Oh dear, the internet was not "produced" by free software. TCP/IP and DNS were not free software projects. Tim Berners Lee didn't write a browser and a web server then release the code to the internet with a shiny new Free Software licence attached. He wrote it while working for CERN and so the copyright would have fallen to CERN. People have later written their own implementations of the standards, some of which were open source - but many of which were not.
Open source gave us many very good implementations of the software you mentioned, but did not spawn them.
I switched to a Powerbook because it meant I'd never have to do work on it. I used it for contacts, music, photos, lifestyle things, sometimes writing.
I like the way the Mac just works, when I open it I can get straight onto my task without wasting time fiddling with updating a driver or all the other crap I do on the PC.
What about if they just want to fire up their PC and get their work done? I've always found open source needs more "coercion" to get the work done. In terms of UI, usability some packages are so obscure that even I can't seem to work out how to get them to do what I want - and I've been around since pre-DOS.
Maybe the kids don't give a crap about learning all these command line tools and switches. Maybe they just want to xfer their latest video from their phone to Youtube, synced to whatever music they're listening to now.
May as well only learn how to use a browser, it's the only tech that's likely to stay with us.
You're making an assumption the telephone gear is going to be mounted in the same rackspace as the servers. While that's possible it's by no means certain. The keyboard and display are usually on a single unit per rack, slide tray affair. Power management runs from the back of the units and can be on boards hanging off the rear. Not sure what audio system you're talking about, link please. I don't recall seeing any racks with 8 us of switching and 8 us of patching - going suggest these are handled for the most part outside the rack.
I'm just wondering what makes the Firefox team certain they can write these codec implementations and players better than the teams who specialise in that field. Security can be quite tricky and there's no reason to believe that a volunteer for a browser project will also be bringing a raft of security programming practices to bear on his code.
If anything, I think Firefox shouldn't ship with any media playing code or codecs, and instead should rely on the other projects to provide that via plug-ins, libraries, whatever it takes to hook the two together.
Learn to delegate.
I know Quicktime / ffmpeg / etc are all open to system flaws and attack, but what code isn't. How about you count up how many the Firefox project has had over the last 12 months and if it's any more than 1 it means you guys aren't producing perfectly secure code either.
The solution is not to use the "crappy" software, and instead choose a project that suits your needs both in terms of functionality and quality. If it fails to meet your needs, don't use it!
You're indulging in the "Not written here" attitude, where code that is written in any other codeshop is considered inferior. If the programmers would put their egos on hold for a while and learn to re-use code and acquire libraries then they might actually start to get some product out the door.
For the record, I have almost 30 years experience writing code, and a good decade of running teams of programmers. I know what they're like.
In the past release times were sometimes a bit more extended that I would like, and I would be ready to see the film again by the time it was out for hire. They've compacted those times (I think), so it's not as bad an issue.
I also use a PS3 for playback, via PS3 Media Server, and while it upscales very well the detail is nothing compared to a decent Bluray transfer e.g. Wall-E.
I think we have a Netflix like service out here, but I'm a bad candidate for using it since my nearest post box is about 8 KM away - right next to the nearest rental place. I can't just pop DVDs into the mail as I pass on the way to work like I did in London.
I watch a lot of films, and I'm on a pretty tight budget, so it needs to really provide bang-per-buck for me to be satisfied. I'm actually on a pension for now, so not only is the budget really tight, but I have a huge amount of free time to try and fill each day and TV is not helping.
I've always been into alternative cinema far more than the mainstream films, but I tend to watch most things short of chick flicks and summer student films. I like my anime, Japanese horror, Korean cinema, and French films along with all kinds of other World Cinema - so my local store is never going to satisfy my desires.
At present I fan-sub what I can, pirate what I have to, purchase on DVD/Bluray as much as possible and every so often make a trip to the local cinema. Over time the divx's will be replaced with DVDs/Bluray or they end up deleted.
