Somebody ought to pick up the market by designing a Firewire-to-USB 2.0 external converter. Somebody like TI should design the chip -- I think it would be a good seller. Remember the Firewire-to-SCSI converters of yore?
Sorry. Should've capitalized. That's 3.5 Megabytes/second. I guess I harken back to the old days when mb was an understood and acceptable acronym for megabyte. Times have obviously changes.
Well, no, not really. The general hour recording limit exists for one simple reason: the limit of the media.
Uncompressed DV-format video takes up 3.5 mb/sec. That's about 12.6 gigs/hour. The DVD-Rs used in camcorders aren't normally full-size -- in fact, they're only 2.8 gigabytes. So now we're looking at 4:1 compression, which is about what one gets when compressing to MPEG. So 1/4 the space at 1/4 the size gives us about the same as we started: one hour.
One might ask why DVD-R palmcorders don't use full-size DVDs. There are two reasons for that. The first is spin stability. Torque being equal to the cross-product of force and distance from axis of rotation, a larger disc radius means much greater stability problems. Back in the days before 4 MB CD-R buffers, you might've noticed that your CD-R drive was much less shock-resistant when burning the last half of the disc rather than the first half (or the other way around, I don't quite remember how it was). CD-Rs burn from the inside-out (or vice versa, like I said, I just can't remember right now). When the CD-R gets to burning the outer portion of the disc, its much less fault-tolerant. Disable the cache of your CD-R or hook up an old one to test it out if you don't believe me.
There's also just the issue of disc size. People like their consumer electronics to be small. Small consumer electronics means lighter weight, less baggage, easier to put in a carry-on for that three-hour New York to Orlando flight. It also means that there's less to lug around Disneyworld, especially when you've got to take a diaper bag for Junior. Lot's of people owned camcorders ten years ago, but they were big and didn't take them out. Now they're small, so people take them everywhere, which means that more people see them everywhere, more people buy them, etc. So I guess maybe there's a conspiracy to make small consumer electronics, but I'm not complaining.
At this point you might say "Ah-Ha! But miniDV also has the 1-hour limit. So did older Hi-8 and mini-SHVS tapes. What gives there, huh?" The answer is pretty simple. Those standards all spring from larger ones. miniDV springs from full-sized DV (with up to 180 minute capacity). Hi-8, though not identical, is derived from VHS. The origin of mini-SVHS and mini-VHS should be obvious. With the possible exception of Hi-8, the mini-formats exist so that they are interoperable with the larger standard. Sure, maybe it'd be possible to re-design miniDV so that it would have higher capacity. But that would make it incompatable with full-DV -- a compatability that not only drives down costs (one standard) but also makes it appeal to the professional and semi-professional market (you can't fault electronics companies for being good businesspeople). There's some simple math here. MiniDV is about half the size of full-DV (in terms of tape length). If max DV = 180 minutes, than max miniDV should equal 90 minutes (which is the case). Half the tape, half the length. Same goes for mini-VHS -- a standard that was invented to keep portability high and still allow tapes to be played in regular VCRs (wasn't that cool -- and talk about something that might encourage piracy!).
The miniaturization of the standards occurred because electronics companies know that consumers will put portability ahead of media length. Sometimes it's a pain -- weddings, bar mitzvahs, Junior's debut as Hamlet -- often last longer than an hour. But for most consumers, the portability and size are well worth it (check out bhphotovideo.com to see how big full-size DV/SVHS camcorders are).
Corporate conspiracy hogwash. The limits in each case derive from standards, and nobody was thinking of any sort of conspiracy when developing the original standard. To think that the media companies think that far ahead is giving them way, way too much credit. It's a little akin to saying that backup manufacturers are keeping their capacity low relative to hard-drive/server capacity so that people have to buy multiple backup systems. That's pretty crazy. Media are limited. Get used to it.
As for the size of the hard-drive in question, I think I can shed some light on that. As a consultant who works largely with design/graphics/art firms, I work with digital video systems a lot. Hard drive fault tolerance is a huge factor -- when you're streaming video, a slight failure translates into choppy video, dropped frames, or worse (like a loss of timecode that renders subsequent footage near-useless). A variety of professional companies make expensive portable FireWire drives that you can connect to a camcorder to capture footage directly to disk instead of to tape. These systems have huge (often 25+ meg) cache. Some of my clients have invested in these systems and been extremely disappointed. Anything more than a smooth walk causes dropped frames or corrupted files. Regular hard drives, even laptop drives, might be able to stand up to the stress for occasional disk access (such as with an iPod). But for continuous write, much higher standards are necessary. Keeping the cost down was probably a big impetus to only having a 1.5 gig drive -- again, most consumers really don't need more than an hour of video.
