I don't know much about Windows programming, so I have to ask: how can this not be provided just as easily by making the media player a COM object?
I would assume that this is possible.
You still have the same API issue, of course.
If MS is guaranteeing other app developers that a particular set of services will be available, removing the COM object would break the promise.
Substituting another COM object that failed to meet the interface exactly would break the promise.
If you were an app developer, I'm guessing that you would be unhappy if you had to include code that tested for the identity of the COM object and had to code around a different set of flaws in each.
There are stories that suggest that the original design decisions (back when it was Video for Windows) were driven in part by some of the performance limitations of the Windows code.
At least one story claimed that there were critical sections in Windows that could take long enough to run that audio and video buffers would underrun while the critical section was doing its thing.
It was rumored that those sections had been modified to make periodic callouts to the VfW code to allow buffer updates, something that could only happen if the VfW code were part of the OS.
And, of course, as long as MS is going to preserve the ability to run old binaries, they are stuck with the "code in the OS" model.
really? didn't know an operating system needed a media player to work correctly.
Without defending the MS design decisions, they elected to provide certain audio and video playback capabilities by incorporating WMP code "into the OS."
Some of the design decisions were driven by the choice to give application developers services at the level of "play the audio stream in this file and notify me when it's done."
The OS service makes all the choices about codecs and drivers and moving data in a timely manner.
Given that choice (and some of the known problems with scheduling and such on some Windows variants), it seems inevitable that there would be OS code that looked like a media player.
A simple media player "app" then becomes little more than a frame and a few buttons -- all the hard parts are done by the OS services.
Linux and other UNIX-like OSs made a different set of design decisions.
Low-level audio support tends to live in the OS, video support tends to live in user space (although that might not be true if X didn't live there).
At this point in time, it seems more reasonable to assume that a consumer-oriented OS would have audio and video services available for the app developers, than to assume not.
They actually ran a trial a few miles away from me, but abandoned it because the bandwidth sucked (they could only get ~10mb across it reliably and that had to be shared between all customers...
While many of the other problems inherent with BPL can be addressed, this may be the real show-stopper in urban/suburban areas.
OFDM can probably be tailored to avoid particular pieces of spectrum in specific physical areas where interference is an issue (eg, ham operators).
Several of the vendors of this type of equipment claim that they now meet the FCC emission requirements (involving radiated power levels at distances of 1m, 3m and 9m from the wires) for unlicensed equipment.
OTOH, if the power company has only pushed fiber out to their substations and must share a few Mbits of bandwidth on the power lines over thousands of subscribers, the overall performance will suck, particularly during high-load periods of the day (for cable modems, 7-10 PM local time).
In areas that are so sparse that this is not an issue, the spacing distance between repeaters -- currently about 1km -- becomes an issue.
How many repeaters must be installed to reach each subscriber?
IMO, if the FCC is looking to universal broadband service in the future, they're going to have to take the same tack they've always taken with phone service -- urban/suburban subscribers will pay a tax/fee to subsidize rural users.
Re:Support is demanding and expensive
on
Orwellian Tech Support
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· Score: 2, Interesting
And they were paying 5-figures + just for support, so there was a real incentive and resource base to make quality support happen. Despite that there were times when our customers got less than the best level of support. I'd hate to think what support is like in low margin, high volume businesses.
Exactly.
So it is not surprising that the support service for products that are generally sold by being the least-cost box available is a DISASTER.
I bought a Gateway box for $399.
With one exception, it has worked just fine.
I suspect that if I ever make a call to tech support, Gateway ends up losing money.
The one time I had a problem, their Web site actually had useful information that allowed me to recover gracefully -- much better information than I think I would have gotten from the call center.
you're not required to have a passport, not required to have a driver's license, not required to have a state's alternative ID card, etc....
While it is still feasible to function as an adult in the US without some form of photo ID, it has become quite difficult from a practical perspective to do so.
Without such an ID, you can't:
Operate or rent an automobile,
Travel by plane,
Buy alcohol (unless you have enough gray hair, like me, that no one questions that you're 21),
Access many commercial services (my bank will not lease you a safe-deposit box without photo ID),
Be employed at many companies.
The last one is perhaps most unsettling.
When I started at my last position, I had to provide photo ID as evidence that I was who said I was and that I was a citizen.
A passport did the job nicely, otherwise you needed a drivers license (or state alternative) and a certified birth certificate.
My 17-year-old daughter applied for a near-minimum-wage job which required a drug test and the testing firm required photo ID -- no ID, no test, no job.
Once people become accustomed to showing their "papers" on demand in their private lives, they will probably be more willing to do so in their public lives as well.
I fully expect that "papers" will become a requirement in the US during my lifetime.
The world has become a more dangerous place, and will continue to do so.
For example, we are almost to the point where technology will allow a lunatic with the resources of a small country at their disposal to engineer "designer diseases" and use them as weapons -- much easier and cheaper than building a nuke.
Assume an epidemic killing a million people, and it is more likely that the Supreme Court will change their mind about the balance between "unreasonable searches and seizures" and "provide for the common defense and general welfare".
Why should these scientists be any less prone to political bias than anyone else?
