I purchase plenty of books from Amazon. When I go to the bookstore, and find book 3 of a fascinating sounding series, but cannot find book 1 or book 2, it'll get to me by Amazon a lot quicker than it will to have them order it. (And if I liked one series by the author, chances are good I'll like other series by the same author.) I still need to checkout the smaller bookstores around here, see what they have, but the big chain stores are what are generally available. They're pretty good if you're buying the latest in a series, not so great if you want to start from scratch with one.
I *MISS* Powell's in Portland.:-( (If I save up, last time I checked, I could purchase $50 of USED books and get shipping for free...)
This is a much bigger problem with patents than copyright. I don't know of any author, or potential author, who quivers in fear over the possibility that something they wrote so closely resembles somebody else's work that they can't prove its their own original product. This isn't nearly as true with patents as they are often overly broad and often preclude derivative works until the patent expires. With fiction, or even non-fiction, you don't have to worry about the "Romance Novel" being patented. You can't directly use somebody else's characters, or write something that follows in lock step with somebody else's plot, but you can sure as heck write things that have the same feel as somebody else's works.
If you're in a rural environment, setting up a decentralized energy production MAY make sense. Most of the US's population - I can't speak about the rest of the world as I don't know - is located in the highly developed coastlines and other metropolises where decentralized energy doesn't really make as much sense. These metropolises need a lot of energy all the time. Also, people mean different things when they talk about decentralized energy production. Some mean smaller energy companies, some mean self production. Self production for most of us isn't an option, either because of location restrictions or because of the high start up and potentially high maintenance costs. I'm also leery of millions of homes connected to the grid generating their own energy. Who maintains all the disparate systems? Heck, who makes sure they were all setup properly to begin with? Most people currently purchasing renewables for self production put a fair amount of research into them, but if there's some sort of mandate to get X% of people to self produce energy, i'm pretty sure we're going to run into a maintenance mess. Maybe not with the first home owner, but what about the second, or third?
Also, the efficiency of smaller plants is usually not the same as the efficiency for much larger plants. To be off grid requires batteries and the loss of energy when storing or retrieving the energy from the batteries. Wind turbines are a perfect example of larger is better. Larger swept area greatly increases the energy harvested from the wind. A much taller tower gets you higher wind speeds. The same can be said about any sort of fossil fuel based production. The individual units aren't as efficient. When talking of decentralized plants, a larger plant probably takes nearly the same amount of overhead, once it's built, than a smaller one, and there are fewer power lines to run.
Much as I hate to admit it, for many things large corporations actually make sense. They can build bigger, more efficient plants be it traditional fossil fuel plants, larger wind turbines, mass amounts of solar cells, nuclear plants, manufacturing, or what have you. They are not the be all, end all for everything. Many new technologies actually come from smaller companies, but it's hard to argue with the efficiencies of scale of larger companies once it's figured out how to produce whatever it is that they're making.
Also, for the green revolution it makes more sense to make your stationary energy production as efficient as possible, as opposed to trying to get cars totally off of fossil fuels. It doesn't have the energy density problems that autos have. I don't know if thorium is the answer, or breeder reactors, but either of these would work for the electric grid's base load and get us off of natural gas or coal to produce the same amount of energy. Most of our alternatives for base load, including renewables, have their own problems. Energy availability with wind and / or solar, as well as getting the production sites approved in the first place. Coal is exceptionally dirty, and fairly expensive to make cleaner. Natural gas is used a lot hear, but now you're back to fossil fuels. (I don't see getting rid of all of these plants as they run turbines that handle the spikes in the load.)
There is one thing most of us can do to help energy production and that's to ask for more energy efficient appliances, even if they cost a bit more. I think England has a 1 watt initiative - all consumer electronics must go to a 1 watt standby state. It's incredible the amount of energy that's wasted for our appliances when they're sitting there idle, and the technology isn't hard to implement. Heck, it should be easier to implement then the stupid DRM that most our products are forced to use. Further, we can ask that our PC and Console manufacturers make things so that the auto power management even while we're using them works properly. Most PCs sit there chewing up much more energy than they need, even when we're not playing the l
No DRM is silly for music...except that the iTunes store does this. I can see that technical publishers, in particular, will probably want to keep this around, but no DRM on novels would be nice and help guarantee interoperability.
I really don't like the specter of having the Betamax of the e-book world, having the authentication servers go down, and have all my books disable themselves because the e-book reader couldn't communicate with the authentication server for X days/months/years, whatever.
If we have to have DRM - and that's debatable - then I want DRM that's interoperable between the Kindle, Sony, and other BIG publishers out there that doesn't require the reader to phone home on any sort of a regular basis and allows one to transfer books from one competitor's device to the other...as you'd be able to do with no DRM, and should be able to do even with DRM if designed properly, though I could see the process being a bit of a pain.
I want this for movies and music too. No DRM, or if we have to have DRM, make it possible to transfer media that I've purchased to other devices. It still galls me that if I do the right thing and purchase media from whoever, I'm getting a broken product, and that the "pirate's" offerings are more interoperable with more devices.
Gah, slashdot ate my previous post when I logged in. Grumble.
Thermostat control with a thermostat in a logical place in every room, not some poorly placed hallway. Automatically keep the boys rooms cooler and girls rooms warmer - generalizing here. Also have it turn the thermostat on and off based on time of day / motion so that you're not eating energy when you're at work or sleeping. Heck, have a truly smart house that learns when you're about automatically rather then setting arbitrary rules that get outdated quickly.
Timed lighting.
Timed integration with automation bots like the roomba.
Centralized media center. All the music and DVDs - won't happen because of DMCA, though Netflix a-like may take its place - on one media player / server, and the speakers wired up so you can have whole house music, or each room playing whatever. Tivo says it doesn't need to record something until 8PM? Great, leave it truly off, the cable box off, the flatscreen, ps3, 360, wii, amplifier, and whole entertainment system off until somebody gets home. Background loads chew through depressing amounts of energy. Heck, have "smart" jacks that can be monitored so you know how much energy any given appliance is using.
Have an NTP server keep all those pesky clocks in synch, rather than 15-20 minutes off in either direction +/- an hour for daylight savings time. Tell which devices you even want to display the time and turn some of the annoying clocks off all together.
A kitchen assistant? Maybe. Feed an advanced recipe into your kitchen helper and have it walk you through food prep, rather than guessing if you need to put the veggies on now or not. It could pre-heat your oven while you're doing prep work so you don't forget. Tell you when it's time to start doing something. Heck, hook it up with the food network and have it pull videos of what the preparation should look like. Help you out with what you'll actually need for the week's shopping. (Lazy, can't cook guy helper would be another name for this, though it could also help with larger families.)
Is any of this needed? No. Is some of it helpful, possibly. The timed energy / heat in particular.
There is no single industry that's guaranteed to be a money maker forevermore. I believe right now we're purchasing more books then just about any other time in history, so I don't think book publishers have to look out for the digital bogey man just yet. Even in today's economy we could suffer through massive numbers of people making a transition to electronic books. It's not the authors, publishers, editors, or marketers who'd be hurt by this. Mostly it would be the guys in the manufacturing plants, warehouses, and retail. Even there, I don't think that the market for paperbacks will suddenly disappear over night. If it does look like it's going to disappear, there will be plenty of notice for those in the industry, should they heed the signs - and I think it would be more likely that if it dries up it would because people are buying fewer books, at least in the short to middle term.
There are other traditional paper based products that are already hurting...newspapers. (Maybe magazines too, I don't know.) I could actually see a small revitalization of that industry with e-book readers. If the price is right, I could see more people subscribing to a hard hitting national/international paper via e-ink devices. If done *RIGHT*, and priced right, I could see a reason for at least the national / international newspapers to start differentiating themselves again based on content and regions they focus on. They could also open up their archives. They wouldn't make nearly as much as selling their archive to a library, but selling enough subscriptions to the archives at a reasonable price should be worth the trade off. (They could also sell DVD/Blue Ray/Whatever copies of their archives, but I'm thinking more of a lookup service where the person doesn't really want to keep a whole archive of the papers locally.)
Heck, priced right and with actual stories in it, I wouldn't mind subscribing to local papers this way. Done right it would be something like a searchable microfiche - the original "image" of the paper, but with the text stored in a indexed database, adds and images indexed too.
