One thing I missed on the feature list: bluetooth.
Combine this with one-handed chording keyboard, maybe a camera or just a hole to look through (or allow one-eye option) and some wireless connectivity (say, your mobile phone as GPRS modem), and you have a lightweight wearable computer.
bonus for whoever comes up with a handy wearable cursor control device - kinda trackpoint on the keyboard would do, but they are quite obnoxious.
The way I see it, with built-in flash memory, you draw it from your pocket, it spins for 30s at high speed buffering the disk, then stops and plays from memory. No need to keep it spinning all the time.
Things will get worse before they get better for software. We're accepting buggier software than ever and paying more for it than ever.
More or less. The market shows with the whole hype for "beta" that stability is not what people require from software. It doesn't have to work 'always', just 'mostly'.
Remember that each halving the number of remaining bugs costs the same. So going from 94% uptime to 98% uptime costs the same as going from 99.5% to 99.75%. You can produce a program that works in 99.75% cases, or two that work in 94% cases each for about the same price. And with keeping the functionality rich and prices low, people will close an eye on stability.
First, you need an expensive smart phone or even more expensive laptop to have it working. Second, battery life of the display would be moot, the laptop/phone would die hours earlier. Third, you'd waste lots of battery life of the device on transmission.
I don't agree with any external device to render the contents. The reader, in 'reading mode' should be totally self-contained and portable. It can (and should) depend on a number of external devices for upload, conversion, purchase of books etc, but no external devices for actually -using- it please.
The way I see it, the reader contains: * e-ink display * SD card reader * a microcontroller for display, keys etc, * a postscript rendering chip * standard batteries, preferably AAA. * rugged case with plain keys for interface. It would be neat if it opened like a book, providing two pages of display, protecting the screen from scratching and halving the size when not in use.
The cost is low. SD cards currently provide the best price per gigabyte of flash storage, and you're not limited with internal storage - want to carry 200GB of books with you? Buy a handful of the cards, swap as needed. Plus being a standard, spare space can be used for whatever else you want, phonebook for your phone, camera, mp3 player. Just swap the card. And as removable media, it removes necessity for ANY other interfaces. No USB, no Bluetooth, no extra sockets, no drivers needed.
Why Postscript? Because hardware to render it is 30 years old. It can be the same chip that is used in printers. Conversion to Postscript from mostly everything else is as easy as checking "print to file". It's feature-rich, mature, and has quite low requirements (6MB SIMM memory?)
Standard batteries because you can buy a bunch of accumulators and keep them charged with external charger, never worry about expensive proprietary replacements, and as technology progresses, just buy ones of higher capacity.
Keys, because they are cheap. touch-screen is fancy and cool but it costs a lot. And keys are just as good for the particular purpose. And a case that will withstand as much abuse as a hardcover book can.
extra software would have to be installed that constantly relayed to an outside source with the kindles own triangulated position.
<hat material="tinfoil"> Constantly, or on request. You connect to the net and some steganographic message in some metadata (say, whitespaces in http headers) tells it to triangulate its position and send it to the requesting party. Such piece of software could be hidden quite deep in network drivers or such. </hat>
Even if you come up with a clever test that would pierce the illusion, one would have to assume whoever maintains the illusion would simply fix it so that didn't work a second time. Nothing would be repeatable.
Unless they don't. You come up with this test and it works reliably and repeatably. Why assume "whoever maintains the illusion" doesn't want us to find out it's just it? Maybe just opposite, finding it is the ultimate test, apotheosis, final enlightenment?
"Because it's written that way" is a poor excuse for explaining all the puzzles, but in case it is true, 'reverse engineering' the underlying 'machine' and creating a running copy would give us a lot of insight. Or just hacking it and modifying the properties of the universe. Conveniently circumvent rules of spatial geometry and conservation of mass and energy, 'spawn' goods instead of producing them, save&restore, copy&paste, do mostly any tricks that are possible only in software.
The concept is worth exploring just for the huge profits in case it's true, and if it isn't, it still is a useful thought device to have some problems solved, an abstraction that even if false, still may be useful.
or you can make the player such that it won't leak the decrypted data or keys, say, using a custom chip that is common to all manufacturers. And through legislation make leaking the key a bankruptcy sentence on any manufacturer.
