I thought that the greatest benefit of the Internet for SARS was the fact that all those people quarantined at home can't do anything but surf the net...
It is interesting (and mildly related) that the president can use his presidential powers to fly onto a aircraft carrier to undercut his political rivals in the presidential election market.
You KNOW that the video of him on that aircraft carrier (complete with carefully placed personnel with colorful shirts) will be used in the upcoming election.
He is basically using public funds to advance his image for the next election.
Not only that, but the typical increase of speed when overclocking a motherboard is around 20%. The speed difference is rarely noticable!
If you had just waited two more weeks, the cost of a faster chip and motherboard would have dropped to the same price that you paid for yours, and you wouldn't need to overclock, add any cooling units (which cost extra money anyway), and worry about the stability of your system.
Though most of my co-workers would gladly rig such a system up, using a GPS to call a cab wont be useful until you have a "Call Cab" button on your cell phone or something equivalent.
Now if only they had a "call pizza" button.... Then you could call a pizza to your car while you are stuck in traffic.
Text based ads as they are presented on Google will not go away. There are major differences between the way Google uses text based ads and the banners found on most other web sites:
- The ads on Google are almost always related to the search that the user is performing. The ads almost augment the search results with semi-relevant information. - Banner ads on most other websites (cough.. slashdot!.. cough) are unrelated to the topic of the web page, and sometimes to the subject matter of the website itself. - As the article stated, the user is already expecting to be moving onward to another web page, so feels free to click on an ad.
These are major differences that have nothing to do with the fact that one is text and another is a banner. If google wanted to display banner or graphical ads instead of text boxes in the same way, the clickthrough rate would probably be similar or better.
I dont care about an "Anime Unleashed" advertisement when I am posting a message about banner ads. If Slashdot tied the topics of the articles to the banners that they present, they might bet better clickthrough rates...
Why don't they just rent the cartridge to you for 30 months for the same price as selling it to you? You can run it dry or never use it at all... it is up to you. Then, after 30 months, you can send it back to HP. Actually, since its cheaper to manufacture a new one, why don't you throw it away?
How is this different? As long as the fact that the cartridge expires after 30 months is clearly stated before the user "purchases" it, I see no difference.
On the other hand, if this fact is stated quietly in the 30 page EULA, then it is what I would consider unethical.
DVD's will be around a while, and when they're gone the replacement will be something more akin to a permanent download into a huge video jukebox appliance than some watch-it-once-and-never-see-it-again model
Agreed!
Consumers like having some control over what they have purchased. If they are going to dish out some cash for something, they do not want to be told what to do with it.
Compare this to Tivo. For about 10 bucks a month, the user gets the equivalent to video-on-demand. But in addition to this, the user can do pretty much what they want with the videos that their Tivo device captures. They can save their videos indefinitely, watch them hundreds of times, or delete them without watching them. There is strong appeal to this level of control that should not be underestimated.
Compare the two different approaches: PPV: - User only has a limited time to view the video - Large infrastructure cost - cost burden on slow moving "head-up-thier-asses" cable company. - General costs are close to video rental prices.
Jukebox/Tivo: - User has complete control over the videos that are recorded. - Low percieved cost to user, but guaranteed monthly income to provider. (12.95/mo) This is probably comparable or better than the average income from your average PPV viewer, and the end user gets MORE product at little cost to the provider. This creates loyalty... (e.g., the rabid Tivo evangelists) - No infrastucture to change. - Works with a variety of media sources. - User has control over the hardware platform (user can switch to Replay/WMC/UTV etc)
As you can see, there are clear advantages to the tivo model from both the consumer and provider ends...
First, most OSS developers do not think they can make money selling their software. They think that software that sells needs to be super stable and perfect, with a perfect UI and a large advertising budget... Though, shareware shows that this does not have to be the case.
They do not realize that they are taking food out of their future mouths.
Think about this.
When someone makes a scientific discovery, usually, thier discovery becomes part of the public domain and everyone can use it without paying royalties. On the other hand, when someone writes closed source software, they must be paid whenever anyone wants to use that software.
Open source software (via the GPL in particular) causes software development to resemble scientific research, as you give your "inventions" to the public domain, allowing others to improve and advance the "science". The progess is then cumulative (or can be), as other programmers add to existing sofware and improve on it.
If I understand the pictures correctly, it's amazing to see how much carbon is converted in the northern hemisphere... in Canada and Russia. It counters the conventional wisdom of the Amazon as being the primary oxygen producing region.
It will make me doubt all those "save the rain forest" tree-huggers.
I wonder if they could do the same thing to show the amount of carbon being produced.
