Companies have a much stronger interest in preventing, not encouraging, end-user modification of their products. This is because they want to charge you for extra features and upgrades. Consider one of the most obvious and prevalent examples of computer hardware hacking (which the authors failed to mention although I am sure it was in their minds): CPU overclocking. Intel has no interest in making it easy for you to buy one of their inexpensive CPUs and making it run like one of their premium CPUs with no benefit to them. To the contrary, their entire pricing model is based on charging you extra for those capabilities.
Yes, there is the occasional product that gains geek cult status because the manufacturer encourages end-user hacking (e.g., Lego Mindstorms). But those products are already aimed at that particular segment of the market. Makers of mass-market electronics, on the other hand, have no interest in letting you upgrade their products when they would much rather sell you the upgrade.
I wonder to what extent this is a byproduct of the number of major universities in the Boston area (MIT, Harvard, Boston University, Boston College, Northeastern, Tufts, Brandeis, UMass, etc.). Or to look at it the other way around, I wonder if this would be less likely to occur in a state in which the population is not saturated with tech-savvy college graduates. To make this happen, would you need a critical mass of people in the state population who give a damn -- a "seed" population? If so, how many other places have the right conditions? On the other hand, could it be done by just a small core of motivated people in the right government agency?
Re:Yes, yes, yes, Apple's dying, blah blah blah
on
Why iPod Can't Save Apple
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Indeed, the article cites the "failure of the iPod to drive CPU sales" as evidence of trouble. Have the authors of the article forgotten that Apple made a deliberate decision to make the iPod not dependent on the Apple platform? The ads tout that the iPod is compatible with both the Apple and Windows platforms. So here is a product that is successful in exactly the way that Apple intended: it is penetrating the market for Windows users as well as Apple users. Would the authors of the article be happier if the iPod was instead limited to the Apple niche?
#2) The data was collected using random-digit dialing. Obviously, the people who don't have phones are more likely to not have internet access too. I wouldn't discount this factor.
Good point, but it's already accounted for in the survey. If you look at the definition of the base "population" (i.e., the denominator in the ratio), Nielsen defines it as "Total persons in the U.S. aged 2 and above, living in households equipped with a landline phone." So they are saying, in effect, that three-quarters of telephone-equipped households have online access.
Also remember that the national Do Not Call registry has an exception for telephone surveys, so Nielsen can still call just about anybody to conduct these surveys. The more interesting question is whether the very small subset of people who actually agree to participate are typical of the population as a whole.
In fairness, I see nothing in the article to indicate that Microsoft itself is the source of the term "iPod Killer." Yes, the phrase appears in quotation marks, but only in the reporter's text. It does not appear in the verbatim quotes from the Microsoft representative. The term may be be the reporter's own invention. Microsoft's marketing department is usually more sophisticated than this, since the term obviously sets them up for a fall.
It's a good point, especially regarding the "worst case" examples which make such good online headlines and attract so much online buzz.
But there is a counter-argument. In the field of law (and particularly in specialties like patent law), weekly and monthly newletters have been published by companies like CCH and West for many decades. So even before there was a Slashdot, there were communities of experts keeping abreast of the latest decisions. And even in that long-term context, some of the recent patent decisions are just off the wall.
I'm surprised the patent office is undergoing such a wild goose chase with no data to back the project up.
True, I am not aware of any metrics to support or refute conclusively the proposition that things today are worse than they were prior to the era of software patents. But certainly, since the era of software patents began a few years ago, there is a wealth of anecdotal evidence that is very disturbing to people with long-term experience in the patent field. Many of the worst examples of "obvious" patents being granted are in the area of software patents, and the horror stories are real. So even without conclusive metrics, I remain concerned that something is wrong. The flip side of your assertion is that the absence of hard data certainly does not mean the absence of a problem. It just may mean that the data is not easily quantifiable due to the need to apply judgment and expertise to each example rather than crunching a lot of easily-accessible numbers.
I perceive another flaw in the system that I do not believe is widely recognized: being a patent examiner is essentially an entry-level position. Patent examiners tend to be young law-school graduates with technical undergraduate degrees. Consequently, although they may be smart and have good intentions, they do not have sufficient practical experience in business or industry to dinstinguish what is truly "novel" from what would be "obvious" to an old hand. Being young and inexperienced, to them everything appears to be novel. There is nothing wrong with being a beginner, but the system really needs some kind of oversight by grayer heads who have sufficient familiarity with the field and are less easily impressed. And yes, this means money in the form of higher salaries to attract and keep such people.