A competent group could create such a chip. It's not impossible.
Actually, it's more like the signing system. Enable the playback only if the stream is signed by originating party. The consumer appliance has only the public key, the data must be signed by the private key that never leaves the factory.
As long as the DRM and the playback chips are separate, you can intercept the data between them, spoof the DRM 'okay' signal, and so on. If the devices are integrated, good luck getting a microscope and trying to extract the data from the chip's memory cells when it never goes further than 0.05mm away to the decoder part.
Building 'DRM protection + decoder + digital-analog converter' single-chip players is not feasible for any single manufacturer, but if it was a cooperation work of many companies, with government support, it would be possible, feasible and quite likely profitable.
But as I know the life, it will be just another half-assed, easy to crack attempt to get one of existing, faulty schemes formalized.
EU laws define what local laws should be. Local laws are used to judge people. Local laws that are in violation of EU laws (and shouldn't be) are still used to judge people, effectively trumping EU laws.
Local law trumps EU law whenever it conflicts with it. The conflict is a ShouldntHappen(tm) situation but is surprisingly common.
That is, if you violate any particular local law, which conflicts with EU law, you're fucked. You can apply for the law to be changed to comply with EU laws, and by all means it should be changed then (though the process may face a lot of obstacles - be delayed for a long time, crippled by lobbyists, generally suffer all kind of hurdles that can be thrown its way), but your court decision won't be overturned once the law changes.
In other words, EU law forces local law to be compliant with it, but doesn't override it, and the process of changing the local law to comply is separate from jurisdiction, and often falls short of its appointed goals.
There is a couple of laws in Poland that are in contradiction to EU laws. People are being judged and sentenced following them, despite the fact that it is known these laws are illegal. The legislation to have these laws changed is progressing at snail speed, meantime people spend prison time for violating them.
It relies on a secret, not on obscurity. The algorithm doesn't have (and shouldn't) be secret to be secure. Just like GPG being secure despite being open source.
DRM can be standarized, open specs, maybe even open source implementation. But each participant has a set of secret keys, and they don't have to be shared. As long as there's no inherent weakness to the keys, algorithm and implementation, the result is secure. Leak of one key doesn't break protection on all the rest of them.
Of course the no inherent weakness to the keys, algorithm and implementation part is very tricky. Every program has bugs. Bugs can be fixed, but keeping the system up-to-date is left to the end-user. In case of personal encryption systems, it's in your best interest to have it up-to-date. If there are any bugs in your SSH, you want them patched. But it's strictly against your interests to have security bugs in your DRM appliance patched, so if any is found, it may allow people to exploit it to decrypt the data, and just break the system.
They invest a lot in a new array of telescopes and have not enough computational power to process the new data... Shouldn't they invest some of the money in a data center to be able to process it? Or at least an advertisement campaign to recruit more volunteers?
Been there. The dept bought a top-notch, highest quality computer to run the best FEM software with huge projects, and after the purchase they found out they don't have enough to purchase the actual software.
The nice, simple and cool alternative is if iPods were mp3-enabled. No DRM. Songs from any source can be used, except of few chosen ones that use DRM;)
Many companies have been proclaimed dead or dying while their shares kept going up, and they keep going up still. Some portals were proclaimed to be dead because their percentage market share vaned comparing to Google, but they actually gain users as the net grows, and they actually grow and note profits each year.
You get copyright for 3 years for free, to "test the waters". For a patent, you need to pay a fee, say, $1000 and you get 3 years of protection. It still counts as if you paid this $1000 for this copyright.
Then you can extend it all, for as long as you wish, by paying twice the previous price for each year you want to extend it.
If it was a failure, you drop it and it enters public domain. If it seems still promising, invest first a little, then a little more, eventually it may take up and return the investment and keep running. If it's a milk cow, 10 years later you're more than willing to pay $32,000 to keep the copyright for another year. If it's a patent that keeps your company running, $131mln to keep the patent through 20th year after purchasing it is not too much.
