Often, when I recommend AppleCare to people, they say, "Well, I had $OLDER_MAC for $LENGTH_OF_TIME and never had a problem at all!"
In the 6 years I've owned PCs, I've had 2 parts fail outside of the standard warranty, and 2 parts fail under warranty (outside of DOA parts which were simply returned for replacement). The 2 under warranty were taken care of very quickly by DiamondMM (when they were still DiamondMM anyway, those were 12MB Voodoo2 cards btw, destroyed by their own heat and the proximity required for SLI operation with the standard SLI cable). The two parts that failed outside of warranty were a CD-ROM drive (from excessive use) which cost $40 to replace with a faster drive, and a motherboard (a screw found it's way into a place you never want a screw to go during a move across country) which would have cost $100 to replace, if I hadn't decided to just upgrade to a faster CPU/RAM combination unsupported by the (now dead) motherboard.
Of course, most of the parts I bought 6 years ago are still running strong in other people's machines, mostly family members that don't upgrade very often and mostly do web surfing / email / occasional work from home. I've also got one particular system that's running with no parts newer than 5 years, including a 2x DVD-ROM drive and a 6x2 CD-RW (and the only part I've ever bought that went up in price after I bought it: an ASUS P2B-LS motherboard that went up in price for a while because of the cost of the SCSI controller on the board), it's even running the Riva128 video card that I originally bought to run beside the V2 cards that ate themselves (though I've got a GeForce256SDR somewhere that I'm planning to put in there for the higher res & refresh rate support).
In short, support contracts are only worth it in the worst-case scenario, otherwise they wouldn't be offered in the first place (after all, they have to make money). The only people that I would really recommend a support contract to are those that don't feel comfortable working on the computers themselves (which are, of course, most people) and don't have good relationships with anyone that does. The majority of computer problems are things that can be solved by careful observation of the problem and a careful check of all possible causes. Many times the most complicated thing that needs to be done to solve a problem is flashing the BIOS or making sure all of the cards are seated properly and all cable connections are correct.
Perhaps there is only one cable tv company where you live, but that is not the case everywhere.
In San Diego county there are 2 cable companies, but the 2nd one only covers areas that Cox cable doesn't cover. San Diego is the 6th largest (by population) city in the US. Now that I've moved across the country, Cox cable is the only cable company anywhere in site. Their standard cable TV service is just as bad here, too, it's almost to the point where the only thing keeping me from going to putting up an antenna and getting the signals from the air is the fact that the only channels I watch are the cable channels (ie History Channel, Discovery, HBO, and CNN/FNC).
The world's issues of human rights, hunger, and power struggles have little to do with the issues surrounding the DMCA. True. But then, giving up your right to copy a CD will not end world hunger. And the fact that there is civil war somewhere in the world does not detract from the importance of fair use - its still all about money, control, and power. Try to maintain some of that perspective you claim to hold.
Or, to put it a better way: What if the Congress had spent the time it took to pass the DMCA doing something useful instead, like trying to end hunger in the US (clean up your own home before trying to clean up the neighborhood), or finding a way to reduce prison populations without putting murderers on the street with early parole.
Oh, and their estimate of $250 additional cost is a load of crap. Yes, it would cost that much (or more) today, because of supply and demand
The really sad part is that the longer they can delay being forced to incorporate the tuners into all new TVs, the longer they can continue selling the tuners at $250 a piece. The simple fact is that the demand for digital TVs is increasing, but it would increase more quickly if the prices came down. At the same time, the manufacturers can most likely keep the price higher as long as they're still selling analog sets at all price points, and keeping the digital sets mostly in the larger sizes at higher price ranges.
Besides getting digital-to-analog converters, most people will still be able to use their analog TVs for cable, satellite, VHS/DVD, etc. (though, of course, the people this will affect most are those that don't already have cable or satellite service and may not be able to go out and buy a digital converter when the analog signals go out).
I think that's why things that are generally at a higher-level (as the review says this book is) tend to be much better, and have a longer shelf-life, than the typical programming book. At the same time, I find it to be helpful to get particular books to build my own basis for a particular language or application, and then find more detailed and up-to-date information from there. Of course, I have about 6 boxes of computer books (mostly programming, some administration) sitting in my room waiting to be unpacked after moving across the country about a month ago.
As another poster pointed out, though, the ebooks that are packed on the CD with more and more of the new books are great, especially when you don't want to lug a 900 page book around (or worse, 3 or 4 of them, as I have a tendency to read on multiple things at a time to keep from getting bored with a particular subject).
11. Consumer attitude towards pricing is that CDs are way, way to pricey and that record stores/labels could afford to sell them way cheaper. Obviously our industry has totally failed here to create value for our customers. You hear nowhere near the bellyaching about software where you buy a Microsoft Office CD that costs them 82 cents to make and they sell for $300! Or about videogames that sell for fifty bucks.
I'd have to say that last part is not quite true. Office and Windows are probably among the most highly pirated pieces of software in the industry, and price point has a lot to do with that. A great deal of the popularity of the open source movement in business has more to do with cost than with the availability of the source code. Similarly, most gamers feel that the prices of PC games are too high (this may or may not be true of console games as well, I find that many gamers feel that console games are a better value in some cases because bugs are less prevalent with the limited platform than with PC games). The PC games industry has an added problem in that the early adopters (who pay the most for those games) also are the most likely to suffer from the bugs in that game and have to spend the most time working through those bugs. Software like Office, on the other hand, is something few people buy more than once every few years (Office 97 is still the most common version, though Office 2000 is growing), and usually purchase with a computer (at a lower price point, when they're already spending quite a bit of money).
As an additional point, the consumers of music CDs tend to represent a much broader range of incomes, whereas the majority of Office licenses go to corporations, and the gamers that buy the most PC games are the same people that are spending $400 on a video card that will be replaced in the product line in 6 months (meaning that they'll buy another video card in 6-12 months at nearly the same price point).
What my personal exposure to the PC gamers has shown (through doing tech support and running an online gaming league) is that gamers are starting to pay more attention to the price/performance ratio of their hardware, and are more willing to spend the $50+ for a new game from a reliable developer that has a good history (or perceived good history) of releasing games that are fairly well finished and will provide a great deal of entertainment for their money (ie replay value, online experience, and the depth of the single play-through). Gamers are streaming towards AMD CPUs for their price/performance, and nVidia's GeForce MX line, even though they know they can get something better if they pay more money, they get the best value, knowing fully well that the system requirements of games are well below what they're buying anyway.
It's because consumers feel they've been getting additional value from software and games, but not from music. Is the pop star of today really any better than the pop star of years gone by? Albums now are longer and better produced, but is the music really any better? A lot of our customers don't feel so, so the price of CDs to them still seems to be too high.