I divide films into several categories: see at the cinema, rent on dvd, buy it, download.
Putting aside the option to see it at the cinema there are three other ways that a single company could fulfill my purchasing needs.
On the day they release it to the rental places, they could also open up the opportunity for me to download a DRM copy that I can view at home for 2-3 days. The cost should be at least slightly cheaper than the rental stores because they have no overhead costs besides bandwidth.
On the day the DVDs hit the stores they should allow me the opportunity to download a copy with no DRM beyond that a normal DVD has - i.e. an ISO image I can burn to DVD and the covers so I can print both on the media and the slips for the box. Pirates working out the back of a shop in Chinatown can manage this, any decent company should be able to also.
The third way would be to make a DIVX/XVID copy available some time after release, and I really can't see them doing this or even being able to compete with the warez group - it doesn't make sense - so there are really just two ways to capitolise on me.
Now here's what grinds my gears. If I go to the cinema, or rent a DVD from the shop prior to buying, I still pay full price for the DVD. There is in fact almost no incentive for me to ever rent a DVD since they release for purchase soon enough after. The same applies to a cinema version - and with electronic ticketing and digital projectors there seems little reason not to propose this...if I paid you a whack of cash to see it at the cinema I should get a rebate on purchasing it to own.
Currently I might end up purchasing the "rights to view" a product three separate times. First it costs $22 AUS to view at the cinema, then $6 AUS to rent, then $30 AUS to buy to own. So on a really good title I have to pay a total of $58 AUS to see it at first release, then first home release, before finally buying to enjoy for the next few years.
So, what I want is this: Digital Rights Management - where I actually get "rights" and they are managed.
I want someone to whack up a pile of huge servers somewhere with plenty of bandwidth. When I pay my $22 for my cinema ticket I want that logged to my account and for them to offer me a modest discount on purchasing / renting the film in the future. When it's released to rental market I want that same site to let me know, and allow me to download the film. After I've seen the film I'd like to be able to indicate I want to purchase it on mainstream release, and get a decent sized discount on that. I'm a valued repeat customer, they should treat me like one and work hard to continue to do business with me. If for any reason whatsoever I lose a copy of a film I should be able to download it again at no cost. If a new print of the film comes out I should get access to this at minimal cost - why pay another $40 to buy the film again on Bluray when I already have a licence to watch it, and just want to see it in an improved bitrate/codec.
Currently I have to rent a film, just to see if it's even worth one watch, let alone the five or so watches that are required to break even on the cost of perhaps buying i
Quite right, I can't get Hulu here (without presumably some proxy fun and games) so doubtless Netflix will shaft us too. Amazon is the same with their so called download service. Regardless, the point stands, it's more expensive and locks up the bandwidth, and uses up your allocation if you're capped.
Wonder if you get the extras too, or just the main film?
More expensive than renting a physical DVD either at my local store or Netflix -and- I have to provide the bandwidth as well...no thanks. (note: in Aus we don't get unlimited bandwidth, I'm on 50gb / month at present)
You can blame Disney and their rodent for the current state of copyright laws. Don't think that when copyright period for Mickey once again draws to a close there won't be a large bundle of cash handed out to the nearest person able to extend the period another 20-50 years.
I pity the fool who comes home from work and then strives to do even more on his home machine. Not sure what your comment about ripping off from the net is meant to mean, since all but 1 of those activities are totally legally provided.
I'll stop playing Age of Conan when something better comes along.
I'm a tad surprised at how usable it would be for running the AH, light grinding, etc. It's not quite the same as running on the iPhone, since it's just streaming a video of the game to the iPhone and taking keypress and sense data in return - but still, it's fairly cool.
Agreed, there's a list of actors I just have no interest in seeing again because they don't 'act' they just walk in front of a screen and say their lines. In no particular order:
* Jack Nicolson
* Josh Hartnet
* Jim Carey (exception for ESotSM)
* Tom Cruise
* Alec Baldwin
* Vin Diesel
* Jude Law
* Orlando Bloom
* Hayden Christensen
* Keanu Reeves
* Matt Daemon
* Hugh Grant
Like, why can't a black or asian guy play the lead in MacBeth?
