His alien machines could not replicate anything living.
That cuts to the heart of two - perhaps three - fundamental questions:
Can the original be scanned non-destructively?
Are you certain you have a true - stable and trustworthy - copy? Will copies of a copy be degraded?
The replicator is simply an automated factory. Unless the machine is wholly magical in operation it needs raw materials. Metal dug out of the earth. Chemical feed stocks ready for processing.
The machine doesn't provide services or support.
It is not a concert hall, theater, recording studio or motion picture sound stage. It is not a teaching hospital, research lab or machinist's workbench. It can't staff the facilities you build with the parts it provides.
With nothing real at stake the hobbyist can flit from one thing to another and never accomplish anything. SourceForge is an elephant's graveyard - it's where your hobbyist project goes to die. Because you lost interest in the thing. Because you couldn't recruit - and hang on to - enough talented and energized people to drive the project to completion.
Trips over North America can be supersonic, since it's doubtful the American government will care about sonic booms. If they do, I'm sure a few "campaign donations" will fix that....
It didn't work for Boeing in the '70s:
The anti-SST paperback, "SST and Sonic Boom Handbook" edited by William Shurcliff, which claimed that a single flight would "leave a 'bang-zone' 50 miles wide by 2,000 miles long" along with a host of problems that would cause. In tests in 1965 with the XB-70 near Oklahoma City, the path had a maximum width of 16 miles, but still resulted in 9,594 complaints of damage to buildings, 4,629 formal damage claims, and 229 claims for a total of $12,845.32, mostly for broken glass and cracked plaster. Boeing 2707
Think about it, most really long flights are going to be trips like LA to Tokyo, LA to Beijing, LA to Sydney, NYC to London, NYC to Paris, etc.
There are two big problems here.
The North Atlantic run is heavily traveled.
But very competitive and price-sensitive. No matter how quick the turn-around, you need to sell a lot of seats on your SST at super-premium prices to compete against the jumbo jets and charters.
The really long runs over water - and there are not so very many of them, when you come right down to it - don't generate anything like that kind of traffic.
Ban P2P and 'elite' FTPs will reemerge with private memberships.
Did you miss the part about Gorton being held personally liable?
First, the judge found Gorton, who is also LimeWire's sole director, personally liable for infringement, observing in her ruling that "an individual, including a corporate officer, who has the ability to supervise infringing activity and has a financial interest in that activity, or who personally participates in that activity is personally liable for infringement."
Did you also forget that copyright infringment and conspiracy to commit copyright infringment can be prosecuted as a felony under US federal law? You membership card is the noose around your neck.
It looks like my company is looking at going with Windoze for a few important servers because of a few outtages. I know it was because of faulty hardware, because I had just compiled a custom kernel for those servers with just the right flags needed (I want to get the most performance!) but this must have triggered a hardware bug because the kernel worked fine on my work laptop...
magen, if you can't download Windows, Photoshop or MS Office anymore
The OEM system bundle of hardware and OS software has been the gold standard in the consumer market for thirty years.
I can think of almost no one who pays - or needs to pay - retail list for the full version of MS Office. I do know that MS Office skills are marketable locally at any age. The ticket out of a welfare or SSI disability income for some folks.
Photoshop retail boxed sells for the price of a decent telephoto lens from Nikon or Sigma. For the pro it's part of the cost of doing business.
There are perfectly intelligible reasons why the "free" alternatives aren't embraced more often. This is as true in music and video and PC games as it is in PC software generally.
World of Goo isn't everyone's cup up of tea. There is - musical - life beyond the garage band.
First, the judge found Gorton, who is also LimeWire's sole director, personally liable for infringement, observing in her ruling that "an individual, including a corporate officer, who has the ability to supervise infringing activity and has a financial interest in that activity, or who personally participates in that activity is personally liable for infringement."
That will likely strike fear in the hearts of would-be P2P moguls who may have been clinging to the belief that they could hide behind corporate shells, insulating their own assets if the law ever caught up with them.
