I doubt the war between the cartridge-protected and cartridge-free camps will ever be solved by getting both groups to agree... but there's one thing the industry could do that would be, IMHO, a vast improvement: embrace the semi-optional cartridge idea used by DVD-RAM.
For those who haven't used a DVD-RAM capable drive (just about everyone, probably), the standard "officially" requires that discs be protected by hard cartridges that vaguely resemble a big floppy disk. In fact, that's how blank DVD-RAM media is packaged... a disk in a shell. HOWEVER, the disk can be removed from the shell by popping a pin from the shell, sliding a latch, and opening it up.
The general idea is that normal players are assumed to be designed with drawers that can accommodate both a cartridge AND a bare disk. It's assumed that most people will keep the disks in their cartridges, but someone who has a good reason to remove them (say, for laptops where it would take too much room to put a cartridge slot) can do so.
The benefit is that Hollywood could continue to sell DVDs as bare disks (claiming to do it in the name of saving consumers money, while REALLY increasing the likelihood that those same consumers will trash the disk and have to buy a new one), but smart consumers (particularly those with kids) can buy empty cartridge shells and put those same bare disks INTO them to keep them safe.
Had Justin Timberlake pulled out a big, pus-covered rusty knife and CUT HER NIPPLE OFF, it would have been OK by American standards. On the other hand, had he bent over and caressed it with his tongue, he would have been performing for his new neighbors at Guantanamo Bay;-)
The particular exploit discussed here is clearly viral/trojan in nature and a prime candidate for Norton, but there's a good reason why Symantec in particular stays FAR away from spyware detection and deactivation -- the threat of lawsuits.
There's one thing that distinguishes most spyware from what historically would have been classified as viri or trojans... EULAs. Often, the EULAs are cloaked in various ways and trick the user into agreeing to them, or play various tricks with the online equivalent of "shrinkwrap agreements", but one way or another, they're there. Would any sane jury ever actually uphold a EULA promising to deliver targeted advertising in return for the "service" of notifying the contacts in one's address book of free porn, particularly if it were buried in the middle of a EULA the length of __War_and_Peace__? Probably not. But that doesn't mean companies behind it wouldn't go after Symantec anyway and force them to bear the expense of defending themselves against hundreds and hundreds of lawsuits filed against them in every jurisdiction of the world.
Of course, lawsuits against them for helping users to breach EULAs is just one possibility. In common-law countries, actions for libel are another possibility. God only knows what they could be sued for in a civil-law country.
It's the same reason why DELL's tech support refuses (or at least did as of a few months ago... not sure of their current policy) to assist with spyware removal.
Remember, most companies that financially support spyware are on the shady side anyway. For companies like them (can we say, "Sco?"), selling goods and providing services are just ONE element of their money-making plans. They view things like, say, suing their own victims, as a perfectly legitimate strategy.
Well, let's see... at the time KDE 3 came out, Mozilla wasn't quite (*cough*) ready for prime time yet, Netscape 4 sucked, and Internet Explorer for Linux (with DirectX window manager and Explorer Desktop for $89.95) didn't exist (admit it... there are a LOT of Linux users who would have used IE4Lin had it actually existed 2 years ago... though I suspect few of the copies would have actually been *bought*).
IMHO, at the time, Konqueror was the ONLY civilized browser for Linux. It wasn't perfect, but it was a hell of a lot better than the alternatives.
Of course, Moz is now the best, but Konqueror was definitely a welcome gift when it arrived:-)
The Soviet police wouldn't *have* to set up checkpoints to catch people living in Moscow without permission.
In a society where the government owns and operates just about every business and industry, it could achieve the same result simply by refusing to employ or sell to anyone living in the "wrong" place.
Using a New York metaphor... how long would a normal, sane person voluntarily endure living in, say, MANHATTAN if he couldn't (without great difficulty and depending upon assistance from others) buy subway tickets or food, just to give two particular examples? Sure, he could possibly rely upon the kindness of others, but unless he's particularly fond of the homeless lifestyle, it's going to get old *really fast* and probably motivate him to move back to where he's "supposed" to live within a matter of days.
As I understand it, here's the situation in Florida with Bellsouth:
BellSouth.net won't let you establish DSL service unless there's existing landline service or you agree to have landline service installed first.
Third-party ISPs won't do it for non-commercial accounts, even though they technically can, because the effort and resources it takes to twist BellSouth's arm into doing it don't justify the actual profit they make from a single residential customer. Now, if you wanted 1.5m SDSL, they'll probably go to bat for you... but for garden-variety 1.5/256k, forget it. For what it's worth, I've been told that what ISPs REALLY do in this case is sign up for local phone service at the site in their own name, have DSL added to the line, then cancel the landline phone service immediately afterwards and factor the expense into their setup charge.