One is also tempted to ask the question, "Does a Nobel prize in one field of specialization qualify one to make informed judgements in other fields?"
Of course, the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no.
History has a sizable number of examples of Nobel and other award winners making asses of themselves in other fields.
What qualifies (with no disrespect intended) a prize-winner for physics working on the behavior of small groups of atoms at temperatures near absolute zero to judge policy on global warming and its consequences on a regional biosphere?
Anything important is always linked back to me in some way.
When I've done academic-style work in the past, some number of the documents end up being available online, along with e-mail contact information.
A small but significant number of e-mails arrive whose only link to me is a common interest in a particular class of problems (and solutions).
Some of these turn out to be important, but a previous linkage could be extremely difficult to establish -- e-mail from a university student in South Africa is one real-life example.
Of course, almost all of these could be identified by a filter with sufficient sophistication and a database of my posted papers.
Hard to work a reference to run-time feature interaction management or real-time network impairment emulation into a Viagra ad:^)
All the day traders I knew during the boom didn't know how to read the financial statements. They just relied on advises of some hot shot, other day traders who knew no better, and their gut feelings.
Almost by definition, day traders are NOT going to be interested in financials.
The basic premise of day trading is that you can make money on short-term trades.
Depending on the strategy, short-term can mean seconds, minutes, or days, but almost never weeks or months.
Such strategies do not care about underlying financials -- they care about short-term trends and patterns in prices.
For example, a theory that if MSFT goes down on Tuesday, it will go up on the following Thursday between 1:00 EST and market close
(hey, I've seen stranger theories in use!).
But many (most?) doctors and hospitals provide free treatment to the poor, and many doctors work part-time without charging at free hospitals (either government hospitals, or institutions like the Voluntary Health Services in Madras) in addition to their private practice.
Still trying to understand enough to have some sort of apples-to-apples comparison.
Would this free care include something like the heart-valve replacement surgery originally mentioned?
Certainly one of the reasons for the rapidly rising costs of health care in the US is the vast array of treatments that have become available.
When my grandparents' knee cartilage wore out, the docs gave them a cane and aspirin.
Should mine wear out one of these days, knee replacement is an option -- if my insurance covers it or I can afford it.
In recent years, about 270,000 knee replacements were done each year in the US.
A friend of mine's aunt ended up having open heart surgery for a valve replacement in Baroda India. She had it at a private surgicenter with excellent Indian U.S. trained physicians with follow-up and post-op ICU care for less than $8000. The equivalent cost in the USA would have been $50k minimum with ICU days costing another $9k-$15k per DAY, with additional costs for the anesthesiologists and for the surgeons.
Considering the local costs of living that are described elsewhere in these comments, is this so out of line?
Those comments indicate that an upper-middle-class lifestyle costs about $12,000 per year over there.
$8,000 is two-thirds of that.
Suppose an upper-middle-class lifestyle in the US requires an income of $90,000 (some would suggest that the cost is higher than that).
Two-thirds of that is $60,000, which is on the same order as what you cite as the expense in the US.
The interesting difference appears to be the difference in the availability of insurance.
Roughly 60% of the US population is covered by some form of health insurance, either private or provided by the government.
What percentage of the Indian population is covered?
Since someone with an income of $90,000 in the US can afford health insurance (barring cases with expense, chronic conditions, who can't buy private insurance at any price), I assume that someone making $12,000 in India can also afford health insurance.
I beleive the EU may have this in mind as part of the reasoning for sticking it to them a little harder this time.
What are the range of punishments that the EU can hand out?
I know that they can impose large fines, I believe as high as 10% of global revenues.
Can they also ban a company from operating in the EU, or otherwise block its products?
Not that I'm sure how they would justify such a ban (certainly, the inability to buy or import a Windows PC would create a great deal of consumer inconvenience initially), but is that an option?
And what meaning would that be? "I'm willing to spend a few thousand dollars on you"? Buy her a nice car, it will have a purpose and cost way more than some piddling little ring. Buy a house, you're going to be making a family theoretically, you'll want a place to live, right?
There are plenty of better ways to show that you're willing to spend money on someone (how exactly does this relate to love again?) that are actually useful, or that could be just as, if not more, romantic (Paris for two for a week?)
Exactly.
By the time you get to where the advertisers are telling you that a $4,000 diamond is appropriate, people ought to be thinking in terms of "our" money, not "his" money or "her" money (with apologies to couples of the same sex).
Side note -- counselors say that if you can't bring yourself to think of it as "our" money, and agree in general on financial priorities, your relationship has an excellent chance of failing.
Somehow, spending $4,000 of "our" money on a diamond, which was going to spend most of its time in a safe-deposit box because you have to be nuts to walk around with that much in easily stolen/fenced goods on your finger, seemed like the wrong thing to do.
Take a romantic trip, save towards a house, pay off some of your school loans, start a college fund for your kids, buy a new television; there have to be a zillion things that are more important to a couple starting out than a $4,000 diamond.
How much corn does it take to generate 335 kilo-joules of energy? How long does it take for that corn to grow? I'm willing to bet that miles of traditional solar panels will still produce more power over the same amount of time. But who wants to give up hundreds of thousands of acres of land for solar power generation?
