Because in my use case, I've got a load of gear that I don't want to attempt to replace: TVs, satellite TV box, AV amp, projector, POTS phones, security cameras etc - getting all these connected over ethernet isn't practical without replacing everything.
Say I want to watch the satellite TV feed in the bedroom, and get my IR remote working up there as well so I can change the channels. My SkyHD sat TV box doesn't the ability to connect to a network - should I buy a PC and put it into the living room with a video capture card (good luck with doing this with HDMI high def content) and an IR blaster, and have it stream the result over ethernet to another PC in the bedroom with a monitor attached to it? No, what I want is a long virtual HDMI cable and a long, virtual coax cable for the remote signal.
What you're saying is it carries ethernet and phone (presumably on a spare pair on the ethernet cable), and you use this to move HD video, audio and TV over ethernet. Not the same thing.
No, No, I don't. I've run lots of stuff over Cat5 before, but what I'd like is somethign that'll let me run several audio signals, several video signals (component, RF, composite, HDMI, VGA etc), plus a whole boat load of other stuff *simultaneously* to differnt devices. You can't do this on 8 core Cat 5 wire.
What I've wanted for some time is a universal standard of structured cabling: I'd run a "bus" cable round the house, and in each room or termination point I'd have a box that allowed me to run different signals and different protocols over that bus - audio, HD video, ethernet, etc. No more running new cable runs each time I wanted to add a phone point, or an extra network socket. If this provides a way of doing this over a universal optical bus, then count me in...
The key word here is "spec". The USB spec isn't Apples, and it isn't Palms, and it exists to stop this kind of mucking about and clouding the waters. Vendors shouldn't impersonate other vendors' USB devices, period, and I'd imagine membership of the USB consortium requires accepting this at some point. As much as I admire Palm's chutzpah here, and would like the Pre to natively sync, this is exactly the sort of hacking that isn't acceptable in a mass-market consumer device, and must surely be some anti-competition fishing expedition from Palm.
On a practical note: the iPhone sync is 2-way. What would happen if Palm implemented its sync with a bug that zapped your iTunes library?
"And paying $240 per child (rough conversion from 150 pound list price) to stave off an infinitesimal risk is stupid"
Is it? How about $120? Or $60? or 60c? My point is this is market forces: if parents feel the need to buy this, they will. Some people have higher disposable income than others, some people place more of a premium on peace of mind, some don't mind blowing a couple of hundred dollars on sneakers. I don't care either way, but it's kind of nice there's an option for people that want this kind of technology.
'Is the world really that unsafe that parents need to track their children electronically? I don't think so,'
So what's to lose? Say you have a 6 year old kid: is it really going to harm them to wear one of these? Sure, chances are very very high that this'll never be needed, but so what? It's kind of like Pascal's wager, isn't it?
The bit that irritates me most about this is the retailer's website "Loc8r", "Where R U" etc. I'd be more worried about the effects of this on their spelling than their general well being.
Give them something *they* will find useful.
Let's face it, a fair number of people there are going to start off pissed as you're blocking facebook/myspace/webmail etc. First priority is set the scene: *why* are these blocked? What are the real risks? Give some concrete examples of times when it's caused issues with viruses, phishing, etc. Make sure it's clear that there's a valid business reason for your stance. Show them how the company is protecting itself and them right now: how much spam is filtered at the mail server, how many intrusion attempts are defeated by the firewall each day, etc
I'd wrap up with a "whilst I've got you" session on what they can do generally to protect themselves in and out of work. Examples of phishing, keyloggers, common online scams, the importance of using non-guessable passwords, and the importance of not sharing sensitive passwords across multiple systems/sites. Maybe suggest Firefox instead of IE for home use (you'er on a sticky wicket with this if the company uses IE though!). Leave them thinking that the company is taking a sensible stand, and that it's offering them both professional and personal protection by its actions.
I'd love to say "open up facebook at lunchtime on the proxy" etc but from past experience it plain doesn't work unless your bandwidth costs you nothing. Blocking FB and youtube saw a 90% reduction in traffic at the last place I worked: there's no business case in the world that'd stand up to those figures.
Apple's not a terribly good example here. You buy software AND hardware from Apple. That nice G5 you bought 5 years ago? No parts available from Apple anymore, sorry. Oh, and Snow Leopard's dropped PPC support so won't run on it. One thing Apple's never been is scared of breaking backwards compatibility.
