Just like MSN, AIM, ICQ etc.. they all lock you and your friends into using the software. Skype is no different, it's not interoperable with anything else.
How many times have you reluctantly had to sign up for some proprietary messaging system, then got forced into using a advert laden badly made piece of software, or less than optimal alternative (hear that Microsoft MSN Messanger and Gaim?) when there are tried, tested and IMO superior alternatives.
Me? I use SIP and have a number of hardware & software phones that work with it at home and in the office... for messaging I use IRC and always have done.
If only Sony would adopt homebrew applications like Furikup instead of tying themselfs in with Skype or some other proprietary vendor.
Why use a stripped Windows kernel instead of a stripped Linux kernel - because it's extremely hard to do. You will not be supported by Microsoft, when shit happens there's little you can do about it because you don't have the ability to fix it yourself...
It's not a case of which OS runs their custom software better, it's a case of 1) cost, 2) vendor tie-ins, 3) in-house expertise. Google do have a huge amount of money, but one of the reasons they stay competative is because they have minimal licensing fees (e.g. they don't have to pay $2k per server). With vendor tie-ins - they are their own vendor, and have years of in-house expertise in Linux to the point where they are almost self sufficient.
As for Microsoft's terraserver - they're dealing with static data that can easily be distributed across however many servers you want. This is in no way on the same level as what eBay does, and really just proves how expensive Microsoft is - at the time the method they used was to throw lots of money at mid-frame SMP boxen, doing it the other more scalable way (many replicated index servers with content partitioned across low-end servers) would've cost 10x more in licensing.
I get a pretty good idea of the difference, but until seeing some of the worst moments of FOX (e.g. blatant neo-con suckups) I only really thought the news channels were a bit shallow.
For example (whats on now): * FOX - Caucus countdown - and has been for ages. Dumbing it down quite nicely. * CNN - Fairly well rounded comparison of the different candidates, fairly blatant focus on how evangelical christianity makes some candidates better people (ahaha...) * CNBC - Market trends today - as usual. * BBC - 5 minutes on the US elections, stuff from Kenya and price of oil ($100 a barrel). * Bloomberg - Elections again... * CBS News - Uhh... elections...
Only CNBC and BBC seem to be covering anything other than the elections, weird. But yeah I very much agree with you, most of it seems to be confined to US news channels - but I still consider TV news to be far less reliable or in-depth compared to just getting it yourself from 3 or 4 different sources - unless you want a quick 10 minute summary.
So long as they don't actively hide harmful activities from the public, they can do as much bending over backwards, ass-licking, baby-kissing, mud-slinging, etc, as they like, so long as democracy works. I'm just worried that democracy isn't working that well, for example in the 2003 stop the war protest in London, ~5% of the voting population turned up - in person, outside parlaimant to object to the governments actions regarding Iraq.
In this example, their actions were actively harmful and as we all later found out there was much deception going on.
If the greed of those in power (industry lobbyists via the Bush administration etc.) brings them to commit crime on an international level with no rebuttal, what happens when they start doing things that affect you?
Just like the congestion charging cameras in London, UK don't track you or where you go. Or how some cameras on the motorways don't track you either to judge your average speed and fine you if you go over...
You know one of the main reasons their introducing more cameras in the UK - to get rid of street crime.. by intimidating you (the randomly violent thug) into being really cautious about what you do because you're almost always on CCTV. See what I'm getting at...
Ofcourse there are two sides to the argument - you might feel safer by knowing that if a drug pushing terrorist paedophile were to assault you in the street, atleast there'll be easier to convict them if their ever caught...
My point is: with a current trend of power hungry politions, leveraging whatever they have now to ensure their political ideals are on-top in future; are you sure you're happy with that?
All it takes is a little bit of c*****ship, a touch of fascism and dictatorial policy before it starts sliding - ever seen that movie V for Vendetta?:)
The flat I rent came furnished with appliances, most of them I figured out how to use as the manuals have long since been lost by previous tennants.
However - the fridge has 0 - 5 for temperature control with no indication of what it means.
For example, is that 0C to 5C? 0=off and 5=fullpower.
There are slightly different shapes next to each indicator, but i have no idea what they mean and don't seem to have any indication of that effect turning it to "0" will do.
