"And this is going to keep us from recording and copying the music steam how?"
MS Spokes person replies...
" Oh no, this won't prevent anyone from copying audio data... far from it! No, this is our submission to the Stupid, Unworkable, CD Protection Competition [TM].... you know, the one the RIAA set? Well anyway, both myself and Mr. Gates think we're in with a chance of winning!
Furthermore, we believe that UPS (Unworkable Protection Schemes) concept development will be a growth market in the coming years - one which Microsoft can use to sell useless concepts (firstly) to record media giants companies until their eventual demise (targeting Q2 2005) whereupon we can purchase them at a bargain rate (bargain bin rate... ha!) and control that part of the media industry. Then after that we will move after...
Oh... I don't think I was meant to tell you that part... don't tell anyone will you? "
Re phone revenue, I've wondered about that - given the amount of money the phone network companies have paid for the licences** they'll be very careful with what sevices they offer. For example, I've heard the Orange MS Smartphone thing doesn't let you run any applications you want - only ones the service provider has digitally signed.
My guess is that, if a network release a phone with bluetooth or even WiFi that also let you run your own apps, then theres a risk people would buy the phones but use local area wireless networks + internet for communication. Certainly that'd cover SMS, email, pictures but it could possibly cover voice if VOIP is at all viable.
Whatever, the result is that networks don't want to sell you something that doesn't result in a continued revenue stream from their customers!
** in the UK the phone co's spent absolutely ridiculous amounts on 3G phone licences and are struggling to sell enough to cover the costs.
I think a far greater proportion of digital images will be destroyed however. As a completely non-scientific method to guess the figures, consider how many film pictures you've taken say 5 years ago (or some time before you had a digital cam) and consider how many of those pictures you've destroyed - likely it will just be all the ones that didn't come out right, plus others that are boring or duplicates.
With digital images you'll likely have more immediatly crap pictures since there's no cost in taking them. Plus, because of their lower value (you didn't pay to get them developed), you'll be more likely to delete them in the future.
Another way to consider it is, if you took a roll of film last new years (36 pictures?), and took 3 times the pictures with a digital camera this year (108 pictures?), then in 10 years time how many of each do you think you'll still have?
That said, if you did something incredibly embarasing this year then if its on digital media it stands are far far greater chance of ending up on a lot of different peoples hard-drives!!
The problem I have with any "professional" uses of these devices, like Insurance Adjusters, is that I don't think the image quality will ever** be good enough. Thus relagating picture phones to novelty status.
On the other hand, a decent digital camera with bluetooth + mobile phone with bluetooth and *then* I think you're in business!
Does anyone know if there are any standards in place to make this workable?
**when I say "ever" and I'm talking about technology, I mean 18 months!
This is old hat - in the future, everyone will be using typewritter keyboards.... I'm assuming that everyone here has seen the film Brazil (http://us.imdb.com/Title?0088846) yes?
And I'll bet the best thing is having a "shift lock", which is a fantastic time-saving feature that seems to have disappeared from modern keyboards allowing you to enter all the shift symbols on the number keys without needing to hold down shift. Its great!
The description of their new "shell" environment sounds like they are atetmpting to clone the old Amiga CLI environment, replacing the REXX scripting / application integration language with something more ".NET"-centric. It's funny that MS should keep returning to the Amiga for ideas.
We'll just ignore that whole REXX actually being an IBM "invention" thing!
On a slight tangent, does anyone know why Windows doesn't already support "macro-recording" (like in MS Office) from the Windows desktop itself?
It always iritates me that it doesn't and that in order to write any WSH scripts I have to download the relevant MS docs to find what object they're using these days, e.g. DAO vs. ADO or even CDO vs.CDOsys (is that what its called now?)
Oh and transaction logging from the OS? If the OS provided the facility to record "macros" by catching messages being passed from UI to application, then why can't an OS also track these transactions and provide roll-back as an OS service.
I'm rambling of course, and I know that there are MS transaction management facilities available if you're writting apps, but what I'd really like is OS level macro recording and OS level transaction logging - the latter purely to provide an audit trail!
How many times have I moved or renamed a file by accident? An audit trail would let me easily find out what I did!