This is a legitimate possibility.
One advantage of converting corn to ethanol is that it provides relatively-safe, relatively-dense portable energy storage.
Not as dense as gasoline or nuclear, better density than hydrogen or batteries.
At the present time, energy demand in the US can be divided into two broad categories: applications that are essentially fixed in position (houses and other buildings) and applications that are mobile (cars, trucks, trains, planes, ships, etc).
Energy production that works well for one doesn't generally work well for the other.
That is, nuclear is fine for generating electricity to put on a grid to distribute to fixed locations;
gasoline is fine for mobile applications;
nuclear-powered cars and gasoline-fired power plants are both kind of silly.
What would be terrific is an efficient way to convert electrical power into a stored form that is safe, dense, small, and efficient in conversion in both directions.
Heinlein worked such a device into one of his novels.
Not only was it used in mobile applications like cars, but it was also used in stationary apps.
It became economical for some locations (say the Sahara) where they could harvest large amounts of solar power (to your point, where there are hundreds of thousands of acres of otherwise worthless land people would cheerfully give up for solar power production) to charge up the devices and then ship them around the world.
Sixty years after its invention, the corporation that controlled the technology essentially owned the world.
Do not, under any circumstances, modify this section. There is no documentation available for this section, and the individual who wrote it is no longer working here.
MS isn't the first place where this has happened.
For many years,
Bell Labs would not modify the source code for "troff".
The original author had died, and the code was so twisted that no one was willing to try making changes for fear of introducing bugs worse than the ones they were trying to fix.
I believe that eventually there was a completely new implementation.
In this case the smaller company Comcast is willing to offer shares of Comcast stock in exchange for Disney stock.
In this case Comcast is actually the larger company.
As of today's close, Disney's market cap is about $56B and Comcast's is $70B.
Comcast's share price took a nasty hit today (typical for a big company offering to make a large purchase like this) -- yesterday they were worth around $75B.
(me shows joe his new sharp zaurus and other Linux-based devices)
On which you can't play any mainstream movies or music.
The media giants are learning.
From CDs they learned,
don't distribute digital content in the clear.
From DVDs they learned,
encryption based on trade secrets can and will be reverse engineered.
WMA offers the "advantage" that some aspects of it are covered by patents, that any player not properly licensed infringes on the patents, and that MS can easily win the infringement cases against the developers in court.
Financially ruin a couple of hackers for life (personal bankruptcy won't get you any relief from that $10M judgement you owe MS -- you're going to be poor FOREVER) and the hackers will quit.
And for better or worse, Joe Sixpack and his family want to consume mainstream content.
Joe WANTS to see the local sports teams.
His tykes WANT to watch Disney cartoons.
And so on.
If the Linux-based device won't play WMA, Joe's not going to be interested.
And possession of an MPEG version of the video (as an example) will be a trivially easy copyright infringement case to win -- since the only legal copies that are distributed are in WMA...
I used to do technology intelligence work for a large media firm, and predicted this as a likely evolution at least three years ago.
So perhaps it is possible that IBM violated the contract by not keeping any contributed source within the license scope, although did they not meet this condition by keeping the AIX derivative work to themselves? (The materials being the final derivative work that is AIX.) They are free to use their own copyrighted code wherever they please. Of course IANAL, so judge for yourself.
No, they are free to use their own copyrighted code wherever they please, subject to the terms of a contract that they signed prior to writing that code in which they agreed to limitations on those uses.
The contract appears to allow them to use the code in binary form in any of their own products.
But it also says that they can't reveal the methods (eg, source code) without AT&T's (now SCO's) permission.
There's an addendum to the contract that appears to provide them with a way out of that part of the agreement.
One interesting part of the case will be those bits that came from Dynix;
they were developed under a contract like the one IBM signed, but without the addendum;
when IBM bought those bits, they probably can't bring them under the IBM addendum.
IBM really needs to have this case play out all the way, in order to establish once and for all what portions of their work the contract applies to.
SCO's betting a real long shot here, and there's no way IBM can be found liable for $5B in damages to SCO, but it needs to get settled.
Patches for every single Linux distribution by the end of the week.
Won't matter.
The code in question appears to be contributions by IBM -- things like JFS.
There's never been any question but what IBM made those contributions.
Now it's an issue of whether IBM making those contributions violated their old contract with AT&T.
Which is exactly what the claims from SCO got pared down to this week.
Assume for the moment that IBM loses the contract case -- which seems unlikely.
In general, it's damned hard to put "trade secrets" back into the bottle once they're out and as widely distributed as these.
The court would probably award SCO damages, but would also note that the secrets are no longer secret, which would preclude SCO from actually getting damages or license fees from anyone else.
Any real lawyers willing to comment on that?
this is a micro investment and the reward is def.
going to pay off as long as people have to use
computers
Sometimes these things work out, sometimes they don't.
There is a growing body of evidence in the US that cutting sweetheart deals to bring in some corporate facility can be a losing proposition.
