What they really need to do is make the cost so low that people don't even think of whether or not to buy it. It should be so low that I don't even want to bother pirating it. Music should be a dime a song, $1 for the album, books should cost $1. That way I could buy every song I even remotely liked, without even thinking about whether or not it was "worth it", or if I should spend the extra time to pirate it. With the distribution costs being basically zero, and the production being a fixed cost, people shouldn't have to think about whether or not to buy it. It should be so cheap that every will automatically just buy it, if they have any interest in it at all.
Depends. Maybe if there is a good paycheck in it that can be sent to his family, it wouldn't be all that bad of an idea. Depending on the age of his kids (maybe they are all teenagers?) there isn't much of a role left for him to play. Not to mention, by the time the trip gets off the ground (literally), his kids will have grown up. Also, it's worth mentioning that even non-mars astronauts would have big problems with family life and small kids, as do many other professions. Many business people spend 80 hours a week at work, leaving almost no time for their families. Many kids are raised entirely by nannies, and almost never see either of their parents. Having one of your parents be a Mars astronaut, which would make enough money for the other parent to stay home, would be better than a lot of kids get.
And yet, I have no problems with my torrents. In fact, I'm only paying for 3mbit service, but actually getting getting 10mbit, and have been for the past 2 months. Even after multiple power outages. I've never had a problem with Rogers throttling torrents or any other traffic. Maybe it's the city I live in, or just luck, but I find that Rogers service is pretty good.
What I'm saying is not that these small apps will supplant the top rated titles that actually require a lot of development time. What they will supplant is the stuff that generally sells with a high price tag that isn't anything more than a small utility. You mention small utility, but forget to mention that a lot of small utilities sell for quite high prices. WinZip current "starts at" $29.95. That's quite a bit for a product that for most people is just used to compress/uncompress files. Sure there are alternatives. But a lot of people don't realize it. WinRAR carries a similar price tag. There's a lot of "little utilites" that take almost no development, or haven't changed in 10 years, that cost $30 plus. This is the kind of thing that the app store on the MAC will hopefully get rid of.
At the end of the day there is still a competition. I've bought way more $5-$15 WiiShop games than I have bought $60 titles that required I buy a physical disk. You are right, it's kind of odd to compare the two, as they are about as different as different gets. However, I have quite a few games for my Wii that only cost $10 that are about 100 times better than a lot of the stuff they used to for $30 or $20 in the bargain bin at Walmart. What it really means is that developers won't be able to charge a premium for crap games as they did in the past. Sure, top rated titles will still demand a high price tag, but games that require very little development and could be done by a couple of good developers in their spare time will no longer be able to sell for $30+. Which is probably a good thing for all gamers in the end.
Yeah, my windows notebook does the same. Close the top down, it goes to sleep after 1 hour (configurable) it will go into hibernation. I seriously doubt that any notebook could maintain sleep mode for months. Although a nice feature would be a small solid state drive the same size as RAM to hibernate to in order to speed up the wake-up process. When you have 4GB of RAM, coming out of hibernation takes almost as much time as doing a fresh boot, however with the advantage of not having to restart all your programs.
But there are a lot of companies out there who want to pay lots of money to get their name mentioned on TV every time something happens. It's the same reason you see companies paying to have their name on the sports stadiums. By doing this, every time someone talks about the upcoming game for sports team X, they also mention the name of the stadium, which happens to be some corporate brand. Imagine if every time MIR or Hubble was mentioned on the news, it was instead the Coke Space Station, or the VISA telescope. Going to MARS would be a big deal, and it would be on the news a lot. Many companies would love to put their name on the thing to have their name mentioned every time someone talked about the Mars project.
Exactly. In this day and age, there are so many more and better ways of encrypting your conversations that it's amazing that anybody uses cell phones and other government-tappable means of communication when doing things the government would be interested in. I'm sure that there are many criminals who are using proper crypto to send messages, but there are many-many more who aren't, and those are the ones being caught.
The problem here being that users might be more or less active. It might just so happen that a lot of really active users get put on the same node. And then a bunch of inactive users get placed on another node. So then you end up with an over-utilized node and and under-utilized node. So what you would really have to do is have real time assigning of clients to different nodes. This is what Akamai is supposed to do. The problem is that they assign clients to nodes based on the location of their DNS Server. They should really have a better approach, and I assume they will come up with something better in the near future. I'm not sure why they would assume that somebody's DNS Server is geographically close to the client. It isn't the case in many situations. Although now the problem has gotten out of control, because not only is the DNS server not geographically close to the clients, but a single DNS server is being used for a very large number of clients. The same thing could have happened if a large ISP decided to use a single DNS server for all their clients, much the same way google DNS is acting as a single large DNS server.