I haven't read through the whole thing ( http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/2006/Bills/S2000/1979_R2.HTM ), but it seems just like the other monitoring systems which have come up on/. in the past.
Require the person to submit to the installation on the person's computer or device with Internet capability, at the person's expense, one or more hardware or software systems to monitor the Internet use; and It seems like it's just monitoring your computer (if you have that), with penalties imposed if you're found to be using the internet for purposes you shouldn't be - or if you've been banned, from using it at all.
What I don't understand is why these draconian measures are used, limiting peoples rights who are having a hard time as it is - their already on parole, their already being posted around as demons... if they do re-offend they know there's the weight of a tougher sentance (which for those without psychological problems is the major deterrant).
Not only that, but with this law some anal social worker or judge can fuck them over even more. Don't get me wrong, some people do cruel things, others (as many people have pointed out) do something stupid and end up on the sex offenders register... but we already have a system in-place to deal with them, adding (in my opinion) more laws of possibly unconstitutional nature won't help if the system isn't working anyway. It just makes us hate polititions even more.
Sorry, end of rant.. I'm British and it's very scary to see my own country only a few years from the USA in terms of governmental madness.
I think you've missed one of the main points - forcing people to use Firefox is just going back to the bad old ways of "Designed for IE".
"Oh cool, I can do this in Firefox/Mozilla, but it means it doesn't work so well in other browsers - well everybody uses Firefox anyway so why does it matter..."
I use a mix of Opera, Safari, Firefox, IE and at times Links and Dillo. I target the standards instead of specific browsers, then test to make sure it's usable in all the common browsers.
I was lucky that I never had the "coded for IE" mindset - being an early user of Mosiac, Netscape, IE and Opera gave me insight into why being able to use the same page across multiple browsers was an important thing. In the monoculture of Internet Explorer and Windows that most web developers/designers started in it was almost expected to forget the original meaning and use of HTML that we're only starting to get back to today.
. And this provides a neat counterpoint to above -- if Apple had 90% and MS had 10%, Apple still wouldn't be under as much fire, because Webkit actually follows standards. Wasn't it the first to pass ACID2? I think you've hit the nail on the head here, but it's all wrapped up in so much red tape and legal crud that it gets missed.
Opera are certainly pushing for this issue, partly because IE makes their jobs difficult and every web developer I know probably spends 10% of their time specifically hacking stuff together to work with IE 6 and 7. On one hand (Microsoft get their shit together) their hailed as saviours for getting Microsoft to be a responsible company, or if it goes the other way they end up with bigger market share.
Personally I think this could've been made much better on the PR side of things, instead of going straight for the neck they could've written an open letter and a petition to present to Microsoft saying how much of an absolute turd they've been acting over the past years and it's time to change their ways. With enough support - yes, you could eventually get a relatively large boycot... and then if Microsoft still don't do anything - the whole anti-trust & monopoly law thing should follow in full force.
However, most of the people I know that buy music from artists on labels that are members of the RIAA buy it because they are really great music artists and that's the only way they can get the music legally.
The small percentage of other people I know that buy music from artists who's labels are members of the RIAA really don't have a clue and from some perspective I consider them to have bad taste - falling for marketing and hype and making up the "stupid" majority that contribute most to the top-40 hit list.
A lot of our customers don't really have many problems with their providers ADSL, but at the end of the day there's no QOS.
We pretty much solved this by offering our own ADSL and having QOS on their LAN, then QOS enforced at our side on the ADSL. It's pretty reliable so far, but it's only really required because some ISPs offer substandard high-latency bandwidth even on "business" DSL.
That said, where reliability and a guranteed number of channels is needed - we always go for ISDN, E1 or similar.
If you are really that desperate to protect your precious from the Evil consumers then get it on iTunes and be done with it. and then...
I am sick of having to go to random websites and having to use the half-assed players you guys think are acceptable. As far as I'm concerned iTunes is a half-assed player and really isn't of acceptable quality (compared to say.. mplayer or Media Player Classic).
Just release everything in a non-drm format and be done with it; people will pirate it regardless of if it's DRM'd or not. There's absolutely no point in trying to stop a glacier from moving, once the momentum is in place you can only watch what happens.
Personally I think the results will be beautiful and result in much more social value, rather than monetary value.
