The thing is, it's not the DRM side of Steam that's helpful, it's the distribution and networking side. I suppose one could argue that without the DRM they wouldn't dare to provide digital distribution, so as an (IMO rather over-generous) concession we could treat them as a single entity. In that case I would agree that it presents some decent features, and arguably does benefit the user initially - not all that bad, as DRM schemes go, I suppose.
It still doesn't work, though. I've just checked Mininova, and a quick search shows that if I were so inclined I could quickly and easily download a cracked version of Half Life 2, Portal, or plenty of other Valve games. To me, this means it has little to no upside in terms of protection against illegal copying, and as such any of its downsides should be viewed with that context in mind. And it's certainly not without its downsides for the consumer:
Although Steam is an entirely virtual entity, its centralized nature allows developers and publishers to geographically restrict where a game is available, and at what price. Both regional restrictions and pricing are unpopular with Steam users affected by them, and a Steam Community group called "Rest of World" exists to try and lobby against them. ... While Valve does not have region restrictions on their own games, they do use Steam's authentication to prevent boxed versions of their games sold in Russia and Thailand, which are priced significantly lower than elsewhere, from being used outside those territories.
According to the Steam Subscriber Agreement, Steam's availability is not guaranteed and Valve is under no legal obligation to release an update disabling the authentication system in the event that Steam becomes permanently unavailable.
Games bought through Steam cannot be resold. The Steam Subscriber Agreement denies users the right to "sell, charge others for the right to use or otherwise transfer [an] account";.
Furthermore, retail purchases which have already been tied to a Steam account will not be transferred to another if the receipt presented to Valve as proof of purchase is from an "online auction website or used software vendor".
So basically no recourse against artificial price inflation, the risk that all the games will become unplayable at some unspecified time in the future, and no second hand market.
This is the example of 'good' DRM - I think you can see why I'm against it.
I've yet to see a working DRM system. Every single one of them that I've come across has the effect of inconveniencing at least some legitimate customers for one reason or another, and I have yet to find a piece of DRM protected content that is not available freely and illegally in its DRM free form.
Basically, DRM artificially increases the value of the (already free) infringing content, at the expense of the legal content.
There is actually a logical backing for that. Think of the music industry, for example: they'll take anything they possibly can from their artists, if they can get away with it. Making certain rights legally impossible to waive puts a brick wall in the way of some of the more potentially abusive contracts that they would otherwise try to write up.
That's why the way this legislation is going could actually be a good thing. If they'd managed to push this through with a bit of intelligence and subtlety, maybe creeping in with the infrastructure behind the scenes (I'm looking at you, IWF) and then expanding it publicly, it would only be a matter of time before other countries were citing it as a success and proposing to employ their own, equally horrific censorship schemes.
As it stands, however, this guy is making it so unbelievably unpalatable that even people who don't normally care about this kind of thing are kicking up a fuss. The list of requirements doesn't even sound reasonable any more. That's excellent news, because it gives us something to cite if and when they try to do similar things elsewhere.
Didn't say they were invincible, just pointed out that they're not scared of the government, which means that they're not going to lie down and change a presumably very profitable lock-in policy without years of legal wrangling. They're certainly not going to change it quickly because someone threatens to contact the European Comissioner for Competition.
Because Microsoft have been shown time and again as a meek and fearful opponent with neither the funding nor the legal expertise to attempt opposing the fair trading offices of major governments.
It could easily be argued that since these are government projects, paid for by our taxes, that they should prefer options where their funding gives more overall value to the public.
As such, even if it were somewhat more expensive to pay a team of coders to add 'feature X' to OpenOffice than to use MS Office with 'feature X' already included, they should still consider doing so in order to contribute both 'government services' and improved software to the public, as opposed to contributing 'government services' to the public and funding for software development to a private company.
So in effect, instead of 'burning' out a specific section of an SDD, they will simply burn out the entire disk at once due to wear leveling?
Technically speaking, yes, the drive is more likely to go from 'all cells functioning' to 'many cells dead' in a relatively short amount of time due to wear levelling, whereas without it the mode of failure would be a more gradual reduction in functioning cells.
Practically speaking, however, these things support an awful lot of read/write cycles. On the order of a million or more, according to the data I could find. Unfortunately the Intel datasheet for the drive mentioned in the summary doesn't actually include write-cycle data, though.
A quick and dirty calculation (not taking into account block size, etc.) for drive lifetime is simply (capacity)*(write cycles)/(write speed).
Imagine a drive with no wear levelling. Say you have a 1GB file, the entirety of which is being continually rewritten to the same 1GB section of the drive. A million read/write cycles means you need to write approximately 1,000,000 GB (that's 1000TB!) to that 1GB section of drive to kill it. Again, somewhat inaccurate in the real world, but good enough for a back of the envelope estimate. Allowing a fairly generous write speed of 100MB/s, writing to that same 1GB area of disk 24/7, would burn it out in around 115 days - about 4 months. In that time, remember, you'll have generated 1000TB of data - that's certainly not insignificant, even for fairly major applications, but it could be done, and you're left with a drive that's got 1GB less capacity than it started with.
