Why do ISPs pretend that their customers aren't paying them to access the content?
"Google should pay us to use our Pipes" "BBC should pay us to send video to our customers"
What BS. Google is paying to put data onto the internet. BBC is paying for the same privilege.
The ISP's customers are paying to get/send data to the internet. The customers download data from BBC. Two ISPs are getting paid for this transaction.
If you don't like it, get out of the ISP business. If you want to stay in, but your customers are using too much bandwidth, either raise prices, or limit their bandwidth. It's a simple solution, and most ISPs have done it for years. ISPs calculate how much bandwidth they have, and give each customer more than their 'fair share', because they know that not all customers will use all their bandwidth 24/7. The better ISPs do this calculation regularly, and compare it to the real traffic use of their customers, and reduce the bandwidth limits(or increase the available bandwidth) as needed to keep the network running smoothly.
I use noscript, and instead of giving youtube permanent permissions, I always give it temporary permissions. Well, in recent weeks, I've needed to grant permissions to both youtube.com and ytimg.com to get videos to play, so they seem to be farming out their bandwidth to a caching service.
I don't agree with the "piracy boosts sales" theory regarding Windows. Yes, this might have been true in the past. These days, with all the OEM bundling MS manages to achieve, they don't need piracy anymore. For Windows anyway. I respectfully disagree - partially.
I think that there are a LOT of geeks who build their own systems who wouldn't buy Vista unless they have experience with it, and wouldn't have experience with it at this point without 'pirating'("free trialing") vista.
Which is why I think MS made these changes in SP1 rather than as soon as the 'cracks'/tricks came to light: They got a year of geeks tinkering and learning that isn't "that bad", and then they close the holes and nudge the geeks to buy it for real. Now that the geeks have used it, they are more willing to consider buying it and everyone is happy. (Well, everyone except those who really do want vista, but really don't want to/can't pay for it.)
Why wasn't the spec designed right in the first place? That's my gripe with it..
SATA is a great standard, and eSATA is a great idea... but they decided, for secure connections(it seems that even the SATA-io thinks the internal plugs aren't secure enough for external drives), they'd use a different connector. So you have to buy a different kind of cable for eSATA than internal SATA anyways..
But instead of taking the opportunity to add power pins, and allow a full 3.5" drives' worth of power to be drawn from that port, they didn't add any power at all!
Now they're talking about doing PoE-esque negotiation and sending power over pins normally used for other things(Probably extra ground pins?) And the icing on the cake is they're still going to limit it to around 500mA, so it won't be able to power 3.5" disks, only the 2.5" ones that you can power off of USB or firewire just fine. What a waste of a spec.
...I've never made sure to always check my MD5 signatures, but I damn sure am now. Unfortunately, the next guy will just edit the.md5 files to contain the correct signature.
(For those who don't get it: MD5 only caught it because the 'hacker' didn't think to check for MD5 signatures. They're trivial to regenerate after you change the file.)
GPG signing is more secure, but if the secret key is compromised, they can be faked as well. That said, there are at least revocation procedures that can catch it even if you don't read the news.
The thing is, I don't think that Apple is going to make much money off of this. They traditionally don't make much on content. The thing is.. Disney/Pixar DOES make a lot of money off of content.
And Steve Jobs is on the Disney board of directors.
until you get to the point where they ask for your truecrypt password, you give it to them, and then they ask for the hidden volume password, because they read the truecrypt website too.
If this is Truecrypt's killer ap, and you deny having another password, they'll bring it up in court and claim you're hiding it from them - getting you in trouble in other ways.
Forking the kernel brings more diversity into the intellectual marketplace. Were the kernel forked now, when Linus gets tired of playing with his toy there will be the ability for the kernel to go on. You're missing the point. We don't need to fork it for your given reason UNTIL linus gets tired of playing with his toy. Do you understand why? Because we can fork it whenever we want. We can do whatever we want to it as long as we adhere to the GPL when re-releasing it.
Beyond that, there's already a good bit of intellectual diversity. There are several vendor-independent forks out there.. SELinux is one of them. Some of them eventually get their uniqueness ported into the mainline kernel, some of them don't.. That's part of the other niceness of the linux kernel in general, the build time configure system allows one source tree to contain many features, even mutually exclusive ones, but only compile a small subset of them.
