I know the GP started it, but this isn't the time for nationalism - things are going to shit on both sides of the Atlantic, and trying to argue that one side is doing better or worse is not productive; they're bad in different ways.
To paraphrase your post "People in the UK look at stuff that goes on in the US... teens being charged as sex offenders for taking pictures of themselves, or strip searched at school for carrying a headache pill...".
In my experience, Britain is more susceptible to allowing 'big brother' style intrusions from the government, while the US is more likely to get caught up in moral panics. Not to say that either country is immune to either problem, of course.
America looks at some of Britain's free speech violations and shakes their head at how the likes of this could never happen with the constitution for protection, while Britain looks back at America and wonders how much more power the fire-and-brimstone Christian minority can seize.
It's not the particular religion that's the issue, it's the development level of the countries. I'm too lazy to elucidate the whole argument right now, but in a nutshell: look at the extreme forms of Christianity practised by some in Africa.
I know it's against Slashdot tradition, but I'd recommend that you RTFA. The summary gave me the same impression - that it would be some corporate fluff piece about how it's a good thing that the networks are screwing you - but the article itself is actually a very well reasoned technical explanation of the various bits of spectrum (and the the protocols running on them) in use today and in the near future, and how these often interfere with interoperability.
Although the Kinect is apparently not subsidised, I completely see your point. They were projecting every Kinect as including $x in additional software sales as well as the $y profit on the hardware, and I totally understand why they're pissed about not getting that $x that they were hoping for. That wasn't my point - their motivation in wanting to prevent the Kinect being used as a standalone device is clear.
My point, and the bit that surprises me, is that they seem to be operating on the assumption that there was ever a chance of preventing the Kinect from being used openly. This assumption leads them to make bad PR moves, like the 'tampering' comments. I wasn't expecting a company like MS, who are usually not too bad with their marketing, to totally ignore all precedent (DRM, undocumented protocols, and the like are always cracked) and come to faulty assumptions like that.
What I find strangest is that the PR people at MS still don't seem to get this: spouting a lot of inflammatory nonsense about the Kinect being "tamper-resistant" and the like will piss off the geeks no end, and the non-geeks don't care either way (unless someone comes out with a nicely packaged piece of software that uses the PC interface, I guess). As it stands, we're triumphantly saying "fuck you, evil corporation" and the company that sponsored this is adding a further donation to the EFF to support the good work they do in keeping this stuff legal. The net result for MS is bad publicity with geeks, no impact with the majority of the market, and an open source driver for their device within a few days of its release. I suppose if they'd had any hope of blocking the production of the driver then the bad blood may have served some purpose, but as it stands I'd say they really, really need to fire some people in marketing if they couldn't predict that chain of events. I'm genuinely a little surprised that MS didn't know better.
If they'd just looked at pretty much any similar example in history to see that the open driver was inevitable, they could've played it in such a manner that they distanced themselves from supporting or condoning it, but congratulated the community for their innovation.
I just wish they would get their pissing match done with and play nice. Seriously. This isn't doing ANYONE any good.
They may be doing it for entirely selfish reasons, but the fact of the matter is that Google are bringing forward the argument about open access to one's data.
Many thousands of people who's eyes would glaze over at the mere mention of open document formats or API interoperability are being told in no uncertain terms that their data will be trapped by a non-open service, and that this can lead to bad things further down the line.
Now if only Google considered it profitable to make a similar stand against those manufacturers who decide to treat the end user as an adversary in terms of access to their own device, we might really get somewhere.
Your post assumes that workers with little to no holiday get more done in a year than those with some time to relax. I'd posit that this is not the case.
My default recommendation in these cases is a Nokia 1100 (or 1101). Black and white screen, so excellent readability and very long life, but with enough pixels to display a text message properly (unlike the Motorola F3's segmented e-ink screen), costs next to nothing, decent lithium ion battery, a well thought out interface, and nearly indestructible.
Yes, it is. If you keep all your books on your ebook reader, and you lose/break/whatever your reader such that they cannot be retrieved, you should be SOL.
Your suggestion of tying the books to a single device necessitates them being stored in one or two places (reader, computer, or split between the two). Those 'places' are, by their nature, fragile electronic devices that hold many thousands of books - the actual data storage part easily fits in a pocket. It's a hell of a lot harder to safeguard a micro SD card than a library.