I've seen this a number of times, shady people who only want to make a quick buck or have entirely unrealistic expectations of what software development costs or how it's done. At the root of this problem are either the shady people trying to make a quick buck, or the shady freelancers trying to meet the requirements on a non-existant budget.
Lets take the average scenario: - Shady person sees a piece of software and thinks they can make some money if they made their own. - Shady person has no programming knowledge, so posts on rentacoder or similar. - Because they have no idea of what software development entails, or in order to make money it must cost next to nothing. - Shady freelancer or outsourcing business wins the bid. - Shady freelancer re-brands an existing piece of software in a day and the job's complete.
Quite a few times this is down to freelancers knowing they can just re-brand an existing open-source project, or even the shady business knowing they can get it cheap if freelancers do that.
Some times they get lucky and their "product" gets more success than the original project, but it's origins are now hidden and will be forever because you can't just come clean 6-12 months down the line when it's making money.
I've long called this pump and dump software, companies or individuals trying to build up a large portfolio of software under a common brand covering the widest market possible in the remote hope that they'll profit from some.
Not quite true regarding Flash Video codecs, while most videos are encoded using MP3 as the audio format, an issue still remains with another codec Macromedia/Adobe have been using in the past for real-time stuff (e.g. webcams, voice chat) where MP3 isn't suitable - the Nelly Moser codec.
The company behind the codec has so far been very reluctant to license it, and most people trying to decode or encode audio to the format have so far either had to pay extortionate license fees (if they manage to license it at all) or come up with a quirky hack using Flash it'self.
So far this has prevented Flash from being able to compete in an entire market - VoIP.
Nobody would in their right mind build a shared-use data center in the middle of nowhere because neither the population or the tranist are there.
I presume that by Microsoft doing this it will house only their servers (so shipping them in bulk for a 5000km trip won't really be a significant cost) and they'll be making their own arrangements for uplinks to Russia, Europe and China; probably by laying their own fiber.
Out of curiosity - how will they persuade sysadmins & rack monkeys to emmigrate to Siberia? I can't imagine the long winters and complete lack of night life would be of any interest, unless their thinking of staffing the whole thing with native Russians?
I was literally just talking with my flatmate that was going on about how there's no non-drm music... there is and I buy it every week and know quite a few people (mostly djs though) that use it as one of the primary sources of music, along with the good old vinyl shops (like Know How in Camden).
Places like DjDownload.com, Beatport.com, Trackitdown.net etc. all offer unencombured 320kbit mp3s, and in some cases FLACs or plain old wavs. You simply cannot play stuff from iTunes or similar on a large soundsystem, you can hear the difference easily and it's not nice. These are niche sites for an audience of maybe a quater of a million or less people, but a lot of them care about sound quality, respect the artists enough not to pirate the music and best of all - the artists get a nice bug chunk unlike iTunes or large-corp record deals.
Dont get me wrong, iTunes is ok, but there have always been alternatives in niche areas and always will be. iTunes is good for finding new music and is gaining in popularity by individual artists and much smaller labels, but the majority of my stuff comes from these alternative retailers.
iTunes is the new boy here trying to be the alternative to the big highstreet retailer...
Can't we just find something that divides nicely between the time it takes light to travel between the sun & earth and the amount of time it takes for the earth to circle the sun once?
I really liked the Swatch "Internet Time", but I had doubts about its mathmatical soundness... however, wakingup at 250, having lunch at 500 and going to sleep at 750 would be nice:)
If it translates to 13.5% or more performance in the same test then their onto a winner with the overclocking audience (that love numbers and driving a hard bargain).
Allows you to fairly use content in a situation which merits it, for example: * Educational material * Parodies * Licensed use * Short clips * Lots of others
I'm not in the USA, but say for example I own a hard copy of a movie or TV show on DVD, am I "allowed" to stream it from home during my lunch break or after work when this system is possibly live?
Remember, if they are doing filtering it means they are no longer a common carrier, what is the legality of this in regard to third party content; if I were to transfer illegal content over their connection will they be liable for this because they haven't filtered it out? Or will the law apply to them when it suites em.
There are so many holes in this I couldn't possibly see this implemented, not to mention the resources that'd be required on their end to keep up with the constant change in codecs/compression methods and to be able to decode it in realtime.
