I was chastising 1) the person who submitted the article, and 2) the/. editors. Perhaps it was unreasonable to come down on the guy who was just submitting the story that he thought was accurate. Still, I think it was very easy to find info which contradicts what is in the story (for instance, on the sony website).
Some might say that the editors don't have any responsibility to check the facts of a story before they post it. I disagree. I think there is due diligence which is proper and wasn't done.
So maybe instead of RTFA, it's check the facts, man.
All I can say is that I bothered to look at the actual specs of the unit. There is nothing that indicates that you can connect the unit to a TV and play DVD-Video discs. The only thing that you can do with it is connect it to a PC and play DVD-Video using PowerDVD or other software loaded onto the PC.
Would you classify the DVD-ROM drive in a PC as a DVD Player? Not really, because that would confuse it with a standalone DVD player. That exact confusion is here. It's a DVD-ROM drive, but not a DVD player.
But thanks for the insult. If I was illiterate, at least I wouldn't have to read your insults.
After exploring all the information on the Sony site, there is no indication that you can play DVDs directly to a TV. It appears to essentially be a portable drive that can play MP3s on it's own.
Sony product page Sony's cool new Digital Relay(TM) portable battery operated CD-RW/DVD-ROM/Memory Stick® drive burns CDs when attached to a PC or Macintosh® computer using the USB 2.0/1.1 port. Detach the drive from the computer, and you now have a portable CD player that also plays MP3 and WAV files on CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, or Memory Stick media.
It plays DVD-ROMs, not DVD-Video discs. This basically is a MP3 player that can use DVDs. So you can get 4.7GB on a MP3 disc instead of 650-700 MB. I still think it's worth a link on/., but for pete's sake, RTFA before you submit, and editors, RTFA before you post!
I was in a hurry when I typed that. The diameter of pluto's orbit is 7,000,000,000 miles, which I am assuming that is used as the measurement for the size of the solar system.
The sun is about 800,000 miles across. The diameter of pluto is about 7,000,000,000 miles. The volume of a sphere with that diameter is about 4.3e+28 miles. You could fit something on the order of 5e+22 suns in that space.
Considering that labels are under some amount of pressure for price-fixing/gouging, and they desperately want to cram some kind of content control mechanism into digital audio, it seems that they might be able to do that if they made the discs cheaper.
That seems unlikely, but let's say they released DVD-As/SACDs for $12, and left CDs at $15-20. DVDs were deliberately priced low to make the format attractive, and that seems to have contributed to its success.
Now, It seems unlikely to me that the labels would do such a thing. If they were that smart, they would already have their own pay-napster and be making $10/month off from millions of people. But if they did, they just might get to that "critical mass" needed to make one of those new formats the next CD.
It certainly sounds like it will have a video in connection add-on:
As we mentioned before, the Jukebox Multimedia will soon have a module - pictured on the left - to allow video recording. This does not comes without some added controversy (like the trading movies and music files are not controversial enough). Right now the Music, Film and TV industries are trying to push a bill in congress that would make it illegal to use digital recorders the same way we use our VCRs. They have decided that the Supreme Court's Betamax ruling (that says taping you favorite TV shows for later viewing does not constitute copyright infringement) shouldn't apply to digital recorders.
IIRC, Sony even wants to encrypt the signal between the computer and the monitor. Even if that were the case, let's say I aim a digital camera at the screen and take photos, then run the photos through OCR. Or use voice-recognition software and read the book aloud into it. Or just re-type the damn thing in.
As Thomas Jefferson said, if you want exclusive control of your ideas, keep them to yourself.
I remember circa 1992-1995, you could easily get windows 3.1, office 6, etc. PC presence in offices was growing faster than IT departments could manage the chaos (if an actual IT department existed at all). An awful lot of people copied all their software. The result: Windows and Office was everywhere. Microsoft didn't have the BSA cracking down like crazy. They deliberately let copying continue in order to spread their product. And it worked. Now the junkies are hooked.