If movie studios didn't want people to be able to record what's on screen, they could very easily do so -- just by changing frame rates. The frame rate of video/prosumer NTSC equipment is currently 29.98 fps. The frame rate of film is 24 fps. If the movie industry and the consumer/prosumer camera industry really wanted to make it impossible to film a movie in a theatre, all they would have to do would be to change the frame rates in each case -- either by upping distributed films to 29.98 or lowering prosumer equipment to 24 fps (its far more likely that they'd up films to 29.98 than the other way around).
This method is virtually impossible to get around. If the two media had matched frame rates, a person filming off the screen would have to exactly sync the two recordings -- or every frame filmed on the camcorder would actually show the split frame on the movie screen. A friend of mine from college runs a small film company that exclusively uses Panasonic's new 24 fps miniDV camcorders. A scene from the movie he's working on has a couple in a screening room watching a movie. He wanted the movie they were watching to appear normal in his film. He had to rent a $30,000 projector rig and central control system in order to sync the two -- and even then it took him three takes and over six hours to get it right. It was almost enough for him to give up his artistic purism in favor of 29.98 fps cameras, which don't have as much of that problem (the extra few frames interpolate so that some of them are off, some are on, but your eye/brain makes up for the difference). Syncing speeds would just create a permanent disjunction.
My friend in film has also informed of something even more practical. MiniDV tapes -- like the old mini-SVHS and mini-VHS tapes -- are designed to be interoperable with larger standards, yet small enough to fit inside a regular camcorder. MiniDV interoperates with full-sized DV (which has recording times up to 180 minutes, on a larger casette); same goes for the VHS standards. The time of each cassette is so low because the casette is so small, and designed to work with larger standards. It follows (rather logically) that if a full-size DV cassette holds 180 minutes along X meters, a miniDV cassette should only hold 60 minutes over X/3 meters.
-Shylock0
Questions and comments welcome (just reply). Flames ignored.
You don't have to sell tangible goods to charge sales tax. Hotels don't sell tangible goods, and many states have a "hotel" tax -- same goes for taxis, billboards (which are taxed in some jurisdictions), any service really. eBay provides a service, and they charge a commission. That commission can definately be taxed.
Actually, that's not true. You bring to light the invention of the term "shipping and handling."
It is illegal to advertise a "shipping" cost of $10 when the actual "shipping" cost is only $5, and then charge the buyer (on eBay or through or a catalog or anywhere) the full advertised $10.
However, long ago retailers figured out the loophole: lump "shipping" and "handling" together as one charge. Then you can quote (and charge) the highest possible shipping cost, and if the shipping actually ends up being any less, well, that was "handling."
This is completely common practice in the catalog industry (among others). It's not at all unique to eBay, and completely legal -- provided that "shipping and handling" and not just "shipping" is quoted.
This may effectively kill Rep. Boucher's attempt to reform the DMCA through the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (the "DMCRA"). DRM with the DMCA still in effect is almost too horrible for me to contemplate.
I agree. But there is still room for consumer protection on the state level -- California-style (note the irony). Remember how California has the entire car industry by the throat, because their strict emissions standards set the bar for the rest of the country (unless car makers want to design, devlop and build California-compliant models, which would cost them millions of dollars). All that needs to happen is for a large and progressive state -- say, NY, MI, or IL (or a less progressive and large state, like FL) -- to pass a consumer rights law saying that any product shipping with DRM technology must allow that technology to be completely disabled by the user if the user so desires. Constitutionally feasible and legally impeccable, at least as far as I can see. It would never pass at the Federal level (and might not be Constitutional there anyway), but the states, or a state, could totally do it. State reps, at least outside of CA, are much more independant than national reps (i.e., Hollings (D-Disney)).
I think you also gain certain advantages if you use this system with absolutely identical hardware all around. For example: If Joe's computer stops working due to software failure, I can just hand him a temporary card so that he can get his work done. I can then sit in my office and troubleshoot what's wrong with on the software end -- and easily ascertain that it's a software problem simply by dropping another card into Joe's computer.
Many IT departments solve the above problems by switching their entire workforce to identical laptops. But let's do a quick cost analysis here. Let's assume a corporation of 100 employees. That 100 * $3,000 (which is about what a decently-equipped ThinkPad costs these days) = 300,000. On the other hand, we go with the dumb terminal idea. 100 * $1,500 (and I think that $1,500 is at the high end) = $150,000. That's 50% savings. It justifies those Dell commercials where the IT guy saves the day. On top of which, we save money in licensing. And in support. And in non-support man hours. Huge savings.