Actually, although many people do feel that the value of newer albums isn't as much as older albums were previously, I think the biggest factor is that the music industry said that CD prices would drop, and they have instead risen. When I first started buying CDs they were about $5 more than the cassettes I was buying before that, even though they were already cheaper to produce than cassettes. Since my budget for music didn't grow, I was buying about 2/3rds as much music as I had been buying before, simply because I was spending $15 per CD rather than $10 per cassette. Now that my budget for that has grown, the CD prices have risen as well, and a new CD can run anywhere from $17 to $20 for even non-top-40 bands, unless I take the time to go looking for them at smaller stores with smaller selections to get them for the $14 or $15 I was paying 10 years ago. So, the record industry raised prices, lowered manufacturing costs (CDs cost about 1/2-1/3 the cost of a cassette to produce), lowered the royalties for many of their artists for CDs (experimental format charge), and lied to the consumers, saying the prices would drop when the CD became the prevalent format, and then never dropping the prices. Records cost more today, too, but that's understandable because of a much more limited supply and demand, so they're produced in much smaller numbers (a new record tends to run about $20-30, depending on the length of the album (how many records it takes up), the number pressed, and anything else unusual about it, such as unusual colours for the records themselves).
It's certainly not unusual for me to drop $100-200 every time I walk into a record store, but when I'm walking away with fewer albums each time, or have to spend more time in the store looking for something to spend that money on, I'm less likely to do it as often. I've also spent a great deal more money buying music online in the last 4 years than buying it in stores, because stores simply can't afford to stock a lot of the stuff I like to listen to (or, if it's Wal-Mart, Sam Goody, and the like, they will refuse to stock or sell many of the albums I buy, or only sell censored versions of those albums). After all, how many record stores want to stock a CD that they might only sell 1 copy of each year it's on their shelves? It's especially helpful that many of the record labels (or sub-labels in some cases) that carry a few of the bands I listen to sell direct from their website at prices that are near or lower than what you've quoted the major labels are selling albums to record stores for, and are very up-front about whether or not the version you're buying is censored (something that's sometimes not as obvious in a store).
I have such difficulty imagining what the high-ups at RIAA are thinking. Crushing diversity and turning broadcasters against them isn't going to help even them one single bit.
Diversity is exactly what they don't want, and any broadcaster that isn't owned by them doesn't matter to them, anyway. Even if 90% of the music that was available on Napster came straight out of the top 40, the remaining 10% was large enough to create some diversity, moving listeners to buy independant CDs or CDs from artists that barely register on the RIAA's scope. Diversity is part of what the internet has created in music, and is one of the biggest reasons that a #1 album today sells about half as many copies as a #1 album 10 years ago.
Before the internet was in most people's homes, the music industry could easily guide people's listening habits, and react when an artist managed to slip past them and sell CDs without their help. When Nirvana started selling copies of their first major-label album, the industry reacted by pushing them into heavy radio and MTV rotations and signing any band that sounded remotely like Nirvana, and then pushed all of that onto the airwaves. The same thing can be seen through most of the recording industry's modern history, ultimately speeding up the normal cycle of music being rejected by society in favour of something different, so the life-span of 'grunge rock' was about 2-3 years instead of the 10 years it might've been had it hit in an atmosphere where the industry wasn't pushing two-bit clones to try to squeeze out every penny. This is also why some artists will see one album or single bring in outrageous sales, and then the next will fall horribly, because people are no longer interested in hearing something from them when they heard the previous single everywhere they went.
Once the internet hit, people could find new music for themselves, or get recommendations (and samples) from other people all over the world, either through chat programs (including instant messaging) or through bulletin boards on websites either for artists they like or general music interest sites. Most of the larger online music stores will recommend things based on whatever metrics they use to determine what you might like from what you've bought (or what you're looking at), and will let you listen to short samples of the music. All of this means that people are spending more of their CD-buying money on back catalogues and lesser-known artists, so the recording industry isn't making as much of a profit as they could if everyone was buying what they told them to (though, of course, they're still making money off of most of those CDs, and they write off any money they lose from supporting a particular artist anyway).
Personally, the majority of my music comes from recommendations of people I trust (in terms of their tastes in music anyway), or from particular artists that I've found reliably release music I enjoy, even if their music changes in style quite a bit from one release to the next. In many cases I'm not aware that a new album has been released until it's been around long enough to get some reviews (or for someone else I know to have bought it), so I'll get a chance to find out whether or not I should worry about that particular album, and go find some way to really listen to at least a few songs from it before I buy it.
People are becoming more discerning buyers and are growing a more diverse taste in music. This makes the consumers less predictable for the RIAA's member corporations, and they, understandably, don't like that. What they should be doing to capitalize on this is open themselves up to cater to the internet consumers, but instead they're trying to push it away, because they don't understand, yet, how to handle this whole thing. Chances are that whatever they come up with will be lacking in some ways, but once they find something that's just good enough (rather than as good as can be), it'll most likely gain enough acceptance that the majority of people will forget what they've been doing here until the next new medium comes along, just as they'd forgotten about the fit the industry threw over tapes and just about anything else that came along.
They also seem to be the chain with the people most likely to have no clue what you're asking for if you ask for a large coffee. No, I'm not going to learn your marketroid names, I'm going to ask for what I want, which is the biggest damned cup on your little plaque over there. I don't want to refill my coffee cup once I'm at work, and the damned coffee is so hot that I can't drink it for an hour or two anyway.
I was irked when I ordered an extra-large and they told me 'we dont have extra-large anymore'. Then again, I was irked when the Taco Bell told me they don't have chili-cheese burritos anymore, too.
Non-ADD suffers should remember that when the PS2 originally debuted, there were significant problems with it's anti-aliasing abilities. Every two-bit flamebaiter was crowing the latest 'clever' pun like "Tekken Jag Tournament."
'I was playing PS2 and cut myself on the jaggies'
Anyway, this is also why SoulCalibur on the DC looks better than Tekken Tag on the PS2. GTA3, Devil May Cry, etc definitely look great, but then you're not really talking launch titles any more (then again, the Fry's in San Diego had TTT running on a small TV and SC running on a PC monitor and people were still waiting in line to reserve PS2s and leaving DCs that cost less than half as much on the shelves).
Consider their statement sort of a peak processing level if everything is perfect. How fast are today's machines if you (a)add together all of the processing done in the P4, the graphics chip, the audio chip, and the MPEG decoder in your DVD controller, and (b)you assume that it's running some hypothetical instruction sequence loaded with parallelism and (c)instruction scheduling is perfect?
Not to mention that of those items, the graphics chip is quickly becoming the fastest of those chips, producing the highest theoretical numbers of floating point operations per second, primarily because they only handle a small number of operations (compared to an x86 chip) and are designed specifically for executing those operations as quickly as possible. The XBox was touted as 80 gigaflops, and probably 78-79 (if not all 80) of those came from the nVidia graphics chip (since their consumer boards that shipped shortly after were rated ~76).
Chances are that they're taking the numbers from each 'core', each of which is most likely optimized for a reduced set of very specific functions (and let's face it, most PC games today are heavily reliant on the graphics card for their speed, so a console is going to be heavily reliant on it's graphics chip). The numbers are still fairly impressive as long as the number of processing cores is in the single digits, but it's still not going to run Windows/MacOS/Linux 100x faster than the 10-gigaflop P4/G4 systems.
