If Google were not available from my ISP for even 24 hours, I would go to a *lot* of trouble to find another ISP.
But what if your ISP offered you Microsoft's new gonzo search engine at full speed? And while it wasn't as good as Google, it was 90% as good?
Remember, that under the best of circumstances, you'd be looking at a couple of days to switch over to a new ISP. If Google slowed to a crawl, would you wait those days until you had a new ISP to do your search on Google? Would your brand loyalty to Google be so complete that you'd do without searching while you waited?
Maybe, maybe not. I think many people would try the alternate search their ISP was pushing. And if they got the results they wanted, the urge to switch might be diminished. They might take a "wait and see" attitude and try a few more searches on Microsoft before committing to switching. And if all those searches got them the results they needed, then it would become a matter of principle to switch, not a matter of utility.
Look at the way our country is today. Look at the people. Give me a ballpark estimate of the percentage of people who fall into one or the other of the following two groups. Group 1: People who get mad about something and do something about it! Group 2: People who get mad about something and merely bitch about it, but never get up the gumption to really do something.
Group 2 is huge and Group 1 is a minority. While you may be in Group 1, you've probably got lots of elbow room at the meetings. And because Group 2 is willing to settle for "almost as good" because it's easier than doing something about it, the market is not as efficient a regulator as some would have us believe.
Long ago, in a humor column on religion, I wrote: "Humanity, by nature, is an ambivalent animal, given to fits of inertia, and we're more than likely to sit on our noncommittal behinds unless there's a bogeyman to chase us out of our chairs." I was talking about how certain religions use the concept of the Devil to scare us toward God, but it applies to a lot of things.
I'm not so sure that the market will work things out due to a few factors:
Consumer ambivalence - If your ISP starts slowing down X, Y, and Z sites, how bad will it have to get before you, as a consumer, go to the trouble of switching ISPs?
Changing E-mail - While a lot of us have free e-mail accounts through Yahoo, Hotmail, or Google, how many people have just the e-mail address they got from their ISP? People who do not have established freemail accounts that they use as their primary address have an incentive to stay where they are, because if they leave, they lose the address everyone knows to contact them at.
Changing ISPs can be a bear just on a technical level - I used to have 6 megabit DSL through speakeasy. When I made some job changes, I decided to downgrade to 3 megabit DSL from Verizon so I could save $700 bucks a year. Problem was that there seemed to be no way for me to cancel the Speakeasy DSL line and have Verizon pick up service on the same day or even the next. Best estimate I could get would be 3 days or more without broadband service as Speakeasy/Covad released the switch and Verizon assumed it. I'd gone with DSL because my house was built without cable running into the room I used as a home office and I didn't want to drill through walls. Finally, I went with 8 megabit cable, coming into another room, then shunted into the office through a Broadband over Power Line (BPL) bridge. With some tweaks in cabling and placement of the bridge units, I was able to get about the same speed I had with the 6 megabit DSL. But it was an adventure in frustration.
Lock-in Contracts - The broadband providers have taken a page from the cell phone companies. They're offering free installation and equipment, but to get that, you have to sign up for a 1 or 2 year contract with early termination penalties. So if you have ISP X and you have 6-8 months left on your contract, how slow will your favorite sites have to get before you're willing to pay the early termination fee?
With all those factors working against switching broadband providers, will the market really work itself out? Things will have to get pretty bad to force the average consumer to vote with their wallets and go to the ISPs that deliver the services they really want. There may be some ripples felt in terms of new entrants to the market, but most of those will be people moving into new homes or new apartments. When it comes to the people in existing residences where broadband is available (excluding people in rural markets who are still waiting for broadband to become available), if they don't have broadband yet, are they really among the technically savvy people who will know enough or care enough to shop wisely?
How is a 19 year old man more capable of sexual assault than a 17 year old football player? If the guy who had sexually assaulted her were actually 17 instead of 19 would she go "oh, my fault" and not sue MySpace?
She and her mom are looking for a scapegoat for her poor judgement and looking to get rich over it.
I feel for her. Sexual assault is bad news and can really mess with a woman's head for years. But there's a difference in my level of sympathy for a woman who takes precautions and gets assaulted anyway vs. a foolish woman who intentionally puts herself in harms way and then tries blame a third party so she doesn't have to take responsibility for her bad judgement.