BMW has already started experimenting with a way to use waste heat from internal combustion engines, and it's very low-tech, but high-possibility.. Essentially, in between the normal exhaust stage and the intake stage at the beginning of the next cycle, they do a pure compression stage, compressing whatever air is in that cylinder, and then direct-inject water at TDC or near it, the water flash-boils from the heat in the cylinder, causing it to expand, pushing the piston down, harnessing the waste heat of the previous combustion.
Then it's exhausted like normal, and more fuel/air is injected.
As for waste heat from electronics, there are a few possibilities I know of, none have reached 'marketable product' stage, as far as I'm aware, but some might be getting close.
Also, basically many kinds of heat engines could be harnessed to convert the heat to mechanical energy, which can then be converted to electrical. The large question is how to do so efficiently, without causing the heat to be harder to manage in the original equipment.
Look up stirling engines and possibly piezoelectrics.
Similar database-backed systems could significantly reduce the amount of data generated if the apache log output was parsed into events between websites/servers, pages/documents, and actions, then you could reduce the incremental log data per page view to the minimal necessary, and still keep high granularity logs.. or you could record it all, up front, and then throw away all data that matches(or doesn't match) x before committing it to long term storage.. like, say, visitors who show up and don't ever log in, and search engine crawlers.. just note the # and types, and thats all you need to know.. vs. saving the entire visit history of anyone who actually bought anything, for troubleshooting/CYA/abuse prevention.
Sure it would take some extra CPU, but as others noted, dedicated syslog hosts aren't unheard of either.;) (I'd be really curious to see if this has been done already somewhere.. otherwise it might make a marketable product.)
I can't pretend to understand why AMD thought it was worthwhile to buy ATI at this point, but both companies COULD have positive results down the line. (ATI has, until now, been dependant on TSMC for actual production, and process improvements. Theoretically, AMD could shift fab capacity at older fabs(Like the 90nm fabs that should be seeing reduced production orders very soon) to ATI chips, which could give ATI a significant clock speed advantage over nVidia. (Just remember, don't try to directly compare clock speed between nVidia and ATI chips.. but if a given chip can run at a 25% higher clock speed, products using it can be tuned for ~%20 higher performance with the same/similar investment)
However, a chip designed for TSMC's fabs probably can't be produced on AMD's process, and ATI would either need to just use TSMC for the R600, or spend significant time and money retooling it for AMD's process. I HOPE the latter is the reason for R600's delay. Otherwise, ATI has completely fubar'd their hopes for this generation.
Also, ATI's chipsets have been getting better over the years. Until recently, most good motherboards using them have only used the AMD northbridge, and a ULi southbridge(ATI's southbridges had massive USB performance issues, but ULi made pin-compatible ones that worked well.) The new ATI southbridges are still less than ideal, but no longer orders of magnitude slower, and they've gotten progressively better each of the past 3 generations.
That all said.. currently, if I were buying a new computer, it'd be a Core 2 Duo. I wouldn't complain if I was given an AMD system, they're still good, but Intel is pulling out all the stops to undercut AMD, and it's working.
"Continually breaking the DRM schemes costs the studios a lot of money. It ensures that DRM is never "fire and forget;" and it turns DRM from being a one-time cost into a continual cost center, a black hole that they need to keep pouring money into. If you can make the cost of maintaining an effective DRM system higher than the cost of the piracy that it allegedly prevents, then it will eventually go away -- either the companies will see the light, or they'll be run out of business by other companies who do, and who are more profitable as a result."
You're missing the point. You touch on it when you say "... the piracy that it allegedly prevents", but you make an argument about making it more expensive than they're allegedly losing to piracy.
They know they're not losing as much as they claim they are. The claims are just for the legislators. The point of DRM is not to stop piracy, but to monetize things that used to be free. Not even 'fair use', simply free, completely. You'll buy a movie, and you'll only be able to watch it on your main TV. If you want to watch it in your car, you'll have to pay for the privilege. If you want to watch it on your computer, pay them again. If you want to make a copy of it, well, too bad.
You won't make it more expensive. Reason #1: Part of the cost is being swallowed by Intel and AMD(And AMD/ATI and nVidia. And seagate and western digital. And Microsoft and Intervideo.) Reason #2: they'll likely be able to DOUBLE if not TRIPLE their revenues by selling you playback rights you used to get for free. It won't be immediate, but they plan to grow their revenue as people become accustomed to paying for extra 'conveniences' with their DVDs.