The effect of the Patriot act and similar freedom-crushings is that people don't even make the government do its own dirty work anymore. The uni says "remove that info because the government *might* have a problem with it." We're on our way to a self-policing state in which unorthodox opinions are quelled with "shh...someone might hear you." It's sad that a university isn't willing to at least let the authorities decide what they don't like, never mind fight them when they come knocking.
I find it ironic that commericals are running on US TV right now which celebrate freedom. In one, a few guys in a diner are talking and one starts complaining about how the gummint takes a lot of money in taxes. The other guys start getting nervous and tell him to keep quiet or else someone will come after him. Essentially they are propaganda to get people to support the government's war, yet the very instruments of that war are having the exact effect of limiting freedom shown in that commercial.
Apparently, a bunch of golden age heroes were never copyrighted and just faded into obscurity
If they were created, they were copyrighted. Perhaps the copyrights were not registered, but that doesn't make them public domain. Perhaps the copyright owners are dead or defunct, or just don't care. Perhaps no one knows for sure who had the copyrights. And perhaps the copyright has expired.
Just don't say "they were never copyrighted" because that's just not true.
I'm fully aware of spoofed e-mail headers. I didn't put every last detail of my thought process, but that doesn't mean I didn't consider the facts. Your third point acknowledges what I was saying, i.e., the spammer has to provide some way to contact the advertised business in order to purchase their product. As I said in my original post, you publish the email/phone/web site somewhere (say, similar to the MAPS database). This means that a human being extracts the important info from the spam. Then the automated tool connects to the database, retrieves the info, and launches the attack.
Here's a thought on how to defeat spammers - flood them. Publish their e-mail/phone/web site, and distribute a tool that will e-mail/phone/connect to them automatically, over and over. Like a DDoS attack. The important part is not just this would be annoying and crash their system, but makes it impossible to distinguish between legitimate customers and the attack. This, ultimately, makes it useless to spam, because it is no longer cost effective if you can't get any business from it.
The difference is, Scientists will eventually admit they were wrong and their "beliefs" will morph and change over time based on evidence
I believe God made all of the natural laws which science seeks to discover. God also made spiritual truths which religion (or philosophy) seeks to discover. Both the natural laws and spiritual truths are eternal and unchanging. However, our understanding of those laws changes. I can say that I believe certain things about God the way I can say that I believe Newtonian physics. However, I have learned that there are cases where Newtonian physics breaks down. It was simply that the language of Newtonian physics is inadequate to describe the fullness of the true natural laws.
The apostle Paul writes that "we see as through a glass, darkly." Anyone who claims to have a lock on all spiritual truth is like someone who says they know all scientific truth. I believe that the day will come when I find out what things I thought were true but were about as accurate as "the earth is flat."
Very true. However, as Mr. Valentine said, "Our products just aren't engineered for security." If you let the assumption continue, i.e., that people need to still use Microsoft products, then yes, the answer is the new MS solution. If you respond, with, "that's right, MS is insecure, that's why we keep telling you to use Linux," then the Palladium argument holds less water. In fact, it calls into question whether Microsoft will ever get it together, since they can't seem to while someone else has.
If Mr. Valentine had been coached by the marketing team, he would have said, "all current computer systems are insecure by nature, because all code is trusted by default" or some such thing which would have tarred Linux, Unix, BSD, Apple, Be, and everything else under the sun with the same brush. Then the "we have the solution" is a lot more potent (in marketFUD-speak, at least).
If you read the previous/. article, you'll see that the m130 can only display 4096 colors (12 bit). However, they play some dithering tricks to claim the 58621 colors. Of course, if you did the same thing with real 16 bit color, you could probably claim millions of colors.
The bottom line is that they are quite a ways off. Now, they are saying, "well, we didn't quite give you the full 64k colors, and we're offering a refund even though we're just a few percent off." They look like they are going out of their way for people who wouldn't notice the difference between 65536 and 58621. But in fact they are trying to make sure no one calls them on the fact that they lied - big time, and can only deliver 4096 colors.
Here's an article from the Chicago Tribune back in June about companies who are using call centers in India. Instead of some obnoxious, apathetic criminal-justice major from the local community college, you get a polite, knowledgeable Indian with a master's degree.