I also don't think that the credit card drive is any more dangerous, security wise, than a laptop. When was the last time you forgot your wallet at airport security? When was the last time you forgot your laptop? I'm just a consultant so I don't have to deal with shit like that, but the IT guys I know at mid-size corporations spend probably 5 hours a week trying to track down lost laptops. But wallets? We safeguard those a little better. That ties right back to the cost factor. Cost of replacing a $3,000 laptop: $3,000. Cost of replacing a $15 hard-drive card: $15. That's quite the math.
Maybe. But then Microsoft would have to prove that the programmer in charge of the project had access to Microsoft code. It's not illegal to come up with something on your own, even if it looks like something else. If I wrote "The Sun Also Rises" verbatim, Hemmingway's estate couldn't sue me unless they could prove that I'd read the original -- or that the original was so readily available that I couldn't come up with the idea on my own. Microsoft has to prove that the programmer copied the code on purpose, which is kind of hard if the code isn't available.
I'm a consultant, and I know several network admins (not to mention upper management) who would love the idea. Think about it for a second. If we're talking full hard drives the size of a credit card, it would allow an office to be equipped entirely with dumb terminals. 100 cubicles, 100 dumb terminals.
The way it works today, Joe from marketing flies from the NY office to the LA office for a week. Joe from marketing uses Adobe Illustrator for page layout. But Adobe Illustrator is an expensive program, and it isn't licensed on any of the computers Joe can get his hands on out in LA. By letting Joe take his entire harddrive, apps included, it drastically simplifies corporate licensing. Give each employee only the apps they need, and let them carry them everywhere they go. Granted, we could've given Joe a laptop -- but there are a huge number of other headaches involved with that, like reconfiguring Joe's laptop to work with the office network every time his 16 year old configures it for a LAN party. Dumb terminals are also a lot cheaper than laptops.
Apps are still too large, and the method too slow, to keep on central servers. An easy removable hard disk solution is the perfect answer to the aforementioned issues. If its fast enough to a complete system, I think the 5 gig models will be great.
Yeah, but I imagine speed will be the real issue. If its a hard-disk style platter instead of an optical medium like DVD or CD, that'll make a huge difference. People continued to buy Zip drives and disks well after CDRs were popularized. Same reason. Having an easy read-write tech that doesn't have to be erased every time and is essentially drag-and-drop is a huge selling point for some people. Portability is just a plus -- as is price, in this case.
This whole new policy of Microsoft's makes me really wonder how much they value their source code. They're not so stupid in Redmond to think that there won't be leaks if they start offering the code for free to any government that asks.
I know some fairly well-placed programmers who have worked on XP and Win2k, and even they didn't have access to the complete source code the way governments will.
So we should ask ourselves what Microsoft gains from an unofficial general release of their code. I think there's a lot of speculation that can be done here, and it becomes very paranoid very quickly. In the reasonable realm, I think two things are possible:
1) Microsoft cries "uncle" when their source is plastered all over the net. They start lawyers and a few bots looking through thousands of lines of GPLed code looking for similarities. They then sue the writers of the code for stealing MS code and using it in GPL software (which would be very, very clearly against the law).
2) They use the illicitly released code as an experiment. They know it can't start showing up in applications, because they haven't released it legally, and nobody wants to be sued (for an essentially legitimate reason) by a company with billions and billions in the bank. So they see how often code like it shows up. How much people mimic their code. How people try to stretch the limits of the law to use some of MS's techniques. Or if people are simply uninterested. Letting it be released illegally seems to be a great way to test the waters for a legal release of protected source code, Apple-style.
3) The third possibility is that Microsoft knows that their code will be stolen, but that doesn't scare them quite as much as the prospect of losing tens of thousands of government computers to OSS.
That's precisely the kind of functionality I was looking for when I submitted the comment. If a programmer were to come up with a file manager for windows that let me do that, I would pay good money for it. Alternitively, it a good Linux file manager came out with that sort of functionality, it would certainly be another huge reason to switch...
If somebody did do that for GIMP, it would be a substantial incentive for graphics houses to switch to it from Photoshop or Illustrator. Especially if somebody comes up with a fast GIMP port for Windows...
It also would forbid cable companies from electronically blocking off any output ports on the televisions
I think this ties into what you're talking about. Digital in, digital out. The article refers specifically to allowing output on the television to connect to other devices, specifically the possibility of "other TVs" in the house. Couldn't one of those "other TVs" just be a PVR or a computer w/digital input card?