You're listing the people paying the patent fees and concluding that they support the format, which seems backwards. They are the people with most to gain from switching to an alternative to avoid fees or to benefit from price competition from a competitor.
See a penny, pick it up.
Everyday you will have good luck.
Licensing H.264 costs next to nothing for corporations the size of LG, Panasonic, Samsung and Mitsubishi Electric.
How many Slashdot readers could, with no exposure to any existing video coding and compression methods, come up with one that works? My guess is a few could, if they'd just stop reading Slashdot for a few weeks and work on it.
To be a player in this league you need to understand all of the following text without a crib sheet:
The JCT-VC is currently evaluating modifications to current coding tools, such as
* adaptive loop filter (ALF),
* extended macroblock size (EMS),
* larger transform size (LTS),
* internal bit depth increasing (IBDI), and
* adaptive quantization matrix selection (AQMS),
as well as new coding tools, such as
* modified intra prediction,
* modified de-block filter, and
* decoder-side motion vector deviation (DMVD).
Many new features are proposed to meet the requirements:
Plus, what are you going to do once there are h.265 cameras out there?
"Although some agreements about the goals of an H.265 project have been reached, e.g. computational efficiency and high compression performance, the current state of technology proved not yet mature for creation of an entirely new H.265 standard, and all contributions are modifications to KTA JM11, a reference H.264 encoder by the MPEG/VCEG Joint Video Team. In April 2009, the scope of the project was changed to H.NGVC, with a H.264+ standard being the most likely outcome." High Efficiency Video Coding
Remove all devices that don't have a reason to care about HTML5 from your list, and what are you left with?
Everything that outputs, switches, records, edits and processes [in hardware or software] video for your HTML 5 browser to parse.
A search of Google Shopping returns 1,600 hits for "WiFi H.264 Camera."
Security cameras for home, commercial and industrial use. Would it be convenient to remotely view the video and control the camera through an ordinary web page? Of course it would.
A search of Google Shopping returns 3,600 hits for "H.264 Camcorder."
The HD "Flip" pocket camcorder beginning at $125-$150. The pro-sumer Sony Handycam at $4,000. Product in stores now. Does it make sense to transcode or store all the H.264 videos these cameras output as Theora or VP8? Probably not.
It makes even less sense when you are serving video directly to the "Internet-enabled" Blu-Ray player, set-top box, video game console or HDTV.
Knowing that 100% of the manufacturers of these devices are MPEG LA licensors and licensees of the H.264 codec.
Why? It capitulates to a non-free standard, and if H.264 becomes the defacto standard for HTML5 it effectively destroys the ability of any free browsers without deep pockets behind them to compete in the market
H.264 has unstoppable momentum beyond the browser:
Cell phones. Professional production. High Definition Video. Cable, sattelite and broadcast technologies.
CCTV (Think Medical, Industrial and Security Video.) The list goes on and on and on.
H.264 has the support of industrial giants like LG. Mitsubishi. NTT. Philips. Samsung. Toshiba - and, quite literally, hundreds of licensees that would be considered first tier in their chosen markets.
China-Japan-Korean support for the codec is anchored in bedrock.
The decoder is in your HDTV. Your Blu-Ray Player. Your "Flip" Camcorder. Your cell pone. Video Game Console. Set Top Box.
Your Mac, Windows, and OEM Ubuntu Linux PC.
The decoder is - for all practical purposes - free-as-in-beer almost everywhere in the world. In the US licensing maxes out at $5 million a year. That is not a problem for Apple, Microsoft, Cannonical or Google.
Not a problem for HP or Dell. For Netflix. For Adobe. For Canon. For Nintendo. For Panasonic or Vizio.
Seldon's answer to the Fall was the introduction of backstage manipulators answerable to no one.
The geek might usefully remember that the Western Roman Empire on which the Foundation series is modeled had a four hundred year run and the Eastern Empire about a thousand years more.
The Windows OS used aboard the super carrier USS George H.W.Bush is sold and customized through Microsoft Federal Systems in an IT partnership with Lockheed Martin.