Yes, but if you RTFA, you'll see that the context was referring to 'properly' in relation to the expose clones for XP, which cannot implement it 'properly' because XP does not support the same kind of off-screen window buffers automatically.
I just hope that the APIs required to implement arbitrary Aero effects (such as expose, or effects we haven't thought of yet) is a public API - IE, stable and 'allowed' to be used by programs from 3rd party developers.
If it isn't a public API, I think MS is shooting themselves in the foot by artificially limiting what kind of gee-whiz features can be added by third party applications. I think it's likely that your average home user will download 50 of them and try to run them all at once and then complain how slow everything is, but I don't want the rest of us to be that handicapped to satisfy the clueless.
Re:More cutting-edge innovation?
on
How MP3 Was Born
·
· Score: 1
It isn't portable, but you can listen to Pandora through both of Slim Devices' products:
"Define unsolicited. Lets say you do have a legitimate business relationship with me. My entity often has to send updates to all current customers telling them of changes in policy and important information."
There is a big difference between "Changes in policy and important information." and "Would you like to buy this spiff lightweight vacuum? Just 15 easy payments of $99.95, billed directly to your credit card if you cash this $10 check."
And you can bury the 'solicitation' offer in the small print of other offers if you want.. fine by me, just don't expect me to help you make any money beyond what I need you for. If more companies would have a checkbox saying 'would you LIKE to receive useless junk email that might have something your great aunt would love for her birthday', they'd probably send out closer to 30% of the volume of mail, and would probably get 80% as many buyers. Is the extra 20% of the income worth the extra 70% of the cost? apparently.
On a more general note, in my opinion, spam is this: Unsolicited Bulk Email.
It doesn't matter if it is commercial. It doesn't matter if you have a business partner I once bought a chia pet from.
I did not solicit your email, and you sent it in bulk to many people. It IS spam, no matter how legitimate your business is.
Many 'legitimate' companies have been put on my spam lists because they have sent me emails when I never gave them my email address. Yes, this would be a much smaller problem if other companies weren't selling my email address. However, there are some where I literally do not have a choice, and I know some of my credit cars are selling some of my info, and have little control over what is done with it once it is sold.. and I like getting payment reminders and the like by email.
Don't forget that the most profitable oilfields are in a part of the country that would be unfriendly to the US, given the ethnic group that mostly inhabits that region.
The general consensus elsewhere in the thread seems to be along the lines of: "Other yogurts might not have much that is still alive, this stuff is metered so you KNOW you get the real stuff."
and yet, how do you make homemade yogurt? Buy some store bought, stick it in a container with some freshly-pasteurized milk, and let it sit at a given temperature for x hours. Makes me think there is enough in there.;) Especially since I end up eating some every morning before work, just because I like the taste, and it's higher-protein(Keeps me going longer) than the muffins and other fast food I have available.
(On the other hand, the store brand junk that doesn't have any mention of 'live cultures' and has to call it something like 'yogurt food product', I'd be willing to bet is not as healthy.;) )
Perhaps someone here can tell me, what is the real difference between this fancy 'Activia' brand, and normal live culture yogurt (such as the Yoplait custard style I've been eating for 20 years when I want yogurt)?
Good yogurt has always had live bacteria in it, and the health effects of eating that live bacteria are not news.
No - it's basically just some accessible memory(Maybe in physical ram(encrypted?), maybe only physically in the TPM chip..), where the keys are stored, and in the more fancy implementations, decryption is done. From there, it passes, via memory that only the 'trusted' functions are allowed to access, to the display subsystem, which either passes it to a 'trusted' display device, or downsamples it(If the image constraint token is enabled on the content) and passes it to an 'untrusted' device.
The idea is that the TPM will require any access to the keys to be authenticated each time. I do not believe this will stop motivated hackers(I am willing to bet that the hackers who are VERY good at binary patching executables will be able to modify a powerDVD or whatever to do its TPM voodoo, and then save the keys to file, or store them in memory location 0xdeadbeef or whatever.)
Slashdot Mirror
Why do ISPs pretend that their customers aren't paying them to access the content?