Because MAC addresses are only used at layer 2, and don't travel the whole length of the packet. The MAC address changes between each router the packet passes between. The MAC address seen by the Apple servers are just the MAC Address that apple has on their own routers in the datacenter. Apple has no way of seeing the initial MAC address from the Apple TV unit initiating the request.
Haven't tested it myself, but according to coding horror, Ophcrack can crack "Fgpyyih804423" in 160 seconds. Even seemingly strong passwords can be cracked extremely fast.
Or you could just change your MAC address in software before using your neighbour's wireless internet. Why do some many people think a MAC address is some magical thing you can't change?
When I was in highschool, we got to write english exams on the school lab computers. We could do the exam by hand, but we had the option of using computers if we felt more comfortable doing that. The fact was, even in 1997, that many students would rather type out the essay answers than have to sit there writing with a pen for 2 hours. We had all the advantages that WP5.1 would give us, including spell checking. Computers are the way most people write in 2010. What's the point of making people write stuff out by hand?
I personally only have 3 Mbit internet (256 k up). So I don't have broadband either. But I could get up to 50 Mbit, I just don't want to pay for it. 3 Mbit is fast enough to stream videos, netflix included (if SD is good enough for you). It fulfills all my needs. Sure it would be nice to have 50 mbit, and download a Linux distro in 10 minutes, but it's really hard to justify the cost for the number of times you have to do that in a year. Sure people don't want to be running on dial up speeds, but not everyone needs 10 mbit internet.
Maybe you're on to something. Store all your data in the cloud, but store in encrypted with a public key that's only on your device (and backed up to and SD card or something). That way you are only requesting files, and decrypting them locally. The cloud itself has no method of reading the document. Still run all apps locally, but all your data is stored on the cloud, encrypted, and if you buy a new device, you just reload all the software, which comes from the cloud, and the new device acts just like the old one. If you're worried about the device obtaining and transmitting your private key, don't worry. It could be stored on the card, and all the decryption happens on the card, the machine itself only gets the data. When you get a new keycard, you get 3 or 4 for backup, so you are never without your key.
The default license on anything is copyright. Therefore, you are free to download it, but you aren't allowed to redistribute it, because that would be a breach of copyright. Similar to when you buy a book/cd/dvd. There is no license (usually??) but the fact that you bought the book only gives you the right to read, sell, or do anything else copyright allows. It doesn't give you the right to make 1000 copies and sell them on the street corner. There doesn't need to be a license, because copyright restricts what you can do already.
Maybe they don't mean for anyone else to do it, maybe they just put the files there so they could access them later. To be more precise, just because I put some source code up on an FTP Site, doesn't give somebody the right to violate copyright on it. Think about it this way. Linux is available for free on many web sites around the world. But if you want to go around distributing it to other folks, you have to follow the rules set out in the GPL (which extend the freedoms of copyright). So, possibly EMI putting the files up on Rapidshare (and telling you to download it) gives you the right to download it. But it doesn't give you the right to then distribute it to everyone else. Another explicit licence would be needed for that.
And yet some people never clue in and continue buying stuff from eBay and somethingfishy.ch, even though they've been ripped off multiple times, and the times they haven't been outright ripped off (product not delivered, product non-functional), they get a crappy product that lasts 6 months, and then dies.
The problem is that you had people doing jobs that are unskilled. If your job could be done by the average kid in high school, you should really should rethink your career path. Long gone are the days where you could go work for the local factory and work there your entire life. People are capable of much more, but for the most part, they aren't living up to it because there was always an alternative. Most people are lazy and will take the unskilled labour route if it means they can pay the bills. Once that path does not exist anymore, and the options consist of "live on the street" or "learn how to do something useful" you'll see a lot more people doing useful stuff.