This one seems of a managable size, but in cases of large facilities employing thousands, there can be serious ripple effects as the local governments must build new roads, new schools, expand water treatment facilities, etc.
In many cases, the sweetheart deal means the billion-dollar factory is not paying local taxes to help fund those expenses.
Nor is it just the workers at the facility whose taxes pay those bills -- everyone who lived and worked there before gets hit with higher tax rates.
Some people -- locals who get employed at the new facility at higher wages -- are clearly better off.
Some people -- local workers whose wages stay the same but whose tax rates are higher -- are clearly worse off.
Here's an example.
A few years ago, Denver, where I live, lost the bidding war for a new United Airlines maintenance facility to Indianapolis.
The Denver paper recently ran a piece about how the deal worked out for Indianapolis.
Most of the facility got built, and Indianopolis spent a boatload of money on infrastructure to support it.
But United never actually started to use the facility -- so the jobs never materialized, the local property tax base has decreased because United doesn't pay those taxes under the deal terms, and Indianapolis taxpayers are out hundreds of millions of dollars spent on unneeded infrastructure.
At least, it's been pared back down to what it was originally -- a weak contract case.
SCO owns AT&T's contract with IBM that says that IBM can't reveal the methods used in their enhancements to SysV UNIX (AIX) without permission.
IBM says
There's an addendum to the contract that says we can.
At least some of the features you're talking about were developed outside of AIX, and ported from those other sources to Linux.
There are limits to what can be considered to be "derivative works".
To some degree, the original SCO legal theory made a bit of sense.
And SCO had a point in saying that without access to IBM's internal development history, they couldn't prove/disprove their claims:
JFS is in AIX, and
JFS was contributed to Linux, and
SCO didn't give permission, so
there's at least the possibility that the methods used in "derivative works" were inappropriately revealed.
People apparently in the know claim the development history shows JFS originally developed for OS/2, and ported from there to both AIX and Linux independently.
SCO and their attorneys appear to me to have committed two colossal blunders over the course of all this.
They filed all kinds of other insane claims, which they have now had to drop, making them look kind of stupid.
And they let Darl out without a keeper, running his mouth, making his own set of nutty claims in public ("millions of infringing lines").
I suspect that IBM is in no hurry to have the case dropped because they would prefer an outright win on the first or third grounds mentioned above.
That would get them out from under any future threats from this contract.
Re:Why wouldn't math be known across the universe?
on
The Golden Ratio
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· Score: 2, Interesting
No, but quantum behavior does. It is there, but not there, and ove there too... Also the problem is the info comes in quantas. If a truly alien race first dicovered this, and constructed their physics -> math based on this, then the concepts of integers for them is extremely alien.
An interesting idea; under what kinds of conditions might it be possible?
An electron may be both here and there, but a sheep (to pick a particular object) is either here or there.
Technically, I suppose that this sheep in front of me is both here and on the other side of the hill with different probabilities, but the probability for it's being anywhere else is so small that I'm unlikely to observe it in the next several billion years.
Postulate some sort of quantum intelligence; it seems to me that one of two things must be true: (a) it occurs on a scale so small that we are unlikely to encounter one another or (b) it has in some fashion managed to extend quantum effects to a scale more like our own.
Starting from the latter perspective, they would certainly be alien!
Would they exist in some fuzzy quantum state so that they are always both here and there?
Can they choose where to be (just as we can "choose" where electrons are in electron-slit experiments by observing them)?
Integers would certainly be a strange concept for them -- a fuzzy being postulating that an object be in a single place, not infinitely many?
Physics concepts like "speed of light" would also be alien to them, if they could coherently be here at one instant of time (quantum time?) and there at the next instant.
Actually, they are using between 5 - 70 Mhz.... since nothing important(*) resides down there...
The powerline stuff operates at quite low total output power levels.
In the US (can't speak to Canada, although the rules are probably similar in nature), the regulations call for you to be below particular radiated power levels at distances of 1m and 3m from the conductors -- several companies claim that their powerline stuff meets these rules.
Recent versions of the powerline gear uses OFDM as the modulation scheme, which does allow for avoiding particular spectrum regions where there are interference problems -- it's still not perfect, of course, but they can dodge the amateur radio bands in areas where people are sensative to even low levels of interference.
I find the claims that they're going to get reliable 150m coverage out of unlicensed 802.11b to be more dubious.
For most people, there's a minimum of one outside wall between the PC and the WAP, and possibly more depending on the location of the medium-voltage power lines.
If they only get 50m coverage, they're going to need a LOT more devices, greatly increasing their costs.
And what happens when the Indians and the Chinese have absorbed so much of our know how through on-hands tech-transfer, that they don't need us anymore? Indian firms are already partnering with US drug companies, not as low-cost manufacturers, but as co-developers. Chinese firms are already buying whole US plants, lock, stock, and barrel, AND the company name/brands (ie, DustDevil). It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine a future where the US is nothing more than a stock market, and a few banks - and what happens when foreign banks/stock markets adopt US style accounting/regulation, and start undercutting us?
And where, exactly, are the Indian and Chinese firms going to sell these products?
At the present time, the US is the "consumer of last resort" for far too many economies around the world.