The actual manufacturing, shipping, storage and selling of books does generate jobs, but a lot of that is in the lower end of the job spectrum. Warehouse work and retail. Not that we want to lose more of these jobs, but this end of the job market has always faced the specter of that particular job disappearing for whatever reason. No more profitable mining to be done, lumber mills closing, fisheries becoming unprofitable, what have you. Shipping and logging don't just rely on book sales. Publishers aren't going anywhere anytime soon, just as I don't really see music publishers going out of business either. The editing, marketing, and all the "traditional" roles of a top tier publisher will remain. It will be a while before the format wars on e-books stabilizes. I hope we do end up with an iTunes clear winner in this industry - even if it has DRM to start - because one of the worst things for it would be that magazines A,B,C are only accessible on device Y, academic book publishers go with device Z, these paper back publishers go with product X, etc. One $200+ device I can live with, but having to own multiple devices with the specter of the device I own ending up on the losing side of a format war, and possibly having a large chunk of my library obsolete is...unappealing.
At this point anybody who's not in the first batch and wants one will have to wait until the second batch. Most people in the first batch who've stuck with it are pretty dedicated to this type of device, more than the "general" audience that will make up the customers in a lot of the other batches. Even amongst that crowd there have been plenty who got impatient and received refunds.
I don't know when they'll start producing the second batch - I'd guess mid to late January, but I'm not part of the team - but since all the designing and prototyping is done, and they'll have some of the parts on hand already - like ~6000 cases and a bunch of analog nubs - the second batch should go smoothly. As long as nobody complains about some defect in the first batch Pandoras I'd feel pretty confident about ordering in the second batch.
If you're absolutely not going to pre-order something, then you'll have to wait until they have inventory on hand, or an e-shop in your country has one on hand to order. I don't know if that'll happen in the second batch, or some later batch. I'm confident at some point it'll happen, but I don't know what the release cycle on the Pandora will look like. This is a perfectly legitimate way to order what for most people will be a game playing / media playing toy. Others who are more excited are free to order earlier.
Props for mentioning the Pandora. I'm in the first batch and looking forward to receiving mine, hopefully by the end of the year.
It's been a longer wait than I wanted, and the wait won't be over until I have the thing in my hands. I'm not sure where I am in the queue, but it's possible the guys on the tail end of the first 4,000 won't see the units until January. I think they're going to make a big effort NOT to have that happen, but there have been a lot of unanticipated issues up to this point. Certainly anybody not in the first batch won't be getting one until sometime in 2010.
The last big thing to finalize is nearly here. Come mid October we SHOULD see the final cases shipped from the factory. I have to say I'm getting excited about it again. (While it was perpetually two months I think a lot of enthusiasm...got put on hold.)
No, I don't see it competing with the PSP, or the DS, or the iPhone. It's more powerful then the first two, and has better game controls than the later, but it's a niche device. Depending on who you are, it's either a home brew gaming machine, a portable emulator which MAY emulate at playable rates a subset of Dream Cast and Nintendo 64 games. It'll certainly emulate a good chunk of the Mame library, and most platforms with less oomph then the Dream Cast or 64. It'll also play most games that have been ported to Linux. The ID games, maybe even up to Doom3, but certainly up to Quake3. Somebody was working on Homeworld, though that had a ways to go. Most of the LucasArts adventure games will play on it, etc. I think Decent, which would be awesome with the dual analog sticks.
For me, Homebrew and independent games, a nice platform to target my own development efforts, and media player. It won't replace my PC or Laptop anytime soon. I'm not a fan of typing on small keyboards for huge chunks of time, but I'm definitely looking forward to having keyboard controls to play games that benefit from them. I like that the libraries it's using are open, and that there aren't any artificial restrictions to my use of the hardware I've purchased.
I don't see a lot of big name developers targeting their games for this device, so it won't challenge Nintendo or Sony. I hope a lot of independent games target the platform, and some truly innovative game play comes of it. (The early in development games look good - Lerp for instance.)
If you're running IE6 is it likely that you're using a modern Mac with Safari on it? Wouldn't it already have this installed?
I'm guessing Opera isn't on the list because it isn't free...but that's just a guess.
Yes, rewording things would've been more polite.
I've seen both good and bad community colleges. I actually enjoyed my time at Clark Community College in Vancouver, WA, and thought many of the classes they taught there were more challenging then the 300 level classes I took at WSU.
The classes at the SF Community college - at least the ones on comp-sci and the cert based ones were pretty well run as well. But I've also seen classes bogged down by people who should be bumped from the current level of math that they're taking to a remedial course, or allowed to fail and not allowed to soak up all the time in the class. Unfortunately in some of those classes more of the class was in the remedial state then at the level the class were supposed to be.
In colleges, even community colleges, I believe the teachers should be able to - easily - bump disruptive students from their classes, ban them entirely if their behavior doesn't improve, or if the student can't cram to meet the level of the class, to refer them to a lower level be it for math, science, English, or what have you. Actually, I think this should be true of any school. I also think it should be easier, in high school at least, for exceptional students to either have access to accelerated classes, or find some way to teach them a subject like geometry - maybe in a study hall / work shop like setting - then allow them to test out of the class. I know plenty of smart students who've nearly failed classes because the class was going so slow it couldn't keep them engaged.
Community colleges have always had the aspect of remedial classes, but unfortunately they're having to deal with an ever increasing percentage of people who don't have the basics down. Four year colleges get this too, but not to the same extent. This means that what could be an inexpensive and effective first two years of college for a lot of students gets turned into "high school 2.0". I think that's a sad state of affairs. I think all levels of education should be able to expect a minimum proficiency of the students entering the classes, and should be able to fail the students who don't meet those requirements rather than dumbing the whole class down. That doesn't seem to be the trend.
So here's a question. How does one help anybody in a "blighted" neighborhood? Not necessarily just a poor one. There are poor neighborhoods and communities that don't have raging problems with drugs, gangs, and other "inner city" issues - and not all the gang problems are strictly inner city ones, you just have a higher concentration of the problem there.
Where drugs and gangs are a huge factor, with welfare moms, with fathers who may not know about all the children they have, and often don't help out with child support, assuming they're not in jail, what's a good way to stop the cycle those neighborhoods are in?
I can blame the circumstances all I want, but it doesn't change their circumstances. Most of the ideas I could come up with border on the totalitarian.
One thing we can do is cut back most direct welfare - i.e. money directly to single moms with children. Sure, fine, but when they continue to have children anyway, what can be done for the children? (Here I'm more worried about those who have no choice then the people who've already made their choices.)
Also, where the parent is trying to be responsible - what services actually prove to be useful? Daycare? Bussing? Programs to get the children breakfast and dinner, and not just school lunches? For a while my family was on the border of being a welfare family, and having access to daycare so mom could continue working probably helped her keep her house - she couldn't get an apartment, nobody would rent to her with children in tow in San Francisco.
I've heard suggestions of taking more children away from parents, or where there's just a mother, from her. Maybe not in this thread, but the subject has come up. How many more children would be taken? Would this solve the problem when mothers continue to have babies? (Fathers are an issue as well but it's often not easy to identify the father.) Would all the children go to foster homes, or would you end up with huge crÃches?
What about birth control? You can't talk about mandatory birth control as that treads all over just about any civil right we have, but what about getting access to implants as easy as possible? What about easy access to permanent forms of birth control if the mother - or father - decides they don't want to have any more children? Would this even be effective when in many poorer neighborhoods the number of children a father has is a point of pride to the father even if he isn't helping support the child, and mothers may choose to have more children even if there is no economic incentive to do so?
What does one do to encourage successful people to stay in such a neighborhood, or move to it, rather than abandoning it the first chance they get?
Circumstances and neighborhoods certainly go a long ways towards one's possible success in life, but I don't see a "clean" way of dealing with a neighborhood once it's reached bad straights. Are there true success stories about converting such neighborhoods? Are the success stories any way similar to each other so that the common factors can be applied to cleaning up other problem neighborhoods?
Then there are the neighborhoods where English is a second language, assuming it's spoken fluently at all by more than a minority of it's inhabitants. What's the best way to get the students speaking English, without totally ignoring their native language - be it Spanish, Chinese, or what have you? What programs have been proven to work under those circumstances, and are the neighborhoods similar enough that the solution that worked in one neighborhood could be applied to the other(s)? Is deportation really the solution...assuming that the person who doesn't speak English wasn't born here making them a citizen?
What about legalizing most drugs, taking a lot of the monetary incentive of having access to a controlled substance away? Or running such heavy patrols through these neighborhoods that most of the drug dealers are caught?