"Google should pay us to use our Pipes" "BBC should pay us to send video to our customers"
What BS. Google is paying to put data onto the internet. BBC is paying for the same privilege.
The ISP's customers are paying to get/send data to the internet. The customers download data from BBC. Two ISPs are getting paid for this transaction.
If you don't like it, get out of the ISP business. If you want to stay in, but your customers are using too much bandwidth, either raise prices, or limit their bandwidth. It's a simple solution, and most ISPs have done it for years. ISPs calculate how much bandwidth they have, and give each customer more than their 'fair share', because they know that not all customers will use all their bandwidth 24/7. The better ISPs do this calculation regularly, and compare it to the real traffic use of their customers, and reduce the bandwidth limits(or increase the available bandwidth) as needed to keep the network running smoothly.
I suspect this is already taken care of.
I use noscript, and instead of giving youtube permanent permissions, I always give it temporary permissions. Well, in recent weeks, I've needed to grant permissions to both youtube.com and ytimg.com to get videos to play, so they seem to be farming out their bandwidth to a caching service.
Funny, I am still seeing that problem with windows.
;P)
In fact, I'm not FINDING a solution other than 'turn it all off, wait 5 minutes, reboot'.
(Yes, it is because we have a lexmark printer, but it was free-to-us.
I run windows on the desktop because I play windows-only games regularly, and rebooting is annoying.
My server/router is running linux because it works, and works well.
Yes, this might have been true in the past. These days, with all the OEM bundling MS manages to achieve, they don't need piracy anymore. For Windows anyway. I respectfully disagree - partially.
I think that there are a LOT of geeks who build their own systems who wouldn't buy Vista unless they have experience with it, and wouldn't have experience with it at this point without 'pirating'("free trialing") vista.
Which is why I think MS made these changes in SP1 rather than as soon as the 'cracks'/tricks came to light: They got a year of geeks tinkering and learning that isn't "that bad", and then they close the holes and nudge the geeks to buy it for real. Now that the geeks have used it, they are more willing to consider buying it and everyone is happy. (Well, everyone except those who really do want vista, but really don't want to/can't pay for it.)
SATA is a great standard, and eSATA is a great idea... but they decided, for secure connections(it seems that even the SATA-io thinks the internal plugs aren't secure enough for external drives), they'd use a different connector. So you have to buy a different kind of cable for eSATA than internal SATA anyways..
But instead of taking the opportunity to add power pins, and allow a full 3.5" drives' worth of power to be drawn from that port, they didn't add any power at all!
Now they're talking about doing PoE-esque negotiation and sending power over pins normally used for other things(Probably extra ground pins?) And the icing on the cake is they're still going to limit it to around 500mA, so it won't be able to power 3.5" disks, only the 2.5" ones that you can power off of USB or firewire just fine. What a waste of a spec.
Perhaps they couldn't physically fit more than 13 modules into the same space as a 3.5" HDD?
Either way, it nicely explains the 1.6TB version (128MB modules instead of 64MB modules..)
...I've never made sure to always check my MD5 signatures, but I damn sure am now. Unfortunately, the next guy will just edit the(For those who don't get it: MD5 only caught it because the 'hacker' didn't think to check for MD5 signatures. They're trivial to regenerate after you change the file.)
GPG signing is more secure, but if the secret key is compromised, they can be faked as well. That said, there are at least revocation procedures that can catch it even if you don't read the news.
And Steve Jobs is on the Disney board of directors.
TrueCrypt sounds nice and all...
until you get to the point where they ask for your truecrypt password, you give it to them, and then they ask for the hidden volume password, because they read the truecrypt website too.
If this is Truecrypt's killer ap, and you deny having another password, they'll bring it up in court and claim you're hiding it from them - getting you in trouble in other ways.
Beyond that, there's already a good bit of intellectual diversity. There are several vendor-independent forks out there.. SELinux is one of them. Some of them eventually get their uniqueness ported into the mainline kernel, some of them don't.. That's part of the other niceness of the linux kernel in general, the build time configure system allows one source tree to contain many features, even mutually exclusive ones, but only compile a small subset of them.
