Sounds like a very good approach, but am I the only one to see an issue in the texts they're using that are already available in multiple languages?
The examples given (two religious texts and a legal one) don't really sound like the best things for teaching a "blank slate" program a new language. I understand that it's looking for structure and rules rather than word-for-word links, but the Bible uses many outdated or non-standard phrases and sentence structures, as does most legal text I've ever seen. I'm not a linguist or a statistician, but from my uneducated viewpoint it sounds like problems might arise in the texts that are available for training the system. Anyone know how they're planning to overcome this?
I was about to say "But the general public don't care". Then I read this (emphasis mine):
Understood to be a sub-operating system residing in the chip's firmware, AMT will allow administrators to both monitor or control individual machines independent of an operating system.
Additionally, AMT also features what Intel calls "IDE redirection" which will allow administrators to remotely enable, disable or format or configure individual drives and reload operating systems and software from remote locations, again independent of operating systems.
It'll be hacked soon enough, people will realise that DRM isn't the good thing that the monopolies say it is and everyone will live happily ever after. Way to shoot yourselves in the foot, Intel.
I can't say I've used the OS personally, but one thing that immediately puts me off is that they are trying to sell antivirus software for Linux. Fair enough, if there's a problem then fix it and feel free to make money doing so, but I don't like that a company feels the need to try making people think there's a problem just to sell a service.
While I agree with you about the fact that all hardware should be compatible, having the cards working on all SLi boards would probably be kinda pointless if you think about it. I would assume people want single card SLi rather than dual card SLi because they don't have a dual PCI-E board. A single slot board won't be an SLi board because it hasn't got enough slots to do "true" SLi, meaning the card won't work even if it was fully SLi compatible.
I'm yet to see them give a remotely plausible reason as to why we need to spend £100 each on the cards anyway. The closest I've heard is:
"It'll stop terrorists"
"The 9/11 hijackers had valid ID"
"Errr.."
Even the 'illegal immigrants' angle seems flawed - they are, by nature, here illegaly. What's to stop them stealing/faking IDs? And it's just forcing more hoops to jump through for those who want to come here legally.
I think the most interesting figure I've seen is that the PS3 can do 2 teraflops. I may be being very, very dumb here but that sounds impossibly high. There are machines in the top 500 supercomputers that won't do 2 teraflops peak - am I missing something here or is that comic actually fairly accurate?
It's already been speculated upon, although not confirmed by either party.
As for Linux, it's a damn good OS, very stable and you've gotta love the OSS ideal. Regular home users, however are either not willing or not able (I'm really not sure which) to use it - that's changing, but in terms of a literally plug and play solution that's out there right now you can't beat a Mac Mini.
Although BitTorrent is demonstrably usable for many non-infringing purposes, it would be naive to think that this search engine will have anything less than 50% (as a conservative estimate) legally dubious content indexed. To follow from that, however, I think my post from the previous discussion on this search engine is relevant:
I'm interested to see what is and isn't worthy of a lawsuit. This search engine is now three steps removed from the (assumed) copyright infringement.
Uploading music from within a country where that is outlawed seems to be fair game for legal action now (although countries where a fee is paid on blank media have a fairly strong case for to say they've already paid) and it's been that way for some time.
More recently sites like Suprnova and BTefnet, who provide no copyrighted content but do provide information on where to get it in the form of trackers, have been subject to successful legal action.
This search engine will now provide no copyrighted content. It will not tell users where to get copyrighted content. It will (presumably) tell users where to get information (.torrent files and their associated trackers) on where to get copyrighted content. Is this enough for a case? I'm really not sure it is.
Could I be taken to court for handing out [illegal item] - yes. Could I be taken to court for telling people that Joe Bloggs on the other side of town can put them in touch with someone who will give them [illegal item] - I wouldn't think so.