Yeah, it's just speculation at the moment, but in a really dark and unfunny way I can see PHBs combined with RIAA/MPAA mafia seriously pushing something similar based on their draconian previous tendancies.
Slashdot Mirror
Just like MSN, AIM, ICQ etc.. they all lock you and your friends into using the software. Skype is no different, it's not interoperable with anything else.
How many times have you reluctantly had to sign up for some proprietary messaging system, then got forced into using a advert laden badly made piece of software, or less than optimal alternative (hear that Microsoft MSN Messanger and Gaim?) when there are tried, tested and IMO superior alternatives.
Me? I use SIP and have a number of hardware & software phones that work with it at home and in the office... for messaging I use IRC and always have done.
If only Sony would adopt homebrew applications like Furikup instead of tying themselfs in with Skype or some other proprietary vendor.
Why use a stripped Windows kernel instead of a stripped Linux kernel - because it's extremely hard to do. You will not be supported by Microsoft, when shit happens there's little you can do about it because you don't have the ability to fix it yourself...
It's not a case of which OS runs their custom software better, it's a case of 1) cost, 2) vendor tie-ins, 3) in-house expertise. Google do have a huge amount of money, but one of the reasons they stay competative is because they have minimal licensing fees (e.g. they don't have to pay $2k per server). With vendor tie-ins - they are their own vendor, and have years of in-house expertise in Linux to the point where they are almost self sufficient.
Oh, and regarding eBay: http://www.addsimplicity.com/downloads/eBaySDForum2006-11-29.pdf Their using IIS and ISAPI for front-end web servers only, everything behind that is Java and Oracle running on Solaris.
As for Microsoft's terraserver - they're dealing with static data that can easily be distributed across however many servers you want. This is in no way on the same level as what eBay does, and really just proves how expensive Microsoft is - at the time the method they used was to throw lots of money at mid-frame SMP boxen, doing it the other more scalable way (many replicated index servers with content partitioned across low-end servers) would've cost 10x more in licensing.
I get a pretty good idea of the difference, but until seeing some of the worst moments of FOX (e.g. blatant neo-con suckups) I only really thought the news channels were a bit shallow.
For example (whats on now):
* FOX - Caucus countdown - and has been for ages. Dumbing it down quite nicely.
* CNN - Fairly well rounded comparison of the different candidates, fairly blatant focus on how evangelical christianity makes some candidates better people (ahaha...)
* CNBC - Market trends today - as usual.
* BBC - 5 minutes on the US elections, stuff from Kenya and price of oil ($100 a barrel).
* Bloomberg - Elections again...
* CBS News - Uhh... elections...
Only CNBC and BBC seem to be covering anything other than the elections, weird. But yeah I very much agree with you, most of it seems to be confined to US news channels - but I still consider TV news to be far less reliable or in-depth compared to just getting it yourself from 3 or 4 different sources - unless you want a quick 10 minute summary.
In this example, their actions were actively harmful and as we all later found out there was much deception going on.
If the greed of those in power (industry lobbyists via the Bush administration etc.) brings them to commit crime on an international level with no rebuttal, what happens when they start doing things that affect you?
Not trying to track me...
:)
Just like the congestion charging cameras in London, UK don't track you or where you go. Or how some cameras on the motorways don't track you either to judge your average speed and fine you if you go over...
You know one of the main reasons their introducing more cameras in the UK - to get rid of street crime.. by intimidating you (the randomly violent thug) into being really cautious about what you do because you're almost always on CCTV. See what I'm getting at...
Ofcourse there are two sides to the argument - you might feel safer by knowing that if a drug pushing terrorist paedophile were to assault you in the street, atleast there'll be easier to convict them if their ever caught...
My point is: with a current trend of power hungry politions, leveraging whatever they have now to ensure their political ideals are on-top in future; are you sure you're happy with that?
All it takes is a little bit of c*****ship, a touch of fascism and dictatorial policy before it starts sliding - ever seen that movie V for Vendetta?
Or would this be a great trial run before deployment in "the homeland". :)
The flat I rent came furnished with appliances, most of them I figured out how to use as the manuals have long since been lost by previous tennants.
However - the fridge has 0 - 5 for temperature control with no indication of what it means.