The XBox supposedly can do around 80 gigaflops, though I'm not sure if that's some weird combination of the CPU and GPU or just the graphics engine (which is certainly more powerful than the CPU in that system; the TNT2 card supposedly handles 15gigaflops, GeForce3: 76...).
Of course, most of the Apple press I've seen discussing G4s love the gigaflop ratings for the G4 itself (12-15 gigaflops on the newer dual-processor systems), but shy away from the rating when they add that it comes with a GeForce4MX, probably because the GeForce4 has far fewer operations that it has to be capable of handling than even the RISC G4.
Which is why the development system for business for the next 5 years will be Visual Studio 6.0. Look around, companies can barely stay afloat. When are they going to have the money and time to rewrite all their inhouse apps or retrain their people?
I've been using VS.Net since the last RC, and it's been very useful using C# and VB.Net in tandem for a lot of small projects that would normally be done in VB around here. That said, though, VS6 won't be pulled from my dev systems any time soon, simply because only a couple of the people here are even considering using VS.Net. Everyone seems to be happy with the results, but not everyone's ready to make the jump, nor do all of the projects have the funding to upgrade development software and give people time (or training) to learn the changes (whether in the interface or in the language(s) they're using).
Besides, I've got plenty of code that still needs to be maintained and that I will not be updating to VB.Net (or managed C++ or C#) any time soon, simply because there are too many possible things that could need rewriting.
The OEMs want this basically because they can sell placement in their distributions (or at least buy cheaper). Microsoft, of course, does not want this, as it means they have to make each component better than the alternative, instead of just having a better total distribution.
If Microsoft sells the OS to OEMs at a lower cost without the extra products (or a reduced cost based on the number (or which) of 'middleware' applications they remove), then the OEMs will have every incentive to use anything but Microsoft's 'middleware', regardless of what their customers want and/or the quality of the software vs. competing software. The reason is simply this:
1) they get a price cut from MS 2) competitors will pay them to include their software 3) the OEMs are working on slimmer margins all the time, making almost anything that increases their profits worthwhile
I think the OEMs should be able to ship whatever 3rd party software with their computers they want to put on there. However, I don't think they should be permitted to be the people that make the final decision on what 'middleware' is on there, especially if it only benefits them (monetarily) to remove as much of the MS software as possible.
At the very least, the scheme MS has devised for WinXP SP1 (allowing end users to enable/disable middleware at any time) gives the users the choice of what's being used on their system, rather than the OEMs' profit-driven choices being hard-coded.
Nothing but an OS, no browser or media player. If you want that then MS must sell it on the open market. MS isn't going away and the lawsuit must force a more level playing field.
Sell it on the open market for what? The going price of the next-largest competitor? So, for a browser you're looking at... free. For a media player you're probably looking at ads + nag screens or $10 to remove them.
The actual result of the DoJ settlement proposal is more along the lines of allowing people to remove access to these components from everything except those functions that will not work with any other company's replacement (Windows Update is usually a good example of this, since it doesn't seem to work with other browsers). There are a few other points in there, but that's the one that will be most visible to most people (the majority of it has to do with contracts with ISVs, ISPs, and OEMs, so people won't really see the changes there unless their vendors make changes to other developers' software because of the contractual changes).
Personally, I think the judge should choose something more of a middle ground between the DoJ proposal and the 9 states' proposal. Unfortunately, there really isn't much to go on in the case that the DoJ originally made (after the appeal threw out quite a bit of it), and the majority of the case was built upon contractual items excluding (or making very costly) competitors from the market. The case didn't lay a good groundwork for opening up code and breaking applications from the operating system, primarily because the easiest thing to prove is what's written down and given to other companies, the contracts they had with them.
Other than that, antitrust law isn't about 'a more level playing field', it's about keeping the biggest player on the field from preventing other players entering the field. Microsoft made contracts with other companies that made it prohibitive for them to use or sell other people's software when it competed with their own, and opening the source code to Office (part of the 9 states' proposal) doesn't address that situation (though both proposals include contractual changes that will address it).
My thumbprint, picture, and signature are all stored in the CA DMV's database, which also has my SS# (required to get even a basic ID card in CA). Furthermore, there's a mag-strip on the back of the card so the cops just run it through a reader (keeps them from having to learn how to type I guess), which will in turn retrieve the information and display it for them in their car.
Realisticly, the only way you truly can keep all of your information from being thrown in a database and shared throughout the government is by not being a member of society.
As a musician and developer with equal interest in both I have a hard time looking at my code and seeing poetry or music.
Besides my love for music itself, what attracts me to actually playing and writing music is the mathematical relationships involved in music. You can go into quite a bit of math just to figure out how the 12-steps of the western scale were devised, and there's a whole series of numbers in every piece of music, whether it's the way particular instruments interact or the way in which a series of notes relate to one another (or the notes within a chord relate to one another). Sometimes thinking about music in this fashion can be limiting, but at other times it creates the next logical piece when constructing a song (ie the bridge can be created by determining a particular mathematical relationship with the chorus, or a fill can be derived from the existing pieces around it).
At the same time, there's always more than one way to write a particular program, and the decision to go one way or the other can sometimes be purely the coder's personality rather than a tradeoff for speed or capabilities.
Re:Well, they're not *quite* the same
on
Hacker Survey
·
· Score: 1
I find the differences to be more limited, in that most users of my software are going to have very similar experiences with it, and can more easily quantify any complaints they have about it (and aren't likely to come up with completely different interpretations of it).
Otherwise, for me anyway, both fill a need to create something. Music may bring out more of the emotional side, I sometimes feel the music expressing feelings which a piece of code can not readily do, but when a particular piece of code is done the feeling is essentially the same as when a particular piece of music is ready. Still, it's all an application of a limited set of pre-defined parts to come to a final construction, applying some math, logic, and intuition to the piece at hand.
As far as this portion: Frankly, all the music YOU'LL ever write has basically been written; after hundreds of years of musical development, it's damned hard to find anything new to call your own. (It's not impossible, but very, very, very hard.)
Speaking strictly in terms of the western scale (which has not been used throughout the history of music, or even in every culture), you have 12 notes (including the octave) and 10 octaves (the common range of human hearing) ((11x10)+1 ~111 notes). Not even taking into account the various methods (depending on type of instrument) for playing notes outside of the western scale on a tempered instrument (bends, tremolo, etc), and various effects that can be applied (pitch-shifting, creating sounds that don't exist on real instruments, simulating environments, and so on), what can be played on just a single instrument without taking chords and rhythm into account becomes quite amazing just based on the number of notes you wish to play in a given sequence. The question is simply one of the sounds you're willing to invoke and the instruments you wish to combine, as well as rhythmic differences (after all, most songs would simply not be the same with the same sequence of notes in a different rhythm). The boundaries are equally created by one's own imagination and the imagination of those in the past, and sometimes those little rules that constrain artists are exactly what must be broken to create the proper sound in a piece of music.