It (should be) smarter than that. The thing that's traditionally stopped this working is the overhead of micropayments. It takes time/money to process each transaction and below a certain value: it's not worth doing.
What I'm presuming Google is proposing is the papers sign up for the service, that the user "pays" via a google account, and that google provide the smarts to say "OK newspaper, we've received a few micro payments for you, and when we've got a critical mass of a few thousand we'll put through a single transaction and reimburse you". Google will take a cut, the paper will get micropayments which traditionally has been too hard a nut for them to crack, and we get either nickel and dimed to death or we get to pay a fair price for our reporting.
Ultimately I assume the market will decide, and poor reporting will result in poor sales, but I'm in an optimistic mood today.
Kind of. But not MS outsourcing. Outsourcing *TO* MS.
MS have a new strategy called "Azure" in which they aim to commoditise the server. Lots of people run an Exchange account on a hosted service, don't they? Now, apply that to, say, a SQL server or a specialised app server. Lease the hosting from MS, they have a vast VM farm with autopatching and DR etc and it kind of looks like a reasonably attractive option to the average IT manager. Like it or not, this *is* where MS are heading - as I was briefed by their UK corporate business manager last week...
When my missus realised she'd locked her keys in the car when it was parked in the copmany's car park, and I was away on business, I and the rest of the family got a text message, some missed calls, an email and a facebook call for help as she was bored waiting for me. Strangely the facebook one generated the most response. I picked them all up at the same time when my iphone got coverage, but she had a number of calls from friends asking if she was OK based on her facebook status.
Bottom line, if most of your friends use facebook a lot, it's worth using it as one of several avenues to communicate I hguess
Kind of. The EU uses GSM, which has the obvious advantage of separating handset hardware from the Subscriber Identity Module.
Still, most phones sold are subsidised, and there are tie-ins (O2 having the iPhone, T-Mobile having the G1, etc).
However, you can and always have been able to buy unlocked SIM-free handsets, plug in your SIM and away you go.
I've been doing this for years through a combination of gadget-lust, an obsession with smartphones, and years of a work-paid-for-sim-card. If you want to get an idea of what's out there go see www.expansys.com and check the UK site (no affiliation, they're just a good, big reseller).
rationale for 3rd party help? It makes the person who signs it off look good for a short term, which is long enough for them to stick another paragraph on the CV and go on to the next thing. We're using an indian outsourcing company to compress 7 years of work into 6 months. Never mind that this flat out doesn't work, at some level on a spreadsheet it's making a PHB look good. It'll be absolute crap when/if it ever delivers, but on paper it'll look good.
+1 from me. No toy guns in my house, in much the same way there's no toy severed heads or toy bleeding bodies. I know everytime guns get mentioned on/. we end up in that (to my, UK mind) weird cognitive disconnect between peace and love and open source and owning lethal weapons which are probably more likely to end up accidentally killing a loved one than saving them thing.
Don't like guns, don't like the thought of my kids playing at shooting each other either.
The price comparison thing isn't *strictly* fair, though.
vis:
SL only gets installed on Macs, so Apple is making money from the hardware (1)
SL is an upgrade - the licence entitles you to upgrade an Intel Mac from Tiger/Leopard to Snow Leopard, rather than a clean install (2)
1) Yes, I know. I have a Hackintosh myself as a loft server, but it's not common place and is tricky enough to do that it's unlikely to become so
2) Yes, I know. You can clean install SL off the retail disk, but you aren't licenced to. And if you're not going to worry about licencing then why not get it off a torrent, making this point even more confused...!
My handwriting's awful and I put it down to a combination of a) typing pretty much everything so lacking practice, and b) being so much faster typing than writing - I taught myself to touchtype 20 years ago - that when I write by hand it's frustrating as my hand doesn't keep up, thereby making my writing a feverish chickenscratch.
On the plus side, no-one can read over my shoulder when I'm taking notes in meetings! I've found the only tool that's helped me significantly with this is a 0.5mm mechanical pencil. For some reason these really help my legibility.
Yup, a number of people who were arrested under the anti terrorism laws after the London bombings had leaks fabricated to the newspapers about child pr0n on confiscated PCs, etc which was later found to be untrue..
Slashdot Mirror
Because in my use case, I've got a load of gear that I don't want to attempt to replace: TVs, satellite TV box, AV amp, projector, POTS phones, security cameras etc - getting all these connected over ethernet isn't practical without replacing everything.