I read recently at BBC news about the salaries of the UK's top execs. The top most was £10 million for someone working for EMI (or another record co, but I think it was EMI!).
Two thoughts on this:
1). When the record companies are bleating about loosing money, and pirates etc etc, when don't they just hire cheaper execs? I mean how many pirated CDs/Videos do you need verses one expensive exec?!!
2). Presumably this exec had to negotiate this deal. Did he start *higher* than this? I can't imagine actually saying "oh I think I'm worth £10 million" or whatever and keeping a straight face!
I'm still scared from years of having to "support" a few of these things.
To refresh the memory of anyone who cares, they from an OS called AMOS (the company was called Alpha Micro, okay) and they were 68000 based multi-user (clears throat) "mini" computers.
Oh, and they crashed quite a lot too.
Re:W95 and DOS will not expire at the end of the y
on
Bringing Back the PDP8
·
· Score: 2, Funny
But why the hell would anyone still be running Windows 95 in 2025? Or running games which run on Windows 95 in 2025?
Ask the man with the beard and the Dec-PDP8. He speaks in 12 bits. He knows everything!
but you do (presumeably) get some extra CPU cost for I/O. It is a trade-off most would accept.
I hadn't noticed until you said that, but a cool thing about using an XML based format is that the compression can be made optional. So, in the case of office files used by an individual, a compressed format is fine since the CPU overhead like you say "is a trade-off most would accept" but you could also use a plain uncompressed xml format for batch processing where the CPU overhead might be more of an issue.
(I'm not actually making any point here - its just an observation!)
There's Serializing stuff in Java too; but neither Java nor VC would need to simply "memory dump" - they could build an xml "journal"! I guess that would likely be less efficient, plus I've just noticed that I'm rambling and have entirely missed your point anyway.
Back on topic - if an XML office format is standardised on, a product (take MS Office for example) would still be free to use its own performance enhancements such as a memory-dump-journal-file-thingy(TM) as long as it wrote out the entire XML office file at the end.
Thinking about this a little more (perhaps too much) it would in theory be possible to extend the file system to natively support the XML tree as an extension of its own file/folder tree and use XPath to navigate it. Oh, and then be able to lock individual parts of the XML document so multiple people could work on different parts of the same office document concurrently.
[I really am rambling now - and I'm in full swing!]
Since XML text files are just a serialized representation of a data structure, an OS could keep these objects in their raw binary ugly but efficient format and just generate serialized XML for interchange.... or something... *I* know what I mean anyway.
I'll have to have a think about this - I'm sure there's something fantastically ground breaking here, I just can't quite put my finger on it!
Good link to hixie.ch BTW - its convinced me to try and stick with HTML4 as the prefered output format in the short term!!
Slightly OT, but does anyone have a decent strategy for figuring the correct output for a given UA? Specifically, IE doesn't mention "text/html" in its Accept header.... which is a bit of a pain in the arse really. Thus, I need a default output format, and thus that needs to be "text/html" for the minute. (FYI I'm transforming raw XML data using an XSLT doc based on the Accept header).
the querystring is a very, very messy way of doing things
Elegant it ain't. I think the querystring should really just be used for resource identification and *something else* used to maintain transient state information, but we're stuck with what we got!
introduce the potential for many, many more bugs in a web app.
How so?
Obviously you do have to organise you app such that you know that you've validated every bit of UA supplied information, but then thats a given in anycase. I guess if you've had agro from NS4.x then that'd be enough to put anyone off!
All that said, re-thinking about my points on "vastly improved" scalability, I was talking out of my arse, since using the querystring forces you to dynamically generate each page! I'll try to remember to think before I post in future!!:)
I don't know what you're trying to do but about the only problem with a user not accepting cookies is that they have to "login" to the site on each visit. You can track a user on a site by query-string/form.
I'm only pointing this out as many sites don't work without cookies and I feel this is a poor state of affairs, mostly 'cos its due to lazy site building that depends on the session management features of the web server.
I'd urge any slightly clue'd-up web developer who cares, to try build sites that operate without cookies. The reason is that, okay, it is slightly more hassle to build the first one, but once you've got the hang of building stateless applications, you get the benefit of vastly improved scalability! This is a good thing.