Now consider the same case with wear levelling. Assume for the sake of simplicity it functions perfectly, and ignore block size. On an 80GB drive, continually overwriting that same 1GB file, it will simply cycle through the entire 80GB capacity of the drive repeatedly rather than just hammering the same 1GB section. This means that you suddenly increased the effective lifespan by a factor of 80 (again, not entirely real-world due to the fact that the drive would normally have data filling some of the rest of that 80GB, but sufficient to get the point across). You're now looking at over 25 years of continuous writing, by which time you will have generated 8 yottabytes of data.
That's why wear levelling is a good thing. Even on a disk that's completely full (not something that happens particularly often, but still worth thinking about) the drive itself has some built in excess capacity to use for wear reduction.
Yeah, I'm aware that the ads are regional, but I was under the impression that it was more to do with broadcast licensing. They already have functioning region detection - they use it to lock out the non-US users.
If they just brokered a few deals with some international advertisers and changed the region check to switch the ads rather than block the content entirely, they could get significantly more viewers for relatively little effort, resulting in more revenue for both them and the content providers. The cost/benefit for that seems pretty good to me, but the issues then arise with those very providers who stand to benefit from the increased potential audience start whining and miring the whole thing in bureaucracy.
It's the same with YouTube, actually: some videos, usually those pushed by commercial entities, are region locked. Anyone want to make a guess whether people who wanted to see the video either: (a) Say "Oh, it seems that it's in my interest to be denied access to this free content. I'll just go and pay money for the related product anyway." (b) Say "Oh, it's not working. I'll download it somewhere else then."
As it happens, I made another post more or less covering that point.
Basically I don't see it being a 'good' reason to artificially and ineffectively limit users' access to legitimate content simply based on the (now fairly blurred) line between a TV and a monitor.
The level of pettiness here is getting ridiculous: watching fullscreen with a browser in the background on your HTPC hooked to a plasma screen in your living room? Fine. Doing the same thing but streaming direct through a plugin? Not allowed. To me, that doesn't really scream "understandable and logical business plan".
I can see where they're coming from - they want to protect the revenues from cable and satellite plans - but artificially restricting what one can do with perfectly legal, ad supported content is going to do one of two things: leave the users watching the content in a slightly more inconvenient form (through a browser, but on the same monitor, for instance) or direct them to the pirate bay. Hell, if they keep pissing people off like this then some people might even stop paying for content just out of spite.
Hulu seem to be quite resistant to naming them, which is a shame. It's clear that they're walking a fine line between pleasing customers and pleasing providers, and you can see very clearly from the tone of their blog post that they're not happy about blocking Boxee - I'm surprised that they aren't pushing back a little by simply telling their customers who's pressed them into it.
I honestly cannot see a single good reason to allow the content through a browser but not through a plugin. I assume the thinking of the content providers is that most people aren't going to hook up a 'normal' computer to a TV, and thus Hulu doesn't really compete with cable/satellite without services like Boxee. This is short-sighted and stupid - when there is a huge surplus of free (illegal) media out there for the taking, the last thing they should be doing is placing limitations on the legal media. Same goes for HDCP, CSS, UOPs, region lockouts and any other scheme that reduces the value of legitimate content in comparison to 'pirated' content.
It's not precisely the same thing (due to the complexity of international broadcasting rights), but the fact you can only get Hulu in the US is a symptom of the same line of thinking. I want to watch House, for example - if I could get it through Hulu I'd do so, and be happy enough to watch the ads. Back when the region lockout was easy to bypass I used the service and was pleasantly surprised; picture quality is much better than BBC iPlayer and the ads are less intrusive than commercial broadcast TV. As it stands now I'll just wait until the DVD boxsets are cheap enough second hand and get them instead - partly to save money, partly as a matter of principle: if they won't give me half decent access to the product I want, I'll do my best to ensure they don't get any of my money when I do pay for it.
Reading the comments on the blog entry linked in the summary seems to show that there are ads on Hulu streams through Boxee. I can see absolutely no good reason whatsoever for the content providers forcing Hulu to do this.
As much as that sucked, it at least made it understandable when Apple claimed that only service centres should replace the drives (not that I ever understood why they designed it that way in the first place...).
What I find odd is that this battery is still classed as non-user-serviceable, even though the (user serviceable) hard drive and RAM require the exact same procedure. Apple are quite happy for you to take off the back casing, pop out the memory and remove a further couple of screws to pull the hard drive, but if you dare touch the three screws to remove the battery while you're at it you lose your warranty.