If your landline phone service lapses, BellSouth simultaneously disconnects your DSL (regardless of ISP)... but when you call, scream, escalate the matter several times, and keep driving home to their tech support people that the problem is that your landline service was disconnected but you want to keep DSL active, eventually you'll reach someone who can turn it back on within a matter of minutes.
The catch: under Florida PUC regulations, if your DSL local loop has a problem, BellSouth has at least 4 hours before they have to even take action to verify that there IS a problem. And even then, your ONLY recourse if the problem continues is a prorated refund of the $37.50 local loop charge for each FULL DAY the problem continues. As a practical matter, BellSouth still fixes problems in a timely manner because they make 3x as much money selling you a pair of copper wires for DSL as they do selling voice service over the same wires... but if something like, say, a hurricane or widespread outage of some kind were to stretch their resources, you can kiss your DSL goodbye until every last T-1 and POTS customer is happy. They'd probably PREFER to restore DSL service than POTS service because they make more money off of it per customer, but when POTS or T-1 service fails, they start getting hit with fines and penalties that vastly exceed the actual short-term revenue provided by those services.
OK, the "100X" stat was in reference to raw CPU power (more than MHz increased since the original 200MHz Pentium).
The last time I looked, Office 2000 is about as archaic as you can get Office-app-wise without facing an employee revolt... and Win32 apps with embedded browser components generally won't run at all without having IE5 or better installed.
Yeah, modern apps are bloated. It's a fact of life that's not going to change and will only get worse. But the fact is, a 500MHz P3 or Athlon, or maybe 1GHz Celeron, is about as low as you can go on the CPU food chain TODAY before anyone using the PC automatically qualifies for official martyrdom. Lynx and vi just don't cut it anymore.
On the other hand, I definitely think desktop systems with dual Athlon 2400s (maybe even slower, though at this point the cost savings would be a whopping $20 or so to go any lower) and a gig of RAM would serve office users MUCH better than 3+GHz P4 systems due to the way most office users work (two dozen apps open at once, including Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, seven or eight instances of IE, and god knows what else).
Now, as far as NT4 goes... that's just a bit on the masochistic side. Windows 2000 on a 500MHz P3 w/512mb is usable, but NT4 is going to run into lots of pervasive (admittedly contrived and imposed by Microsoft and vendor laziness, but nevertheless real) roadblocks at every turn. Running NT4 today is kind of like the project to create an independent, open-source JVM... a noble ideal, but one that leaves just about everyone scratching his head trying to find some practical, non-ideological excuse for its existence;-)
In South Florida, at least, most organizations won't accept any system below a working 500mhz P3 6+GB hard drive and working optical drive, period. And getting them to take anything more than 2 years old will be a major challenge. Why? Anything less is pretty much useless for running modern apps (don't even TRY bringing up Linux... KDE and Gnome demand just as many system resources as Windows XP, maybe more. Netscape 4 was dead on arrival, and even Moz w/lightweight window manager makes pretty hefty demands) and they don't want to end up having to dispose of the equipment themselves.
> Is there really that much functionality to the officeworker of an athlon FX 64 bit machine compared to a P200?
Holy f**king god, yes there is. More than 100X, to be exact. A 200MHz Pentium can't even run Internet Explorer under Windows 98 without collapsing from the strain.
Now, if you were comparing a 2GHz P4 to an Athlon 64, things might be a little more balanced. But going down to the level of a P200 is stretching the example WAY too far.
I'd KILL for a 16lb lunchbox with two Opterons (or maybe a budget version with two AMD 2600MP CPUs... I might even slum it and settle for dual Xeons if I'm really desperate) and, more importantly, a real honest-to-god buckling-spring mechanical keyboard like the IBM "Model M".
Hell, I'd go for it for the keyboard alone!
Realistically, it would add about an inch of thickness and a little over a pound (most of the keyboard's weight is due to the steel plates intentionally put there to give the keyboard more mass... something the laptop itself would do just fine). The only real challenge would be designing a cam-raised "terrace" to raise and tilt the keys to the right height and angle when the lid gets opened, and flatten them down when it's closed.
I suspect that if some laptop ODM (like, say, Clevo) were to make a model that was substantially similar to their biggest 16:9 17" display desktop replacement system in every other respect (so vendors familiar with configuring one could painlessly handle the other and offer it as an option), they'd sell a LOT of them.
People who type 100+ WPM don't need to be convinced that buckling spring keyboards are worth the extra cost, weight, and thickness... most people in that group (myself included) are absolutely dysfunctional trying to type on most laptop keyboards (my typing rate goes down to maybe 60-70wpm, and my error rate soars).
Re:mainly because people are ignorant
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You're assuming it's possible to neatly separate one gram into 50 billion discrete 1/50th nanogram doses and distribute one of them to each of the 50 billion people. In reality, a relatively small number of people would absorb individually massive (relative to 1/50th nanogram) doses and bear the brunt of it.
