It's not The Big Bad Government trying to nose its way into our lives, it's one group of people (content providers/owners) trying to make sure that what they perceive as their best interests are protected through the law.
Huh? I doubt you could name any policy of any government, ever, that wasn't about "somebody" who wanted "something." That in itself isn't a justification.
If you assume somebody is being evil just for the sake of being evil, it's more likely their motive is selfish and you just don't know yet what they're trying to get. That doesn't mean they're not evil.
the human brain/neocortex works so well because of its massively parallel nature (not because of the processing power of any one neuron), and that computers simply aren't able to exploit this as they aren't designed to work like this
A serial computer can compute anything a parallel computer can.
Hardware isn't the problem anyways. If anybody could currently write an algorithm to understand and solve general problems in the way people can, but it took a 1000 node cluster to run at 1/100th of human speed, nobody would care about the massive computational resources consumed; it would be the biggest breakthrough ever in computer science.
The cost of the infrastructure (in this case "wires") is NOT a one time cost
Ok, you and I pay for them, every month. The money to repay the investors who funded the buildout comes from the customers, but whereas the investors have ownership, the customers who repay the investment with interest never end up owning anything. That is how customers ended up paying $800 for a simple telephone over the years, back when they wouldn't allow you to buy one for $12 at Best Buy and plug it into the wall.
Sure, Comcast got the money from the investors and built the network, good for them. But there is a market there that somebody would have filled; if not Comcast, some other company who might have been a bit better or worse.
I do agree with the idea of competition.
Even for cable networks? I don't. I'd no sooner propose multiple redundant cable networks than multiple redundant power grids or sewer systems. (ISP services are another matter.) Since competition and the free market don't provide a good solution to the problem, the question is what to do next. The normal approach is to pretend that compeition and the free market are working great and sit back as the network owners raise prices year after year. Milking a cash cow is nice work if you can get it.
If I'm looking for information on, say, the E-Zuper project I working on at work. This allows me to turn up everything that refers to it, whether its an email, a document, a bookmark -- anything.
If XML ever takes over, we'll all be back to storing data as text, and all you need is "grep":) Ok, and "find."
If you can assign arbitrary meta attributes, you can bypass the limitations of a traditional directory structure. For example, I can search and find documents that I'm supposed to have completed by tomorrow, if I include an attribute such as "date-needed" on those files.
In theory, yes. But since nobody will ever do that, it's not much of a feature. In fact, you can use good old "ln" to create multiple different views of sets of files reflecting different information. But nobody ever does.
Don't believe me? Load up Konqueror, Firefox, IE, or Opera, and go to http://www.csszengarden.com/. Looks nice, right? I particularly like the design called A Simple Sunrise. Pretty nice actually.
In my browser the Simple Sunrise page is all messed up. The letters are all overlapping with each other, and with the callout boxes. The overlapping text and boxes are the same color, so it's unreadable. This is Mozilla 1.7.6, which I happend to download yesterday.
Extra degrees of flexibility = reduced control and increased bugginess. So far, based on market acceptance, the extra cost and complexity of separating content from presentation is not worthwhile.
Are the web designers hacks? Well, a lot probably are. That's why throwing a complex, multilayered suite of authoring languages into their laps will never work. Deriding them won't fix that problem.
The simple fact is people are going to do what it takes to get the desired result for the intended audience, and then move on. They are not going to do extra work "just in case" for contexts they can't even forsee.
By the ways, this is also why the Semantic Web isn't happening and won't happen.
Could you please elaborate on how you got remote sound?
Well, that's the problem, I don't. There are such things as "sound servers," but getting decent performance sending sound effects and music would require careful integration with applications.
mp3's, for instance, should be decoded client-side. Repetitive sounds (common in games) should only be sent once and referred to by some sort of handle afterwards. None of that is at all likely to be implemented, because it would require integration with every sound-producing application.
The only practical solution is "mega bandwidth" - decoding sounds on the server and sending them to the client. But a slow laptop on 802.11b does not have mega bandwidth. Depending on how much the network card's firmware does for you, (i.e. encryption), just receiving the data uses up a major chunk of your thin client.
The problem with a thin client that "just presents the user interface" is that these days most of the heavy lifting is the user interface!
Well, have you tried it? I have. In fact my wife's main computer is a 233mhz laptop running VNC. She likes having her same desktop wherever in the house, and I can pull it up from work for tech support (naughty but useful).
However, I never use that VNC laptop. It's just too sluggish. (I would use X if it were any better). The fact is a pretty powerful terminal IS necessary if what you want to do is watch movies on it. My little boy's main application is Flash web games, guess how well they run on a remote display? (They have sound by the way).
The huge difference is: now mozilla (firefox etc) is actually a good browser! We take it for granted now, but linux wasn't as fun before it had a good browser.
Well I wish I had a mod point for you. The Federal government abuses taxation to grab whatever non-Constitutional powers it desires.
The evisceration of state and local government is IMHO the biggest problem with the USA, because individual citizens have practically no influence. Or as one famous elected leader who shall remain nameless (too distracting for the partisans) put it, "Who cares what you think?"
Personally, I would much sooner choose an IMac G5 over the mini. The choice of a laptop drive for a desktop machine seems like a clear mistake to me. Laptop drives are more expensive, much smaller in capacity, and above all, slower. I gather there are people who think CPUs are "fast enough," but surely not hard drives! And for what, a few cubic inches in a desktop machine. The mini plus a monitor plus its power supply is not smaller than the iMac in any usable way, just more wires.