Ha ha! Get it: remotely this sturdy. It's a space probe...
Re:This is about 5Ghz technology
on
DOD vs. 802.11b
·
· Score: 1
This is a great point (hey moderators, mod this guy up). But I've got a question here. So, the Pentagon can only ask the US Government not to license the frequencies in question. That means, however, that other countries can -- and that the technology is already available worldwide.
So while it would be all well and good for the DoD to have radar that works in our country, wouldn't it also be nice if that radar worked everywhere else? I think that its good that this issue is being investigated, but it makes me kind of nervous. Shouldn't it show the DoD that they should start work, today, on the next-next generation of radar, which won't be able to be foiled by a bunch of high-power 5 ghz transmission devices, the basic parts for which might soon become available from civilian outlets over the Internet.
Re:Typical Military BS
on
DOD vs. 802.11b
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, but I think the broader point is that it "might" cause interference; nobody knows, and the military just wants to put things on hold to test things out. Note that they talked not just about tracking systems, but also about possible interference with missile guidance. The people over at the DOD who work on these things all have PhDs in physics, so I'm assuming this isn't all BS.
It would be a real, real shame if wireless tech interfered with long-range weapons systems so that, say, wireless tech in Israel caused enough interference for smart bombs in Iraq to hit a hospital instead of a weapons depot... I'm not saying its possible, I'm just saying that the possibility needs to be investigated, so that the military can redesign their systems to fix the problem.
I think the poster has a good point -- we should probably look into interference produced by many of today's wireless devices, particularly higher-frequency devices like 802.11b&a. The DOD has every right to investigate this potential threat to national security, not to mention aviation safety.
At the same time, I've really got to question some of the limits placed on aircraft passengers in terms of using their cell-phone and other two-way electronic devices in flight and during takeoff. It seems to me that since the signals from the ground are bouncing all over the place anyway. Could somebody who knows a little more let me know how much interference these actually cause? Generally speaking, how much of a problem is interference? Or is the point sort of that nobody (DOD included) knows, and that more research really should be done on the issue?
I wasn't talking about developers at Microsoft, Apple, or Sun. "Suits" are a generic term for management, the people who set broad policy. It is lunacy to dispute the fact that Microsoft, Sun, and Apple are market-driven. Maybe Microsoft less so in recent years, because its monopoly in certain areas has allowed it to ignore the market, but on the whole its true.
The analogy still holds. Oftentimes, professional photographers are more technically talented than thier "artistic" counterparts. Both of them do what they love for a living (like many devs in the OSS community), its just that one of them does it commercially.
Developers are all geeks, whether they do OSS or commercial dev., we can't dispute that. But anybody who's worked at a major software company will most likely support me in saying that oftentimes its not the "geeks," the developers, who decide the course of the project. It's the management -- who may have been geeks once-upon-a-time, but now have a broader responsibility to shareholders.
Good distinction...
on
Decentralization
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This is an interesting hypothesis, and in some ways it's probably correct. Consider this:
"Suits" -- i.e., Microsoft, Sun, Apple -- create operating systems and software which appeal to wide swaths of people. They have to; they have something to sell and money to make.
"Geeks" -- i.e., most of the GPL community -- write software for the purpose of writing software. The end result is pure art in a way.
A good analogy would be the world of photography. Professional photographers take pictures for magazines and newspapers, or at weddings, etc. They need to be product-driven, they have something to sell, and it shows in their work.
Artistic photographers, on the other hand, are driven by purity. They strive for an artistic goal, which is very different from the commerical one.
The same thing could go for music -- say the wide world of "artistic music" and artists (okay, okay, that's a sensitive one here on/.) and studio bands.
Questions and comments welcome. Flames ignored. Post resonsibly
Well, first of all... Your response feels a little like flamebait, but I'll clarify a few points:
1) My neighbor, who has TiVO, called them six weeks ago and asked them to take her off their list, which includes a certain kind of push content (suggestions, which some people like, but which she found annoying -- because even as a mother of three, her viewing habits made it the TiVO box assume she was a lesbian). It didn't stop. Two weeks later, she called back. Still didn't stop. A week later, still going., so she called again. Last Monday she tried again; we'll see what happens...
2) I'm not a privacy nut. I'm trying to make some extreme comparisons to prove a point. What TiVO did upset a number of people, and the point in an earlier post was relevant because the TiVO issue has been discussed in the past on/.