Yes, XML is an annoying buzzword which clueless managers (who learn everything they know from trade rags) think should be used for everything. However this is actually a legit use of the technology. If your goal is to have a generic security language, you might as well use a generic data format.
I find its actually a good filter - where people quote knowledge of XML in their skill-set with no mention of any specific XML technologies you know they've just dropped in a current buzzword for good measure. Its about as useful as saying "I know about files", its that generic!
I'll have to try to resist the temptation to download Devpac from somewhere and run it on an Emulator.... and then key in my assembler. Funny thing is, I've long since thrown out my dead speccy's and zillions of tapes and books and crap bits of hardware (a light-pen I ask you? why?!) but I've *still* got my old hand-written assembler in a folder. Can't throw it out, but can't do anything with it either!
It'll go full circle at some point. A kind-of-example, might be PalmOS in so far as it is wildly stripped down and slim when compared with WindowsCE. The problem is that it costs at lot to develop really beautifully engineered code. Some day it'll happen though - like a nice, tight office suite that loads ridulously quickly and does everything you want.
I remember years ago writting a run-length decompressor in Z80 asm that was 32 bytes. I think the compressor was 50 something bytes!
I also recall adding up the clock cycles for all of this to try and find the fastest implementation!
I'm over it now though!
I'm just glad to forget those cassette-tape based, hand coded assembler days, but it is kind of a shame to see how bloated code has got. If only I'd had a macro-assembler on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum (Timex something or other in the US) in those days... oh the world could've been mine!!
Slashdot Mirror
"And this is going to keep us from recording and copying the music steam how?"
MS Spokes person replies...
"
Oh no, this won't prevent anyone from copying audio data... far from it! No, this is our submission to the Stupid, Unworkable, CD Protection Competition [TM].... you know, the one the RIAA set? Well anyway, both myself and Mr. Gates think we're in with a chance of winning!
Furthermore, we believe that UPS (Unworkable Protection Schemes) concept development will be a growth market in the coming years - one which Microsoft can use to sell useless concepts (firstly) to record media giants companies until their eventual demise (targeting Q2 2005) whereupon we can purchase them at a bargain rate (bargain bin rate... ha!) and control that part of the media industry. Then after that we will move after...
Oh... I don't think I was meant to tell you that part... don't tell anyone will you?
"
Re phone revenue, I've wondered about that - given the amount of money the phone network companies have paid for the licences** they'll be very careful with what sevices they offer. For example, I've heard the Orange MS Smartphone thing doesn't let you run any applications you want - only ones the service provider has digitally signed.
My guess is that, if a network release a phone with bluetooth or even WiFi that also let you run your own apps, then theres a risk people would buy the phones but use local area wireless networks + internet for communication. Certainly that'd cover SMS, email, pictures but it could possibly cover voice if VOIP is at all viable.
Whatever, the result is that networks don't want to sell you something that doesn't result in a continued revenue stream from their customers!
** in the UK the phone co's spent absolutely ridiculous amounts on 3G phone licences and are struggling to sell enough to cover the costs.
I think a far greater proportion of digital images will be destroyed however. As a completely non-scientific method to guess the figures, consider how many film pictures you've taken say 5 years ago (or some time before you had a digital cam) and consider how many of those pictures you've destroyed - likely it will just be all the ones that didn't come out right, plus others that are boring or duplicates.
With digital images you'll likely have more immediatly crap pictures since there's no cost in taking them. Plus, because of their lower value (you didn't pay to get them developed), you'll be more likely to delete them in the future.
Another way to consider it is, if you took a roll of film last new years (36 pictures?), and took 3 times the pictures with a digital camera this year (108 pictures?), then in 10 years time how many of each do you think you'll still have?
That said, if you did something incredibly embarasing this year then if its on digital media it stands are far far greater chance of ending up on a lot of different peoples hard-drives!!
The problem I have with any "professional" uses of these devices, like Insurance Adjusters, is that I don't think the image quality will ever** be good enough. Thus relagating picture phones to novelty status.
On the other hand, a decent digital camera with bluetooth + mobile phone with bluetooth and *then* I think you're in business!
Does anyone know if there are any standards in place to make this workable?