Exactly, the most popular console of any time period will have tons of shovelware as thousands of game developers rush to make a quick buck on the fad of the day. You'll never find shovelware for virtual-boy, SegaCD, Dreamcast, or many other less popular systems that died fast. Also, It's worth pointing out that although the Wii does have a very large number of very bad games, there's also quite a respectable list of very good games. Personally I'm of the opinion, that as long as there are 10 to 20 really great games for a console, that is good enough, as I will likely never buy more than that anyway. For my Wii I only have about 10 games, but they are all top notch games and were worth every penny.
Let's also not forget that consoles generally are a lot cheaper than a top of the line gaming PC. Even the PS3 which everyone said was way too expensive with an initial price of $500, is still around half the price of a top of the line processor. People don't want to spend $3000 on a console, because it will be out of date in 4 years anyway. Just as a top of the line PC would be.
That's what I was thinking. How readable would the font be if the text were not English words, but something more difficult to fill in the gaps with, such as a big string of random characters. I don't think anybody would be able to "read" it with any consistency if they had to discern individual letters.
I don't know. Personally, I find that IE (6,7, and 8) on my XP machines to be terribly slow. Even simple things such as opening a new tab cause quite a bit of lag. I'm not sure how it keeps up in raw JS execution speed, but the experience as a whole is pretty slow. Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera on the same machine are all sufficiently fast, except for Firefox's startup time. As are the more recent versions of IE on Vista/7 are also sufficient. I do understand what you are saying, that most browsers are good enough, but there are still some slow ones out there that give a bad experience. And even though Firefox 3 is fast enough, I have to say that using Chrome, just feels an extra level quicker, and I'll use it whenever I can.
On the other hand, going with the status quo can sometimes be the better option. I know people who were working part time in the government, who had to compete for their own job. When their temporary job was moved to a permanent job, they couldn't just have the job. They had to compete against everyone else, even people they had been working with the whole time for the job they were already doing. It wasn't alright to just hire someone who was already doing the job perfectly well, and would require no training or time to get up to speed, because they were already doing the job. They had to have an open competition, so that everyone could have an equal shot at the position. So naturally they wrote up the requirements for the job in such a way that the only person who was qualified was the person who was already getting the job. This is the exact same problem. You can't just opt to use MS solution, because all your employees already know how the MS solution operates. You have to consider non-MS solutions. Nevermind that you would have to retrain your entire department.
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What they really need to do is make the cost so low that people don't even think of whether or not to buy it. It should be so low that I don't even want to bother pirating it. Music should be a dime a song, $1 for the album, books should cost $1. That way I could buy every song I even remotely liked, without even thinking about whether or not it was "worth it", or if I should spend the extra time to pirate it. With the distribution costs being basically zero, and the production being a fixed cost, people shouldn't have to think about whether or not to buy it. It should be so cheap that every will automatically just buy it, if they have any interest in it at all.
Depends. Maybe if there is a good paycheck in it that can be sent to his family, it wouldn't be all that bad of an idea. Depending on the age of his kids (maybe they are all teenagers?) there isn't much of a role left for him to play. Not to mention, by the time the trip gets off the ground (literally), his kids will have grown up. Also, it's worth mentioning that even non-mars astronauts would have big problems with family life and small kids, as do many other professions. Many business people spend 80 hours a week at work, leaving almost no time for their families. Many kids are raised entirely by nannies, and almost never see either of their parents. Having one of your parents be a Mars astronaut, which would make enough money for the other parent to stay home, would be better than a lot of kids get.
And yet, I have no problems with my torrents. In fact, I'm only paying for 3mbit service, but actually getting getting 10mbit, and have been for the past 2 months. Even after multiple power outages. I've never had a problem with Rogers throttling torrents or any other traffic. Maybe it's the city I live in, or just luck, but I find that Rogers service is pretty good.
So are people.
What I'm saying is not that these small apps will supplant the top rated titles that actually require a lot of development time. What they will supplant is the stuff that generally sells with a high price tag that isn't anything more than a small utility. You mention small utility, but forget to mention that a lot of small utilities sell for quite high prices. WinZip current "starts at" $29.95. That's quite a bit for a product that for most people is just used to compress/uncompress files. Sure there are alternatives. But a lot of people don't realize it. WinRAR carries a similar price tag. There's a lot of "little utilites" that take almost no development, or haven't changed in 10 years, that cost $30 plus. This is the kind of thing that the app store on the MAC will hopefully get rid of.
