It's pretty much impossible to know that one is in violation of a software patent in a meaningful way, since most challenges don't revolve around "Our product doesn't come under those criteria", but instead go for "The patent is invalid and should never have been granted". The latter depends on subjective criteria like obviousness, which means going to court is a gamble every time - the policy to sometimes feed the trolls is probably just the product of a bit of statistical analysis on the outcomes of similar court cases.
The chip doesn't cost that much in the first place, though. I'm not sure I'd go as far as to estimate 25% off in a few months anyway, but even if that is the drop we see, $50 is not an especially significant amount of cash to most people (not the ones in the market for a fairly high-end new machine, anyway). When I see people running out to buy $1200 'extreme edition' chips, I certainly wonder whether they need that extra few percent in performance enough to justify adding the price of an entire high-end laptop to the build, but when you're talking about price differences that would only pay for a copy of Portal 2, a bit of future-proofing doesn't seem too big a waste.
Prices are set to maximise profits based on what the market will bear; the extra cost of providing decent manufacturing conditions would have a negligible impact (if any) on end-user pricing.
What it would impact, however, is the income of the executives. We can't expect them to survive on some few hundred thousand a year pittance, can we? If the income isn't at least 50 times the national median, what would be the point in getting out of bed in the morning?
A fair point, and much better put than either of our original posts on the subject, I think. Now to work on getting the government to give a well deserved slap to a large corporation. How hard can that be...
I made my decision, which (among other things) is why my phone's only on WiFi, but that doesn't mean I've given up all right to complain about the fact that my options have been reduced to "Sign a contract (and pay for a service) that makes absolutely no technical sense" or "Don't have mobile internet".
Yes, I have a choice. It's a crappy choice made possible by conflict of interest, lack of competition, general asshattery on the part of the businesses, and the total abandonment of logic in the contracts. Ideally, of course, I'd set up my own telco (with blackjack and hookers), but I don't have the capital for that. I've already voted with my wallet. Unless I make quite clear why I think the providers are wrong (and tethering is certainly not the entirety of the issue), and convince others of the validity of my argument, how are we supposed to convince them to change?
The carrier sells you 'x' GB/month of total data transfer (where x=data_rate*seconds_in_month if they sold the plan as 'unlimited'). What the hell difference does it make which device those bits happen to end up on after transiting through your phone?
Also, while I'm aware that this could only be considered 'on topic' by the most tenuous of standards, I'm surprised we got a term so positive as 'jailbreak' into mainstream usage. The connotation that the phone as-provided is trapped in a jail, and that the user is freeing it by hacking the OS, seems like a reasonable analogy to me, it's just that I would've expected the carriers to go for a bit of negative PR. Something along the lines of "Sure, you could install that evil communist app that hasn't been authorised by an upstanding corporation's store, but you'd need to terrorist-molest your phone to do so. You don't want to do that, do you?"
I'm more than happy with it, personally. I certainly wouldn't be happy if the only software source were a single company-controlled app store (it's one of the main reasons an iPhone isn't an option for my next mobile), but as long as I can fire up a browser, hit 'download', and install from there, that's absolutely fine. Most companies allow unlimited re-downloads for a given license key, which is good, and storage is cheap, so I can back up my install files just as easily as I can keep an optical disc safe if I don't want to rely on their servers.
Looking through my list of installed software, the only things that came from a DVD are Aperture, the Adobe Suite, and the OS itself. Those three installations are literally the only times I can remember using the optical drive on this machine, and I've had it a good few years. I used to rip CDs, too, back in the distant past, but I went over to downloads (and, more recently, Spotify) once they dropped the DRM. Aperture and Adobe's stuff are both available digitally (no point waiting for a download since I've got the discs lying around, but I'd be just as happy without them) and the OS can be installed from a thumb drive (the solution they went with for the MacBook Air, which ships without an optical drive).
I think the point about external drives is the key, though - even I can think of the occasional conceivable circumstance in which I might need an optical drive, but that's a poor argument for building one into the laptops that we have to carry around every day. I can't think of any reasonable circumstance when I'll need to use a DVD drive urgently while I'm on the move; a cheap external one living in a drawer somewhere, and a smaller laptop, is fine by me.
Sony has done a great deal to incur the wrath of an awful lot of geeky people, and their failure to understand that aspect of the market may be their downfall.
I certainly hope so, but it seems to have done them very little harm so far. The CD rootkits got a lot of internet ranting, but didn't actually seem to impact sales in any appreciable manner. Hotz talked about forcing them to fight in court, but he caved when he realised just how unpleasant they could make his life (an issue of the legal system, certainly, but that's a separate matter). The disappearance of OtherOS hasn't actually led to any successful claims against Sony that I know of. The list goes on...
