1,000 seems very low. When I was a small child, I had a book called 'My First Thousand Words in Pictures.' It only contained concrete nouns (because those are easy to have pictures of) and only ones I'd expect small children to know (duck, pond, boat, dinner, lunch, things like that). I'd be pretty astonished if someone managed to survive without using more than 1,000 words for their entire life...
A quick search found that my numbers were the generally accepted estimates, so I'd be interested in a source for the 1000-2000 numbers. The Simple English Wikipedia uses about 2,000 words, and it is using a significantly reduced subset of English...
There's a difference between a user license and a distribution license. I'm no fan of the GPL, but it doesn't restrict how you use the software in any way. It also allows unlimited redistribution of unmodified copies. It only restricts redistribution of derived works. There's a big difference between that and something that says you can only play it on approved devices, or can't transcode it.
Apple showed very well that allowing DRM gives a huge amount of power to the distributor, at the expense of the copyright holder. Why does the movie industry not learn the lesson that the music industry demonstrated? Requiring DRM does not do anything to reduce piracy, but it does do a lot to allow people further down the supply chain than you to control the prices that you can charge.
I would not call "random 8 character password(upper, lower, numbers, 40 symbols)" a "hard to remember" password in any case. Those are "completely impossible to remember, absolutely must be written down" passwords.
Not really. I still remember the password for my dial-up ISP, which was a randomly generated password of this nature. More importantly, I also remember a number of passwords that I've generated that match this description simply by taking the first letter from each word and the punctuation from a sentence. For example, 1/2a£o2pr,1/2a£ot is easy to remember (half a pound if tuppeny rice, half a pound of treacle), but contains numbers, letters, and symbols. There's some repetition in this one, but if you exclude repetition then you reduce the search space and your code are easier to crack (ask the Nazis).
It assumes that the reader tries a dictionary, but it also assumes that words in the dictionary are equally probable. An English dictionary contains about 600,000 words. A typical English speaker uses 2,000 different words over the course of any given week and knows about 20,000. Depending on which of these numbers you use as the search space, the entropy is a lot larger. For example, XKCD's metric would regard 'Natalie Portman is superlatively callipygian' and 'I like to eat apples' as having the same entropy, but the former is probably a lot harder to find with a dictionary attack, because a list of 2,000 common words is not likely to contain callipygian and may not contain superlatively, while it will contain all of the words from the second example.
Unions in the USA are under threat from unions as much as from the right wing. The problem that unions were meant to address is unbalanced bargaining. Unfortunately the 'solution' becomes that bargaining is now unbalanced in favour of the union rather than the employer. Requirements of union membership for all employees mean that this does not translate to being unbalanced in favour of the workers.
There are a few differences on this side of the pond that make unions more useful. The first is that requiring membership of a union is just as illegal as requiring non-membership. Your employer is not allowed to dictate whether you are a member of a union or not. This means that you are always free to leave a union that is not acting in your interests. For example, if you are competent but the union is pushing extra protections for incompetent workers, you can leave.
The second is that any agreement reached by the union on behalf of its members must be available to non-members as well. That doesn't mean that they must accept it, it just means that employers can't offer a better deal to union members than to everyone else. This means that you don't get screwed over for not being part of a union that isn't acting in your best interests.
One side effect of this is that you often have multiple unions for the same profession. Because the unions are then competing for members, they have a much stronger incentive to act in the interests of their members rather than their officers.
I think that's the most ridiculous straw man I've ever read on Slashdot. No piece of software or algorithm ever created has been tested in court and found not to infringe on anyone else's patents. At most, it can be tested in court and found not to infringe a specific set of patents. So far, in spite of the fact that the MPEG-LA started trying to create a pool of patents that VP8 infringed two years ago, no VP8 user or distributor has been involved in a patent lawsuit over VP8 and the MPEG-LA has not produced a single patent that VP8 is alleged to infringe.