That should be fixed with a bios firmware update. Fixed my problem with a similar HP tablet.
Unfortunately I needed to install Windows to install it...but it seemed to resolve the problem. I still need to configure the tablet portion of things - I haven't gotten around to doodling with it yet - but everything else seems to work now.
One that could output 1080p natively. That could also act as a media portal. That had a minimal X install, OpenGL and SDL. With the option of installing Ubuntu or other common desktop Linux. That used either Deb or RPM package management. That had sane defaults for installation locations
That had drivers for 3D OpenGL, wireless, wired,
bluetooth, usb, and every other component. That made getting games that work under Wine to
work under it. Maybe a unique wine "profile" for each game?
If there was something like this that became popular enough, you might see more Linux adoption for games. Something like the Pandora Handheld - if it ever really gets up off the ground - but for the living room. Something that actually ends up with exclusive games. Maybe fore arcade cabinets as well.
I haven't bought or downloaded music in years. There's no DRM on "real" CDs, but the music companies don't advertise which disks are "standard" CDs and which ones have autorun programs on them. Voting with your dollar becomes a little harder in this case if you can't get accurate information on which disks have junk ware on them and which don't.
It's a similar situation with the advertisements on DVDs. The DVDs aren't required to label that there are 5-10 minutes of commercials in the guise of previews and FBI warnings and media company "education" that you may not be able to skip by. So if you're willing to swallow the DRM, you don't get to know until after you purchase the disk that you also have to swallow their advertisements. So, again, voting with one's dollar becomes troublesome here as well.
I have purchased a few DVDs, and I'm of very mixed mind when I do. I like the shows I'm purchasing, but I'm obviously supporting a group that I don't agree with. My bad when I do break down and purchase a DVD then.
Simply not purchasing disks isn't really going to accomplish anything, unfortunately. There are so few people, relatively speaking, that even realise or care about the restrictions on the various media that it's not an effective boycott.
That, and the media companies are doing their best to make it so that ANY copyrightable media is copy righted indefinitely, that any channel that one might get the media through has DRM built into it from beginning to end, that given their druthers, there would be no media except DRM'd media, which is almost the point we're at with DVDs, and I expect Blue Ray and HDDVD to be at least as bad. I'm heartened a smidge by the music industry backing off, a little, on DRM, but I don't expect it to last indefinitely. It won't stop there if they have their way. It'll continue on to broadcast and cable with the broadcast flag and the DMCA backing up their poor encryption on that channel. It'll start there with a few shows, then a few more, and eventually you'll have pay per view everything.
If you take this to its ultimate conclusion, there won't be a choice to have non encrypted media, then when people say it's such a horrible thing they can say "but EVERYBODY's doing it." even though it was them who forced the DRM down the hardware manufacture's and citizen's throats.
Oh, yes, and lets not forget about the possibility of one of those scurvy pirates of cracking a license key and making my blue ray or hd dvd player not capable of playing any disks published past that sad date. Sure, I blame the pirates for breaking the code, just as I would if they managed to break my XP/Vista license key and MS disabled my OS. But I also blame the media companies, and MS in this case, for building in something to a product I legally purchased and had no way of protecting that would render the product I legally purchased unusable.
I find it insulting that I have to "prove" that I purchased my dvd, blue ray disk, and/or HDdvd. I find it disturbing that SONY's only sorry for installing a root kit on my computer because they got caught at it, and for once the media companies actually aired it in the news. Or that big media finds it "okay" to make music CDs that aren't really music CDs and aren't compatible with a bunch of CD drives, and often attempt to install unwanted software on my computer - the SONY root kit wasn't the first copy right software on an audio disk. I find it insulting that I can't load my legally purchased disks into a big disk changer and stream them to any of the screens at my house - and that they sued a company that was making a very expensive player for rich clients that was making just this out of existence, that if I was an "early adopter" of a high def TV means that I can't play these disks at full resolution, that I can't put my legally acquired media onto a huge hard drive and leave the relatively fragile disks in some safe place where they won't get damaged when the blue ray player gets unaligned and the lens starts scraping the disks. I dislike the fact that big media would roll back the advent of the VCR if they could with the broadcast flag. I dislike the fact that they've poured so much money, and so control the broadcast media, that our politicians let them pass the DMCA which neatly bypasses all fair use rights. I find it insulting that I have to watch previews every stinking single time I insert certain disks, or watch the stupid "you wouldn't steal a car" commercial at the beginning of a bunch of disks - or that they even put that into my legally purchased DVD. I mean, c'mon, it's only the legal disks that will have this, the pirates will just remove it. I'm tired of being their customer and being treated like a criminal for being so. Or how about the digital signing of my downloads, and that if they decide to close down that devision of their company that I'm simply SOL because they decided NOT to migrate me to an offline DRM scheme. DRM in all forms is all about control. It doesn't stop piracy, heck, it barely slows it down. It just makes it very inconvenient for those who wish to "do the right thing" and use the media that they've legally purchased in the way that we chose to use it. It's a sad state of affairs when the "pirated" media can be just as high quality, treat's me the "customer" with a lot more respect, won't sue me, threaten to throw me in jail or bankrupt me, and unlike traditional "pirates" won't rape me, kill me, or pillage my belongings, and is "more compatible" then the legally purchased big media disks. That if I purchase a screen that's big enough and want to invite a bunch of my friends over to my house, or my church, to watch the big game that I might be infringing somebody's copyright and they might sue me - they don't have a "screen size" control yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's coming, but it's perfectly okay for the sports bar down the street that's MAKING MONEY because of the same fricking big screens can show the game to as large a crowd as they want.
But the point remains that in a busy theater you'll often end up with at least one person who needs the manager solution. And you run into one or two people who just honestly forget about it, despite the 10 or so "Please turn off your cell phone" messages. Purses or those with a bunch of pockets can make it take a while to find and silence the phone, if it's that person's inclination to do so. It's particularly bad in a theater because now you have to find a manager which may take several minutes while the guy is yammering and the brave soul who went to get the manager is missing his movie, the company of the people he came with, etc. And it's sometimes a pain, even with a manager, to get the person out of the theater. I'm all for having chicken wired theaters - maybe not all of them in a multiplex - that are clearly marked as such. If you're somebody on call, you go to the ones that aren't chicken wired. If you've forgotten your cellphone, it doesn't inconvenience a couple hundred people who've all payed for the privilege of watching a movie on a big screen with good sound and no interruptions.
The same goes for other environs. Some coffee shops or restaurants will end up advertising their access to cell services the way they do wifi now, and others will advertise that not only do they not allow them, but that they won't even work in the store. It then offers a choice to those who don't want to deal with cell phones, and their multiple annoying ring tones, and it gives those who *have to have* a cell phone on them, for whatever reason foreknowledge that their phone won't work in the establishment.
Of course, if you put up enough cages it may make the already spotty cell networks more spotty, so this may not be the most practical of solutions, but I have no problem with the idea of making certain establishments cell free as long as they're clearly marked. Unfortunately for all considerate cell users and patrons who aren't using the cell phone it only takes one inconsiderate user to sour an evening for dozens if not hundreds of other people. And for those who are belligerent personalities, the use of a cell phone, similar to trolls on forums, seem to make them more belligerent, not less so. Having an option of just not dealing with them at all would be a relief. It's not a cop out or a weak willed solution, it's a statement that one knows without reservation that he won't have to deal with the cell phones at all.
There are at least two issues with credit card data based on this article. I definitely like the retailer's NOT storing full credit card data. The credit card type, possibly the bank, the card holder's name, the last few digits of the credit card number, and the charge date and time should be more than enough to identify a transaction, especially if there's a transaction id. The credit card companies HAVE to have full account data, but the more systems this data is stored in, the less secure it is, no matter what security is implemented at each individual site. If you can remove the bank and CC number entirely and work strictly off of transaction ID and card type, I'd be even happier. Storing this minimum of data would allow everybody to identify a particular charge if there's a dispute about charges, would still allow retailers to generate whatever statistical data they need, and would prevent identity thieves from getting full CC numbers, expiration dates, etc. from retailers.
On the other hand, retailers still need to secure whatever legacy data they have, and work on purging the systems that store it. These are two different problems, and both sides of this debate seem to want to point out the problems with their opponent's positions without addressing their own issues. If retailers have the data and aren't securing it, then I have little sympathy for them when they get heavily fined for not treating our sensitive data properly, even if the CC companies require the storage of some of that data and shouldn't. Especially for major retailers where the IT budget can be spread across many, many stores.