I totally agree. This would probably cause you to recieve more spam as a result. However, it might be a bit more cleaned up and "professionalized".
The only way to stop spam is either re-work SMTP or intellegent spam filters... Its hard to knock spam filters nowadays... They are almost artificial intelligence in their ability to spot a spam e-mail. Its amazing... Try a good one like iHateSpam and see... They remove close to 99% of spam.
I predict the first self-aware system will not be a 2001 HAL-like supercomputer, but a spam filter running on someones desktop.
"What are you doing Dave? How about a lower mortgage rate, Dave?"
Unless SMTP is re-worked to disallow false source addresses, spam is not going to be stopped by a system like this. As long as there is no accountability from the sources of spam, it will continue to be pumped out from overseas. Though projects like PennyBlack and SpamNet are good in concept, the only one that has proven to work is intellegent filtering. Spam filters like Spam Inspector remove around 99% of junk email... You need to have one to make using your e-mail account worth using again...
I couldn't imagine my Yahoo mail without their spam controls... (Unlike Hotmail, which spams you themselves)
E-voting would go far to curing voter apathy, but would almost guarantee problems.
1) This would be the biggest shiniest target for hackers around the world. What a convienent way to subvert the American democracy... From your desk in China! And much cheaper than giving huge donations to the democratic party!
2) This would be the biggest target for hackers in the US. All those crazy Libertarian high-tech industry workers would finally get a Libertarian president. Who cares if the exit polls dont even remotely match the outcome of the election? They don't now. Which brings me to...
3) This would be just as bad as the electronic voting systems that are being released now... The source would be owned by a private company and proprietary. All changes would be controlled by them. Its frightening how little accountability there is in the current system. It would be just as bad online. Worse yet, the founder and former CEO of the largest electronic voting systems vendor is a Republican Senator. Which might explain why exit polls in states where electronic voting systems are used no longer match the actual outcome of the election any longer.
The enhancement of themselves and their children WILL happen. It is much like spam. You can ban it here, and those who want to do it will just go overseas.
Even though it is just a matter of time before persons modify thier children to enhance them, I do not think it will become a problem in the United States. We are too afraid of offending others or stepping on their rights... Just the fact that it is possible will make some edgy and afraid of offending others in fear of a lawsuit.
I imagine it would be much like Muslims and blacks are treated now. Some people don't like them, some people treat them better than they would otherwise. You never hear of a black-on-white crime being called a "hate-crime". Neither do you hear of a Muslim-on-Jew crime being called a "hate-crime". However, it does happen on occasion when the roles are reversed. I think the cause is mainly society's fear of offending and infringing on other's human rights.
Agreed... But the purpose of most regulation is the preservation of competition. Otherwise, the trend of consolidation would continue. This is a driving force intrinsic to capitalism. The economies of scale start the trend and the insuing monopolies continue it.
No, Bush is not to blame for everything wrong with the world, but I will eat my hat if he forces internet providers to provide a minimum quality of service. The argument is: It would be expensive for them to provide this level of service... and the technology is too new for that level of stability and reliability. Granted, a more liberal administration would also probably not place those demands on the industry either, but it will be a cold day in hell if the Bush administration does.
Re:DRM will be *needed* by linux
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 1
On the "time-limited DRM" topic:
Most people, even non-techies, have a bad taste in their mouth when items they purchase have an arbitrary and artificial constraint on them.
For example: - Allowing only one TV or computer to talk with your cable connection. - Allowing only one phone per phone line (this was the case before the breakup of AT&T, wasn't it?) - Ebooks that you are not allowed to share with friends. - Software that you cannot share with your friends, even though it is trivial to copy it. (note the rampant software piracy outside of business sector. Its hard to find someone that runs Windows who does not have tons of copied software) - Propriatary interfaces vs. open ones... even semi-open ones. (Linux wouldn't stand a fighting chance if it werent for those people who are enamored with its "openness". It is probably the only reason that it has progressed as far as it has.) - Blackouts of sporting event broadcasts. - And of course, time limited videos, books, or software.
Some of these things are still offensive, some we have come to accept.
What the vendors of digital information need to find is a constraint that is not as visible, or is less abrasive to the sensibilities of the consumer. Consumers know that a video that stops working 2 days after you buy/rent it is not a technical limitation, but a limitation created by greed^H^H^H^H^H capitalism.
In the case of Blockbuster, why should the digital videos stop working after 2 days? If you could make them impossible to copy (if that is even possible), why not make the video viewable forever? How many times have you purchased a video that you only watched one time? How many times have you rented a movie more than once? The benefit of making the rentals equivalent to a purchase far outweigh the potential loss.