This way companies wouldn't be able to accumulate thousands of patents portfolios - they would keep 5-6 most important ones and pursue new ideas to get new ones at low price, while dropping the most expensive ones as they stop being financially feasible. People wouldn't stash their patent portfolios for later, they would chase into the market, hurrying before keeping the patent becomes financially unfeasible.
Want to keep your copyright for 40 years? Pay $274,877,906,943,000 and you're free to do so.
I stayed with Altavista quite long. I tried Google once, soon after it emerged, didn't feel impressed and went back to Altavista. And for the time, It Was Good.
I kept using it for another 2 or 3 years and saw it go down the drain.
First, they fell victim to spammers. People figured out how to position their sites with it, and any somewhat common keyword yielded many pages of commercial junk before you could get to content, and first 10 or so positions for mostly -any- keyword were occupied by spam links.
Then they started adding ads. Sponsored links replacing first search results, some obnoxious popups, really bad junk. Remember these were times before Adblock. It was utter junk.
Then it stopped keeping up with progress. Sites took months to get indexed, and 404s even more to get removed. The results were a total junk.
I gave Google another chance and was hugely impressed. It was still before people figured out most of pagerank tricks and Google was almost totally spam-free. I had my results within first 3-4 links, not after 3-4 pages!
Red Queen was right: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."
Slashdot Mirror
none, but with no registration process there's no proof the work was ever under CC.
1. People ILLEGALLY claim copyrighted works (by others) are CC, and other people who use them in good faith find themselves violating copyright.
2. People ILLEGALLY remove CC from their works, but the burden of proof that the work was ever CC is on whoever made the derivative works or copies.
"1" is "man in the middle attack", "claim it's yours and it's CC"
"2" is "bait and switch", "I'd swear it was still CC yesterday!"
TFA says "MP3 format" but for all you know it's encoded as mono@32kbps with literally zero info in the ID3 tags
.sid instead of .mp3 format.
MONO?
Next step:
One thing I missed on the feature list: bluetooth.
Combine this with one-handed chording keyboard, maybe a camera or just a hole to look through (or allow one-eye option) and some wireless connectivity (say, your mobile phone as GPRS modem), and you have a lightweight wearable computer.
bonus for whoever comes up with a handy wearable cursor control device - kinda trackpoint on the keyboard would do, but they are quite obnoxious.
Nope. It puts you at advantage if you have genuine windows.
Same as mafia protects your health from damage for a fee.
Agreed. For about any of the 'half-wild' monster races Ranger is more reasonable than Warrior as 'default' class.
The way I see it, with built-in flash memory, you draw it from your pocket, it spins for 30s at high speed buffering the disk, then stops and plays from memory. No need to keep it spinning all the time.
Tic-tac-toe Championship Results: Global Thermonuclear War Prevented!
Things will get worse before they get better for software. We're accepting buggier software than ever and paying more for it than ever.
More or less. The market shows with the whole hype for "beta" that stability is not what people require from software. It doesn't have to work 'always', just 'mostly'.
Remember that each halving the number of remaining bugs costs the same. So going from 94% uptime to 98% uptime costs the same as going from 99.5% to 99.75%. You can produce a program that works in 99.75% cases, or two that work in 94% cases each for about the same price. And with keeping the functionality rich and prices low, people will close an eye on stability.
Not worldwide just in Europe, through legislation. No unapproved devices can be imported, built, used etc.
Yeah, it's crazy. But it's possible.
No.
No external appliances to render the screen data.
First, you need an expensive smart phone or even more expensive laptop to have it working.
Second, battery life of the display would be moot, the laptop/phone would die hours earlier.
Third, you'd waste lots of battery life of the device on transmission.
I don't agree with any external device to render the contents. The reader, in 'reading mode' should be totally self-contained and portable. It can (and should) depend on a number of external devices for upload, conversion, purchase of books etc, but no external devices for actually -using- it please.
The way I see it, the reader contains:
* e-ink display
* SD card reader
* a microcontroller for display, keys etc,
* a postscript rendering chip
* standard batteries, preferably AAA.
* rugged case with plain keys for interface.
It would be neat if it opened like a book, providing two pages of display, protecting the screen from scratching and halving the size when not in use.