The Chinese economy is growing rapidly, but is starting from such a small base, that if the US market for their goods dried up, they would be in serious trouble.
Japan's economy is deflating;
Europe's economy is growing at a very low rate;
if the US weren't buying far beyond its means (look at the rates at which US consumer, corporate and government debt are increasing),
India and China wouldn't have anywhere to sell those goods and services.
If the US economy stops buying DVD players, China shuts down factories.
If the US quits buying service contracts, India shuts down call centers.
If the US quits buying PCs, Taiwan shuts down assembly plants.
In all probability, a major recession in the US will hurt those trading partners that are currently running huge surpluses with the US at least as much and possibly more than it hurts the US itself.
So the problem becomes not so much a one of analog vs. digital, but layout and intuitiveness. I agree a collection of dials is easier to read than a collection of digital readouts, but green/yellow/read bar indicators might be another step up.
Yeah, I think the key for a collection of indicators is to have some scheme where there's a distinct non-random pattern representing "normal" operation.
Humans are remarkably good at learning to recognize visual patterns and small perterbations from a standard pattern.
In the dials case that I remember, any dial that didn't match the parallel horizontal lines that represented normal operation really jumped out.
You could, in fact, glance quickly at the array and then away, tell that something was wrong, but not be able to say which specific dial was off.
The color differences you suggest would probably be even better for that kind of "something is wrong" recognition.
I think handwriting technology (pens, inks, paper) will be another one. I admit that I have never hidden my love of fountain pens, but even the average Bic has a role. Jotting down a small bit of information while on the phone or standing somewhere is just simpler and quicker with pen and paper.
Class notes for almost any class with serious math content.
Subscripts, superscripts, integrals, odd character sets, sketches of curves and graphs.
Large expressions that barely fit across the page of paper, let alone on a PDA screen.
Flipping back two pages to see whether an expression there matches what you've just written.
All typically done at insane speed -- somewhere in the Ph.D. programs there must be a seminar where they teach the secret of how to write that fast on a blackboard.
To a lesser degree, the same argument applies to almost any situation where you're trying to work out a bit of math by hand.
For notes I'm addicted to Parker ballpoints.
For more normal writing, my personal favorite is a high-quality #0 drafting pen with India ink.
Darned hard to find these days.
Pain in the butt to keep clean.
Tends to make a serious mess when you take it on an airplane due to the drop in air pressure (had the same thing happen when I drove over the Continental Divide with one).
But a wonderfully-precise high-contrast smooth-flowing line, no bleeding through the paper, almost waterproof as soon as it dries.
Slashdot Mirror
I would assume that this is possible. You still have the same API issue, of course. If MS is guaranteeing other app developers that a particular set of services will be available, removing the COM object would break the promise. Substituting another COM object that failed to meet the interface exactly would break the promise. If you were an app developer, I'm guessing that you would be unhappy if you had to include code that tested for the identity of the COM object and had to code around a different set of flaws in each.
There are stories that suggest that the original design decisions (back when it was Video for Windows) were driven in part by some of the performance limitations of the Windows code. At least one story claimed that there were critical sections in Windows that could take long enough to run that audio and video buffers would underrun while the critical section was doing its thing. It was rumored that those sections had been modified to make periodic callouts to the VfW code to allow buffer updates, something that could only happen if the VfW code were part of the OS. And, of course, as long as MS is going to preserve the ability to run old binaries, they are stuck with the "code in the OS" model.
Without defending the MS design decisions, they elected to provide certain audio and video playback capabilities by incorporating WMP code "into the OS." Some of the design decisions were driven by the choice to give application developers services at the level of "play the audio stream in this file and notify me when it's done." The OS service makes all the choices about codecs and drivers and moving data in a timely manner. Given that choice (and some of the known problems with scheduling and such on some Windows variants), it seems inevitable that there would be OS code that looked like a media player. A simple media player "app" then becomes little more than a frame and a few buttons -- all the hard parts are done by the OS services.
Linux and other UNIX-like OSs made a different set of design decisions. Low-level audio support tends to live in the OS, video support tends to live in user space (although that might not be true if X didn't live there). At this point in time, it seems more reasonable to assume that a consumer-oriented OS would have audio and video services available for the app developers, than to assume not.
While many of the other problems inherent with BPL can be addressed, this may be the real show-stopper in urban/suburban areas. OFDM can probably be tailored to avoid particular pieces of spectrum in specific physical areas where interference is an issue (eg, ham operators). Several of the vendors of this type of equipment claim that they now meet the FCC emission requirements (involving radiated power levels at distances of 1m, 3m and 9m from the wires) for unlicensed equipment. OTOH, if the power company has only pushed fiber out to their substations and must share a few Mbits of bandwidth on the power lines over thousands of subscribers, the overall performance will suck, particularly during high-load periods of the day (for cable modems, 7-10 PM local time). In areas that are so sparse that this is not an issue, the spacing distance between repeaters -- currently about 1km -- becomes an issue. How many repeaters must be installed to reach each subscriber?
IMO, if the FCC is looking to universal broadband service in the future, they're going to have to take the same tack they've always taken with phone service -- urban/suburban subscribers will pay a tax/fee to subsidize rural users.
