Actually, Bruce often advocates solutions that actually work. Take airline security. He advocates putting security doors on the cockpits. That will do more to prevent hijackings and increase security than all the TSA guards you see milling about. It's also cheaper and less intrusive.
That said, I also think his analysis of man in the middle attacks is a little flawed. The problem is that the vulnerablity lies in clients not authenticating the servers. If the client (via the security token) encrypts the stream before sending it out, that should prevent man in the middle attacks. Typically then, you might need one token for each server (or group of servers) that you want to access. On the other hand trojans are nearly impossible to beat. They have access to the token and they can steal your username/password unencrypted.
Hey here's an idea, let's fake another landing on another solar system body!
No good. Stanley Kubrick is no longer around to direct it. Who are you going to get to take his place, Lucas? Spielberg? I don't think so. Especially not after the colossal wreck that was AI.
Some people are really just idiots. What we need are more engineers. Look at the inputs to the system - supply and demand. On the supply side, we're limited by the variety of songs to download. Granted 200,000+ is quite a few, but how many are most people really interested in? Just a small percentage of that. Volume is irrelevant as the marginal cost is virtually negligable. (especially if you get rid of those stupid DRM schemes). On the demand side, most people would only find maybe 1000-2000 tracks they feel would be worth having. The other constraint is what the average budget for purchasing songs might be and what other things someone might wish to spend that money on. Lowering the cost per song would have one strongly bennificial effect: It would help artists who might not quite sell as many songs. On the other hand, it also completely ignores the dynamics of demand for certain songs (a problem that happens when all songs are fixed at the same price, wether it be $.99 or $.05). Musicians and labels are both generally interested in maximizing their profit. The latest track from Green Day might have an ideal price (from a maximum profit perspective) of $3.59 (at least while it's fresh and new) while "classics" from Styx or Twisted Sister might only fetch $.25. Furthermore, it should be real easy to adjust rates in real time. (Only sold 23 tracks in the last hour? Drop the price 10 cents). Frankly, the last thing we need is another tax and more regulations making a busted system even worse. [/rant over]
And I fully agree with you. I question, however, wether the FCC has the authority to regulate a data service/internet traffic. It seems to me to be outside the scope of their congressional mandate. Really, do you want the FCC to regulate how you setup a firewall?
I think the FCC was very smart in the size of the fine. Large enough to discourage the practice, but not large enough that it would likely be challenged in court. So, you're right that the precedent it sets is important here and it's a very dangerous one.
I recently picked up the ATI HDTV Wonder and so far, it's pretty good at recording programs, but the user interface on the included software (downloading the latest from ATI) is horrible. What I'm wondering is if anyone out there has found a better interface for it. Otherwise, I love that digital picture.
Better than that, you need a bit torrent like system that responds to demand. IE, the client sees a lot of demand for a particular file signature so it downloads and caches a few file fragments. Users never have the complete file and furthermore, never even need to know what file they actually have since they'll only have a hash of some sort to identify it. Not really even all that complicated to build.
I think their production costs run about $1.6M an episode. Or I could be making that number up. Regardless, you could do an entire season of Reading Rainbow for half that. And last I heard, they were hurting for funds. About a year ago, LeVar Burton (see, that's how I'm staying almost on topic) was out stumping for funds. You too could help. Frankly, the best thing for the Star Trek franchise at this point would be a good 5-10 year hiatus. That and the resurection of Gene Roddenberry.
Airlines are private companies. However, the TSA is not. From here we get into two different scenarios: The first, an airline requires you to show ID to board an airplane. The airline, being private, is entitled to do that. If they're just follwing government regulations, they're still entitled to and (IANAL) you probably would not have standing to challenge that in court, though the airline would, if they chose. The second scenario is the TSA requiring you to show an ID before boarding the plane. There you would have direct standing to challenge in court. The government would likely cite the recent Hibbel decision and the plaintiff would likely as well. It was pretty narrowly worded. First, according to the decision, you are not required to produce identification, merely to give your name. Second, it was limited to police officers conducting an investigation who had reasonable suspicion that a crime is or was being commited. The plaintiffs would also likely cite other constitutional issues such as free speech, rights of association and travel. The government has a pretty flimsy case for mandating IDs, but the courts have been reluctant to challenge security lately.