No, it wouldn't be a Happy Ending, but relative to the global impact of, say, an asteroid landing in the Pacific ocean somewhere around Hawaii, it would be pretty minor by comparison.
Hyundai Tiburon *HAD* power-tweak-on-demand
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The 1999 Hyundai Tibuoron had a switch to choose between "performance" and "economy". I quickly learned that it ONLY made a difference when I used super unleaded... but when I did... wow.
Sadly, the bastards removed it from the 2001 Tiburon (along with the glove compartment lock, but that's another rant). I guess they had to emasculate the car's performance to bump up their CAFE fuel economy score to make up for the new XG300 and Santa Fe. Still... I'm convinced that somewhere in the car's wiring harness, the pins are still there, and that if I can find them and add my own switch, the feature will magically re-appear.
Anyone know where the two magic wires/pins on the wiring harness are?
That sounds kind of like the argument that McDonalds limits the freedom of consumers to eat healthy food by being too convenient and cheap, and thus luring poor helpless diners into gastronomic slavery by pandering to their laziness and frugality. Bull$hit.
The fact is, Microsoft shipped a JVM that blew Sun's implementation out of the water insofar as the execution of web page applets (and most consumers) was concerned. It didn't, however, support RMI (something that most JAVA developers, even relatively advanced ones) have never bothered with either).
Microsoft's biggest sin, however, that drove Sun up the wall, can be summed up succinctly as "com.microsoft.*". That innocent-sounding package hierarchy gave Java apps running under Windows direct, native win32 API access. That's right... no need to screw around with JNI and all its related ugliness. DirectX? Simple. Embed IE in your own app? Trivial.
Sun freaked out. It was pure politics and religious zealotry. Sun WANTED it to be hard and painful for Java apps to directly interact with native code. Sun didn't sue microsoft to force them to incorporate RMI... they sued them to force their JVM's castration and removal of com.microsoft.*.
As for why Microsoft doesn't just bundle the 1.4 JPI with Windows XP, it's simple: Sun tried to bully Microsoft into accepting a new EULA that imposed MORE restrictions on what Microsoft is allowed to do than the old one that Microsoft can still legally get away with, and Microsoft told them to F**k off.
Of course, there's another way to look at it... if some disaster renders my VoIP *and* my cell phone unable to reach 911, I'd say there's a pretty good chance that the fine folks at 911 wouldn't exactly be in much of a position to help anyway.
"BellSouth 911. May I help you?"
"Yeah, my house is on fire."
"I'm sorry, sir. We're in the middle of a category 5 hurricane. There's nothing we can do for you. "
For that matter, does ANYBODY think you'll REALLY achieve anything useful by calling 911 after a jet crashed into your neighborhood and buried half your house in flaming wreckage?
Maybe hurricane andrew and September 11 just left me permanently nihilistic about emergency assistance. But I still think, if things are SO BAD that BOTH your VoIP and cell phone stop working and you need emergency assistance, you're pretty much screwed any way you look at it.
The *ideal* compromise would be if "all" tray-loading DVD players were to have trays like the ones used by Panasonic in their DVD-RAM/DVD-R video recorders that can handle both the cartridge used by DVD-RAM and bare disks.
The DVD-RAM cartridge itself (at least the blank TDK ones I've bought) permit the disk inside to be removed and re-inserted as desired. Hollywood studios -- assholes that they are -- could continue selling bare disks with the expectation that they'll get trashed in short order, while consumers could handily give them the finger and put their newly-purchased disks into aftermarket empty cartridges for playback and safekeeping.
And what would drive consumers to go out and buy yet another DVD player? Blockbuster.
How's this for a scenario: Blockbuster hires some company to design aftermarket caddies that indicate (in some tamper-resistant way) whether the disk was removed by the renter. Disks that remain in the caddies go for the normal price, disks found to have been removed from their caddies are subject to an excess wear surcharge. To make things more palatable for consumers, they could set up the scheme so that surcharged rental costs were the same as normal DVD rentals are now, with a new (lower) rental fee for protected disks (after all, the disks will last a lot longer).
I guarantee that caddy-friendly DVD players would become dominant overnight... especially if Blockbuster's competitors (NetFlix comes to mind as an obvious candidate) followed suit with the "surcharge-if-you-remove-the-disk" scheme.
The best part, of course, is perfect backwards compatibility. Cartridged disks that need to be played on legacy players can be removed, and legacy disks can be put in empty cartridges at any point in the future. And Hollywood could bitch, moan, stomp their feet, and threaten to file as many lawsuits as they want... the sheer beauty of the whole scheme is that end users could take matters completely into their own hands and put their disks in cartridges themselves.
