or evil, and it's perfectly natural to pass on wealth to your heirs. However, in a country that strives (but often fails) to be a meritocracy, placing people in positions of permanent wealth is probably corrosive over time. It's better to have a nation of self-made men and women than people who are rich because because their parents were rich.
The first American transfer tax, enacted in 1797 and later repealed, was designed to help build a navy to counter French aggression on the high seas. Subsequently, Congress passed what would become temporary wartime estate taxes - during the Civil War in 1862, the Spanish-American War in 1898, and World War I in 1916.
In addition a number of the founding fathers considered this kind of generational wealth transfer a potential problem. That does not mean that they didn't engage in it. Like slavery there was a gulf between what they were worried about and what they actually acted on.
The first American transfer tax, enacted in 1797 and later repealed, was designed to help build a navy to counter French aggression on the high seas. Subsequently, Congress passed what would become temporary wartime estate taxes - during the Civil War in 1862, the Spanish-American War in 1898, and World War I in 1916.
Sorry, you're right. I plead posting while angry.
There's a growing belief in this country, and it isn't new, that if you are poor you did something to deserve it. You either don't work hard enough, or made bad decisions. Now, there are lots of reasons people face issues like bankruptcy, and the largest reason are medical bills. Since its unlikely that people choose to become realy, realy sick (or in your case badly injured), most cases of bankruptcy are for things that are truly out of peoples' control. However, if you subscribe to the idea that it's a person's fault they're poor, then you have no responsiblity (morally) to help them. I think many people who subscribe to the idea that poverty is choice are looking for a way to be able to face themselves in the mirror each morning.
Bingo - that's it on the nose. It's not that my stack of little green slips of paper is not as tall as you stack. It's that my child dies of leukemia because I don't have enough money to see a doctor, while you child goes to the best hospitals on the planet for a mild thyroid condition. It's about access to health care, education, nutrition, and in some sense luxuries. Imagine how it galls some people in brazil that a group of Porsche driving Yuppie kids spend more money in one night on dinner than they make in a year.