So, short term solution is to get the retail stores to abide by the current security regulations posted by CC companies. The longer term solution is to get a more sane set of security solutions from the CC companies, and make it so that every retail outlet is required NOT to store sensitive data that crackers might want to get a hold of. This would reduce the number of outlets to our sensitive data to a minimum. It would reduce it to the companies that have to retain that data anyway.
I respect artists. I don't personally trade music, though I know how easy it is to do. As far as sculpture or paintings are concerned it's almost impossible to get an exact copy, but copies of both have been made in many ways. Prints of paintings, and replicas, including full size to scale replicas of sculptures have been done.
Unfortunately, with music and movies, I believe DRM - digital restrictions mechanisms - are at least as much about control of the market as they are about keeping me from giving a copy of that Spears CD to a friend. And all the expenses associated with that need for control are not paid by the organizations that want the lock downs, it's paid by their customers.
I find it repellent that in the upcoming publisher's utopia that I won't be able to record even pay per view venues, such as sports, should they decide that they don't want me to. That if I purchase a piece of music in whatever format that I can't play it on whichever of my devices that I choose. That if I was an early adopter of HDTV that I won't be able to watch a vast quantity of HD content because my set doesn't have the appropriate (*$$#)*@ connector that encrypts the signal all the way to internals of the TV set itself.
I find it ironic that if I want a CLEAN, easily portable source for my entertainment, I have to break any number of laws to get it, instead of simply purchasing a DVD with no encryption on it. Everything I've mentioned was legal with fair use, but now with the DMCA it's the manufacturers and publishers that determine what devices and how many times I may listen to content that I've legally purchased. It's the publishers that are putting out broken, bug ridden - look at non redbook CDs that won't play in many CDPlayers - inferior products than the pirates are. The "content" industries are pushing some of their best customers to "piracy" and other illegal acts because, though the content they're releasing may be compelling, all the restrictions around the content, the trouble that it causes - like the Sony root kit fiasco, the price fixing that they were convicted of, is much less compelling than a clean version of their product one can download from the internet. If they'd simply release the products in an enencumberred format, and possibly reduce the price of the content - something they promissed they'd do a long time ago, then they may find that they have more loyal customers. The contempt that they breed when we see their unbridled greed and grab for power makes us much less guilty when we steal from the mouths of the billionaires.
So, I go the route not many people talk about. I don't purchase music or movies from the companies I don't agree with, and I don't pirate it either. I do without. I do find it a little unsettling that more people aren't willing to go this route. For better or worse, it's not our god given right to listen to whatever we want to, whenever we want to, weather we have the money to purchase the products or not. If enough people would do this, vocally, then maybe the media companies would cave in to consumer demand. The trick, of course, is to overcome personal greed, and to find some way to educate "joe average" about the slow eroding of his rights to do with the products he purchased as he wishes. And the media companies know that it has to be slow, so that we accept the next level of restrictions before tightening things down even further.
I'm not saying I'm a saint. Sometimes I do go out to the movies. I have downloaded content I don't own before, though not much, and I made a decision quite some time ago not to do it, but I think a little personal integrity can go a long way, if we're willing to excercise it. If the media companies really aren't putting out any content you wish to hear, if you really object to the restrictions they're requiring us to endure, then simply don't purchase from them. Or, worst case, purchase used.
Does that mean I'm against a boycott? No, I'm not. For a while I refused to go to the movies. But if it's just me doing it, by myself, the movie industry won't notice. It's still an admirable thing to do if I object to their practices. I really don't want to fund the next DMCA pumped up on hormones and steroids, and even if my friends don't know the issues, I certainly do. So what does it say about me if I throw my principles out the door and purchase things from companies I know are working to undermine any rights that I have as a person, not just a consumer?
But my acting alone isn't going to get the RIAA's or the MPAA's notice. If I want a boycott to be successful, I have to put out the effort to get a true movement going, and that's HARD. Even networking with those who are like minded about this would be difficult. Once networked, getting the word out to enough people to make a difference in the RIAA/MPAA's bottom line to get noticed is a truly monumental task.
Finally, getting most those people to boycott the RIAA and MPAA LEGALLY, without resorting to illegal file sharing for their next hit of entertainment would be a truly herculean task. And I think that, in large part, the protest would have to be legal to be taken seriously by the RIAA/MPAA, and congress. If there was suddenly a spike in file trading while legal purchases dropped down, I think that would simply encourage a bigger witch hunt. (It probably will anyway, but HOPEFULLy at least the congresspeople would listen if enough people stopped purchasing.)
Boycotts are never easy. They are usually a last resort when something happens that a large enough group of people object to, and they aren't beeing listened to by those who have control. I can garauntee that boycotting the bussing system and walking for miles every day in your business clothes was a heck of a lot more inconvenient than having to listen to your current music library instead of picking up that next great CD with 1 or 2 songs on it you want.
The problem with boycotting something as large as the music or movie industries is three fold. First is apathy. It's not nearly as important an issue as segregation was. Not being so fundamental an issue, is it worth it trying to convince all your friends not to purchase that new CD, or not to go see that latest and greatest new movie, and if you can't convince them, is it worth staying at home while they all go out and have a good time at the movies without you?
Second is scope. This is a national problem, not a local one. It's a much more difficult thing to organize a boycott on a national level than it is to organize it within one metropolis.
Finally there's education. Most people don't realize the extent the "content" industries, entertainment and software both, would like to lock down the purchases we make, and how many times they'd like us to pay for the privledge of watching or listening to a single piece of music, show, or a single piece of software. What makes this even more frustrating to convey is similar to trying to convey environmental issues. "Where's the evidence it'll get that bad? It's certainly not that bad now. And didn't you say the world would end in 50 years if we didn't repent our ways...50 years ago?" If you paint worst case cenarios while it's still really easy to share CDs, and download just about anything you want, and DVDs are playable pretty much anywhere you want to play them, then it's easy to come of sounding like the preacher on the corner yelling "Repent, the end is nigh!" And the arguments about not being able to legally play your DVDs on Linux isn't going to sway the mass public either. They all use PCs or Macs, as a rule.
I don't have a list, but there's powells.com. Powell's is really a HUGE new/used brick and mortar store that allows you to place orders online as well, including international orders.
They have a great selection of books, and I can usually find good quality used books from them when I place my orders. Powell's is probably one of the things I miss most about my time in Portland, and I'm happy to support them from my current home in Reno.
That one of the big problems in game development is the stranglehold that the big 3 have on the consoles. It looks like their certification process is long and expensive, and might be truly arduous for a smaller company, with a good game, to pass. So you need to be part of a larger development house if you want to release games for the consoles...
What if some of these disgruntled software engineers team up with some hardware engineers and come up with a more open x-box like console. I'd guess that it would have to be more expensive than MS's, but that the games could sell for a little bit less. (Make a profit on everything, rather than having the console as a loss leader for the games.)
You'd still have a certification process - you want quality games - but it would be "at cost", with the theory being that you want to entice as many talented developers to develop for your console as possible. And you wouldn't discourage "non-certified" games, you'd just make it known that they haven't been tested, and they can't put your trademark on the game to certify it passes the quality measurement.
And you'd purposefully tout it's open and programmable - with free tools - interface as features of the console - again, trying to get as many developers working for the console as possible. (Rather than needing an expensive developers kit to develop with.)
You'd probably need to use BSD or Linux as the operating system to keep costs to a minimum. You'd need to convince N-videa, ATI, or one of the up-and-coming 3D card manufacturers to open source their video card drivers...there would be a few other licencing hurdles to leap - like the DVD and/or blue ray one.
You MIGHT even want to come up with some form of online service, similar to MS's. You pay one monthly bill. You get access to all the games that have an online component. I'd imagine patches and other "large" things like demos and what not could have a bittorrent download - build into the console, the trickiest thing would be building a quality network that doesn't get bogged down...
Or maybe this is all a pipe-dream and there is no competing with the large corporations and their marketing expertise...
are out there that are decent, and will work as simple IDE controllers?
I've had difficulty finding anything that has more than two controllers that doesn't force you to use the half-baked raid.
All I'd like is a good ata-133 controller (that's what I have, but others may want to know about sata) that actually has at least 4 IDE chanells that show up as normal IDE to the Linux kernel, rather than forcing me to use their weird raid.