Say I want to watch the satellite TV feed in the bedroom, and get my IR remote working up there as well so I can change the channels. My SkyHD sat TV box doesn't the ability to connect to a network - should I buy a PC and put it into the living room with a video capture card (good luck with doing this with HDMI high def content) and an IR blaster, and have it stream the result over ethernet to another PC in the bedroom with a monitor attached to it? No, what I want is a long virtual HDMI cable and a long, virtual coax cable for the remote signal.
What you're saying is it carries ethernet and phone (presumably on a spare pair on the ethernet cable), and you use this to move HD video, audio and TV over ethernet. Not the same thing.
No, No, I don't. I've run lots of stuff over Cat5 before, but what I'd like is somethign that'll let me run several audio signals, several video signals (component, RF, composite, HDMI, VGA etc), plus a whole boat load of other stuff *simultaneously* to differnt devices. You can't do this on 8 core Cat 5 wire.
What I've wanted for some time is a universal standard of structured cabling: I'd run a "bus" cable round the house, and in each room or termination point I'd have a box that allowed me to run different signals and different protocols over that bus - audio, HD video, ethernet, etc. No more running new cable runs each time I wanted to add a phone point, or an extra network socket. If this provides a way of doing this over a universal optical bus, then count me in...
The key word here is "spec". The USB spec isn't Apples, and it isn't Palms, and it exists to stop this kind of mucking about and clouding the waters. Vendors shouldn't impersonate other vendors' USB devices, period, and I'd imagine membership of the USB consortium requires accepting this at some point. As much as I admire Palm's chutzpah here, and would like the Pre to natively sync, this is exactly the sort of hacking that isn't acceptable in a mass-market consumer device, and must surely be some anti-competition fishing expedition from Palm.
On a practical note: the iPhone sync is 2-way. What would happen if Palm implemented its sync with a bug that zapped your iTunes library?
"And paying $240 per child (rough conversion from 150 pound list price) to stave off an infinitesimal risk is stupid"
Is it? How about $120? Or $60? or 60c? My point is this is market forces: if parents feel the need to buy this, they will. Some people have higher disposable income than others, some people place more of a premium on peace of mind, some don't mind blowing a couple of hundred dollars on sneakers. I don't care either way, but it's kind of nice there's an option for people that want this kind of technology.
'Is the world really that unsafe that parents need to track their children electronically? I don't think so,'
So what's to lose? Say you have a 6 year old kid: is it really going to harm them to wear one of these? Sure, chances are very very high that this'll never be needed, but so what? It's kind of like Pascal's wager, isn't it?
The bit that irritates me most about this is the retailer's website "Loc8r", "Where R U" etc. I'd be more worried about the effects of this on their spelling than their general well being.
Give them something *they* will find useful.
Let's face it, a fair number of people there are going to start off pissed as you're blocking facebook/myspace/webmail etc. First priority is set the scene: *why* are these blocked? What are the real risks? Give some concrete examples of times when it's caused issues with viruses, phishing, etc. Make sure it's clear that there's a valid business reason for your stance. Show them how the company is protecting itself and them right now: how much spam is filtered at the mail server, how many intrusion attempts are defeated by the firewall each day, etc
I'd wrap up with a "whilst I've got you" session on what they can do generally to protect themselves in and out of work. Examples of phishing, keyloggers, common online scams, the importance of using non-guessable passwords, and the importance of not sharing sensitive passwords across multiple systems/sites. Maybe suggest Firefox instead of IE for home use (you'er on a sticky wicket with this if the company uses IE though!). Leave them thinking that the company is taking a sensible stand, and that it's offering them both professional and personal protection by its actions.
I'd love to say "open up facebook at lunchtime on the proxy" etc but from past experience it plain doesn't work unless your bandwidth costs you nothing. Blocking FB and youtube saw a 90% reduction in traffic at the last place I worked: there's no business case in the world that'd stand up to those figures.
Thank you for your full and detailed post. They can still go fvck themselves. Enough is enough
Apple's not a terribly good example here. You buy software AND hardware from Apple. That nice G5 you bought 5 years ago? No parts available from Apple anymore, sorry. Oh, and Snow Leopard's dropped PPC support so won't run on it. One thing Apple's never been is scared of breaking backwards compatibility.
He can't answer. Someone with an assault rifle turned up to ask him why he was posting on /.
What does this have to do with the DRM required for ER/ES?
It (should be) smarter than that. The thing that's traditionally stopped this working is the overhead of micropayments. It takes time/money to process each transaction and below a certain value: it's not worth doing.