Anyway, one of the issues with TiVO -- and the relevant issue in this forum -- was the use of the information acquired to push content. It's basically impossible that, since the info was being used for content push on a user-by-user basis, that it couldn't identify you. It must. Now, in that case, TiVO wasn't selling identified information -- and granted, doing so would probably be illegal without the consent of the user. Again, this was just to prove a point... I'm no privacy nut, but push content by its nature has to be user-linked.
Hmm... My neighbor owns a TiVO box, and six weeks ago she called and asked. Two weeks later she called and asked. A week later she called and asked. It hasn't stopped...
It's interesting, because as of a little while ago (this may have changed, I'm not a TiVO subscriber) you were't allowed to opt out. Besides, what we're talking about here is a slippery-slope argument. The real "idiots" are the ones who can't see that privacy, which is a very real value, is eroded by things such as this. Its good that we can opt out, which we can, but the point is that we have to be aware that these things are going on in order to opt out. The response was to say that such things are indeed an invasion of privacy. To deny that fact is somewhat foolish; see above.
I (and many others) consider it an invasion of my privacy for information about myself to be collected or compiled without my express consent.
Would you consider it an invasion of your privacy if a guy stood outside your house (on public property), made note of everbody who exited and entered, as well as times that they did so, compiled that information into an easily accessible format, and then sold it to the highest bidder? Or, for that matter, would you consider it an invasion of your privacy if your car recorded the speed you were traveling and then sent the information to law enforcement officials? Would you consider it an invasion of your privacy if your ISP intercepted and compiled a list of all the domains you vist, and then made the information public (for a fee?)
All of those examples are just compiling and sending aggregate information...
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody ought to pick up the market by designing a Firewire-to-USB 2.0 external converter. Somebody like TI should design the chip -- I think it would be a good seller. Remember the Firewire-to-SCSI converters of yore?
Sorry. Should've capitalized. That's 3.5 Megabytes/second. I guess I harken back to the old days when mb was an understood and acceptable acronym for megabyte. Times have obviously changes.
Uncompressed DV-format video takes up 3.5 mb/sec. That's about 12.6 gigs/hour. The DVD-Rs used in camcorders aren't normally full-size -- in fact, they're only 2.8 gigabytes. So now we're looking at 4:1 compression, which is about what one gets when compressing to MPEG. So 1/4 the space at 1/4 the size gives us about the same as we started: one hour.
One might ask why DVD-R palmcorders don't use full-size DVDs. There are two reasons for that. The first is spin stability. Torque being equal to the cross-product of force and distance from axis of rotation, a larger disc radius means much greater stability problems. Back in the days before 4 MB CD-R buffers, you might've noticed that your CD-R drive was much less shock-resistant when burning the last half of the disc rather than the first half (or the other way around, I don't quite remember how it was). CD-Rs burn from the inside-out (or vice versa, like I said, I just can't remember right now). When the CD-R gets to burning the outer portion of the disc, its much less fault-tolerant. Disable the cache of your CD-R or hook up an old one to test it out if you don't believe me.
There's also just the issue of disc size. People like their consumer electronics to be small. Small consumer electronics means lighter weight, less baggage, easier to put in a carry-on for that three-hour New York to Orlando flight. It also means that there's less to lug around Disneyworld, especially when you've got to take a diaper bag for Junior. Lot's of people owned camcorders ten years ago, but they were big and didn't take them out. Now they're small, so people take them everywhere, which means that more people see them everywhere, more people buy them, etc. So I guess maybe there's a conspiracy to make small consumer electronics, but I'm not complaining.
At this point you might say "Ah-Ha! But miniDV also has the 1-hour limit. So did older Hi-8 and mini-SHVS tapes. What gives there, huh?" The answer is pretty simple. Those standards all spring from larger ones. miniDV springs from full-sized DV (with up to 180 minute capacity). Hi-8, though not identical, is derived from VHS. The origin of mini-SVHS and mini-VHS should be obvious. With the possible exception of Hi-8, the mini-formats exist so that they are interoperable with the larger standard. Sure, maybe it'd be possible to re-design miniDV so that it would have higher capacity. But that would make it incompatable with full-DV -- a compatability that not only drives down costs (one standard) but also makes it appeal to the professional and semi-professional market (you can't fault electronics companies for being good businesspeople). There's some simple math here. MiniDV is about half the size of full-DV (in terms of tape length). If max DV = 180 minutes, than max miniDV should equal 90 minutes (which is the case). Half the tape, half the length. Same goes for mini-VHS -- a standard that was invented to keep portability high and still allow tapes to be played in regular VCRs (wasn't that cool -- and talk about something that might encourage piracy!).