Depends on the quality of the students you are talking about. If you are talking 1st year college students who are trying to pound out a physics class to earn their science credit in a liberal arts literature or journalism degree, I would strongly suggest they don't have a clue about trigonometry or the fundamental laws of motion.
We are not necessarily talking engineering students here, and discussion of the fundamental laws of motion is something expected out of students at this level of physics instruction.
The differences between the British and American university systems are probably causing a bit of confusion here.
In the UK, anyone taking a physics degree will study almost 100% physics/mathematics, perhaps with the option to take an engineering or maybe a chemistry module from time to time. There's pretty much no such thing (in normal circumstances, at least) as someone from a degree in physical sciences doing humanities modules, or vice versa. Certainly I don't know of anywhere here that has a practise analogous to the 'general requirements' in areas outside your major that most American universities have. In fact, we don't even have a major and a minor, a physics degree is a physics degree - you choose before you begin and there's often little overlap between any but the most closely related courses (even physics and astrophysics, for example, only overlap on about the first 75% of the first year).
As it happens, I know Imperial (the university linked in the summary); it's a very well regarded university that only deals with maths/science/engineering based degrees - comparable to Caltech or MIT, to the limits of how useful comparisons across the two different systems can be. I would be extremely surprised if anyone without a good working knowledge of trigonometry or Newtonian mechanics could even make it in to the first year, to be honest. Deriving the functions shouldn't be any real stretch, either.
Admittedly you can make bottle rocket experiments very detailed, and considering every possible factor to model it in a real world situation could become almost arbitrarily complex, but even if it can be made challenging it's not what I'd call inspiring, for this level of student.
It's not so much that I think your idea is bad, just that it's pitched at the wrong type of student. These are the type of people who read New Scientist and chuckle when it makes a mistake, so spending a week of lab work on something that looks like a school project wouldn't be likely to go down so well.
All that said, I suppose the one thing you would achieve would be very rapidly seeing a huge number of calculations on the power and trajectory needed to make a bottle hit any number of entertaining targets around central London from the Imperial campus.
Why didn't they just switch every channel to a screensaver type message explaining the basics of the switchover and giving a helpline number for more info?
I'm sure 48 hours with that on every channel before they're turned off would've been relatively cheap and easy, and I don't think anyone could possibly have claimed not to have heard/understood then.
(Maybe they did, I guess, but I don't get that impression from the coverage I've seen)
The whole point of a subtle misspelling is, as you said, in order that the counterfeiters won't notice and will continue to print without the mistake, setting them apart. Obviously as soon as they see the news story they start to print the misspelled ones instead. There's also the fact that there will still be many many (legitimate) correctly spelled bags in circulation at the same time - all the people who have older bags left over could be targeted as fraudsters.
If, on the other hand, the story is fake and the city only ever produces correctly spelled bags, it's actually reasonably cunning. The counterfeiters see the story and quickly start producing misspelled bags, which then find their way in amongst the new (correctly spelled) bags. Since it was a bluff and all real bags, new and old, have the correct spelling, the fakes are much easier to find.
You've missed the point. Obviously the cost of the bag is negligible, but the remainder of the $2 pays for the actual disposal of the contents of that bag. Rather than having an amount of your taxes pay for waste services, you effectively pay by the quantity of waste you throw out.
I don't recall ever seeing anyone in London pay for a purchase with an RFID credit/debit card.
As another poster said, you might be thinking of the Chip & PIN smartcard tech, in which case you're absolutely right, nobody uses the magstripe any more. It differs from RFID in a few ways, most notably that it requires a physical connection between the card and the reader (IMO a very good thing). I don't know that there are any cards left in the UK (other than tourists, as you mention) without chips, actually; if there are then they'll certainly expire and be replaced within the next year or two.
The Oyster cards that everyone uses for public transport are RFID though, so maybe that was the source of your mistake - other than the combined RFID credit card/Oyster card (which I've yet to actually see in the wild) you can't pay for anything on Oyster, but it is an example of RFID replacing magstripes. It's also a fairly good warning, since the security on them was cracked not too long ago.
Well, yes, but that would necessitate completely missing the sarcasm of the OP, despite the presence of an emoticon and the (current) Score:4, Funny moderation.
I absolutely agree that the problems with OSS solutions need to be considered, but to say that OpenOffice 'sucks, compared to MS Office' is far too narrow a statement. All products have relative merits and problems, and there is a time and a place for most of them.
Commercial software is often (but not always) not completely matched in terms of features when compared to the closest open source competitor. The key is to find out whether anyone was actually using those particular features and thus whether they'll be missed when they're gone. Office software is a good example because a huge percentage of users really do only use the basic features - one can't argue that OpenOffice does everything that MS Office does, but that's a moot point if OpenOffice does everything that the users need.