Maybe this'll be the straw that broke the camel's back, I suppose - even if all those other things didn't really damage them, it's not like there's any goodwill left either. Although personal data leaks tend to generate a bit of hot air in the mass media, they rarely deal a critical blow to the company in question; cutting off millions people's entertainment, on the other hand, is likely to provoke a reaction much stronger than they're used to dealing with.
It's completely reasonable to have point-of-sale equipment that pairs with a phone and have the phone connect directly to bank servers to *specifically* authorize a transaction amount and have the PoS verify that data as well without such a silly use of an account number and just exchangine public keys and per-transaction authorization data.
How should one generate an authorisation, though? Requiring a PIN is a good start, but since it's been introduced in the UK the banks have been using it to blame any and all fraud on the customer, because "the terminals can't be hacked" (demonstrably untrue, as I'm sure you guessed). Perhaps more importantly, many things that can be implemented on the terminals (such as a PIN requirement) are inappropriate for online use, meaning that when someone gets hold of your wallet (or your data from Sony's servers) they just run it through an offshore online casino.
It's a genuinely difficult problem, largely because cards need to be fast to be usable. When I do direct bank-to-bank transfers, the bank provides a randomly generated numerical key on the screen, and an automated system calls my phone (within about a minute) and asks me to input the key before the transaction is authorised; it then auto-allows subsequent transfers to that account, but sends me a text message whenever they take place. It's a good system, but I certainly wouldn't like to be stuck in line with everyone going through that process to get their lunch. Maybe require a PIN for in-person transactions, and phone authorisation for online. I guess auto-allowing transactions only below a certain threshold could work, too, but then they already have systems to block 'suspicious' transactions... I don't know. Like I said, it's a tough one.
...they provide absurdly good financial aid to the point that no student should be kept from going there due to financial issues.
As with the post I was originally replying to, I think your wording says a lot more than you perhaps intended. Basing admissions purely on a candidate's academic ability, rather than wealth, is considered to be the entire basis of the education system in most countries, not an "absurdly good" exception to the rule.
Yup; stack 'em up, keep them for a while in case they need to be referred to (never happened yet), destroy 'em when it's clear that they aren't needed.
To be fair, though, maybe the only reason this works is that documents I actually will need to refer to (bank statements, particularly) already come electronically...
A fair point, and it is admirable, but it's perhaps worth clarifying that I wasn't only referring to tuition (substantial though it is, the aforementioned godless commie government helped me out a lot in that regard) - I can't imagine living with a commercial loan of that size like so many Americans do, but it's straightforward and clear, it's like the sticker price on the education one receives.
The bit that was unexpected, the bit that really made me think "These guys are in it for the money", was the (sometimes petty, sometimes substantial) hidden costs enforced by university policies. All first years had to live on campus, in housing with rents a good 40%+ above other local options. Many housing plans came with mandatory pre-paid meal plans: distinctly average cafeteria food at rates that work out to $12/meal; an effort to donate all unused pre-pay meals to charity was deemed too costly to implement. Student run societies needed to go through bureaucratic approval in order to purchase food for events from any sources other than the university's private catering contractor. Not only did courses require $70+ textbooks, the campus book store tended to sell them at rates a good 20% higher than Amazon.
It's beginning to sound like I had a real problem with the place, and that's absolutely not the case. I learned a huge amount and there were parts of the American system that I would love to see adopted in England. It's just jarring to go in expecting a public service organisation, albeit one with a significant up-front cost, and instead find the administration to be treating you as a captive audience of customers.
Religious organisations almost invariably promote dogma over observable evidence - since you chose to bring up the Vatican as an example, perhaps you'd care to explain how their anti-condom policy, the history of misinformation surrounding it, and the increased incidence of AIDS for which it is partially responsible, is intellectually justifiable?
You probably didn't mean anything deep by it, but I find the choice to lump universities under the broad heading of 'charity' an interesting one. Although I think there's little better use for one's money than promoting education, my time spent at a (fairly well-regarded) American university seemed (to my godless commie foreign eyes) a surprisingly commercialised experience. It's clear just from looking at the campus that an awful lot of money is given back by alumni, and this action by Bose further confirms it, but I don't think I could ever get over the voice in the back of my head saying "What about all those times you tried to screw me out of every penny I didn't have?".
I applaud the efforts of people like Bose in giving something back, and I know this is something of a digression. It just seems odd, from my external perspective, that people are happy giving such vast gifts to organisations that treat their students in such a mercenary manner; or, I suppose, that organisations receiving such vast gifts still feel the need to squeeze their students so much...