For example, is that 0C to 5C? 0=off and 5=fullpower.
There are slightly different shapes next to each indicator, but i have no idea what they mean and don't seem to have any indication of that effect turning it to "0" will do.
Water and ice come through the door?
:)
I think that's called a "broken" fridge
What I don't understand is why these draconian measures are used, limiting peoples rights who are having a hard time as it is - their already on parole, their already being posted around as demons... if they do re-offend they know there's the weight of a tougher sentance (which for those without psychological problems is the major deterrant).
Not only that, but with this law some anal social worker or judge can fuck them over even more. Don't get me wrong, some people do cruel things, others (as many people have pointed out) do something stupid and end up on the sex offenders register... but we already have a system in-place to deal with them, adding (in my opinion) more laws of possibly unconstitutional nature won't help if the system isn't working anyway. It just makes us hate polititions even more.
Sorry, end of rant.. I'm British and it's very scary to see my own country only a few years from the USA in terms of governmental madness.
I think you've missed one of the main points - forcing people to use Firefox is just going back to the bad old ways of "Designed for IE".
"Oh cool, I can do this in Firefox/Mozilla, but it means it doesn't work so well in other browsers - well everybody uses Firefox anyway so why does it matter..."
I use a mix of Opera, Safari, Firefox, IE and at times Links and Dillo. I target the standards instead of specific browsers, then test to make sure it's usable in all the common browsers.
I was lucky that I never had the "coded for IE" mindset - being an early user of Mosiac, Netscape, IE and Opera gave me insight into why being able to use the same page across multiple browsers was an important thing. In the monoculture of Internet Explorer and Windows that most web developers/designers started in it was almost expected to forget the original meaning and use of HTML that we're only starting to get back to today.
Opera are certainly pushing for this issue, partly because IE makes their jobs difficult and every web developer I know probably spends 10% of their time specifically hacking stuff together to work with IE 6 and 7. On one hand (Microsoft get their shit together) their hailed as saviours for getting Microsoft to be a responsible company, or if it goes the other way they end up with bigger market share.
Personally I think this could've been made much better on the PR side of things, instead of going straight for the neck they could've written an open letter and a petition to present to Microsoft saying how much of an absolute turd they've been acting over the past years and it's time to change their ways. With enough support - yes, you could eventually get a relatively large boycot... and then if Microsoft still don't do anything - the whole anti-trust & monopoly law thing should follow in full force.
I do this and most of my friends do also...
However, most of the people I know that buy music from artists on labels that are members of the RIAA buy it because they are really great music artists and that's the only way they can get the music legally.
The small percentage of other people I know that buy music from artists who's labels are members of the RIAA really don't have a clue and from some perspective I consider them to have bad taste - falling for marketing and hype and making up the "stupid" majority that contribute most to the top-40 hit list.
Nuff said...
(Disclaimer: I work at a VoIP company)
A lot of our customers don't really have many problems with their providers ADSL, but at the end of the day there's no QOS.
We pretty much solved this by offering our own ADSL and having QOS on their LAN, then QOS enforced at our side on the ADSL. It's pretty reliable so far, but it's only really required because some ISPs offer substandard high-latency bandwidth even on "business" DSL.
That said, where reliability and a guranteed number of channels is needed - we always go for ISDN, E1 or similar.
Just release everything in a non-drm format and be done with it; people will pirate it regardless of if it's DRM'd or not. There's absolutely no point in trying to stop a glacier from moving, once the momentum is in place you can only watch what happens.
Personally I think the results will be beautiful and result in much more social value, rather than monetary value.
Uh, I did grow up on a farm, and I and everybody I know always called them cattle grids in the UK...
I've seen this a number of times, shady people who only want to make a quick buck or have entirely unrealistic expectations of what software development costs or how it's done. At the root of this problem are either the shady people trying to make a quick buck, or the shady freelancers trying to meet the requirements on a non-existant budget.
Lets take the average scenario:
- Shady person sees a piece of software and thinks they can make some money if they made their own.
- Shady person has no programming knowledge, so posts on rentacoder or similar.
- Because they have no idea of what software development entails, or in order to make money it must cost next to nothing.
- Shady freelancer or outsourcing business wins the bid.