BMW has already started experimenting with a way to use waste heat from internal combustion engines, and it's very low-tech, but high-possibility.. Essentially, in between the normal exhaust stage and the intake stage at the beginning of the next cycle, they do a pure compression stage, compressing whatever air is in that cylinder, and then direct-inject water at TDC or near it, the water flash-boils from the heat in the cylinder, causing it to expand, pushing the piston down, harnessing the waste heat of the previous combustion.
Then it's exhausted like normal, and more fuel/air is injected.
As for waste heat from electronics, there are a few possibilities I know of, none have reached 'marketable product' stage, as far as I'm aware, but some might be getting close.
Also, basically many kinds of heat engines could be harnessed to convert the heat to mechanical energy, which can then be converted to electrical. The large question is how to do so efficiently, without causing the heat to be harder to manage in the original equipment.
Look up stirling engines and possibly piezoelectrics.
Similar database-backed systems could significantly reduce the amount of data generated if the apache log output was parsed into events between websites/servers, pages/documents, and actions, then you could reduce the incremental log data per page view to the minimal necessary, and still keep high granularity logs.. or you could record it all, up front, and then throw away all data that matches(or doesn't match) x before committing it to long term storage.. like, say, visitors who show up and don't ever log in, and search engine crawlers.. just note the # and types, and thats all you need to know.. vs. saving the entire visit history of anyone who actually bought anything, for troubleshooting/CYA/abuse prevention.
;) (I'd be really curious to see if this has been done already somewhere.. otherwise it might make a marketable product.)
Sure it would take some extra CPU, but as others noted, dedicated syslog hosts aren't unheard of either.
I can't pretend to understand why AMD thought it was worthwhile to buy ATI at this point, but both companies COULD have positive results down the line. (ATI has, until now, been dependant on TSMC for actual production, and process improvements. Theoretically, AMD could shift fab capacity at older fabs(Like the 90nm fabs that should be seeing reduced production orders very soon) to ATI chips, which could give ATI a significant clock speed advantage over nVidia. (Just remember, don't try to directly compare clock speed between nVidia and ATI chips.. but if a given chip can run at a 25% higher clock speed, products using it can be tuned for ~%20 higher performance with the same/similar investment)
However, a chip designed for TSMC's fabs probably can't be produced on AMD's process, and ATI would either need to just use TSMC for the R600, or spend significant time and money retooling it for AMD's process. I HOPE the latter is the reason for R600's delay. Otherwise, ATI has completely fubar'd their hopes for this generation.
Also, ATI's chipsets have been getting better over the years. Until recently, most good motherboards using them have only used the AMD northbridge, and a ULi southbridge(ATI's southbridges had massive USB performance issues, but ULi made pin-compatible ones that worked well.) The new ATI southbridges are still less than ideal, but no longer orders of magnitude slower, and they've gotten progressively better each of the past 3 generations.
That all said.. currently, if I were buying a new computer, it'd be a Core 2 Duo. I wouldn't complain if I was given an AMD system, they're still good, but Intel is pulling out all the stops to undercut AMD, and it's working.
"Continually breaking the DRM schemes costs the studios a lot of money. It ensures that DRM is never "fire and forget;" and it turns DRM from being a one-time cost into a continual cost center, a black hole that they need to keep pouring money into. If you can make the cost of maintaining an effective DRM system higher than the cost of the piracy that it allegedly prevents, then it will eventually go away -- either the companies will see the light, or they'll be run out of business by other companies who do, and who are more profitable as a result."
You're missing the point. You touch on it when you say "... the piracy that it allegedly prevents", but you make an argument about making it more expensive than they're allegedly losing to piracy.
They know they're not losing as much as they claim they are. The claims are just for the legislators. The point of DRM is not to stop piracy, but to monetize things that used to be free. Not even 'fair use', simply free, completely. You'll buy a movie, and you'll only be able to watch it on your main TV. If you want to watch it in your car, you'll have to pay for the privilege. If you want to watch it on your computer, pay them again. If you want to make a copy of it, well, too bad.
You won't make it more expensive. Reason #1: Part of the cost is being swallowed by Intel and AMD(And AMD/ATI and nVidia. And seagate and western digital. And Microsoft and Intervideo.)
Reason #2: they'll likely be able to DOUBLE if not TRIPLE their revenues by selling you playback rights you used to get for free. It won't be immediate, but they plan to grow their revenue as people become accustomed to paying for extra 'conveniences' with their DVDs.