Backend software is also a good place to start, but for the opposite reason. While it's likely that many of the features are being used, it's the IT department rather than the end user that is running the software - this makes it far easier to draw up a list of what can and can't be replicated with open source, rely on your 'user' to be able to adjust to a different way of doing things, and so on.
The summary mentions Gimp vs. Photoshop, however, and this is perhaps not such a good place to transition. It's the kind of software that is far more likely to have users who actually do need many of the features. The advice I would give is to make sure you know exactly what your students need from their software - Photoshop licenses are expensive, so when an engineering student needs to make some pretty buttons for their website it seems completely fair to direct them towards Gimp. If, on the other hand, the graphic design department were deprived of Photoshop, I think they would have a very legitimate right to complain - not only because they may well need features that are simply unmatched in the OSS alternative, but also because it is only fair to give students experience of the software that is standard in their industry. Same goes for a lot of CAD software, mathematical programs, and other specialist applications.
Office software, however, isn't used as a specialist tool by many people; it's a general utility for fairly mundane tasks. Everyone's experience will differ, but just as an example this is what I've found using OpenOffice:
Personally I prefer Writer to MS Word. My needs when it comes to word processing are fairly basic, and Writer fulfils them. It also has a few less annoyances than Word in my general day-to-day use - diagrams stay where I put them rather than being randomly scattered around the document when I go back to change a line or two, to take the first example that springs to mind. Obviously there must be some logic to the way that Word handles inline images, but it was never apparent to me. OpenOffice wins for me on word processing.
I have no real need for PowerPoint at the moment, other than to open the occasional.ppt file sent to me by someone else, and for that purpose Impress seems perfectly functional. The fact it's free tips the balance in favour of OpenOffice for my current purposes, but to be honest I'd probably use Keynote if I actually had to produce PowerPoint-style presentations on any regular basis.
Calc is where OpenOffice falls down a bit for me. It's not bad, but it's lacking some of the useful features that Excel has. This ranges from taking three steps to do something I could do in Excel in one, to actually having to export to.xls and use MS Excel on one of the shared machines. I still use Calc on my own machines because it's free, but it's a definite weak spot and Excel is the only component of the MS Office suite that I actually find to be the best on the market.
I was half joking, but you seem to have missed my point: everything you say is right, from a point of morality of fairness it's a horrible dragnet law that would indiscriminately punish plenty of innocent people on the assumption that they might have done something wrong. Of course it's insane.
The (presumably unintended) consequence, however, is that they are making the tacit statement that the monetary value of copyright infringement is £20/household/year. They're admitting that they're unable to stop infringement and thus accepting the money in lieu of the cessation of 'piracy'. Since they (in this hypothetical situation) will choose to charge me £20/year for my downloaded media, I will in turn accept this offer (as I am being forced by law to do) and choose to download for free all the media that I would otherwise have spent money on, and encourage anyone I can get to listen to do the same.
Incidentally, if every household in the UK did pay this fee it would come to about £433,000,000. That's less than half of the music industry's current revenue, and the proposed UK tax includes films too.
Just because an idea is unfair and ridiculous doesn't mean that (in this case) we can't make it work to our advantage!
An annual fee of £20 is significantly less than I spend on music/DVDs as it stands, so it sounds like a pretty good deal.
I must assume that's not their intent, and that they just want to use this top up their revenues to what they think they 'should' be, but if they're going to charge me on the assumption that I'm illegally downloading copyrighted materials, the least I can do is illegally download some copyrighted materials, right?
The actual diode is always tiny, the main visible part of what one would call an LED is just a plastic lens. If you look at the full-resolution version of this close up on Wikipedia you can get a fairly good view of the tiny wire filaments connected to the actual LED inside the reflector.
Of course, even the completed component is still only ~5mm in diameter so a bulb would still use an array of them, just like they do now.
I'm assuming (since you say 'game CDs') that they're commercial discs - that means produced in large volume, and thus the data layer will be made from pressed aluminium. Metal doesn't deform over a decade in any half way sensible storage environment, and I think the approximate amount of time it takes plastic to degrade (again, in a relatively normal environment) is known as a 'metric fuckton', so I can see those things easily lasting decades, hell maybe even centuries (assuming there's not some subtle long-term instability in them that I'm missing).
Burned discs, which is what this machine would have to contain if it were using any kind of user-created content on CD/DVD, are somewhat unstable almost by definition - the writing laser has to be able to cause changes in the dye and thus the dye has to be of a variable nature. If a moderately powered laser can alter its state in less than a second, environmental factors over half a century have a good chance of doing the same. In ideal conditions could you keep a CD-R for 50 years? Perhaps, but it's a gamble. Even with ten backup copies (by no means a difficult task) I'd be dubious; of course, the chances of the data degrading in such a way that you couldn't recover one full copy from bits of each the ten discs is probably small, but that's hardly a plug-and-play solution for people with no idea how to operate that type of technology.