That is a good observation and perhaps not bizarre at all. I think it might be even more basic to say that "war stimulates technology" and that, as a consequence, "war stimulates vocabulary." This is because new technologies generate their own terms of art, buzzwords, and jargon. Think of all the words and phrases that were coined to describe each aspect of those technologies that you identified -- launch pad, blast shield, telemetry, sound barrier, ejection seat, etc.
It sounds as if it may be cool, but I wonder if these robotic lips are really as advanced as the article suggests, or if instead some kind of shortcut was taken. I was a music major and I played a brass instrument (french horn). Brass instruments do not have a reed or any other artificial source of vibrations. Instead, the performer's own lips are the source of the vibrations. The performer essentially generates a highly-controlled "raspberry" by constricting the muscles that surround the mouth and buzzing the lips while pressed against the mouthpiece (so the sound of a brass instrument is really just an amplified raspberry, artfully done). This is hard enough to do by itself, but it's made even harder by the fact that brass instruments embody the open harmonic series, which means that the peformer can play many notes without changing the valve settings just by adjusting the tension in the mouth (think of a bugle). One of the things that makes a brass player competent is the ability to hit the correct harmonic without cracking the note (also known as a "clam"). It's very hard to get it right consistently. If this robot is really doing all of this, plus pressing the valves, plus articulating the correct attacks and rhythm, and doing all of it well enough to play "Trumpeter's Holiday," I'm impressed!
Ma Bell's switching system was the largest relay logic machine of all time. If you are interested in that sort of thing, you would probably enjoy reading the Collected Papers of Claude Shannon, most of which were written when he was at Bell Labs. He designed several small relay computers just for fun, including one that calcluated in Roman Numerals (e.g., III * IX = XXVII).
There is an even better approach: make your own comparison. If you are truly interested in this field, you probably already have. There is nothing stopping you from installing the codecs, choosing a source video, making test clips at various compression settings, and comparing the results with your own eyes. Most people are too willing to learn by reading than by doing. Reading is not the source of expertise. Doing is the source of expertise.
The cheap webcam wastes a lot of bandwidth by transmitting a picture when all we really want is a sample of the speed numbers and a weather report.
Yes, but that single webcam image includes the entire traffic pattern and weather condition for all of the three thousand cars that are on that bridge, and it does so in a single image that can be assessed at a glance. As opposed to three thousand individual signals, each of which is sending half a dozen data points from multiple sensors to a satellite, which is in turn sending the signal to the cluster of computers that processes the data and generates the reports, etc. It's similar to the debate regarding whether analog is superior to digital for certain types of data reporting.
Sure, you could put multiple monitoring devices in millions of cars, along with transmitting technology and a network of satellites, backed up by a network of computers to process the data and generate reports, all to show that there is a traffic jam on the Triboro bridge. Or you could point one cheap webcam at the same bridge and get a better, faster, more accurate assessment of the conditions.
Your wrongness is astounding. . . . I'll never read the comments on slashdot again."
The comments on Slashdot are a kind of peer review system. Errors are often quickly pointed out, opinions are rebutted, and we all meander slowly toward better knowledge. That's what I like about it. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
Maybe for the same reason that it's more fun to fly an airplane than to fly MS Flight Simulator, even if you're not flying an F-16. Simulations are nice, but sometimes you just want to get away from your computer and play with tangible things. And just because it's not the historical Enigma doesn't mean it's not cool in its own right.
That is correct. The only thing that has happened so far is a recommendation to Congress. So think it through. If this recommendation even begins to move forward at all, what will be the result? First there will be lobbying of the members of Congress. On one side, there will be a well-funded campaign of professional lobbyists with inside connections, paid for by an industry that has an enormous stake in maintaining the status quo. On the other side will be . . . essentially nothing. There is no substantial advocacy group, no substantial funding, no substantial organization on the other side. Are you going to pull out your checkbook to support this recommendation? Are you going to contact your congressional representatives? Of course not. This is not going to happen, ever.
This sounds similar to the approach taken by Mitsubishi regarding the Lemelson machine vision patents. I believe Mitsubishi argued that the Lemelson foundation had deliberately embarked on a practice of bringing weak patent claims nationwide because it knew that most defendants could not afford protracted litigation, and then would "settle" by requiring each defendant to purchase a license that cost less than the cost of defense. So virtually every defendant was forced to settle even though they believed the patents had no merit (and, ultimately, those patents were invalidated). My recollection is that the RICO claim did not work, but I am sure that counsel in the RIAA case has review the arguments pretty carefully.