Imposing certain artificial restrictions on eBooks could be seen as a valid way to preserve the value of the content. I personally don't agree that DRM is the way to go, but I understand the mindset. Your idea of having 'artificial fragility' as one of those restrictions, however, is simply introducing one of the fringe drawbacks of hard copy into the digital version; fragility it's a function of the cost of reproduction, not of the value of the content.
Sure, the 'brand name' of a school will have an impact, but so will the student's degree type, their grades and a bunch of other things. Yes, bad high school grades might well translate to a less selective university, which will then knock a few points off against the guy who went to Harvard, but that's not the same as having one's destiny set for life by the age of 18.
You're paying the ISP to transfer the data, Hulu is providing the content which is supported by the ads. If you're paying the ISP for data, and paying Hulu for the content, then having to watch the ads seem to be a pretty poor deal.
It's somewhat self-fulfilling: people see linux as a server OS, so the time and money goes into developing that aspect of it, making it a better server OS; repeat ad infinitum. FWIW the only time I've actually seen macs in a datacenter does support this hypothesis: they were Mac Pros sitting on trays in the rack, being used for video processing. Apparently Xserves don't have enough space for drives or expansion cards to be worth the money for a job like that.
There's also the startling hypocrisy of the corporations, both in the actions themselves and the penalties applied. The same politicians and companies who push for bankruptcy-inducing fines and hugely invasive tracking are then caught infringing copyright themselves, but continue to operate as if nothing happened.
It may just be that I'm misinterpreting your phrasing, but even while disagreeing with them you seem to have fallen into the ISP's trap: Google and Netflix are already paying for their upstream bandwidth. They pay upstream at the datacenter, the customers pay downstream at the home/office.
What the ISPs want is for the content providers to pay something for the downstream at the customer's end as well as the customer.
Incidentally, I get the impression that there's actually plenty of capacity, for the moment at least. Obviously upgrades cost money and must be ongoing, but my 50Mbps connection in London was reasonably priced (when split between a household of four), uncapped and provided close enough to the advertised speed that I was happy.
It's less that they're worried about covering the cost of upgrades (although I'm sure that comes into it somewhat) and more that they just want to come up with a plausible sounding reason to be paid twice.
What part of Slashdot doesn't degrade properly? Everything in the comment section appears to be comprised of standard HTML links which are intercepted by JS before the HTML action occurs - no JS, no interception, and it falls back to HTML (which then contains the relevant parameters to have the correct comment or reply page constructed server-side).
If anything it's a good example of how graceful degradation should work, in my opinion.
Here's a Wired article talking about the mistake. That said, suggesting that a government with an (apparently) moderately effective web filter "isn't too web savy" on the basis of a newspaper's screw up 8 years ago might be taking things a little far.
An interesting aside to this is that due to the power of the big retailers (Walmart and the like), and their refusal to stock NC-17 movies or AO games, means that it's considered commercial suicide to release a title that hits these marks. Although I don't support the government stepping in on principle, the practical upshot in countries like the UK where there is a legally enforced rating system is that 18 rated games and movies are a big part of the market, thus they are sold by all major retailers without argument - in principle it's more restrictive, but in practise the publishers don't have to spend their time worrying about getting the highest rating out of the black box that is the MPAA.
The summary says that the South Korean animators are re-outsourcing an unspecified amount (could be a majority for all we know) of the workload to North Korea; for all you know it was this practise that was being commented on, not the South Korean studios themselves.
Yup. The fact that they didn't implement some kind of scale based on percentage use of the total capacity or the like strongly suggests they're either incompetent or there's a conflict of interests. In either case, the wrong people are doing the job.
Re:What was the name of that 70's thing...
on
USB 'Dead Drops'
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· Score: 1
Although clearly not from the 70s, the idea sounds somewhat similar to travel bugs, which one sometimes finds in geocaches. All this has happened before, and so forth...
Re:Engineering aspects:
on
USB 'Dead Drops'
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· Score: 4, Informative
Basically, this. A very reasonable point, and one that I hadn't considered myself.
Hell, my netbook still only has 16GB storage, and a good amount of that is taken by the OS. If the GP was thinking of these drops for trading movies (and the P2P allusions mean that's not an unreasonable assumption) then yeah, it's a trivial amount, but if you want to transfer information you can pack a whole crapload into a few MB.