The whole article is sheer idiocy because the real fights are for the corporate desktop and the eduacational markets. If Daddy can't work on his spreadsheet at home, he's not going to buy that PC or OS. Education runs a distant second, but it's important because you want people entering the workforce already familiar with your products. Hardware manufacturers will write drivers for whatever the dominant platform is, and if worthwhile, for the secondary platforms. Plain and simple.
TFA misses the point as well that if there was an MS driver abstraction layer in Linux, that would only improve distribution leading the hardware folks to write more native drivers for Linux.
The answer of course, is don't use Oracle if you can help it.:) They're just as evil as Microsoft, but they don't give away nearly as many free T-Shirts.
Effectively it's SMP on one CPU. Something I very much look forward to as I always build my desktops SMP. It also incorporates some of the overhead of SMP into the CPU driving down the system price a little bit.
While you're right that SMP offers little performance to most apps, I tend to run a lot of CPU hogs at the same time. Watch a DVD while waiting for a project to finish compiling or whatnot. It can also help keep runaway processes from sabatoging your system. I used to have a program that set its priority to 'AboveNormal' and would from time to time it would hang up in a loop. Since it was running at a higher priority, you sometimes couldn't bring up Task Manager to kill it off as the higher priorty thread always took precedant. And if all else fails, you can set up 2 SETI @ Home clients and process twice as many packets. But do your self a favor and set their priorty to 'Low'.
Also, you've got a chicken and egg problem. The reason there's so few programs that benifit from SMP is that there are so few computers that are SMP. When I was running some computer labs at a Big 10 university a few years back I was insisting on SMP workstations so that the CS students could learn to program multithreaded apps and see the benifits of it when it ran on 1 vs. 2 processors.
Lastly, my basement is very poorly insulated and gets a bit chilly in the winter. Anything to help warm it up and keep my fingers working properly is a good thing(tm)!
Ahh, but there are 2 things that make this dupe interesting. Firstly, it wasn't posted by CmdrTaco. Secondly, it gives a UK perspective on the issue. That said, allow me to summarize: FCC bad. EFF good. Big business bad. Open source good. Public domain best yet.
It makes me cry in my beer to think that Reagan may have been the best president of the last 40 years or so. What's really scary is the amount of US Treasury securities that Asian banks (especially China) hold. That's the real benifit of Social Security privatization. Americans owning more of the world. The arms race of the 21st century is going to be about the accumulation of assets.
But to get back on topic here, at least there's a court that's made an intelligent decision for a change. The likely outcome, is that even if this broadcast flag eventually goes through, it'll be tied up in court and probably not implemented for several years. Or so we can hope.
A $1/gallon tax credit is not economical because everyone is subsidising it. For a short term plan, it may help, but long term it's not sustainable. It's a tax credit that will be phased out as alternative fuels come to market. (Unless those fuels come from the state of a well connected Senator).
However the point regarding disposal of animal waste (particularly in response to BSE and other related diseases) is certainly valid. If you can drive down or eliminate the raw materials cost, then the product comes down to about $60-$65/barrel refined. There you're starting to hit a marketable price for diesel fuel, especially if oil prices continue to rise. I don't imagine oil prices will rise much in the next several years, though, as OPEC is smart enough to keep prices just low enough to make alternative fuels not economically viable.
So you're telling me that the real problem is the politicians. I've never really understood this "brodcast flag" to begin with. They're pushing for digital adoption by consumers then they throw this on at the last minute? I think that may be biggest reason I haven't seen many HDTV tuners for sale at my local retail outlets.