With the cost of CDs there's no harm in throwing a few in on the chance that they might survive, but I wouldn't count on them. Not that I'd count on any one potential point of failure, obviously. Magneto-optical would stand a better chance of surviving, although I don't know enough about the theory behind their operation to tell you authoritatively how much of a gamble that is, but I believe they're fairly inert below their Curie point. Basically while a CD-R is always in its 'writeable' state, magneto-optical needs to be heated and then written, meaning when it cools it becomes read-only and is less likely to be 'written' by environmental factors. One thing to keep in mind is how they're stored on the shelf, as the media itself can warp simply under the effects of gravity over a long enough time period.
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The thing is, it's not the DRM side of Steam that's helpful, it's the distribution and networking side. I suppose one could argue that without the DRM they wouldn't dare to provide digital distribution, so as an (IMO rather over-generous) concession we could treat them as a single entity. In that case I would agree that it presents some decent features, and arguably does benefit the user initially - not all that bad, as DRM schemes go, I suppose.
It still doesn't work, though. I've just checked Mininova, and a quick search shows that if I were so inclined I could quickly and easily download a cracked version of Half Life 2, Portal, or plenty of other Valve games. To me, this means it has little to no upside in terms of protection against illegal copying, and as such any of its downsides should be viewed with that context in mind. And it's certainly not without its downsides for the consumer:
To quote the Wikipedia article:
So basically no recourse against artificial price inflation, the risk that all the games will become unplayable at some unspecified time in the future, and no second hand market.
This is the example of 'good' DRM - I think you can see why I'm against it.
I've yet to see a working DRM system. Every single one of them that I've come across has the effect of inconveniencing at least some legitimate customers for one reason or another, and I have yet to find a piece of DRM protected content that is not available freely and illegally in its DRM free form.
Basically, DRM artificially increases the value of the (already free) infringing content, at the expense of the legal content.
There is actually a logical backing for that. Think of the music industry, for example: they'll take anything they possibly can from their artists, if they can get away with it. Making certain rights legally impossible to waive puts a brick wall in the way of some of the more potentially abusive contracts that they would otherwise try to write up.
That's why the way this legislation is going could actually be a good thing. If they'd managed to push this through with a bit of intelligence and subtlety, maybe creeping in with the infrastructure behind the scenes (I'm looking at you, IWF) and then expanding it publicly, it would only be a matter of time before other countries were citing it as a success and proposing to employ their own, equally horrific censorship schemes.
As it stands, however, this guy is making it so unbelievably unpalatable that even people who don't normally care about this kind of thing are kicking up a fuss. The list of requirements doesn't even sound reasonable any more. That's excellent news, because it gives us something to cite if and when they try to do similar things elsewhere.
Didn't say they were invincible, just pointed out that they're not scared of the government, which means that they're not going to lie down and change a presumably very profitable lock-in policy without years of legal wrangling. They're certainly not going to change it quickly because someone threatens to contact the European Comissioner for Competition.
Because Microsoft have been shown time and again as a meek and fearful opponent with neither the funding nor the legal expertise to attempt opposing the fair trading offices of major governments.
Oh, wait...
It could easily be argued that since these are government projects, paid for by our taxes, that they should prefer options where their funding gives more overall value to the public.
As such, even if it were somewhat more expensive to pay a team of coders to add 'feature X' to OpenOffice than to use MS Office with 'feature X' already included, they should still consider doing so in order to contribute both 'government services' and improved software to the public, as opposed to contributing 'government services' to the public and funding for software development to a private company.
Technically speaking, yes, the drive is more likely to go from 'all cells functioning' to 'many cells dead' in a relatively short amount of time due to wear levelling, whereas without it the mode of failure would be a more gradual reduction in functioning cells.
Practically speaking, however, these things support an awful lot of read/write cycles. On the order of a million or more, according to the data I could find. Unfortunately the Intel datasheet for the drive mentioned in the summary doesn't actually include write-cycle data, though.
A quick and dirty calculation (not taking into account block size, etc.) for drive lifetime is simply (capacity)*(write cycles)/(write speed).
Imagine a drive with no wear levelling. Say you have a 1GB file, the entirety of which is being continually rewritten to the same 1GB section of the drive. A million read/write cycles means you need to write approximately 1,000,000 GB (that's 1000TB!) to that 1GB section of drive to kill it. Again, somewhat inaccurate in the real world, but good enough for a back of the envelope estimate. Allowing a fairly generous write speed of 100MB/s, writing to that same 1GB area of disk 24/7, would burn it out in around 115 days - about 4 months. In that time, remember, you'll have generated 1000TB of data - that's certainly not insignificant, even for fairly major applications, but it could be done, and you're left with a drive that's got 1GB less capacity than it started with.