There's so many things wrong with this statement. I'll start with it being a British part of the United States canon.
Then I'll mention that MacBeth is Scottish, and a part of the monarchy as well. Not a lot of 'black guys' or 'asian guys' were known to be medieval Scottish monarchs.
You would be hard pressed to find a worse example - unless maybe you wanted to cast Uncle Tom as a genial elderly white guy from Kentucky.
Star Trek has the most homogeneous and boring alien design of any sci-fi. "Hey, is that an alien stumbling towards us?" "No, that's just a dude with grilled cheese stuck on his forehead."
Really, what is worth doing on a PC now that -doesn't- require a network connection. If I lose my ISP connection for a day I tend to stare at my machine in futility. Let's see how I use it on a daily basis:
Check Slashdot
Check BBC News
Check my mail (gmail)
Play Age of Conan
Hop on vent and chat
Download something to watch or cruise Youtube
Check out movie previews at Apple.com
Update my software / drivers (more weekly than daily)
All of those are network enabled, most are provided by a browser. I wouldn't want to play AoC using a Flash game in browser because I think the 20 GB download is a little too much every time I want to play (though it could cache:p)
Your 'box' is really just storage, processing, video and sound. The network is the rest. Without the net most people's boxes are useless - or good as caches / storage at best.
There is one activity my box is good for without the network - writing short stories, which I very occasionally do. Even then, when it comes time to share the story I'm going to need that net back up.
Slashdot Mirror
4-5 years, and it's still working a treat.
Oh dear, the internet was not "produced" by free software. TCP/IP and DNS were not free software projects. Tim Berners Lee didn't write a browser and a web server then release the code to the internet with a shiny new Free Software licence attached. He wrote it while working for CERN and so the copyright would have fallen to CERN. People have later written their own implementations of the standards, some of which were open source - but many of which were not.
Open source gave us many very good implementations of the software you mentioned, but did not spawn them.
I guess FreeBSD was useful, for the 4 guys who installed it. Now it's the basis for an OS used by tens of millions - that's useful.
I switched to a Powerbook because it meant I'd never have to do work on it. I used it for contacts, music, photos, lifestyle things, sometimes writing.
I like the way the Mac just works, when I open it I can get straight onto my task without wasting time fiddling with updating a driver or all the other crap I do on the PC.
I'm a programmer.
What about if they just want to fire up their PC and get their work done? I've always found open source needs more "coercion" to get the work done. In terms of UI, usability some packages are so obscure that even I can't seem to work out how to get them to do what I want - and I've been around since pre-DOS.
Maybe the kids don't give a crap about learning all these command line tools and switches. Maybe they just want to xfer their latest video from their phone to Youtube, synced to whatever music they're listening to now.
May as well only learn how to use a browser, it's the only tech that's likely to stay with us.
I can't believe someone gave you a mod point.
These addresses would all be in the private range e.g. 10.0.0.x
The school would only need a couple of IPs that are visible to the outside would - maybe as few as one if they only need to publish HTTP / FTP / etc.
You're making an assumption the telephone gear is going to be mounted in the same rackspace as the servers. While that's possible it's by no means certain. The keyboard and display are usually on a single unit per rack, slide tray affair. Power management runs from the back of the units and can be on boards hanging off the rear. Not sure what audio system you're talking about, link please. I don't recall seeing any racks with 8 us of switching and 8 us of patching - going suggest these are handled for the most part outside the rack.
I'm just wondering what makes the Firefox team certain they can write these codec implementations and players better than the teams who specialise in that field. Security can be quite tricky and there's no reason to believe that a volunteer for a browser project will also be bringing a raft of security programming practices to bear on his code.
