This is a joke (and a shitty one) if ever there was one.
They realize that they're suing very narrowly, anyway, right? XHTML is a subset of XML -- why not sue everyone on the web that claims compatibility with the XHTML doctype?
Most people I know who have one swear by their TiVos. I'm probably the rare Slashdotter that doesn't have one yet, but my reasons are very simple: I hate TV and the vast majority of the content available. I have a few shows that routinely take up my time, and they're on at shitty hours (damn you, [adult swim]!), but I can't justify buying a TiVo just to watch 3 or 4 shows in the middle of the afternoon rather than 1:00 AM.
I'm wondering if most people don't feel the same way, considering the response to this DRM seems to be "I'd have to get rid of my TiVo and stop watching TV". Given this, doesn't it seem that IP TV and true on-demand services might get a big boost out of TiVo's being crippled with DRM? If broadcasters can't sell commercials they won't buy shows, and if shows can't sell themselves to broadcasters they inevitably have to start selling directly to the people who want to watch.
The United States suffered *none* of the disaster that was World War II with regard to our infrastructure and general populace. In fact, our economy got such a kick out of the production the war spurred that it put the US into what many people consider its Golden Age: the 1950s.
Eastern Europe was *devastated* by World War II, and was under the control of the Soviet Union for much of the Cold War. The result being that the area never truly recovered from the war and only now under the European Union is seeing any progress. Western Europe was also badly damaged, but had many important advantages: it had the United States to bolster its regrowth, and the population loss wasn't as great as in the East. Europe is still second fiddle to the United States economically, and will probably never regain its former position in the world with the rising economies of the Far East.
The United States basically lucked out of WWII (though I don't say that with any intention of diminishing the accomplishment or the sacrifice), and relative to the rest of the world, we got off very easy. The political unrest in the aftermath of the Cold War, by the way, is what *we* are dealing with today in the form terrorism -- you can't fight secret wars on the backs of poor people without engendering serious animosity. The threat of nuclear annihilation was actually *more* unlikely during the Cold War than it is today -- terrorist groups might not hesitate to spark a nuclear war or use a nuclear weapon, as they have very little to lose relative to the former Soviet empire.
I know this is Slashdot and someone is bound to call me a grammar/spelling Nazi for saying this, but one of the biggest problems I have with Wikipedia is that articles that have been handled by many people tend to start losing any semblance of decent grammar and coherent thought.
I hope the editors take a closer look not only at blatant vandalism, but also ensure that the articles are written well. If Wikipedia is to be taken seriously by a more mainstream audience (I love it, personally, but many academics don't) it has to maintain appearances of academic quality, one of which, definitely, is attention to grammar and flow of the articles.
Hell, in some of the articles I've read, you could actually be dumber after having read it. How embarrassing would it be for a little kid to submit a report based on the things they read in Wikipedia and, not having known any better and not having a good example from something they'd consider a reputable source, have it plagued with "should of gone"s and "where their going"s?
C
Why? CSI and its ilk have shown a cooler side to using science to solve real-world problems.
The problem is that people enter (or try to enter) the field with unrealistic expectations because some of the technology depicted in the show is still on the level of sci-fi equipment.
It still doesn't change the fact that more people are interested in the field *because* they saw cool things happen with it on TV.
Because the network is already much larger and nearly universally connected. And probably much cheaper, too.
Plus, I'd predict people disconnecting from the power grid once advances in fuel-cell generators make owning your own power plant feasible.
The power companies are going to have to do something with the miles and miles of high-capacity wire they already have strung up to everybody's house...
I agree wholeheartedly that the point of whether the product is promoted one way or another is irrelevant. What is pertinent is that Grokster itself did not download any copyrighted material or found to be guilty of anything except the tangential copyright infringement of their users.
It shouldn't matter if they told their users to commit copyright infringement using their product. It shouldn't matter that they *encouraged* users to commit copyright infringement using their product. They, in fact, did not commit the crime, the user downloading the copyrighted material did.
Unless, of course, encouraging others to commit a crime is itself a crime. Something, of course, they were not on trial for to begin with, but which also stinks of a worse problem regarding First Amendment rights.
Apple should be pushing their software. Everyone on Slashdot who's used OSX (any Unix aficionado, anyway) can't shut up about how it is the way to do desktop Unix.
Apple is commoditizing their own hardware. That's what the whole move to Intel is about. So arguing that they're a hardware company first and a software company second isn't as true anymore. Are they a consumer electronics company first, computer hardware company second and software company third because their current big moneymaker is the iPod?