Now consider the same case with wear levelling. Assume for the sake of simplicity it functions perfectly, and ignore block size. On an 80GB drive, continually overwriting that same 1GB file, it will simply cycle through the entire 80GB capacity of the drive repeatedly rather than just hammering the same 1GB section. This means that you suddenly increased the effective lifespan by a factor of 80 (again, not entirely real-world due to the fact that the drive would normally have data filling some of the rest of that 80GB, but sufficient to get the point across). You're now looking at over 25 years of continuous writing, by which time you will have generated 8 yottabytes of data.
That's why wear levelling is a good thing. Even on a disk that's completely full (not something that happens particularly often, but still worth thinking about) the drive itself has some built in excess capacity to use for wear reduction.
Yeah, I'm aware that the ads are regional, but I was under the impression that it was more to do with broadcast licensing. They already have functioning region detection - they use it to lock out the non-US users.
If they just brokered a few deals with some international advertisers and changed the region check to switch the ads rather than block the content entirely, they could get significantly more viewers for relatively little effort, resulting in more revenue for both them and the content providers. The cost/benefit for that seems pretty good to me, but the issues then arise with those very providers who stand to benefit from the increased potential audience start whining and miring the whole thing in bureaucracy.
It's the same with YouTube, actually: some videos, usually those pushed by commercial entities, are region locked. Anyone want to make a guess whether people who wanted to see the video either:
(a) Say "Oh, it seems that it's in my interest to be denied access to this free content. I'll just go and pay money for the related product anyway."
(b) Say "Oh, it's not working. I'll download it somewhere else then."
As it happens, I made another post more or less covering that point.
Basically I don't see it being a 'good' reason to artificially and ineffectively limit users' access to legitimate content simply based on the (now fairly blurred) line between a TV and a monitor.
The level of pettiness here is getting ridiculous: watching fullscreen with a browser in the background on your HTPC hooked to a plasma screen in your living room? Fine. Doing the same thing but streaming direct through a plugin? Not allowed. To me, that doesn't really scream "understandable and logical business plan".
I can see where they're coming from - they want to protect the revenues from cable and satellite plans - but artificially restricting what one can do with perfectly legal, ad supported content is going to do one of two things: leave the users watching the content in a slightly more inconvenient form (through a browser, but on the same monitor, for instance) or direct them to the pirate bay. Hell, if they keep pissing people off like this then some people might even stop paying for content just out of spite.
Hulu seem to be quite resistant to naming them, which is a shame. It's clear that they're walking a fine line between pleasing customers and pleasing providers, and you can see very clearly from the tone of their blog post that they're not happy about blocking Boxee - I'm surprised that they aren't pushing back a little by simply telling their customers who's pressed them into it.
I honestly cannot see a single good reason to allow the content through a browser but not through a plugin. I assume the thinking of the content providers is that most people aren't going to hook up a 'normal' computer to a TV, and thus Hulu doesn't really compete with cable/satellite without services like Boxee. This is short-sighted and stupid - when there is a huge surplus of free (illegal) media out there for the taking, the last thing they should be doing is placing limitations on the legal media. Same goes for HDCP, CSS, UOPs, region lockouts and any other scheme that reduces the value of legitimate content in comparison to 'pirated' content.
It's not precisely the same thing (due to the complexity of international broadcasting rights), but the fact you can only get Hulu in the US is a symptom of the same line of thinking. I want to watch House, for example - if I could get it through Hulu I'd do so, and be happy enough to watch the ads. Back when the region lockout was easy to bypass I used the service and was pleasantly surprised; picture quality is much better than BBC iPlayer and the ads are less intrusive than commercial broadcast TV. As it stands now I'll just wait until the DVD boxsets are cheap enough second hand and get them instead - partly to save money, partly as a matter of principle: if they won't give me half decent access to the product I want, I'll do my best to ensure they don't get any of my money when I do pay for it.
Reading the comments on the blog entry linked in the summary seems to show that there are ads on Hulu streams through Boxee. I can see absolutely no good reason whatsoever for the content providers forcing Hulu to do this.
As much as that sucked, it at least made it understandable when Apple claimed that only service centres should replace the drives (not that I ever understood why they designed it that way in the first place...).
What I find odd is that this battery is still classed as non-user-serviceable, even though the (user serviceable) hard drive and RAM require the exact same procedure. Apple are quite happy for you to take off the back casing, pop out the memory and remove a further couple of screws to pull the hard drive, but if you dare touch the three screws to remove the battery while you're at it you lose your warranty.
There's also the difference between 'should last 90 days' and 'will absolutely without fail last 90 days'.
The former has a fair chance of breaking down earlier, the latter has a fair chance of breaking down later (much later in this case).
The differences between the British and American university systems are probably causing a bit of confusion here.