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I purchase plenty of books from Amazon. When I go to the bookstore, and find book 3 of a fascinating sounding series, but cannot find book 1 or book 2, it'll get to me by Amazon a lot quicker than it will to have them order it. (And if I liked one series by the author, chances are good I'll like other series by the same author.) I still need to checkout the smaller bookstores around here, see what they have, but the big chain stores are what are generally available. They're pretty good if you're buying the latest in a series, not so great if you want to start from scratch with one. I *MISS* Powell's in Portland. :-( (If I save up, last time I checked, I could purchase $50 of USED books and get shipping for free...)
This is a much bigger problem with patents than copyright. I don't know of any author, or potential author, who quivers in fear over the possibility that something they wrote so closely resembles somebody else's work that they can't prove its their own original product. This isn't nearly as true with patents as they are often overly broad and often preclude derivative works until the patent expires. With fiction, or even non-fiction, you don't have to worry about the "Romance Novel" being patented. You can't directly use somebody else's characters, or write something that follows in lock step with somebody else's plot, but you can sure as heck write things that have the same feel as somebody else's works.
If you're in a rural environment, setting up a decentralized energy production MAY make sense. Most of the US's population - I can't speak about the rest of the world as I don't know - is located in the highly developed coastlines and other metropolises where decentralized energy doesn't really make as much sense. These metropolises need a lot of energy all the time. Also, people mean different things when they talk about decentralized energy production. Some mean smaller energy companies, some mean self production. Self production for most of us isn't an option, either because of location restrictions or because of the high start up and potentially high maintenance costs. I'm also leery of millions of homes connected to the grid generating their own energy. Who maintains all the disparate systems? Heck, who makes sure they were all setup properly to begin with? Most people currently purchasing renewables for self production put a fair amount of research into them, but if there's some sort of mandate to get X% of people to self produce energy, i'm pretty sure we're going to run into a maintenance mess. Maybe not with the first home owner, but what about the second, or third?
Also, the efficiency of smaller plants is usually not the same as the efficiency for much larger plants. To be off grid requires batteries and the loss of energy when storing or retrieving the energy from the batteries. Wind turbines are a perfect example of larger is better. Larger swept area greatly increases the energy harvested from the wind. A much taller tower gets you higher wind speeds. The same can be said about any sort of fossil fuel based production. The individual units aren't as efficient. When talking of decentralized plants, a larger plant probably takes nearly the same amount of overhead, once it's built, than a smaller one, and there are fewer power lines to run.
Much as I hate to admit it, for many things large corporations actually make sense. They can build bigger, more efficient plants be it traditional fossil fuel plants, larger wind turbines, mass amounts of solar cells, nuclear plants, manufacturing, or what have you. They are not the be all, end all for everything. Many new technologies actually come from smaller companies, but it's hard to argue with the efficiencies of scale of larger companies once it's figured out how to produce whatever it is that they're making.
Also, for the green revolution it makes more sense to make your stationary energy production as efficient as possible, as opposed to trying to get cars totally off of fossil fuels. It doesn't have the energy density problems that autos have. I don't know if thorium is the answer, or breeder reactors, but either of these would work for the electric grid's base load and get us off of natural gas or coal to produce the same amount of energy. Most of our alternatives for base load, including renewables, have their own problems. Energy availability with wind and / or solar, as well as getting the production sites approved in the first place. Coal is exceptionally dirty, and fairly expensive to make cleaner. Natural gas is used a lot hear, but now you're back to fossil fuels. (I don't see getting rid of all of these plants as they run turbines that handle the spikes in the load.)
There is one thing most of us can do to help energy production and that's to ask for more energy efficient appliances, even if they cost a bit more. I think England has a 1 watt initiative - all consumer electronics must go to a 1 watt standby state. It's incredible the amount of energy that's wasted for our appliances when they're sitting there idle, and the technology isn't hard to implement. Heck, it should be easier to implement then the stupid DRM that most our products are forced to use. Further, we can ask that our PC and Console manufacturers make things so that the auto power management even while we're using them works properly. Most PCs sit there chewing up much more energy than they need, even when we're not playing the l
No DRM is silly for music...except that the iTunes store does this. I can see that technical publishers, in particular, will probably want to keep this around, but no DRM on novels would be nice and help guarantee interoperability.
I really don't like the specter of having the Betamax of the e-book world, having the authentication servers go down, and have all my books disable themselves because the e-book reader couldn't communicate with the authentication server for X days/months/years, whatever.
If we have to have DRM - and that's debatable - then I want DRM that's interoperable between the Kindle, Sony, and other BIG publishers out there that doesn't require the reader to phone home on any sort of a regular basis and allows one to transfer books from one competitor's device to the other...as you'd be able to do with no DRM, and should be able to do even with DRM if designed properly, though I could see the process being a bit of a pain.
I want this for movies and music too. No DRM, or if we have to have DRM, make it possible to transfer media that I've purchased to other devices. It still galls me that if I do the right thing and purchase media from whoever, I'm getting a broken product, and that the "pirate's" offerings are more interoperable with more devices.
Gah, slashdot ate my previous post when I logged in. Grumble.
Thermostat control with a thermostat in a logical place in every room, not some poorly placed hallway. Automatically keep the boys rooms cooler and girls rooms warmer - generalizing here. Also have it turn the thermostat on and off based on time of day / motion so that you're not eating energy when you're at work or sleeping. Heck, have a truly smart house that learns when you're about automatically rather then setting arbitrary rules that get outdated quickly.
Timed lighting.
Timed integration with automation bots like the roomba.
Centralized media center. All the music and DVDs - won't happen because of DMCA, though Netflix a-like may take its place - on one media player / server, and the speakers wired up so you can have whole house music, or each room playing whatever. Tivo says it doesn't need to record something until 8PM? Great, leave it truly off, the cable box off, the flatscreen, ps3, 360, wii, amplifier, and whole entertainment system off until somebody gets home. Background loads chew through depressing amounts of energy. Heck, have "smart" jacks that can be monitored so you know how much energy any given appliance is using.
Have an NTP server keep all those pesky clocks in synch, rather than 15-20 minutes off in either direction +/- an hour for daylight savings time. Tell which devices you even want to display the time and turn some of the annoying clocks off all together.
A kitchen assistant? Maybe. Feed an advanced recipe into your kitchen helper and have it walk you through food prep, rather than guessing if you need to put the veggies on now or not. It could pre-heat your oven while you're doing prep work so you don't forget. Tell you when it's time to start doing something. Heck, hook it up with the food network and have it pull videos of what the preparation should look like. Help you out with what you'll actually need for the week's shopping. (Lazy, can't cook guy helper would be another name for this, though it could also help with larger families.)
Is any of this needed? No. Is some of it helpful, possibly. The timed energy / heat in particular.
There is no single industry that's guaranteed to be a money maker forevermore. I believe right now we're purchasing more books then just about any other time in history, so I don't think book publishers have to look out for the digital bogey man just yet. Even in today's economy we could suffer through massive numbers of people making a transition to electronic books. It's not the authors, publishers, editors, or marketers who'd be hurt by this. Mostly it would be the guys in the manufacturing plants, warehouses, and retail. Even there, I don't think that the market for paperbacks will suddenly disappear over night. If it does look like it's going to disappear, there will be plenty of notice for those in the industry, should they heed the signs - and I think it would be more likely that if it dries up it would because people are buying fewer books, at least in the short to middle term.
There are other traditional paper based products that are already hurting...newspapers. (Maybe magazines too, I don't know.) I could actually see a small revitalization of that industry with e-book readers. If the price is right, I could see more people subscribing to a hard hitting national/international paper via e-ink devices. If done *RIGHT*, and priced right, I could see a reason for at least the national / international newspapers to start differentiating themselves again based on content and regions they focus on. They could also open up their archives. They wouldn't make nearly as much as selling their archive to a library, but selling enough subscriptions to the archives at a reasonable price should be worth the trade off. (They could also sell DVD/Blue Ray/Whatever copies of their archives, but I'm thinking more of a lookup service where the person doesn't really want to keep a whole archive of the papers locally.)
Heck, priced right and with actual stories in it, I wouldn't mind subscribing to local papers this way. Done right it would be something like a searchable microfiche - the original "image" of the paper, but with the text stored in a indexed database, adds and images indexed too.