People are sick of Microsoft. This much is true. The interesting thing is that it's not just the geeks anymore (see Firefox). Apple giving users an alternative -- especially the friendly, Apple alternative -- and partnering with Dell would make a huge impact. But to do it, they have to work on commodity hardware -- even boxes that enthusiasts put together themselves. Period.
So, to clarify, you're suggesting that DNS not only do name mapping to IP addresses, but protocol AND name mapping to an IP address AND port?
Technically, I like it, but it seems like it'd be a mess in practice. For instance, when you register mydomain.com, are you registering http://mydomain.com? https://mydomain.com? etc.
Having to register across TLDs is, in my opinion, already bad enough and I think a lot of non-tech people would be confused by the new scheme.
Besides, isn't WSDL supposed to address this? Speak up, web services folks.
Who maintains them? Oh, that's right, the taxpayers.
Who makes money off them? Well, lessee: there's UPS and FedEX and the USPS and many small shipping companies and Greyhound and...
Who makes money off the cable network? Oh, that's right: Comcast and a few others.
Who makes money off the phone network? Oh, that's right: Verizon and a few others.
Why am I being so pedantic? Because the lies are such that they can be seen through by a 5-year-old if you just have the will to open your eyes and stop jabbering about how any government involvement in the economy is socialist/communist and, ultimately, a Bad Thing(tm). The above examples are probably proof enough that an open system is better for capitalism in the end -- i.e., the overall size of the market, not just the vast fortunes a few greedy bastards in control of fundamental networks can hold the system ransom for.
Didn't taxpayers pay to lay some of these networks to begin with, anyway?
I read this article this morning and it really pissed me off (especially how rabidly positive the author was about the connector) -- now PC users will have to contend with all the DRM nonsense that the people who bought new HDTVs recently will soon be exposed to.
It brought to mind some questions though:
Is this LEGAL? The only broadcast flag implementation that the providers seem to want to want to endorse is HDCP, an Intel product. Now, the FCC can make all sorts of claims that they have not mandated an encryption/authentication standard, but if the only standard television and broadcasting manufacturers will support is HDCP, they've effectively given Intel a license to print money (just think of all the audio/video equipment manufacturers that must now become HDCP licensees or go out of business). If the FCC has gone so far as to mandate that copy protection must exist, they should mandate that interoperability must also exist.
Following on the legality question: is this creating a consumer electronics cartel that bars entry to the market and fair competition? A license for HDCP costs $15,000 and 1,000,000 keys costs an additional $5,000. This, of course, is a pittance to what consumer electronics manufacturers can come up with, but say you're an Open Source developer that wants to bring a software player to market (or Linux) that can play HDCP protected streams. You're SOL as this is clearly the same problem as DVD/CSS.
I'm sure this has been already asked, but would it be possible to establish a self-funded Open Source community that would become an HDCP licensee on the condition that it would only distribute the software it develops to members (like a small collective that would make the cost of a license small per developer). Naturally, the cost of a license would go down dramatically once more members signed on, but what's to stop Intel from revoking your license once you released the source to the product?
This is as big a problem as, if not bigger than, CSS.
I'll agree that there isn't much mainstream demand for faster service. Most people I know, in fact, hardly use the service they currently have to its fullest.
I wonder, however, how large a part the incumbent carriers have to play in this. For instance, most people don't realize that, hey, you could actually get everything over the internet provided that it's fast enough (latency included) and only pay one bill per month rather than shelling out a big chunk of money to Comcast for tv and internet and then another big chunk to Verizon for phone service. Or that you could actually watch TV across the 'net. Clearly, the people providing the service wouldn't want it to start cannibalizing their core businesses, so who's goint to get out there and tell people that these capabilities exist?
Further, the services in the states are being pushed as "consumer only" -- that is, most people are missing out on one of the main reasons the 'Net took off and exists to begin with: users providing value to the network, instead of the network owner. Upload speeds will suffer until people demand the ability to cheaply serve up their own stuff from servers located in their own homes, but how do you even convince people that this capability is worthwhile (whereas we who have been here longest understand that it's fundamental)?
Y'know, I'm actually very happy that Comcast started eating Verizon's lunch (via VoIP). Now there's talk of fiber to the house offering TV and internet (VoIP, naturally, included) -- who'da thunk?
Plus, yesterday I finally got a reason to possibly be pleased about living in Philly:)
I used to think that only we in the good ol' USA could come up with ridiculous judgments like this (the never-ending innovation in legal interpretation). Nice to see insanity is a generally human condition. Hopefully, this won't pass muster in the US under Freedom Of Speech, but I'm not hopeful (has our Justice Department / Judiciary given anyone hope recently? Just curious...)