In Florida, at least, courts generally look upon noncompete agreements with EXTREME prejudice (against the employer) in cases where involuntary separation was involved... especially if the old company can't prove that the employee has actively solicited clients of the old company, actively encouraged former co-workers to jump ship, or otherwise done something that most people would nod in agreement and say, "yeah, that IS kind of unethical...". For the most part, Florida courts are EXTREMELY hesitant to uphold any kind of noncompete agreement that would basically render the former employee unemployable in his community using knowledge not directly and clearly proprietary to his former employer.
That's not to say employers here don't make newly-hired employees sign draconian noncompete agreements. They do. It just means that they're VERY unlikely to stand up to judicial scrutiny if the employee was involuntary terminated (as opposed to leaving to start one's own company, or taking a higher-paying position with a competitor, etc.)
I suspect the delay in Britain is due to American movie studios wanting to promote the movie's release with a Europe-wide ad campaign. If they were to just treat the UK like a distant (but wealthy, urban, and populous) state (like, say, Hawaii) and lump it in with the American ad campaign, there's no good reason I can think of why they couldn't release movies simultaneously with the US market.
Well, ok, maybe they'd also have to cut the traditional UK licensees out of the equation and just extend the American distributor's territory to include it, and lots of politically well-connected individuals would raise holy hell, but in the long run, I think ultra-regional distributors are as good as dead anyway.
Of course, in the longer run, there's the fairly obvious fact that the de-facto language of a potentially united future Europe is going to wind up being English anyway just because it's the one language just about everyone with any degree of education speaks to some degree, in which case the whole merit of holding up the European release to accommodate localization becomes a questionable business decision.
God, the more I think about it, the sillier and more pointless the whole idea of regional licensing in today's marketplace seems...
Ultimately, the government will realize that trying to tax VoIP to VoIP calls is a hopeless lost cause. Where it will most likely end up throwing around its weight is at the edge, where VoIP calls interact with the PSTN (ie, VoIP to "local" call, cell phone, etc). My personal predictions...
* Some fixed monthly FCC-imposed tarriff imposed for VoIP access to the PSTN (like the current network access surcharge). No fee, no access.
* Higher taxes on call terminations to the PSTN. Way higher.
* Possible tax on phone number itself.
* Lower taxes on PSTN service in general.
The FCC can't do a thing about VoIP calls that never touch the PSTN at all (as a practical OR legal matter), but I suspect it's going to get increasingly aggressive about its dealings with anyone whose VoIP network touches the PSTN in any way.
On the other hand, I can see RBOCs themselves getting into VoIP for local service.
Suppose, for instance, you had local phone service with DSL. Except you hardly ever used the local phone line directly... By default, your calls to the "main" number, as well as the rest of the virtual IP-based quasi-centrex system you pay BellSouth $50 a month for (with no hard limit on the number of simultaneous outgoing or incoming calls, up to a half-dozen phone numbers, and as many quasi extensions as you want to define for the auto attendant) go to the VoIP router you've got the rest of your home phone system plugged into (or the SIP phones strewn about the house). But when, for whatever reason, BellSouth realizes that it can't reach your VoIP router (say, a power outage), it automatically routes all your incoming calls to the physical phone line (which is connected to an old fashioned phone somewhere in the house). Likewise, if the router discovers that it can't reach BellSouth over the DSL line, it automatically tries to fail over ot the POTS line.
The end result: the best of all worlds (except maybe cost)... PSTN reliability, with VoIP freedom and flexibility. And grandma still knows how to call her sister on the phone;-)
The last time I checked, the local loop charges ALONE accounted for $37.50 of my $50/month DSL bill (1.5/256 w/static IP), and MY rates are only $50 because I've been a snappyDSL customer for aeons and was grandfathered in at the old rate (I think their current rate for what I have is $60-65/month).
BellSouth.net and a few others dip down to $40 or so, but they positively SUCK. They HAVE TO... after the local loop charges, they get MAYBE $2-3 from the customer (bellsouth.net is really whomever inherited UUnet operating under bellsouth's name). The REAL BellSouth collects the lion's share.
As long as the local loop charges are $37.50, I don't see HOW the monthly service charges could POSSIBLY fall below that rate for ANYONE (bellsouth.net included... as mentioned earlier, they're just borrowing bellsouth's name).
What I *really* want to do is drop my worthless and never-used local phone service and just keep the DSL. From what I've heard, bellsouth *has* to let you drop your local phone service and keep your DSL if you scream loudly enough, but all the rules regarding timeliness of repairs go out the window once the line no longer has local phone service (ie, they can take days/weeks to even SCHEDULE repairs to a DSL-only line, but need to take action within 4-6 hours -- even weekends/holidays -- if it's a voice line). Sigh. Circuit-switched phone service is a useless dinosaur. The sooner it's gone and replaced by VoIP, the better IMHO...
