While I know it's bad practice to go hooking your computer up to any untrustworthy data sources, is there that much a malicious USB stick could do to any patched up OS?
I genuinely don't know the answer, but experience would lead me to believe that I'd see some variation on "Really-trustworthy-program-that-isn't-a-virus,-honest is trying to modify your computer. Continue?" from OSX, Windows or Linux. Are zero-day exploits really common enough for it to be a significant worry otherwise?
Although the summary and linked article blame DRM (and I'm not one to defend that restrictive crap), the original joystiq article implies that it's just grabbing an incomplete update which doesn't have proper Xbox Live support yet. Nothing to do with DRM or copyright, simply that MS haven't set up a final version of the new firmware yet because they thought they had another few days to do so.
375 miles for the German car, so it is 600km. In either case, though, you're absolutely right that the costs to charge are very much in favour of the electric. Between the low fuel cost and government subsidies, it might be worthwhile even with the early adopter overhead.
This is, however, trading reliance on oil as a fuel source for reliance on lithium as a storage medium. Admittedly that's more conducive to recycling, but while I'm no expert on batteries, I'm pretty sure it's not trivial to turn a dead, degraded cell into a shiny new one.
It's a shame we haven't managed to get particularly far with hydrogen as a storage medium - it can be produced straight from fossil fuels to ease the transition, and then produced directly from water once we get the power generation infrastructure up to scratch. No reliance on a non-renewable power source or storage medium.
Now to totally suck the humour out of that post: Call it 1GW output for a reasonably sized nuclear plant. A reasonable estimate for the efficiency of an electric car (according to Wikipedia) is about 15kWh/100km; after converting to more usable units, the 600km capacity means the battery holds 324MJ. A 6 minute charge time gives a 900kW transfer rate, or about 1,100 users per nuclear power station.
I think most people probably prefer paper for the actual reading experience (I know I do), but ereaders do have their advantages - the combination of a vast array of free classic content, the ability to download instantly from both local and international libraries and have the books 'return' themselves automatically, and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to carry a whole collection in a small, light unit was enough to convince me to get one. Considering what I'd end up spending even on out of copyright novels it's already working towards paying for itself surprisingly quickly.
I'm with you on the DRM issue, though. Fine for rentals/library borrowing, but totally unacceptable for something that I'm supposed to own.
That's the model that library ebooks currently follow: free, but they self-destruct in two weeks. Which I'm fine with, because I didn't pay for them. In general, I'll tolerate DRM on a rental because it simply enforces a rule that would exist anyway on a non-digital copy.
What I'm not fine with is DRM of any kind on books that I pay more than a trivial amount for, or ebooks that cost more than the paperback would (after subtracting a reasonable printing and shipping cost).
Quite agreed. Unfortunately, many people are morons, and will thus respond to adverts of that type. Not only will they respond, their aforementioned idiocy makes them more likely to be talked into buying inferior, overpriced products that they quite possibly don't even need.
What surprises me more is not the bad adverts, but just how much our economy is based on advertising. TV, newspapers, sports & the majority of the internet all basically run on the assumption that the marketing is actually working. The advertisers keep paying with little tangible method to measure results, and I can never quite bring myself to believe the payoff is as good as they seem to think. Maybe I'm wrong - they're the millionaires, after all - I don't know, it just doesn't seem plausible that advertising can actually have enough impact to justify that kind of outlay.
You may well already know about it, but Project Gutenberg is an excellent 'one stop shop' for out of copyright literature. Combine that with online library access and it becomes pretty easy to keep an eBook reader (legally) filled without paying to do so.
That said, I quite agree with you that current eBook pricing is too high, and I think there's a lot of room for improvement in the market.
I know nothing of her campaign team, so I don't know if they would be this smart, but the fact stands that we're now reading a story about Meg Whitman. Sure, it's a little negative, but there's a vast opportunity for positive spin while her name's getting thrown out there.
The last time I saw a proposal like that (specific wording was a pledge to "end the storage of internet and email records without good reason") was a few months back. It came from the very same coalition government who are proposing this surveillance.