It seems redundant to post on Slashdot that this is senseless legislation. I'm sure everyone here would clearly agree that legislating on the merits/legality of <meta> tags is absurd.
What really bothers me about this is that this is a judgment specifically to address a shortcoming in a commercial product! What, just because everybody loves Google and uses it every day some court is going to decide that it's illegal to put particular kinds of content on your website because -- uh, oh! -- Google doesn't know how to fairly rank sites containing this content?
Clearly, all one needs to do is become popular enough -- the courts will eventually find a way to bend the system to suit you. And, yes, I'm leveling this at e-mail, too, although at least in that case you're being harassed externally by a business you don't want to have contact with. Here, a robot is (uninvitedly) scouring your webpages to figure out where things are on the web, and isn't smart enough to figure out that you have a lot of crap on your website. The system is clearly broken, and yet instead of trying to fix the blatant technical problems we're trying to legislate them away.
What next? Make it illegal to have invisible blocks of text that just have the same word over and over to get a better ranking with full-text search?
Well, I'd like to think that I'm keeping up... (I'm actually kinda trying to write a 3D enigne) My textbooks are, in fact, from 1998 but that doesn't mean I don't follow what's happening;)
I know that these normal tricks exist -- most recently Normal Maps and such (which seem promising, but still amount to a texture mapping trick). I realize that pixel shaders can produce similar results, but think about which is easier: 1) allowing the art team to come up with a nice-looking model and calling glShadeModel(GL_PHONG); or 2) making the art team come up with a good low-poly model, running it through the mesh optimizer, and coding a special pixel shader that does something the video card SHOULD be doing for you automatically anyway.
You're right that the lighting model is quite old, and simply not fully implemented in hardware yet because interpolating all the normals is too computationally expensive right now. Does that mean we should be accomodating underpowered gaming platforms through tricks that leverage areas where they are strong or pushing forward to implement this [basic | old] feature in hardware?
I know the philosophy is "if it looks right, it is right" and geometry minimization is a way to squeeze performance out of a graphics engine, but getting rid of the geometry means it's just not there for things like physics or collision detection...
The immediate problem that springs to mind for me is that current graphics cards and APIs don't produce good shading effects when the geometry is turned down. Gouraud shading (color-per-vertex interpolated across the face of the triangle) is the best that hardware acceleration will handle right now, and turning down the number of vertices will lead to problems with detailed color operations under normal circumstances (complicated lighting/shadow effects, etc.)
Shouldn't the industry be pushing further toward graphics cards that can accelerate true Phong shading, rather than shortcuts and texture mapping tricks? Or even automatic interpolation between meshes of different complexity depending on how much of the scene a particular model takes up? If that functionality was developed first, then this mesh optimization would make perfect sense. But, for now, anyway, it seems like getting rid of the geometry is going to force developers to continue to rely on tricks to get the best look out of their engines.
Not that you'd HAVE to use it, though...
C
Could IBM possibly mandate a proprietary component
on
Patents and the Penguin
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Everyone is discounting IBM's ability to derail and/or subsume F/OSS by virtue of the GPL (that is, they won't be able to because the GPL requires that they provide the source for their contributions to the kernel). The problem I see with this is that they have the ability, due to their market presence, to incorporate a proprietary component into their distributions -- possibly protected by patents -- that is subsequently shoved down the throats of businesses they service.
In other words, they definitely have the potential/capability to "pull a Microsoft" and steer people in the direction of building their enterprises around a proprietary solution that sits on top of an open standard (in Microsoft's case, it was the open x86 ISA -- make no mistake that it's the *main* reason they succeeded against Apple and the Mac).
Imagine that IBM creates "Super-indispensable-wonder-widget-for-business" 1.0 and incorporates it into their distributions for the low, low price of $0.00 (think "Internet Explorer"). Meanwhile, they file a patent for said widget, ensuring that nobody, anywhere will be able to implement the same concept without getting sued. Businesses that are now reliant on the formerly free widget are now shocked to learn that buying the widget along with the support for their otherwise free distribution costs a staggering $gajillion.00.
Their position will be cemented, and there will be no recourse to an open-source alternative. Simply implementing the idea would require paying IBM a licensing fee.
While it's easy for us geeks to be upset by this, do you think that it's just the media companies that want this sort of thing?
For instance, Lotus Notes (used by corporations "serviced" by IBM the world around) has a nifty feature whereby should a sender wish, they can block access to many client features like, oh, printing or forwarding. Making an unpopular/possibly illegal move with your company? Do it by e-mail! No whistleblowers (save the truly geekiest that can get around this sort of thing) will bother you. Being subpoenaed by the FBI (like Microsoft has been over and over and over again via e-mails)? Have your trusty computer eat it! Simple!