I thought the biggest users of filters were clueless parents who heard some horror story of the internet, bought a filter and installed it just so they could be 'hands-off' parents. Parents don't want the responsibilly of monitoring the net usage of their kid.
Even then, they're not really affected by the filter, because they can just enter a password to bypass it. Still, with state (and attempted federal) laws sometimes requiring the filters in certain places (such as libraries as he stated), and those places certainly seeing more users than the average home computer, it's likely that the libraries and similar places are among the biggest sources of income for the people creating and selling this software (not to mention that one good-sized library will buy more licenses than they're likely to sell to the home users of the neighborhood that library is in).
The big parts of the problem as specifically related to libraries are that: 1) the people using the library computers to access the internet may not have another way to gain access (though this also means they may not be very adept at determining whether or not the information they find is correct and/or useful)
2) public expectations of a library vary from one neighborhood to the next (in some areas it's quite possible that a certain level of censorship is not only practiced in a library, but also expected by the people that utilize that library)
3) many libraries do not have a really good computer staff, and therefore do not know how to manage the software well (to reduce overblocking and extend the filter to block unwanted sites), and even if they wanted more information, there's really not much information available until/unless you log complaints about overblocking / underblocking (and this goes for the parents trying to take the hands-off approach as well as libraries, schools, and other institutions)
Obviously, when it comes to parents and their kids, I believe that discussion is always the best answer for dealing with ethical and moral issues, as well as just dealing with any questions the kids may have (rather than dodging the issue), and that parents should be more aware of what their children are doing. Still, parents should be able to make informed decisions about this kind of software, and with laws preventing recovering the lists of blocked sites from these types of software (because of defeating encryption), and the software publishers/developers themselves unwilling to publish the information, they're being prevented from getting the information needed to really make an informed decision. This tends to leave them with either the option of overblocking (and underblocking) and possibly limiting their children (especially teen-agers) from important information that they may simply be uncomfortable discussing with their parents (and therefore may not discuss with their parents, especially if a piece of software their parents installed blocks them from the information), using other means to block them out entirely (which probably wouldn't be very effective since the kids usually know more about the computer than the parents eventually), or leaving it open and unmonitored.
I don't care how many "good guys" know about a vulnerability. I do care if the "bad guys" know about it!
By sitting on the information for any time longer than the length of time that it takes to post an alert message, I believe that "security researchers" are unnecesarily putting our systems in danger.
Actually, by sitting on the information they're reducing the possible number of 'bad guys' and 'good guys' that have the information. Essentially, the only 'bad guys' that are going to know about it during the period between discovery and release are the ones that actually discover it for themselves or were told by someone that discovered it. It's very rare for an exploit to become widespread before public disclosure, whereas after public disclosure it could be anywhere from a few hours to a few months for the exploit to be in use (depending, of course, on the severity of the exploit, the availability of publicly connected vulnerable systems, and the amount of information released).
I'm not going to defend HP's invoking the DMCA (because there's no excuse for invoking it), but even SnoSoft isn't going to defend the actions of the person that posted the information within 1 day of first contacting HP about the vulnerability. I have little doubt that HP's upcoming fix is going to be public more quickly because of the publicity, but at the same time that means less testing, and a higher chance for future problems.
I believe the purpose of the comment was to get response and feedback, though it's not quite clear how that can be accomplished. The CNN article does state that there will be a more finalized plan in September, and hopefully that will supply the proper methods both for feedback on where legal protections are needed as well as where information on vulnerabilities should be sent within the government.
It is possible for the network to disable or block your phone remotely using the IMEI. I don't think thats a right they should have unless I harm their network. Therefore changing the IMEI will make it impossible for them to block a phone based on IMEI and will make it impossible for them to trace or block legit phones (as in bought and paid for) at their whim.
Actually, it seems quite likely that if the IMEI doesn't match the customer ID that your phone sends you won't be able to access the network anyway, or they may add some fees to your bill for changing phones (or using multiple phones). Basically you're changing the identity of the phone, but not yourself, and whatever you've changed the IMEI to will be attached to your information in the phone company's database.
I agree that it's a pointless law, though, unless, as stated by another poster elsewhere, the purpose is to shut down shops that are changing the IMEI (currently legally) for people that stole the phones. While there may be privacy concerns that would lead someone to want to change their IMEI, they're really not gaining any privacy by doing so, as the new IMEI can easily be attached to the person using it unless they also change the subscriber identification in the phone (which would be stealing phone service most likely).
People are used to upgrading their computers fairly regularly and there are often compelling reasons to upgrade, which is why this tactic works there - although notice how many ordinary people still have ancient computers sitting on their desks.
Even then, people that upgrade their computers frequently eventually start raising their own threshold on what is a 'compelling reason to upgrade'. I went from upgrading my CPU when I could get 1.5x the MHz rating (on a similar CPU, so essentially 1.5x the speed minus the overhead of the system), to waiting until it was nearly 2x, and now my next CPU upgrade is coming primarily because replacing a dead motherboard is only about 50-60% of the cost of upgrading CPU & motherboard & RAM to either a P4 or Athlon system, and the MHz rating will still be 2+x that of the existing system. Similarly, I went from upgrading video cards almost constantly to skipping the speed-only upgrades (ie GeForce SDR to DDR and Pro or whatever the bumped-up GeForce was), and now I'm running a 64MB GeForce2 GTS video card (that I pre-ordered from Hercules) and considering whether or not the 128MB GeForce4 Ti4400 is worth the upgrade, or waiting for the next card to drive down the price of the Ti4600.
On top of all of that, I've still got a P3-500 sitting on one end of my desk (the Dell P4-1.7 the company gave me sitting on the other end of the desk) that fills a number of purposes quite well (without even feeling remotely slow).
As far as MPEG-2 vs MPEG-4, MPEG-4 isn't an upgrade, it's a specification for streamable content that includes video, audio, and interactive features. Basically, you can use MPEG-2 in an MPEG-4, and most people do. The majority of those MPEG-4 videos that float around simply drop the bitrates and/or combine different codecs for audio and video to get the best compression rates. MPEG-4 content can be encoded with just about any codec, the specification doesn't state that it has to be anything in particular, and overall it doesn't really suit the TV medium which is most often used for providing non-interactive content. Maybe the networks and/or cable companies would like to offer more interactive content (and some cable and satellite providers do), but that's just more crap piled on top of the bandwidth used for the video and audio, and the cable and satellite providers can do it anyway because they control their own broadcast specifications to some degree (satellite much less than cable).
and if democrats are in power they'll just implement a tax-payer funded buy-back program to buy people's old TVs. Then a year later they'll implement another tax-payer funded program to buy TVs for people that participated in the buy-back program.
Slashdot Mirror
Often, when I recommend AppleCare to people, they say, "Well, I had $OLDER_MAC for $LENGTH_OF_TIME and never had a problem at all!"