Dee in Denver, or Deepali in Delhi?
India is a leader in `remote outsourcing,' in which customer-service calls are answered overseas. The industry's U.S. clients save money, but they don't want their customers to know that they aren't.
By Liz Sly Tribune foreign correspondent
June 23, 2002
NEW DELHI -- It is 5 p.m. and, in an air-conditioned office complex on the city's outskirts, several dozen of the brightest and best of India's educated young elite are gearing up for a long night of what in the industry is known as "remote outsourcing."
On the other side of the globe, America is just waking up. Soon, this building is buzzing with the sound of nearly 3,000 people, some dressed in jeans, others in saris, talking to people in Chicago, New York, Cleveland or Memphis about their computer problems, credit card bills and Internet accounts.
What most of the Americans dialing their toll-free numbers don't realize is that the person called Bradley or Sophia who is helping them on the other end of the line is really an Indian named Sanchoy or Deepali speaking from halfway across the world.
That's the whole point of Spectramind, one of the first and most sophisticated of the homegrown call centers that have sprung up across India in the past two years, setting a trend that is expected to lure billions of dollars of business in the years ahead.
Raman Roy, Spectramind's founder and chief executive, denies that any deception is involved. His representatives don't lie, he said.
But they don't exactly tell the truth, either. The agents give themselves American names. If customers ask representatives where they are located, they respond that they are not allowed to disclose their location for security reasons.
Everything about this industry is highly sensitive. Roy declines to disclose the names of his 15 business clients, except to say that the vast majority of them are American and most are in the Fortune 500. It is written into their contracts that he not identify them, and he invites visitors to the building only on the condition that they not reveal the corporate identities.
He cites reasons of competitiveness; just as likely, the big names whose logos adorn the walls of Spectramind don't want their customers to know that they are talking to Indians in India.
"It's still a new thing," Roy acknowledged. "Most Americans haven't woken up to it yet."
No expense has been spared to sustain the illusion that this could be Dallas or Detroit, not Delhi. Outside, a dust storm presages the imminent arrival of the monsoon season, the mercury hovers at a scorching 112 degrees and the occasional cow wanders by.
Inside Spectramind's climate-controlled offices, decorated in soothing pastel shades, this could be the corporate headquarters of any trendy new American start-up. Clocks on the wall show the time in Chicago and New York. Tennessee Titans and Atlanta Falcons pennants flutter over cubicles.
New recruits watch reruns of "Friends" over and over until they can talk exactly like Chandler, Monica or Phoebe. They learn the rules of American baseball and the names of American football stars.
"We have to be sure that if a customer from Chicago wants to chat about last night's Bears game, our representative can say something intelligent," said Roy.
People who have never seen a snowflake in their lives are shown pictures of American cities in winter and are required to familiarize themselves with that day's weather in Chicago or Denver before starting work. They are schooled in the U.S. system of government and in the eating habits of Americans.
Roy helped pioneer the trend nearly a decade ago when, as a longtime employee of American Express in India, he helped set up the first customer call service in India. Other multinationals already in India quickly followed, including GE and British Airways.
Then Roy hit on the idea of providing call-center services to U.S. companies with no existing presence in India, and two years ago, Spectramind was born.
Industry employs thousands
For India, it is a booming industry that employs about 110,000 and generates around $1.5 billion in annual revenue. By 2008, the industry is expected to have grown tenfold, with India commanding around 4 percent of the global outsourcing market, according to the consultancy McKinsey & Co.
India faces competition from the Philippines and Ireland. But it is Indians themselves who give India the edge. No other country offers such a vast pool of English-speaking, well-educated talent at such low cost.
Most college graduates in the U.S. would turn up their noses at a job answering customer queries over the phone. In India, which produces 2 million to 3 million college graduates a year and nowhere near enough jobs to employ them all, a career at Spectramind is highly sought-after.
For every job advertised, there are around 400 applicants. A college degree is required. Many employees have postgraduate qualifications. They earn around $3,000 to $4,000 a year, or around 20 percent of the salary paid to an American for the same work. Higher telecommunications costs eat into some of the savings, but overall an American company using Spectramind's services will cut costs by 50 percent, Roy said.