In the UK, anyone taking a physics degree will study almost 100% physics/mathematics, perhaps with the option to take an engineering or maybe a chemistry module from time to time. There's pretty much no such thing (in normal circumstances, at least) as someone from a degree in physical sciences doing humanities modules, or vice versa. Certainly I don't know of anywhere here that has a practise analogous to the 'general requirements' in areas outside your major that most American universities have. In fact, we don't even have a major and a minor, a physics degree is a physics degree - you choose before you begin and there's often little overlap between any but the most closely related courses (even physics and astrophysics, for example, only overlap on about the first 75% of the first year).
As it happens, I know Imperial (the university linked in the summary); it's a very well regarded university that only deals with maths/science/engineering based degrees - comparable to Caltech or MIT, to the limits of how useful comparisons across the two different systems can be. I would be extremely surprised if anyone without a good working knowledge of trigonometry or Newtonian mechanics could even make it in to the first year, to be honest. Deriving the functions shouldn't be any real stretch, either.
Admittedly you can make bottle rocket experiments very detailed, and considering every possible factor to model it in a real world situation could become almost arbitrarily complex, but even if it can be made challenging it's not what I'd call inspiring, for this level of student.
It's not so much that I think your idea is bad, just that it's pitched at the wrong type of student. These are the type of people who read New Scientist and chuckle when it makes a mistake, so spending a week of lab work on something that looks like a school project wouldn't be likely to go down so well.
All that said, I suppose the one thing you would achieve would be very rapidly seeing a huge number of calculations on the power and trajectory needed to make a bottle hit any number of entertaining targets around central London from the Imperial campus.
Why didn't they just switch every channel to a screensaver type message explaining the basics of the switchover and giving a helpline number for more info?
I'm sure 48 hours with that on every channel before they're turned off would've been relatively cheap and easy, and I don't think anyone could possibly have claimed not to have heard/understood then.
(Maybe they did, I guess, but I don't get that impression from the coverage I've seen)
I'm thinking it's probably a double bluff.
The whole point of a subtle misspelling is, as you said, in order that the counterfeiters won't notice and will continue to print without the mistake, setting them apart. Obviously as soon as they see the news story they start to print the misspelled ones instead. There's also the fact that there will still be many many (legitimate) correctly spelled bags in circulation at the same time - all the people who have older bags left over could be targeted as fraudsters.
If, on the other hand, the story is fake and the city only ever produces correctly spelled bags, it's actually reasonably cunning. The counterfeiters see the story and quickly start producing misspelled bags, which then find their way in amongst the new (correctly spelled) bags. Since it was a bluff and all real bags, new and old, have the correct spelling, the fakes are much easier to find.
You've missed the point. Obviously the cost of the bag is negligible, but the remainder of the $2 pays for the actual disposal of the contents of that bag. Rather than having an amount of your taxes pay for waste services, you effectively pay by the quantity of waste you throw out.
I don't recall ever seeing anyone in London pay for a purchase with an RFID credit/debit card.
As another poster said, you might be thinking of the Chip & PIN smartcard tech, in which case you're absolutely right, nobody uses the magstripe any more. It differs from RFID in a few ways, most notably that it requires a physical connection between the card and the reader (IMO a very good thing). I don't know that there are any cards left in the UK (other than tourists, as you mention) without chips, actually; if there are then they'll certainly expire and be replaced within the next year or two.
The Oyster cards that everyone uses for public transport are RFID though, so maybe that was the source of your mistake - other than the combined RFID credit card/Oyster card (which I've yet to actually see in the wild) you can't pay for anything on Oyster, but it is an example of RFID replacing magstripes. It's also a fairly good warning, since the security on them was cracked not too long ago.
Well, yes, but that would necessitate completely missing the sarcasm of the OP, despite the presence of an emoticon and the (current) Score:4, Funny moderation.
I absolutely agree that the problems with OSS solutions need to be considered, but to say that OpenOffice 'sucks, compared to MS Office' is far too narrow a statement. All products have relative merits and problems, and there is a time and a place for most of them.
Commercial software is often (but not always) not completely matched in terms of features when compared to the closest open source competitor. The key is to find out whether anyone was actually using those particular features and thus whether they'll be missed when they're gone. Office software is a good example because a huge percentage of users really do only use the basic features - one can't argue that OpenOffice does everything that MS Office does, but that's a moot point if OpenOffice does everything that the users need.
Backend software is also a good place to start, but for the opposite reason. While it's likely that many of the features are being used, it's the IT department rather than the end user that is running the software - this makes it far easier to draw up a list of what can and can't be replicated with open source, rely on your 'user' to be able to adjust to a different way of doing things, and so on.
The summary mentions Gimp vs. Photoshop, however, and this is perhaps not such a good place to transition. It's the kind of software that is far more likely to have users who actually do need many of the features. The advice I would give is to make sure you know exactly what your students need from their software - Photoshop licenses are expensive, so when an engineering student needs to make some pretty buttons for their website it seems completely fair to direct them towards Gimp. If, on the other hand, the graphic design department were deprived of Photoshop, I think they would have a very legitimate right to complain - not only because they may well need features that are simply unmatched in the OSS alternative, but also because it is only fair to give students experience of the software that is standard in their industry. Same goes for a lot of CAD software, mathematical programs, and other specialist applications.