Also, as ATI points out on their page for the HDTV Wonder any device manufactured before July 1, 2005 is exempt, and you get the impression from their remarks that they're ramping up production because of this. I know I'll be buying one (or something similar) before then.
The consumer is wiling to pay for the Plasma TV that has a specific lifespan because the technology doesn't exist to make a plasma TV that lasts longer. Also, hardware (whether TV, Radio, computer, whatever) often is obsolete before it wears out.
There is no reason to buy software with an expiration date. You mention Open Source and Freeware as influences that prevent major software makers from ganging up, but that's bogus. Other than Office and Windows, there's sufficient competition in most products that keep the market open. And Office and Windows are stymied mostly by corporate buyers willing to sit on older versions rather than give in to a subsription model of liscencing.
Frankly, I think the linked article is rather bogus. Microsoft has a way of ensuring that software wears out. They simply release new versions and slowly quit fixing older versions. Combine that with added features such that older versions of Office can't open documents created with current versions and new features for Windows forcing consumers to buy current versions to run the latest software. Microsoft isn't hurting by any stretch of the imagination. There is no "declining market for Windows and Office."
The author of the article is clearly a Mac evangelist. Also, the author of the article is clearly an idiot for allowing his SO to put an unpatched box on the net without so much as a firewall in between. He asks if you would buy a car that failed miserably shortly after you drove it off the lot. Bad analogy. If you maintain your pc - apply security patches, maintain good practices, Windows works very well. Likewise, if you never change the oil in your car, it's going to croak after 10k miles. If you put an unpatched Linux box out on the net, you'd be owned inside of a week. The author has been enjoying the fruits of security through obscurity -- that doesn't work if everyone had a Mac. If everyone had a Mac, you'd hear all day long about how Macs were full of security holes, viruses and spyware.
Firstly, your logic is terribly fallible. You have undoubtably benifited from the public resources the fire and police departments provide. They are essential to living in a safe society. Furthermore, in some cases fire departments have been known to send bills to people they've helped if they're found to have been negligent in starting the fire. Roads are a fundamental public resource. Also, most new residential road construction is paid for by the developments they're serving. Sewer and water service are typically city monopolies because it's not realistic to create a competitive marketplace for them. Electricity is an interesting issue as the transmission lines are typically a monopoly, but just about anyone can build and operate a power generation facility.
This brings us to a point of principle: how far should the role of government extend? I'm typically of the mindset that it should be no further than is really necessary.
For $1 - $2 billion, you could give every kid in Washington DC a year of a tuition at a very nice private school and a college scholorship. To waste this kind of money on a telescope that does virtually nothing to advance basic science is an absolute travesty. I'm all for space exploration, but there are much better ways to spend federal funds - and I'm not talking about that quagmire Iraq, either.
I would've linked the URL. Slashdot has great Page Rank. By including my URL in my sig, I managed to hit the front page of the major search engines when searching for my last name. (Previously, I had been down around 50 or so). Although, I've dropped, 'cuz my site has been down for about 2 months now. I need to find a new host.
Nah, too much work. I look forward to the day when some IT pilot fish gets a request from the FBI under Patriot Act IV and must make a decision about whether to supply the data and face indictment in Canada or refuse and face indictment in the US.
It's not that all software patents are bad, just most of 'em. Take the LZH compression algorigthm. It was a pretty good patent back in the early 80s when it was granted. It was sufficiently narrow (one specific method of data compression) and reasonably not obvious (for that point in time). The problem is that the patent office has no concept of 'novel' or 'obvious' and that prior art means 'already patented'. Also, there's a tendancy by the patent office to let the courts decide the actual merits, whereas the courts like to defer to the patent office.
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Actually, Bruce often advocates solutions that actually work. Take airline security. He advocates putting security doors on the cockpits. That will do more to prevent hijackings and increase security than all the TSA guards you see milling about. It's also cheaper and less intrusive.