To be honest I'm actually disappointed. I didn't have especially high hopes, but I was expecting a little better than this.
Incidentally, what's going on with comments on Idle? On the rest of/. clicking a comment title expands it in the thread, but here it opens briefly then refreshes the page to only that comment (meaning you can't open up multiple bits of a thread without waiting for a bunch of page refreshes). Off topic, I know, but it's more irritating when a decent story might be discussed in Idle.
Specifying FM radio clout is somewhat unfair, as that mentality is tied into the idea that the style of marketing performed by the big labels is the only valid style of marketing. If you believe that, then you're pretty much tied to Universal or someone of their ilk - if you're lucky you'll get very rich with their help, and I certainly see the appeal of that, but signing one of those contracts is a major gamble. Depending on your connections and your style of music, that gamble may or may not have the best odds for you; sure, you'll be stuck playing by the rules of those asshats for a while even if it does pay off, but to be honest I'd probably take those terms myself if I thought they were going to throw enough resources my way to make me a major seller.
The other option, also a gamble, is to promote yourself and/or employ a good PR firm. Viral videos (the kind people actually like to watch - think OK Go; although they may have had a major label behind them, the idea doesn't require one), gigs in the right places, low-cost high-volume sales on iTunes, and the right kind of image could be plenty to earn you the notoriety that leads to a very decent living. The maximum win probably isn't as high as that which you might get with the major labels, but the freedom is greater and the chance of some success, rather than either tens of millions or abject failure, may well be higher.
I wouldn't have thought there was any money at all in the reader itself. The less work to do on it, the better.
I suppose perhaps they were trying to drive sales of the full version of Acrobat, but then I don't see who would really purchase that specifically when there are plenty of free/extremely cheap methods to export to PDF from your document creation software of choice. It seems foolish to have screwed over a perfectly good format in an effort to salvage sales a largely redundant piece of software - it's the kind of behaviour that I would understand if Acrobat were their main or only product, but when they've got Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, and the like I don't see the need for it.
Adobe used to make very good software - now they make very exploitable software.
They still can make good software, which they proceed to sell for very large quantities of cash. What I don't really understand is why they ever updated PDF beyond being a simple document format - it introduced all of these vulnerabilities, and gave them a lot more work to do on their free reader software, for little real value. What was wrong with just keeping it as a simple extension of postscript?
Dell has better volume discounts than you ever will, both with Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers. They further offset this by bundling in a whole load of crapware on the default OS install.
Even after accounting for their profit margin and your time spent re-imaging the machines with a clean version of Windows, the cost from Dell compared to DIY for standard beige-box business machines should be somewhere between slightly cheaper and slightly more expensive; if it's the latter, a single point of contact for warranty issues is still perhaps worth the money. If it's the former, you win on all counts.
Precisely. These kind of projections invariably fail to take into account even the most basic ideas about supply and demand. As we begin to run lower on a given resource it becomes increasingly more viable to recycle it or look for alternatives. In most cases this happens without even especially inconveniencing people - everyone might grumble about fuel prices, but then they just drive a little less, the market for more efficient cars grows, and not that much changes in our day to day lives.
That's quite reasonable, but you do then need a backup plan for the times that it becomes necessary to travel long distances. If the combined cost of an electric car and the power to run it was low enough, it could be reasonable to have a secondary car just for long distances, but in the current market one may as well just use the petrol driven car for day-to-day short drives too and skip the (significant) expense of the electric one. Public transport (bus, train, plane, whatever) for long distances and a hire car at the other end is probably a more logical way to deal with it, but that does leave you with a dependence on the schedules, pricing and general whims of the transportation companies.
Exactly. Some of us are quite happy to provide a little bit of free access to those who need it. All the machines on my network are secured, the network itself is deliberately open.
Slashdot Mirror
While I know it's bad practice to go hooking your computer up to any untrustworthy data sources, is there that much a malicious USB stick could do to any patched up OS?
I genuinely don't know the answer, but experience would lead me to believe that I'd see some variation on "Really-trustworthy-program-that-isn't-a-virus,-honest is trying to modify your computer. Continue?" from OSX, Windows or Linux. Are zero-day exploits really common enough for it to be a significant worry otherwise?