Yes, but if you RTFA, you'll see that the context was referring to 'properly' in relation to the expose clones for XP, which cannot implement it 'properly' because XP does not support the same kind of off-screen window buffers automatically.
I just hope that the APIs required to implement arbitrary Aero effects (such as expose, or effects we haven't thought of yet) is a public API - IE, stable and 'allowed' to be used by programs from 3rd party developers.
If it isn't a public API, I think MS is shooting themselves in the foot by artificially limiting what kind of gee-whiz features can be added by third party applications. I think it's likely that your average home user will download 50 of them and try to run them all at once and then complain how slow everything is, but I don't want the rest of us to be that handicapped to satisfy the clueless.
It isn't portable, but you can listen to Pandora through both of Slim Devices' products:
;)
http://www.slimdevices.com/
Very spiffy, but out of my price range for a music player. My (high-end) computer speakers are good enough for me.
Everyone's forgetting that in Pinky and the Brain canon, Bill Gates is really a hamster named Snowball.
"Define unsolicited. Lets say you do have a legitimate business relationship with me. My entity often has to send updates to all current customers telling them of changes in policy and important information."
There is a big difference between "Changes in policy and important information." and "Would you like to buy this spiff lightweight vacuum? Just 15 easy payments of $99.95, billed directly to your credit card if you cash this $10 check."
And you can bury the 'solicitation' offer in the small print of other offers if you want.. fine by me, just don't expect me to help you make any money beyond what I need you for. If more companies would have a checkbox saying 'would you LIKE to receive useless junk email that might have something your great aunt would love for her birthday', they'd probably send out closer to 30% of the volume of mail, and would probably get 80% as many buyers. Is the extra 20% of the income worth the extra 70% of the cost? apparently.
What he said. ;)
On a more general note, in my opinion, spam is this:
Unsolicited Bulk Email.
It doesn't matter if it is commercial. It doesn't matter if you have a business partner I once bought a chia pet from.
I did not solicit your email, and you sent it in bulk to many people. It IS spam, no matter how legitimate your business is.
Many 'legitimate' companies have been put on my spam lists because they have sent me emails when I never gave them my email address. Yes, this would be a much smaller problem if other companies weren't selling my email address. However, there are some where I literally do not have a choice, and I know some of my credit cars are selling some of my info, and have little control over what is done with it once it is sold.. and I like getting payment reminders and the like by email.
Don't forget that the most profitable oilfields are in a part of the country that would be unfriendly to the US, given the ethnic group that mostly inhabits that region.
Other than.... The Dip.
Yeah, that stuff is Low Fat Velveeta. ;)
The general consensus elsewhere in the thread seems to be along the lines of: "Other yogurts might not have much that is still alive, this stuff is metered so you KNOW you get the real stuff."
;) Especially since I end up eating some every morning before work, just because I like the taste, and it's higher-protein(Keeps me going longer) than the muffins and other fast food I have available.
;) )
and yet, how do you make homemade yogurt? Buy some store bought, stick it in a container with some freshly-pasteurized milk, and let it sit at a given temperature for x hours. Makes me think there is enough in there.
(On the other hand, the store brand junk that doesn't have any mention of 'live cultures' and has to call it something like 'yogurt food product', I'd be willing to bet is not as healthy.
Perhaps someone here can tell me, what is the real difference between this fancy 'Activia' brand, and normal live culture yogurt (such as the Yoplait custard style I've been eating for 20 years when I want yogurt)?
Good yogurt has always had live bacteria in it, and the health effects of eating that live bacteria are not news.
No - it's basically just some accessible memory(Maybe in physical ram(encrypted?), maybe only physically in the TPM chip..), where the keys are stored, and in the more fancy implementations, decryption is done. From there, it passes, via memory that only the 'trusted' functions are allowed to access, to the display subsystem, which either passes it to a 'trusted' display device, or downsamples it(If the image constraint token is enabled on the content) and passes it to an 'untrusted' device.
The idea is that the TPM will require any access to the keys to be authenticated each time. I do not believe this will stop motivated hackers(I am willing to bet that the hackers who are VERY good at binary patching executables will be able to modify a powerDVD or whatever to do its TPM voodoo, and then save the keys to file, or store them in memory location 0xdeadbeef or whatever.)