Most 'H.264 hardware' is not really H.264 hardware. It doesn't take an H.264 bitstream and fill the frame buffer with video. It is a DSP that has certain instructions that are heavily optimised for implementing H.264 decoders and encoders. A lot of these are also, due to the similarity between the CODECs, good targets for VP8 decoders. In contrast, something like Dirac uses a very different set of algorithmic steps, so is much harder to support on existing hardware.
VP8 was sold commercially by On2 for years before it was bought by Google. During this time, there were no patent lawsuits against it. A part of the reason for that is that On2 (and now Google) owns patents covering VP8 that may well be infringed by H.264, so if someone does sue over VP8 then Google can start suing everyone who uses H.264, which would seriously damage the MPEG-LA's credibility (why bother buying a license from them, when you're going to need a license from Google too?).
All the video I generate comes out of my devices in h.264
If you look in your device's manual, you will see some small print that says that you may not use this output for commercial purposes without buying an additional license from the MPEG-LA.
You're talking about client costs, which are irrelevant because clients are not the people making the decision about what format to support. If you want to stream half-hour videos, you need to pay MPEG-LA for a license. You don't need to pay anything for WebM. That makes it cheaper. On the other hand, your site then may not be available to some devices, which may affect your revenue.
Rational decisions include no longer selling anything/quitting the industry, lowering prices, ignoring the issue, or offering a cut down product for free (or a lower price)
Actually, ignoring the problem is exactly the right thing to do because piracy is not the problem. Piracy is an emotional issue, not a business issue. If you search for the title of any of my books on Google, I think the top hit is an illegal PDF download. Yes, it sucks. Move on. Back in the world of business, there are three categories of people:
People who are your customers.
People who might become your customers.
People who will never be your customers.
None of these categories is pirates. Pirates are spread all over them and they are irrelevant. Your job as a business is to make sure that people in the first category stay in it, and people from the second category move into the first.
The anti-piracy measures by a number of companies have moved me out of their first category. Companies I used to buy from, I no longer do because my time is too valuable to waste on a product that may or may not work due to some DRM crap. I buy entertainment to be entertained, not to be frustrated (well, except adventure games, then it's a mixture of both). Meanwhile, pirates just get the version with the DRM stripped off and don't care.
I spent more money on GOG.com in the first six months than I had spent on games for the preceding five years. I'm pretty sure that they don't sell anything that isn't available on your favourite file sharing network, but I still prefer to buy than to pirate. Actually, that's probably true of the company I rent DVDs from too - they lock down their streaming service with so much DRM that I can't actually use it on the machine connected to my projector nor on my tablet (you know, the two places where I might actually want to watch films...) and yet somewhere like ThePirateBay has a much wider selection of films. I'm personally not going to pirate, but they've managed to make the illegal version far more attractive than the legal one, so I wouldn't be surprised if other people did.
I've bought games for $2.99 on GOG.com that I've played for over 40 hours, and a lot more for the same price that I've played for 10-20 hours. The most expensive game I bought recently was the Creeper World / Creeper World 2 bundle for $15. I've no idea how long I played those, but I'm pretty sure I played the free flash demos for over 40 hours. I actually thought for a while about spending $15 on a game, before realising that it was silly to think so long about such a small amount of money. Meanwhile, games at $3 are just impulse purchases - I've bought some from GOG that I still haven't got around to playing.
That would make sense if the panels were the main cost. Unfortunately, they are not. The installation is typically around half of the cost of deployment. Better panels won't alter the cost, but they will make a big difference to the payback time.
Uh, what? China isn't shutting down mines, it's increasing mining, it's just making sure that the output from the mining goes to factories in China (which have lower environmental standards than in most of the rest of the industrial world, which is a big part of the reason why companies can manufacture cheaply there) rather than being sent abroad. Although they'll quite happily send them to factories producing goods for export.
If anything, reducing rare earth exports increases pollution in China.
No they wouldn't. In direct sunlight, the amount of power hitting the Earth is about 1kW/m^2. The top of my laptop is 0.09m^2, so the total solar energy hitting the back (assuming I'm sitting in direct sunlight with the back of the screen perpendicular to the Sun - and have you ever tried that?) is 90W. The most efficient solar cells ever made are 45% efficient. Most are about 10-20%. At 20% efficient, that's 18W. Still not bad, but once you're out of direct sunlight and into somewhere where you can actually see the screen, that drops to under 5W. Not worth bothering with. You can, however, get parasols with solar panels on top. These will quite happily power a laptop...