The actual manufacturing, shipping, storage and selling of books does generate jobs, but a lot of that is in the lower end of the job spectrum. Warehouse work and retail. Not that we want to lose more of these jobs, but this end of the job market has always faced the specter of that particular job disappearing for whatever reason. No more profitable mining to be done, lumber mills closing, fisheries becoming unprofitable, what have you. Shipping and logging don't just rely on book sales. Publishers aren't going anywhere anytime soon, just as I don't really see music publishers going out of business either. The editing, marketing, and all the "traditional" roles of a top tier publisher will remain. It will be a while before the format wars on e-books stabilizes. I hope we do end up with an iTunes clear winner in this industry - even if it has DRM to start - because one of the worst things for it would be that magazines A,B,C are only accessible on device Y, academic book publishers go with device Z, these paper back publishers go with product X, etc. One $200+ device I can live with, but having to own multiple devices with the specter of the device I own ending up on the losing side of a format war, and possibly having a large chunk of my library obsolete is...unappealing.
At this point anybody who's not in the first batch and wants one will have to wait until the second batch. Most people in the first batch who've stuck with it are pretty dedicated to this type of device, more than the "general" audience that will make up the customers in a lot of the other batches. Even amongst that crowd there have been plenty who got impatient and received refunds.
I don't know when they'll start producing the second batch - I'd guess mid to late January, but I'm not part of the team - but since all the designing and prototyping is done, and they'll have some of the parts on hand already - like ~6000 cases and a bunch of analog nubs - the second batch should go smoothly. As long as nobody complains about some defect in the first batch Pandoras I'd feel pretty confident about ordering in the second batch.
If you're absolutely not going to pre-order something, then you'll have to wait until they have inventory on hand, or an e-shop in your country has one on hand to order. I don't know if that'll happen in the second batch, or some later batch. I'm confident at some point it'll happen, but I don't know what the release cycle on the Pandora will look like. This is a perfectly legitimate way to order what for most people will be a game playing / media playing toy. Others who are more excited are free to order earlier.
Props for mentioning the Pandora. I'm in the first batch and looking forward to receiving mine, hopefully by the end of the year.
It's been a longer wait than I wanted, and the wait won't be over until I have the thing in my hands. I'm not sure where I am in the queue, but it's possible the guys on the tail end of the first 4,000 won't see the units until January. I think they're going to make a big effort NOT to have that happen, but there have been a lot of unanticipated issues up to this point. Certainly anybody not in the first batch won't be getting one until sometime in 2010.
The last big thing to finalize is nearly here. Come mid October we SHOULD see the final cases shipped from the factory. I have to say I'm getting excited about it again. (While it was perpetually two months I think a lot of enthusiasm...got put on hold.)
No, I don't see it competing with the PSP, or the DS, or the iPhone. It's more powerful then the first two, and has better game controls than the later, but it's a niche device. Depending on who you are, it's either a home brew gaming machine, a portable emulator which MAY emulate at playable rates a subset of Dream Cast and Nintendo 64 games. It'll certainly emulate a good chunk of the Mame library, and most platforms with less oomph then the Dream Cast or 64. It'll also play most games that have been ported to Linux. The ID games, maybe even up to Doom3, but certainly up to Quake3. Somebody was working on Homeworld, though that had a ways to go. Most of the LucasArts adventure games will play on it, etc. I think Decent, which would be awesome with the dual analog sticks.
For me, Homebrew and independent games, a nice platform to target my own development efforts, and media player. It won't replace my PC or Laptop anytime soon. I'm not a fan of typing on small keyboards for huge chunks of time, but I'm definitely looking forward to having keyboard controls to play games that benefit from them. I like that the libraries it's using are open, and that there aren't any artificial restrictions to my use of the hardware I've purchased.
I don't see a lot of big name developers targeting their games for this device, so it won't challenge Nintendo or Sony. I hope a lot of independent games target the platform, and some truly innovative game play comes of it. (The early in development games look good - Lerp for instance.)
If you're running IE6 is it likely that you're using a modern Mac with Safari on it? Wouldn't it already have this installed? I'm guessing Opera isn't on the list because it isn't free...but that's just a guess. Yes, rewording things would've been more polite.
I've seen both good and bad community colleges. I actually enjoyed my time at Clark Community College in Vancouver, WA, and thought many of the classes they taught there were more challenging then the 300 level classes I took at WSU.
The classes at the SF Community college - at least the ones on comp-sci and the cert based ones were pretty well run as well. But I've also seen classes bogged down by people who should be bumped from the current level of math that they're taking to a remedial course, or allowed to fail and not allowed to soak up all the time in the class. Unfortunately in some of those classes more of the class was in the remedial state then at the level the class were supposed to be.
In colleges, even community colleges, I believe the teachers should be able to - easily - bump disruptive students from their classes, ban them entirely if their behavior doesn't improve, or if the student can't cram to meet the level of the class, to refer them to a lower level be it for math, science, English, or what have you. Actually, I think this should be true of any school. I also think it should be easier, in high school at least, for exceptional students to either have access to accelerated classes, or find some way to teach them a subject like geometry - maybe in a study hall / work shop like setting - then allow them to test out of the class. I know plenty of smart students who've nearly failed classes because the class was going so slow it couldn't keep them engaged.
Community colleges have always had the aspect of remedial classes, but unfortunately they're having to deal with an ever increasing percentage of people who don't have the basics down. Four year colleges get this too, but not to the same extent. This means that what could be an inexpensive and effective first two years of college for a lot of students gets turned into "high school 2.0". I think that's a sad state of affairs. I think all levels of education should be able to expect a minimum proficiency of the students entering the classes, and should be able to fail the students who don't meet those requirements rather than dumbing the whole class down. That doesn't seem to be the trend.
So here's a question. How does one help anybody in a "blighted" neighborhood? Not necessarily just a poor one. There are poor neighborhoods and communities that don't have raging problems with drugs, gangs, and other "inner city" issues - and not all the gang problems are strictly inner city ones, you just have a higher concentration of the problem there.
Where drugs and gangs are a huge factor, with welfare moms, with fathers who may not know about all the children they have, and often don't help out with child support, assuming they're not in jail, what's a good way to stop the cycle those neighborhoods are in?
I can blame the circumstances all I want, but it doesn't change their circumstances. Most of the ideas I could come up with border on the totalitarian.
One thing we can do is cut back most direct welfare - i.e. money directly to single moms with children. Sure, fine, but when they continue to have children anyway, what can be done for the children? (Here I'm more worried about those who have no choice then the people who've already made their choices.)
Also, where the parent is trying to be responsible - what services actually prove to be useful? Daycare? Bussing? Programs to get the children breakfast and dinner, and not just school lunches? For a while my family was on the border of being a welfare family, and having access to daycare so mom could continue working probably helped her keep her house - she couldn't get an apartment, nobody would rent to her with children in tow in San Francisco.
I've heard suggestions of taking more children away from parents, or where there's just a mother, from her. Maybe not in this thread, but the subject has come up. How many more children would be taken? Would this solve the problem when mothers continue to have babies? (Fathers are an issue as well but it's often not easy to identify the father.) Would all the children go to foster homes, or would you end up with huge crÃches?
What about birth control? You can't talk about mandatory birth control as that treads all over just about any civil right we have, but what about getting access to implants as easy as possible? What about easy access to permanent forms of birth control if the mother - or father - decides they don't want to have any more children? Would this even be effective when in many poorer neighborhoods the number of children a father has is a point of pride to the father even if he isn't helping support the child, and mothers may choose to have more children even if there is no economic incentive to do so?
What does one do to encourage successful people to stay in such a neighborhood, or move to it, rather than abandoning it the first chance they get?
Circumstances and neighborhoods certainly go a long ways towards one's possible success in life, but I don't see a "clean" way of dealing with a neighborhood once it's reached bad straights. Are there true success stories about converting such neighborhoods? Are the success stories any way similar to each other so that the common factors can be applied to cleaning up other problem neighborhoods?
Then there are the neighborhoods where English is a second language, assuming it's spoken fluently at all by more than a minority of it's inhabitants. What's the best way to get the students speaking English, without totally ignoring their native language - be it Spanish, Chinese, or what have you? What programs have been proven to work under those circumstances, and are the neighborhoods similar enough that the solution that worked in one neighborhood could be applied to the other(s)? Is deportation really the solution...assuming that the person who doesn't speak English wasn't born here making them a citizen?
What about legalizing most drugs, taking a lot of the monetary incentive of having access to a controlled substance away? Or running such heavy patrols through these neighborhoods that most of the drug dealers are caught?