It doesnt matter that Cable is incrementally faster than DSL. (DSL already seems "instant" when I surf the web)
When you use a cable modem, you are stuck with a single provider for your internet access that you cannot leave without losing your internet access. If it wasn't for DSL, there would be no competition for the cable modem market. That means when their service starts to degrade (from the low point it is already at), you can do nothing about it but go without broadband.
They don't treat your internet access like a critical service, like electricity or telephone. If your electricity went out, the governement requires the electric company to get it back on asap. Its that critical. Now that companies like Vonage are providing phone service across broadband, internet access is going to be just as critical... however, under the Bush administration, I doubt there will be any additional demands on industry...
If you dont have business traffic going to your house, then there is no problem.
Don't worry about that sort of stuff... Just start making money first... I know of plenty of home businesses that started with almost no "official" stuff at all... You can take care of the technicalities later.
It doesn't make it ethical to say, "If I don't do it, someone else will." It's almost as bad as "My boss told me to do it." You have to do what's right even if other are doing wrong.
As Einstein once said:
Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.
Then the majority of the world can connect to the NEW better-designed internet on their better-designed Linux boxes using their better-designed Dvorak keyboards.
I suppose the cellular providers are worried that customers will jump ship to competitors if they were able to keep their phone numbers. But, when the customers switch, they switch to OTHER cellular providers.... which means that non-customers are just as able to switch TO thier company.
The only valid concern I can think of is that preventing users from keeping their number is that they keep their revenues consistent. If users switched all the time, they wouldn't be as able to dependably predict the next quarter's revenues. Though, I doubt it would fluctuate that much. It leaves them open to being overtaken by better competitors, but it equally allows them to steal away the other guy's users. (I guess they don't have much self-confidence)
That is like saying "buying" is bad and "selling" is good, when they are just two sides of the same transaction.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that the greatest benefit of the Internet for SARS was the fact that all those people quarantined at home can't do anything but surf the net...
It is interesting (and mildly related) that the president can use his presidential powers to fly onto a aircraft carrier to undercut his political rivals in the presidential election market.
You KNOW that the video of him on that aircraft carrier (complete with carefully placed personnel with colorful shirts) will be used in the upcoming election.
He is basically using public funds to advance his image for the next election.
Actually, the first mainstream stream-of-conciousness novel would probably be Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.
The entire novel is written in present tense, but spans the entire youth of the author.
The obligitory Simpsons reference:
"As long as everyone is videotaping everyone else... justice will be done." -Marge Simpson
Not only that, but the typical increase of speed when overclocking a motherboard is around 20%. The speed difference is rarely noticable!
If you had just waited two more weeks, the cost of a faster chip and motherboard would have dropped to the same price that you paid for yours, and you wouldn't need to overclock, add any cooling units (which cost extra money anyway), and worry about the stability of your system.
Though most of my co-workers would gladly rig such a system up, using a GPS to call a cab wont be useful until you have a "Call Cab" button on your cell phone or something equivalent.
Now if only they had a "call pizza" button.... Then you could call a pizza to your car while you are stuck in traffic.
Text based ads as they are presented on Google will not go away. There are major differences between the way Google uses text based ads and the banners found on most other web sites:
- The ads on Google are almost always related to the search that the user is performing. The ads almost augment the search results with semi-relevant information.
- Banner ads on most other websites (cough.. slashdot!.. cough) are unrelated to the topic of the web page, and sometimes to the subject matter of the website itself.
- As the article stated, the user is already expecting to be moving onward to another web page, so feels free to click on an ad.
These are major differences that have nothing to do with the fact that one is text and another is a banner. If google wanted to display banner or graphical ads instead of text boxes in the same way, the clickthrough rate would probably be similar or better.
I dont care about an "Anime Unleashed" advertisement when I am posting a message about banner ads. If Slashdot tied the topics of the articles to the banners that they present, they might bet better clickthrough rates...
Why don't they just rent the cartridge to you for 30 months for the same price as selling it to you? You can run it dry or never use it at all... it is up to you. Then, after 30 months, you can send it back to HP. Actually, since its cheaper to manufacture a new one, why don't you throw it away?
How is this different? As long as the fact that the cartridge expires after 30 months is clearly stated before the user "purchases" it, I see no difference.
On the other hand, if this fact is stated quietly in the 30 page EULA, then it is what I would consider unethical.
DVD's will be around a while, and when they're gone the replacement will be something more akin to a permanent download into a huge video jukebox appliance than some watch-it-once-and-never-see-it-again model
Agreed!