With the subsidy factored in, they're actually a reasonably good investment now. The problem is that the current rate of development means that if I wait for a few years I'll get a much better system. This isn't a problem for something like a computer, because it's relatively cheap and I'll replace it in a few years anyway. Something like a solar power system I'd want to last for at least 10 years. If I can get one twice as good for the same price in two years, it's worth waiting...
Uh, what? Customers don't pay for power, they pay for energy. $0.40/watt, assuming 8 hours of useable sunlight per day, means about 3kWh/year. Customers pay $0.10/kWh in places where electricity is cheap. After one year, customers would pay at least $0.30, so the payback period is one and a third years, make it two years to cover installation / transmission costs and so on. In some places in the USA, electricity costs $0.40/kWh, so this would pay for itself in 4 months.
Uh, that's not the argument against drilling. The argument against drilling is that the benefit will be short term, i.e. that it will only last 1-2 years. The benefit of R&D lasts much longer - even when this technology is obsolete, the next one is likely to be based on what was learned developing it.
I looked at solar panels for my house two years ago, and I looked again recently. The efficiency of the available cells has increased by about 50% for the same cost. So saying nothing has changed is a bit misleading.
Which is all fine and good for a larger application. But for the small and light program that does a few things but does it well, there isn't much money for support. Not all software is equal.
So? A small program doesn't take long to write, so it doesn't need much investment. A larger program does.
Lets use Microsoft Office. In general most people know how to use it, if it is going to break you reinstall it and it works again
Big corporate users spend huge amounts of money writing custom wizards and templates for MS Office. It's actually a very good example, because it's more of a software development platform than an application, as used in large companies. Customisation of MS Office is big business.
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1,000 seems very low. When I was a small child, I had a book called 'My First Thousand Words in Pictures.' It only contained concrete nouns (because those are easy to have pictures of) and only ones I'd expect small children to know (duck, pond, boat, dinner, lunch, things like that). I'd be pretty astonished if someone managed to survive without using more than 1,000 words for their entire life...
A quick search found that my numbers were the generally accepted estimates, so I'd be interested in a source for the 1000-2000 numbers. The Simple English Wikipedia uses about 2,000 words, and it is using a significantly reduced subset of English...
There's a difference between a user license and a distribution license. I'm no fan of the GPL, but it doesn't restrict how you use the software in any way. It also allows unlimited redistribution of unmodified copies. It only restricts redistribution of derived works. There's a big difference between that and something that says you can only play it on approved devices, or can't transcode it.
Apple showed very well that allowing DRM gives a huge amount of power to the distributor, at the expense of the copyright holder. Why does the movie industry not learn the lesson that the music industry demonstrated? Requiring DRM does not do anything to reduce piracy, but it does do a lot to allow people further down the supply chain than you to control the prices that you can charge.
I would not call "random 8 character password(upper, lower, numbers, 40 symbols)" a "hard to remember" password in any case. Those are "completely impossible to remember, absolutely must be written down" passwords.
Not really. I still remember the password for my dial-up ISP, which was a randomly generated password of this nature. More importantly, I also remember a number of passwords that I've generated that match this description simply by taking the first letter from each word and the punctuation from a sentence. For example, 1/2a£o2pr,1/2a£ot is easy to remember (half a pound if tuppeny rice, half a pound of treacle), but contains numbers, letters, and symbols. There's some repetition in this one, but if you exclude repetition then you reduce the search space and your code are easier to crack (ask the Nazis).
It assumes that the reader tries a dictionary, but it also assumes that words in the dictionary are equally probable. An English dictionary contains about 600,000 words. A typical English speaker uses 2,000 different words over the course of any given week and knows about 20,000. Depending on which of these numbers you use as the search space, the entropy is a lot larger. For example, XKCD's metric would regard 'Natalie Portman is superlatively callipygian' and 'I like to eat apples' as having the same entropy, but the former is probably a lot harder to find with a dictionary attack, because a list of 2,000 common words is not likely to contain callipygian and may not contain superlatively, while it will contain all of the words from the second example.