At the end of the day there is still a competition. I've bought way more $5-$15 WiiShop games than I have bought $60 titles that required I buy a physical disk. You are right, it's kind of odd to compare the two, as they are about as different as different gets. However, I have quite a few games for my Wii that only cost $10 that are about 100 times better than a lot of the stuff they used to for $30 or $20 in the bargain bin at Walmart. What it really means is that developers won't be able to charge a premium for crap games as they did in the past. Sure, top rated titles will still demand a high price tag, but games that require very little development and could be done by a couple of good developers in their spare time will no longer be able to sell for $30+. Which is probably a good thing for all gamers in the end.
Yeah, my windows notebook does the same. Close the top down, it goes to sleep after 1 hour (configurable) it will go into hibernation. I seriously doubt that any notebook could maintain sleep mode for months. Although a nice feature would be a small solid state drive the same size as RAM to hibernate to in order to speed up the wake-up process. When you have 4GB of RAM, coming out of hibernation takes almost as much time as doing a fresh boot, however with the advantage of not having to restart all your programs.
But there are a lot of companies out there who want to pay lots of money to get their name mentioned on TV every time something happens. It's the same reason you see companies paying to have their name on the sports stadiums. By doing this, every time someone talks about the upcoming game for sports team X, they also mention the name of the stadium, which happens to be some corporate brand. Imagine if every time MIR or Hubble was mentioned on the news, it was instead the Coke Space Station, or the VISA telescope. Going to MARS would be a big deal, and it would be on the news a lot. Many companies would love to put their name on the thing to have their name mentioned every time someone talked about the Mars project.
Exactly. In this day and age, there are so many more and better ways of encrypting your conversations that it's amazing that anybody uses cell phones and other government-tappable means of communication when doing things the government would be interested in. I'm sure that there are many criminals who are using proper crypto to send messages, but there are many-many more who aren't, and those are the ones being caught.
The problem here being that users might be more or less active. It might just so happen that a lot of really active users get put on the same node. And then a bunch of inactive users get placed on another node. So then you end up with an over-utilized node and and under-utilized node. So what you would really have to do is have real time assigning of clients to different nodes. This is what Akamai is supposed to do. The problem is that they assign clients to nodes based on the location of their DNS Server. They should really have a better approach, and I assume they will come up with something better in the near future. I'm not sure why they would assume that somebody's DNS Server is geographically close to the client. It isn't the case in many situations. Although now the problem has gotten out of control, because not only is the DNS server not geographically close to the clients, but a single DNS server is being used for a very large number of clients. The same thing could have happened if a large ISP decided to use a single DNS server for all their clients, much the same way google DNS is acting as a single large DNS server.
Because MAC addresses are only used at layer 2, and don't travel the whole length of the packet. The MAC address changes between each router the packet passes between. The MAC address seen by the Apple servers are just the MAC Address that apple has on their own routers in the datacenter. Apple has no way of seeing the initial MAC address from the Apple TV unit initiating the request.
Haven't tested it myself, but according to coding horror, Ophcrack can crack "Fgpyyih804423" in 160 seconds. Even seemingly strong passwords can be cracked extremely fast.
Or you could just change your MAC address in software before using your neighbour's wireless internet. Why do some many people think a MAC address is some magical thing you can't change?
When I was in highschool, we got to write english exams on the school lab computers. We could do the exam by hand, but we had the option of using computers if we felt more comfortable doing that. The fact was, even in 1997, that many students would rather type out the essay answers than have to sit there writing with a pen for 2 hours. We had all the advantages that WP5.1 would give us, including spell checking. Computers are the way most people write in 2010. What's the point of making people write stuff out by hand?
I personally only have 3 Mbit internet (256 k up). So I don't have broadband either. But I could get up to 50 Mbit, I just don't want to pay for it. 3 Mbit is fast enough to stream videos, netflix included (if SD is good enough for you). It fulfills all my needs. Sure it would be nice to have 50 mbit, and download a Linux distro in 10 minutes, but it's really hard to justify the cost for the number of times you have to do that in a year. Sure people don't want to be running on dial up speeds, but not everyone needs 10 mbit internet.
Maybe you're on to something. Store all your data in the cloud, but store in encrypted with a public key that's only on your device (and backed up to and SD card or something). That way you are only requesting files, and decrypting them locally. The cloud itself has no method of reading the document. Still run all apps locally, but all your data is stored on the cloud, encrypted, and if you buy a new device, you just reload all the software, which comes from the cloud, and the new device acts just like the old one. If you're worried about the device obtaining and transmitting your private key, don't worry. It could be stored on the card, and all the decryption happens on the card, the machine itself only gets the data. When you get a new keycard, you get 3 or 4 for backup, so you are never without your key.