The miniaturization of the standards occurred because electronics companies know that consumers will put portability ahead of media length. Sometimes it's a pain -- weddings, bar mitzvahs, Junior's debut as Hamlet -- often last longer than an hour. But for most consumers, the portability and size are well worth it (check out bhphotovideo.com to see how big full-size DV/SVHS camcorders are).
Corporate conspiracy hogwash. The limits in each case derive from standards, and nobody was thinking of any sort of conspiracy when developing the original standard. To think that the media companies think that far ahead is giving them way, way too much credit. It's a little akin to saying that backup manufacturers are keeping their capacity low relative to hard-drive/server capacity so that people have to buy multiple backup systems. That's pretty crazy. Media are limited. Get used to it.
As for the size of the hard-drive in question, I think I can shed some light on that. As a consultant who works largely with design/graphics/art firms, I work with digital video systems a lot. Hard drive fault tolerance is a huge factor -- when you're streaming video, a slight failure translates into choppy video, dropped frames, or worse (like a loss of timecode that renders subsequent footage near-useless). A variety of professional companies make expensive portable FireWire drives that you can connect to a camcorder to capture footage directly to disk instead of to tape. These systems have huge (often 25+ meg) cache. Some of my clients have invested in these systems and been extremely disappointed. Anything more than a smooth walk causes dropped frames or corrupted files. Regular hard drives, even laptop drives, might be able to stand up to the stress for occasional disk access (such as with an iPod). But for continuous write, much higher standards are necessary. Keeping the cost down was probably a big impetus to only having a 1.5 gig drive -- again, most consumers really don't need more than an hour of video.
This method is virtually impossible to get around. If the two media had matched frame rates, a person filming off the screen would have to exactly sync the two recordings -- or every frame filmed on the camcorder would actually show the split frame on the movie screen. A friend of mine from college runs a small film company that exclusively uses Panasonic's new 24 fps miniDV camcorders. A scene from the movie he's working on has a couple in a screening room watching a movie. He wanted the movie they were watching to appear normal in his film. He had to rent a $30,000 projector rig and central control system in order to sync the two -- and even then it took him three takes and over six hours to get it right. It was almost enough for him to give up his artistic purism in favor of 29.98 fps cameras, which don't have as much of that problem (the extra few frames interpolate so that some of them are off, some are on, but your eye/brain makes up for the difference). Syncing speeds would just create a permanent disjunction.
My friend in film has also informed of something even more practical. MiniDV tapes -- like the old mini-SVHS and mini-VHS tapes -- are designed to be interoperable with larger standards, yet small enough to fit inside a regular camcorder. MiniDV interoperates with full-sized DV (which has recording times up to 180 minutes, on a larger casette); same goes for the VHS standards. The time of each cassette is so low because the casette is so small, and designed to work with larger standards. It follows (rather logically) that if a full-size DV cassette holds 180 minutes along X meters, a miniDV cassette should only hold 60 minutes over X/3 meters.
-Shylock0
Questions and comments welcome (just reply). Flames ignored.
You don't have to sell tangible goods to charge sales tax. Hotels don't sell tangible goods, and many states have a "hotel" tax -- same goes for taxis, billboards (which are taxed in some jurisdictions), any service really. eBay provides a service, and they charge a commission. That commission can definately be taxed.
It is illegal to advertise a "shipping" cost of $10 when the actual "shipping" cost is only $5, and then charge the buyer (on eBay or through or a catalog or anywhere) the full advertised $10.
However, long ago retailers figured out the loophole: lump "shipping" and "handling" together as one charge. Then you can quote (and charge) the highest possible shipping cost, and if the shipping actually ends up being any less, well, that was "handling."
This is completely common practice in the catalog industry (among others). It's not at all unique to eBay, and completely legal -- provided that "shipping and handling" and not just "shipping" is quoted.
I agree. But there is still room for consumer protection on the state level -- California-style (note the irony). Remember how California has the entire car industry by the throat, because their strict emissions standards set the bar for the rest of the country (unless car makers want to design, devlop and build California-compliant models, which would cost them millions of dollars). All that needs to happen is for a large and progressive state -- say, NY, MI, or IL (or a less progressive and large state, like FL) -- to pass a consumer rights law saying that any product shipping with DRM technology must allow that technology to be completely disabled by the user if the user so desires. Constitutionally feasible and legally impeccable, at least as far as I can see. It would never pass at the Federal level (and might not be Constitutional there anyway), but the states, or a state, could totally do it. State reps, at least outside of CA, are much more independant than national reps (i.e., Hollings (D-Disney)).
Thoughts anyone?