It is not the mass market consumer product.
It is not priced or supported in the same way as the mass market consumer product.
Purchase 1,000 off-the-shelf video game consoles through ordinary consumer wholesale and retail distribution channels for your HPC cluster and you take your lumps as they come.
You void the consumer warranty when you use the product in a different environment.
When you crack open the box to make unauthorized hardware and software changes.
Warranty and service contracts expire.
Production ends. Replacement parts become hard to find.
The Slim incorporates many economies in manufacture. It may not be a drop-in replacement for the Fat even if the OtherOS is supported.
In California's case receiving "found" property is also a crime if the finder did not do his/her best return it to the rightful owner.
Under California law, lost property must be surrendered to the police, if your "best efforts" to return it to its owner fail.
California law also requires you to take proper care of lost property. No free phone calls. No dis-assembly on the work bench. No commercial photo sessions for your web site.
The guy who stole/found the phone doesn't look too good from this report, but remember when Gizmodo was talking to him they didn't have Apple's side, or a full police report.
From the WSJ:
Hogan, 21, sold the lost iPhone to Gizmodo.com, which had offered him $10,000 for the prototype, and a "cash bonus" in July should Apple make "an official product announcement regarding the new iPhone," according to the document.Seller Of Lost Apple iPhone Prototype Turned In By Roommate
The one thing you must not do when you are in possession of lost property is to assert any right of ownership:
The longer the phone remains in your hands the more you look like a thief or a receiver of stolen goods.
You have no right to disassemble the prototype.
You have no right to photograph the prototype for commercial purposes.
But some manufacturers quickly stepped forward saying that their Linux netbooks don't have higher return rates at all.
WalMart is the world's largest retailer.
The pioneer of the 30-second warranty.
The world's most aggressive deep discount retailer - and the lone American big box retailer who for the better part of ten years gave the Linux cheerleaders on the sidelines something real to shout about.
WalMart dropped kicked the Linux netbook into the dumpster out back - and it was not for lack of trying.
Today not one of the 126 netbooks and laptops - sold under 13 brand names - runs Linux.
If it costs orders of magnitude more to make than to consume, the population will get segmented into two warring classes of haves and have-nots with respect to ability to make.
It's called division of labor.
Your ability to make things, do things well, rarely extends beyond doing one thing well.
You are not likely to be equally successful as a silversmith, surgeon, and cabinet maker. Work that demands specialized tools. Skills that take years to master.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you can duplicate everything, including food and shelter, the whole idea of working to survive goes out the window.
Ralph Williams' short story, "Business As Usual, During Alterations," has a lot to say about replicators.
His alien machines could not replicate anything living.
That cuts to the heart of two - perhaps three - fundamental questions:
Can the original be scanned non-destructively?
Are you certain you have a true - stable and trustworthy - copy? Will copies of a copy be degraded?
The replicator is simply an automated factory. Unless the machine is wholly magical in operation it needs raw materials. Metal dug out of the earth. Chemical feed stocks ready for processing.
The machine doesn't provide services or support.
It is not a concert hall, theater, recording studio or motion picture sound stage. It is not a teaching hospital, research lab or machinist's workbench. It can't staff the facilities you build with the parts it provides.
With nothing real at stake the hobbyist can flit from one thing to another and never accomplish anything.
SourceForge is an elephant's graveyard - it's where your hobbyist project goes to die. Because you lost interest in the thing. Because you couldn't recruit - and hang on to - enough talented and energized people to drive the project to completion.
Trips over North America can be supersonic, since it's doubtful the American government will care about sonic booms. If they do, I'm sure a few "campaign donations" will fix that....
It didn't work for Boeing in the '70s:
The anti-SST paperback, "SST and Sonic Boom Handbook" edited by William Shurcliff, which claimed that a single flight would "leave a 'bang-zone' 50 miles wide by 2,000 miles long" along with a host of problems that would cause. In tests in 1965 with the XB-70 near Oklahoma City, the path had a maximum width of 16 miles, but still resulted in 9,594 complaints of damage to buildings, 4,629 formal damage claims, and 229 claims for a total of $12,845.32, mostly for broken glass and cracked plaster.