It does look like they've tried to be fairly subject-impartial though, more so than the article seems to think: the A-List contains both a the very geeky (such as Wil Wheaton and "Nick DePlume") and the very un-geeky likes of Josh Rubin (a personal favourite of mine, runs the site "Cool Hunting", based around the best new things in art and fashion).
While they're not entirely inovative, I reccomend you take a look at both Viewtiful Joe and Alien Hominid (which started life as a flash game). They're excellent examples of great fun, great looking games that forego realism and even 3D graphics.
Uncompressed (or lossless), high definition video. The mass-market switch to HD digital (which should happen over the next 10-15 years, a roughly plausible timescale for the introduction of this media) is the perfect time to introduce a decent quality standard for video without any nasty artifacts or problems when recompressing (you can get a much better compressed file from a lossless source than a lossy compressed source).
I'd be very surprised if writers for these were made any time soon after the media's release. To write one of these it sounds like you've got to lay down the nanotech bits appropriately to the data stored so that all the layers mesh together nicely. A machine to do said nanotech laying would probably be expensive and impracticaly for anything other than large runs - it's the same reason that people don't use highly reliable pressed DVDs for very small-scale production runs, and in this case it looks like the physical component of the media couldn't just be replaced by dye (like in DVD-Rs) or a generic base, making general purpose writers a difficult problem.
It's not hard to legally fill a 400GB+ drive if you're using lossless media for whatever reason.
Plenty of people want to rip all their CDs and DVDs so that they can shuttle them around the home network as and when they are needed. Since storage is fairly cheap, it's often worthwhile to rip once and forget rather than using the format of the day and then finding out you can get much better quality in a year's time. 400GB is only about 75 DVD images if you aren't recompressing (and I don't want to watch recompressed MPEG2 on a decent size screen, so straight DVD images are the way to go for a home media server).
Alternatively, people in the creative business obviously don't want to compress their master copies, and uncompressed SD video can easily fill several gigs for a minute of footage. If we can have 850GB discs, we might finally be able to watch true lossless HD video.
Yes, many people fill drives with media content, but quite alot of them bought it fairly or created it themselves.
Re:Same keyboard but with text
on
Blank Keyboard
·
· Score: 1
Pricing is very often based on what the percieved value of the item is rather than the actual value.
If I invented a technology that could produce a 42" plasma screen for a cost of $25, would the manufacturers sell it for $50 and make $25 profit or would they sell it for $500 and make $475 profit because that's what the market percieves as a good deal compared to other similar screens?
Equally, MS actually took time and money to strip down and limit XP Home in order to make it into XP Starter (or whatever it's called), but it has less functionality than XP Home therefore it's cheaper.
What this company is doing is nothing new. The keyboard is percieved as valuable since it is uncommon, therefore an appropriate price is attached.
I think it's quoted as 5% of their revenue, which is about $100,000,000 per day - thus leading to the $5,000,000 figure. In my post I was talking about their reported profit for the entire company, significantly less than their revenue but significantly more than their profit for the EU alone. I'm fairly sure that they can fine on worldwide sales though.
Seriously though, the article does not show me any reason that the virus writer can be trusted on his word alone. How would you know that he really will send the key?
I can see three possible ways this is done: the files could be encrypted with a random key which is sent back to the author - in this case I guess the key could be intercepted on its way out of your computer, but you'd have to anticipate being infected. Alternatively, the virus might always use the same key, in which case one person needs to buy/brute force it and everyone's sorted. Finally, it might use a random key which the writer has no way of knowing - secure, but he'll take the money and run because he doesn't know the key.
In any of those three scenarios I'd think it makes sense to try to avoid giving him any money. Either that or I've missed something.
Ignoring stockholder issues that others have mentioned, here's how the fine breaks down: MS reported $2,560,000,000 profit last quarter. Spread over 90 days that's $28,444,444.44 profit per day. That means that $5,000,000 per day is about 17.6% of their profit. If the EU provides less than 17.6% of MS's market then it'll be actively costing them money to remain operating in Europe.
