It's widely agreed that the US digital cell network is much less developed than in many european countries, where the networks are all-digital and are used everywhere (since landlines are less common).
I don't know what sms messages have been lost, but I know that I've missed calls when I'm at full antenna strength. And I've had my sms informing me I have voicemail arrive late or not at all. This will improve as the networks are updated.
The main problem I see is that you need specialty hardware to make the box run like a set-top box. No matter what OS you run there's time for post and time for loading the os and the main GUI. Most folks don't want to wait 30 seconds to a minute to boot their media box. Another concern I have is sound... silent/ultraquiet computers are still a bit underpowered in typical configurations for capturing and divx playback. I looked into it but with fundamental problems like these you have to weigh the value more heavily.
The book is interesting to read, but most of the stories are fictional. In general, it can give you a better understanding of the concepts and possibilities of social engineering, so you can learn to protect yourself. Mostly, I think it will serve as entertainment, especially for the anti-social engineers:).
I did get the impression that not all of the fictional stories were completely made up... and the book takes a little off of the rosy sheen a lot of the "hacker community" tries to put on social engineering and Kevin's actions (but hey, if you take anything the media or the "hacker community" says at face value you're living in a dream world). Now before I get flames, I'm not advocating illegal imprisonment, I'm just saying the term "innocent hackers" is a little too often used. To his credit, I don't think Mitnick claims to be innocent.
Well, whoever came up with 95% was using the same kind of accounting that lets the movie, software, and music industries think they're loosing $3.5M every minute to 12 year olds (who obviously would have paid for the hundreds of thousands of dollars of pirated stuff on their computers if only we had more laws).
Anyway, mp3's can't carry viruses. There was a scare earlier about a theoretical exploit with the mp3s, but last I checked it was pretty benign. And also linked to certain players. So unless 95% of people now use the same mp3 player, the story isn't accurate. It doesn't mean that the RIAA wouldn't love to do it, just that they can't right now.
Too late! Futurama already got the axe and no new episodes will be produced. After the current season is done there won't be any more episodes (a movie is possible, but not yet in the works). To make it worse, the US hasn't even gotten season 1 on DVD yet!
Hey, without digital phones you can't get adult material on your phone! With the new color screens and faster data rates, you're really missing out with an analog phone.;)
Anyway, as many people have pointed out this topic is way behind the times on frequencies (and those can change anyway) and mostly skews the facts. Getting a good digital phone (and an antenna network as dense as the analog one you're comparing to) will eliminate the advantages of analog.
Also note that 2.4GHz corless phones were supposed to have better range and quality than the 900MHz ones, but that's not mentioned. Due to the complete lack of any modern details, I think this article was written a few years ago when digital was still brand new. Otherwise the author is simply a few years behind the times.
Yes, but to use real's codecs you have to use their player (unless you use a hacked media player, but I doubt that's legal). That rules out any intelligent users.
I agree - the success of compressed video relies on the fact that it has been an uninhibited codec (as well as inexpensive to use). Proprietary solutions are just substandard for the most part and compete at a disadvantage.
The problem is that for amateur photography, film may still better. I'd need an 8 megapixel camera to match the scans I do for pictures I'm not enlarging. Those that I am enlarging are usually at 1200 dpi (32+ megapixels). Granted, without superior optics thats overkill, but it illustrates my point that the technology is young. I'm not ready to spend several grand on a digital camera, so I'm not sure if digital cameras in the amateur price range are yet good enough. (of course, anything would be better than using disposable cameras... with the exception of the 320x240 camera that came with my motorola phone)
I've been saying micropayments would be a great idea for a while (for things worth paying for obviously... it would have to be better content than most of what you see now and bandwidth is *not* a commodity). The only problem is that the system gets very complicated when you get into the details: how do you ensure that the system is accurate and not hackable? How do you keep costs down when there are millions or billions of small transactions per day? How you find retailers willing to sell things for a reasonable price when they're used to overinflating the price? How do you convince a public that if they'd stop being so damn cheap they could get something worthwhile?
Anyway, the reason I see this as being slow to start is that you need a bunch of sites that people want to use before any customer would put $5 on their visa for the services. If you only have one site, the whole $5 goes to that one site and it's not really a micropayment.
If they sold copies of TV shows using DivX.AVI's for a reasonable price, they'd find themselves making quick/easy cash.