Many IT departments solve the above problems by switching their entire workforce to identical laptops. But let's do a quick cost analysis here. Let's assume a corporation of 100 employees. That 100 * $3,000 (which is about what a decently-equipped ThinkPad costs these days) = 300,000. On the other hand, we go with the dumb terminal idea. 100 * $1,500 (and I think that $1,500 is at the high end) = $150,000. That's 50% savings. It justifies those Dell commercials where the IT guy saves the day. On top of which, we save money in licensing. And in support. And in non-support man hours. Huge savings.
I also don't think that the credit card drive is any more dangerous, security wise, than a laptop. When was the last time you forgot your wallet at airport security? When was the last time you forgot your laptop? I'm just a consultant so I don't have to deal with shit like that, but the IT guys I know at mid-size corporations spend probably 5 hours a week trying to track down lost laptops. But wallets? We safeguard those a little better. That ties right back to the cost factor. Cost of replacing a $3,000 laptop: $3,000. Cost of replacing a $15 hard-drive card: $15. That's quite the math.
Maybe. But then Microsoft would have to prove that the programmer in charge of the project had access to Microsoft code. It's not illegal to come up with something on your own, even if it looks like something else. If I wrote "The Sun Also Rises" verbatim, Hemmingway's estate couldn't sue me unless they could prove that I'd read the original -- or that the original was so readily available that I couldn't come up with the idea on my own. Microsoft has to prove that the programmer copied the code on purpose, which is kind of hard if the code isn't available.
The way it works today, Joe from marketing flies from the NY office to the LA office for a week. Joe from marketing uses Adobe Illustrator for page layout. But Adobe Illustrator is an expensive program, and it isn't licensed on any of the computers Joe can get his hands on out in LA. By letting Joe take his entire harddrive, apps included, it drastically simplifies corporate licensing. Give each employee only the apps they need, and let them carry them everywhere they go. Granted, we could've given Joe a laptop -- but there are a huge number of other headaches involved with that, like reconfiguring Joe's laptop to work with the office network every time his 16 year old configures it for a LAN party. Dumb terminals are also a lot cheaper than laptops.
Apps are still too large, and the method too slow, to keep on central servers. An easy removable hard disk solution is the perfect answer to the aforementioned issues. If its fast enough to a complete system, I think the 5 gig models will be great.
Yeah, but I imagine speed will be the real issue. If its a hard-disk style platter instead of an optical medium like DVD or CD, that'll make a huge difference. People continued to buy Zip drives and disks well after CDRs were popularized. Same reason. Having an easy read-write tech that doesn't have to be erased every time and is essentially drag-and-drop is a huge selling point for some people. Portability is just a plus -- as is price, in this case.
I know some fairly well-placed programmers who have worked on XP and Win2k, and even they didn't have access to the complete source code the way governments will.
So we should ask ourselves what Microsoft gains from an unofficial general release of their code. I think there's a lot of speculation that can be done here, and it becomes very paranoid very quickly. In the reasonable realm, I think two things are possible:
1) Microsoft cries "uncle" when their source is plastered all over the net. They start lawyers and a few bots looking through thousands of lines of GPLed code looking for similarities. They then sue the writers of the code for stealing MS code and using it in GPL software (which would be very, very clearly against the law).
2) They use the illicitly released code as an experiment. They know it can't start showing up in applications, because they haven't released it legally, and nobody wants to be sued (for an essentially legitimate reason) by a company with billions and billions in the bank. So they see how often code like it shows up. How much people mimic their code. How people try to stretch the limits of the law to use some of MS's techniques. Or if people are simply uninterested. Letting it be released illegally seems to be a great way to test the waters for a legal release of protected source code, Apple-style.
3) The third possibility is that Microsoft knows that their code will be stolen, but that doesn't scare them quite as much as the prospect of losing tens of thousands of government computers to OSS.
For our sake, I hope that it's 2 or 3...
~Shylock0
Comments and questions welcome. Flames ignored.
That's precisely the kind of functionality I was looking for when I submitted the comment. If a programmer were to come up with a file manager for windows that let me do that, I would pay good money for it. Alternitively, it a good Linux file manager came out with that sort of functionality, it would certainly be another huge reason to switch...
If somebody did do that for GIMP, it would be a substantial incentive for graphics houses to switch to it from Photoshop or Illustrator. Especially if somebody comes up with a fast GIMP port for Windows...
I think this ties into what you're talking about. Digital in, digital out. The article refers specifically to allowing output on the television to connect to other devices, specifically the possibility of "other TVs" in the house. Couldn't one of those "other TVs" just be a PVR or a computer w/digital input card?