5 free usb drives, where's my bike?
No longer where you left it, since a passerby though 'hey, a free bike'.
Although the summary and linked article blame DRM (and I'm not one to defend that restrictive crap), the original joystiq article implies that it's just grabbing an incomplete update which doesn't have proper Xbox Live support yet. Nothing to do with DRM or copyright, simply that MS haven't set up a final version of the new firmware yet because they thought they had another few days to do so.
I know - 324MJ/(6 minutes*60 seconds) = 900kW, unless I'm missing your point.
375 miles for the German car, so it is 600km. In either case, though, you're absolutely right that the costs to charge are very much in favour of the electric. Between the low fuel cost and government subsidies, it might be worthwhile even with the early adopter overhead.
This is, however, trading reliance on oil as a fuel source for reliance on lithium as a storage medium. Admittedly that's more conducive to recycling, but while I'm no expert on batteries, I'm pretty sure it's not trivial to turn a dead, degraded cell into a shiny new one.
It's a shame we haven't managed to get particularly far with hydrogen as a storage medium - it can be produced straight from fossil fuels to ease the transition, and then produced directly from water once we get the power generation infrastructure up to scratch. No reliance on a non-renewable power source or storage medium.
Now to totally suck the humour out of that post:
Call it 1GW output for a reasonably sized nuclear plant. A reasonable estimate for the efficiency of an electric car (according to Wikipedia) is about 15kWh/100km; after converting to more usable units, the 600km capacity means the battery holds 324MJ. A 6 minute charge time gives a 900kW transfer rate, or about 1,100 users per nuclear power station.
I think most people probably prefer paper for the actual reading experience (I know I do), but ereaders do have their advantages - the combination of a vast array of free classic content, the ability to download instantly from both local and international libraries and have the books 'return' themselves automatically, and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to carry a whole collection in a small, light unit was enough to convince me to get one. Considering what I'd end up spending even on out of copyright novels it's already working towards paying for itself surprisingly quickly.
I'm with you on the DRM issue, though. Fine for rentals/library borrowing, but totally unacceptable for something that I'm supposed to own.
That's the model that library ebooks currently follow: free, but they self-destruct in two weeks. Which I'm fine with, because I didn't pay for them. In general, I'll tolerate DRM on a rental because it simply enforces a rule that would exist anyway on a non-digital copy.
What I'm not fine with is DRM of any kind on books that I pay more than a trivial amount for, or ebooks that cost more than the paperback would (after subtracting a reasonable printing and shipping cost).
Cry 'havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war ...only at pets.com
Quite agreed. Unfortunately, many people are morons, and will thus respond to adverts of that type. Not only will they respond, their aforementioned idiocy makes them more likely to be talked into buying inferior, overpriced products that they quite possibly don't even need.
What surprises me more is not the bad adverts, but just how much our economy is based on advertising. TV, newspapers, sports & the majority of the internet all basically run on the assumption that the marketing is actually working. The advertisers keep paying with little tangible method to measure results, and I can never quite bring myself to believe the payoff is as good as they seem to think. Maybe I'm wrong - they're the millionaires, after all - I don't know, it just doesn't seem plausible that advertising can actually have enough impact to justify that kind of outlay.
You may well already know about it, but Project Gutenberg is an excellent 'one stop shop' for out of copyright literature. Combine that with online library access and it becomes pretty easy to keep an eBook reader (legally) filled without paying to do so.
That said, I quite agree with you that current eBook pricing is too high, and I think there's a lot of room for improvement in the market.
Or the people on the ground could, y'know, point a dish at the satellite themselves...
I'm sure this is more a publicity stunt than a practical idea, but it doesn't fail quite that easily.
I know nothing of her campaign team, so I don't know if they would be this smart, but the fact stands that we're now reading a story about Meg Whitman. Sure, it's a little negative, but there's a vast opportunity for positive spin while her name's getting thrown out there.