I don't have
That should be fixed with a bios firmware update. Fixed my problem with a similar HP tablet. Unfortunately I needed to install Windows to install it...but it seemed to resolve the problem. I still need to configure the tablet portion of things - I haven't gotten around to doodling with it yet - but everything else seems to work now.
Scott, I'll be sure to check that out. Thank you for the links.
One that could output 1080p natively. That could also act as a media portal. That had a minimal X install, OpenGL and SDL. With the option of installing Ubuntu or other common desktop Linux. That used either Deb or RPM package management. That had sane defaults for installation locations That had drivers for 3D OpenGL, wireless, wired, bluetooth, usb, and every other component. That made getting games that work under Wine to work under it. Maybe a unique wine "profile" for each game?
If there was something like this that became popular enough, you might see more Linux adoption for games. Something like the Pandora Handheld - if it ever really gets up off the ground - but for the living room. Something that actually ends up with exclusive games. Maybe fore arcade cabinets as well.
I haven't bought or downloaded music in years. There's no DRM on "real" CDs, but the music companies don't advertise which disks are "standard" CDs and which ones have autorun programs on them. Voting with your dollar becomes a little harder in this case if you can't get accurate information on which disks have junk ware on them and which don't.
It's a similar situation with the advertisements on DVDs. The DVDs aren't required to label that there are 5-10 minutes of commercials in the guise of previews and FBI warnings and media company "education" that you may not be able to skip by. So if you're willing to swallow the DRM, you don't get to know until after you purchase the disk that you also have to swallow their advertisements. So, again, voting with one's dollar becomes troublesome here as well.
I have purchased a few DVDs, and I'm of very mixed mind when I do. I like the shows I'm purchasing, but I'm obviously supporting a group that I don't agree with. My bad when I do break down and purchase a DVD then.
Simply not purchasing disks isn't really going to accomplish anything, unfortunately. There are so few people, relatively speaking, that even realise or care about the restrictions on the various media that it's not an effective boycott.
That, and the media companies are doing their best to make it so that ANY copyrightable media is copy righted indefinitely, that any channel that one might get the media through has DRM built into it from beginning to end, that given their druthers, there would be no media except DRM'd media, which is almost the point we're at with DVDs, and I expect Blue Ray and HDDVD to be at least as bad. I'm heartened a smidge by the music industry backing off, a little, on DRM, but I don't expect it to last indefinitely. It won't stop there if they have their way. It'll continue on to broadcast and cable with the broadcast flag and the DMCA backing up their poor encryption on that channel. It'll start there with a few shows, then a few more, and eventually you'll have pay per view everything.
If you take this to its ultimate conclusion, there won't be a choice to have non encrypted media, then when people say it's such a horrible thing they can say "but EVERYBODY's doing it." even though it was them who forced the DRM down the hardware manufacture's and citizen's throats.
Oh, yes, and lets not forget about the possibility of one of those scurvy pirates of cracking a license key and making my blue ray or hd dvd player not capable of playing any disks published past that sad date. Sure, I blame the pirates for breaking the code, just as I would if they managed to break my XP/Vista license key and MS disabled my OS. But I also blame the media companies, and MS in this case, for building in something to a product I legally purchased and had no way of protecting that would render the product I legally purchased unusable.
I find it insulting that I have to "prove" that I purchased my dvd, blue ray disk, and/or HDdvd. I find it disturbing that SONY's only sorry for installing a root kit on my computer because they got caught at it, and for once the media companies actually aired it in the news. Or that big media finds it "okay" to make music CDs that aren't really music CDs and aren't compatible with a bunch of CD drives, and often attempt to install unwanted software on my computer - the SONY root kit wasn't the first copy right software on an audio disk. I find it insulting that I can't load my legally purchased disks into a big disk changer and stream them to any of the screens at my house - and that they sued a company that was making a very expensive player for rich clients that was making just this out of existence, that if I was an "early adopter" of a high def TV means that I can't play these disks at full resolution, that I can't put my legally acquired media onto a huge hard drive and leave the relatively fragile disks in some safe place where they won't get damaged when the blue ray player gets unaligned and the lens starts scraping the disks. I dislike the fact that big media would roll back the advent of the VCR if they could with the broadcast flag. I dislike the fact that they've poured so much money, and so control the broadcast media, that our politicians let them pass the DMCA which neatly bypasses all fair use rights. I find it insulting that I have to watch previews every stinking single time I insert certain disks, or watch the stupid "you wouldn't steal a car" commercial at the beginning of a bunch of disks - or that they even put that into my legally purchased DVD. I mean, c'mon, it's only the legal disks that will have this, the pirates will just remove it. I'm tired of being their customer and being treated like a criminal for being so. Or how about the digital signing of my downloads, and that if they decide to close down that devision of their company that I'm simply SOL because they decided NOT to migrate me to an offline DRM scheme. DRM in all forms is all about control. It doesn't stop piracy, heck, it barely slows it down. It just makes it very inconvenient for those who wish to "do the right thing" and use the media that they've legally purchased in the way that we chose to use it. It's a sad state of affairs when the "pirated" media can be just as high quality, treat's me the "customer" with a lot more respect, won't sue me, threaten to throw me in jail or bankrupt me, and unlike traditional "pirates" won't rape me, kill me, or pillage my belongings, and is "more compatible" then the legally purchased big media disks. That if I purchase a screen that's big enough and want to invite a bunch of my friends over to my house, or my church, to watch the big game that I might be infringing somebody's copyright and they might sue me - they don't have a "screen size" control yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's coming, but it's perfectly okay for the sports bar down the street that's MAKING MONEY because of the same fricking big screens can show the game to as large a crowd as they want.
But the point remains that in a busy theater you'll often end up with at least one person who needs the manager solution. And you run into one or two people who just honestly forget about it, despite the 10 or so "Please turn off your cell phone" messages. Purses or those with a bunch of pockets can make it take a while to find and silence the phone, if it's that person's inclination to do so. It's particularly bad in a theater because now you have to find a manager which may take several minutes while the guy is yammering and the brave soul who went to get the manager is missing his movie, the company of the people he came with, etc. And it's sometimes a pain, even with a manager, to get the person out of the theater. I'm all for having chicken wired theaters - maybe not all of them in a multiplex - that are clearly marked as such. If you're somebody on call, you go to the ones that aren't chicken wired. If you've forgotten your cellphone, it doesn't inconvenience a couple hundred people who've all payed for the privilege of watching a movie on a big screen with good sound and no interruptions.
The same goes for other environs. Some coffee shops or restaurants will end up advertising their access to cell services the way they do wifi now, and others will advertise that not only do they not allow them, but that they won't even work in the store. It then offers a choice to those who don't want to deal with cell phones, and their multiple annoying ring tones, and it gives those who *have to have* a cell phone on them, for whatever reason foreknowledge that their phone won't work in the establishment.
Of course, if you put up enough cages it may make the already spotty cell networks more spotty, so this may not be the most practical of solutions, but I have no problem with the idea of making certain establishments cell free as long as they're clearly marked. Unfortunately for all considerate cell users and patrons who aren't using the cell phone it only takes one inconsiderate user to sour an evening for dozens if not hundreds of other people. And for those who are belligerent personalities, the use of a cell phone, similar to trolls on forums, seem to make them more belligerent, not less so. Having an option of just not dealing with them at all would be a relief. It's not a cop out or a weak willed solution, it's a statement that one knows without reservation that he won't have to deal with the cell phones at all.
There are at least two issues with credit card data based on this article. I definitely like the retailer's NOT storing full credit card data. The credit card type, possibly the bank, the card holder's name, the last few digits of the credit card number, and the charge date and time should be more than enough to identify a transaction, especially if there's a transaction id. The credit card companies HAVE to have full account data, but the more systems this data is stored in, the less secure it is, no matter what security is implemented at each individual site. If you can remove the bank and CC number entirely and work strictly off of transaction ID and card type, I'd be even happier. Storing this minimum of data would allow everybody to identify a particular charge if there's a dispute about charges, would still allow retailers to generate whatever statistical data they need, and would prevent identity thieves from getting full CC numbers, expiration dates, etc. from retailers.
On the other hand, retailers still need to secure whatever legacy data they have, and work on purging the systems that store it. These are two different problems, and both sides of this debate seem to want to point out the problems with their opponent's positions without addressing their own issues. If retailers have the data and aren't securing it, then I have little sympathy for them when they get heavily fined for not treating our sensitive data properly, even if the CC companies require the storage of some of that data and shouldn't. Especially for major retailers where the IT budget can be spread across many, many stores.