Boeing 2707
Think about it, most really long flights are going to be trips like LA to Tokyo, LA to Beijing, LA to Sydney, NYC to London, NYC to Paris, etc.
There are two big problems here.
The North Atlantic run is heavily traveled.
But very competitive and price-sensitive. No matter how quick the turn-around, you need to sell a lot of seats on your SST at super-premium prices to compete against the jumbo jets and charters.
The really long runs over water - and there are not so very many of them, when you come right down to it - don't generate anything like that kind of traffic.
Ban P2P and 'elite' FTPs will reemerge with private memberships.
Did you miss the part about Gorton being held personally liable?
First, the judge found Gorton, who is also LimeWire's sole director, personally liable for infringement, observing in her ruling that "an individual, including a corporate officer, who has the ability to supervise infringing activity and has a financial interest in that activity, or who personally participates in that activity is personally liable for infringement."
Did you also forget that copyright infringment and conspiracy to commit copyright infringment can be prosecuted as a felony under US federal law? You membership card is the noose around your neck.
It looks like my company is looking at going with Windoze for a few important servers because of a few outtages. I know it was because of faulty hardware, because I had just compiled a custom kernel for those servers with just the right flags needed (I want to get the most performance!) but this must have triggered a hardware bug because the kernel worked fine on my work laptop...
Help Wanted, Male.
magen, if you can't download Windows, Photoshop or MS Office anymore
The OEM system bundle of hardware and OS software has been the gold standard in the consumer market for thirty years.
I can think of almost no one who pays - or needs to pay - retail list for the full version of MS Office. I do know that MS Office skills are marketable locally at any age. The ticket out of a welfare or SSI disability income for some folks.
Photoshop retail boxed sells for the price of a decent telephoto lens from Nikon or Sigma. For the pro it's part of the cost of doing business.
There are perfectly intelligible reasons why the "free" alternatives aren't embraced more often. This is as true in music and video and PC games as it is in PC software generally.
World of Goo isn't everyone's cup up of tea. There is - musical - life beyond the garage band.
As the title says; 60 percent!? Really?
From Download.com.
Total LimeWire client downloads: 206 million.
Total last week: 320,000.
Total uTorrent client downloads: 8 million.
Total last week: 61,000.
P2P & File-Sharing Software
From Reuters:
First, the judge found Gorton, who is also LimeWire's sole director, personally liable for infringement, observing in her ruling that "an individual, including a corporate officer, who has the ability to supervise infringing activity and has a financial interest in that activity, or who personally participates in that activity is personally liable for infringement."
That will likely strike fear in the hearts of would-be P2P moguls who may have been clinging to the belief that they could hide behind corporate shells, insulating their own assets if the law ever caught up with them.
Ruling could have chilling effect on P2P services
Its like the legal profession is completely naive of how software on the Internet works.
The judge based her decision on how LimeWire conducted its business.
How the LimeWire client was designed to facilitate that business was part of what she looked at - but by no means the whole.
The geek sees everything in isolation. He never connects the dots.
Until it is too late.
You're listing the people paying the patent fees and concluding that they support the format, which seems backwards. They are the people with most to gain from switching to an alternative to avoid fees or to benefit from price competition from a competitor.
See a penny, pick it up.
Everyday you will have good luck.
Licensing H.264 costs next to nothing for corporations the size of LG, Panasonic, Samsung and Mitsubishi Electric.
How many Slashdot readers could, with no exposure to any existing video coding and compression methods, come up with one that works? My guess is a few could, if they'd just stop reading Slashdot for a few weeks and work on it.