The question then is how much money is it worth to retain worldwide dominance? If they loose Europe, it's a massive crack in their market since the multinational companies will have to be interoperable with non-MS software. MS does have a strong incentive to comply here, AFAICS.
MusicBrainz does work very well (not perfect, but very well) at what it does. What is lacking, however, is content in the database - we need more users submitting info to make it a truly useful service.
I ask this as an honest question: aren't judges supposed to care about technical details?
I would've thought that it does matter whether you were the person that gave out [illegal item] or whether you just said "I know a guy who can tell you where to get [illegal item]". Why isn't it the same online?
To be honest I'd forgotten about The Broken until a newsletter dropped into my inbox from their site about half an hour ago. Looks like it's not as dead as we thought:
When is thebroken episode 4 coming out?
After several weeks of lawyer negotations with G4 (my 9-5 job), they have agreed to release me from my contract. Friday May 27th 2005 marks my last day on the G4 network. That means we are focusing on thebroken / Systm FULL TIME! We are starting to plan the next episode of thebroken now, and we'll send out another update as we get closer to the release! Now that this is our full-time job, expect to see many more video releases coming your way!
I'm interested to see what is and isn't worthy of a lawsuit. This search engine is now three steps removed from the (assumed) copyright infringement.
Uploading music from within a country where that is outlawed seems to be fair game for legal action now (although countries where a fee is paid on blank media have a fairly strong case for to say they've already paid) and it's been that way for some time.
More recently sites like Suprnova and BTefnet, who provide no copyrighted content but do provide information on where to get it in the form of trackers, have been subject to successful legal action.
This search engine will now provide no copyrighted content. It will not tell users where to get copyrighted content. It will (presumably) tell users where to get information (.torrent files and their associated trackers) on where to get copyrighted content. Is this enough for a case? I'm really not sure it is.
I fully admit that I want something for nothing (or close enough). I am well aware that people aren't too excited about signing up for random stuff so I offer a small incentive. Assuming that the original AC wasn't trolling, there appears to have been a misunderstanding which I'm happy to resolve via email.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like a very good approach, but am I the only one to see an issue in the texts they're using that are already available in multiple languages?
The examples given (two religious texts and a legal one) don't really sound like the best things for teaching a "blank slate" program a new language. I understand that it's looking for structure and rules rather than word-for-word links, but the Bible uses many outdated or non-standard phrases and sentence structures, as does most legal text I've ever seen. I'm not a linguist or a statistician, but from my uneducated viewpoint it sounds like problems might arise in the texts that are available for training the system. Anyone know how they're planning to overcome this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/30/technology/30hil lis.html?ex=1275105600&en=4a1c68b85a47519f&ei=5090 &partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Reg free link.
I can't say I've used the OS personally, but one thing that immediately puts me off is that they are trying to sell antivirus software for Linux. Fair enough, if there's a problem then fix it and feel free to make money doing so, but I don't like that a company feels the need to try making people think there's a problem just to sell a service.
While I agree with you about the fact that all hardware should be compatible, having the cards working on all SLi boards would probably be kinda pointless if you think about it. I would assume people want single card SLi rather than dual card SLi because they don't have a dual PCI-E board. A single slot board won't be an SLi board because it hasn't got enough slots to do "true" SLi, meaning the card won't work even if it was fully SLi compatible.
I'm yet to see them give a remotely plausible reason as to why we need to spend £100 each on the cards anyway. The closest I've heard is:
"It'll stop terrorists"
"The 9/11 hijackers had valid ID"
"Errr.."
Even the 'illegal immigrants' angle seems flawed - they are, by nature, here illegaly. What's to stop them stealing/faking IDs? And it's just forcing more hoops to jump through for those who want to come here legally.
I take it you've never been to Birmingham then?