So, short term solution is to get the retail stores to abide by the current security regulations posted by CC companies. The longer term solution is to get a more sane set of security solutions from the CC companies, and make it so that every retail outlet is required NOT to store sensitive data that crackers might want to get a hold of. This would reduce the number of outlets to our sensitive data to a minimum. It would reduce it to the companies that have to retain that data anyway.
How do you prevent theft? You don't...
I respect artists. I don't personally trade music, though I know how easy it is to do. As far as sculpture or paintings are concerned it's almost impossible to get an exact copy, but copies of both have been made in many ways. Prints of paintings, and replicas, including full size to scale replicas of sculptures have been done.
Unfortunately, with music and movies, I believe DRM - digital restrictions mechanisms - are at least as much about control of the market as they are about keeping me from giving a copy of that Spears CD to a friend. And all the expenses associated with that need for control are not paid by the organizations that want the lock downs, it's paid by their customers.
I find it repellent that in the upcoming publisher's utopia that I won't be able to record even pay per view venues, such as sports, should they decide that they don't want me to. That if I purchase a piece of music in whatever format that I can't play it on whichever of my devices that I choose. That if I was an early adopter of HDTV that I won't be able to watch a vast quantity of HD content because my set doesn't have the appropriate (*$$#)*@ connector that encrypts the signal all the way to internals of the TV set itself.
I find it ironic that if I want a CLEAN, easily portable source for my entertainment, I have to break any number of laws to get it, instead of simply purchasing a DVD with no encryption on it. Everything I've mentioned was legal with fair use, but now with the DMCA it's the manufacturers and publishers that determine what devices and how many times I may listen to content that I've legally purchased. It's the publishers that are putting out broken, bug ridden - look at non redbook CDs that won't play in many CDPlayers - inferior products than the pirates are. The "content" industries are pushing some of their best customers to "piracy" and other illegal acts because, though the content they're releasing may be compelling, all the restrictions around the content, the trouble that it causes - like the Sony root kit fiasco, the price fixing that they were convicted of, is much less compelling than a clean version of their product one can download from the internet. If they'd simply release the products in an enencumberred format, and possibly reduce the price of the content - something they promissed they'd do a long time ago, then they may find that they have more loyal customers. The contempt that they breed when we see their unbridled greed and grab for power makes us much less guilty when we steal from the mouths of the billionaires.
So, I go the route not many people talk about. I don't purchase music or movies from the companies I don't agree with, and I don't pirate it either. I do without. I do find it a little unsettling that more people aren't willing to go this route. For better or worse, it's not our god given right to listen to whatever we want to, whenever we want to, weather we have the money to purchase the products or not. If enough people would do this, vocally, then maybe the media companies would cave in to consumer demand. The trick, of course, is to overcome personal greed, and to find some way to educate "joe average" about the slow eroding of his rights to do with the products he purchased as he wishes. And the media companies know that it has to be slow, so that we accept the next level of restrictions before tightening things down even further.
I'm not saying I'm a saint. Sometimes I do go out to the movies. I have downloaded content I don't own before, though not much, and I made a decision quite some time ago not to do it, but I think a little personal integrity can go a long way, if we're willing to excercise it. If the media companies really aren't putting out any content you wish to hear, if you really object to the restrictions they're requiring us to endure, then simply don't purchase from them. Or, worst case, purchase used.
Does that mean I'm against a boycott? No, I'm not. For a while I refused to go to the movies. But if it's just me doing it, by myself, the movie industry won't notice. It's still an admirable thing to do if I object to their practices. I really don't want to fund the next DMCA pumped up on hormones and steroids, and even if my friends don't know the issues, I certainly do. So what does it say about me if I throw my principles out the door and purchase things from companies I know are working to undermine any rights that I have as a person, not just a consumer?
But my acting alone isn't going to get the RIAA's or the MPAA's notice. If I want a boycott to be successful, I have to put out the effort to get a true movement going, and that's HARD. Even networking with those who are like minded about this would be difficult. Once networked, getting the word out to enough people to make a difference in the RIAA/MPAA's bottom line to get noticed is a truly monumental task.
Finally, getting most those people to boycott the RIAA and MPAA LEGALLY, without resorting to illegal file sharing for their next hit of entertainment would be a truly herculean task. And I think that, in large part, the protest would have to be legal to be taken seriously by the RIAA/MPAA, and congress. If there was suddenly a spike in file trading while legal purchases dropped down, I think that would simply encourage a bigger witch hunt. (It probably will anyway, but HOPEFULLy at least the congresspeople would listen if enough people stopped purchasing.)
Boycotts are never easy. They are usually a last resort when something happens that a large enough group of people object to, and they aren't beeing listened to by those who have control. I can garauntee that boycotting the bussing system and walking for miles every day in your business clothes was a heck of a lot more inconvenient than having to listen to your current music library instead of picking up that next great CD with 1 or 2 songs on it you want.
The problem with boycotting something as large as the music or movie industries is three fold. First is apathy. It's not nearly as important an issue as segregation was. Not being so fundamental an issue, is it worth it trying to convince all your friends not to purchase that new CD, or not to go see that latest and greatest new movie, and if you can't convince them, is it worth staying at home while they all go out and have a good time at the movies without you?
Second is scope. This is a national problem, not a local one. It's a much more difficult thing to organize a boycott on a national level than it is to organize it within one metropolis.
Finally there's education. Most people don't realize the extent the "content" industries, entertainment and software both, would like to lock down the purchases we make, and how many times they'd like us to pay for the privledge of watching or listening to a single piece of music, show, or a single piece of software. What makes this even more frustrating to convey is similar to trying to convey environmental issues. "Where's the evidence it'll get that bad? It's certainly not that bad now. And didn't you say the world would end in 50 years if we didn't repent our ways...50 years ago?" If you paint worst case cenarios while it's still really easy to share CDs, and download just about anything you want, and DVDs are playable pretty much anywhere you want to play them, then it's easy to come of sounding like the preacher on the corner yelling "Repent, the end is nigh!" And the arguments about not being able to legally play your DVDs on Linux isn't going to sway the mass public either. They all use PCs or Macs, as a rule.
I don't have a list, but there's powells.com. Powell's is really a HUGE new/used brick and mortar store that allows you to place orders online as well, including international orders.
They have a great selection of books, and I can usually find good quality used books from them when I place my orders. Powell's is probably one of the things I miss most about my time in Portland, and I'm happy to support them from my current home in Reno.
That one of the big problems in game development is the stranglehold that the big 3 have on the consoles. It looks like their certification process is long and expensive, and might be truly arduous for a smaller company, with a good game, to pass. So you need to be part of a larger development house if you want to release games for the consoles...
What if some of these disgruntled software engineers team up with some hardware engineers and come up with a more open x-box like console. I'd guess that it would have to be more expensive than MS's, but that the games could sell for a little bit less. (Make a profit on everything, rather than having the console as a loss leader for the games.)
You'd still have a certification process - you want quality games - but it would be "at cost", with the theory being that you want to entice as many talented developers to develop for your console as possible. And you wouldn't discourage "non-certified" games, you'd just make it known that they haven't been tested, and they can't put your trademark on the game to certify it passes the quality measurement.
And you'd purposefully tout it's open and programmable - with free tools - interface as features of the console - again, trying to get as many developers working for the console as possible. (Rather than needing an expensive developers kit to develop with.)
You'd probably need to use BSD or Linux as the operating system to keep costs to a minimum. You'd need to convince N-videa, ATI, or one of the up-and-coming 3D card manufacturers to open source their video card drivers...there would be a few other licencing hurdles to leap - like the DVD and/or blue ray one.
You MIGHT even want to come up with some form of online service, similar to MS's. You pay one monthly bill. You get access to all the games that have an online component. I'd imagine patches and other "large" things like demos and what not could have a bittorrent download - build into the console, the trickiest thing would be building a quality network that doesn't get bogged down...
Or maybe this is all a pipe-dream and there is no competing with the large corporations and their marketing expertise...
are out there that are decent, and will work as simple IDE controllers?
I've had difficulty finding anything that has more than two controllers that doesn't force you to use the half-baked raid.
All I'd like is a good ata-133 controller (that's what I have, but others may want to know about sata) that actually has at least 4 IDE chanells that show up as normal IDE to the Linux kernel, rather than forcing me to use their weird raid.