IBM and Hitachi are two of the few manufacturers that still offer 3-year warranties on IDE hard drives. They are also two of the few mainframe manufacturers. I had thought that there was a correlation between these two facts -- perhaps that mainframe manufacturers regard storage as something more sacred or mission-critical than your average hard drive manufacturer. I am disappointed that IBM would knowingly ship drives with a too-high rate of failure. This is not consistent with their mainframe heritage.
"Technology" does not necessarily mean "digital"
on
Digital Oscars Awarded
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Filmmaking is technological by nature. Many filmmaking technologies are in the realms of mechanical engineering, optics, lighting, chemistry (e.g., film emulsions), model making, etc. I don't think it's very accurate to refer to the Academy Awards for technological achievements as the "Digital Oscars."
That's why they aren't talking about DVD/DiVX but rather much higher resolutions.
Actually, I think they ARE talking about DiVX (in essence). In particular, they are talking about using the MPEG-4 codec (and DiVX is essentially the same codec). MPEG-4 is a fine codec for the limited resolutions of a desktop monitor, but it is a lossy codec. If you grab a frame from an MPEG-4 compressed movie and compare it to the original, the loss in resolution is very apparent. The problem with artifacts cited in the parent to this thread could be significant.
. . . is this: Where are they obtaining the email addresses for these mass mailings? The article states that they have "millions" of addresses. I find it hard to believe that millions of people have opted in to receive political email. I wonder if they political parties are instead using the same kinds of purchased email databases used by other large-scale spammers.
To the contrary, I think it's an interesting question. Jobs is the head of one of the world's great computer companies. Jobs is also the head of one of the worlds great computer animation studios. As both mentioned in the article. But his studio's render farms -- the industrial engines that churn out the frames -- do not run on his computers, even though for many years he has pitched his computers as the machines of choice for computer graphics. I know that rendering is actually on the "production" side rather than the "development" side, and that it is a batch process rather than a creative process, but still, it creates an interesting tension from a PR standpoint. Kind of like finding out that the president of Chrysler drives a Porsche.
An idle question: Has anyone ever seen Steve Jobs make any significant public statement about the fact that the Pixar render farm uses Linux computers? I'm sure he has an opinion on the benefits of Linux, but I don't know if he's ever expressed it near a reporter.
Slashdot Mirror
Companies have a much stronger interest in preventing, not encouraging, end-user modification of their products. This is because they want to charge you for extra features and upgrades. Consider one of the most obvious and prevalent examples of computer hardware hacking (which the authors failed to mention although I am sure it was in their minds): CPU overclocking. Intel has no interest in making it easy for you to buy one of their inexpensive CPUs and making it run like one of their premium CPUs with no benefit to them. To the contrary, their entire pricing model is based on charging you extra for those capabilities.
Yes, there is the occasional product that gains geek cult status because the manufacturer encourages end-user hacking (e.g., Lego Mindstorms). But those products are already aimed at that particular segment of the market. Makers of mass-market electronics, on the other hand, have no interest in letting you upgrade their products when they would much rather sell you the upgrade.
I wonder to what extent this is a byproduct of the number of major universities in the Boston area (MIT, Harvard, Boston University, Boston College, Northeastern, Tufts, Brandeis, UMass, etc.). Or to look at it the other way around, I wonder if this would be less likely to occur in a state in which the population is not saturated with tech-savvy college graduates. To make this happen, would you need a critical mass of people in the state population who give a damn -- a "seed" population? If so, how many other places have the right conditions? On the other hand, could it be done by just a small core of motivated people in the right government agency?
Indeed, the article cites the "failure of the iPod to drive CPU sales" as evidence of trouble. Have the authors of the article forgotten that Apple made a deliberate decision to make the iPod not dependent on the Apple platform? The ads tout that the iPod is compatible with both the Apple and Windows platforms. So here is a product that is successful in exactly the way that Apple intended: it is penetrating the market for Windows users as well as Apple users. Would the authors of the article be happier if the iPod was instead limited to the Apple niche?
#2) The data was collected using random-digit dialing. Obviously, the people who don't have phones are more likely to not have internet access too. I wouldn't discount this factor.
Good point, but it's already accounted for in the survey. If you look at the definition of the base "population" (i.e., the denominator in the ratio), Nielsen defines it as "Total persons in the U.S. aged 2 and above, living in households equipped with a landline phone." So they are saying, in effect, that three-quarters of telephone-equipped households have online access.