*ducks*
I think the most interesting figure I've seen is that the PS3 can do 2 teraflops. I may be being very, very dumb here but that sounds impossibly high. There are machines in the top 500 supercomputers that won't do 2 teraflops peak - am I missing something here or is that comic actually fairly accurate?
Maybe Apple is going to use intel hardware...
It's already been speculated upon, although not confirmed by either party.
As for Linux, it's a damn good OS, very stable and you've gotta love the OSS ideal. Regular home users, however are either not willing or not able (I'm really not sure which) to use it - that's changing, but in terms of a literally plug and play solution that's out there right now you can't beat a Mac Mini.
Although BitTorrent is demonstrably usable for many non-infringing purposes, it would be naive to think that this search engine will have anything less than 50% (as a conservative estimate) legally dubious content indexed. To follow from that, however, I think my post from the previous discussion on this search engine is relevant:
I'm interested to see what is and isn't worthy of a lawsuit. This search engine is now three steps removed from the (assumed) copyright infringement.
Uploading music from within a country where that is outlawed seems to be fair game for legal action now (although countries where a fee is paid on blank media have a fairly strong case for to say they've already paid) and it's been that way for some time.
More recently sites like Suprnova and BTefnet, who provide no copyrighted content but do provide information on where to get it in the form of trackers, have been subject to successful legal action.
This search engine will now provide no copyrighted content. It will not tell users where to get copyrighted content. It will (presumably) tell users where to get information (.torrent files and their associated trackers) on where to get copyrighted content. Is this enough for a case? I'm really not sure it is.
Could I be taken to court for handing out [illegal item] - yes. Could I be taken to court for telling people that Joe Bloggs on the other side of town can put them in touch with someone who will give them [illegal item] - I wouldn't think so.
It does look like they've tried to be fairly subject-impartial though, more so than the article seems to think: the A-List contains both a the very geeky (such as Wil Wheaton and "Nick DePlume") and the very un-geeky likes of Josh Rubin (a personal favourite of mine, runs the site "Cool Hunting", based around the best new things in art and fashion).
While they're not entirely inovative, I reccomend you take a look at both Viewtiful Joe and Alien Hominid (which started life as a flash game). They're excellent examples of great fun, great looking games that forego realism and even 3D graphics.
Uncompressed (or lossless), high definition video. The mass-market switch to HD digital (which should happen over the next 10-15 years, a roughly plausible timescale for the introduction of this media) is the perfect time to introduce a decent quality standard for video without any nasty artifacts or problems when recompressing (you can get a much better compressed file from a lossless source than a lossy compressed source).
I'd be very surprised if writers for these were made any time soon after the media's release. To write one of these it sounds like you've got to lay down the nanotech bits appropriately to the data stored so that all the layers mesh together nicely. A machine to do said nanotech laying would probably be expensive and impracticaly for anything other than large runs - it's the same reason that people don't use highly reliable pressed DVDs for very small-scale production runs, and in this case it looks like the physical component of the media couldn't just be replaced by dye (like in DVD-Rs) or a generic base, making general purpose writers a difficult problem.
It's not hard to legally fill a 400GB+ drive if you're using lossless media for whatever reason.
Plenty of people want to rip all their CDs and DVDs so that they can shuttle them around the home network as and when they are needed. Since storage is fairly cheap, it's often worthwhile to rip once and forget rather than using the format of the day and then finding out you can get much better quality in a year's time. 400GB is only about 75 DVD images if you aren't recompressing (and I don't want to watch recompressed MPEG2 on a decent size screen, so straight DVD images are the way to go for a home media server).
Alternatively, people in the creative business obviously don't want to compress their master copies, and uncompressed SD video can easily fill several gigs for a minute of footage. If we can have 850GB discs, we might finally be able to watch true lossless HD video.
Yes, many people fill drives with media content, but quite alot of them bought it fairly or created it themselves.
Pricing is very often based on what the percieved value of the item is rather than the actual value.