In the 6 years I've owned PCs, I've had 2 parts fail outside of the standard warranty, and 2 parts fail under warranty (outside of DOA parts which were simply returned for replacement). The 2 under warranty were taken care of very quickly by DiamondMM (when they were still DiamondMM anyway, those were 12MB Voodoo2 cards btw, destroyed by their own heat and the proximity required for SLI operation with the standard SLI cable). The two parts that failed outside of warranty were a CD-ROM drive (from excessive use) which cost $40 to replace with a faster drive, and a motherboard (a screw found it's way into a place you never want a screw to go during a move across country) which would have cost $100 to replace, if I hadn't decided to just upgrade to a faster CPU/RAM combination unsupported by the (now dead) motherboard.
Of course, most of the parts I bought 6 years ago are still running strong in other people's machines, mostly family members that don't upgrade very often and mostly do web surfing / email / occasional work from home. I've also got one particular system that's running with no parts newer than 5 years, including a 2x DVD-ROM drive and a 6x2 CD-RW (and the only part I've ever bought that went up in price after I bought it: an ASUS P2B-LS motherboard that went up in price for a while because of the cost of the SCSI controller on the board), it's even running the Riva128 video card that I originally bought to run beside the V2 cards that ate themselves (though I've got a GeForce256SDR somewhere that I'm planning to put in there for the higher res & refresh rate support).
In short, support contracts are only worth it in the worst-case scenario, otherwise they wouldn't be offered in the first place (after all, they have to make money). The only people that I would really recommend a support contract to are those that don't feel comfortable working on the computers themselves (which are, of course, most people) and don't have good relationships with anyone that does. The majority of computer problems are things that can be solved by careful observation of the problem and a careful check of all possible causes. Many times the most complicated thing that needs to be done to solve a problem is flashing the BIOS or making sure all of the cards are seated properly and all cable connections are correct.
Perhaps there is only one cable tv company where you live, but that is not the case everywhere.
In San Diego county there are 2 cable companies, but the 2nd one only covers areas that Cox cable doesn't cover. San Diego is the 6th largest (by population) city in the US. Now that I've moved across the country, Cox cable is the only cable company anywhere in site. Their standard cable TV service is just as bad here, too, it's almost to the point where the only thing keeping me from going to putting up an antenna and getting the signals from the air is the fact that the only channels I watch are the cable channels (ie History Channel, Discovery, HBO, and CNN/FNC).
The world's issues of human rights, hunger, and power struggles have little to do with the issues surrounding the DMCA. True. But then, giving up your right to copy a CD will not end world hunger. And the fact that there is civil war somewhere in the world does not detract from the importance of fair use - its still all about money, control, and power. Try to maintain some of that perspective you claim to hold.
Or, to put it a better way:
What if the Congress had spent the time it took to pass the DMCA doing something useful instead, like trying to end hunger in the US (clean up your own home before trying to clean up the neighborhood), or finding a way to reduce prison populations without putting murderers on the street with early parole.
Oh, and their estimate of $250 additional cost is a load of crap. Yes, it would cost that much (or more) today, because of supply and demand
The really sad part is that the longer they can delay being forced to incorporate the tuners into all new TVs, the longer they can continue selling the tuners at $250 a piece. The simple fact is that the demand for digital TVs is increasing, but it would increase more quickly if the prices came down. At the same time, the manufacturers can most likely keep the price higher as long as they're still selling analog sets at all price points, and keeping the digital sets mostly in the larger sizes at higher price ranges.
Besides getting digital-to-analog converters, most people will still be able to use their analog TVs for cable, satellite, VHS/DVD, etc. (though, of course, the people this will affect most are those that don't already have cable or satellite service and may not be able to go out and buy a digital converter when the analog signals go out).
Topical material is quickly out of date
I think that's why things that are generally at a higher-level (as the review says this book is) tend to be much better, and have a longer shelf-life, than the typical programming book. At the same time, I find it to be helpful to get particular books to build my own basis for a particular language or application, and then find more detailed and up-to-date information from there. Of course, I have about 6 boxes of computer books (mostly programming, some administration) sitting in my room waiting to be unpacked after moving across the country about a month ago.
As another poster pointed out, though, the ebooks that are packed on the CD with more and more of the new books are great, especially when you don't want to lug a 900 page book around (or worse, 3 or 4 of them, as I have a tendency to read on multiple things at a time to keep from getting bored with a particular subject).
11. Consumer attitude towards pricing is that CDs are way, way to pricey and that record stores/labels could afford to sell them way cheaper. Obviously our industry has totally failed here to create value for our customers. You hear nowhere near the bellyaching about software where you buy a Microsoft Office CD that costs them 82 cents to make and they sell for $300! Or about videogames that sell for fifty bucks.
I'd have to say that last part is not quite true. Office and Windows are probably among the most highly pirated pieces of software in the industry, and price point has a lot to do with that. A great deal of the popularity of the open source movement in business has more to do with cost than with the availability of the source code. Similarly, most gamers feel that the prices of PC games are too high (this may or may not be true of console games as well, I find that many gamers feel that console games are a better value in some cases because bugs are less prevalent with the limited platform than with PC games). The PC games industry has an added problem in that the early adopters (who pay the most for those games) also are the most likely to suffer from the bugs in that game and have to spend the most time working through those bugs. Software like Office, on the other hand, is something few people buy more than once every few years (Office 97 is still the most common version, though Office 2000 is growing), and usually purchase with a computer (at a lower price point, when they're already spending quite a bit of money).
As an additional point, the consumers of music CDs tend to represent a much broader range of incomes, whereas the majority of Office licenses go to corporations, and the gamers that buy the most PC games are the same people that are spending $400 on a video card that will be replaced in the product line in 6 months (meaning that they'll buy another video card in 6-12 months at nearly the same price point).
What my personal exposure to the PC gamers has shown (through doing tech support and running an online gaming league) is that gamers are starting to pay more attention to the price/performance ratio of their hardware, and are more willing to spend the $50+ for a new game from a reliable developer that has a good history (or perceived good history) of releasing games that are fairly well finished and will provide a great deal of entertainment for their money (ie replay value, online experience, and the depth of the single play-through). Gamers are streaming towards AMD CPUs for their price/performance, and nVidia's GeForce MX line, even though they know they can get something better if they pay more money, they get the best value, knowing fully well that the system requirements of games are well below what they're buying anyway.
It's because consumers feel they've been getting additional value from software and games, but not from music. Is the pop star of today really any better than the pop star of years gone by? Albums now are longer and better produced, but is the music really any better? A lot of our customers don't feel so, so the price of CDs to them still seems to be too high.