Consumers like having some control over what they have purchased. If they are going to dish out some cash for something, they do not want to be told what to do with it.
Compare this to Tivo. For about 10 bucks a month, the user gets the equivalent to video-on-demand. But in addition to this, the user can do pretty much what they want with the videos that their Tivo device captures. They can save their videos indefinitely, watch them hundreds of times, or delete them without watching them. There is strong appeal to this level of control that should not be underestimated.
Compare the two different approaches:
PPV:
- User only has a limited time to view the video
- Large infrastructure cost
- cost burden on slow moving "head-up-thier-asses" cable company.
- General costs are close to video rental prices.
Jukebox/Tivo:
- User has complete control over the videos that are recorded.
- Low percieved cost to user, but guaranteed monthly income to provider. (12.95/mo) This is probably comparable or better than the average income from your average PPV viewer, and the end user gets MORE product at little cost to the provider. This creates loyalty... (e.g., the rabid Tivo evangelists)
- No infrastucture to change.
- Works with a variety of media sources.
- User has control over the hardware platform (user can switch to Replay/WMC/UTV etc)
As you can see, there are clear advantages to the tivo model from both the consumer and provider ends...
Monster has removed all resumes with Arab-sounding names and has forward their contact information to der fuhrer^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Mr. Ashcroft.
I think there are a few reasons.
First, most OSS developers do not think they can make money selling their software. They think that software that sells needs to be super stable and perfect, with a perfect UI and a large advertising budget... Though, shareware shows that this does not have to be the case.
They do not realize that they are taking food out of their future mouths.
Think about this.
When someone makes a scientific discovery, usually, thier discovery becomes part of the public domain and everyone can use it without paying royalties. On the other hand, when someone writes closed source software, they must be paid whenever anyone wants to use that software.
Open source software (via the GPL in particular) causes software development to resemble scientific research, as you give your "inventions" to the public domain, allowing others to improve and advance the "science". The progess is then cumulative (or can be), as other programmers add to existing sofware and improve on it.
If I understand the pictures correctly, it's amazing to see how much carbon is converted in the northern hemisphere... in Canada and Russia. It counters the conventional wisdom of the Amazon as being the primary oxygen producing region.
It will make me doubt all those "save the rain forest" tree-huggers.
I wonder if they could do the same thing to show the amount of carbon being produced.
Whoops... I meant iHateSpam.
Which by the way, I found out it is free after rebate for a limited time from Amazon.com (in the full packaging with manual).
I totally agree. This would probably cause you to recieve more spam as a result. However, it might be a bit more cleaned up and "professionalized".
The only way to stop spam is either re-work SMTP or intellegent spam filters... Its hard to knock spam filters nowadays... They are almost artificial intelligence in their ability to spot a spam e-mail. Its amazing... Try a good one like iHateSpam and see... They remove close to 99% of spam.
I predict the first self-aware system will not be a 2001 HAL-like supercomputer, but a spam filter running on someones desktop.
"What are you doing Dave? How about a lower mortgage rate, Dave?"
Unless SMTP is re-worked to disallow false source addresses, spam is not going to be stopped by a system like this. As long as there is no accountability from the sources of spam, it will continue to be pumped out from overseas. Though projects like PennyBlack and SpamNet are good in concept, the only one that has proven to work is intellegent filtering. Spam filters like Spam Inspector remove around 99% of junk email... You need to have one to make using your e-mail account worth using again...
I couldn't imagine my Yahoo mail without their spam controls... (Unlike Hotmail, which spams you themselves)
E-voting would go far to curing voter apathy, but would almost guarantee problems.
1) This would be the biggest shiniest target for hackers around the world. What a convienent way to subvert the American democracy... From your desk in China! And much cheaper than giving huge donations to the democratic party!
2) This would be the biggest target for hackers in the US. All those crazy Libertarian high-tech industry workers would finally get a Libertarian president. Who cares if the exit polls dont even remotely match the outcome of the election? They don't now. Which brings me to...
3) This would be just as bad as the electronic voting systems that are being released now... The source would be owned by a private company and proprietary. All changes would be controlled by them. Its frightening how little accountability there is in the current system. It would be just as bad online. Worse yet, the founder and former CEO of the largest electronic voting systems vendor is a Republican Senator. Which might explain why exit polls in states where electronic voting systems are used no longer match the actual outcome of the election any longer.
http://www.blackboxvoting.com/
The enhancement of themselves and their children WILL happen. It is much like spam. You can ban it here, and those who want to do it will just go overseas.