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I doubt the war between the cartridge-protected and cartridge-free camps will ever be solved by getting both groups to agree... but there's one thing the industry could do that would be, IMHO, a vast improvement: embrace the semi-optional cartridge idea used by DVD-RAM.
For those who haven't used a DVD-RAM capable drive (just about everyone, probably), the standard "officially" requires that discs be protected by hard cartridges that vaguely resemble a big floppy disk. In fact, that's how blank DVD-RAM media is packaged... a disk in a shell. HOWEVER, the disk can be removed from the shell by popping a pin from the shell, sliding a latch, and opening it up.
The general idea is that normal players are assumed to be designed with drawers that can accommodate both a cartridge AND a bare disk. It's assumed that most people will keep the disks in their cartridges, but someone who has a good reason to remove them (say, for laptops where it would take too much room to put a cartridge slot) can do so.
The benefit is that Hollywood could continue to sell DVDs as bare disks (claiming to do it in the name of saving consumers money, while REALLY increasing the likelihood that those same consumers will trash the disk and have to buy a new one), but smart consumers (particularly those with kids) can buy empty cartridge shells and put those same bare disks INTO them to keep them safe.
Had Justin Timberlake pulled out a big, pus-covered rusty knife and CUT HER NIPPLE OFF, it would have been OK by American standards. On the other hand, had he bent over and caressed it with his tongue, he would have been performing for his new neighbors at Guantanamo Bay ;-)
The particular exploit discussed here is clearly viral/trojan in nature and a prime candidate for Norton, but there's a good reason why Symantec in particular stays FAR away from spyware detection and deactivation -- the threat of lawsuits.
There's one thing that distinguishes most spyware from what historically would have been classified as viri or trojans... EULAs. Often, the EULAs are cloaked in various ways and trick the user into agreeing to them, or play various tricks with the online equivalent of "shrinkwrap agreements", but one way or another, they're there. Would any sane jury ever actually uphold a EULA promising to deliver targeted advertising in return for the "service" of notifying the contacts in one's address book of free porn, particularly if it were buried in the middle of a EULA the length of __War_and_Peace__? Probably not. But that doesn't mean companies behind it wouldn't go after Symantec anyway and force them to bear the expense of defending themselves against hundreds and hundreds of lawsuits filed against them in every jurisdiction of the world.
Of course, lawsuits against them for helping users to breach EULAs is just one possibility. In common-law countries, actions for libel are another possibility. God only knows what they could be sued for in a civil-law country.
It's the same reason why DELL's tech support refuses (or at least did as of a few months ago... not sure of their current policy) to assist with spyware removal.
Remember, most companies that financially support spyware are on the shady side anyway. For companies like them (can we say, "Sco?"), selling goods and providing services are just ONE element of their money-making plans. They view things like, say, suing their own victims, as a perfectly legitimate strategy.
Well, let's see... at the time KDE 3 came out, Mozilla wasn't quite (*cough*) ready for prime time yet, Netscape 4 sucked, and Internet Explorer for Linux (with DirectX window manager and Explorer Desktop for $89.95) didn't exist (admit it... there are a LOT of Linux users who would have used IE4Lin had it actually existed 2 years ago... though I suspect few of the copies would have actually been *bought*).
:-)
IMHO, at the time, Konqueror was the ONLY civilized browser for Linux. It wasn't perfect, but it was a hell of a lot better than the alternatives.
Of course, Moz is now the best, but Konqueror was definitely a welcome gift when it arrived
The Soviet police wouldn't *have* to set up checkpoints to catch people living in Moscow without permission.
In a society where the government owns and operates just about every business and industry, it could achieve the same result simply by refusing to employ or sell to anyone living in the "wrong" place.
Using a New York metaphor... how long would a normal, sane person voluntarily endure living in, say, MANHATTAN if he couldn't (without great difficulty and depending upon assistance from others) buy subway tickets or food, just to give two particular examples? Sure, he could possibly rely upon the kindness of others, but unless he's particularly fond of the homeless lifestyle, it's going to get old *really fast* and probably motivate him to move back to where he's "supposed" to live within a matter of days.
As I understand it, here's the situation in Florida with Bellsouth:
BellSouth.net won't let you establish DSL service unless there's existing landline service or you agree to have landline service installed first.
Third-party ISPs won't do it for non-commercial accounts, even though they technically can, because the effort and resources it takes to twist BellSouth's arm into doing it don't justify the actual profit they make from a single residential customer. Now, if you wanted 1.5m SDSL, they'll probably go to bat for you... but for garden-variety 1.5/256k, forget it. For what it's worth, I've been told that what ISPs REALLY do in this case is sign up for local phone service at the site in their own name, have DSL added to the line, then cancel the landline phone service immediately afterwards and factor the expense into their setup charge.