The GPL is a license, not a surrender of copyright, so if SCO does not accept the GPL, isn't all the GPL'ed code they're using in this distro is being used illegally? Is EFF prepping a lawsuit?
OTOH, why would SCO even do this? Any belief that it will give them some cash flow or some other position that benefits them is irrational.
This must be the hallucination that precedes death.
Washington is literally littered with casinos. There are probably 6-8 roadside and stripmall casinos within 5 miles of my house. These aren't the big Indian casinos either. They're maybe 6 tables, a bar, and a restaurant. If I want to take a 20 minute drive, I can hit the massive Tulalip tribal casino.
Washington has their own lottery, Quinto, MegaMillions, various scratch games, Lucky For Life, and more casinos per capita than I've seen anywhere other than Nevada.
It's just like when they went after people who were buying cigarettes over the Internet to get around the highest tobacco taxes in the country. Washington is trying to protect its revenues from all the gambling that goes on in state. I guess their philosophy is: "If you want to play poker, you can damn well get in your car and play it where Auntie Chris (a.k.a. Governor Gregoire) gets a piece of the action."
I'm sure they'll find room for the car at Ed Begley Junior's house. I believe he already has one and it's probably pretty lonely, plus I'm sure it gets teased by the hybrid.
It's pretty rare when a big corporation sets out to compete with some popular grass-roots movement and actually gets it right.
It will gain *some* traction. They're going to throw enough money behind it to get people checking it out. And of those who do, a small percent might actually use it. But they're not doing it better than their competitors. It's not really innovative. It's just a "me too" (a phrase I'll forever associate with AOL and its users) site.
Calacanis being behind it probably gives it less cred with me than if they'd hired away Cmdr. Taco or one of the Digg or Fark founders to do it. Calacanis is a suit in sheep's clothing, and nothing good comes of suits.
Trusting the big telcos and cable companies to act in the best interests of their customers is like hiring a python as a babysitter. They're going to act in the best interest of the bottom line. If the market is savvy enough to make acting in the interest of customers a competitive factor, then they'll do it. If it's not, then they'll screw their customers to make more money and their customers will just bitch and moan, but won't leave.
A very real fear is that a telco says "this pipe is reserved for general internet traffic" and never increases the size of that pipe. As time goes on, they continue to expand capacity, but all new capacity is reserved for the pay-for-play lanes. The original pipe stays its original size for years, getting more and more congested until any company that wants to reach this telco's customers with any kind of speed or surety needs to pay the telco for access to the pay-for-play lanes. That's an unregulated net where filtering and prioritizing has gone awry.
On an overregulated network, where absolute neutrality is enforced, you have the doomsday scenario where World Cup streaming takes down the Internet.
A middleground I think works is that you enforce a ratio of neutral pipe width to free prioritized pipe width (for ensuring that certain services can maintain a certain minimum level of quality) to pay-for-play prioritized pipe width (where a QOS is guaranteed to anyone willing to pay the premium). As capacity grows, all of those pipes grow at a proportional rate. So if BellSouth/AT&T lays new fiber that triples bandwidth across their backbone, the neutral pipe width triples, the free prioritized pipe width triples, and the pay-for-play pipe width triples.
It's figuring out what's a fair ratio and a workable way of monitoring it that's the trick.
Forget the arguments over the relative merits of the two languages. I'm just wondering what benefit there is in combining them this way. The author explains HOW you can do it, but not WHY you'd want to or what makes it better than just doing PHP for server-side processing and JavaScript for client-side processing.
HTML with JavaScript: 59 lines
HTML with JavaScript and PHP: 67 lines
Functional difference: Indistinguishable
Maybe these are just proof of concept examples and if you're doing a big long page with lots of DHTML in it, there's a benefit somewhere, but I'm not seeing it. Please, someone, enlighten me why this is functionally relevant instead of just a semi-interesting thought exercise.
I don't know what research the author of TFA has done on bootleg DVDs, but I've seen a few a friend brought back from Thailand.
The ones that hit the street before even the US release of the DVD are either from a video camera in the theater or from copying a screener. Often you can see the screener warnings while watching the movie.
Additionally, to serve an Asian market, many have had additional Asian subtitles added and then were recompressed, causing quality to diminish.