The cost is low. SD cards currently provide the best price per gigabyte of flash storage, and you're not limited with internal storage - want to carry 200GB of books with you? Buy a handful of the cards, swap as needed. Plus being a standard, spare space can be used for whatever else you want, phonebook for your phone, camera, mp3 player. Just swap the card. And as removable media, it removes necessity for ANY other interfaces. No USB, no Bluetooth, no extra sockets, no drivers needed.
Why Postscript? Because hardware to render it is 30 years old. It can be the same chip that is used in printers. Conversion to Postscript from mostly everything else is as easy as checking "print to file". It's feature-rich, mature, and has quite low requirements (6MB SIMM memory?)
Standard batteries because you can buy a bunch of accumulators and keep them charged with external charger, never worry about expensive proprietary replacements, and as technology progresses, just buy ones of higher capacity.
Keys, because they are cheap. touch-screen is fancy and cool but it costs a lot. And keys are just as good for the particular purpose. And a case that will withstand as much abuse as a hardcover book can.
extra software would have to be installed that constantly relayed to an outside source with the kindles own triangulated position.
<hat material="tinfoil">
Constantly, or on request. You connect to the net and some steganographic message in some metadata (say, whitespaces in http headers) tells it to triangulate its position and send it to the requesting party. Such piece of software could be hidden quite deep in network drivers or such.
</hat>
Even if you come up with a clever test that would pierce the illusion, one would have to assume whoever maintains the illusion would simply fix it so that didn't work a second time. Nothing would be repeatable.
Unless they don't. You come up with this test and it works reliably and repeatably. Why assume "whoever maintains the illusion" doesn't want us to find out it's just it? Maybe just opposite, finding it is the ultimate test, apotheosis, final enlightenment?
"Because it's written that way" is a poor excuse for explaining all the puzzles, but in case it is true, 'reverse engineering' the underlying 'machine' and creating a running copy would give us a lot of insight. Or just hacking it and modifying the properties of the universe. Conveniently circumvent rules of spatial geometry and conservation of mass and energy, 'spawn' goods instead of producing them, save&restore, copy&paste, do mostly any tricks that are possible only in software.
The concept is worth exploring just for the huge profits in case it's true, and if it isn't, it still is a useful thought device to have some problems solved, an abstraction that even if false, still may be useful.
or you can make the player such that it won't leak the decrypted data or keys, say, using a custom chip that is common to all manufacturers. And through legislation make leaking the key a bankruptcy sentence on any manufacturer.
A competent group could create such a chip. It's not impossible.
OTOH, I don't believe it will happen.
unless the output device won't play it without putting a tiny mark in the corner, and the camera will not record it if the mark is visible.
There are already printers that refuse to print images of dollars.
Yeah, all can be circumvented.
Actually, it's more like the signing system.
Enable the playback only if the stream is signed by originating party. The consumer appliance has only the public key, the data must be signed by the private key that never leaves the factory.
As long as the DRM and the playback chips are separate, you can intercept the data between them, spoof the DRM 'okay' signal, and so on. If the devices are integrated, good luck getting a microscope and trying to extract the data from the chip's memory cells when it never goes further than 0.05mm away to the decoder part.
Building 'DRM protection + decoder + digital-analog converter' single-chip players is not feasible for any single manufacturer, but if it was a cooperation work of many companies, with government support, it would be possible, feasible and quite likely profitable.
But as I know the life, it will be just another half-assed, easy to crack attempt to get one of existing, faulty schemes formalized.
"if correctly adopted"
That's the tricky part, you know.
EU laws define what local laws should be.
Local laws are used to judge people.
Local laws that are in violation of EU laws (and shouldn't be) are still used to judge people, effectively trumping EU laws.
This isn't entirely true.
Local law trumps EU law whenever it conflicts with it. The conflict is a ShouldntHappen(tm) situation but is surprisingly common.
That is, if you violate any particular local law, which conflicts with EU law, you're fucked. You can apply for the law to be changed to comply with EU laws, and by all means it should be changed then (though the process may face a lot of obstacles - be delayed for a long time, crippled by lobbyists, generally suffer all kind of hurdles that can be thrown its way), but your court decision won't be overturned once the law changes.