That said, I also think his analysis of man in the middle attacks is a little flawed. The problem is that the vulnerablity lies in clients not authenticating the servers. If the client (via the security token) encrypts the stream before sending it out, that should prevent man in the middle attacks. Typically then, you might need one token for each server (or group of servers) that you want to access. On the other hand trojans are nearly impossible to beat. They have access to the token and they can steal your username/password unencrypted.
Hey here's an idea, let's fake another landing on another solar system body!
No good. Stanley Kubrick is no longer around to direct it. Who are you going to get to take his place, Lucas? Spielberg? I don't think so. Especially not after the colossal wreck that was AI.
Some people are really just idiots. What we need are more engineers. Look at the inputs to the system - supply and demand. On the supply side, we're limited by the variety of songs to download. Granted 200,000+ is quite a few, but how many are most people really interested in? Just a small percentage of that. Volume is irrelevant as the marginal cost is virtually negligable. (especially if you get rid of those stupid DRM schemes). On the demand side, most people would only find maybe 1000-2000 tracks they feel would be worth having. The other constraint is what the average budget for purchasing songs might be and what other things someone might wish to spend that money on. Lowering the cost per song would have one strongly bennificial effect: It would help artists who might not quite sell as many songs. On the other hand, it also completely ignores the dynamics of demand for certain songs (a problem that happens when all songs are fixed at the same price, wether it be $.99 or $.05). Musicians and labels are both generally interested in maximizing their profit. The latest track from Green Day might have an ideal price (from a maximum profit perspective) of $3.59 (at least while it's fresh and new) while "classics" from Styx or Twisted Sister might only fetch $.25. Furthermore, it should be real easy to adjust rates in real time. (Only sold 23 tracks in the last hour? Drop the price 10 cents). Frankly, the last thing we need is another tax and more regulations making a busted system even worse. [/rant over]
And I fully agree with you. I question, however, wether the FCC has the authority to regulate a data service/internet traffic. It seems to me to be outside the scope of their congressional mandate. Really, do you want the FCC to regulate how you setup a firewall?
I think the FCC was very smart in the size of the fine. Large enough to discourage the practice, but not large enough that it would likely be challenged in court. So, you're right that the precedent it sets is important here and it's a very dangerous one.
I recently picked up the ATI HDTV Wonder and so far, it's pretty good at recording programs, but the user interface on the included software (downloading the latest from ATI) is horrible. What I'm wondering is if anyone out there has found a better interface for it. Otherwise, I love that digital picture.
Better than that, you need a bit torrent like system that responds to demand. IE, the client sees a lot of demand for a particular file signature so it downloads and caches a few file fragments. Users never have the complete file and furthermore, never even need to know what file they actually have since they'll only have a hash of some sort to identify it. Not really even all that complicated to build.
I think their production costs run about $1.6M an episode. Or I could be making that number up. Regardless, you could do an entire season of Reading Rainbow for half that. And last I heard, they were hurting for funds. About a year ago, LeVar Burton (see, that's how I'm staying almost on topic) was out stumping for funds. You too could help. Frankly, the best thing for the Star Trek franchise at this point would be a good 5-10 year hiatus. That and the resurection of Gene Roddenberry.
And we see why Keith Richards has thumbed his nose at the prospect of being knighted. Mick, on the other hand, sold out.
Airlines are private companies. However, the TSA is not. From here we get into two different scenarios: The first, an airline requires you to show ID to board an airplane. The airline, being private, is entitled to do that. If they're just follwing government regulations, they're still entitled to and (IANAL) you probably would not have standing to challenge that in court, though the airline would, if they chose. The second scenario is the TSA requiring you to show an ID before boarding the plane. There you would have direct standing to challenge in court. The government would likely cite the recent Hibbel decision and the plaintiff would likely as well. It was pretty narrowly worded. First, according to the decision, you are not required to produce identification, merely to give your name. Second, it was limited to police officers conducting an investigation who had reasonable suspicion that a crime is or was being commited. The plaintiffs would also likely cite other constitutional issues such as free speech, rights of association and travel. The government has a pretty flimsy case for mandating IDs, but the courts have been reluctant to challenge security lately.