It is illogical. And before someone says "What if the user does something wrong and breaks the company machine?", I'm perfectly happy to see them disciplined for damaging company equipment if the upgrade does go wrong, and taking that risk is their choice, but there's no sense in punishing someone for doing something that could potentially have done damage but actually made an improvement (at least not when the chance of damage is much lower than that of improvement, and the cost of the potential damage is relatively low. If we were talking about million dollar equipment, and/or an upgrade process with a 50% failure rate, I'd obviously reconsider my point).
The rules are what they are, and I'm not suggesting that the guy goes out and tries to push the point, because I'm sure he would end up getting a lot of crap for doing so. I'm just saying that your characterisation of "uppity Slashdot 'power users'" is a little unfair when their point of view has decent logical reasoning behind it.
In an ideal world, perhaps that'd work. As it stands, it's exactly the kind of net-neutrality destroying idea that so many geeks are worried about: it'd give the ISPs an incentive to create ever more onerous (and artificial) transfer caps, to encourage more content providers to pay for hosting on their cache servers. It would disincentivise costly upgrades to the backbone network (since many of the big names that customers demand are already on the caching network), further marginalising the wider internet by reducing the speed available within those strict transfer limits. Eventually, as even the last mile network becomes saturated, you might even end up with secondary transfer caps being introduced on data from the cache servers.
Looking at the past actions of the ISPs, can you honestly say that kind of behaviour is beyond them?
I agree with the vast majority of what you say, but I find the comment about marketplaces a bit odd. The standard install path for the vast majority of applications on all operating systems for the past decade or so has been "Go to website. Click download. Click install." - I'd hesitate to say that the rapid growth in popularity of the iPhone and Android marketplaces has negated that. Of course, if your OS actively blocks non-marketplace installs then you have a valid point, but simply not having built-in access to one only puts the tablet in the same position as OSX last year or Windows now; hardly a critical failure, to my mind.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty much impossible to know that one is in violation of a software patent in a meaningful way, since most challenges don't revolve around "Our product doesn't come under those criteria", but instead go for "The patent is invalid and should never have been granted". The latter depends on subjective criteria like obviousness, which means going to court is a gamble every time - the policy to sometimes feed the trolls is probably just the product of a bit of statistical analysis on the outcomes of similar court cases.
Interesting, but what's the advantage of this over condensing the vapour from the pools directly?
The chip doesn't cost that much in the first place, though. I'm not sure I'd go as far as to estimate 25% off in a few months anyway, but even if that is the drop we see, $50 is not an especially significant amount of cash to most people (not the ones in the market for a fairly high-end new machine, anyway). When I see people running out to buy $1200 'extreme edition' chips, I certainly wonder whether they need that extra few percent in performance enough to justify adding the price of an entire high-end laptop to the build, but when you're talking about price differences that would only pay for a copy of Portal 2, a bit of future-proofing doesn't seem too big a waste.
Prices are set to maximise profits based on what the market will bear; the extra cost of providing decent manufacturing conditions would have a negligible impact (if any) on end-user pricing.
What it would impact, however, is the income of the executives. We can't expect them to survive on some few hundred thousand a year pittance, can we? If the income isn't at least 50 times the national median, what would be the point in getting out of bed in the morning?
These stupid companies think they can treat their customers like children and very occasionally they don't get away with it.
FTFY.
A fair point, and much better put than either of our original posts on the subject, I think. Now to work on getting the government to give a well deserved slap to a large corporation. How hard can that be...
I made my decision, which (among other things) is why my phone's only on WiFi, but that doesn't mean I've given up all right to complain about the fact that my options have been reduced to "Sign a contract (and pay for a service) that makes absolutely no technical sense" or "Don't have mobile internet".
Yes, I have a choice. It's a crappy choice made possible by conflict of interest, lack of competition, general asshattery on the part of the businesses, and the total abandonment of logic in the contracts. Ideally, of course, I'd set up my own telco (with blackjack and hookers), but I don't have the capital for that. I've already voted with my wallet. Unless I make quite clear why I think the providers are wrong (and tethering is certainly not the entirety of the issue), and convince others of the validity of my argument, how are we supposed to convince them to change?
The carrier sells you 'x' GB/month of total data transfer (where x=data_rate*seconds_in_month if they sold the plan as 'unlimited'). What the hell difference does it make which device those bits happen to end up on after transiting through your phone?