I bought Apple stock a while ago at $14. I thought I was being smart by selling it at $30. I was wrong:(
Disagree! You doubled your money, congratulations! Having the guts to give up while you're ahead is way smarter than riding the stock all the way up - and back down.
Wait a minute. So when we hear about our crap standardized test scores compared to Japan, is that compared to all Japanese of a certain age, or only the elite who aren't dropped into trade school?
Those up-and-coming bands that are giving music away for free are doing so because they are hoping to build buzz and a fan base, so they can one day make a living. They aren't catering to leeches.
Why are you so sure? Are you posting to Slashdot because you think it's a springboard to becoming a rich author? Or are you in fact catering to leeches? Or could it be you want to express yourself, and it isn't about money.
Downloading music is only "breaking the law" in countries which have artificial property laws.
What does that mean? The notion of property itself (including physical property) is artificial - just a made-up construct of law. But that in itself doesn't mean property is bad.
It would be interesting to know if locking things down actually forces people to work more efficiently, or whether people just take breaks in other ways. For instance, zoning out in meetings.
What customers exactly? If you were Adaptec, would you write drivers for your hardware in Windows, a platform you're programmers are very experienced with and caters to the 90% marketshare, or write drivers for the niche 5% MacOS X or 5% other *nix market?
I'd love to see your evidence that 90% of servers with RAID run Windows, or for that matter that MacOS is close to UNIX in that market.
The only downside i've seen it that i've found is that if you look real hard at some text on screen you can actually see pixels.
But projected films have very noticeable grain. And you don't need to look hard to see it, either. I will be interested to see whether the pixelization is better or worse than today's grain.
Slashdot Mirror
If you assume somebody is being evil just for the sake of being evil, it's more likely their motive is selfish and you just don't know yet what they're trying to get. That doesn't mean they're not evil.
Hardware isn't the problem anyways. If anybody could currently write an algorithm to understand and solve general problems in the way people can, but it took a 1000 node cluster to run at 1/100th of human speed, nobody would care about the massive computational resources consumed; it would be the biggest breakthrough ever in computer science.
Sure, Comcast got the money from the investors and built the network, good for them. But there is a market there that somebody would have filled; if not Comcast, some other company who might have been a bit better or worse.
Even for cable networks? I don't. I'd no sooner propose multiple redundant cable networks than multiple redundant power grids or sewer systems. (ISP services are another matter.) Since competition and the free market don't provide a good solution to the problem, the question is what to do next. The normal approach is to pretend that compeition and the free market are working great and sit back as the network owners raise prices year after year. Milking a cash cow is nice work if you can get it.Come to think of it, I'm at University today and maybe they have a caching proxy.
I just got the videos off the original site at 800 KBytes/second. Granted it's been a couple of hours since the link was posted, but still, wow.
Extra degrees of flexibility = reduced control and increased bugginess. So far, based on market acceptance, the extra cost and complexity of separating content from presentation is not worthwhile.
Are the web designers hacks? Well, a lot probably are. That's why throwing a complex, multilayered suite of authoring languages into their laps will never work. Deriding them won't fix that problem.
The simple fact is people are going to do what it takes to get the desired result for the intended audience, and then move on. They are not going to do extra work "just in case" for contexts they can't even forsee.
By the ways, this is also why the Semantic Web isn't happening and won't happen.
mp3's, for instance, should be decoded client-side. Repetitive sounds (common in games) should only be sent once and referred to by some sort of handle afterwards. None of that is at all likely to be implemented, because it would require integration with every sound-producing application.
The only practical solution is "mega bandwidth" - decoding sounds on the server and sending them to the client. But a slow laptop on 802.11b does not have mega bandwidth. Depending on how much the network card's firmware does for you, (i.e. encryption), just receiving the data uses up a major chunk of your thin client.
The problem with a thin client that "just presents the user interface" is that these days most of the heavy lifting is the user interface!
However, I never use that VNC laptop. It's just too sluggish. (I would use X if it were any better). The fact is a pretty powerful terminal IS necessary if what you want to do is watch movies on it. My little boy's main application is Flash web games, guess how well they run on a remote display? (They have sound by the way).
The huge difference is: now mozilla (firefox etc) is actually a good browser! We take it for granted now, but linux wasn't as fun before it had a good browser.
The evisceration of state and local government is IMHO the biggest problem with the USA, because individual citizens have practically no influence. Or as one famous elected leader who shall remain nameless (too distracting for the partisans) put it, "Who cares what you think?"
Personally, I would much sooner choose an IMac G5 over the mini. The choice of a laptop drive for a desktop machine seems like a clear mistake to me. Laptop drives are more expensive, much smaller in capacity, and above all, slower. I gather there are people who think CPUs are "fast enough," but surely not hard drives! And for what, a few cubic inches in a desktop machine. The mini plus a monitor plus its power supply is not smaller than the iMac in any usable way, just more wires.
Wait a minute. So when we hear about our crap standardized test scores compared to Japan, is that compared to all Japanese of a certain age, or only the elite who aren't dropped into trade school?
It would be interesting to know if locking things down actually forces people to work more efficiently, or whether people just take breaks in other ways. For instance, zoning out in meetings.
Thanks, pal, you just ruined pricewatch for me.
Whoopdie-doo. Just because the AFP website makes some demands doesn't mean it's the law.
But google just has headlines and links. To read the story you have to go to an AFP authorized news site.