The geeks, for our part, must take a stand and make sure people who buy this equipment are appropriately punished for it. This includes our friends and family -- if they buy something containing this sort of embedded DRM, refuse to help them with anything and everything regarding the cursed device. Assuming you'll be able to get around the DRM and help them to begin with...
not the other way around. Games by themselves won't make people come to the platform, and no developer will sink the (millions of) dollars it takes to build a game if there's no chance the investment will be worthwhile.
Look at the Mac: it had MS beat, hands down, on user interface and desktop publishing tools that took advantage of the nifty commonality of a standard GUI. The problem being, of course, that Apple discouraged people from buying the Mac by pricing it well above PCs and keeping it a very closed platform. We naturally know how that turned out. Now, while people still use Macs for Photoshop and other desktop publishing tasks today, the bulk of the work is done on Windows PCs and THE EXACT SAME SOFTWARE (ported to the PC). This isn't because the desktop publishing software came to Windows and the legions of rabid Mac users clamoring for PCs raised Windows out of the dirt and made it king. The developers behind said software said, "Gee, there's a lot of people using PCs and Windows. Maybe we should try to sell them some software..."
Games under Windows were, similarly, a joke and, more importantly, a huge pain in the ass until Windows95 and, more importantly, DirectX. This is true. But what is also true is that developers STILL TRIED to put those games out on Windows. Remember WinG? Or having special DOS BOOT disks to run your favorite resource-intensive game that Windows was muscling out of CPU time? Yeah, me too. I was king of autoexec.bat and config.sys for this very reason. Microsoft eventually came around and admitted that it was hard for developers to write games under Windows and gave them DirectX.
Notice a pattern here? Microsoft, if nothing else, has gone to great lengths to strike a balance between keeping the PC as open a platform as possible (Windows runs on nearly 100% of the hardware out there -- granted, a lot of hardware is designed with Windows in mind wrt. driver support, but it's the same problem of the installed base...) and making it easier and easier to use. This is one thing they have done QUITE correctly.
Now, on the other hand, being a CS geek and general practitioner of most CS philosophy/ideology, I think that Unix (and Linux, by extension) is more PHILOSOPHICALLY correct in its approach to computing. It's much more modular, security and multiple users have been in place since the beginning, and stability generally trumps features. This is good. What is bad is how hard it has been, historically, for people that don't know what they're doing to get going in Linux. And, if you're Joe User who just wants to download pictures off your camera and look at pictures of girlies on the web, it's more trouble than it's worth because Windows, for all its faults, does it out of the box.
Linux needs to get into the business. Into the small to mid-size business. Vendors need to push the point that, in general, you will pay through the nose to get Windows installed legally on 3 computers in your home office. Price and user control is still king in this game (hell, it's why the PC won), but people need to be convinced that it's cheaper and just as good. Better, even -- who cares if it's just as good? If they have to spend a lot of time to learn it, then, guess what? It's not cheaper; people value their time above most other things. And, sadly, while OOo is just as good as (I use it every day), it's not *better* than Word.
My thoughts, anyway.
C
It seems to me a little hypocritical to complain about MONO and dotGNU when there's also WINE out there. What's the point of getting Win32 Apps to run natively under Linux? We'll never keep up with MS adding things to the API...
The point is, the more implementations there are of the CLR for.NET the better. I, for one, am glad to see that the effort is being made and that.NET is not going to become yet ANOTHER MS only technology. If you think Java has merit (and it does), then you can't reasonably believe that.NET has nothing to offer -- they're conceptually the same thing, skewed in slightly different directions. Java is bent more towards security, while.NET is bent more towards flexibility. It makes sense to bring it to Linux: it's useful (really!).
On the flip side, why isn't anybody complaining that there's an abundance of Java VM implementations out there?
Well, to be fair, companies that make their money off of custom controls (and I'm sure there are plenty) will have a tough go of this decision. However, I'm kina surprised that the W3C is so upset by this decision, the reason being that there already exist multiple XML vocabularies for doing a lot of what the plugins most people are worried about do.
For instance, PDFs could be expressed as XSL:FO snippets embedded in a webpage. Similarly, Flash could be replaced by SVG embeds. Movies would be a problem, but there's always the possibility of using SOAP/XMLProtocol to launch an instance of the player remotely. The beauty here being that XML namespaces essentially allow for lots of different XML to be embedded, mixed and matched. How much time has Microsoft taken in getting around to supporting the various W3C standards? Right: a really, really long time.