"For a lower price we're giving better quality work from better qualified people," said Roy.
Few customers guess truth
Rarely is the illusion detected. Occasionally, a customer will have read a newspaper story about the growth of the industry in India and ask. But otherwise, they never guess, said Deepali Sharma, a.k.a. Sophia, a bright 23-year-old with a master's degree in business management.
"Some people have asked me if I'm from Spain or Australia," she said, "but never India."
The only problem comes when callers, so impressed with the friendliness and service of their representative, ask for dates: Sophia has been asked out to lunch three times since she started work in February.
"I always just tell them, this is a professional conversation, so please let's just talk about business," she purrs, slipping into the flawless American accent she perfected over 12 weeks of rigorous training.
Slashdot Mirror
Some might say that the editors don't have any responsibility to check the facts of a story before they post it. I disagree. I think there is due diligence which is proper and wasn't done.
So maybe instead of RTFA, it's check the facts, man.
"Once something has been approved by the Government, It's no longer immoral"
Rev. Lovejoy
Would you classify the DVD-ROM drive in a PC as a DVD Player? Not really, because that would confuse it with a standalone DVD player. That exact confusion is here. It's a DVD-ROM drive, but not a DVD player.
But thanks for the insult. If I was illiterate, at least I wouldn't have to read your insults.
PowerDVD loads onto the PC. At that point, you just use the unit as a reguar DVD-ROM drive attached to the PC. That's a far cry from a standalone DVD.
After exploring all the information on the Sony site, there is no indication that you can play DVDs directly to a TV. It appears to essentially be a portable drive that can play MP3s on it's own.
Sony product page
Sony's cool new Digital Relay(TM) portable battery operated CD-RW/DVD-ROM/Memory Stick® drive burns CDs when attached to a PC or Macintosh® computer using the USB 2.0/1.1 port. Detach the drive from the computer, and you now have a portable CD player that also plays MP3 and WAV files on CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, or Memory Stick media.
It plays DVD-ROMs, not DVD-Video discs. This basically is a MP3 player that can use DVDs. So you can get 4.7GB on a MP3 disc instead of 650-700 MB. I still think it's worth a link on /., but for pete's sake, RTFA before you submit, and editors, RTFA before you post!
I was in a hurry when I typed that. The diameter of pluto's orbit is 7,000,000,000 miles, which I am assuming that is used as the measurement for the size of the solar system.
The sun is about 800,000 miles across. The diameter of pluto is about 7,000,000,000 miles. The volume of a sphere with that diameter is about 4.3e+28 miles. You could fit something on the order of 5e+22 suns in that space.
That seems unlikely, but let's say they released DVD-As/SACDs for $12, and left CDs at $15-20. DVDs were deliberately priced low to make the format attractive, and that seems to have contributed to its success.
Now, It seems unlikely to me that the labels would do such a thing. If they were that smart, they would already have their own pay-napster and be making $10/month off from millions of people. But if they did, they just might get to that "critical mass" needed to make one of those new formats the next CD.
As we mentioned before, the Jukebox Multimedia will soon have a module - pictured on the left - to allow video recording. This does not comes without some added controversy (like the trading movies and music files are not controversial enough). Right now the Music, Film and TV industries are trying to push a bill in congress that would make it illegal to use digital recorders the same way we use our VCRs. They have decided that the Supreme Court's Betamax ruling (that says taping you favorite TV shows for later viewing does not constitute copyright infringement) shouldn't apply to digital recorders.
Go ahead and try...I have caller ID.
As Thomas Jefferson said, if you want exclusive control of your ideas, keep them to yourself.
Maybe, but this is slashdot. I'm waiting for the rerun.
http://www.legitgov.org/front.html
I remember circa 1992-1995, you could easily get windows 3.1, office 6, etc. PC presence in offices was growing faster than IT departments could manage the chaos (if an actual IT department existed at all). An awful lot of people copied all their software. The result: Windows and Office was everywhere. Microsoft didn't have the BSA cracking down like crazy. They deliberately let copying continue in order to spread their product. And it worked. Now the junkies are hooked.