Even though it is just a matter of time before persons modify thier children to enhance them, I do not think it will become a problem in the United States. We are too afraid of offending others or stepping on their rights... Just the fact that it is possible will make some edgy and afraid of offending others in fear of a lawsuit.
I imagine it would be much like Muslims and blacks are treated now. Some people don't like them, some people treat them better than they would otherwise. You never hear of a black-on-white crime being called a "hate-crime". Neither do you hear of a Muslim-on-Jew crime being called a "hate-crime". However, it does happen on occasion when the roles are reversed. I think the cause is mainly society's fear of offending and infringing on other's human rights.
Agreed... But the purpose of most regulation is the preservation of competition. Otherwise, the trend of consolidation would continue. This is a driving force intrinsic to capitalism. The economies of scale start the trend and the insuing monopolies continue it.
No, Bush is not to blame for everything wrong with the world, but I will eat my hat if he forces internet providers to provide a minimum quality of service. The argument is: It would be expensive for them to provide this level of service... and the technology is too new for that level of stability and reliability. Granted, a more liberal administration would also probably not place those demands on the industry either, but it will be a cold day in hell if the Bush administration does.
On the "time-limited DRM" topic:
Most people, even non-techies, have a bad taste in their mouth when items they purchase have an arbitrary and artificial constraint on them.
For example:
- Allowing only one TV or computer to talk with your cable connection.
- Allowing only one phone per phone line (this was the case before the breakup of AT&T, wasn't it?)
- Ebooks that you are not allowed to share with friends.
- Software that you cannot share with your friends, even though it is trivial to copy it. (note the rampant software piracy outside of business sector. Its hard to find someone that runs Windows who does not have tons of copied software)
- Propriatary interfaces vs. open ones... even semi-open ones. (Linux wouldn't stand a fighting chance if it werent for those people who are enamored with its "openness". It is probably the only reason that it has progressed as far as it has.)
- Blackouts of sporting event broadcasts.
- And of course, time limited videos, books, or software.
Some of these things are still offensive, some we have come to accept.
What the vendors of digital information need to find is a constraint that is not as visible, or is less abrasive to the sensibilities of the consumer. Consumers know that a video that stops working 2 days after you buy/rent it is not a technical limitation, but a limitation created by greed^H^H^H^H^H capitalism.
In the case of Blockbuster, why should the digital videos stop working after 2 days? If you could make them impossible to copy (if that is even possible), why not make the video viewable forever? How many times have you purchased a video that you only watched one time? How many times have you rented a movie more than once? The benefit of making the rentals equivalent to a purchase far outweigh the potential loss.
It doesnt matter that Cable is incrementally faster than DSL. (DSL already seems "instant" when I surf the web)
When you use a cable modem, you are stuck with a single provider for your internet access that you cannot leave without losing your internet access. If it wasn't for DSL, there would be no competition for the cable modem market. That means when their service starts to degrade (from the low point it is already at), you can do nothing about it but go without broadband.
They don't treat your internet access like a critical service, like electricity or telephone. If your electricity went out, the governement requires the electric company to get it back on asap. Its that critical. Now that companies like Vonage are providing phone service across broadband, internet access is going to be just as critical... however, under the Bush administration, I doubt there will be any additional demands on industry...
If you dont have business traffic going to your house, then there is no problem.
Don't worry about that sort of stuff... Just start making money first... I know of plenty of home businesses that started with almost no "official" stuff at all... You can take care of the technicalities later.
It doesn't make it ethical to say, "If I don't do it, someone else will." It's almost as bad as "My boss told me to do it." You have to do what's right even if other are doing wrong.
As Einstein once said:
Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.
Then the majority of the world can connect to the NEW better-designed internet on their better-designed Linux boxes using their better-designed Dvorak keyboards.
Already-implemented trumps better-designed.
I suppose the cellular providers are worried that customers will jump ship to competitors if they were able to keep their phone numbers. But, when the customers switch, they switch to OTHER cellular providers.... which means that non-customers are just as able to switch TO thier company.
The only valid concern I can think of is that preventing users from keeping their number is that they keep their revenues consistent. If users switched all the time, they wouldn't be as able to dependably predict the next quarter's revenues. Though, I doubt it would fluctuate that much. It leaves them open to being overtaken by better competitors, but it equally allows them to steal away the other guy's users. (I guess they don't have much self-confidence)
That is like saying "buying" is bad and "selling" is good, when they are just two sides of the same transaction.
Multiply by 60? Wow. Since an IT worker in India might make $5000, multiplying by 60 would make it $300K.
Either the multiplier is wrong, or (more likely) the cost of living as compared with wages is much higher in the USA.