The game then shifts from the company that supported plugins and scripting best to the company that has the best renderer for a particular XML vocabulary. Not only that, but it would give a lot of the XML vocabularies that are having trouble picking up support (like SVG vs. Flash) a big boost. Further, it would force people to finally start writing some HTML/XHTML compliant web pages to allow for validity checking in tag interop. The W3C has been trying to get that going for years.
So, tell me again why the W3C or "Little Browser, Inc." is so upset? I think they just got handed a huge competetive advantage in disguise.
Slashdot Mirror
HA!
This is a joke (and a shitty one) if ever there was one.
They realize that they're suing very narrowly, anyway, right? XHTML is a subset of XML -- why not sue everyone on the web that claims compatibility with the XHTML doctype?
Absurd.
Most people I know who have one swear by their TiVos. I'm probably the rare Slashdotter that doesn't have one yet, but my reasons are very simple: I hate TV and the vast majority of the content available. I have a few shows that routinely take up my time, and they're on at shitty hours (damn you, [adult swim]!), but I can't justify buying a TiVo just to watch 3 or 4 shows in the middle of the afternoon rather than 1:00 AM.
I'm wondering if most people don't feel the same way, considering the response to this DRM seems to be "I'd have to get rid of my TiVo and stop watching TV". Given this, doesn't it seem that IP TV and true on-demand services might get a big boost out of TiVo's being crippled with DRM? If broadcasters can't sell commercials they won't buy shows, and if shows can't sell themselves to broadcasters they inevitably have to start selling directly to the people who want to watch.
Basically: might this be a blessing in disguise?
C
I will take exception with what you had to say:
The United States suffered *none* of the disaster that was World War II with regard to our infrastructure and general populace. In fact, our economy got such a kick out of the production the war spurred that it put the US into what many people consider its Golden Age: the 1950s.
Eastern Europe was *devastated* by World War II, and was under the control of the Soviet Union for much of the Cold War. The result being that the area never truly recovered from the war and only now under the European Union is seeing any progress. Western Europe was also badly damaged, but had many important advantages: it had the United States to bolster its regrowth, and the population loss wasn't as great as in the East. Europe is still second fiddle to the United States economically, and will probably never regain its former position in the world with the rising economies of the Far East.
The United States basically lucked out of WWII (though I don't say that with any intention of diminishing the accomplishment or the sacrifice), and relative to the rest of the world, we got off very easy. The political unrest in the aftermath of the Cold War, by the way, is what *we* are dealing with today in the form terrorism -- you can't fight secret wars on the backs of poor people without engendering serious animosity. The threat of nuclear annihilation was actually *more* unlikely during the Cold War than it is today -- terrorist groups might not hesitate to spark a nuclear war or use a nuclear weapon, as they have very little to lose relative to the former Soviet empire.
I know this is Slashdot and someone is bound to call me a grammar/spelling Nazi for saying this, but one of the biggest problems I have with Wikipedia is that articles that have been handled by many people tend to start losing any semblance of decent grammar and coherent thought. I hope the editors take a closer look not only at blatant vandalism, but also ensure that the articles are written well. If Wikipedia is to be taken seriously by a more mainstream audience (I love it, personally, but many academics don't) it has to maintain appearances of academic quality, one of which, definitely, is attention to grammar and flow of the articles. Hell, in some of the articles I've read, you could actually be dumber after having read it. How embarrassing would it be for a little kid to submit a report based on the things they read in Wikipedia and, not having known any better and not having a good example from something they'd consider a reputable source, have it plagued with "should of gone"s and "where their going"s? C
Forensic Investigator.
Why? CSI and its ilk have shown a cooler side to using science to solve real-world problems.
The problem is that people enter (or try to enter) the field with unrealistic expectations because some of the technology depicted in the show is still on the level of sci-fi equipment.
It still doesn't change the fact that more people are interested in the field *because* they saw cool things happen with it on TV.
C
Because the network is already much larger and nearly universally connected. And probably much cheaper, too.
Plus, I'd predict people disconnecting from the power grid once advances in fuel-cell generators make owning your own power plant feasible.
The power companies are going to have to do something with the miles and miles of high-capacity wire they already have strung up to everybody's house...
C
Not surprising.
The bastard took my pointers and templates away. My *pointers and templates*!
Rude fucker.
C
Someone please mod this up.
I agree wholeheartedly that the point of whether the product is promoted one way or another is irrelevant. What is pertinent is that Grokster itself did not download any copyrighted material or found to be guilty of anything except the tangential copyright infringement of their users.
It shouldn't matter if they told their users to commit copyright infringement using their product. It shouldn't matter that they *encouraged* users to commit copyright infringement using their product. They, in fact, did not commit the crime, the user downloading the copyrighted material did.