Actually, although many people do feel that the value of newer albums isn't as much as older albums were previously, I think the biggest factor is that the music industry said that CD prices would drop, and they have instead risen. When I first started buying CDs they were about $5 more than the cassettes I was buying before that, even though they were already cheaper to produce than cassettes. Since my budget for music didn't grow, I was buying about 2/3rds as much music as I had been buying before, simply because I was spending $15 per CD rather than $10 per cassette. Now that my budget for that has grown, the CD prices have risen as well, and a new CD can run anywhere from $17 to $20 for even non-top-40 bands, unless I take the time to go looking for them at smaller stores with smaller selections to get them for the $14 or $15 I was paying 10 years ago. So, the record industry raised prices, lowered manufacturing costs (CDs cost about 1/2-1/3 the cost of a cassette to produce), lowered the royalties for many of their artists for CDs (experimental format charge), and lied to the consumers, saying the prices would drop when the CD became the prevalent format, and then never dropping the prices. Records cost more today, too, but that's understandable because of a much more limited supply and demand, so they're produced in much smaller numbers (a new record tends to run about $20-30, depending on the length of the album (how many records it takes up), the number pressed, and anything else unusual about it, such as unusual colours for the records themselves).
It's certainly not unusual for me to drop $100-200 every time I walk into a record store, but when I'm walking away with fewer albums each time, or have to spend more time in the store looking for something to spend that money on, I'm less likely to do it as often. I've also spent a great deal more money buying music online in the last 4 years than buying it in stores, because stores simply can't afford to stock a lot of the stuff I like to listen to (or, if it's Wal-Mart, Sam Goody, and the like, they will refuse to stock or sell many of the albums I buy, or only sell censored versions of those albums). After all, how many record stores want to stock a CD that they might only sell 1 copy of each year it's on their shelves? It's especially helpful that many of the record labels (or sub-labels in some cases) that carry a few of the bands I listen to sell direct from their website at prices that are near or lower than what you've quoted the major labels are selling albums to record stores for, and are very up-front about whether or not the version you're buying is censored (something that's sometimes not as obvious in a store).
I have such difficulty imagining what the high-ups at RIAA are thinking. Crushing diversity and turning broadcasters against them isn't going to help even them one single bit.
Diversity is exactly what they don't want, and any broadcaster that isn't owned by them doesn't matter to them, anyway. Even if 90% of the music that was available on Napster came straight out of the top 40, the remaining 10% was large enough to create some diversity, moving listeners to buy independant CDs or CDs from artists that barely register on the RIAA's scope. Diversity is part of what the internet has created in music, and is one of the biggest reasons that a #1 album today sells about half as many copies as a #1 album 10 years ago.
Before the internet was in most people's homes, the music industry could easily guide people's listening habits, and react when an artist managed to slip past them and sell CDs without their help. When Nirvana started selling copies of their first major-label album, the industry reacted by pushing them into heavy radio and MTV rotations and signing any band that sounded remotely like Nirvana, and then pushed all of that onto the airwaves. The same thing can be seen through most of the recording industry's modern history, ultimately speeding up the normal cycle of music being rejected by society in favour of something different, so the life-span of 'grunge rock' was about 2-3 years instead of the 10 years it might've been had it hit in an atmosphere where the industry wasn't pushing two-bit clones to try to squeeze out every penny. This is also why some artists will see one album or single bring in outrageous sales, and then the next will fall horribly, because people are no longer interested in hearing something from them when they heard the previous single everywhere they went.
Once the internet hit, people could find new music for themselves, or get recommendations (and samples) from other people all over the world, either through chat programs (including instant messaging) or through bulletin boards on websites either for artists they like or general music interest sites. Most of the larger online music stores will recommend things based on whatever metrics they use to determine what you might like from what you've bought (or what you're looking at), and will let you listen to short samples of the music. All of this means that people are spending more of their CD-buying money on back catalogues and lesser-known artists, so the recording industry isn't making as much of a profit as they could if everyone was buying what they told them to (though, of course, they're still making money off of most of those CDs, and they write off any money they lose from supporting a particular artist anyway).
Personally, the majority of my music comes from recommendations of people I trust (in terms of their tastes in music anyway), or from particular artists that I've found reliably release music I enjoy, even if their music changes in style quite a bit from one release to the next. In many cases I'm not aware that a new album has been released until it's been around long enough to get some reviews (or for someone else I know to have bought it), so I'll get a chance to find out whether or not I should worry about that particular album, and go find some way to really listen to at least a few songs from it before I buy it.
People are becoming more discerning buyers and are growing a more diverse taste in music. This makes the consumers less predictable for the RIAA's member corporations, and they, understandably, don't like that. What they should be doing to capitalize on this is open themselves up to cater to the internet consumers, but instead they're trying to push it away, because they don't understand, yet, how to handle this whole thing. Chances are that whatever they come up with will be lacking in some ways, but once they find something that's just good enough (rather than as good as can be), it'll most likely gain enough acceptance that the majority of people will forget what they've been doing here until the next new medium comes along, just as they'd forgotten about the fit the industry threw over tapes and just about anything else that came along.
They also seem to be the chain with the people most likely to have no clue what you're asking for if you ask for a large coffee. No, I'm not going to learn your marketroid names, I'm going to ask for what I want, which is the biggest damned cup on your little plaque over there. I don't want to refill my coffee cup once I'm at work, and the damned coffee is so hot that I can't drink it for an hour or two anyway.
I was irked when I ordered an extra-large and they told me 'we dont have extra-large anymore'. Then again, I was irked when the Taco Bell told me they don't have chili-cheese burritos anymore, too.
12 ounce is usually a 'child' sized cup. 16 is a 'small' 20 is a 'regular' 22 is a 'medium' 32 is a large, and 44 is an extra large.
Unless you're at McDonald's, their largest size is 42 ounces...
Non-ADD suffers should remember that when the PS2 originally debuted, there were significant problems with it's anti-aliasing abilities. Every two-bit flamebaiter was crowing the latest 'clever' pun like "Tekken Jag Tournament."
'I was playing PS2 and cut myself on the jaggies'
Anyway, this is also why SoulCalibur on the DC looks better than Tekken Tag on the PS2. GTA3, Devil May Cry, etc definitely look great, but then you're not really talking launch titles any more (then again, the Fry's in San Diego had TTT running on a small TV and SC running on a PC monitor and people were still waiting in line to reserve PS2s and leaving DCs that cost less than half as much on the shelves).
Consider their statement sort of a peak processing level if everything is perfect. How fast are today's machines if you (a)add together all of the processing done in the P4, the graphics chip, the audio chip, and the MPEG decoder in your DVD controller, and (b)you assume that it's running some hypothetical instruction sequence loaded with parallelism and (c)instruction scheduling is perfect?
Not to mention that of those items, the graphics chip is quickly becoming the fastest of those chips, producing the highest theoretical numbers of floating point operations per second, primarily because they only handle a small number of operations (compared to an x86 chip) and are designed specifically for executing those operations as quickly as possible. The XBox was touted as 80 gigaflops, and probably 78-79 (if not all 80) of those came from the nVidia graphics chip (since their consumer boards that shipped shortly after were rated ~76).