If anything, I think Firefox shouldn't ship with any media playing code or codecs, and instead should rely on the other projects to provide that via plug-ins, libraries, whatever it takes to hook the two together.
Learn to delegate.
I know Quicktime / ffmpeg / etc are all open to system flaws and attack, but what code isn't. How about you count up how many the Firefox project has had over the last 12 months and if it's any more than 1 it means you guys aren't producing perfectly secure code either.
Why didn't you just leave the phone on your desk at work or were you a travelling salesman?
Time to start a business selling tinfoil hats for use on cars ^^
The solution is not to use the "crappy" software, and instead choose a project that suits your needs both in terms of functionality and quality. If it fails to meet your needs, don't use it!
You're indulging in the "Not written here" attitude, where code that is written in any other codeshop is considered inferior. If the programmers would put their egos on hold for a while and learn to re-use code and acquire libraries then they might actually start to get some product out the door.
For the record, I have almost 30 years experience writing code, and a good decade of running teams of programmers. I know what they're like.
In the past release times were sometimes a bit more extended that I would like, and I would be ready to see the film again by the time it was out for hire. They've compacted those times (I think), so it's not as bad an issue.
I also use a PS3 for playback, via PS3 Media Server, and while it upscales very well the detail is nothing compared to a decent Bluray transfer e.g. Wall-E.
I think we have a Netflix like service out here, but I'm a bad candidate for using it since my nearest post box is about 8 KM away - right next to the nearest rental place. I can't just pop DVDs into the mail as I pass on the way to work like I did in London.
I watch a lot of films, and I'm on a pretty tight budget, so it needs to really provide bang-per-buck for me to be satisfied. I'm actually on a pension for now, so not only is the budget really tight, but I have a huge amount of free time to try and fill each day and TV is not helping.
I've always been into alternative cinema far more than the mainstream films, but I tend to watch most things short of chick flicks and summer student films. I like my anime, Japanese horror, Korean cinema, and French films along with all kinds of other World Cinema - so my local store is never going to satisfy my desires.
At present I fan-sub what I can, pirate what I have to, purchase on DVD/Bluray as much as possible and every so often make a trip to the local cinema. Over time the divx's will be replaced with DVDs/Bluray or they end up deleted.
I divide films into several categories: see at the cinema, rent on dvd, buy it, download.
Putting aside the option to see it at the cinema there are three other ways that a single company could fulfill my purchasing needs.
On the day they release it to the rental places, they could also open up the opportunity for me to download a DRM copy that I can view at home for 2-3 days. The cost should be at least slightly cheaper than the rental stores because they have no overhead costs besides bandwidth.
On the day the DVDs hit the stores they should allow me the opportunity to download a copy with no DRM beyond that a normal DVD has - i.e. an ISO image I can burn to DVD and the covers so I can print both on the media and the slips for the box. Pirates working out the back of a shop in Chinatown can manage this, any decent company should be able to also.
The third way would be to make a DIVX/XVID copy available some time after release, and I really can't see them doing this or even being able to compete with the warez group - it doesn't make sense - so there are really just two ways to capitolise on me.
Now here's what grinds my gears. If I go to the cinema, or rent a DVD from the shop prior to buying, I still pay full price for the DVD. There is in fact almost no incentive for me to ever rent a DVD since they release for purchase soon enough after. The same applies to a cinema version - and with electronic ticketing and digital projectors there seems little reason not to propose this...if I paid you a whack of cash to see it at the cinema I should get a rebate on purchasing it to own.
Currently I might end up purchasing the "rights to view" a product three separate times. First it costs $22 AUS to view at the cinema, then $6 AUS to rent, then $30 AUS to buy to own. So on a really good title I have to pay a total of $58 AUS to see it at first release, then first home release, before finally buying to enjoy for the next few years.
So, what I want is this: Digital Rights Management - where I actually get "rights" and they are managed.