Unless, of course, encouraging others to commit a crime is itself a crime. Something, of course, they were not on trial for to begin with, but which also stinks of a worse problem regarding First Amendment rights.
C
Apple should be pushing their software. Everyone on Slashdot who's used OSX (any Unix aficionado, anyway) can't shut up about how it is the way to do desktop Unix.
Apple is commoditizing their own hardware. That's what the whole move to Intel is about. So arguing that they're a hardware company first and a software company second isn't as true anymore. Are they a consumer electronics company first, computer hardware company second and software company third because their current big moneymaker is the iPod?
People are sick of Microsoft. This much is true. The interesting thing is that it's not just the geeks anymore (see Firefox). Apple giving users an alternative -- especially the friendly, Apple alternative -- and partnering with Dell would make a huge impact. But to do it, they have to work on commodity hardware -- even boxes that enthusiasts put together themselves. Period.
Oh, and would somebody change the G5 icon now?
So, to clarify, you're suggesting that DNS not only do name mapping to IP addresses, but protocol AND name mapping to an IP address AND port?
Technically, I like it, but it seems like it'd be a mess in practice. For instance, when you register mydomain.com, are you registering http://mydomain.com? https://mydomain.com? etc.
Having to register across TLDs is, in my opinion, already bad enough and I think a lot of non-tech people would be confused by the new scheme.
Besides, isn't WSDL supposed to address this? Speak up, web services folks.
C
Oh, that's right. The government.
Who maintains them? Oh, that's right, the taxpayers.
Who makes money off them? Well, lessee: there's UPS and FedEX and the USPS and many small shipping companies and Greyhound and...
Who makes money off the cable network? Oh, that's right: Comcast and a few others.
Who makes money off the phone network? Oh, that's right: Verizon and a few others.
Why am I being so pedantic? Because the lies are such that they can be seen through by a 5-year-old if you just have the will to open your eyes and stop jabbering about how any government involvement in the economy is socialist/communist and, ultimately, a Bad Thing(tm). The above examples are probably proof enough that an open system is better for capitalism in the end -- i.e., the overall size of the market, not just the vast fortunes a few greedy bastards in control of fundamental networks can hold the system ransom for.
Didn't taxpayers pay to lay some of these networks to begin with, anyway?
C
I read this article this morning and it really pissed me off (especially how rabidly positive the author was about the connector) -- now PC users will have to contend with all the DRM nonsense that the people who bought new HDTVs recently will soon be exposed to.
It brought to mind some questions though:
This is as big a problem as, if not bigger than, CSS.
C
I'll agree that there isn't much mainstream demand for faster service. Most people I know, in fact, hardly use the service they currently have to its fullest.
I wonder, however, how large a part the incumbent carriers have to play in this. For instance, most people don't realize that, hey, you could actually get everything over the internet provided that it's fast enough (latency included) and only pay one bill per month rather than shelling out a big chunk of money to Comcast for tv and internet and then another big chunk to Verizon for phone service. Or that you could actually watch TV across the 'net. Clearly, the people providing the service wouldn't want it to start cannibalizing their core businesses, so who's goint to get out there and tell people that these capabilities exist?
Further, the services in the states are being pushed as "consumer only" -- that is, most people are missing out on one of the main reasons the 'Net took off and exists to begin with: users providing value to the network, instead of the network owner. Upload speeds will suffer until people demand the ability to cheaply serve up their own stuff from servers located in their own homes, but how do you even convince people that this capability is worthwhile (whereas we who have been here longest understand that it's fundamental)?
Y'know, I'm actually very happy that Comcast started eating Verizon's lunch (via VoIP). Now there's talk of fiber to the house offering TV and internet (VoIP, naturally, included) -- who'da thunk?
Plus, yesterday I finally got a reason to possibly be pleased about living in Philly :)
C
I used to think that only we in the good ol' USA could come up with ridiculous judgments like this (the never-ending innovation in legal interpretation). Nice to see insanity is a generally human condition. Hopefully, this won't pass muster in the US under Freedom Of Speech, but I'm not hopeful (has our Justice Department / Judiciary given anyone hope recently? Just curious...)
It seems redundant to post on Slashdot that this is senseless legislation. I'm sure everyone here would clearly agree that legislating on the merits/legality of <meta> tags is absurd.
What really bothers me about this is that this is a judgment specifically to address a shortcoming in a commercial product! What, just because everybody loves Google and uses it every day some court is going to decide that it's illegal to put particular kinds of content on your website because -- uh, oh! -- Google doesn't know how to fairly rank sites containing this content?