To be a player in this league you need to understand all of the following text without a crib sheet:
The JCT-VC is currently evaluating modifications to current coding tools, such as
* adaptive loop filter (ALF),
* extended macroblock size (EMS),
* larger transform size (LTS),
* internal bit depth increasing (IBDI), and
* adaptive quantization matrix selection (AQMS),
as well as new coding tools, such as
* modified intra prediction,
* modified de-block filter, and
* decoder-side motion vector deviation (DMVD).
Many new features are proposed to meet the requirements:
* 2-D non-separable adaptive interpolation filter (AIF)
* Separable AIF
* Directional AIF
* Motion compensation with 1/8-pel motion vectors (no longer available)
* "Supermacroblock" structure up to 64x64 with additional transforms
* Adaptive prediction error coding (APEC) in spatial and frequency domain
* Competition-based scheme for motion vector selection and coding
* Mode-dependent KLT for intra coding
It is speculated that these techniques are most beneficial with multi-pass encoding.
High Efficiency Video Coding
Plus, what are you going to do once there are h.265 cameras out there?
"Although some agreements about the goals of an H.265 project have been reached, e.g. computational efficiency and high compression performance, the current state of technology proved not yet mature for creation of an entirely new H.265 standard, and all contributions are modifications to KTA JM11, a reference H.264 encoder by the MPEG/VCEG Joint Video Team. In April 2009, the scope of the project was changed to H.NGVC, with a H.264+ standard being the most likely outcome." High Efficiency Video Coding
Remove all devices that don't have a reason to care about HTML5 from your list, and what are you left with?
Everything that outputs, switches, records, edits and processes [in hardware or software] video for your HTML 5 browser to parse.
A search of Google Shopping returns 1,600 hits for "WiFi H.264 Camera."
Security cameras for home, commercial and industrial use. Would it be convenient to remotely view the video and control the camera through an ordinary web page? Of course it would.
A search of Google Shopping returns 3,600 hits for "H.264 Camcorder."
The HD "Flip" pocket camcorder beginning at $125-$150. The pro-sumer Sony Handycam at $4,000. Product in stores now. Does it make sense to transcode or store all the H.264 videos these cameras output as Theora or VP8? Probably not.
It makes even less sense when you are serving video directly to the "Internet-enabled" Blu-Ray player, set-top box, video game console or HDTV.
Knowing that 100% of the manufacturers of these devices are MPEG LA licensors and licensees of the H.264 codec.
Firefox has a large enough install base to actually stop or at least slow down H.264 adaption.
The geek refuses to look beyond the browser.
Firefox is roadkill. Little Dolly Dumpling tied to the railroad tracks.
H.264 has the support of 817 of the biggest names in global manufacturing: Fujitsu. LG. Mitsubishi. Panasonic. Philips. Samsung. Toshiba...
In cable, broadcast and sattelite distribution. In CCTV.
In home video.
In PCs. In cell phones. In mobile devices of every sort.
It is backed by Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft - and Canonical.
Why? It capitulates to a non-free standard, and if H.264 becomes the defacto standard for HTML5 it effectively destroys the ability of any free browsers without deep pockets behind them to compete in the market
H.264 has unstoppable momentum beyond the browser:
Cell phones. Professional production. High Definition Video. Cable, sattelite and broadcast technologies.
CCTV (Think Medical, Industrial and Security Video.) The list goes on and on and on.
H.264 has the support of industrial giants like LG. Mitsubishi. NTT. Philips. Samsung. Toshiba - and, quite literally, hundreds of licensees that would be considered first tier in their chosen markets.
China-Japan-Korean support for the codec is anchored in bedrock.
The decoder is in your HDTV. Your Blu-Ray Player. Your "Flip" Camcorder. Your cell pone. Video Game Console. Set Top Box.
Your Mac, Windows, and OEM Ubuntu Linux PC.
The decoder is - for all practical purposes - free-as-in-beer almost everywhere in the world. In the US licensing maxes out at $5 million a year. That is not a problem for Apple, Microsoft, Cannonical or Google.
Not a problem for HP or Dell. For Netflix. For Adobe. For Canon. For Nintendo. For Panasonic or Vizio.