Slashdot Mirror
I know the GP started it, but this isn't the time for nationalism - things are going to shit on both sides of the Atlantic, and trying to argue that one side is doing better or worse is not productive; they're bad in different ways.
To paraphrase your post "People in the UK look at stuff that goes on in the US... teens being charged as sex offenders for taking pictures of themselves, or strip searched at school for carrying a headache pill...".
In my experience, Britain is more susceptible to allowing 'big brother' style intrusions from the government, while the US is more likely to get caught up in moral panics. Not to say that either country is immune to either problem, of course.
America looks at some of Britain's free speech violations and shakes their head at how the likes of this could never happen with the constitution for protection, while Britain looks back at America and wonders how much more power the fire-and-brimstone Christian minority can seize.
It's not the particular religion that's the issue, it's the development level of the countries. I'm too lazy to elucidate the whole argument right now, but in a nutshell: look at the extreme forms of Christianity practised by some in Africa.
I know it's against Slashdot tradition, but I'd recommend that you RTFA. The summary gave me the same impression - that it would be some corporate fluff piece about how it's a good thing that the networks are screwing you - but the article itself is actually a very well reasoned technical explanation of the various bits of spectrum (and the the protocols running on them) in use today and in the near future, and how these often interfere with interoperability.
Although the Kinect is apparently not subsidised, I completely see your point. They were projecting every Kinect as including $x in additional software sales as well as the $y profit on the hardware, and I totally understand why they're pissed about not getting that $x that they were hoping for. That wasn't my point - their motivation in wanting to prevent the Kinect being used as a standalone device is clear.
My point, and the bit that surprises me, is that they seem to be operating on the assumption that there was ever a chance of preventing the Kinect from being used openly. This assumption leads them to make bad PR moves, like the 'tampering' comments. I wasn't expecting a company like MS, who are usually not too bad with their marketing, to totally ignore all precedent (DRM, undocumented protocols, and the like are always cracked) and come to faulty assumptions like that.
What I find strangest is that the PR people at MS still don't seem to get this: spouting a lot of inflammatory nonsense about the Kinect being "tamper-resistant" and the like will piss off the geeks no end, and the non-geeks don't care either way (unless someone comes out with a nicely packaged piece of software that uses the PC interface, I guess). As it stands, we're triumphantly saying "fuck you, evil corporation" and the company that sponsored this is adding a further donation to the EFF to support the good work they do in keeping this stuff legal. The net result for MS is bad publicity with geeks, no impact with the majority of the market, and an open source driver for their device within a few days of its release. I suppose if they'd had any hope of blocking the production of the driver then the bad blood may have served some purpose, but as it stands I'd say they really, really need to fire some people in marketing if they couldn't predict that chain of events. I'm genuinely a little surprised that MS didn't know better.
If they'd just looked at pretty much any similar example in history to see that the open driver was inevitable, they could've played it in such a manner that they distanced themselves from supporting or condoning it, but congratulated the community for their innovation.
I just wish they would get their pissing match done with and play nice. Seriously. This isn't doing ANYONE any good.
They may be doing it for entirely selfish reasons, but the fact of the matter is that Google are bringing forward the argument about open access to one's data.
Many thousands of people who's eyes would glaze over at the mere mention of open document formats or API interoperability are being told in no uncertain terms that their data will be trapped by a non-open service, and that this can lead to bad things further down the line.
Now if only Google considered it profitable to make a similar stand against those manufacturers who decide to treat the end user as an adversary in terms of access to their own device, we might really get somewhere.
Your post assumes that workers with little to no holiday get more done in a year than those with some time to relax. I'd posit that this is not the case.
Interesting document. I find it odd that religious beliefs are protected but political ones are not.
My default recommendation in these cases is a Nokia 1100 (or 1101). Black and white screen, so excellent readability and very long life, but with enough pixels to display a text message properly (unlike the Motorola F3's segmented e-ink screen), costs next to nothing, decent lithium ion battery, a well thought out interface, and nearly indestructible.
Your suggestion of tying the books to a single device necessitates them being stored in one or two places (reader, computer, or split between the two). Those 'places' are, by their nature, fragile electronic devices that hold many thousands of books - the actual data storage part easily fits in a pocket. It's a hell of a lot harder to safeguard a micro SD card than a library.