Ha ha! Get it: remotely this sturdy. It's a space probe...
So while it would be all well and good for the DoD to have radar that works in our country, wouldn't it also be nice if that radar worked everywhere else? I think that its good that this issue is being investigated, but it makes me kind of nervous. Shouldn't it show the DoD that they should start work, today, on the next-next generation of radar, which won't be able to be foiled by a bunch of high-power 5 ghz transmission devices, the basic parts for which might soon become available from civilian outlets over the Internet.
It would be a real, real shame if wireless tech interfered with long-range weapons systems so that, say, wireless tech in Israel caused enough interference for smart bombs in Iraq to hit a hospital instead of a weapons depot... I'm not saying its possible, I'm just saying that the possibility needs to be investigated, so that the military can redesign their systems to fix the problem.
At the same time, I've really got to question some of the limits placed on aircraft passengers in terms of using their cell-phone and other two-way electronic devices in flight and during takeoff. It seems to me that since the signals from the ground are bouncing all over the place anyway. Could somebody who knows a little more let me know how much interference these actually cause? Generally speaking, how much of a problem is interference? Or is the point sort of that nobody (DOD included) knows, and that more research really should be done on the issue?
The analogy still holds. Oftentimes, professional photographers are more technically talented than thier "artistic" counterparts. Both of them do what they love for a living (like many devs in the OSS community), its just that one of them does it commercially.
Developers are all geeks, whether they do OSS or commercial dev., we can't dispute that. But anybody who's worked at a major software company will most likely support me in saying that oftentimes its not the "geeks," the developers, who decide the course of the project. It's the management -- who may have been geeks once-upon-a-time, but now have a broader responsibility to shareholders.
"Suits" -- i.e., Microsoft, Sun, Apple -- create operating systems and software which appeal to wide swaths of people. They have to; they have something to sell and money to make.
"Geeks" -- i.e., most of the GPL community -- write software for the purpose of writing software. The end result is pure art in a way.
A good analogy would be the world of photography. Professional photographers take pictures for magazines and newspapers, or at weddings, etc. They need to be product-driven, they have something to sell, and it shows in their work.
Artistic photographers, on the other hand, are driven by purity. They strive for an artistic goal, which is very different from the commerical one.
The same thing could go for music -- say the wide world of "artistic music" and artists (okay, okay, that's a sensitive one here on /.) and studio bands.
Questions and comments welcome. Flames ignored. Post resonsibly
1) My neighbor, who has TiVO, called them six weeks ago and asked them to take her off their list, which includes a certain kind of push content (suggestions, which some people like, but which she found annoying -- because even as a mother of three, her viewing habits made it the TiVO box assume she was a lesbian). It didn't stop. Two weeks later, she called back. Still didn't stop. A week later, still going., so she called again. Last Monday she tried again; we'll see what happens...
2) I'm not a privacy nut. I'm trying to make some extreme comparisons to prove a point. What TiVO did upset a number of people, and the point in an earlier post was relevant because the TiVO issue has been discussed in the past on
Anyway, one of the issues with TiVO -- and the relevant issue in this forum -- was the use of the information acquired to push content. It's basically impossible that, since the info was being used for content push on a user-by-user basis, that it couldn't identify you. It must. Now, in that case, TiVO wasn't selling identified information -- and granted, doing so would probably be illegal without the consent of the user. Again, this was just to prove a point... I'm no privacy nut, but push content by its nature has to be user-linked.
Hmm... My neighbor owns a TiVO box, and six weeks ago she called and asked. Two weeks later she called and asked. A week later she called and asked. It hasn't stopped...
It's interesting, because as of a little while ago (this may have changed, I'm not a TiVO subscriber) you were't allowed to opt out. Besides, what we're talking about here is a slippery-slope argument. The real "idiots" are the ones who can't see that privacy, which is a very real value, is eroded by things such as this. Its good that we can opt out, which we can, but the point is that we have to be aware that these things are going on in order to opt out. The response was to say that such things are indeed an invasion of privacy. To deny that fact is somewhat foolish; see above.
Would you consider it an invasion of your privacy if a guy stood outside your house (on public property), made note of everbody who exited and entered, as well as times that they did so, compiled that information into an easily accessible format, and then sold it to the highest bidder? Or, for that matter, would you consider it an invasion of your privacy if your car recorded the speed you were traveling and then sent the information to law enforcement officials? Would you consider it an invasion of your privacy if your ISP intercepted and compiled a list of all the domains you vist, and then made the information public (for a fee?)
All of those examples are just compiling and sending aggregate information...