**when I say "ever" and I'm talking about technology, I mean 18 months!
Sorry - the link again in click-o-matic form: Brazil
I promise to always use preview in the future - except when using a mechanical typewritter!
This is old hat - in the future, everyone will be using typewritter keyboards.... I'm assuming that everyone here has seen the film Brazil (http://us.imdb.com/Title?0088846) yes?
And I'll bet the best thing is having a "shift lock", which is a fantastic time-saving feature that seems to have disappeared from modern keyboards allowing you to enter all the shift symbols on the number keys without needing to hold down shift. Its great!
The description of their new "shell" environment sounds like they are atetmpting to clone the old Amiga CLI environment, replacing the REXX scripting / application integration language with something more ".NET"-centric. It's funny that MS should keep returning to the Amiga for ideas.
We'll just ignore that whole REXX actually being an IBM "invention" thing!
On a slight tangent, does anyone know why Windows doesn't already support "macro-recording" (like in MS Office) from the Windows desktop itself? It always iritates me that it doesn't and that in order to write any WSH scripts I have to download the relevant MS docs to find what object they're using these days, e.g. DAO vs. ADO or even CDO vs.CDOsys (is that what its called now?)
Oh and transaction logging from the OS? If the OS provided the facility to record "macros" by catching messages being passed from UI to application, then why can't an OS also track these transactions and provide roll-back as an OS service.
I'm rambling of course, and I know that there are MS transaction management facilities available if you're writting apps, but what I'd really like is OS level macro recording and OS level transaction logging - the latter purely to provide an audit trail!
How many times have I moved or renamed a file by accident? An audit trail would let me easily find out what I did!
End ramble.
Disengage.
That'd be top! An Oven/Fridge/Speaker combo!! Ideal for roadie's.
I read recently at BBC news about the salaries of the UK's top execs. The top most was £10 million for someone working for EMI (or another record co, but I think it was EMI!).
Two thoughts on this:
1). When the record companies are bleating about loosing money, and pirates etc etc, when don't they just hire cheaper execs? I mean how many pirated CDs/Videos do you need verses one expensive exec?!!
2). Presumably this exec had to negotiate this deal. Did he start *higher* than this? I can't imagine actually saying "oh I think I'm worth £10 million" or whatever and keeping a straight face!
Its another world!
Does anyone run these any more?
I'm still scared from years of having to "support" a few of these things.
To refresh the memory of anyone who cares, they from an OS called AMOS (the company was called Alpha Micro, okay) and they were 68000 based multi-user (clears throat) "mini" computers.
Oh, and they crashed quite a lot too.
But why the hell would anyone still be running Windows 95 in 2025? Or running games which run on Windows 95 in 2025?
Ask the man with the beard and the Dec-PDP8. He speaks in 12 bits. He knows everything!
(Soon, we learn about the built-in SELF-DESTRUCT chip.)
:P
Didn't Fujitsu embed one of these babies in some of their HDs? Shame they primed it to self destruct before the warrantee had expired!
but you do (presumeably) get some extra CPU cost for I/O. It is a trade-off most would accept.
I hadn't noticed until you said that, but a cool thing about using an XML based format is that the compression can be made optional. So, in the case of office files used by an individual, a compressed format is fine since the CPU overhead like you say "is a trade-off most would accept" but you could also use a plain uncompressed xml format for batch processing where the CPU overhead might be more of an issue.
(I'm not actually making any point here - its just an observation!)
There's Serializing stuff in Java too; but neither Java nor VC would need to simply "memory dump" - they could build an xml "journal"! I guess that would likely be less efficient, plus I've just noticed that I'm rambling and have entirely missed your point anyway.
Back on topic - if an XML office format is standardised on, a product (take MS Office for example) would still be free to use its own performance enhancements such as a memory-dump-journal-file-thingy(TM) as long as it wrote out the entire XML office file at the end.
Thinking about this a little more (perhaps too much) it would in theory be possible to extend the file system to natively support the XML tree as an extension of its own file/folder tree and use XPath to navigate it. Oh, and then be able to lock individual parts of the XML document so multiple people could work on different parts of the same office document concurrently.
[I really am rambling now - and I'm in full swing!]