If your landline phone service lapses, BellSouth simultaneously disconnects your DSL (regardless of ISP)... but when you call, scream, escalate the matter several times, and keep driving home to their tech support people that the problem is that your landline service was disconnected but you want to keep DSL active, eventually you'll reach someone who can turn it back on within a matter of minutes.
The catch: under Florida PUC regulations, if your DSL local loop has a problem, BellSouth has at least 4 hours before they have to even take action to verify that there IS a problem. And even then, your ONLY recourse if the problem continues is a prorated refund of the $37.50 local loop charge for each FULL DAY the problem continues. As a practical matter, BellSouth still fixes problems in a timely manner because they make 3x as much money selling you a pair of copper wires for DSL as they do selling voice service over the same wires... but if something like, say, a hurricane or widespread outage of some kind were to stretch their resources, you can kiss your DSL goodbye until every last T-1 and POTS customer is happy. They'd probably PREFER to restore DSL service than POTS service because they make more money off of it per customer, but when POTS or T-1 service fails, they start getting hit with fines and penalties that vastly exceed the actual short-term revenue provided by those services.
OK, the "100X" stat was in reference to raw CPU power (more than MHz increased since the original 200MHz Pentium).
;-)
The last time I looked, Office 2000 is about as archaic as you can get Office-app-wise without facing an employee revolt... and Win32 apps with embedded browser components generally won't run at all without having IE5 or better installed.
Yeah, modern apps are bloated. It's a fact of life that's not going to change and will only get worse. But the fact is, a 500MHz P3 or Athlon, or maybe 1GHz Celeron, is about as low as you can go on the CPU food chain TODAY before anyone using the PC automatically qualifies for official martyrdom. Lynx and vi just don't cut it anymore.
On the other hand, I definitely think desktop systems with dual Athlon 2400s (maybe even slower, though at this point the cost savings would be a whopping $20 or so to go any lower) and a gig of RAM would serve office users MUCH better than 3+GHz P4 systems due to the way most office users work (two dozen apps open at once, including Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, seven or eight instances of IE, and god knows what else).
Now, as far as NT4 goes... that's just a bit on the masochistic side. Windows 2000 on a 500MHz P3 w/512mb is usable, but NT4 is going to run into lots of pervasive (admittedly contrived and imposed by Microsoft and vendor laziness, but nevertheless real) roadblocks at every turn. Running NT4 today is kind of like the project to create an independent, open-source JVM... a noble ideal, but one that leaves just about everyone scratching his head trying to find some practical, non-ideological excuse for its existence
> Donation of older systems
In South Florida, at least, most organizations won't accept any system below a working 500mhz P3 6+GB hard drive and working optical drive, period. And getting them to take anything more than 2 years old will be a major challenge. Why? Anything less is pretty much useless for running modern apps (don't even TRY bringing up Linux... KDE and Gnome demand just as many system resources as Windows XP, maybe more. Netscape 4 was dead on arrival, and even Moz w/lightweight window manager makes pretty hefty demands) and they don't want to end up having to dispose of the equipment themselves.
> Is there really that much functionality to the officeworker of an athlon FX 64 bit machine compared to a P200?
Holy f**king god, yes there is. More than 100X, to be exact. A 200MHz Pentium can't even run Internet Explorer under Windows 98 without collapsing from the strain.
Now, if you were comparing a 2GHz P4 to an Athlon 64, things might be a little more balanced. But going down to the level of a P200 is stretching the example WAY too far.
I'd KILL for a 16lb lunchbox with two Opterons (or maybe a budget version with two AMD 2600MP CPUs... I might even slum it and settle for dual Xeons if I'm really desperate) and, more importantly, a real honest-to-god buckling-spring mechanical keyboard like the IBM "Model M".
Hell, I'd go for it for the keyboard alone!
Realistically, it would add about an inch of thickness and a little over a pound (most of the keyboard's weight is due to the steel plates intentionally put there to give the keyboard more mass... something the laptop itself would do just fine). The only real challenge would be designing a cam-raised "terrace" to raise and tilt the keys to the right height and angle when the lid gets opened, and flatten them down when it's closed.
I suspect that if some laptop ODM (like, say, Clevo) were to make a model that was substantially similar to their biggest 16:9 17" display desktop replacement system in every other respect (so vendors familiar with configuring one could painlessly handle the other and offer it as an option), they'd sell a LOT of them.
People who type 100+ WPM don't need to be convinced that buckling spring keyboards are worth the extra cost, weight, and thickness... most people in that group (myself included) are absolutely dysfunctional trying to type on most laptop keyboards (my typing rate goes down to maybe 60-70wpm, and my error rate soars).