I want someone to whack up a pile of huge servers somewhere with plenty of bandwidth. When I pay my $22 for my cinema ticket I want that logged to my account and for them to offer me a modest discount on purchasing / renting the film in the future. When it's released to rental market I want that same site to let me know, and allow me to download the film. After I've seen the film I'd like to be able to indicate I want to purchase it on mainstream release, and get a decent sized discount on that. I'm a valued repeat customer, they should treat me like one and work hard to continue to do business with me. If for any reason whatsoever I lose a copy of a film I should be able to download it again at no cost. If a new print of the film comes out I should get access to this at minimal cost - why pay another $40 to buy the film again on Bluray when I already have a licence to watch it, and just want to see it in an improved bitrate/codec.
Currently I have to rent a film, just to see if it's even worth one watch, let alone the five or so watches that are required to break even on the cost of perhaps buying i
Quite right, I can't get Hulu here (without presumably some proxy fun and games) so doubtless Netflix will shaft us too. Amazon is the same with their so called download service. Regardless, the point stands, it's more expensive and locks up the bandwidth, and uses up your allocation if you're capped. Wonder if you get the extras too, or just the main film?
More expensive than renting a physical DVD either at my local store or Netflix -and- I have to provide the bandwidth as well...no thanks. (note: in Aus we don't get unlimited bandwidth, I'm on 50gb / month at present)
I go to cast my fireball spell before I realise I hadn't trained that spell today...I run.
You can blame Disney and their rodent for the current state of copyright laws. Don't think that when copyright period for Mickey once again draws to a close there won't be a large bundle of cash handed out to the nearest person able to extend the period another 20-50 years.
I pity the fool who comes home from work and then strives to do even more on his home machine. Not sure what your comment about ripping off from the net is meant to mean, since all but 1 of those activities are totally legally provided. I'll stop playing Age of Conan when something better comes along.
I'm a tad surprised at how usable it would be for running the AH, light grinding, etc. It's not quite the same as running on the iPhone, since it's just streaming a video of the game to the iPhone and taking keypress and sense data in return - but still, it's fairly cool.
Agreed, there's a list of actors I just have no interest in seeing again because they don't 'act' they just walk in front of a screen and say their lines. In no particular order: * Jack Nicolson * Josh Hartnet * Jim Carey (exception for ESotSM) * Tom Cruise * Alec Baldwin * Vin Diesel * Jude Law * Orlando Bloom * Hayden Christensen * Keanu Reeves * Matt Daemon * Hugh Grant
Like, why can't a black or asian guy play the lead in MacBeth?
There's so many things wrong with this statement. I'll start with it being a British part of the United States canon. Then I'll mention that MacBeth is Scottish, and a part of the monarchy as well. Not a lot of 'black guys' or 'asian guys' were known to be medieval Scottish monarchs. You would be hard pressed to find a worse example - unless maybe you wanted to cast Uncle Tom as a genial elderly white guy from Kentucky.
Star Trek has the most homogeneous and boring alien design of any sci-fi. "Hey, is that an alien stumbling towards us?" "No, that's just a dude with grilled cheese stuck on his forehead."
Really, what is worth doing on a PC now that -doesn't- require a network connection. If I lose my ISP connection for a day I tend to stare at my machine in futility. Let's see how I use it on a daily basis: Check Slashdot Check BBC News Check my mail (gmail) Play Age of Conan Hop on vent and chat Download something to watch or cruise Youtube Check out movie previews at Apple.com Update my software / drivers (more weekly than daily) All of those are network enabled, most are provided by a browser. I wouldn't want to play AoC using a Flash game in browser because I think the 20 GB download is a little too much every time I want to play (though it could cache :p)
Your 'box' is really just storage, processing, video and sound. The network is the rest. Without the net most people's boxes are useless - or good as caches / storage at best.
There is one activity my box is good for without the network - writing short stories, which I very occasionally do. Even then, when it comes time to share the story I'm going to need that net back up.
Is anyone working on a Flash version of World of Warcraft?