The whole article is sheer idiocy because the real fights are for the corporate desktop and the eduacational markets. If Daddy can't work on his spreadsheet at home, he's not going to buy that PC or OS. Education runs a distant second, but it's important because you want people entering the workforce already familiar with your products. Hardware manufacturers will write drivers for whatever the dominant platform is, and if worthwhile, for the secondary platforms. Plain and simple.
TFA misses the point as well that if there was an MS driver abstraction layer in Linux, that would only improve distribution leading the hardware folks to write more native drivers for Linux.
The answer of course, is don't use Oracle if you can help it. :) They're just as evil as Microsoft, but they don't give away nearly as many free T-Shirts.
Effectively it's SMP on one CPU. Something I very much look forward to as I always build my desktops SMP. It also incorporates some of the overhead of SMP into the CPU driving down the system price a little bit.
While you're right that SMP offers little performance to most apps, I tend to run a lot of CPU hogs at the same time. Watch a DVD while waiting for a project to finish compiling or whatnot. It can also help keep runaway processes from sabatoging your system. I used to have a program that set its priority to 'AboveNormal' and would from time to time it would hang up in a loop. Since it was running at a higher priority, you sometimes couldn't bring up Task Manager to kill it off as the higher priorty thread always took precedant. And if all else fails, you can set up 2 SETI @ Home clients and process twice as many packets. But do your self a favor and set their priorty to 'Low'.
Also, you've got a chicken and egg problem. The reason there's so few programs that benifit from SMP is that there are so few computers that are SMP. When I was running some computer labs at a Big 10 university a few years back I was insisting on SMP workstations so that the CS students could learn to program multithreaded apps and see the benifits of it when it ran on 1 vs. 2 processors.
Lastly, my basement is very poorly insulated and gets a bit chilly in the winter. Anything to help warm it up and keep my fingers working properly is a good thing(tm)!
Ahh, but there are 2 things that make this dupe interesting. Firstly, it wasn't posted by CmdrTaco. Secondly, it gives a UK perspective on the issue. That said, allow me to summarize: FCC bad. EFF good. Big business bad. Open source good. Public domain best yet.
It makes me cry in my beer to think that Reagan may have been the best president of the last 40 years or so. What's really scary is the amount of US Treasury securities that Asian banks (especially China) hold. That's the real benifit of Social Security privatization. Americans owning more of the world. The arms race of the 21st century is going to be about the accumulation of assets.
But to get back on topic here, at least there's a court that's made an intelligent decision for a change. The likely outcome, is that even if this broadcast flag eventually goes through, it'll be tied up in court and probably not implemented for several years. Or so we can hope.
A $1/gallon tax credit is not economical because everyone is subsidising it. For a short term plan, it may help, but long term it's not sustainable. It's a tax credit that will be phased out as alternative fuels come to market. (Unless those fuels come from the state of a well connected Senator).
However the point regarding disposal of animal waste (particularly in response to BSE and other related diseases) is certainly valid. If you can drive down or eliminate the raw materials cost, then the product comes down to about $60-$65/barrel refined. There you're starting to hit a marketable price for diesel fuel, especially if oil prices continue to rise. I don't imagine oil prices will rise much in the next several years, though, as OPEC is smart enough to keep prices just low enough to make alternative fuels not economically viable.
So you're telling me that the real problem is the politicians. I've never really understood this "brodcast flag" to begin with. They're pushing for digital adoption by consumers then they throw this on at the last minute? I think that may be biggest reason I haven't seen many HDTV tuners for sale at my local retail outlets.