The last time I saw a proposal like that (specific wording was a pledge to "end the storage of internet and email records without good reason") was a few months back. It came from the very same coalition government who are proposing this surveillance.
To be honest I'm actually disappointed. I didn't have especially high hopes, but I was expecting a little better than this.
Very useful, thanks!
The slashdot.org/article.pl... links just redirect back to idle.slashdot.org/article.pl..., but the slashdot.org/story/... ones don't.
Incidentally, what's going on with comments on Idle? On the rest of /. clicking a comment title expands it in the thread, but here it opens briefly then refreshes the page to only that comment (meaning you can't open up multiple bits of a thread without waiting for a bunch of page refreshes). Off topic, I know, but it's more irritating when a decent story might be discussed in Idle.
Specifying FM radio clout is somewhat unfair, as that mentality is tied into the idea that the style of marketing performed by the big labels is the only valid style of marketing. If you believe that, then you're pretty much tied to Universal or someone of their ilk - if you're lucky you'll get very rich with their help, and I certainly see the appeal of that, but signing one of those contracts is a major gamble. Depending on your connections and your style of music, that gamble may or may not have the best odds for you; sure, you'll be stuck playing by the rules of those asshats for a while even if it does pay off, but to be honest I'd probably take those terms myself if I thought they were going to throw enough resources my way to make me a major seller.
The other option, also a gamble, is to promote yourself and/or employ a good PR firm. Viral videos (the kind people actually like to watch - think OK Go; although they may have had a major label behind them, the idea doesn't require one), gigs in the right places, low-cost high-volume sales on iTunes, and the right kind of image could be plenty to earn you the notoriety that leads to a very decent living. The maximum win probably isn't as high as that which you might get with the major labels, but the freedom is greater and the chance of some success, rather than either tens of millions or abject failure, may well be higher.
I wouldn't have thought there was any money at all in the reader itself. The less work to do on it, the better.
I suppose perhaps they were trying to drive sales of the full version of Acrobat, but then I don't see who would really purchase that specifically when there are plenty of free/extremely cheap methods to export to PDF from your document creation software of choice. It seems foolish to have screwed over a perfectly good format in an effort to salvage sales a largely redundant piece of software - it's the kind of behaviour that I would understand if Acrobat were their main or only product, but when they've got Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, and the like I don't see the need for it.
Adobe used to make very good software - now they make very exploitable software.
They still can make good software, which they proceed to sell for very large quantities of cash. What I don't really understand is why they ever updated PDF beyond being a simple document format - it introduced all of these vulnerabilities, and gave them a lot more work to do on their free reader software, for little real value. What was wrong with just keeping it as a simple extension of postscript?
Dell has better volume discounts than you ever will, both with Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers. They further offset this by bundling in a whole load of crapware on the default OS install.
Even after accounting for their profit margin and your time spent re-imaging the machines with a clean version of Windows, the cost from Dell compared to DIY for standard beige-box business machines should be somewhere between slightly cheaper and slightly more expensive; if it's the latter, a single point of contact for warranty issues is still perhaps worth the money. If it's the former, you win on all counts.
Precisely. These kind of projections invariably fail to take into account even the most basic ideas about supply and demand. As we begin to run lower on a given resource it becomes increasingly more viable to recycle it or look for alternatives. In most cases this happens without even especially inconveniencing people - everyone might grumble about fuel prices, but then they just drive a little less, the market for more efficient cars grows, and not that much changes in our day to day lives.
That's quite reasonable, but you do then need a backup plan for the times that it becomes necessary to travel long distances. If the combined cost of an electric car and the power to run it was low enough, it could be reasonable to have a secondary car just for long distances, but in the current market one may as well just use the petrol driven car for day-to-day short drives too and skip the (significant) expense of the electric one. Public transport (bus, train, plane, whatever) for long distances and a hire car at the other end is probably a more logical way to deal with it, but that does leave you with a dependence on the schedules, pricing and general whims of the transportation companies.
Bigger than Apple or Google?
Exactly. Some of us are quite happy to provide a little bit of free access to those who need it. All the machines on my network are secured, the network itself is deliberately open.