Bit-by-bit copies are fine and good in theory, but that's for discs already in release, serving the languages for which the discs already have subtitles or alternative soundtracks. But by then, there's already been a brisk trade in bootlegs those films.
Yes, the analog hole is inefficient and not the best way to copy something. It's merely an example of how a determined pirate can still get around most DRM. It's like protecting graphics on the web. You can disable right clicking, do odd things with MIME types, etc. But in the end, all someone needs to do is capture the screen and crop out the image.
Long and short, DRM and copy protection stops casual copiers. But dedicated copiers, if left with no other alternative, still have the analog hole as a last resort. And once one dedicated copier puts something on the file sharing nets...
Has anyone done a comparison or testing of a "ground-up" secured Linux like Trustix with a linux hardener like Bastille? It would be interesting to see what the advantages/disadvantages of each are.
Funniest bit is where the city manager says: "I have no fear of the media, in fact I welcome this publicity."
After reading through the exchange on the CentOS site, I think he's going to regret making that statement. Normally, a dunderhead bureaucrat like this would try to sue or claim these e-mails shouldn't have been made public, but with this little statement on file...
I'd call the guy a "dumbass", but he's not necessarily stupid, just ignorant and bullheaded. Of course, ignorant and bullheaded do a very good impersonation of stupid when combined.
With Microsoft's fame for vaporware, especially when it's come to new releases of Windows, I'd think they'd promote whomever was responsible for Vista missing its ship dates. I mean, the only people shocked by the announcement that Vista would miss its ship date were the vendors who had to plan around the dates as if Microsoft actually meant them.
An interesting part of the article is that HP said that if Microsoft doesn't have Vista locked down by August, it will hurt their holiday sales (because they sell so much through retail channels). IIRC, HP has been a big supporter of Linux on the server side of their business. Maybe, after being f'ed over by Microsoft for the umpteenth time, they'll get more serious about consumer-focused Linux.
I'm running XP now, but if I can help it, I will never use Vista. The next time I upgrade hardware, I'm either going 100% Linux with a virtualized XP for the applications I just can't leave behind, or I'm switching to Mac on Intel with an XP dual boot for the applications I just can't leave behind.
The key quote here, IMO, is: "Multiple core systems are a boon for anyone who runs multiple processes simultaneously and/or have a lot of services, background processes and other apps running at once."
All the anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-exploit, DRM, IM clients, mail clients, multimedia "helper" apps, browser "helper" apps, little system tray goodies, etc., etc., and so on, it can start to add up. A lot of home and small business users are running a lot more background and simultaneous stuff than they may realize.
That's not to say these noticeably slow down a 3.2GHz single-core machine with a gig of RAM, but the amount of stuff running in the backgrownd is growing exponentially. Dual core may not be of much benefit to business users now, but how long will that last?
Back in the 70s, my dad bought this off-brand game console from Fedco (a pre-cursor of Costco). Oh, it was terrible. I think it played pong and brickout, but the only one I remember for sure (and the only one he played) was blackjack.
My friends had Atari, and I had junk. It was so embarrassing when my friends would be over and my dad would ask us if we wanted to play video games. He was so proud of this cheap, no-brand, POS.
I don't care how prehistoric some of the old games seem in comparison to the flashy new stuff. Back in the '70s, I would have killed for those prehistoric games.
I wonder if this will mean a reconciliation between the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD formats or just that the joint venture will end up building multi-format players. I'm probably oversimplifying things, but it seems that multiformat has been the way the industry has gone in recent years... look at all the 7-in-1 card readers, DVD burners that support both DVD-R and DVD+R, etc. Would have been nice if Beta/VHS multiformat VCRs had become the standard way back when.
I said a major network. Now, when Stargate came out, it was on Showtime, which is owned by Viacom, which eventually bought CBS. It later moved over to Sci-Fi, which is owned by Universal Studios, which was eventually bought by NBC. But it doesn't air on CBS or NBC and neither was in on the deals to bring it to their related cable subsidiaries.
Waiting for Duke Nukem Forever to come out is like....
A kid waiting for his deadbeat dad to remember his birthday.
A kid waiting for his type-A dad to attend one of his little league games.