Exactly. So it is not surprising that the support service for products that are generally sold by being the least-cost box available is a DISASTER. I bought a Gateway box for $399. With one exception, it has worked just fine. I suspect that if I ever make a call to tech support, Gateway ends up losing money. The one time I had a problem, their Web site actually had useful information that allowed me to recover gracefully -- much better information than I think I would have gotten from the call center.
While it is still feasible to function as an adult in the US without some form of photo ID, it has become quite difficult from a practical perspective to do so. Without such an ID, you can't:
The last one is perhaps most unsettling. When I started at my last position, I had to provide photo ID as evidence that I was who said I was and that I was a citizen. A passport did the job nicely, otherwise you needed a drivers license (or state alternative) and a certified birth certificate. My 17-year-old daughter applied for a near-minimum-wage job which required a drug test and the testing firm required photo ID -- no ID, no test, no job. Once people become accustomed to showing their "papers" on demand in their private lives, they will probably be more willing to do so in their public lives as well.
I fully expect that "papers" will become a requirement in the US during my lifetime. The world has become a more dangerous place, and will continue to do so. For example, we are almost to the point where technology will allow a lunatic with the resources of a small country at their disposal to engineer "designer diseases" and use them as weapons -- much easier and cheaper than building a nuke. Assume an epidemic killing a million people, and it is more likely that the Supreme Court will change their mind about the balance between "unreasonable searches and seizures" and "provide for the common defense and general welfare".
One is also tempted to ask the question, "Does a Nobel prize in one field of specialization qualify one to make informed judgements in other fields?" Of course, the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no. History has a sizable number of examples of Nobel and other award winners making asses of themselves in other fields. What qualifies (with no disrespect intended) a prize-winner for physics working on the behavior of small groups of atoms at temperatures near absolute zero to judge policy on global warming and its consequences on a regional biosphere?
When I've done academic-style work in the past, some number of the documents end up being available online, along with e-mail contact information. A small but significant number of e-mails arrive whose only link to me is a common interest in a particular class of problems (and solutions). Some of these turn out to be important, but a previous linkage could be extremely difficult to establish -- e-mail from a university student in South Africa is one real-life example. Of course, almost all of these could be identified by a filter with sufficient sophistication and a database of my posted papers. Hard to work a reference to run-time feature interaction management or real-time network impairment emulation into a Viagra ad :^)
Almost by definition, day traders are NOT going to be interested in financials. The basic premise of day trading is that you can make money on short-term trades. Depending on the strategy, short-term can mean seconds, minutes, or days, but almost never weeks or months. Such strategies do not care about underlying financials -- they care about short-term trends and patterns in prices. For example, a theory that if MSFT goes down on Tuesday, it will go up on the following Thursday between 1:00 EST and market close (hey, I've seen stranger theories in use!).
Still trying to understand enough to have some sort of apples-to-apples comparison. Would this free care include something like the heart-valve replacement surgery originally mentioned? Certainly one of the reasons for the rapidly rising costs of health care in the US is the vast array of treatments that have become available. When my grandparents' knee cartilage wore out, the docs gave them a cane and aspirin. Should mine wear out one of these days, knee replacement is an option -- if my insurance covers it or I can afford it. In recent years, about 270,000 knee replacements were done each year in the US.
Considering the local costs of living that are described elsewhere in these comments, is this so out of line? Those comments indicate that an upper-middle-class lifestyle costs about $12,000 per year over there. $8,000 is two-thirds of that. Suppose an upper-middle-class lifestyle in the US requires an income of $90,000 (some would suggest that the cost is higher than that). Two-thirds of that is $60,000, which is on the same order as what you cite as the expense in the US. The interesting difference appears to be the difference in the availability of insurance. Roughly 60% of the US population is covered by some form of health insurance, either private or provided by the government. What percentage of the Indian population is covered? Since someone with an income of $90,000 in the US can afford health insurance (barring cases with expense, chronic conditions, who can't buy private insurance at any price), I assume that someone making $12,000 in India can also afford health insurance.
What are the range of punishments that the EU can hand out? I know that they can impose large fines, I believe as high as 10% of global revenues. Can they also ban a company from operating in the EU, or otherwise block its products? Not that I'm sure how they would justify such a ban (certainly, the inability to buy or import a Windows PC would create a great deal of consumer inconvenience initially), but is that an option?
Exactly. By the time you get to where the advertisers are telling you that a $4,000 diamond is appropriate, people ought to be thinking in terms of "our" money, not "his" money or "her" money (with apologies to couples of the same sex). Side note -- counselors say that if you can't bring yourself to think of it as "our" money, and agree in general on financial priorities, your relationship has an excellent chance of failing. Somehow, spending $4,000 of "our" money on a diamond, which was going to spend most of its time in a safe-deposit box because you have to be nuts to walk around with that much in easily stolen/fenced goods on your finger, seemed like the wrong thing to do. Take a romantic trip, save towards a house, pay off some of your school loans, start a college fund for your kids, buy a new television; there have to be a zillion things that are more important to a couple starting out than a $4,000 diamond.