Also, while I'm aware that this could only be considered 'on topic' by the most tenuous of standards, I'm surprised we got a term so positive as 'jailbreak' into mainstream usage. The connotation that the phone as-provided is trapped in a jail, and that the user is freeing it by hacking the OS, seems like a reasonable analogy to me, it's just that I would've expected the carriers to go for a bit of negative PR. Something along the lines of "Sure, you could install that evil communist app that hasn't been authorised by an upstanding corporation's store, but you'd need to terrorist-molest your phone to do so. You don't want to do that, do you?"
By jailbreaking your handset, and telling the carrier to be more honest in their marketing next time if they complain?
I'm more than happy with it, personally. I certainly wouldn't be happy if the only software source were a single company-controlled app store (it's one of the main reasons an iPhone isn't an option for my next mobile), but as long as I can fire up a browser, hit 'download', and install from there, that's absolutely fine. Most companies allow unlimited re-downloads for a given license key, which is good, and storage is cheap, so I can back up my install files just as easily as I can keep an optical disc safe if I don't want to rely on their servers.
Looking through my list of installed software, the only things that came from a DVD are Aperture, the Adobe Suite, and the OS itself. Those three installations are literally the only times I can remember using the optical drive on this machine, and I've had it a good few years. I used to rip CDs, too, back in the distant past, but I went over to downloads (and, more recently, Spotify) once they dropped the DRM. Aperture and Adobe's stuff are both available digitally (no point waiting for a download since I've got the discs lying around, but I'd be just as happy without them) and the OS can be installed from a thumb drive (the solution they went with for the MacBook Air, which ships without an optical drive).
I think the point about external drives is the key, though - even I can think of the occasional conceivable circumstance in which I might need an optical drive, but that's a poor argument for building one into the laptops that we have to carry around every day. I can't think of any reasonable circumstance when I'll need to use a DVD drive urgently while I'm on the move; a cheap external one living in a drawer somewhere, and a smaller laptop, is fine by me.
Sony pissed off a lot of geeks, many of whom are smart and amoral. Some of them vowed revenge. Sony got hacked to an absurd degree soon after.
"Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'."
Sony has done a great deal to incur the wrath of an awful lot of geeky people, and their failure to understand that aspect of the market may be their downfall.
I certainly hope so, but it seems to have done them very little harm so far. The CD rootkits got a lot of internet ranting, but didn't actually seem to impact sales in any appreciable manner. Hotz talked about forcing them to fight in court, but he caved when he realised just how unpleasant they could make his life (an issue of the legal system, certainly, but that's a separate matter). The disappearance of OtherOS hasn't actually led to any successful claims against Sony that I know of. The list goes on...
Maybe this'll be the straw that broke the camel's back, I suppose - even if all those other things didn't really damage them, it's not like there's any goodwill left either. Although personal data leaks tend to generate a bit of hot air in the mass media, they rarely deal a critical blow to the company in question; cutting off millions people's entertainment, on the other hand, is likely to provoke a reaction much stronger than they're used to dealing with.
I think the joke was that they've leaked so many card numbers, the chances of someone attempting fraud on yours in particular is low.
It's completely reasonable to have point-of-sale equipment that pairs with a phone and have the phone connect directly to bank servers to *specifically* authorize a transaction amount and have the PoS verify that data as well without such a silly use of an account number and just exchangine public keys and per-transaction authorization data.
How should one generate an authorisation, though? Requiring a PIN is a good start, but since it's been introduced in the UK the banks have been using it to blame any and all fraud on the customer, because "the terminals can't be hacked" (demonstrably untrue, as I'm sure you guessed). Perhaps more importantly, many things that can be implemented on the terminals (such as a PIN requirement) are inappropriate for online use, meaning that when someone gets hold of your wallet (or your data from Sony's servers) they just run it through an offshore online casino.
It's a genuinely difficult problem, largely because cards need to be fast to be usable. When I do direct bank-to-bank transfers, the bank provides a randomly generated numerical key on the screen, and an automated system calls my phone (within about a minute) and asks me to input the key before the transaction is authorised; it then auto-allows subsequent transfers to that account, but sends me a text message whenever they take place. It's a good system, but I certainly wouldn't like to be stuck in line with everyone going through that process to get their lunch. Maybe require a PIN for in-person transactions, and phone authorisation for online. I guess auto-allowing transactions only below a certain threshold could work, too, but then they already have systems to block 'suspicious' transactions... I don't know. Like I said, it's a tough one.
...they provide absurdly good financial aid to the point that no student should be kept from going there due to financial issues.
As with the post I was originally replying to, I think your wording says a lot more than you perhaps intended. Basing admissions purely on a candidate's academic ability, rather than wealth, is considered to be the entire basis of the education system in most countries, not an "absurdly good" exception to the rule.