I find it ironic that commericals are running on US TV right now which celebrate freedom. In one, a few guys in a diner are talking and one starts complaining about how the gummint takes a lot of money in taxes. The other guys start getting nervous and tell him to keep quiet or else someone will come after him. Essentially they are propaganda to get people to support the government's war, yet the very instruments of that war are having the exact effect of limiting freedom shown in that commercial.
If they were created, they were copyrighted. Perhaps the copyrights were not registered, but that doesn't make them public domain. Perhaps the copyright owners are dead or defunct, or just don't care. Perhaps no one knows for sure who had the copyrights. And perhaps the copyright has expired.
Just don't say "they were never copyrighted" because that's just not true.
I'm fully aware of spoofed e-mail headers. I didn't put every last detail of my thought process, but that doesn't mean I didn't consider the facts. Your third point acknowledges what I was saying, i.e., the spammer has to provide some way to contact the advertised business in order to purchase their product. As I said in my original post, you publish the email/phone/web site somewhere (say, similar to the MAPS database). This means that a human being extracts the important info from the spam. Then the automated tool connects to the database, retrieves the info, and launches the attack.
Here's a thought on how to defeat spammers - flood them. Publish their e-mail/phone/web site, and distribute a tool that will e-mail/phone/connect to them automatically, over and over. Like a DDoS attack. The important part is not just this would be annoying and crash their system, but makes it impossible to distinguish between legitimate customers and the attack. This, ultimately, makes it useless to spam, because it is no longer cost effective if you can't get any business from it.
What, like their APIs?
I believe God made all of the natural laws which science seeks to discover. God also made spiritual truths which religion (or philosophy) seeks to discover. Both the natural laws and spiritual truths are eternal and unchanging. However, our understanding of those laws changes. I can say that I believe certain things about God the way I can say that I believe Newtonian physics. However, I have learned that there are cases where Newtonian physics breaks down. It was simply that the language of Newtonian physics is inadequate to describe the fullness of the true natural laws.
The apostle Paul writes that "we see as through a glass, darkly." Anyone who claims to have a lock on all spiritual truth is like someone who says they know all scientific truth. I believe that the day will come when I find out what things I thought were true but were about as accurate as "the earth is flat."
If Mr. Valentine had been coached by the marketing team, he would have said, "all current computer systems are insecure by nature, because all code is trusted by default" or some such thing which would have tarred Linux, Unix, BSD, Apple, Be, and everything else under the sun with the same brush. Then the "we have the solution" is a lot more potent (in marketFUD-speak, at least).
The bottom line is that they are quite a ways off. Now, they are saying, "well, we didn't quite give you the full 64k colors, and we're offering a refund even though we're just a few percent off." They look like they are going out of their way for people who wouldn't notice the difference between 65536 and 58621. But in fact they are trying to make sure no one calls them on the fact that they lied - big time, and can only deliver 4096 colors.
Here's an article from the Chicago Tribune back in June about companies who are using call centers in India. Instead of some obnoxious, apathetic criminal-justice major from the local community college, you get a polite, knowledgeable Indian with a master's degree.
Dee in Denver, or Deepali in Delhi?
India is a leader in `remote outsourcing,' in which customer-service calls are answered overseas. The industry's U.S. clients save money, but they don't want their customers to know that they aren't.
By Liz Sly
Tribune foreign correspondent
June 23, 2002
NEW DELHI -- It is 5 p.m. and, in an air-conditioned office complex on the city's outskirts, several dozen of the brightest and best of India's educated young elite are gearing up for a long night of what in the industry is known as "remote outsourcing."
On the other side of the globe, America is just waking up. Soon, this building is buzzing with the sound of nearly 3,000 people, some dressed in jeans, others in saris, talking to people in Chicago, New York, Cleveland or Memphis about their computer problems, credit card bills and Internet accounts.
What most of the Americans dialing their toll-free numbers don't realize is that the person called Bradley or Sophia who is helping them on the other end of the line is really an Indian named Sanchoy or Deepali speaking from halfway across the world.