Clearly, all one needs to do is become popular enough -- the courts will eventually find a way to bend the system to suit you. And, yes, I'm leveling this at e-mail, too, although at least in that case you're being harassed externally by a business you don't want to have contact with. Here, a robot is (uninvitedly) scouring your webpages to figure out where things are on the web, and isn't smart enough to figure out that you have a lot of crap on your website. The system is clearly broken, and yet instead of trying to fix the blatant technical problems we're trying to legislate them away.
What next? Make it illegal to have invisible blocks of text that just have the same word over and over to get a better ranking with full-text search?
Why not build a better search engine?
CWell, I'd like to think that I'm keeping up... (I'm actually kinda trying to write a 3D enigne) My textbooks are, in fact, from 1998 but that doesn't mean I don't follow what's happening ;)
I know that these normal tricks exist -- most recently Normal Maps and such (which seem promising, but still amount to a texture mapping trick). I realize that pixel shaders can produce similar results, but think about which is easier: 1) allowing the art team to come up with a nice-looking model and calling glShadeModel(GL_PHONG); or 2) making the art team come up with a good low-poly model, running it through the mesh optimizer, and coding a special pixel shader that does something the video card SHOULD be doing for you automatically anyway.
You're right that the lighting model is quite old, and simply not fully implemented in hardware yet because interpolating all the normals is too computationally expensive right now. Does that mean we should be accomodating underpowered gaming platforms through tricks that leverage areas where they are strong or pushing forward to implement this [basic | old] feature in hardware?
I know the philosophy is "if it looks right, it is right" and geometry minimization is a way to squeeze performance out of a graphics engine, but getting rid of the geometry means it's just not there for things like physics or collision detection...
I dunno.
C
The immediate problem that springs to mind for me is that current graphics cards and APIs don't produce good shading effects when the geometry is turned down. Gouraud shading (color-per-vertex interpolated across the face of the triangle) is the best that hardware acceleration will handle right now, and turning down the number of vertices will lead to problems with detailed color operations under normal circumstances (complicated lighting/shadow effects, etc.)
Shouldn't the industry be pushing further toward graphics cards that can accelerate true Phong shading, rather than shortcuts and texture mapping tricks? Or even automatic interpolation between meshes of different complexity depending on how much of the scene a particular model takes up? If that functionality was developed first, then this mesh optimization would make perfect sense. But, for now, anyway, it seems like getting rid of the geometry is going to force developers to continue to rely on tricks to get the best look out of their engines.
Not that you'd HAVE to use it, though...
C
Everyone is discounting IBM's ability to derail and/or subsume F/OSS by virtue of the GPL (that is, they won't be able to because the GPL requires that they provide the source for their contributions to the kernel). The problem I see with this is that they have the ability, due to their market presence, to incorporate a proprietary component into their distributions -- possibly protected by patents -- that is subsequently shoved down the throats of businesses they service.
In other words, they definitely have the potential/capability to "pull a Microsoft" and steer people in the direction of building their enterprises around a proprietary solution that sits on top of an open standard (in Microsoft's case, it was the open x86 ISA -- make no mistake that it's the *main* reason they succeeded against Apple and the Mac).
Imagine that IBM creates "Super-indispensable-wonder-widget-for-business" 1.0 and incorporates it into their distributions for the low, low price of $0.00 (think "Internet Explorer"). Meanwhile, they file a patent for said widget, ensuring that nobody, anywhere will be able to implement the same concept without getting sued. Businesses that are now reliant on the formerly free widget are now shocked to learn that buying the widget along with the support for their otherwise free distribution costs a staggering $gajillion.00.
Their position will be cemented, and there will be no recourse to an open-source alternative. Simply implementing the idea would require paying IBM a licensing fee.
Software patents are evil. Plain and simple.
C
Hey all,
While it's easy for us geeks to be upset by this, do you think that it's just the media companies that want this sort of thing?
For instance, Lotus Notes (used by corporations "serviced" by IBM the world around) has a nifty feature whereby should a sender wish, they can block access to many client features like, oh, printing or forwarding. Making an unpopular/possibly illegal move with your company? Do it by e-mail! No whistleblowers (save the truly geekiest that can get around this sort of thing) will bother you. Being subpoenaed by the FBI (like Microsoft has been over and over and over again via e-mails)? Have your trusty computer eat it! Simple!
The geeks, for our part, must take a stand and make sure people who buy this equipment are appropriately punished for it. This includes our friends and family -- if they buy something containing this sort of embedded DRM, refuse to help them with anything and everything regarding the cursed device. Assuming you'll be able to get around the DRM and help them to begin with...
Bah. Paranoia sucks.