Yup; stack 'em up, keep them for a while in case they need to be referred to (never happened yet), destroy 'em when it's clear that they aren't needed.
To be fair, though, maybe the only reason this works is that documents I actually will need to refer to (bank statements, particularly) already come electronically...
A fair point, and it is admirable, but it's perhaps worth clarifying that I wasn't only referring to tuition (substantial though it is, the aforementioned godless commie government helped me out a lot in that regard) - I can't imagine living with a commercial loan of that size like so many Americans do, but it's straightforward and clear, it's like the sticker price on the education one receives.
The bit that was unexpected, the bit that really made me think "These guys are in it for the money", was the (sometimes petty, sometimes substantial) hidden costs enforced by university policies. All first years had to live on campus, in housing with rents a good 40%+ above other local options. Many housing plans came with mandatory pre-paid meal plans: distinctly average cafeteria food at rates that work out to $12/meal; an effort to donate all unused pre-pay meals to charity was deemed too costly to implement. Student run societies needed to go through bureaucratic approval in order to purchase food for events from any sources other than the university's private catering contractor. Not only did courses require $70+ textbooks, the campus book store tended to sell them at rates a good 20% higher than Amazon.
It's beginning to sound like I had a real problem with the place, and that's absolutely not the case. I learned a huge amount and there were parts of the American system that I would love to see adopted in England. It's just jarring to go in expecting a public service organisation, albeit one with a significant up-front cost, and instead find the administration to be treating you as a captive audience of customers.
Religious organisations almost invariably promote dogma over observable evidence - since you chose to bring up the Vatican as an example, perhaps you'd care to explain how their anti-condom policy, the history of misinformation surrounding it, and the increased incidence of AIDS for which it is partially responsible, is intellectually justifiable?
You probably didn't mean anything deep by it, but I find the choice to lump universities under the broad heading of 'charity' an interesting one. Although I think there's little better use for one's money than promoting education, my time spent at a (fairly well-regarded) American university seemed (to my godless commie foreign eyes) a surprisingly commercialised experience. It's clear just from looking at the campus that an awful lot of money is given back by alumni, and this action by Bose further confirms it, but I don't think I could ever get over the voice in the back of my head saying "What about all those times you tried to screw me out of every penny I didn't have?".
I applaud the efforts of people like Bose in giving something back, and I know this is something of a digression. It just seems odd, from my external perspective, that people are happy giving such vast gifts to organisations that treat their students in such a mercenary manner; or, I suppose, that organisations receiving such vast gifts still feel the need to squeeze their students so much...
Re:How many digists of pi do you know?
Can't you just square Pi?
Well, yes, but doing so to vast precision requires you to to crunch a vast number of digits of pi, so I imagine it's all largely the same in the end.
It is illogical. And before someone says "What if the user does something wrong and breaks the company machine?", I'm perfectly happy to see them disciplined for damaging company equipment if the upgrade does go wrong, and taking that risk is their choice, but there's no sense in punishing someone for doing something that could potentially have done damage but actually made an improvement (at least not when the chance of damage is much lower than that of improvement, and the cost of the potential damage is relatively low. If we were talking about million dollar equipment, and/or an upgrade process with a 50% failure rate, I'd obviously reconsider my point).
The rules are what they are, and I'm not suggesting that the guy goes out and tries to push the point, because I'm sure he would end up getting a lot of crap for doing so. I'm just saying that your characterisation of "uppity Slashdot 'power users'" is a little unfair when their point of view has decent logical reasoning behind it.
In an ideal world, perhaps that'd work. As it stands, it's exactly the kind of net-neutrality destroying idea that so many geeks are worried about: it'd give the ISPs an incentive to create ever more onerous (and artificial) transfer caps, to encourage more content providers to pay for hosting on their cache servers. It would disincentivise costly upgrades to the backbone network (since many of the big names that customers demand are already on the caching network), further marginalising the wider internet by reducing the speed available within those strict transfer limits. Eventually, as even the last mile network becomes saturated, you might even end up with secondary transfer caps being introduced on data from the cache servers.
Looking at the past actions of the ISPs, can you honestly say that kind of behaviour is beyond them?
I agree with the vast majority of what you say, but I find the comment about marketplaces a bit odd. The standard install path for the vast majority of applications on all operating systems for the past decade or so has been "Go to website. Click download. Click install." - I'd hesitate to say that the rapid growth in popularity of the iPhone and Android marketplaces has negated that. Of course, if your OS actively blocks non-marketplace installs then you have a valid point, but simply not having built-in access to one only puts the tablet in the same position as OSX last year or Windows now; hardly a critical failure, to my mind.