Unions in the USA are under threat from unions as much as from the right wing. The problem that unions were meant to address is unbalanced bargaining. Unfortunately the 'solution' becomes that bargaining is now unbalanced in favour of the union rather than the employer. Requirements of union membership for all employees mean that this does not translate to being unbalanced in favour of the workers.
There are a few differences on this side of the pond that make unions more useful. The first is that requiring membership of a union is just as illegal as requiring non-membership. Your employer is not allowed to dictate whether you are a member of a union or not. This means that you are always free to leave a union that is not acting in your interests. For example, if you are competent but the union is pushing extra protections for incompetent workers, you can leave.
The second is that any agreement reached by the union on behalf of its members must be available to non-members as well. That doesn't mean that they must accept it, it just means that employers can't offer a better deal to union members than to everyone else. This means that you don't get screwed over for not being part of a union that isn't acting in your best interests.
One side effect of this is that you often have multiple unions for the same profession. Because the unions are then competing for members, they have a much stronger incentive to act in the interests of their members rather than their officers.
I think that's the most ridiculous straw man I've ever read on Slashdot. No piece of software or algorithm ever created has been tested in court and found not to infringe on anyone else's patents. At most, it can be tested in court and found not to infringe a specific set of patents. So far, in spite of the fact that the MPEG-LA started trying to create a pool of patents that VP8 infringed two years ago, no VP8 user or distributor has been involved in a patent lawsuit over VP8 and the MPEG-LA has not produced a single patent that VP8 is alleged to infringe.
Most 'H.264 hardware' is not really H.264 hardware. It doesn't take an H.264 bitstream and fill the frame buffer with video. It is a DSP that has certain instructions that are heavily optimised for implementing H.264 decoders and encoders. A lot of these are also, due to the similarity between the CODECs, good targets for VP8 decoders. In contrast, something like Dirac uses a very different set of algorithmic steps, so is much harder to support on existing hardware.
VP8 was sold commercially by On2 for years before it was bought by Google. During this time, there were no patent lawsuits against it. A part of the reason for that is that On2 (and now Google) owns patents covering VP8 that may well be infringed by H.264, so if someone does sue over VP8 then Google can start suing everyone who uses H.264, which would seriously damage the MPEG-LA's credibility (why bother buying a license from them, when you're going to need a license from Google too?).
All the video I generate comes out of my devices in h.264
If you look in your device's manual, you will see some small print that says that you may not use this output for commercial purposes without buying an additional license from the MPEG-LA.
cost-wise, VP8 uses more power for less quality.
You're talking about client costs, which are irrelevant because clients are not the people making the decision about what format to support. If you want to stream half-hour videos, you need to pay MPEG-LA for a license. You don't need to pay anything for WebM. That makes it cheaper. On the other hand, your site then may not be available to some devices, which may affect your revenue.
Rational decisions include no longer selling anything/quitting the industry, lowering prices, ignoring the issue, or offering a cut down product for free (or a lower price)
Actually, ignoring the problem is exactly the right thing to do because piracy is not the problem. Piracy is an emotional issue, not a business issue. If you search for the title of any of my books on Google, I think the top hit is an illegal PDF download. Yes, it sucks. Move on. Back in the world of business, there are three categories of people:
None of these categories is pirates. Pirates are spread all over them and they are irrelevant. Your job as a business is to make sure that people in the first category stay in it, and people from the second category move into the first.
The anti-piracy measures by a number of companies have moved me out of their first category. Companies I used to buy from, I no longer do because my time is too valuable to waste on a product that may or may not work due to some DRM crap. I buy entertainment to be entertained, not to be frustrated (well, except adventure games, then it's a mixture of both). Meanwhile, pirates just get the version with the DRM stripped off and don't care.