That's the whole point of Spectramind, one of the first and most sophisticated of the homegrown call centers that have sprung up across India in the past two years, setting a trend that is expected to lure billions of dollars of business in the years ahead.
Raman Roy, Spectramind's founder and chief executive, denies that any deception is involved. His representatives don't lie, he said.
But they don't exactly tell the truth, either. The agents give themselves American names. If customers ask representatives where they are located, they respond that they are not allowed to disclose their location for security reasons.
Everything about this industry is highly sensitive. Roy declines to disclose the names of his 15 business clients, except to say that the vast majority of them are American and most are in the Fortune 500. It is written into their contracts that he not identify them, and he invites visitors to the building only on the condition that they not reveal the corporate identities.
He cites reasons of competitiveness; just as likely, the big names whose logos adorn the walls of Spectramind don't want their customers to know that they are talking to Indians in India.
"It's still a new thing," Roy acknowledged. "Most Americans haven't woken up to it yet."
No expense has been spared to sustain the illusion that this could be Dallas or Detroit, not Delhi. Outside, a dust storm presages the imminent arrival of the monsoon season, the mercury hovers at a scorching 112 degrees and the occasional cow wanders by.
Inside Spectramind's climate-controlled offices, decorated in soothing pastel shades, this could be the corporate headquarters of any trendy new American start-up. Clocks on the wall show the time in Chicago and New York. Tennessee Titans and Atlanta Falcons pennants flutter over cubicles.
New recruits watch reruns of "Friends" over and over until they can talk exactly like Chandler, Monica or Phoebe. They learn the rules of American baseball and the names of American football stars.
"We have to be sure that if a customer from Chicago wants to chat about last night's Bears game, our representative can say something intelligent," said Roy.
People who have never seen a snowflake in their lives are shown pictures of American cities in winter and are required to familiarize themselves with that day's weather in Chicago or Denver before starting work. They are schooled in the U.S. system of government and in the eating habits of Americans.
Roy helped pioneer the trend nearly a decade ago when, as a longtime employee of American Express in India, he helped set up the first customer call service in India. Other multinationals already in India quickly followed, including GE and British Airways.
Then Roy hit on the idea of providing call-center services to U.S. companies with no existing presence in India, and two years ago, Spectramind was born.
Industry employs thousands
For India, it is a booming industry that employs about 110,000 and generates around $1.5 billion in annual revenue. By 2008, the industry is expected to have grown tenfold, with India commanding around 4 percent of the global outsourcing market, according to the consultancy McKinsey & Co.
India faces competition from the Philippines and Ireland. But it is Indians themselves who give India the edge. No other country offers such a vast pool of English-speaking, well-educated talent at such low cost.
Most college graduates in the U.S. would turn up their noses at a job answering customer queries over the phone. In India, which produces 2 million to 3 million college graduates a year and nowhere near enough jobs to employ them all, a career at Spectramind is highly sought-after.
For every job advertised, there are around 400 applicants. A college degree is required. Many employees have postgraduate qualifications. They earn around $3,000 to $4,000 a year, or around 20 percent of the salary paid to an American for the same work. Higher telecommunications costs eat into some of the savings, but overall an American company using Spectramind's services will cut costs by 50 percent, Roy said.
"For a lower price we're giving better quality work from better qualified people," said Roy.
Few customers guess truth
Rarely is the illusion detected. Occasionally, a customer will have read a newspaper story about the growth of the industry in India and ask. But otherwise, they never guess, said Deepali Sharma, a.k.a. Sophia, a bright 23-year-old with a master's degree in business management.
"Some people have asked me if I'm from Spain or Australia," she said, "but never India."
The only problem comes when callers, so impressed with the friendliness and service of their representative, ask for dates: Sophia has been asked out to lunch three times since she started work in February.
"I always just tell them, this is a professional conversation, so please let's just talk about business," she purrs, slipping into the flawless American accent she perfected over 12 weeks of rigorous training.
"Then they shut up."
Copyright (c) 2002, Chicago Tribune
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