I wanted to start a company do handle this distribution (because it would be a hell of a lot more enjoyable than the fixed-time ad-based system current tv uses) but without a lot of startup capital and licensing agreemtents with the content owners I was SOL. Sadly, big corporations hold all the cards but don't have the insight to play them right.
BTW there would be a lot more valuable content on the web if there were other options besides free or $10. There are a lot of things worth 10 cents per use (if they're done right) but since it's a hassle to charge 10 cents, everyone charges way more than they should for products, or just doesn't sell them at all.
That's just business. It doesn't move fast because managers think they need to keep up with Moore's law... it moves fast because technology moves fast and consumers are fickle. The big losses come from misjudging the *direction* things will move in, not the speed that technology will advance (remember Moore's "law" just addresses the technology... everyone else just applies the same words to other things that aren't applicable).
Your comment about the internet traffic doubling really addresses the direction people thought things were going (thinking bandwidth would be like black gold). The technology is here as planned but someone ordered the wrong stuff! (think of all the unused fiber optic cables all over the place)
Call me AFTER moore's "law" is broken
on
Moore's Law Disputed
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Since it's a rule of thumb and not a law, why should we care if it's *about* to be broken? Let me know when you have 6 months or maybe 2 years of data showing that the cycle is lengthening or shortening. And since we know that progress will eventually double capabilities, isn't the length of the cycle the only thing that can change?
Re:Great, except the crash rate is high...
on
Droning On
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· Score: 1
If drones carrying your packages get shot down by rednecks, we've got bigger problems...
Remember, these things have been called "disposable" so it would make sense that some would be disposed by being sent into high-risk areas. Commercial cargo drones would probably not be much more disposable than the trucks/planes currently used.
I did tech support for Intuit back in college, but the last version that I supported was 2k. This may not apply to 2001, but here's what I'd do: make sure you have a backup(you should have several anyway) or copy of your data and have install keys written down (not just the ones you entered from the package, but the registration key as well). Then uninstall the program and remove the remaining stuff since it stores the updates that have been done. Reinstall and update up to the last version you had (last I saw of it, they had standalone EXE updates for the patches but they tried not to let you know. They could be found on the web site with a lot of searching, but the techs wouldn't tell you unless you couldn't update any other way. This is probably the only way to get the previous update). Then restore your data file. (if the latest version updated your data file, restore the backup you made before updating your data file). You should hopefully be able to get tax table updates manually as well so you can do payroll without auto-updating. Again, this is based on my knowledge of the previous year's product, so who knows if they've made things more complicated.
Other than that, maybe if you make a case to a tech that you can't legally use their servers (or something) they'll be able to tell you if there's really a way around the mandatory membership. If you're nice but insistent sometimes the techs can help you out more, but I know I was less responsive to people who were screaming at me for things I wasn't responsible for. (and of course it depends on who you get... but call soon before tax rush = 2 hour hold time)
As a last note, I'm not sure if it's leagal to agree to future undisclosed fees. More likely, you have the option to go without the ability to email invoices when they start charging. Still lame.
How many ATA drives can sustain 50MB/s? Last I checked they ususally can only write at a max of 20-30MB/s, so you're not loosing much at all except the burst transfer. However, these may be raid, so you're loosing a little, but if you don't want a firewire drive don't get one:)
The zeroth law didn't exist in I, Robot. It appears sometime between 'The Robots of Dawn' and 'Prelude to Foundation' (I haven't finished the books between yet, but I know it exists by Prelude, and I think it appears in 'Robots and Empire')
Considering the engineers (sometimes calling them that is a stretch...) who WROTE the code don't always understand it (hence the bugs), it's unlikely that very many customers would have a clue. Moreover, I have better things to do than debug all software I own. Sometimes I'd like to have access, but it would rarely be useful.
What you'd really see is a competitor saying "we found these bugs in your software when we were copying it. Could you fix them so when we release our first version it won't have those bugs?"
The FBI can't even keep track of how many of its laptops have been stolen. They JUST made a massive update to its databases so they would only be 10 years out of date. That raises two questions:
Does any government agency really have the capability to track all of the millions of transactions every hour? And if they do, why isn't the money allocated to the core competencies of the organizations rather than crap like this? This looks like more of a pipe dream than anything (for a few years).
This should be a signal for a mass exodus (whenever your contract expires, unless you can get out of it). It's one thing to sell customer information underhandedly, but to sue the state government to allow them to continue to do so?
"In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle yesterday, Verizon has accused the state rules of violating the company's right to free speech."