I spent more money on GOG.com in the first six months than I had spent on games for the preceding five years. I'm pretty sure that they don't sell anything that isn't available on your favourite file sharing network, but I still prefer to buy than to pirate. Actually, that's probably true of the company I rent DVDs from too - they lock down their streaming service with so much DRM that I can't actually use it on the machine connected to my projector nor on my tablet (you know, the two places where I might actually want to watch films...) and yet somewhere like ThePirateBay has a much wider selection of films. I'm personally not going to pirate, but they've managed to make the illegal version far more attractive than the legal one, so I wouldn't be surprised if other people did.
I've bought games for $2.99 on GOG.com that I've played for over 40 hours, and a lot more for the same price that I've played for 10-20 hours. The most expensive game I bought recently was the Creeper World / Creeper World 2 bundle for $15. I've no idea how long I played those, but I'm pretty sure I played the free flash demos for over 40 hours. I actually thought for a while about spending $15 on a game, before realising that it was silly to think so long about such a small amount of money. Meanwhile, games at $3 are just impulse purchases - I've bought some from GOG that I still haven't got around to playing.
That would make sense if the panels were the main cost. Unfortunately, they are not. The installation is typically around half of the cost of deployment. Better panels won't alter the cost, but they will make a big difference to the payback time.
Uh, what? China isn't shutting down mines, it's increasing mining, it's just making sure that the output from the mining goes to factories in China (which have lower environmental standards than in most of the rest of the industrial world, which is a big part of the reason why companies can manufacture cheaply there) rather than being sent abroad. Although they'll quite happily send them to factories producing goods for export.
If anything, reducing rare earth exports increases pollution in China.
No, we're much more interested in perfecting cold fusion. We actually have a vague idea about how to do hot fusion though...
No they wouldn't. In direct sunlight, the amount of power hitting the Earth is about 1kW/m^2. The top of my laptop is 0.09m^2, so the total solar energy hitting the back (assuming I'm sitting in direct sunlight with the back of the screen perpendicular to the Sun - and have you ever tried that?) is 90W. The most efficient solar cells ever made are 45% efficient. Most are about 10-20%. At 20% efficient, that's 18W. Still not bad, but once you're out of direct sunlight and into somewhere where you can actually see the screen, that drops to under 5W. Not worth bothering with. You can, however, get parasols with solar panels on top. These will quite happily power a laptop...
With the subsidy factored in, they're actually a reasonably good investment now. The problem is that the current rate of development means that if I wait for a few years I'll get a much better system. This isn't a problem for something like a computer, because it's relatively cheap and I'll replace it in a few years anyway. Something like a solar power system I'd want to last for at least 10 years. If I can get one twice as good for the same price in two years, it's worth waiting...
Yes, but on the down side you have to live in Utah...
Uh, what? Customers don't pay for power, they pay for energy. $0.40/watt, assuming 8 hours of useable sunlight per day, means about 3kWh/year. Customers pay $0.10/kWh in places where electricity is cheap. After one year, customers would pay at least $0.30, so the payback period is one and a third years, make it two years to cover installation / transmission costs and so on. In some places in the USA, electricity costs $0.40/kWh, so this would pay for itself in 4 months.
Uh, that's not the argument against drilling. The argument against drilling is that the benefit will be short term, i.e. that it will only last 1-2 years. The benefit of R&D lasts much longer - even when this technology is obsolete, the next one is likely to be based on what was learned developing it.
I looked at solar panels for my house two years ago, and I looked again recently. The efficiency of the available cells has increased by about 50% for the same cost. So saying nothing has changed is a bit misleading.
Which is all fine and good for a larger application. But for the small and light program that does a few things but does it well, there isn't much money for support. Not all software is equal.
So? A small program doesn't take long to write, so it doesn't need much investment. A larger program does.
Lets use Microsoft Office. In general most people know how to use it, if it is going to break you reinstall it and it works again
Big corporate users spend huge amounts of money writing custom wizards and templates for MS Office. It's actually a very good example, because it's more of a software development platform than an application, as used in large companies. Customisation of MS Office is big business.
Talk to someone who works for either about inter-service rivalry sometime...
No, he is just more confident in his guess as to which one.