Also remember that the national Do Not Call registry has an exception for telephone surveys, so Nielsen can still call just about anybody to conduct these surveys. The more interesting question is whether the very small subset of people who actually agree to participate are typical of the population as a whole.
In fairness, I see nothing in the article to indicate that Microsoft itself is the source of the term "iPod Killer." Yes, the phrase appears in quotation marks, but only in the reporter's text. It does not appear in the verbatim quotes from the Microsoft representative. The term may be be the reporter's own invention. Microsoft's marketing department is usually more sophisticated than this, since the term obviously sets them up for a fall.
It's a good point, especially regarding the "worst case" examples which make such good online headlines and attract so much online buzz.
But there is a counter-argument. In the field of law (and particularly in specialties like patent law), weekly and monthly newletters have been published by companies like CCH and West for many decades. So even before there was a Slashdot, there were communities of experts keeping abreast of the latest decisions. And even in that long-term context, some of the recent patent decisions are just off the wall.
I'm surprised the patent office is undergoing such a wild goose chase with no data to back the project up.
True, I am not aware of any metrics to support or refute conclusively the proposition that things today are worse than they were prior to the era of software patents. But certainly, since the era of software patents began a few years ago, there is a wealth of anecdotal evidence that is very disturbing to people with long-term experience in the patent field. Many of the worst examples of "obvious" patents being granted are in the area of software patents, and the horror stories are real. So even without conclusive metrics, I remain concerned that something is wrong. The flip side of your assertion is that the absence of hard data certainly does not mean the absence of a problem. It just may mean that the data is not easily quantifiable due to the need to apply judgment and expertise to each example rather than crunching a lot of easily-accessible numbers.
I perceive another flaw in the system that I do not believe is widely recognized: being a patent examiner is essentially an entry-level position. Patent examiners tend to be young law-school graduates with technical undergraduate degrees. Consequently, although they may be smart and have good intentions, they do not have sufficient practical experience in business or industry to dinstinguish what is truly "novel" from what would be "obvious" to an old hand. Being young and inexperienced, to them everything appears to be novel. There is nothing wrong with being a beginner, but the system really needs some kind of oversight by grayer heads who have sufficient familiarity with the field and are less easily impressed. And yes, this means money in the form of higher salaries to attract and keep such people.
That is a good observation and perhaps not bizarre at all. I think it might be even more basic to say that "war stimulates technology" and that, as a consequence, "war stimulates vocabulary." This is because new technologies generate their own terms of art, buzzwords, and jargon. Think of all the words and phrases that were coined to describe each aspect of those technologies that you identified -- launch pad, blast shield, telemetry, sound barrier, ejection seat, etc.
It sounds as if it may be cool, but I wonder if these robotic lips are really as advanced as the article suggests, or if instead some kind of shortcut was taken. I was a music major and I played a brass instrument (french horn). Brass instruments do not have a reed or any other artificial source of vibrations. Instead, the performer's own lips are the source of the vibrations. The performer essentially generates a highly-controlled "raspberry" by constricting the muscles that surround the mouth and buzzing the lips while pressed against the mouthpiece (so the sound of a brass instrument is really just an amplified raspberry, artfully done). This is hard enough to do by itself, but it's made even harder by the fact that brass instruments embody the open harmonic series, which means that the peformer can play many notes without changing the valve settings just by adjusting the tension in the mouth (think of a bugle). One of the things that makes a brass player competent is the ability to hit the correct harmonic without cracking the note (also known as a "clam"). It's very hard to get it right consistently. If this robot is really doing all of this, plus pressing the valves, plus articulating the correct attacks and rhythm, and doing all of it well enough to play "Trumpeter's Holiday," I'm impressed!
Ma Bell's switching system was the largest relay logic machine of all time. If you are interested in that sort of thing, you would probably enjoy reading the Collected Papers of Claude Shannon, most of which were written when he was at Bell Labs. He designed several small relay computers just for fun, including one that calcluated in Roman Numerals (e.g., III * IX = XXVII).
There is an even better approach: make your own comparison. If you are truly interested in this field, you probably already have. There is nothing stopping you from installing the codecs, choosing a source video, making test clips at various compression settings, and comparing the results with your own eyes. Most people are too willing to learn by reading than by doing. Reading is not the source of expertise. Doing is the source of expertise.
The cheap webcam wastes a lot of bandwidth by transmitting a picture when all we really want is a sample of the speed numbers and a weather report.