Apparently they think they can sell anything they get their hands on. Would they use the same free speech argument to sell stolen trade secrets?
I'm kindof a digital freak (I've scanned all of my photos and I'm making DVDs out of my home movies, etc.) but this is just wrong. What exactly do you have to show for your life when you spent most of it scanning, editing, and OCRing your life to put on this DVD? I know at least a few people who would rather live life than remember it though a computer.
And I think you all remember when Microsoft said you would get more control over personal information if you gave it all to them...
This is an academic excersise in memory systems. Useful in improving databasing technology, but not practical to use. Even for those that would want to use it... Beware. It's like bolting the front door and leaving the back door open. If anyone gets access to the DB, anything you put in there is wide open.
I think a lot of people here understand that piracy is a social problem - that's good, maybe the movie industry can learn from that simple statement. They need to understand that it's not effective to try to control society through technology. Besides, that's the government's job;)
Honestly, I think napster is the source of a lot of these problems... if the average idiot hadn't learned that they could pirate rather than buy media, then the big companies never would have taken notice. I remember hearing, back in the day, "I'd love to download mp3's but I just can't stomach all the porn pop-ups". Essentially the average joe found out about pirating and went apeshit. This will pass, but technology isn't the solution.
That's a great point about price - I do buy DVDs and some of them really make it worth it with 16 hours of extra material (and if you're only going to watch it once, renting it does just fine. Any "customer" with enough time to pirate hundreds of DVD's probably doesn't make enough money to buy them anyway...). Some CD makers even figured it out and have bonus material on the cd's and a link to a members-only website with more stuff. The rest of them haven't figured out that a cd is a product, not a license to listen to a song. If you're not buying a product then why would you shell out cash? Since it doesn't cost as much to make an album as it does to make a $100M movie, AND CDs are cheaper than DVDs to press, why aren't CDs cheaper?
For the money, I'd rather have a big screen TV:) I already have a bike and if the distance is too short to bike I'll walk.
Seriously, these things look goofy and cost too much, and I'm not sure who would use these things besides the terminally lazy. Walking is GOOD for you. If it's too far to walk, you won't be walking anyway, now will you? So what's the purpose of a replacement for walking?
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It's widely agreed that the US digital cell network is much less developed than in many european countries, where the networks are all-digital and are used everywhere (since landlines are less common).
I don't know what sms messages have been lost, but I know that I've missed calls when I'm at full antenna strength. And I've had my sms informing me I have voicemail arrive late or not at all. This will improve as the networks are updated.
The main problem I see is that you need specialty hardware to make the box run like a set-top box. No matter what OS you run there's time for post and time for loading the os and the main GUI. Most folks don't want to wait 30 seconds to a minute to boot their media box. Another concern I have is sound... silent/ultraquiet computers are still a bit underpowered in typical configurations for capturing and divx playback. I looked into it but with fundamental problems like these you have to weigh the value more heavily.
The book is interesting to read, but most of the stories are fictional. In general, it can give you a better understanding of the concepts and possibilities of social engineering, so you can learn to protect yourself. Mostly, I think it will serve as entertainment, especially for the anti-social engineers :).
I did get the impression that not all of the fictional stories were completely made up... and the book takes a little off of the rosy sheen a lot of the "hacker community" tries to put on social engineering and Kevin's actions (but hey, if you take anything the media or the "hacker community" says at face value you're living in a dream world). Now before I get flames, I'm not advocating illegal imprisonment, I'm just saying the term "innocent hackers" is a little too often used. To his credit, I don't think Mitnick claims to be innocent.
Well, whoever came up with 95% was using the same kind of accounting that lets the movie, software, and music industries think they're loosing $3.5M every minute to 12 year olds (who obviously would have paid for the hundreds of thousands of dollars of pirated stuff on their computers if only we had more laws).
Anyway, mp3's can't carry viruses. There was a scare earlier about a theoretical exploit with the mp3s, but last I checked it was pretty benign. And also linked to certain players. So unless 95% of people now use the same mp3 player, the story isn't accurate. It doesn't mean that the RIAA wouldn't love to do it, just that they can't right now.
Too late! Futurama already got the axe and no new episodes will be produced. After the current season is done there won't be any more episodes (a movie is possible, but not yet in the works). To make it worse, the US hasn't even gotten season 1 on DVD yet!