This is a legitimate possibility. One advantage of converting corn to ethanol is that it provides relatively-safe, relatively-dense portable energy storage. Not as dense as gasoline or nuclear, better density than hydrogen or batteries. At the present time, energy demand in the US can be divided into two broad categories: applications that are essentially fixed in position (houses and other buildings) and applications that are mobile (cars, trucks, trains, planes, ships, etc). Energy production that works well for one doesn't generally work well for the other. That is, nuclear is fine for generating electricity to put on a grid to distribute to fixed locations; gasoline is fine for mobile applications; nuclear-powered cars and gasoline-fired power plants are both kind of silly.
What would be terrific is an efficient way to convert electrical power into a stored form that is safe, dense, small, and efficient in conversion in both directions. Heinlein worked such a device into one of his novels. Not only was it used in mobile applications like cars, but it was also used in stationary apps. It became economical for some locations (say the Sahara) where they could harvest large amounts of solar power (to your point, where there are hundreds of thousands of acres of otherwise worthless land people would cheerfully give up for solar power production) to charge up the devices and then ship them around the world. Sixty years after its invention, the corporation that controlled the technology essentially owned the world.
MS isn't the first place where this has happened. For many years, Bell Labs would not modify the source code for "troff". The original author had died, and the code was so twisted that no one was willing to try making changes for fear of introducing bugs worse than the ones they were trying to fix. I believe that eventually there was a completely new implementation.
In this case Comcast is actually the larger company. As of today's close, Disney's market cap is about $56B and Comcast's is $70B. Comcast's share price took a nasty hit today (typical for a big company offering to make a large purchase like this) -- yesterday they were worth around $75B.
On which you can't play any mainstream movies or music. The media giants are learning. From CDs they learned, don't distribute digital content in the clear. From DVDs they learned, encryption based on trade secrets can and will be reverse engineered. WMA offers the "advantage" that some aspects of it are covered by patents, that any player not properly licensed infringes on the patents, and that MS can easily win the infringement cases against the developers in court. Financially ruin a couple of hackers for life (personal bankruptcy won't get you any relief from that $10M judgement you owe MS -- you're going to be poor FOREVER) and the hackers will quit.
And for better or worse, Joe Sixpack and his family want to consume mainstream content. Joe WANTS to see the local sports teams. His tykes WANT to watch Disney cartoons. And so on. If the Linux-based device won't play WMA, Joe's not going to be interested. And possession of an MPEG version of the video (as an example) will be a trivially easy copyright infringement case to win -- since the only legal copies that are distributed are in WMA...
I used to do technology intelligence work for a large media firm, and predicted this as a likely evolution at least three years ago.
No, they are free to use their own copyrighted code wherever they please, subject to the terms of a contract that they signed prior to writing that code in which they agreed to limitations on those uses. The contract appears to allow them to use the code in binary form in any of their own products. But it also says that they can't reveal the methods (eg, source code) without AT&T's (now SCO's) permission. There's an addendum to the contract that appears to provide them with a way out of that part of the agreement. One interesting part of the case will be those bits that came from Dynix; they were developed under a contract like the one IBM signed, but without the addendum; when IBM bought those bits, they probably can't bring them under the IBM addendum.
IBM really needs to have this case play out all the way, in order to establish once and for all what portions of their work the contract applies to. SCO's betting a real long shot here, and there's no way IBM can be found liable for $5B in damages to SCO, but it needs to get settled.
Won't matter. The code in question appears to be contributions by IBM -- things like JFS. There's never been any question but what IBM made those contributions. Now it's an issue of whether IBM making those contributions violated their old contract with AT&T. Which is exactly what the claims from SCO got pared down to this week.
Assume for the moment that IBM loses the contract case -- which seems unlikely. In general, it's damned hard to put "trade secrets" back into the bottle once they're out and as widely distributed as these. The court would probably award SCO damages, but would also note that the secrets are no longer secret, which would preclude SCO from actually getting damages or license fees from anyone else. Any real lawyers willing to comment on that?
Sometimes these things work out, sometimes they don't. There is a growing body of evidence in the US that cutting sweetheart deals to bring in some corporate facility can be a losing proposition. This one seems of a managable size, but in cases of large facilities employing thousands, there can be serious ripple effects as the local governments must build new roads, new schools, expand water treatment facilities, etc. In many cases, the sweetheart deal means the billion-dollar factory is not paying local taxes to help fund those expenses. Nor is it just the workers at the facility whose taxes pay those bills -- everyone who lived and worked there before gets hit with higher tax rates. Some people -- locals who get employed at the new facility at higher wages -- are clearly better off. Some people -- local workers whose wages stay the same but whose tax rates are higher -- are clearly worse off.
Here's an example. A few years ago, Denver, where I live, lost the bidding war for a new United Airlines maintenance facility to Indianapolis. The Denver paper recently ran a piece about how the deal worked out for Indianapolis. Most of the facility got built, and Indianopolis spent a boatload of money on infrastructure to support it. But United never actually started to use the facility -- so the jobs never materialized, the local property tax base has decreased because United doesn't pay those taxes under the deal terms, and Indianapolis taxpayers are out hundreds of millions of dollars spent on unneeded infrastructure.