You're assuming it's possible to neatly separate one gram into 50 billion discrete 1/50th nanogram doses and distribute one of them to each of the 50 billion people. In reality, a relatively small number of people would absorb individually massive (relative to 1/50th nanogram) doses and bear the brunt of it.
No, it wouldn't be a Happy Ending, but relative to the global impact of, say, an asteroid landing in the Pacific ocean somewhere around Hawaii, it would be pretty minor by comparison.
The 1999 Hyundai Tibuoron had a switch to choose between "performance" and "economy". I quickly learned that it ONLY made a difference when I used super unleaded... but when I did... wow.
Sadly, the bastards removed it from the 2001 Tiburon (along with the glove compartment lock, but that's another rant). I guess they had to emasculate the car's performance to bump up their CAFE fuel economy score to make up for the new XG300 and Santa Fe. Still... I'm convinced that somewhere in the car's wiring harness, the pins are still there, and that if I can find them and add my own switch, the feature will magically re-appear.
Anyone know where the two magic wires/pins on the wiring harness are?
That sounds kind of like the argument that McDonalds limits the freedom of consumers to eat healthy food by being too convenient and cheap, and thus luring poor helpless diners into gastronomic slavery by pandering to their laziness and frugality. Bull$hit.
The fact is, Microsoft shipped a JVM that blew Sun's implementation out of the water insofar as the execution of web page applets (and most consumers) was concerned. It didn't, however, support RMI (something that most JAVA developers, even relatively advanced ones) have never bothered with either).
Microsoft's biggest sin, however, that drove Sun up the wall, can be summed up succinctly as "com.microsoft.*". That innocent-sounding package hierarchy gave Java apps running under Windows direct, native win32 API access. That's right... no need to screw around with JNI and all its related ugliness. DirectX? Simple. Embed IE in your own app? Trivial.
Sun freaked out. It was pure politics and religious zealotry. Sun WANTED it to be hard and painful for Java apps to directly interact with native code. Sun didn't sue microsoft to force them to incorporate RMI... they sued them to force their JVM's castration and removal of com.microsoft.*.
As for why Microsoft doesn't just bundle the 1.4 JPI with Windows XP, it's simple: Sun tried to bully Microsoft into accepting a new EULA that imposed MORE restrictions on what Microsoft is allowed to do than the old one that Microsoft can still legally get away with, and Microsoft told them to F**k off.
Of course, there's another way to look at it... if some disaster renders my VoIP *and* my cell phone unable to reach 911, I'd say there's a pretty good chance that the fine folks at 911 wouldn't exactly be in much of a position to help anyway.
"BellSouth 911. May I help you?"
"Yeah, my house is on fire."
"I'm sorry, sir. We're in the middle of a category 5 hurricane. There's nothing we can do for you. "
For that matter, does ANYBODY think you'll REALLY achieve anything useful by calling 911 after a jet crashed into your neighborhood and buried half your house in flaming wreckage?
Maybe hurricane andrew and September 11 just left me permanently nihilistic about emergency assistance. But I still think, if things are SO BAD that BOTH your VoIP and cell phone stop working and you need emergency assistance, you're pretty much screwed any way you look at it.
The *ideal* compromise would be if "all" tray-loading DVD players were to have trays like the ones used by Panasonic in their DVD-RAM/DVD-R video recorders that can handle both the cartridge used by DVD-RAM and bare disks.
The DVD-RAM cartridge itself (at least the blank TDK ones I've bought) permit the disk inside to be removed and re-inserted as desired. Hollywood studios -- assholes that they are -- could continue selling bare disks with the expectation that they'll get trashed in short order, while consumers could handily give them the finger and put their newly-purchased disks into aftermarket empty cartridges for playback and safekeeping.
And what would drive consumers to go out and buy yet another DVD player? Blockbuster.
How's this for a scenario: Blockbuster hires some company to design aftermarket caddies that indicate (in some tamper-resistant way) whether the disk was removed by the renter. Disks that remain in the caddies go for the normal price, disks found to have been removed from their caddies are subject to an excess wear surcharge. To make things more palatable for consumers, they could set up the scheme so that surcharged rental costs were the same as normal DVD rentals are now, with a new (lower) rental fee for protected disks (after all, the disks will last a lot longer).
I guarantee that caddy-friendly DVD players would become dominant overnight... especially if Blockbuster's competitors (NetFlix comes to mind as an obvious candidate) followed suit with the "surcharge-if-you-remove-the-disk" scheme.
The best part, of course, is perfect backwards compatibility. Cartridged disks that need to be played on legacy players can be removed, and legacy disks can be put in empty cartridges at any point in the future. And Hollywood could bitch, moan, stomp their feet, and threaten to file as many lawsuits as they want... the sheer beauty of the whole scheme is that end users could take matters completely into their own hands and put their disks in cartridges themselves.