Chances are that they're taking the numbers from each 'core', each of which is most likely optimized for a reduced set of very specific functions (and let's face it, most PC games today are heavily reliant on the graphics card for their speed, so a console is going to be heavily reliant on it's graphics chip). The numbers are still fairly impressive as long as the number of processing cores is in the single digits, but it's still not going to run Windows/MacOS/Linux 100x faster than the 10-gigaflop P4/G4 systems.
The XBox supposedly can do around 80 gigaflops, though I'm not sure if that's some weird combination of the CPU and GPU or just the graphics engine (which is certainly more powerful than the CPU in that system; the TNT2 card supposedly handles 15gigaflops, GeForce3: 76...).
Of course, most of the Apple press I've seen discussing G4s love the gigaflop ratings for the G4 itself (12-15 gigaflops on the newer dual-processor systems), but shy away from the rating when they add that it comes with a GeForce4MX, probably because the GeForce4 has far fewer operations that it has to be capable of handling than even the RISC G4.
Which is why the development system for business for the next 5 years will be Visual Studio 6.0. Look around, companies can barely stay afloat. When are they going to have the money and time to rewrite all their inhouse apps or retrain their people?
I've been using VS.Net since the last RC, and it's been very useful using C# and VB.Net in tandem for a lot of small projects that would normally be done in VB around here. That said, though, VS6 won't be pulled from my dev systems any time soon, simply because only a couple of the people here are even considering using VS.Net. Everyone seems to be happy with the results, but not everyone's ready to make the jump, nor do all of the projects have the funding to upgrade development software and give people time (or training) to learn the changes (whether in the interface or in the language(s) they're using).
Besides, I've got plenty of code that still needs to be maintained and that I will not be updating to VB.Net (or managed C++ or C#) any time soon, simply because there are too many possible things that could need rewriting.
The OEMs want this basically because they can sell placement in their distributions (or at least buy cheaper). Microsoft, of course, does not want this, as it means they have to make each component better than the alternative, instead of just having a better total distribution.
If Microsoft sells the OS to OEMs at a lower cost without the extra products (or a reduced cost based on the number (or which) of 'middleware' applications they remove), then the OEMs will have every incentive to use anything but Microsoft's 'middleware', regardless of what their customers want and/or the quality of the software vs. competing software. The reason is simply this:
1) they get a price cut from MS
2) competitors will pay them to include their software
3) the OEMs are working on slimmer margins all the time, making almost anything that increases their profits worthwhile
I think the OEMs should be able to ship whatever 3rd party software with their computers they want to put on there. However, I don't think they should be permitted to be the people that make the final decision on what 'middleware' is on there, especially if it only benefits them (monetarily) to remove as much of the MS software as possible.
At the very least, the scheme MS has devised for WinXP SP1 (allowing end users to enable/disable middleware at any time) gives the users the choice of what's being used on their system, rather than the OEMs' profit-driven choices being hard-coded.
Nothing but an OS, no browser or media player. If you want that then MS must sell it on the open market. MS isn't going away and the lawsuit must force a more level playing field.
Sell it on the open market for what? The going price of the next-largest competitor? So, for a browser you're looking at... free. For a media player you're probably looking at ads + nag screens or $10 to remove them.
The actual result of the DoJ settlement proposal is more along the lines of allowing people to remove access to these components from everything except those functions that will not work with any other company's replacement (Windows Update is usually a good example of this, since it doesn't seem to work with other browsers). There are a few other points in there, but that's the one that will be most visible to most people (the majority of it has to do with contracts with ISVs, ISPs, and OEMs, so people won't really see the changes there unless their vendors make changes to other developers' software because of the contractual changes).
Personally, I think the judge should choose something more of a middle ground between the DoJ proposal and the 9 states' proposal. Unfortunately, there really isn't much to go on in the case that the DoJ originally made (after the appeal threw out quite a bit of it), and the majority of the case was built upon contractual items excluding (or making very costly) competitors from the market. The case didn't lay a good groundwork for opening up code and breaking applications from the operating system, primarily because the easiest thing to prove is what's written down and given to other companies, the contracts they had with them.
Other than that, antitrust law isn't about 'a more level playing field', it's about keeping the biggest player on the field from preventing other players entering the field. Microsoft made contracts with other companies that made it prohibitive for them to use or sell other people's software when it competed with their own, and opening the source code to Office (part of the 9 states' proposal) doesn't address that situation (though both proposals include contractual changes that will address it).
My thumbprint, picture, and signature are all stored in the CA DMV's database, which also has my SS# (required to get even a basic ID card in CA). Furthermore, there's a mag-strip on the back of the card so the cops just run it through a reader (keeps them from having to learn how to type I guess), which will in turn retrieve the information and display it for them in their car.
Realisticly, the only way you truly can keep all of your information from being thrown in a database and shared throughout the government is by not being a member of society.
As a musician and developer with equal interest in both I have a hard time looking at my code and seeing poetry or music.
Besides my love for music itself, what attracts me to actually playing and writing music is the mathematical relationships involved in music. You can go into quite a bit of math just to figure out how the 12-steps of the western scale were devised, and there's a whole series of numbers in every piece of music, whether it's the way particular instruments interact or the way in which a series of notes relate to one another (or the notes within a chord relate to one another). Sometimes thinking about music in this fashion can be limiting, but at other times it creates the next logical piece when constructing a song (ie the bridge can be created by determining a particular mathematical relationship with the chorus, or a fill can be derived from the existing pieces around it).
At the same time, there's always more than one way to write a particular program, and the decision to go one way or the other can sometimes be purely the coder's personality rather than a tradeoff for speed or capabilities.
I find the differences to be more limited, in that most users of my software are going to have very similar experiences with it, and can more easily quantify any complaints they have about it (and aren't likely to come up with completely different interpretations of it).
Otherwise, for me anyway, both fill a need to create something. Music may bring out more of the emotional side, I sometimes feel the music expressing feelings which a piece of code can not readily do, but when a particular piece of code is done the feeling is essentially the same as when a particular piece of music is ready. Still, it's all an application of a limited set of pre-defined parts to come to a final construction, applying some math, logic, and intuition to the piece at hand.
As far as this portion:
Frankly, all the music YOU'LL ever write has basically been written; after hundreds of years of musical development, it's damned hard to find anything new to call your own. (It's not impossible, but very, very, very hard.)
Speaking strictly in terms of the western scale (which has not been used throughout the history of music, or even in every culture), you have 12 notes (including the octave) and 10 octaves (the common range of human hearing) ((11x10)+1 ~111 notes). Not even taking into account the various methods (depending on type of instrument) for playing notes outside of the western scale on a tempered instrument (bends, tremolo, etc), and various effects that can be applied (pitch-shifting, creating sounds that don't exist on real instruments, simulating environments, and so on), what can be played on just a single instrument without taking chords and rhythm into account becomes quite amazing just based on the number of notes you wish to play in a given sequence. The question is simply one of the sounds you're willing to invoke and the instruments you wish to combine, as well as rhythmic differences (after all, most songs would simply not be the same with the same sequence of notes in a different rhythm). The boundaries are equally created by one's own imagination and the imagination of those in the past, and sometimes those little rules that constrain artists are exactly what must be broken to create the proper sound in a piece of music.