Imposing certain artificial restrictions on eBooks could be seen as a valid way to preserve the value of the content. I personally don't agree that DRM is the way to go, but I understand the mindset. Your idea of having 'artificial fragility' as one of those restrictions, however, is simply introducing one of the fringe drawbacks of hard copy into the digital version; fragility it's a function of the cost of reproduction, not of the value of the content.
Sure, the 'brand name' of a school will have an impact, but so will the student's degree type, their grades and a bunch of other things. Yes, bad high school grades might well translate to a less selective university, which will then knock a few points off against the guy who went to Harvard, but that's not the same as having one's destiny set for life by the age of 18.
You're paying the ISP to transfer the data, Hulu is providing the content which is supported by the ads. If you're paying the ISP for data, and paying Hulu for the content, then having to watch the ads seem to be a pretty poor deal.
It's somewhat self-fulfilling: people see linux as a server OS, so the time and money goes into developing that aspect of it, making it a better server OS; repeat ad infinitum. FWIW the only time I've actually seen macs in a datacenter does support this hypothesis: they were Mac Pros sitting on trays in the rack, being used for video processing. Apparently Xserves don't have enough space for drives or expansion cards to be worth the money for a job like that.
There's also the startling hypocrisy of the corporations, both in the actions themselves and the penalties applied. The same politicians and companies who push for bankruptcy-inducing fines and hugely invasive tracking are then caught infringing copyright themselves, but continue to operate as if nothing happened.
It may just be that I'm misinterpreting your phrasing, but even while disagreeing with them you seem to have fallen into the ISP's trap: Google and Netflix are already paying for their upstream bandwidth. They pay upstream at the datacenter, the customers pay downstream at the home/office.
What the ISPs want is for the content providers to pay something for the downstream at the customer's end as well as the customer.
Incidentally, I get the impression that there's actually plenty of capacity, for the moment at least. Obviously upgrades cost money and must be ongoing, but my 50Mbps connection in London was reasonably priced (when split between a household of four), uncapped and provided close enough to the advertised speed that I was happy.
It's less that they're worried about covering the cost of upgrades (although I'm sure that comes into it somewhat) and more that they just want to come up with a plausible sounding reason to be paid twice.
What part of Slashdot doesn't degrade properly? Everything in the comment section appears to be comprised of standard HTML links which are intercepted by JS before the HTML action occurs - no JS, no interception, and it falls back to HTML (which then contains the relevant parameters to have the correct comment or reply page constructed server-side).
If anything it's a good example of how graceful degradation should work, in my opinion.
I thought FF and Safari used the same text rendering, on Snow Leopard at least?
Here's a Wired article talking about the mistake. That said, suggesting that a government with an (apparently) moderately effective web filter "isn't too web savy" on the basis of a newspaper's screw up 8 years ago might be taking things a little far.
An interesting aside to this is that due to the power of the big retailers (Walmart and the like), and their refusal to stock NC-17 movies or AO games, means that it's considered commercial suicide to release a title that hits these marks. Although I don't support the government stepping in on principle, the practical upshot in countries like the UK where there is a legally enforced rating system is that 18 rated games and movies are a big part of the market, thus they are sold by all major retailers without argument - in principle it's more restrictive, but in practise the publishers don't have to spend their time worrying about getting the highest rating out of the black box that is the MPAA.
The summary says that the South Korean animators are re-outsourcing an unspecified amount (could be a majority for all we know) of the workload to North Korea; for all you know it was this practise that was being commented on, not the South Korean studios themselves.
Reasonable points, but you overlook the fact that at wholesale, $1.12/GB is overpriced by about an order of magnitude.
Yup. The fact that they didn't implement some kind of scale based on percentage use of the total capacity or the like strongly suggests they're either incompetent or there's a conflict of interests. In either case, the wrong people are doing the job.
Although clearly not from the 70s, the idea sounds somewhat similar to travel bugs, which one sometimes finds in geocaches. All this has happened before, and so forth...
Basically, this. A very reasonable point, and one that I hadn't considered myself.
Hell, my netbook still only has 16GB storage, and a good amount of that is taken by the OS. If the GP was thinking of these drops for trading movies (and the P2P allusions mean that's not an unreasonable assumption) then yeah, it's a trivial amount, but if you want to transfer information you can pack a whole crapload into a few MB.