Hey, without digital phones you can't get adult material on your phone! With the new color screens and faster data rates, you're really missing out with an analog phone. ;)
Anyway, as many people have pointed out this topic is way behind the times on frequencies (and those can change anyway) and mostly skews the facts. Getting a good digital phone (and an antenna network as dense as the analog one you're comparing to) will eliminate the advantages of analog.
Also note that 2.4GHz corless phones were supposed to have better range and quality than the 900MHz ones, but that's not mentioned. Due to the complete lack of any modern details, I think this article was written a few years ago when digital was still brand new. Otherwise the author is simply a few years behind the times.
Yes, but to use real's codecs you have to use their player (unless you use a hacked media player, but I doubt that's legal). That rules out any intelligent users.
I agree - the success of compressed video relies on the fact that it has been an uninhibited codec (as well as inexpensive to use). Proprietary solutions are just substandard for the most part and compete at a disadvantage.
The problem is that for amateur photography, film may still better. I'd need an 8 megapixel camera to match the scans I do for pictures I'm not enlarging. Those that I am enlarging are usually at 1200 dpi (32+ megapixels). Granted, without superior optics thats overkill, but it illustrates my point that the technology is young. I'm not ready to spend several grand on a digital camera, so I'm not sure if digital cameras in the amateur price range are yet good enough. (of course, anything would be better than using disposable cameras... with the exception of the 320x240 camera that came with my motorola phone)
I've been saying micropayments would be a great idea for a while (for things worth paying for obviously... it would have to be better content than most of what you see now and bandwidth is *not* a commodity). The only problem is that the system gets very complicated when you get into the details: how do you ensure that the system is accurate and not hackable? How do you keep costs down when there are millions or billions of small transactions per day? How you find retailers willing to sell things for a reasonable price when they're used to overinflating the price? How do you convince a public that if they'd stop being so damn cheap they could get something worthwhile?
Anyway, the reason I see this as being slow to start is that you need a bunch of sites that people want to use before any customer would put $5 on their visa for the services. If you only have one site, the whole $5 goes to that one site and it's not really a micropayment.
If they sold copies of TV shows using DivX .AVI's for a reasonable price, they'd find themselves making quick/easy cash.
I wanted to start a company do handle this distribution (because it would be a hell of a lot more enjoyable than the fixed-time ad-based system current tv uses) but without a lot of startup capital and licensing agreemtents with the content owners I was SOL. Sadly, big corporations hold all the cards but don't have the insight to play them right.
BTW there would be a lot more valuable content on the web if there were other options besides free or $10. There are a lot of things worth 10 cents per use (if they're done right) but since it's a hassle to charge 10 cents, everyone charges way more than they should for products, or just doesn't sell them at all.
That's just business. It doesn't move fast because managers think they need to keep up with Moore's law... it moves fast because technology moves fast and consumers are fickle. The big losses come from misjudging the *direction* things will move in, not the speed that technology will advance (remember Moore's "law" just addresses the technology... everyone else just applies the same words to other things that aren't applicable).
Your comment about the internet traffic doubling really addresses the direction people thought things were going (thinking bandwidth would be like black gold). The technology is here as planned but someone ordered the wrong stuff! (think of all the unused fiber optic cables all over the place)
Since it's a rule of thumb and not a law, why should we care if it's *about* to be broken? Let me know when you have 6 months or maybe 2 years of data showing that the cycle is lengthening or shortening. And since we know that progress will eventually double capabilities, isn't the length of the cycle the only thing that can change?
If drones carrying your packages get shot down by rednecks, we've got bigger problems...
Remember, these things have been called "disposable" so it would make sense that some would be disposed by being sent into high-risk areas. Commercial cargo drones would probably not be much more disposable than the trucks/planes currently used.
Three chicks in your Engineering class, and one is really hot? Damn, what school are you at? I should have gone there :)
Or, like the shirt the big guy in 'Happy Gilmore' was wearing: "Guns don't kill people, I kill people"
I did tech support for Intuit back in college, but the last version that I supported was 2k. This may not apply to 2001, but here's what I'd do: make sure you have a backup(you should have several anyway) or copy of your data and have install keys written down (not just the ones you entered from the package, but the registration key as well). Then uninstall the program and remove the remaining stuff since it stores the updates that have been done. Reinstall and update up to the last version you had (last I saw of it, they had standalone EXE updates for the patches but they tried not to let you know. They could be found on the web site with a lot of searching, but the techs wouldn't tell you unless you couldn't update any other way. This is probably the only way to get the previous update). Then restore your data file. (if the latest version updated your data file, restore the backup you made before updating your data file). You should hopefully be able to get tax table updates manually as well so you can do payroll without auto-updating. Again, this is based on my knowledge of the previous year's product, so who knows if they've made things more complicated.