Office software, however, isn't used as a specialist tool by many people; it's a general utility for fairly mundane tasks. Everyone's experience will differ, but just as an example this is what I've found using OpenOffice:
Personally I prefer Writer to MS Word. My needs when it comes to word processing are fairly basic, and Writer fulfils them. It also has a few less annoyances than Word in my general day-to-day use - diagrams stay where I put them rather than being randomly scattered around the document when I go back to change a line or two, to take the first example that springs to mind. Obviously there must be some logic to the way that Word handles inline images, but it was never apparent to me. OpenOffice wins for me on word processing.
I have no real need for PowerPoint at the moment, other than to open the occasional .ppt file sent to me by someone else, and for that purpose Impress seems perfectly functional. The fact it's free tips the balance in favour of OpenOffice for my current purposes, but to be honest I'd probably use Keynote if I actually had to produce PowerPoint-style presentations on any regular basis.
Calc is where OpenOffice falls down a bit for me. It's not bad, but it's lacking some of the useful features that Excel has. This ranges from taking three steps to do something I could do in Excel in one, to actually having to export to .xls and use MS Excel on one of the shared machines. I still use Calc on my own machines because it's free, but it's a definite weak spot and Excel is the only component of the MS Office suite that I actually find to be the best on the market.
I was half joking, but you seem to have missed my point: everything you say is right, from a point of morality of fairness it's a horrible dragnet law that would indiscriminately punish plenty of innocent people on the assumption that they might have done something wrong. Of course it's insane.
The (presumably unintended) consequence, however, is that they are making the tacit statement that the monetary value of copyright infringement is £20/household/year. They're admitting that they're unable to stop infringement and thus accepting the money in lieu of the cessation of 'piracy'. Since they (in this hypothetical situation) will choose to charge me £20/year for my downloaded media, I will in turn accept this offer (as I am being forced by law to do) and choose to download for free all the media that I would otherwise have spent money on, and encourage anyone I can get to listen to do the same.
Incidentally, if every household in the UK did pay this fee it would come to about £433,000,000. That's less than half of the music industry's current revenue, and the proposed UK tax includes films too.
Just because an idea is unfair and ridiculous doesn't mean that (in this case) we can't make it work to our advantage!
An annual fee of £20 is significantly less than I spend on music/DVDs as it stands, so it sounds like a pretty good deal.
I must assume that's not their intent, and that they just want to use this top up their revenues to what they think they 'should' be, but if they're going to charge me on the assumption that I'm illegally downloading copyrighted materials, the least I can do is illegally download some copyrighted materials, right?
The actual diode is always tiny, the main visible part of what one would call an LED is just a plastic lens. If you look at the full-resolution version of this close up on Wikipedia you can get a fairly good view of the tiny wire filaments connected to the actual LED inside the reflector.
Of course, even the completed component is still only ~5mm in diameter so a bulb would still use an array of them, just like they do now.
I'm assuming (since you say 'game CDs') that they're commercial discs - that means produced in large volume, and thus the data layer will be made from pressed aluminium. Metal doesn't deform over a decade in any half way sensible storage environment, and I think the approximate amount of time it takes plastic to degrade (again, in a relatively normal environment) is known as a 'metric fuckton', so I can see those things easily lasting decades, hell maybe even centuries (assuming there's not some subtle long-term instability in them that I'm missing).
Burned discs, which is what this machine would have to contain if it were using any kind of user-created content on CD/DVD, are somewhat unstable almost by definition - the writing laser has to be able to cause changes in the dye and thus the dye has to be of a variable nature. If a moderately powered laser can alter its state in less than a second, environmental factors over half a century have a good chance of doing the same. In ideal conditions could you keep a CD-R for 50 years? Perhaps, but it's a gamble. Even with ten backup copies (by no means a difficult task) I'd be dubious; of course, the chances of the data degrading in such a way that you couldn't recover one full copy from bits of each the ten discs is probably small, but that's hardly a plug-and-play solution for people with no idea how to operate that type of technology.
With the cost of CDs there's no harm in throwing a few in on the chance that they might survive, but I wouldn't count on them. Not that I'd count on any one potential point of failure, obviously. Magneto-optical would stand a better chance of surviving, although I don't know enough about the theory behind their operation to tell you authoritatively how much of a gamble that is, but I believe they're fairly inert below their Curie point. Basically while a CD-R is always in its 'writeable' state, magneto-optical needs to be heated and then written, meaning when it cools it becomes read-only and is less likely to be 'written' by environmental factors. One thing to keep in mind is how they're stored on the shelf, as the media itself can warp simply under the effects of gravity over a long enough time period.