Waiting for all the non-rich "Republicans" to realize Republican politicians just sweet talked them and told them lies about being good Christians so they could fuck them.
Waiting for a major network to put on a *good* sci-fi show that doesn't get cancelled within a couple of seasons if it lasts that long.
My comments below should be taken in the context that I have not played either the 1998 original SiN or the upcoming release.
I think the real question here is how long it takes to play through an episode and if an every-6-months release schedule is going to be responsive enough.
If I can play through an episode in a week and then have to wait 25 weeks for the next episode...
Given, the marketing materials on the site state that the game is very replayable because it doesn't follow a set path, allowing for more variation in replays. But still, how much variation can you get to make the 25 week wait more bearable?
I think this is why MMORPGs do so well, because the constant interaction with other players helps fill in the gaps. If it's mostly interacting with NPCs or head-to-head frag wars, it can get old.
The 1998 version is based on Quake II. IIRC, the Id gaming engines allowed for user-created missions/levels. If this new version of SiN allows for player-created extensions/expansions, that might help bridge the gap between official episode releases. Still, I think that if they're going to sell it on an episodic basis, a quarterly release schedule (at minimum) is needed to keep people hooked.
Not sure I'm understanding this one. They're going to pay the legal fees and fines for one person and they've "joined the fight"? I doubt the RIAA will have any problem taking their money. And unless they're going to do this for every American the RIAA sues, I don't see it making a dent in the effect the RIAA's terrorist tactics have.
Paying the legal expenses and fines of one Texas teen isn't joining the fight. It's a publicity stunt. If they want to join the fight, then they should use their clout and cash to take a more substantive swipe at the RIAA than just a tiny, ineffective gesture.
Slashdot Mirror
Which religions use the Devil to scare people to God?
The ones that posit that the Devil is bad, mmmkay, and is out to get your soul if you stray from the path of righteousness.
- G
If Google were not available from my ISP for even 24 hours, I would go to a *lot* of trouble to find another ISP.
But what if your ISP offered you Microsoft's new gonzo search engine at full speed? And while it wasn't as good as Google, it was 90% as good?
Remember, that under the best of circumstances, you'd be looking at a couple of days to switch over to a new ISP. If Google slowed to a crawl, would you wait those days until you had a new ISP to do your search on Google? Would your brand loyalty to Google be so complete that you'd do without searching while you waited?
Maybe, maybe not. I think many people would try the alternate search their ISP was pushing. And if they got the results they wanted, the urge to switch might be diminished. They might take a "wait and see" attitude and try a few more searches on Microsoft before committing to switching. And if all those searches got them the results they needed, then it would become a matter of principle to switch, not a matter of utility.
Look at the way our country is today. Look at the people. Give me a ballpark estimate of the percentage of people who fall into one or the other of the following two groups. Group 1: People who get mad about something and do something about it! Group 2: People who get mad about something and merely bitch about it, but never get up the gumption to really do something.
Group 2 is huge and Group 1 is a minority. While you may be in Group 1, you've probably got lots of elbow room at the meetings. And because Group 2 is willing to settle for "almost as good" because it's easier than doing something about it, the market is not as efficient a regulator as some would have us believe.
- G
Long ago, in a humor column on religion, I wrote: "Humanity, by nature, is an ambivalent animal, given to fits of inertia, and we're more than likely to sit on our noncommittal behinds unless there's a bogeyman to chase us out of our chairs." I was talking about how certain religions use the concept of the Devil to scare us toward God, but it applies to a lot of things.
I'm not so sure that the market will work things out due to a few factors:
With all those factors working against switching broadband providers, will the market really work itself out? Things will have to get pretty bad to force the average consumer to vote with their wallets and go to the ISPs that deliver the services they really want. There may be some ripples felt in terms of new entrants to the market, but most of those will be people moving into new homes or new apartments. When it comes to the people in existing residences where broadband is available (excluding people in rural markets who are still waiting for broadband to become available), if they don't have broadband yet, are they really among the technically savvy people who will know enough or care enough to shop wisely?
How is a 19 year old man more capable of sexual assault than a 17 year old football player? If the guy who had sexually assaulted her were actually 17 instead of 19 would she go "oh, my fault" and not sue MySpace?
She and her mom are looking for a scapegoat for her poor judgement and looking to get rich over it.