In other words, EU law forces local law to be compliant with it, but doesn't override it, and the process of changing the local law to comply is separate from jurisdiction, and often falls short of its appointed goals.
There is a couple of laws in Poland that are in contradiction to EU laws. People are being judged and sentenced following them, despite the fact that it is known these laws are illegal. The legislation to have these laws changed is progressing at snail speed, meantime people spend prison time for violating them.
It relies on a secret, not on obscurity. The algorithm doesn't have (and shouldn't) be secret to be secure. Just like GPG being secure despite being open source.
DRM can be standarized, open specs, maybe even open source implementation. But each participant has a set of secret keys, and they don't have to be shared. As long as there's no inherent weakness to the keys, algorithm and implementation, the result is secure. Leak of one key doesn't break protection on all the rest of them.
Of course the no inherent weakness to the keys, algorithm and implementation part is very tricky. Every program has bugs. Bugs can be fixed, but keeping the system up-to-date is left to the end-user. In case of personal encryption systems, it's in your best interest to have it up-to-date. If there are any bugs in your SSH, you want them patched. But it's strictly against your interests to have security bugs in your DRM appliance patched, so if any is found, it may allow people to exploit it to decrypt the data, and just break the system.
They invest a lot in a new array of telescopes and have not enough computational power to process the new data...
Shouldn't they invest some of the money in a data center to be able to process it? Or at least an advertisement campaign to recruit more volunteers?
Been there. The dept bought a top-notch, highest quality computer to run the best FEM software with huge projects, and after the purchase they found out they don't have enough to purchase the actual software.
The nice, simple and cool alternative is if iPods were mp3-enabled. No DRM. Songs from any source can be used, except of few chosen ones that use DRM ;)
Actually, I wonder how their stock shares fare.
Many companies have been proclaimed dead or dying while their shares kept going up, and they keep going up still. Some portals were proclaimed to be dead because their percentage market share vaned comparing to Google, but they actually gain users as the net grows, and they actually grow and note profits each year.
So how's it for the record industry?
standard != right.
...and to think human genome is just a puny 800MB.
What about this?
You get copyright for 3 years for free, to "test the waters".
For a patent, you need to pay a fee, say, $1000 and you get 3 years of protection. It still counts as if you paid this $1000 for this copyright.
Then you can extend it all, for as long as you wish, by paying twice the previous price for each year you want to extend it.
If it was a failure, you drop it and it enters public domain. If it seems still promising, invest first a little, then a little more, eventually it may take up and return the investment and keep running. If it's a milk cow, 10 years later you're more than willing to pay $32,000 to keep the copyright for another year. If it's a patent that keeps your company running, $131mln to keep the patent through 20th year after purchasing it is not too much.
This way companies wouldn't be able to accumulate thousands of patents portfolios - they would keep 5-6 most important ones and pursue new ideas to get new ones at low price, while dropping the most expensive ones as they stop being financially feasible. People wouldn't stash their patent portfolios for later, they would chase into the market, hurrying before keeping the patent becomes financially unfeasible.
Want to keep your copyright for 40 years? Pay $274,877,906,943,000 and you're free to do so.
Unfortunately, no, by the end, not.
I stayed with Altavista quite long. I tried Google once, soon after it emerged, didn't feel impressed and went back to Altavista. And for the time, It Was Good.
I kept using it for another 2 or 3 years and saw it go down the drain.
First, they fell victim to spammers. People figured out how to position their sites with it, and any somewhat common keyword yielded many pages of commercial junk before you could get to content, and first 10 or so positions for mostly -any- keyword were occupied by spam links.
Then they started adding ads. Sponsored links replacing first search results, some obnoxious popups, really bad junk. Remember these were times before Adblock. It was utter junk.
Then it stopped keeping up with progress. Sites took months to get indexed, and 404s even more to get removed. The results were a total junk.
I gave Google another chance and was hugely impressed. It was still before people figured out most of pagerank tricks and Google was almost totally spam-free. I had my results within first 3-4 links, not after 3-4 pages!
Red Queen was right: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."