If I invented a technology that could produce a 42" plasma screen for a cost of $25, would the manufacturers sell it for $50 and make $25 profit or would they sell it for $500 and make $475 profit because that's what the market percieves as a good deal compared to other similar screens?
Equally, MS actually took time and money to strip down and limit XP Home in order to make it into XP Starter (or whatever it's called), but it has less functionality than XP Home therefore it's cheaper.
What this company is doing is nothing new. The keyboard is percieved as valuable since it is uncommon, therefore an appropriate price is attached.
I think it's quoted as 5% of their revenue, which is about $100,000,000 per day - thus leading to the $5,000,000 figure. In my post I was talking about their reported profit for the entire company, significantly less than their revenue but significantly more than their profit for the EU alone. I'm fairly sure that they can fine on worldwide sales though.
I'd be more worried about the mind rays getting to me - can you imagine how hard it can be to get a proper supply of hat-making foil out there?
Seriously though, the article does not show me any reason that the virus writer can be trusted on his word alone. How would you know that he really will send the key?
I can see three possible ways this is done: the files could be encrypted with a random key which is sent back to the author - in this case I guess the key could be intercepted on its way out of your computer, but you'd have to anticipate being infected. Alternatively, the virus might always use the same key, in which case one person needs to buy/brute force it and everyone's sorted. Finally, it might use a random key which the writer has no way of knowing - secure, but he'll take the money and run because he doesn't know the key.
In any of those three scenarios I'd think it makes sense to try to avoid giving him any money. Either that or I've missed something.
Ignoring stockholder issues that others have mentioned, here's how the fine breaks down:
MS reported $2,560,000,000 profit last quarter. Spread over 90 days that's $28,444,444.44 profit per day. That means that $5,000,000 per day is about 17.6% of their profit. If the EU provides less than 17.6% of MS's market then it'll be actively costing them money to remain operating in Europe.
The question then is how much money is it worth to retain worldwide dominance? If they loose Europe, it's a massive crack in their market since the multinational companies will have to be interoperable with non-MS software. MS does have a strong incentive to comply here, AFAICS.
MusicBrainz does work very well (not perfect, but very well) at what it does. What is lacking, however, is content in the database - we need more users submitting info to make it a truly useful service.
I ask this as an honest question: aren't judges supposed to care about technical details?
I would've thought that it does matter whether you were the person that gave out [illegal item] or whether you just said "I know a guy who can tell you where to get [illegal item]". Why isn't it the same online?
To be honest I'd forgotten about The Broken until a newsletter dropped into my inbox from their site about half an hour ago. Looks like it's not as dead as we thought:
When is thebroken episode 4 coming out?
After several weeks of lawyer negotations with G4 (my 9-5 job), they have agreed to release me from my contract. Friday May 27th 2005 marks my last day on the G4 network. That means we are focusing on thebroken / Systm FULL TIME! We are starting to plan the next episode of thebroken now, and we'll send out another update as we get closer to the release! Now that this is our full-time job, expect to see many more video releases coming your way!
I'm interested to see what is and isn't worthy of a lawsuit. This search engine is now three steps removed from the (assumed) copyright infringement.
Uploading music from within a country where that is outlawed seems to be fair game for legal action now (although countries where a fee is paid on blank media have a fairly strong case for to say they've already paid) and it's been that way for some time.
More recently sites like Suprnova and BTefnet, who provide no copyrighted content but do provide information on where to get it in the form of trackers, have been subject to successful legal action.
This search engine will now provide no copyrighted content. It will not tell users where to get copyrighted content. It will (presumably) tell users where to get information (.torrent files and their associated trackers) on where to get copyrighted content. Is this enough for a case? I'm really not sure it is.
Why, exactly, do you consider me an asshole?
I fully admit that I want something for nothing (or close enough). I am well aware that people aren't too excited about signing up for random stuff so I offer a small incentive. Assuming that the original AC wasn't trolling, there appears to have been a misunderstanding which I'm happy to resolve via email.
What have I done wrong here?