I thought the biggest users of filters were clueless parents who heard some horror story of the internet, bought a filter and installed it just so they could be 'hands-off' parents. Parents don't want the responsibilly of monitoring the net usage of their kid.
Even then, they're not really affected by the filter, because they can just enter a password to bypass it. Still, with state (and attempted federal) laws sometimes requiring the filters in certain places (such as libraries as he stated), and those places certainly seeing more users than the average home computer, it's likely that the libraries and similar places are among the biggest sources of income for the people creating and selling this software (not to mention that one good-sized library will buy more licenses than they're likely to sell to the home users of the neighborhood that library is in).
The big parts of the problem as specifically related to libraries are that:
1) the people using the library computers to access the internet may not have another way to gain access (though this also means they may not be very adept at determining whether or not the information they find is correct and/or useful)
2) public expectations of a library vary from one neighborhood to the next (in some areas it's quite possible that a certain level of censorship is not only practiced in a library, but also expected by the people that utilize that library)
3) many libraries do not have a really good computer staff, and therefore do not know how to manage the software well (to reduce overblocking and extend the filter to block unwanted sites), and even if they wanted more information, there's really not much information available until/unless you log complaints about overblocking / underblocking (and this goes for the parents trying to take the hands-off approach as well as libraries, schools, and other institutions)
Obviously, when it comes to parents and their kids, I believe that discussion is always the best answer for dealing with ethical and moral issues, as well as just dealing with any questions the kids may have (rather than dodging the issue), and that parents should be more aware of what their children are doing. Still, parents should be able to make informed decisions about this kind of software, and with laws preventing recovering the lists of blocked sites from these types of software (because of defeating encryption), and the software publishers/developers themselves unwilling to publish the information, they're being prevented from getting the information needed to really make an informed decision. This tends to leave them with either the option of overblocking (and underblocking) and possibly limiting their children (especially teen-agers) from important information that they may simply be uncomfortable discussing with their parents (and therefore may not discuss with their parents, especially if a piece of software their parents installed blocks them from the information), using other means to block them out entirely (which probably wouldn't be very effective since the kids usually know more about the computer than the parents eventually), or leaving it open and unmonitored.
I don't care how many "good guys" know about a vulnerability. I do care if the "bad guys" know about it!
By sitting on the information for any time longer than the length of time that it takes to post an alert message, I believe that "security researchers" are unnecesarily putting our systems in danger.
Actually, by sitting on the information they're reducing the possible number of 'bad guys' and 'good guys' that have the information. Essentially, the only 'bad guys' that are going to know about it during the period between discovery and release are the ones that actually discover it for themselves or were told by someone that discovered it. It's very rare for an exploit to become widespread before public disclosure, whereas after public disclosure it could be anywhere from a few hours to a few months for the exploit to be in use (depending, of course, on the severity of the exploit, the availability of publicly connected vulnerable systems, and the amount of information released).
I'm not going to defend HP's invoking the DMCA (because there's no excuse for invoking it), but even SnoSoft isn't going to defend the actions of the person that posted the information within 1 day of first contacting HP about the vulnerability. I have little doubt that HP's upcoming fix is going to be public more quickly because of the publicity, but at the same time that means less testing, and a higher chance for future problems.
I believe the purpose of the comment was to get response and feedback, though it's not quite clear how that can be accomplished. The CNN article does state that there will be a more finalized plan in September, and hopefully that will supply the proper methods both for feedback on where legal protections are needed as well as where information on vulnerabilities should be sent within the government.
It is possible for the network to disable or block your phone remotely using the IMEI. I don't think thats a right they should have unless I harm their network. Therefore changing the IMEI will make it impossible for them to block a phone based on IMEI and will make it impossible for them to trace or block legit phones (as in bought and paid for) at their whim.
Actually, it seems quite likely that if the IMEI doesn't match the customer ID that your phone sends you won't be able to access the network anyway, or they may add some fees to your bill for changing phones (or using multiple phones). Basically you're changing the identity of the phone, but not yourself, and whatever you've changed the IMEI to will be attached to your information in the phone company's database.
I agree that it's a pointless law, though, unless, as stated by another poster elsewhere, the purpose is to shut down shops that are changing the IMEI (currently legally) for people that stole the phones. While there may be privacy concerns that would lead someone to want to change their IMEI, they're really not gaining any privacy by doing so, as the new IMEI can easily be attached to the person using it unless they also change the subscriber identification in the phone (which would be stealing phone service most likely).
People are used to upgrading their computers fairly regularly and there are often compelling reasons to upgrade, which is why this tactic works there - although notice how many ordinary people still have ancient computers sitting on their desks.
Even then, people that upgrade their computers frequently eventually start raising their own threshold on what is a 'compelling reason to upgrade'. I went from upgrading my CPU when I could get 1.5x the MHz rating (on a similar CPU, so essentially 1.5x the speed minus the overhead of the system), to waiting until it was nearly 2x, and now my next CPU upgrade is coming primarily because replacing a dead motherboard is only about 50-60% of the cost of upgrading CPU & motherboard & RAM to either a P4 or Athlon system, and the MHz rating will still be 2+x that of the existing system. Similarly, I went from upgrading video cards almost constantly to skipping the speed-only upgrades (ie GeForce SDR to DDR and Pro or whatever the bumped-up GeForce was), and now I'm running a 64MB GeForce2 GTS video card (that I pre-ordered from Hercules) and considering whether or not the 128MB GeForce4 Ti4400 is worth the upgrade, or waiting for the next card to drive down the price of the Ti4600.
On top of all of that, I've still got a P3-500 sitting on one end of my desk (the Dell P4-1.7 the company gave me sitting on the other end of the desk) that fills a number of purposes quite well (without even feeling remotely slow).
As far as MPEG-2 vs MPEG-4, MPEG-4 isn't an upgrade, it's a specification for streamable content that includes video, audio, and interactive features. Basically, you can use MPEG-2 in an MPEG-4, and most people do. The majority of those MPEG-4 videos that float around simply drop the bitrates and/or combine different codecs for audio and video to get the best compression rates. MPEG-4 content can be encoded with just about any codec, the specification doesn't state that it has to be anything in particular, and overall it doesn't really suit the TV medium which is most often used for providing non-interactive content. Maybe the networks and/or cable companies would like to offer more interactive content (and some cable and satellite providers do), but that's just more crap piled on top of the bandwidth used for the video and audio, and the cable and satellite providers can do it anyway because they control their own broadcast specifications to some degree (satellite much less than cable).
and if democrats are in power they'll just implement a tax-payer funded buy-back program to buy people's old TVs. Then a year later they'll implement another tax-payer funded program to buy TVs for people that participated in the buy-back program.