C
not the other way around. Games by themselves won't make people come to the platform, and no developer will sink the (millions of) dollars it takes to build a game if there's no chance the investment will be worthwhile. Look at the Mac: it had MS beat, hands down, on user interface and desktop publishing tools that took advantage of the nifty commonality of a standard GUI. The problem being, of course, that Apple discouraged people from buying the Mac by pricing it well above PCs and keeping it a very closed platform. We naturally know how that turned out. Now, while people still use Macs for Photoshop and other desktop publishing tasks today, the bulk of the work is done on Windows PCs and THE EXACT SAME SOFTWARE (ported to the PC). This isn't because the desktop publishing software came to Windows and the legions of rabid Mac users clamoring for PCs raised Windows out of the dirt and made it king. The developers behind said software said, "Gee, there's a lot of people using PCs and Windows. Maybe we should try to sell them some software..." Games under Windows were, similarly, a joke and, more importantly, a huge pain in the ass until Windows95 and, more importantly, DirectX. This is true. But what is also true is that developers STILL TRIED to put those games out on Windows. Remember WinG? Or having special DOS BOOT disks to run your favorite resource-intensive game that Windows was muscling out of CPU time? Yeah, me too. I was king of autoexec.bat and config.sys for this very reason. Microsoft eventually came around and admitted that it was hard for developers to write games under Windows and gave them DirectX. Notice a pattern here? Microsoft, if nothing else, has gone to great lengths to strike a balance between keeping the PC as open a platform as possible (Windows runs on nearly 100% of the hardware out there -- granted, a lot of hardware is designed with Windows in mind wrt. driver support, but it's the same problem of the installed base...) and making it easier and easier to use. This is one thing they have done QUITE correctly. Now, on the other hand, being a CS geek and general practitioner of most CS philosophy/ideology, I think that Unix (and Linux, by extension) is more PHILOSOPHICALLY correct in its approach to computing. It's much more modular, security and multiple users have been in place since the beginning, and stability generally trumps features. This is good. What is bad is how hard it has been, historically, for people that don't know what they're doing to get going in Linux. And, if you're Joe User who just wants to download pictures off your camera and look at pictures of girlies on the web, it's more trouble than it's worth because Windows, for all its faults, does it out of the box. Linux needs to get into the business. Into the small to mid-size business. Vendors need to push the point that, in general, you will pay through the nose to get Windows installed legally on 3 computers in your home office. Price and user control is still king in this game (hell, it's why the PC won), but people need to be convinced that it's cheaper and just as good. Better, even -- who cares if it's just as good? If they have to spend a lot of time to learn it, then, guess what? It's not cheaper; people value their time above most other things. And, sadly, while OOo is just as good as (I use it every day), it's not *better* than Word. My thoughts, anyway. C
Hey all,
.NET the better. I, for one, am glad to see that the effort is being made and that .NET is not going to become yet ANOTHER MS only technology. If you think Java has merit (and it does), then you can't reasonably believe that .NET has nothing to offer -- they're conceptually the same thing, skewed in slightly different directions. Java is bent more towards security, while .NET is bent more towards flexibility. It makes sense to bring it to Linux: it's useful (really!).
It seems to me a little hypocritical to complain about MONO and dotGNU when there's also WINE out there. What's the point of getting Win32 Apps to run natively under Linux? We'll never keep up with MS adding things to the API...
The point is, the more implementations there are of the CLR for
On the flip side, why isn't anybody complaining that there's an abundance of Java VM implementations out there?
C
Well, to be fair, companies that make their money off of custom controls (and I'm sure there are plenty) will have a tough go of this decision. However, I'm kina surprised that the W3C is so upset by this decision, the reason being that there already exist multiple XML vocabularies for doing a lot of what the plugins most people are worried about do.
For instance, PDFs could be expressed as XSL:FO snippets embedded in a webpage. Similarly, Flash could be replaced by SVG embeds. Movies would be a problem, but there's always the possibility of using SOAP/XMLProtocol to launch an instance of the player remotely. The beauty here being that XML namespaces essentially allow for lots of different XML to be embedded, mixed and matched. How much time has Microsoft taken in getting around to supporting the various W3C standards? Right: a really, really long time.
The game then shifts from the company that supported plugins and scripting best to the company that has the best renderer for a particular XML vocabulary. Not only that, but it would give a lot of the XML vocabularies that are having trouble picking up support (like SVG vs. Flash) a big boost. Further, it would force people to finally start writing some HTML/XHTML compliant web pages to allow for validity checking in tag interop. The W3C has been trying to get that going for years.
So, tell me again why the W3C or "Little Browser, Inc." is so upset? I think they just got handed a huge competetive advantage in disguise.