The default license on anything is copyright. Therefore, you are free to download it, but you aren't allowed to redistribute it, because that would be a breach of copyright. Similar to when you buy a book/cd/dvd. There is no license (usually??) but the fact that you bought the book only gives you the right to read, sell, or do anything else copyright allows. It doesn't give you the right to make 1000 copies and sell them on the street corner. There doesn't need to be a license, because copyright restricts what you can do already.
Maybe they don't mean for anyone else to do it, maybe they just put the files there so they could access them later. To be more precise, just because I put some source code up on an FTP Site, doesn't give somebody the right to violate copyright on it. Think about it this way. Linux is available for free on many web sites around the world. But if you want to go around distributing it to other folks, you have to follow the rules set out in the GPL (which extend the freedoms of copyright). So, possibly EMI putting the files up on Rapidshare (and telling you to download it) gives you the right to download it. But it doesn't give you the right to then distribute it to everyone else. Another explicit licence would be needed for that.
And yet some people never clue in and continue buying stuff from eBay and somethingfishy.ch, even though they've been ripped off multiple times, and the times they haven't been outright ripped off (product not delivered, product non-functional), they get a crappy product that lasts 6 months, and then dies.
The problem is that you had people doing jobs that are unskilled. If your job could be done by the average kid in high school, you should really should rethink your career path. Long gone are the days where you could go work for the local factory and work there your entire life. People are capable of much more, but for the most part, they aren't living up to it because there was always an alternative. Most people are lazy and will take the unskilled labour route if it means they can pay the bills. Once that path does not exist anymore, and the options consist of "live on the street" or "learn how to do something useful" you'll see a lot more people doing useful stuff.
Exactly, the most popular console of any time period will have tons of shovelware as thousands of game developers rush to make a quick buck on the fad of the day. You'll never find shovelware for virtual-boy, SegaCD, Dreamcast, or many other less popular systems that died fast. Also, It's worth pointing out that although the Wii does have a very large number of very bad games, there's also quite a respectable list of very good games. Personally I'm of the opinion, that as long as there are 10 to 20 really great games for a console, that is good enough, as I will likely never buy more than that anyway. For my Wii I only have about 10 games, but they are all top notch games and were worth every penny.
Let's also not forget that consoles generally are a lot cheaper than a top of the line gaming PC. Even the PS3 which everyone said was way too expensive with an initial price of $500, is still around half the price of a top of the line processor. People don't want to spend $3000 on a console, because it will be out of date in 4 years anyway. Just as a top of the line PC would be.
That's what I was thinking. How readable would the font be if the text were not English words, but something more difficult to fill in the gaps with, such as a big string of random characters. I don't think anybody would be able to "read" it with any consistency if they had to discern individual letters.
I don't know. Personally, I find that IE (6,7, and 8) on my XP machines to be terribly slow. Even simple things such as opening a new tab cause quite a bit of lag. I'm not sure how it keeps up in raw JS execution speed, but the experience as a whole is pretty slow. Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera on the same machine are all sufficiently fast, except for Firefox's startup time. As are the more recent versions of IE on Vista/7 are also sufficient. I do understand what you are saying, that most browsers are good enough, but there are still some slow ones out there that give a bad experience. And even though Firefox 3 is fast enough, I have to say that using Chrome, just feels an extra level quicker, and I'll use it whenever I can.
On the other hand, going with the status quo can sometimes be the better option. I know people who were working part time in the government, who had to compete for their own job. When their temporary job was moved to a permanent job, they couldn't just have the job. They had to compete against everyone else, even people they had been working with the whole time for the job they were already doing. It wasn't alright to just hire someone who was already doing the job perfectly well, and would require no training or time to get up to speed, because they were already doing the job. They had to have an open competition, so that everyone could have an equal shot at the position. So naturally they wrote up the requirements for the job in such a way that the only person who was qualified was the person who was already getting the job. This is the exact same problem. You can't just opt to use MS solution, because all your employees already know how the MS solution operates. You have to consider non-MS solutions. Nevermind that you would have to retrain your entire department.