I feel for her. Sexual assault is bad news and can really mess with a woman's head for years. But there's a difference in my level of sympathy for a woman who takes precautions and gets assaulted anyway vs. a foolish woman who intentionally puts herself in harms way and then tries blame a third party so she doesn't have to take responsibility for her bad judgement.
- G
OTOH, why would SCO even do this? Any belief that it will give them some cash flow or some other position that benefits them is irrational.
This must be the hallucination that precedes death.
- G
Washington is literally littered with casinos. There are probably 6-8 roadside and stripmall casinos within 5 miles of my house. These aren't the big Indian casinos either. They're maybe 6 tables, a bar, and a restaurant. If I want to take a 20 minute drive, I can hit the massive Tulalip tribal casino.
Washington has their own lottery, Quinto, MegaMillions, various scratch games, Lucky For Life, and more casinos per capita than I've seen anywhere other than Nevada.
It's just like when they went after people who were buying cigarettes over the Internet to get around the highest tobacco taxes in the country. Washington is trying to protect its revenues from all the gambling that goes on in state. I guess their philosophy is: "If you want to play poker, you can damn well get in your car and play it where Auntie Chris (a.k.a. Governor Gregoire) gets a piece of the action."
- G
I'm sure they'll find room for the car at Ed Begley Junior's house. I believe he already has one and it's probably pretty lonely, plus I'm sure it gets teased by the hybrid.
- G
It will gain *some* traction. They're going to throw enough money behind it to get people checking it out. And of those who do, a small percent might actually use it. But they're not doing it better than their competitors. It's not really innovative. It's just a "me too" (a phrase I'll forever associate with AOL and its users) site.
Calacanis being behind it probably gives it less cred with me than if they'd hired away Cmdr. Taco or one of the Digg or Fark founders to do it. Calacanis is a suit in sheep's clothing, and nothing good comes of suits.
- G
Trusting the big telcos and cable companies to act in the best interests of their customers is like hiring a python as a babysitter. They're going to act in the best interest of the bottom line. If the market is savvy enough to make acting in the interest of customers a competitive factor, then they'll do it. If it's not, then they'll screw their customers to make more money and their customers will just bitch and moan, but won't leave.
A very real fear is that a telco says "this pipe is reserved for general internet traffic" and never increases the size of that pipe. As time goes on, they continue to expand capacity, but all new capacity is reserved for the pay-for-play lanes. The original pipe stays its original size for years, getting more and more congested until any company that wants to reach this telco's customers with any kind of speed or surety needs to pay the telco for access to the pay-for-play lanes. That's an unregulated net where filtering and prioritizing has gone awry.
On an overregulated network, where absolute neutrality is enforced, you have the doomsday scenario where World Cup streaming takes down the Internet.
A middleground I think works is that you enforce a ratio of neutral pipe width to free prioritized pipe width (for ensuring that certain services can maintain a certain minimum level of quality) to pay-for-play prioritized pipe width (where a QOS is guaranteed to anyone willing to pay the premium). As capacity grows, all of those pipes grow at a proportional rate. So if BellSouth/AT&T lays new fiber that triples bandwidth across their backbone, the neutral pipe width triples, the free prioritized pipe width triples, and the pay-for-play pipe width triples.
It's figuring out what's a fair ratio and a workable way of monitoring it that's the trick.
RMS speed? What does Stallman have to do with the speed of gases?
<ducks and runs for cover>
- Greg
Forget the arguments over the relative merits of the two languages. I'm just wondering what benefit there is in combining them this way. The author explains HOW you can do it, but not WHY you'd want to or what makes it better than just doing PHP for server-side processing and JavaScript for client-side processing. HTML with JavaScript: 59 lines HTML with JavaScript and PHP: 67 lines Functional difference: Indistinguishable Maybe these are just proof of concept examples and if you're doing a big long page with lots of DHTML in it, there's a benefit somewhere, but I'm not seeing it. Please, someone, enlighten me why this is functionally relevant instead of just a semi-interesting thought exercise.
I don't know what research the author of TFA has done on bootleg DVDs, but I've seen a few a friend brought back from Thailand.
The ones that hit the street before even the US release of the DVD are either from a video camera in the theater or from copying a screener. Often you can see the screener warnings while watching the movie.