What I'm presuming Google is proposing is the papers sign up for the service, that the user "pays" via a google account, and that google provide the smarts to say "OK newspaper, we've received a few micro payments for you, and when we've got a critical mass of a few thousand we'll put through a single transaction and reimburse you". Google will take a cut, the paper will get micropayments which traditionally has been too hard a nut for them to crack, and we get either nickel and dimed to death or we get to pay a fair price for our reporting.
Ultimately I assume the market will decide, and poor reporting will result in poor sales, but I'm in an optimistic mood today.
Kind of. But not MS outsourcing. Outsourcing *TO* MS.
MS have a new strategy called "Azure" in which they aim to commoditise the server. Lots of people run an Exchange account on a hosted service, don't they? Now, apply that to, say, a SQL server or a specialised app server. Lease the hosting from MS, they have a vast VM farm with autopatching and DR etc and it kind of looks like a reasonably attractive option to the average IT manager. Like it or not, this *is* where MS are heading - as I was briefed by their UK corporate business manager last week...
When my missus realised she'd locked her keys in the car when it was parked in the copmany's car park, and I was away on business, I and the rest of the family got a text message, some missed calls, an email and a facebook call for help as she was bored waiting for me. Strangely the facebook one generated the most response. I picked them all up at the same time when my iphone got coverage, but she had a number of calls from friends asking if she was OK based on her facebook status.
Bottom line, if most of your friends use facebook a lot, it's worth using it as one of several avenues to communicate I hguess
Kind of. The EU uses GSM, which has the obvious advantage of separating handset hardware from the Subscriber Identity Module. Still, most phones sold are subsidised, and there are tie-ins (O2 having the iPhone, T-Mobile having the G1, etc). However, you can and always have been able to buy unlocked SIM-free handsets, plug in your SIM and away you go.
I've been doing this for years through a combination of gadget-lust, an obsession with smartphones, and years of a work-paid-for-sim-card. If you want to get an idea of what's out there go see www.expansys.com and check the UK site (no affiliation, they're just a good, big reseller).
I think we have a new metric unit of storage, to rival the (now deprecated) Library Of Congress SI unit.
rationale for 3rd party help? It makes the person who signs it off look good for a short term, which is long enough for them to stick another paragraph on the CV and go on to the next thing. We're using an indian outsourcing company to compress 7 years of work into 6 months. Never mind that this flat out doesn't work, at some level on a spreadsheet it's making a PHB look good. It'll be absolute crap when/if it ever delivers, but on paper it'll look good.
at a guess...
Youtube
BBC iPlayer
Last.FM
Some fairly nice free extras right there...
+1 from me. No toy guns in my house, in much the same way there's no toy severed heads or toy bleeding bodies. I know everytime guns get mentioned on /. we end up in that (to my, UK mind) weird cognitive disconnect between peace and love and open source and owning lethal weapons which are probably more likely to end up accidentally killing a loved one than saving them thing.
Don't like guns, don't like the thought of my kids playing at shooting each other either.
The price comparison thing isn't *strictly* fair, though.
vis:
SL only gets installed on Macs, so Apple is making money from the hardware (1)
SL is an upgrade - the licence entitles you to upgrade an Intel Mac from Tiger/Leopard to Snow Leopard, rather than a clean install (2)
1) Yes, I know. I have a Hackintosh myself as a loft server, but it's not common place and is tricky enough to do that it's unlikely to become so
2) Yes, I know. You can clean install SL off the retail disk, but you aren't licenced to. And if you're not going to worry about licencing then why not get it off a torrent, making this point even more confused...!
Strangely, I've noticed this at times when my workload's stressing me out - more homophone errors, that were immediately obvious when I read it back.
My handwriting's awful and I put it down to a combination of a) typing pretty much everything so lacking practice, and b) being so much faster typing than writing - I taught myself to touchtype 20 years ago - that when I write by hand it's frustrating as my hand doesn't keep up, thereby making my writing a feverish chickenscratch.
On the plus side, no-one can read over my shoulder when I'm taking notes in meetings! I've found the only tool that's helped me significantly with this is a 0.5mm mechanical pencil. For some reason these really help my legibility.
and despite the Treo community putting a bounty on hacking it to work, it didn't work with Treos.
Yup, a number of people who were arrested under the anti terrorism laws after the London bombings had leaks fabricated to the newspapers about child pr0n on confiscated PCs, etc which was later found to be untrue..