In Florida, at least, courts generally look upon noncompete agreements with EXTREME prejudice (against the employer) in cases where involuntary separation was involved... especially if the old company can't prove that the employee has actively solicited clients of the old company, actively encouraged former co-workers to jump ship, or otherwise done something that most people would nod in agreement and say, "yeah, that IS kind of unethical...". For the most part, Florida courts are EXTREMELY hesitant to uphold any kind of noncompete agreement that would basically render the former employee unemployable in his community using knowledge not directly and clearly proprietary to his former employer.
That's not to say employers here don't make newly-hired employees sign draconian noncompete agreements. They do. It just means that they're VERY unlikely to stand up to judicial scrutiny if the employee was involuntary terminated (as opposed to leaving to start one's own company, or taking a higher-paying position with a competitor, etc.)
I suspect the delay in Britain is due to American movie studios wanting to promote the movie's release with a Europe-wide ad campaign. If they were to just treat the UK like a distant (but wealthy, urban, and populous) state (like, say, Hawaii) and lump it in with the American ad campaign, there's no good reason I can think of why they couldn't release movies simultaneously with the US market.
Well, ok, maybe they'd also have to cut the traditional UK licensees out of the equation and just extend the American distributor's territory to include it, and lots of politically well-connected individuals would raise holy hell, but in the long run, I think ultra-regional distributors are as good as dead anyway.
Of course, in the longer run, there's the fairly obvious fact that the de-facto language of a potentially united future Europe is going to wind up being English anyway just because it's the one language just about everyone with any degree of education speaks to some degree, in which case the whole merit of holding up the European release to accommodate localization becomes a questionable business decision.
God, the more I think about it, the sillier and more pointless the whole idea of regional licensing in today's marketplace seems...
Ultimately, the government will realize that trying to tax VoIP to VoIP calls is a hopeless lost cause. Where it will most likely end up throwing around its weight is at the edge, where VoIP calls interact with the PSTN (ie, VoIP to "local" call, cell phone, etc). My personal predictions...
;-)
* Some fixed monthly FCC-imposed tarriff imposed for VoIP access to the PSTN (like the current network access surcharge). No fee, no access.
* Higher taxes on call terminations to the PSTN. Way higher.
* Possible tax on phone number itself.
* Lower taxes on PSTN service in general.
The FCC can't do a thing about VoIP calls that never touch the PSTN at all (as a practical OR legal matter), but I suspect it's going to get increasingly aggressive about its dealings with anyone whose VoIP network touches the PSTN in any way.
On the other hand, I can see RBOCs themselves getting into VoIP for local service.
Suppose, for instance, you had local phone service with DSL. Except you hardly ever used the local phone line directly... By default, your calls to the "main" number, as well as the rest of the virtual IP-based quasi-centrex system you pay BellSouth $50 a month for (with no hard limit on the number of simultaneous outgoing or incoming calls, up to a half-dozen phone numbers, and as many quasi extensions as you want to define for the auto attendant) go to the VoIP router you've got the rest of your home phone system plugged into (or the SIP phones strewn about the house). But when, for whatever reason, BellSouth realizes that it can't reach your VoIP router (say, a power outage), it automatically routes all your incoming calls to the physical phone line (which is connected to an old fashioned phone somewhere in the house). Likewise, if the router discovers that it can't reach BellSouth over the DSL line, it automatically tries to fail over ot the POTS line.
The end result: the best of all worlds (except maybe cost)... PSTN reliability, with VoIP freedom and flexibility. And grandma still knows how to call her sister on the phone
The last time I checked, the local loop charges ALONE accounted for $37.50 of my $50/month DSL bill (1.5/256 w/static IP), and MY rates are only $50 because I've been a snappyDSL customer for aeons and was grandfathered in at the old rate (I think their current rate for what I have is $60-65/month).
BellSouth.net and a few others dip down to $40 or so, but they positively SUCK. They HAVE TO... after the local loop charges, they get MAYBE $2-3 from the customer (bellsouth.net is really whomever inherited UUnet operating under bellsouth's name). The REAL BellSouth collects the lion's share.
As long as the local loop charges are $37.50, I don't see HOW the monthly service charges could POSSIBLY fall below that rate for ANYONE (bellsouth.net included... as mentioned earlier, they're just borrowing bellsouth's name).
What I *really* want to do is drop my worthless and never-used local phone service and just keep the DSL. From what I've heard, bellsouth *has* to let you drop your local phone service and keep your DSL if you scream loudly enough, but all the rules regarding timeliness of repairs go out the window once the line no longer has local phone service (ie, they can take days/weeks to even SCHEDULE repairs to a DSL-only line, but need to take action within 4-6 hours -- even weekends/holidays -- if it's a voice line). Sigh. Circuit-switched phone service is a useless dinosaur. The sooner it's gone and replaced by VoIP, the better IMHO...