- Shady freelancer re-brands an existing piece of software in a day and the job's complete.
Quite a few times this is down to freelancers knowing they can just re-brand an existing open-source project, or even the shady business knowing they can get it cheap if freelancers do that.
Some times they get lucky and their "product" gets more success than the original project, but it's origins are now hidden and will be forever because you can't just come clean 6-12 months down the line when it's making money.
I've long called this pump and dump software, companies or individuals trying to build up a large portfolio of software under a common brand covering the widest market possible in the remote hope that they'll profit from some.
FYI, those "pipe-grated things" are called cattle grids.
Not quite true regarding Flash Video codecs, while most videos are encoded using MP3 as the audio format, an issue still remains with another codec Macromedia/Adobe have been using in the past for real-time stuff (e.g. webcams, voice chat) where MP3 isn't suitable - the Nelly Moser codec.
The company behind the codec has so far been very reluctant to license it, and most people trying to decode or encode audio to the format have so far either had to pay extortionate license fees (if they manage to license it at all) or come up with a quirky hack using Flash it'self.
So far this has prevented Flash from being able to compete in an entire market - VoIP.
Nobody would in their right mind build a shared-use data center in the middle of nowhere because neither the population or the tranist are there.
I presume that by Microsoft doing this it will house only their servers (so shipping them in bulk for a 5000km trip won't really be a significant cost) and they'll be making their own arrangements for uplinks to Russia, Europe and China; probably by laying their own fiber.
Out of curiosity - how will they persuade sysadmins & rack monkeys to emmigrate to Siberia? I can't imagine the long winters and complete lack of night life would be of any interest, unless their thinking of staffing the whole thing with native Russians?
I was literally just talking with my flatmate that was going on about how there's no non-drm music... there is and I buy it every week and know quite a few people (mostly djs though) that use it as one of the primary sources of music, along with the good old vinyl shops (like Know How in Camden).
Places like DjDownload.com, Beatport.com, Trackitdown.net etc. all offer unencombured 320kbit mp3s, and in some cases FLACs or plain old wavs. You simply cannot play stuff from iTunes or similar on a large soundsystem, you can hear the difference easily and it's not nice. These are niche sites for an audience of maybe a quater of a million or less people, but a lot of them care about sound quality, respect the artists enough not to pirate the music and best of all - the artists get a nice bug chunk unlike iTunes or large-corp record deals.
Dont get me wrong, iTunes is ok, but there have always been alternatives in niche areas and always will be. iTunes is good for finding new music and is gaining in popularity by individual artists and much smaller labels, but the majority of my stuff comes from these alternative retailers.
iTunes is the new boy here trying to be the alternative to the big highstreet retailer...
Can't we just find something that divides nicely between the time it takes light to travel between the sun & earth and the amount of time it takes for the earth to circle the sun once?
:)
I really liked the Swatch "Internet Time", but I had doubts about its mathmatical soundness... however, wakingup at 250, having lunch at 500 and going to sleep at 750 would be nice
Conclusive proof that Vista has flopped :) Unless the survey was rigged, but CmdrTaco wouldn't be that naive would he?...
"PAGE 9 of 42"....
Sorry I can't be bothered to click through 42 pages and over 200 adverts. If there were a text mode version I might consider RTFA.
If it translates to 13.5% or more performance in the same test then their onto a winner with the overclocking audience (that love numbers and driving a hard bargain).
Allows you to fairly use content in a situation which merits it, for example:
* Educational material
* Parodies
* Licensed use
* Short clips
* Lots of others
I'm not in the USA, but say for example I own a hard copy of a movie or TV show on DVD, am I "allowed" to stream it from home during my lunch break or after work when this system is possibly live?
Remember, if they are doing filtering it means they are no longer a common carrier, what is the legality of this in regard to third party content; if I were to transfer illegal content over their connection will they be liable for this because they haven't filtered it out? Or will the law apply to them when it suites em.
There are so many holes in this I couldn't possibly see this implemented, not to mention the resources that'd be required on their end to keep up with the constant change in codecs/compression methods and to be able to decode it in realtime.
Yeah, it's just speculation at the moment, but in a really dark and unfunny way I can see PHBs combined with RIAA/MPAA mafia seriously pushing something similar based on their draconian previous tendancies.