Recognizing "the good stuff" when you see it is rare. Transforming ideas into marketable products rarer still.
Hari Seldon wrote all about it
Seldon is fiction.
Seldon's answer to the Fall was the introduction of backstage manipulators answerable to no one.
The geek might usefully remember that the Western Roman Empire on which the Foundation series is modeled had a four hundred year run and the Eastern Empire about a thousand years more.
Ban them forever from selling to the US Gov.
The Windows OS used aboard the super carrier USS George H.W.Bush is sold and customized through Microsoft Federal Systems in an IT partnership with Lockheed Martin.
It is not the mass market consumer product.
It is not priced or supported in the same way as the mass market consumer product.
Purchase 1,000 off-the-shelf video game consoles through ordinary consumer wholesale and retail distribution channels for your HPC cluster and you take your lumps as they come.
You void the consumer warranty when you use the product in a different environment.
When you crack open the box to make unauthorized hardware and software changes.
Warranty and service contracts expire.
Production ends. Replacement parts become hard to find.
The Slim incorporates many economies in manufacture. It may not be a drop-in replacement for the Fat even if the OtherOS is supported.
In California's case receiving "found" property is also a crime if the finder did not do his/her best return it to the rightful owner.
Under California law, lost property must be surrendered to the police, if your "best efforts" to return it to its owner fail.
California law also requires you to take proper care of lost property. No free phone calls. No dis-assembly on the work bench. No commercial photo sessions for your web site.
I thought you could get warrants thrown out for just that sort of error?
Think again.
Try spelling unfamiliar corporate names and trademarked brand name products.
Bonus points if you can correctly spell the name of every generic drug in your own medicine cabinet.
The list remains readable.
Warrants were being issued and executed before Webster published his first spelling book and dictionary.
A crime that deserves worldwide news coverage that goes on for weeks and weeks? Please.
The continuing press interest is mostly on tech news sites.
That said.
This is the kind of "ethics in the newsroom" story that has legs.
It reinforces the "above the law" piratical-cowboy stereotype of the geek. That he will take anything that isn't nailed down.
The guy who stole/found the phone doesn't look too good from this report, but remember when Gizmodo was talking to him they didn't have Apple's side, or a full police report.
From the WSJ:
Hogan, 21, sold the lost iPhone to Gizmodo.com, which had offered him $10,000 for the prototype, and a "cash bonus" in July should Apple make "an official product announcement regarding the new iPhone," according to the document. Seller Of Lost Apple iPhone Prototype Turned In By Roommate
The one thing you must not do when you are in possession of lost property is to assert any right of ownership:
The longer the phone remains in your hands the more you look like a thief or a receiver of stolen goods.
You have no right to disassemble the prototype.
You have no right to photograph the prototype for commercial purposes.
But some manufacturers quickly stepped forward saying that their Linux netbooks don't have higher return rates at all.
WalMart is the world's largest retailer.
The pioneer of the 30-second warranty.
The world's most aggressive deep discount retailer - and the lone American big box retailer who for the better part of ten years gave the Linux cheerleaders on the sidelines something real to shout about.
WalMart dropped kicked the Linux netbook into the dumpster out back -
and it was not for lack of trying.
Today not one of the 126 netbooks and laptops - sold under 13 brand names - runs Linux.
Not one of the 75 desktops.
Explain.
Tell me what went wrong.
The introduction of a bill isn't the same thing as the drafting of a bill.
If it costs orders of magnitude more to make than to consume, the population will get segmented into two warring classes of haves and have-nots with respect to ability to make.
It's called division of labor.
Your ability to make things, do things well, rarely extends beyond doing one thing well.
You are not likely to be equally successful as a silversmith, surgeon, and cabinet maker. Work that demands specialized tools. Skills that take years to master.
The bulk of his explanation is three paragraphs that are taken, verbatim, from Wikipedia
Are those three paragraphs original to the Wikipedia - or do they quote or paraphrase other sources?