Additionally, to serve an Asian market, many have had additional Asian subtitles added and then were recompressed, causing quality to diminish.
Bit-by-bit copies are fine and good in theory, but that's for discs already in release, serving the languages for which the discs already have subtitles or alternative soundtracks. But by then, there's already been a brisk trade in bootlegs those films.
Yes, the analog hole is inefficient and not the best way to copy something. It's merely an example of how a determined pirate can still get around most DRM. It's like protecting graphics on the web. You can disable right clicking, do odd things with MIME types, etc. But in the end, all someone needs to do is capture the screen and crop out the image.
Long and short, DRM and copy protection stops casual copiers. But dedicated copiers, if left with no other alternative, still have the analog hole as a last resort. And once one dedicated copier puts something on the file sharing nets...
- Greg
After reading through the exchange on the CentOS site, I think he's going to regret making that statement. Normally, a dunderhead bureaucrat like this would try to sue or claim these e-mails shouldn't have been made public, but with this little statement on file...
I'd call the guy a "dumbass", but he's not necessarily stupid, just ignorant and bullheaded. Of course, ignorant and bullheaded do a very good impersonation of stupid when combined.
- Greg
An interesting part of the article is that HP said that if Microsoft doesn't have Vista locked down by August, it will hurt their holiday sales (because they sell so much through retail channels). IIRC, HP has been a big supporter of Linux on the server side of their business. Maybe, after being f'ed over by Microsoft for the umpteenth time, they'll get more serious about consumer-focused Linux.
I'm running XP now, but if I can help it, I will never use Vista. The next time I upgrade hardware, I'm either going 100% Linux with a virtualized XP for the applications I just can't leave behind, or I'm switching to Mac on Intel with an XP dual boot for the applications I just can't leave behind.
Ooh, like the personalized internet assistant, Bonzi Buddy? Or maybe it will be as widely loved as Clippy.
All the anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-exploit, DRM, IM clients, mail clients, multimedia "helper" apps, browser "helper" apps, little system tray goodies, etc., etc., and so on, it can start to add up. A lot of home and small business users are running a lot more background and simultaneous stuff than they may realize.
That's not to say these noticeably slow down a 3.2GHz single-core machine with a gig of RAM, but the amount of stuff running in the backgrownd is growing exponentially. Dual core may not be of much benefit to business users now, but how long will that last?
- Greg
My friends had Atari, and I had junk. It was so embarrassing when my friends would be over and my dad would ask us if we wanted to play video games. He was so proud of this cheap, no-brand, POS.
I don't care how prehistoric some of the old games seem in comparison to the flashy new stuff. Back in the '70s, I would have killed for those prehistoric games.
- Greg
*Love* the .sig.
I said a major network. Now, when Stargate came out, it was on Showtime, which is owned by Viacom, which eventually bought CBS. It later moved over to Sci-Fi, which is owned by Universal Studios, which was eventually bought by NBC. But it doesn't air on CBS or NBC and neither was in on the deals to bring it to their related cable subsidiaries.
- Greg
- Greg
I think the real question here is how long it takes to play through an episode and if an every-6-months release schedule is going to be responsive enough.
If I can play through an episode in a week and then have to wait 25 weeks for the next episode...
Given, the marketing materials on the site state that the game is very replayable because it doesn't follow a set path, allowing for more variation in replays. But still, how much variation can you get to make the 25 week wait more bearable?
I think this is why MMORPGs do so well, because the constant interaction with other players helps fill in the gaps. If it's mostly interacting with NPCs or head-to-head frag wars, it can get old.
The 1998 version is based on Quake II. IIRC, the Id gaming engines allowed for user-created missions/levels. If this new version of SiN allows for player-created extensions/expansions, that might help bridge the gap between official episode releases. Still, I think that if they're going to sell it on an episodic basis, a quarterly release schedule (at minimum) is needed to keep people hooked.
- Greg
Paying the legal expenses and fines of one Texas teen isn't joining the fight. It's a publicity stunt. If they want to join the fight, then they should use their clout and cash to take a more substantive swipe at the RIAA than just a tiny, ineffective gesture.
- Greg
Try OpenOffice.org for Mac. Microsoft won't read its native file formats, but it can pretty handily read and export in Microsoft file formats.
- Greg