At least, it's been pared back down to what it was originally -- a weak contract case. SCO owns AT&T's contract with IBM that says that IBM can't reveal the methods used in their enhancements to SysV UNIX (AIX) without permission. IBM says
To some degree, the original SCO legal theory made a bit of sense. And SCO had a point in saying that without access to IBM's internal development history, they couldn't prove/disprove their claims: JFS is in AIX, and JFS was contributed to Linux, and SCO didn't give permission, so there's at least the possibility that the methods used in "derivative works" were inappropriately revealed. People apparently in the know claim the development history shows JFS originally developed for OS/2, and ported from there to both AIX and Linux independently.
SCO and their attorneys appear to me to have committed two colossal blunders over the course of all this. They filed all kinds of other insane claims, which they have now had to drop, making them look kind of stupid. And they let Darl out without a keeper, running his mouth, making his own set of nutty claims in public ("millions of infringing lines").
I suspect that IBM is in no hurry to have the case dropped because they would prefer an outright win on the first or third grounds mentioned above. That would get them out from under any future threats from this contract.
An interesting idea; under what kinds of conditions might it be possible? An electron may be both here and there, but a sheep (to pick a particular object) is either here or there. Technically, I suppose that this sheep in front of me is both here and on the other side of the hill with different probabilities, but the probability for it's being anywhere else is so small that I'm unlikely to observe it in the next several billion years. Postulate some sort of quantum intelligence; it seems to me that one of two things must be true: (a) it occurs on a scale so small that we are unlikely to encounter one another or (b) it has in some fashion managed to extend quantum effects to a scale more like our own. Starting from the latter perspective, they would certainly be alien! Would they exist in some fuzzy quantum state so that they are always both here and there? Can they choose where to be (just as we can "choose" where electrons are in electron-slit experiments by observing them)? Integers would certainly be a strange concept for them -- a fuzzy being postulating that an object be in a single place, not infinitely many? Physics concepts like "speed of light" would also be alien to them, if they could coherently be here at one instant of time (quantum time?) and there at the next instant.
The powerline stuff operates at quite low total output power levels. In the US (can't speak to Canada, although the rules are probably similar in nature), the regulations call for you to be below particular radiated power levels at distances of 1m and 3m from the conductors -- several companies claim that their powerline stuff meets these rules. Recent versions of the powerline gear uses OFDM as the modulation scheme, which does allow for avoiding particular spectrum regions where there are interference problems -- it's still not perfect, of course, but they can dodge the amateur radio bands in areas where people are sensative to even low levels of interference.
I find the claims that they're going to get reliable 150m coverage out of unlicensed 802.11b to be more dubious. For most people, there's a minimum of one outside wall between the PC and the WAP, and possibly more depending on the location of the medium-voltage power lines. If they only get 50m coverage, they're going to need a LOT more devices, greatly increasing their costs.
And where, exactly, are the Indian and Chinese firms going to sell these products? At the present time, the US is the "consumer of last resort" for far too many economies around the world. The Chinese economy is growing rapidly, but is starting from such a small base, that if the US market for their goods dried up, they would be in serious trouble. Japan's economy is deflating; Europe's economy is growing at a very low rate; if the US weren't buying far beyond its means (look at the rates at which US consumer, corporate and government debt are increasing), India and China wouldn't have anywhere to sell those goods and services. If the US economy stops buying DVD players, China shuts down factories. If the US quits buying service contracts, India shuts down call centers. If the US quits buying PCs, Taiwan shuts down assembly plants.
In all probability, a major recession in the US will hurt those trading partners that are currently running huge surpluses with the US at least as much and possibly more than it hurts the US itself.
Yeah, I think the key for a collection of indicators is to have some scheme where there's a distinct non-random pattern representing "normal" operation. Humans are remarkably good at learning to recognize visual patterns and small perterbations from a standard pattern. In the dials case that I remember, any dial that didn't match the parallel horizontal lines that represented normal operation really jumped out. You could, in fact, glance quickly at the array and then away, tell that something was wrong, but not be able to say which specific dial was off. The color differences you suggest would probably be even better for that kind of "something is wrong" recognition.
Class notes for almost any class with serious math content. Subscripts, superscripts, integrals, odd character sets, sketches of curves and graphs. Large expressions that barely fit across the page of paper, let alone on a PDA screen. Flipping back two pages to see whether an expression there matches what you've just written. All typically done at insane speed -- somewhere in the Ph.D. programs there must be a seminar where they teach the secret of how to write that fast on a blackboard. To a lesser degree, the same argument applies to almost any situation where you're trying to work out a bit of math by hand.
For notes I'm addicted to Parker ballpoints. For more normal writing, my personal favorite is a high-quality #0 drafting pen with India ink. Darned hard to find these days. Pain in the butt to keep clean. Tends to make a serious mess when you take it on an airplane due to the drop in air pressure (had the same thing happen when I drove over the Continental Divide with one). But a wonderfully-precise high-contrast smooth-flowing line, no bleeding through the paper, almost waterproof as soon as it dries.