Since XML text files are just a serialized representation of a data structure, an OS could keep these objects in their raw binary ugly but efficient format and just generate serialized XML for interchange.... or something... *I* know what I mean anyway.
I'll have to have a think about this - I'm sure there's something fantastically ground breaking here, I just can't quite put my finger on it!
---
I'm quite mad you know! Quite mad!
IE6 SP1 finally supports XHTML sent as text/xml
Not on my Win2K-SP2 machine it don't! The example site http://www.mozillaquestquest.com/ still shows up as an XML tree view.
Good link to hixie.ch BTW - its convinced me to try and stick with HTML4 as the prefered output format in the short term!!
Slightly OT, but does anyone have a decent strategy for figuring the correct output for a given UA? Specifically, IE doesn't mention "text/html" in its Accept header.... which is a bit of a pain in the arse really. Thus, I need a default output format, and thus that needs to be "text/html" for the minute. (FYI I'm transforming raw XML data using an XSLT doc based on the Accept header).
This is a blinking marquee you know! Isn't it nice?........
Mmmmm, Moz now does *everything* and more. This has got to be enough to convert the un-washed IE masses... surely?
---
Jacob Neilsen
the querystring is a very, very messy way of doing things
:)
Elegant it ain't. I think the querystring should really just be used for resource identification and *something else* used to maintain transient state information, but we're stuck with what we got!
introduce the potential for many, many more bugs in a web app.
How so?
Obviously you do have to organise you app such that you know that you've validated every bit of UA supplied information, but then thats a given in anycase. I guess if you've had agro from NS4.x then that'd be enough to put anyone off!
All that said, re-thinking about my points on "vastly improved" scalability, I was talking out of my arse, since using the querystring forces you to dynamically generate each page! I'll try to remember to think before I post in future!!
There's no other way to do it.
I don't know what you're trying to do but about the only problem with a user not accepting cookies is that they have to "login" to the site on each visit. You can track a user on a site by query-string/form.
I'm only pointing this out as many sites don't work without cookies and I feel this is a poor state of affairs, mostly 'cos its due to lazy site building that depends on the session management features of the web server.
I'd urge any slightly clue'd-up web developer who cares, to try build sites that operate without cookies. The reason is that, okay, it is slightly more hassle to build the first one, but once you've got the hang of building stateless applications, you get the benefit of vastly improved scalability! This is a good thing.
So thats nice.
Yes, XML is an annoying buzzword which clueless managers (who learn everything they know from trade rags) think should be used for everything. However this is actually a legit use of the technology. If your goal is to have a generic security language, you might as well use a generic data format.
I find its actually a good filter - where people quote knowledge of XML in their skill-set with no mention of any specific XML technologies you know they've just dropped in a current buzzword for good measure. Its about as useful as saying "I know about files", its that generic!
I found a site via Google that seemed to be using the referer data to highlight the keywords I was googling with.
I thought it was clever anyway!
I'll have to try to resist the temptation to download Devpac from somewhere and run it on an Emulator.... and then key in my assembler. Funny thing is, I've long since thrown out my dead speccy's and zillions of tapes and books and crap bits of hardware (a light-pen I ask you? why?!) but I've *still* got my old hand-written assembler in a folder. Can't throw it out, but can't do anything with it either!
It'll go full circle at some point. A kind-of-example, might be PalmOS in so far as it is wildly stripped down and slim when compared with WindowsCE. The problem is that it costs at lot to develop really beautifully engineered code. Some day it'll happen though - like a nice, tight office suite that loads ridulously quickly and does everything you want.
I remember years ago writting a run-length decompressor in Z80 asm that was 32 bytes. I think the compressor was 50 something bytes!
I also recall adding up the clock cycles for all of this to try and find the fastest implementation!
I'm over it now though!
I'm just glad to forget those cassette-tape based, hand coded assembler days, but it is kind of a shame to see how bloated code has got. If only I'd had a macro-assembler on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum (Timex something or other in the US) in those days... oh the world could've been mine!!
The Australian government should publicly stand up and say "Fine then. You do that - take your f*ckin' shite, third rate console. We don't want it".
No really they should! MS would *never* expect that, and just think of the respect Oz-Gov would get!
Did it say copied games? I thought it was just PS2 games!