Yes, but that single webcam image includes the entire traffic pattern and weather condition for all of the three thousand cars that are on that bridge, and it does so in a single image that can be assessed at a glance. As opposed to three thousand individual signals, each of which is sending half a dozen data points from multiple sensors to a satellite, which is in turn sending the signal to the cluster of computers that processes the data and generates the reports, etc. It's similar to the debate regarding whether analog is superior to digital for certain types of data reporting.
Sure, you could put multiple monitoring devices in millions of cars, along with transmitting technology and a network of satellites, backed up by a network of computers to process the data and generate reports, all to show that there is a traffic jam on the Triboro bridge. Or you could point one cheap webcam at the same bridge and get a better, faster, more accurate assessment of the conditions.
Your wrongness is astounding. . . . I'll never read the comments on slashdot again."
The comments on Slashdot are a kind of peer review system. Errors are often quickly pointed out, opinions are rebutted, and we all meander slowly toward better knowledge. That's what I like about it. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
why not just make a software replica?
Maybe for the same reason that it's more fun to fly an airplane than to fly MS Flight Simulator, even if you're not flying an F-16. Simulations are nice, but sometimes you just want to get away from your computer and play with tangible things. And just because it's not the historical Enigma doesn't mean it's not cool in its own right.
ClearChannel will not let go without a fight.
That is correct. The only thing that has happened so far is a recommendation to Congress. So think it through. If this recommendation even begins to move forward at all, what will be the result? First there will be lobbying of the members of Congress. On one side, there will be a well-funded campaign of professional lobbyists with inside connections, paid for by an industry that has an enormous stake in maintaining the status quo. On the other side will be . . . essentially nothing. There is no substantial advocacy group, no substantial funding, no substantial organization on the other side. Are you going to pull out your checkbook to support this recommendation? Are you going to contact your congressional representatives? Of course not. This is not going to happen, ever.
And it looks sort of like this: (C)
This sounds similar to the approach taken by Mitsubishi regarding the Lemelson machine vision patents. I believe Mitsubishi argued that the Lemelson foundation had deliberately embarked on a practice of bringing weak patent claims nationwide because it knew that most defendants could not afford protracted litigation, and then would "settle" by requiring each defendant to purchase a license that cost less than the cost of defense. So virtually every defendant was forced to settle even though they believed the patents had no merit (and, ultimately, those patents were invalidated). My recollection is that the RICO claim did not work, but I am sure that counsel in the RIAA case has review the arguments pretty carefully.
IBM and Hitachi are two of the few manufacturers that still offer 3-year warranties on IDE hard drives. They are also two of the few mainframe manufacturers. I had thought that there was a correlation between these two facts -- perhaps that mainframe manufacturers regard storage as something more sacred or mission-critical than your average hard drive manufacturer. I am disappointed that IBM would knowingly ship drives with a too-high rate of failure. This is not consistent with their mainframe heritage.
Filmmaking is technological by nature. Many filmmaking technologies are in the realms of mechanical engineering, optics, lighting, chemistry (e.g., film emulsions), model making, etc. I don't think it's very accurate to refer to the Academy Awards for technological achievements as the "Digital Oscars."
That's why they aren't talking about DVD/DiVX but rather much higher resolutions.
Actually, I think they ARE talking about DiVX (in essence). In particular, they are talking about using the MPEG-4 codec (and DiVX is essentially the same codec). MPEG-4 is a fine codec for the limited resolutions of a desktop monitor, but it is a lossy codec. If you grab a frame from an MPEG-4 compressed movie and compare it to the original, the loss in resolution is very apparent. The problem with artifacts cited in the parent to this thread could be significant.
. . . is this: Where are they obtaining the email addresses for these mass mailings? The article states that they have "millions" of addresses. I find it hard to believe that millions of people have opted in to receive political email. I wonder if they political parties are instead using the same kinds of purchased email databases used by other large-scale spammers.
To the contrary, I think it's an interesting question. Jobs is the head of one of the world's great computer companies. Jobs is also the head of one of the worlds great computer animation studios. As both mentioned in the article. But his studio's render farms -- the industrial engines that churn out the frames -- do not run on his computers, even though for many years he has pitched his computers as the machines of choice for computer graphics. I know that rendering is actually on the "production" side rather than the "development" side, and that it is a batch process rather than a creative process, but still, it creates an interesting tension from a PR standpoint. Kind of like finding out that the president of Chrysler drives a Porsche.
An idle question: Has anyone ever seen Steve Jobs make any significant public statement about the fact that the Pixar render farm uses Linux computers? I'm sure he has an opinion on the benefits of Linux, but I don't know if he's ever expressed it near a reporter.