Also, as ATI points out on their page for the HDTV Wonder any device manufactured before July 1, 2005 is exempt, and you get the impression from their remarks that they're ramping up production because of this. I know I'll be buying one (or something similar) before then.
I think this is a good time to quote the movie Wargames:
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play"
Nice troll, but I'll bite.
The consumer is wiling to pay for the Plasma TV that has a specific lifespan because the technology doesn't exist to make a plasma TV that lasts longer. Also, hardware (whether TV, Radio, computer, whatever) often is obsolete before it wears out.
There is no reason to buy software with an expiration date. You mention Open Source and Freeware as influences that prevent major software makers from ganging up, but that's bogus. Other than Office and Windows, there's sufficient competition in most products that keep the market open. And Office and Windows are stymied mostly by corporate buyers willing to sit on older versions rather than give in to a subsription model of liscencing.
Frankly, I think the linked article is rather bogus. Microsoft has a way of ensuring that software wears out. They simply release new versions and slowly quit fixing older versions. Combine that with added features such that older versions of Office can't open documents created with current versions and new features for Windows forcing consumers to buy current versions to run the latest software. Microsoft isn't hurting by any stretch of the imagination. There is no "declining market for Windows and Office."
Mod parent and article down as Flamebait -1.
The author of the article is clearly a Mac evangelist. Also, the author of the article is clearly an idiot for allowing his SO to put an unpatched box on the net without so much as a firewall in between. He asks if you would buy a car that failed miserably shortly after you drove it off the lot. Bad analogy. If you maintain your pc - apply security patches, maintain good practices, Windows works very well. Likewise, if you never change the oil in your car, it's going to croak after 10k miles. If you put an unpatched Linux box out on the net, you'd be owned inside of a week. The author has been enjoying the fruits of security through obscurity -- that doesn't work if everyone had a Mac. If everyone had a Mac, you'd hear all day long about how Macs were full of security holes, viruses and spyware.
Firstly, your logic is terribly fallible. You have undoubtably benifited from the public resources the fire and police departments provide. They are essential to living in a safe society. Furthermore, in some cases fire departments have been known to send bills to people they've helped if they're found to have been negligent in starting the fire. Roads are a fundamental public resource. Also, most new residential road construction is paid for by the developments they're serving. Sewer and water service are typically city monopolies because it's not realistic to create a competitive marketplace for them. Electricity is an interesting issue as the transmission lines are typically a monopoly, but just about anyone can build and operate a power generation facility. This brings us to a point of principle: how far should the role of government extend? I'm typically of the mindset that it should be no further than is really necessary.
How about the government just takes less money from you in the first place? Maybe just enough to do the fundamental services required of it.
For $1 - $2 billion, you could give every kid in Washington DC a year of a tuition at a very nice private school and a college scholorship. To waste this kind of money on a telescope that does virtually nothing to advance basic science is an absolute travesty. I'm all for space exploration, but there are much better ways to spend federal funds - and I'm not talking about that quagmire Iraq, either.
I would've linked the URL. Slashdot has great Page Rank. By including my URL in my sig, I managed to hit the front page of the major search engines when searching for my last name. (Previously, I had been down around 50 or so). Although, I've dropped, 'cuz my site has been down for about 2 months now. I need to find a new host.
Nah, too much work. I look forward to the day when some IT pilot fish gets a request from the FBI under Patriot Act IV and must make a decision about whether to supply the data and face indictment in Canada or refuse and face indictment in the US.
It's not that all software patents are bad, just most of 'em. Take the LZH compression algorigthm. It was a pretty good patent back in the early 80s when it was granted. It was sufficiently narrow (one specific method of data compression) and reasonably not obvious (for that point in time). The problem is that the patent office has no concept of 'novel' or 'obvious' and that prior art means 'already patented'. Also, there's a tendancy by the patent office to let the courts decide the actual merits, whereas the courts like to defer to the patent office.