Other than that, maybe if you make a case to a tech that you can't legally use their servers (or something) they'll be able to tell you if there's really a way around the mandatory membership. If you're nice but insistent sometimes the techs can help you out more, but I know I was less responsive to people who were screaming at me for things I wasn't responsible for. (and of course it depends on who you get... but call soon before tax rush = 2 hour hold time)
As a last note, I'm not sure if it's leagal to agree to future undisclosed fees. More likely, you have the option to go without the ability to email invoices when they start charging. Still lame.
How many ATA drives can sustain 50MB/s? Last I checked they ususally can only write at a max of 20-30MB/s, so you're not loosing much at all except the burst transfer. However, these may be raid, so you're loosing a little, but if you don't want a firewire drive don't get one :)
The zeroth law didn't exist in I, Robot. It appears sometime between 'The Robots of Dawn' and 'Prelude to Foundation' (I haven't finished the books between yet, but I know it exists by Prelude, and I think it appears in 'Robots and Empire')
Considering the engineers (sometimes calling them that is a stretch...) who WROTE the code don't always understand it (hence the bugs), it's unlikely that very many customers would have a clue. Moreover, I have better things to do than debug all software I own. Sometimes I'd like to have access, but it would rarely be useful.
What you'd really see is a competitor saying "we found these bugs in your software when we were copying it. Could you fix them so when we release our first version it won't have those bugs?"
Come get some.
The FBI can't even keep track of how many of its laptops have been stolen. They JUST made a massive update to its databases so they would only be 10 years out of date. That raises two questions: Does any government agency really have the capability to track all of the millions of transactions every hour? And if they do, why isn't the money allocated to the core competencies of the organizations rather than crap like this? This looks like more of a pipe dream than anything (for a few years).
This should be a signal for a mass exodus (whenever your contract expires, unless you can get out of it). It's one thing to sell customer information underhandedly, but to sue the state government to allow them to continue to do so?
"In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle yesterday, Verizon has accused the state rules of violating the company's right to free speech."
Apparently they think they can sell anything they get their hands on. Would they use the same free speech argument to sell stolen trade secrets?
I'm kindof a digital freak (I've scanned all of my photos and I'm making DVDs out of my home movies, etc.) but this is just wrong. What exactly do you have to show for your life when you spent most of it scanning, editing, and OCRing your life to put on this DVD? I know at least a few people who would rather live life than remember it though a computer.
And I think you all remember when Microsoft said you would get more control over personal information if you gave it all to them...
This is an academic excersise in memory systems. Useful in improving databasing technology, but not practical to use. Even for those that would want to use it... Beware. It's like bolting the front door and leaving the back door open. If anyone gets access to the DB, anything you put in there is wide open.
I think a lot of people here understand that piracy is a social problem - that's good, maybe the movie industry can learn from that simple statement. They need to understand that it's not effective to try to control society through technology. Besides, that's the government's job ;)
Honestly, I think napster is the source of a lot of these problems... if the average idiot hadn't learned that they could pirate rather than buy media, then the big companies never would have taken notice. I remember hearing, back in the day, "I'd love to download mp3's but I just can't stomach all the porn pop-ups". Essentially the average joe found out about pirating and went apeshit. This will pass, but technology isn't the solution.
That's a great point about price - I do buy DVDs and some of them really make it worth it with 16 hours of extra material (and if you're only going to watch it once, renting it does just fine. Any "customer" with enough time to pirate hundreds of DVD's probably doesn't make enough money to buy them anyway...). Some CD makers even figured it out and have bonus material on the cd's and a link to a members-only website with more stuff. The rest of them haven't figured out that a cd is a product, not a license to listen to a song. If you're not buying a product then why would you shell out cash? Since it doesn't cost as much to make an album as it does to make a $100M movie, AND CDs are cheaper than DVDs to press, why aren't CDs cheaper?
For the money, I'd rather have a big screen TV :) I already have a bike and if the distance is too short to bike I'll walk.
Seriously, these things look goofy and cost too much, and I'm not sure who would use these things besides the terminally lazy. Walking is GOOD for you. If it's too far to walk, you won't be walking anyway, now will you? So what's the purpose of a replacement for walking?